Let me recall my own experience when I gave up cigarettes. I had been
smoking forty or more a day for several years when I decided to give
them up. Not being able to do things in half-measures I stopped smoking
all at once. I remember walking in the park not long after I had
finished my last cigarette, and feeling pleased with myself that I had
actually taken the decision. (I also felt rather light-headed, which was
no doubt a deprivation symptom—this continued for some days.) But the
principal thought that assailed me was this: though I had no doubt that I
could stick to my resolution, there was one thing that I really
needed to confirm it and to fortify me in my determination not to have
another cigarette, and that one thing was... a cigarette. Far from its
being obvious to me that in order to give up cigarettes I should give up
cigarettes, I had the greatest of trouble to resist the pressing
suggestion that in order to give up cigarettes I should take a cigarette.
Let me also tell you of the researches of Dr. Klar when he was in
Persia shortly after the war. Dr. Klar, besides being a physician, is
also interested in psychology; and he had with him in Persia an
ingenious device for reading a person's character and state of mind.
(This consists of a number of cards each with about eight pairs of
coloured squares pasted on them. The subject is simply required to
indicate which colour in each pair he prefers. He 'read' us all at the
Hermitage, with devastatingly accurate results that did not really
please all of us. But this is a digression.*
He told us that eighty percent of all Persians over the age of
thirty-five (I think he said) take opium (and also that all Persians
tell lies on principle—but this is another digression), and with such a
wealth of material to hand
he was able to do some research. He would give each addict two
readings, one before taking opium and one after. The readings all said
the same thing: before the opium the mental state of the addict was abnormal and disorganized; after
the opium the mental state was normal and organized. The effect of the
opium on the addict was not, as one might think, to disintegrate the
personality; on the contrary, the effect was to integrate a
disintegrated personality. The opium was necessary to restore the addict
to normal. (I have heard similar observations from another doctor who
was for many years a medical missionary in China: if you want to do
business with an opium addict, drive your bargain when the effect of his
last dose is wearing off.)
What can we conclude from all this? We conclude that, unlike a 'normal'
person who may take a drug once in a way for the novelty or pleasure of
the effect, and who at that time becomes 'abnormal', the confirmed
addict is 'normal' only when he has taken the drug, and becomes
'abnormal' when he is deprived of it. The addict reverses the usual
situation and is dependent upon the drug to keep him in his normal
integrated state. (This does not mean, of course, that the addict
derives pleasure from occasional deprivation as the abstainer
does from occasional intoxication; quite the contrary: in both cases the
drugged state is more pleasant, but for the one it is normal and for
the other it is abnormal.) The addict can only do his work efficiently
and perform his normal functions if he takes the drug, and it is in this
condition that he will make plans for the future. (If he cannot take
the drug the only plan he makes is to obtain another dose as quickly as
possible.) If he decides that he must give up his addiction to the drug
(it is too expensive; it is ruining his reputation or his career; it is
undermining his health; and so on) he will make the decision only when
he is in a fit state to consider the matter, that is to say when he is drugged; and it is from this (for him, normal) point of view that he will envisage the future. (Thus, it was as a smoker
that I decided to give up smoking.) But as soon as the addict puts his
decisions into effect and stops taking the drug he ceases to be normal,
and decisions taken when he was normal now appear in quite a different
light—and this will include his decision to stop taking the drug. Either,
then, he abandons the decision as invalid ('How could I possibly have
decided to do such a thing? I must have been off my head') and returns
to his drug-taking, or (though he approves the decision) he
feels it urgently necessary to return to the state in which he
originally took the decision (which was when he was drugged) in order to make the decision seem valid again.
(And so it was that I felt the urgent need of a cigarette to confirm my
decision to give them up.) In both cases the result is the same—a
return to the drug. And so long as the addict takes his 'normal' drugged
state for granted at its face value—i.e. as normal—, the same thing will happen whenever he tries to give up his addiction.
Not only is the drug addict in a vicious circle—the more he takes the
more he wants, the more he wants the more he takes --, but until he
learns to take an outside view of his situation, and is able to see the nature
of drug-addiction, he will find that all his attempts to force a way
out of the vicious circle simply lead him back in again. (A vicious
circle is thus a closed system in stable equilibrium.) It is only when
the addict understands addiction, and holds fast to the right
view that—in spite of all appearances, in spite of all temptations to
think otherwise—his 'normal' drugged state is not normal, that
he will be able to put up with the temporary discomfort of deprivation
and eventually get free from his addiction. In brief, then, an addict
decides to give up drugs, and he supposes that in order to do so all
that is necessary is to give them up (which would certainly be a glimpse
of the obvious were it not that he is profoundly deceiving himself, as
he very soon finds out). No sooner does he start giving them up than he
discovers (if he is very unintelligent) that he is mistaken and has made
the wrong decision, or (if he is less unintelligent) that though the
decision is right he is wrong about the method, and that in order to give up drugs it is necessary to take them.
It is only the intelligent man who understands (against all
appearances) that both the decision and the method are right; and it is
only he that succeeds. For the intelligent man, then, the instruction
'to give up drugs it is necessary to give them up', far from being a
glimpse of the obvious, is a profound truth revealing the nature of
addiction and leading to escape from it.
I would ask you to pause before dismissing this account as fanciful;
this same theme—the vicious circle and the escape from it by way of
understanding and in spite of appearances—is the very essence of the
Buddha's Teaching. The example discussed above—drug-addiction—is on a
coarse level, but you will find the theme repeated again and again right
down to the finest level, that of the four noble truths. It will, I
think, be worthwhile to illustrate this from the Suttas.
In the 75th Sutta of the
Majjhima Nikāya (M.i,506-8) the Buddha shows the vicious circle of
sensual desire and its gratification in the simile of a man with a skin
disease (kutthi—a leper?). Imagine a man with a fiercely
itching skin disease who, to relieve the itching, scratches himself with
his nails and roasts himself near a brazier. The more he does this the
worse becomes his condition, but this scratching and roasting give him a
certain satisfaction. In the same way, a man with finely itching
sensual desire seeks relief from it in sensual gratification. The more
he gratifies it the stronger becomes his desire, but in the
gratification of his desire he finds a certain pleasure. Suppose, now,
that the skin disease were cured; would that man continue to find
satisfaction in scratching and roasting himself? By no means. So, too, a
man who is cured of sensual desire (an arahat) will find no more pleasure in sensual gratification.
Let us extend the simile a little. You, as a doctor, know very well
that to cure an itching skin disease the first thing to do is to prevent
the patient from scratching and making it worse. Unless this can be
done there is no hope of successfully treating the condition. But the
patient will not forego the satisfaction of scratching unless he is made
to understand that scratching aggravates the condition, and that there
can be no cure unless he voluntarily restrains his desire to scratch,
and puts up with the temporarily increased discomfort of unrelieved
itching. And similarly, a person who desires a permanent cure from the
torment of sensual desire must first be made to understand that he must
put up with the temporarily increased discomfort of celibacy (as a bhikkhu)
if the Buddha's treatment is to be successful. Here, again, the way out
of the vicious circle is through an understanding of it and through
disregard of the apparent worsening of the condition consequent upon
self-restraint.
Consider, now, the four noble truths. The fourth of these truths is,
'This is the way leading to the cessation of suffering, that is to say,
the noble eight-factored path'; and the first factor of this path is
'right view', which is defined as knowledge of the four noble truths.
But, as before, the fourth truth is the way leading to cessation of
suffering. So we come to the proposition, 'The way leading to cessation
of suffering is knowledge of the way leading to the cessation of
suffering', or 'To put an end to suffering one must understand the way
to put an end to suffering'. And what is this but a repetition, at the
most fundamental level, of our original theme, 'To give up drugs one
must understand the way to give up drugs'?[1]
Not everybody is addicted to morphia, but most people are addicted to sensual gratification, and all except the ariyasāvakas are addicted to their own personality (sakkāyaditthi),[2] and even the ariyasāvakas, with the exception of the arahat, still have a subtle addiction, the conceit 'I am' (asmimāna). The arahat
has put an end to all addiction whatsoever. There is thus no form of
addiction that the Buddha's Teaching will not cure, provided the addict
is intelligent and willing to make the necessary effort.
P.S. I don't know what you will make of this (I mean the latter part).
In a way it is infinitely more difficult than either of the other things
that I sent you, but that is because it is quite different. They
were concerned only with method, and if either of them was found
difficult that was mainly owing to lack of philosophical background. This deals directly with the Buddha's Teaching, and is difficult because no amount of philosophical background will help. Their principal aim (as we see in retrospect) was the purely negative one of preventing you from attempting to translate this
into terms of psychology (the earlier one) or of physiology (all
knowledge, for example, of the physiological changes produced by opium
is totally irrelevant). You may perhaps find (whether you follow it or
not) that this is of more vital interest than the other two.
Footnotes:
[1]
The rationalist, who would not for a moment dream of practising the
Buddha's Teaching, can never understand that this is anything else than a
glimpse of the obvious. Arthur Koestler, on first meeting the Buddha's
Teaching, exclaimed 'But it's all tautologous, for Heaven's sake!'
[13.f]
Below this point, though the essential structure of addiction remains
the same, it is no longer possible to get an outside view of it by
voluntary effort. In other words, one cannot give up sakkāyaditthi (and become sotāpanna)
as simply as one can give up tobacco, merely by deciding to do so and
sticking to the decision. Indeed, it is so difficult that it takes a
Buddha to find out about it and tell others.
Editorial notes:
Editorial notes:
* coloured squares: This sounds similar to the Lüscher Color Test, used by clinicians. A softcover book, The Lüscher Color Test,
published in the '70s, discusses this approach and includes a set of
coloured cards and detailed (but not always clear) instructions on
interpretations of the results. In our experience self-interpretation is
far more difficult and complicated than the book claims. (Dr. Helmut
Klar is prominent in German Buddhist circles.)
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