Even decades of practice and experience don't
necessarily spell the death of what Rumi called
"the wanting creature inside of me."
After all, it is entirely natural for life to rise up and
say "I want." But the psychodynamics
of human life can easily turn that wanting into a tar-baby
of addictive need, as the natural desire for pleasure and
a sense of completeness, the early experience of separation,
our unique emotional history and imprints, our biochemistry and neural wiring, add up to a perfect storm of unfulfilled wanting that is our constant subtext. These addictive tendencies may not always manifest in the grossly dysfunctional patterns by which we commonly define addiction; but they may nevertheless prove dysfunctional with regard to the depth of our spiritual and relational life. For they go to the heart of the drama of separation that defines the boundary lines of our relationship to self, to another human being, or to the divine ground; and they subject all experience and all others to the projective drama of a separate and unfulfilled life.

My longing may arise in me as a romanticized longing for the goddess that can direct itself anywhere into the material world; for, after all, it is the goddess, the mother, the matrix, mater, that is embodied in matter itself. Many story traditions preserve the memory of the fallen goddess, dismantled into the natural world and forgotten by the distracted psyche, and whose divine sparks, or whose very bones, need to be regathered or remembered back into life. How I understand or approach this task - the resurrection of the goddess - will mean all the difference between unreflective, "uninitiated," or addictive behavior and the capacity to sustain the creative tension of genuinely transformative and earth-sustaining spiritual growth.

Thus I may maintain in my nervous system the ever-present vigilance and expectation that just over the next hill is the woman - be she lover, dakini, or divine mother - ready to welcome me into some final happiness. I say "woman" here both literally and figuratively - that she is there spread out by the river waiting for me, or that just around the next bend of the river is the dakini by the waterfall, offering me her magical fruits of ecstatic embrace. This is the buzz of sexual addiction or of any addiction to outer fulfillment. It is the buzz that something outside of this moment will satisfy or complete me. And it is accompanied by the inherent expectation that "this," that life, is all here for my satisfaction; that there is, at the last, the blissful fulfillment of "me." (And doesn't much of our contemporary "spirituality" also give us this message?) Fundamentally, and in short, it is the illusory belief and the paradigm that egoic-based happiness and satisfaction can ultimately be attained.

Thus, the obvious addictive process is the reflection of an even subtler spiritual addiction: the idea that everything is here for me, the ego, and the need to manipulate to assure that this is so. This is the underlying principle of manas, or the egoic mind, as expressed in Buddhist abhidharma psychology. It is awareness reflecting back on its own mother- ground, encircling a portion of this ground and calling it "me" or "mine." In so doing it creates an illusory - and desperate - separation from its own mother-ground. This is the point at which the divine or primordial awareness in us, Buddha Samantabhadra, surrenders its recognition of its identity with all manifestation, Samantabhadri, its divine consort. To the subjective self it is at once the loss of the mother and of the goddess, perpetually maintained by the logic of separateness, loss, and fear of death leading to exploitation, acquisition, and domination.
Thus addiction arises as instinctive strategy along with the first experience of separateness, and it serves to maintain that experience. It maintains a virtual world of loss and ever sought-for recovery that animates the dance of our nervous system. The egoic - and, we might say, primordially addicted - point of view is both born of, and leads to, a familiar inward or sucking movement of consciousness that draws the world into itself, but diminishes or congeals the world's power and dimension in the process. It is a cognition that shrinks and encapsulates because it cannot hold the sacred reality of the world in its diminishing grasp. It can no longer recognize the rainbow radiance of all life, consciousness shining out of all things. Hence it denies consciousness and aliveness to the natural world and to others. It guarantees that the world is not truly seen. This habit of diminished seeing, and the addiction to separation and grasping, are the activities of a separated and alienated self, and they are mutually reinforcing.
The earlier imagery in the poem and the commentary is, of course, patently male, and it ought therefore to invite the female voice. To colonize the world with the male point of view has been one of the very effective male strategies for coping with the addiction to having a steady supply of "the world as I need it to be" - a world in which the loss of the feminine can be counteracted by domination of the feminine, which ultimately is matter itself. This is the institutionalized boyish solution to ever having to experience things as they are: i.e., a diverse, chaotic, multiphasic reality in which "I" am not in charge nor at the center, nor for myself; yet, by the grace of a humble and more integrated principle of surrender and harmony, may ultimately realize a truer "non-self based" fulfillment. But the addictive solution, through the dramatization of separateness, bypasses both the experiences of fundamental loss and of lack of control; and bypasses as well our genuine capacity for fullness.
From the point of view of the woman - and I realize I am entering late into an old discussion - it may be that the separation from source is reflected in the dynamic of acceptance and collusion with the male projection; as a learned dependence on submission and on the manipulations that collaborate in sustaining it. We are really talking about the masculine and feminine sides of the egoic principle, which comes to maintain a warfare, rather than a harmony, with itself. On one side is to separate from and then dominate the projected feminine. The other side is to separate from the actual feminine, and then have to deny or live up to, the projected feminine. Only this collaboration can sustain our cultural and technological narcissism at the expense of our earth mother. The spiritual resolution then, for the woman, is neither the imitation nor the rejection of the masculine, but rather, as it is also for the male, the re-embrace of original self-nature wholly expressed, which is at once the re-embrace of earth and the re-embrace of the divine. Nothing less can heal history or culture.
The particular male form of the addictive solution may also be expressed in varying cultic dramas of independence, avoidance, secrecy, or control in our individual lives and in our dominant institutions. Thus greed, avoidance, and control characterizes the addictive consciousness of our political and economic institutions - and of the imperialist tide of world history - whose relinquishment would leave us more clearly available to the complete conscious acknowledgment of the independent reality and the primacy of the needs of other human beings; and of our actual equality, reciprocity, and mutual responsibility in all human civic and social relationships, in our relationship to the earth, and in our relationship to the sacred. This conscious and lived acknowledgment is what is constitutionally missing from our historical drama and our addictive conditioning; and our ideals will remain a mirage, our economics exploitative and unsustainable, and our institutions dysfunctional and beyond political correction, until we arrive at a level of human consciousness that grants life to the world, and releases the world, and others, even at the subtlest level, from having to play a role in our addictive story.

The experience of separation - and a sense of lack that leads to grasping - is an understandable and legitimate experience. But the lessons of maturity teach us that even the subtlest indulgence of a narcissistic response to this lack quickly entangles us in addictive patterns that only confirm our separateness and insufficiency. Denial or self-negation does no better. Either strategy reinforces our delusion and dependency, and opens onto the shadow realm of negativity and self-centeredness in which most of our worldly functioning occurs; acting out our perceived separation from love rather than being the source of its expression. What is more, the spiritual and the addictive are so closely aligned that it is no wonder that we frequently see people and teachers of significant spiritual "realization" manifesting grossly addictive patterns of behavior. The failure to humbly address the emotional hole that we may still be seeking to fill late into our spiritual practice confuses and distorts that practice itself.

The addictive premises live like a virus sequestered within the nervous system. Our addictive expectations are so deep that there may be no genuine solution for them other than to consciously incorporate them into our practice through our humble willingness to become awake to our patterns of exploitation, and to practice every day our capacity for awareness, vulnerability, understanding, and compassion. We must be willing to re-feel, directly embrace, and honestly address the actual emotional underpinnings of our life and practice. And to enable ourselves thereby to choose to drop the unconcscious dramatization of our insufficiency and to instead give to each and every experience as the one who is the giver. This is to understand the ecstatic demand of the gods upon us that we be the feasters, not the feasted; to unbend our elbows and uncurl our hands at the deepest level of the psyche.

We may then allow in our experience an outward-flowing, inwardly released or radiant movement of consciousness that by nature gives itself to the world and to everything it sees, as if gently and everywhere broadcasting the seeds by which things become perfectly themselves. This open-handed seeing allows the world to reveal itself in its full dimension and power. It grants freedom and dignity, and reveals aliveness and consciousness in all things, and our behavior is informed accordingly.

Then we may feast and court the goddess through the natural dedication of our contemplative, creative, and relational activity to that which is outside our narcissistic interests or self-reference; so that our daily existence is, in the truest sense, both the expression of, and a sacrifice to, what is holy: the truth of our mutual existence. And further, we may celebrate the goddess through our willingness to experience and express our own life - in its height and depth, in its joy and grief - as, in itself, a complete and free offering - not as a dramatization of our addictive neediness. If we have not yet owned the paradigm of our own wholeness - which includes the ability to metabolize our own feelings of loss, need, or limitation - then we are naturally incapable of seeing others in their own light, but only as players in our own drama of need. The relinquishment of our drama is the difficult and profound relinquishment - an ongoing act of faith and an act of healing - that truly allows the world to open to us; and allows us to uphold the world and others in their own wholeness.

We may then come to recognize this world in each moment, in its physical and its psychic manifestations, as a complete incarnation and gift of the gods. Or we may come to recognize it as a miraculous display of egoless being. In either case, the gift is offered so that we may reciprocate from the heart of our being. If we grab onto the gift as a way of trying to obviate an ancient sense of longing or conviction of separation we only perpetuate that addictive separation. The gift remains life-giving and vital only when it is consciously celebrated and offered back as an act of wholeness, not when it is addictively and unconsciously grabbed onto and taken hold of for ourselves.

When we offer the gifts of the goddess back to herself, in celebration of her own ancient desire for the continuous renewal of all life, both in the world of nature and in the world of the psyche, then we discover that there is, in fact, a dakini by the waterfall who is every moment offering fruit from her basket. But the true freedom of that gift is able to be enjoyed only in the relinquishment of the drama of separation - out of which may finally emerge the mature courting and exchange of gifts, and the true offering to the gods of the fruits of every moment of pleasure and pain, the eloquence of our human experience, by one who has grown wise in his loving.

Today we share the addiction to separateness and self-aggrandizement as an entire cultural paradigm created around the belief in the private ownership, exploitation, and appropriation of the gifts of the gods and the gifts of the earth. It is a profound alienation from our source that only perpetuates the devastation and suffering in the world, and summons the incipient catastrophe that we face; and which will not change until we become wise in our loving and until we come to see the earth as a field of mutual nurturance and support, in which we are continually offering our wealth back to its source.

Yes, everything is already here for us as part of that great cycle of reciprocity by which we are here for everything else. In fact, every occasion in life and every relationship is a holy field of power in which we are given the choice to exploit out of our fundamental scarcity or to nourish out of our fundamental wholeness and abundance. To understand what this means, and to be true to it, is the real dharma practice; or the practice of a truly indigenous and mature culture - a culture that is one with its matrix, one with its soil. It is the practice of the truly mature soul which can only be matured in the practice. Our true wealth, then, lies not in our capacity to fill ourselves from life's abundant table, but in our capacity to give to life: in the abundance of our own dedication to life where we stand, and in our own capacity to nourish and to praise. And to honor, in that way, the unencumbered freedom of life to manifest fully and uniquely in each situation, and in each human being.