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Addicts, Assh*les, and Awakened People

Updated: Jan 28

This article includes some hard hitting but factual Truths. When I was at school parents wanted you to get three A’s at A level so that you could take the pick of the Universities and subjects, and so that they would be ‘proud’ of you (there is always pride before a fall).


When I was at medical school I learned that a ‘triple A’ was an abdominal aortic aneurysm: A condition that, if undetected, if it presented as an emergency after rupture, was almost invariably fatal, similarly to addiction or being an asshole.


In the school that is life I have learned about the ‘Three AAAs': That everyone on the planet who has ever been born grows up to fall into one of three categories: Assholes, Addicts, or Awakened. Sorry, but it's true. Wendy Sellers wrote "Assholes are part of our lives. We can't escape. It is how we deal with them that makes the difference."


We aren’t born like this. We are born awakened, but we slip into the other two categories as a result of parental or societal conditioning, lack of unconditional love, falling asleep for most of our lives, and then a minority of us come back to being awakened.


When I speak to people about their family members they neatly classify every one of them into addicts, assholes, or awakened people. The latter category are sadly in a minority, but it needn't be that way. Just think Christmas lunch with your family: Which category does each member of your family fit into?


Dr Gabor Maté, the world's foremost expert on addiction, wrote that “No society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side... What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true Self at all but the loss of it.”


Assholes are addicts who haven’t found addiction yet. Addicts are assholes who have, but a still quiet voice calls them to a 'calling': If they can hear it above the loud, brash voice of the ego.


98 percent of addicts don’t even try to recover, and of those that do, only half find spirituality, and therefore become awakened, as they are lucky enough to find the path to awakening. Nothing else works. There are many ways to a spiritual awakening: 12 step recovery, ‘A Course in Miracles’, the Hero’s Journey, and via The Dark Night of The Soul: Take your pick...


Addicts, assholes, and awakened people


As Marianne Williamson says, everyone is on a spiritual journey, but not everyone knows that they are. This journey involves a period of suffering as a way of teaching us the true meaning of life. This includes Jesus Christ, The Buddha, and Moses: All had to experience suffering before being ‘reborn’ as fully awakened beings. Even Mother Theresa had to go through a 50-year Dark Night of The Soul to become who she ultimately became.


Almost everyone is actually an addict, but not everyone knows that they are. Addiction includes behavioural addiction, and substance misuse disorders including alcohol. Behavioural addiction includes workaholism, compulsive shopping, gambling, external validation addiction, social media addiction, internet addiction, gaming addiction, sex and love addiction, food addiction (bulimia and anorexia), and many more. You don’t believe me? Try taking an iPad off a three-year-old and watch their wrath and their reaction, like taking a bottle off an alcoholic.


Dr Gabor Maté says that 90 percent of all people are addicts, and the other 10 percent of people are kidding themselves. Maté says that anyone who thinks that they have only one addiction is fooling themselves. 100 percent of addicts are assholes at times. So, you can see that these two categories are closely related. Maté wrote "Much of what we call personality is not a fixed set of traits, only coping mechanisms a person acquired in childhood... The revelations of the soul all assure us that no human being is ever beyond redemption. The possibility of renewal exists so long as life exists. How to support that possibility in others and in ourselves is the ultimate question."


Which category do you fall into? Addict, asshole, or awakened? And how do you step into awareness?


Addicts

Addiction is not a choice, it’s a disease, largely caused by childhood trauma. Maté wrote “Addiction is not a moral failing... Addiction is not a choice anyone makes... The question is never “Why the addiction?” but “Why the pain?” The research literature is unequivocal: most hard-core substance abusers come from abusive homes... We must approach addiction with compassion and understanding, recognising it as a response to deep pain and suffering.” So you really do need to stop judging addicts. If you judge addicts it’s because you are an asshole. Egos judge, to take the focus away from themselves through projection. How can you judge a seven-year-old who did not receive unconditional love as a child? They are so forgiveable.


Maté wrote "What seems nonadapative and self-harming in the present was, at some point in our lives, an adaptation to help us endure what we then had to go through. If people are addicted to self-soothing behaviours, it's only because in their formative years they did not receive the soothing they needed. Such understanding helps delete toxic self-judgment on the past and supports responsibility for the now. Hence the need for compassionate self-inquiry."


Addiction freezes you as your ego (your petrified seven-year-old self). Recovery is a choice, a daily choice made when you wake up of who you are going to be each and every day: Your ego or your Higher Self. There are just over 8 billion people on the planet. One in five adults is an alcoholic. There are only 2 million people in Alcoholics Anonymous. This means that only 1.25% of alcoholics are in 12 step recovery.


Assholes

R. M. Engelhardt wrote “The problem with the world today is that there are too many assholes and not enough saints.” M. F. Moonzajer agrees, writing "The world is so beautiful, but alas. There are so many assholes." L. S. Hawker wrote "You don't shoot people for being assholes, or the human race would be extinct." These are people who live in their ego. They behave like addicts without a fix, because they are addicts without a fix. ‘Fixes’ don’t work anyway. They judge everyone, including themselves. Maté wrote “When I am sharply judgmental of any other person, it's because I sense or see reflected in them some aspect of myself that I don't want to acknowledge.”


Assholes are restless, irritable, and discontented, like addicts without a fix. They are worse off than addicts as they haven't yet received their 'calling' to awakening. Yet there is good news: As Joshua Ferris wrote “Because of God, even the imperious ballbreakers, moralising windbags, and meddling assholes may know love.” Perhaps. He who follows the herd only sees assholes. You don't accidentally become an asshole. It takes a bit of work.


Awakened people

The way out is inwards: To become awakened, and fully charged like a Duracell AAA battery, you need to undergo some form of spiritual awakening. This is the shift from ego to your Higher Self. Dr Carl Jung, the eminent Swiss psychiatrist, psychologist, psychotherapist, spiritual Master, and general all round total dude, effectively set the ball rolling on 12 step recovery through his correspondence with Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous and 12-step recovery. Here is the letter that Jung wrote to Bill W:



Despite his poor and humble origins, Jung became the 'Nikola Tesla of psychology', and through his contributions, the entire field was re-imagined: But that was merely his day job. Just like I’m convinced that Einstein and Shakespeare were really spiritual Masters disguised as a scientist and a playwright respectively, Jung too was a spiritual Master, moonlighting as a psychologist. Their inner and outer purposes were aligned, and that was their Real Personal Power and brilliance. Carl Jung is undoubtedly one of the most important, exciting, and influential figures of the 20th century, and his legacy is even more important today. Carl Jung had an insatiable curiosity as a polymath, like Leonardo de Vinci. Similarly, he had a “once in a generation’ effect on revolutionising his own discipline of psychology and has been described as having an unparalleled intellect. My hypothesis, as to why he had such immense Real Personal Power and influence, even greater than that of Sigmund Freud (his mentor and co-founding father of analytical psychology) was that he had a spiritual approach to life, giving him access to what others have called ‘The Secret’ - an internal connection with the infinite creative intelligence of the Universe.


In the above letter the Bill Wilson, Dr Jung wrote about the process of recovery that there is a necessary "Spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness... the union with God... The only right and legitimate was to such an experience is, that it happens to you in reality and it can only happen to you when you walk on a path, which leads you to a higher understanding. You might be led to that goal by an act of grace or through a personal and honest contact with friends, or go through a higher education of the mind beyond the confines of mere rationalism. I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world (assholes), leads the unrecognised spiritual need into perdition... An ordinary man, not protected by an action from above and isolated in society (social media addicts) cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil."

Dr Carl Jung


Are you ready to become awakened? Let me be your guide...


Speak in such a way that others love to listen to you: Listen in such a way that others love to speak to you.


George Bernard Shaw wrote that “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” Are you ready to change your mind?


Namaste.


Sending you love, light, and blessings brothers.


Olly



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