The only difference between a rut and a grave is how deep it is.
CHARLES GARFIELD
Addiction is a suppression.
Do you know what that means?
It means that it suppresses you
back in your box.
—Ramtha
Let’s take one of the most addictive drugs, heroin, to see how addictions work within the cells of the body. After it is injected, heroin docks with the opiate receptors of a cell. These are the same receptors that are biologically designed to receive endorphins, a neuropeptide manufactured by the hypothalamus. Instead of receiving the endorphins, the cell receives the heroin, and the cell becomes addicted to heroin.
Now let’s try the same scenario with emotions. Emotions produce peptides, or molecules of emotion (MOEs), which dock in receptors on the cell. The same thing that happens with repeated use of heroin occurs with repeated use of the same emotion: Your body’s opiate receptors begin to expect—even crave—that particular peptide. Your body becomes addicted to that emotion.
Shocking, huh? And “you like to think you’re immune to the stuff.” Drive by the alcoholic hanging on the curb, the junkies lined up in front of the meth clinics, the chain-smoker with yellow fingers and black lungs, and you might think, “Not me!” Think again; yes, you!
Shocking. But it explains so much! Do any of these sound familiar?
• Destructive emotional states
• Same situations over and over
• Inability to change
• Feeling helpless to create something new
• Deep cravings for certain emotional responses
• Voices in the head saying, “I want. Give me, give me.”
• Saying you’ll never do something ever again, then three hours later doing it
For all of the times you’ve experienced the above, this chapter is shock therapy. And it’s for all of us (and that’s all of us) who have neuropeptides coursing through our veins.
Heroin users have receptors for the heroin, and the more heroin that they take, their ability to make their own internal endorphins, their own internal heroin, basically starts to decline.
Then their receptors start to become subsensitive where there’s actually less of them, so there are these actual changes. Then there is this new information about how less brain cells are being made so that people get kind of, in all addictions, they get stuck in old patterns. They are just thinking the same thoughts over and over, and they are not able to think of something new.
—Candace Pert, Ph.D.
Humanoid (Noun): A Self-Aware, Self-Toking Organism
Through her research, Dr. Pert found that we have receptors that specifically receive marijuana. Why do we have these receptors? Because our body actually produces chemicals internally that give us the same type of high that we get from marijuana. This goes for whatever drug humans are physically capable of becoming addicted to—there is a chemical inside the body that is analogous to all drugs and a receptor for it to dock on. She explains, “We have marijuana receptors, and we have natural marijuana that’s called endocannabinoids. Every time people toke up, their exogenous1 marijuana is binding to receptors normally meant for fine-tuned internal regulation. So exogenous drugs plug into the same network meant for endogenous physiology self-regulation. These are the molecules of emotion. There’s enough data now to suggest that no psychoactive drug works unless it’s binding to a receptor that’s normally meant for an internal juice.”
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1 Exogenous chemicals are external to the body. Endogenous chemicals are manufactured by the body and are “internal.”
In other words, any external drug that works in our body has an internal counterpart—that is why our body recognizes, responds and becomes addicted to these drugs. External drugs use the internal receptors meant for the internal chemicals.
In the “Brain 101” chapter we covered how the emotions, and memories of emotional experiences, are encoded in neuronets and how these neuronets are connected to the hypothalamus. That is how we become self-toking organisms. All we have to do is fire up the correct net, and the chemicals start to flow internally. As Ramtha says:
Addiction is the feeling of a chemical rush that has cascaded through the bodies through a whole assortment of glands and ductless glands. A feeling that some would call a sexual fantasy. It only takes one sexual fantasy for a man to have a hard-on. In other words, it only takes one thought here [the brain] for a man to have an erection in his member.
For many this is the most direct example of how focusing on a thought produces the proper neuropeptides. There are many other examples: remembering that glorious moment in high school when you caught the winning touchdown, the first time you realized you were in love, or success, like dreaming of the moment when the media calls you an inspired artist or wildly successful. In all these cases the frontal lobe holds the particular thought, activating the particular net that sends its signal to our internal pharmacy.
Does that mean that every time someone triggers this mechanism, they’re an addict? Are you an alcoholic every time you take a drink? Of course not. If once a year you remember that glorious moment in the fall of 1972 when you got the touchdown, that’s not an addiction. If every day you’re wishing for those glory days—guess what? You’ve got a habit going.
Biological Effects
It’s common knowledge that addictions have serious long-term effects on the body. With the discovery of the peptide-receptor mechanism, the biological basis of the effect of addiction, as Dr. Pert explains, has become obvious:
If a given receptor for a given drug or internal juice is being bombarded for a long time at a high intensity, it will literally shrink up; there will be less of them or it will be desensitized or down regulated so that the same amount of drug or internal juice will illicit a much smaller response. The best example of this that people are familiar with would be tolerance. We all know how an opiate addict has to take larger and larger doses of drugs to achieve the same high.
Everyone is addicted. I don’t care who they are. And they’re addicted because they’ve never had anything better to replace what they are addicted to and have a reason to wake up every morning to live for. The man who is addicted to power gets up every morning, and he drives things that show his power. He has to have a lot of people to feed off of, to suppress, to order around, in order to feel worthy. Because he does not feel worthy. He needs the emotions to feel worthy.
—Ramtha
The same tolerance effect is seen in emotions. The thrill seeker who pushes himself further and further into extreme bungee jumping from airplanes to get that adrenaline high, or the sexaholic who seeks the kinkier and kinkier, or the politician running for higher and higher offices, not out of a desire to serve, but on a quest for more power. If you begin to look for these scenarios with people you know, or especially, in your own life, you’ll see examples everywhere.
When we fast from those emotions, those voices that come up, the cells are literally sending nerve impulses up to the brain, to let it know that it’s starving, the body is starving, from what it’s depended on chemically. And those chemicals are very powerful information carriers.
—Joe Dispenza
Meanwhile those poor little cells are being starved. The constant overuse of the chemicals required to produce an emotion, like anger, in the body result in desensitized receptor sites being created to adapt to all those anger neuropeptides. The cells are no longer getting a “well-balanced” meal, as they receive whatever emotion they are addicted to more than others, so they are left with having to get a narrower supply of nutrition. The more anger the personality creates, the more satiated the cell will feel. This is the story behind a guy who on Friday night is out “looking for a fight.” He’s not angry for a particular reason; he’s just out feeding his little cell friends. And those little guys can raise quite a racket when they need something. Ever hear a little voice in your head that says, “I’m hungry” or “I’m thirsty”?
Ever wonder who said that? Well, according to Ramtha, those voices in your head are the collective voice of your cells. They are telling you, “Feed me.” And if the emotion is one that you think is socially or morally incorrect, you won’t hear, “Let’s go make someone feel stupid so we can feel intellectually superior,” but rather there will be a nebulous craving that makes you unconsciously go out and make that happen. In other words, you’ll create it.
Emotional addictions explain so much—why someone constantly trashes other people, or gets into the same abusive relationship, or the same horrible living situation over and over. In other words, emotional addictions are why people continue to create a particular reality in their lives, even though they say, “Well, I would never create that.” The only way to move past these repetitive behaviors and addictions is to say, “Well, I do create that over and over, so I must be addicted to it.”
For many, many people, all the creations in their lives are emotionally, addictively based. As an example of creating something “bad” in your life, let’s look at “victim mentality.” Something bad initially happened, you told someone, they felt bad for you (now they’re suffering, too) and so they fixed the problem. Relief. Hey, not bad, you might be thinking. Let’s see if I can make that work again.
Suddenly, people are taking care of you. They’re giving you money, supporting you emotionally, are sympathetic and available anytime you need them. Of course, the downside is that there is a built-in shelf life to the victim/savior relationship. Every savior needs to feel just as special as the victim, so they tend to move on after the initial “rush” wears off. If either of you don’t change, both of you just go on to rediscover your addiction with someone else and someone else. And keep on, in the words of a true victim, “having bad, unfair situations happen to me.” Sounds rather different from, “I continually create situations that allow me to get sympathy and support from people.”
Dr. Joe Dispenza put it eloquently when he said: “My definition of an addiction is something really simple: It’s something that you can’t stop. If you can’t control your emotional state,” he says, “you must be addicted to it.”
Emotionalics Anonymous
In some ways it’s a pretty grim picture. I’m addicted; you’re addicted—let’s get together and rub our addictions together. Actually, that doesn’t sound so bad; that’s what everyone does all the time. We’re frequency specific with those emotions, and so bring like-minded beings into our sphere. According to Ramtha: “The people that we really love are people who are willing to share our emotional needs, our feelings.” Dr. Dispenza describes it this way: “We’re breaking the addictions to all those agreements chemically. That is an uncomfortable state for the human . . . because you look for some evidence in your life that you are doing the right thing, and everywhere you look for evidence in your life is with the people you’ve had all those agreements with.”
You can’t cure an addict until you give an addict everything they want and then they ask no more. That’s when we have owned an experience. And that is when we are wise. Couple that with indeed new revenues to the mind. And revenue to the mind is knowledge. From knowledge, it’s like building blocks; we build new holograms, and we create realities.
—Ramtha
But still, it’s grim because addictions are hard to break. That’s what makes them addictions. And the way these emotions got to be an addiction is through continually trying to recreate an initial experience. The first experience of sex, or sympathy, or power is not an addiction. It is chasing that high over and over that becomes the addiction. Says Ramtha:
Now, what about people who are addicted to sex, to heroin, to marijuana? Well, they all do different chemistries in the brain. They’re endeavoring to touch the pleasure center in the brain. That is not what that brain was meant to do. So people reinvent experiences in their brain by distributing the same chemicals, the same feeling.
And what was the brain meant to do? To dream new dreams, new realities, then bring them forward into manifestation and experience that first incredible emotional moment . . . a moment with a new emotion.
Sounds great—new emotions, new highs—so why is it so hard to break the habit?
And we’re still asking the question of how to break those addictions!
Possibly the most successful program ever in dealing with addictions is Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Millions have kicked their alcohol addiction “one day at a time” through implementing their 12-step program. It would be a disservice to attempt to go over it here, and anyone interested should check it out.
But take a moment and consider this part of the program—the alcoholic is told to repeatedly reaffirm, “I am an alcoholic.” And while in the beginning that is necessary to face up to the reality of the situation, it forever locks the person into that personality. So it’s never over. The addiction has never been owned and retired. The person continually identifies with that which he is trying to push away and release. Finally, it denies the person the possibility of complete and utter transformation, which is why we’re here.
Emotions that we’ve depended on for so long are now no longer being given to the cell, and the cell goes in decay on us. If we persist past it, just like we persist past any addiction, we break the response, because we’re not responding to the voice in our head. At the same time, we’re breaking the response chemically, because now the cell isn’t getting its chemical needs. The cell, ultimately, will be released of its chemical addiction, and now when it reproduces itself, it “up regulates.” It lets go of all those receptor sites that have been responsible for those emotional states, and now the cell is in a better state of harmony, and the body experiences joy.
—Joe Dispenza
Why ARE We Here?
Ahh, back to the Great Questions. And why are they great? Is it because they are not obvious or easy to answer? Or because they seem meaningful? Or because they sound great at a cocktail party, and you get to impress people when you bring up Great Questions? It’s because they’re the answer to get one out of a great mess.
We are here to be creators. We are here to infiltrate space with ideas and mansions of thought. We are here to make something of this life.
—Ramtha
Our purpose here is to develop our gifts of intentionality. And learn how to be effective creators.
—William Tiller, Ph.D.
The point is that we’re here to do something with ourselves. We’re here to explore the total limits of creation;Mwe’re here to make known the unknown.
—Miceal Ledwith
The whole purpose of this game: We prepare our body chemically, through a thought, to have an experience. However, if we keep preparing our body chemically to have the same thoughts, to have the same experiences, we don’t ever evolve as human beings.
—Joe Dispenza
Creating, evolving, breaking out of old patterns, being magicians—the fact that we are creators, that we do create our life experience, our reality, the fact that we have that ability points to why we’re here. In short, to use it or lose it.
If we are here, as Dr. Ledwith says, “to make known the unknown,” that would mean experiencing for ourselves something we’ve never tasted before. The same old, same old becomes the ever new, ever new.
Addictions are broken by changing, evolving.
Sixty to eighty percent of crime is linked to drugs and addiction. Just think of the possibilities for change, not just on a personal level, but on a societal level as well.
And if that is why we are here, those new emotions will be so amazing, fulfilling and luscious that the old ones will seem like an old high-school yearbook—a big deal at the time, but now retired to a forgotten bookshelf. Dr. Pert reports and biology supports this transformation through very recent discoveries. There is evidence now that when people or laboratory animals, like rats, are addicted to a drug (nicotine, alcohol, cocaine, heroin), all of the test subjects have something in common—growth of new brain cells are blocked. But when the subjects discontinue taking the drug, the new brain cells continue growing. As Dr. Pert says, “One can completely recover, and one can make up her mind and create a new vision for herself, a new brain.” There is hope in a new beginning for many, from the smallest addictions, to the largest.
As Ramtha sums up the way out: “We must pursue knowledge without any interference of our addictions. And if we can do that, we will manifest knowledge in reality, and our bodies will experience in new ways, in new chemistry, in new holograms, new elsewheres of thought, beyond our wildest dreams.”
Ponder These for a While . . .
• Why does it feel sooo good to feel sooo bad?
• List some of your emotional addictions.
• Okay, so what’s the addiction you didn’t list?
• List the addictions of the people closest to you.
• How are you able to recognize their addictions?
• Are all addictions bad?