The mythic dimension of addiction

Addiction is a refusal to experience the "present moment"—but what is the present moment anyway, and why does it so often feel unbearable?

Several times every week, I sit under fluorescent lights, join hands with the people either side of me, and pray for the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

If you’d told me eleven years ago that I’d ever be caught dead doing this, I would have told you exactly where you could shove it. So why am I doing it so gladly now? What’s it all about? Why is this prayer—the serenity prayer—at the centre of the world’s largest addiction-recovery fellowship, and what can it tell us all—addicted or otherwise—about the way we live today?

Last week, I shared my belief that addiction is a condition of being unwilling to live in the present moment, with all its insecurity and potential for loss and pain (and so also its potential for joy and love and belonging). It’s a constant checking-out from the present moment. So in recovery, we say the serenity prayer because the first order of business in getting well is finding the strength to sit with reality.

And there it is. The word I’ve been trying not to say so far in these discussions of addiction: “reality.” Because this is where the conversation starts to get tricky. At the risk of sounding like a stoned philosophy undergraduate: what do we mean when we say “reality”?

For many of us raised in the present-day UK (which is one of the least religious nations in the world) as well as in large stretches of the rest of Europe and the Anglophone world, even the question “what is reality?” can seem suspect. Obviously—obviously—it is the observable, empirically demonstrable facts about the material world around us. Immaterial things do sometimes enter this worldview, of course, most often in the form of relationships between people. But under rationalist materialism, even something as mysterious and ineffable as a relationship is best understood when you apply the scientific method (because let’s not forget that psychoanalysis was born out of an impulse to make the study of the human psyche a Real Science). Under this worldview, there’s also never any doubt that a human is an individual, a sort of meat sack wrapped up in its own skin, alone, like an unnecessarily complicated sausage.

And that, my friends, is not a vision of reality that I personally can tolerate. In fact it’s a vision of reality that had me drinking to blackout every single day, until I found something better to believe. How awful, how deadening, how untrue: to see yourself and everyone around you as a meat sack, to believe that the world is just matter with no unifying consciousness, no spirit or soul or deep purpose. To believe that all there is to know can be seen with the dissecting, judging eye instead of felt with the heart.

In order to be able to sit with the present moment—which is to say, in order to overcome my addiction—I had to come to understand that the present moment is also always eternal. That before and beyond each of our temporary flesh homes, there is a unifying spirit, a consciousness that brought all of this into being. Only when I could hold a felt sense of this cradling spirit both inside and around my body, and only when I could trust that it didn’t fucking matter that it would never show up under a microscope because the feeling itself was the realest thing I had ever known—only then was I able to sit in the present moment, able to sit in the shit it so often throws up, without reaching for a bottle.

Of course, that’s the whole reason this prayer is a prayer. Nobody’s sitting around asking their cousin Brian to grant them the serenity to accept the things they cannot change. You can’t get better until you can live with reality, and you can’t live with reality, not really, not without checking out somehow, until you understand that reality is far more than post-Enlightenment Western culture would have us believe—that we are cradled in something much larger than ourselves. That’s why the biggest, most successful recovery fellowship in the world centres around a program of spiritual awakening.

In the early days of this Substack, I was writing to you about Paleolithic cave rituals; about how the world is sound; about the techniques our oldest ancestors used to connect to the more-than-material world, to the imaginal realm, to the great consciousness that enfolds all that we see and do. And about how this way of living—in constant, reciprocal relationship with the great spirit, with the imaginal realm—has been the only way of life for the vast, vast majority of humans who’ve ever lived. It’s the blink of an eye, really, that we’ve been living in this other, complicated-sausage vision of reality.

In recent months, I’ve been talking more about the history of colonialism and Englishness and my own history of addiction—and I’m conscious that it might seem as though I’ve dropped that original thread; that shimmering story I began to tell of a different, more alive way of being and creating. But if we want to step back into the imaginal realm, the shimmering story, we have to understand these other histories too. We have to see, clearly, the addictions to power and “safety” and numbness and oblivion that have left modern cultures like mine shut out of spirit, out of the imaginal, and out of any sense of belonging on this earth.

The almost inconceivably good news is that the great consciousness that precedes matter, the imaginal realm—it’s still right there. It never went away. It’s been waiting all this time for us to look up from our distraction and our fear—to stop harming ourselves and each other—and see what we’re missing. The world is still sound. The caves still want to sing back to us.

Try saying the serenity prayer today. You never know what might open up.

Love,

xx Ellie