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WARNING! Addiction
This is about spirits and the spiritual world through a lens of addiction
Who or what is behind me?
[ 8 minute read ]
My local shopkeeper, in my village, was, like everyone else it seems to me, suddenly on guard when I told him I was about to gamble on a horse race; the Cheltenham Gold Cup. I could see him stiffen and think, 'Addict!'
Many people balk at horse racing. I am never going to put up any strong and consistent argument against other people's perceptions, sympathy or empathy. Everyone approaches everything from their own perspective; a point of view that has been moulded (Amer. molded) by their environment, and crucially, their ability to hear an 'inner voice', or even a disembodied voice that they think is their conscience.
A long time ago, my friend, Mark, told me that the day passes in segments that have areas of separation. He thought that instead of the light fading at the end of the day, it instead dimmed in a series of blocks; each block of the end of the day almost imperceptibly darker than the one before, but he could detect it happening. He used to say some weird stuff, but now I recognise that something interesting was going on in his mind. He allowed himself to consider that he didn't know how to perceive the environment he existed in simply because he had inherited rules and heuristics from everyone around him. He was able to suspend belief and consider a wide scope of possibilities. Interestingly, he wasn't afraid to tell anyone he trusted what he thought was going on, from young ideas of conspiracy theories, to aliens and physics.
Often, I get a distinct feeling that there is someone watching me. When I bring the thought to the fore I experience a chill, a little shiver. I can't help but think that there is a primitive part of the brain that is triggered when ideas of supernatural activity is considered to be apparent. The 'everyday functioning brain' asks a different part of the brain for specialist assistance; a part of the brain that, I suspect, has a radar for activity in the spirit world. I might consider that people who like horror films are having a part of their brain stimulated that is there to deal with the supernatural. It might be a bit of a leap of thinking if we consider that there are only psychopaths in horror films, but not for me, because I know that people with no sympathy or empathy for other living things would make great hosts for entities that want to manipulate and destroy.
When I perceived my local shop-keeper stiffen when I, to him it seems, told him I am an addict of some kind, I am fairly sure he had passed information to the part of his brain that deals with threats, specifically spiritual threats. An addict, is, I believe, commonly thought to stop at nothing to feed their habit. To many people this is tantamount to being no different to a zombie or a psychopath. Indeed, if psychologists and psychiatrists used open and conversational language they might loosely sum up many addicts as being psychopaths. I might be crass and use umbrella terms like that but we all hope that people working in, and on, mental health issues are a little more circumspect about casting wet and clinging blankets of category over comparable attributes just to make them easier to file. If, like me, you found that last sentence tortuous, then consider, 'pigeon-holing' as just such a blanket term to replace the weird and kinked sentence. But spice everything up with a sense of irony too. (Note to self: I find myself disappointed at my limitations in being able to describe my thoughts sometimes - yesterday, fine; today, somehow circumscribed).
So, without realising it, I suggest, my local shopkeeper used a lens of perception to alert him to any spiritual threat. Perhaps that is why there is such a strong reaction to the discovery that there is an addict in the building, that I so often find. Are people really considering only a higher probability of theft, deceit and violence in the physical world? I don't think so.
I am not an addict. I can smoke cigarettes for months or years and then just stop. I can drink vodka for two weeks without a single day of abstinence and then not, I am no sop. I can gamble on horses or other things and not chase my loss.
When I told my local shopkeeper that I had created a spreadsheet on which horse in the Cheltenham Gold Cup (horse race) had a good chance of winning and thus inferring that it would return a financial gain to me, I think he considered I might be chasing a large sum, such as at least £20 or £30. That is not what I do though. i don't seek the large win. I seek to beat the odds by hedging my bets and apply careful focus on variables. The win is merely a moment that allows me to congratulate myself for being perspicacious, perceptive, or focused.
Of course, having large amounts of free money is not intolerable for me to consider and so I also consider a win that actually returns more money than I have spent as being a little exciting too.
After the race, I had occasion to go back into the local shop and immediately told the shopkeeper that I had only lost £1.33 during my earlier mad gambling spree.
'Well, that's okay,' he said. I suppose he was still thinking I had only a small amount of money because my card was declined when I tried to withdraw more then the daily limit through the Post Office. 'Declined' doesn't necessarily mean 'no money' in the account. It means money is not available.
I couldn't help smiling inside. I get it that many people may have gambled and lost £5, £10, £20, £50, or £100 in a single day. Me, I haven't lost £20 in total for the whole of my life, and that includes doing any national lotteries across Europe, and money disappearing down the inside of sofas. I simply don't chase money. In other words, the reward that many people get from smoking, drinking and gambling does not occur in my own life. I don't get the same dopamine hit that most people get.
Perhaps it is from considering the addiction to dopamine that almost everyone is susceptible to, that I might gain more understanding of how people judge each other. To my mind, when someone passes information to a part of their brain that deals with spiritual activity when they, rightly or wrongly, perceive an addict, they may also exhibit a tendency to ignore more common instances of spiritual activity or spiritual vulnerability, just as they ignore doing the National Lottery as an addictive gambling habit.
Yesterday, I transferred £5 to an online account to be able to bet on some horses. I had 20 pence left over, so, even though I can bet only 10 pence on some other thing, I decided to throw caution to the wind and cast my fate onto a game of chance; a national lottery.
I told my shopkeeper that I might win £11.60 at six o'clock. He laughed and said if I do he would like to share it with me. He seems to only see the money. I see only the variance in my life as being a better goal. I wouldn't have withdrawn the money or said to myself, 'Woo hoo, party!' It would just sit in an online account and I would forget about it.
Weirdly, I did spend a further 40 pence on two more lotteries, one that might net me about £8 tonight and the the same next Saturday. There is no gain in that though. I am not engaged in it and dispassionately it is for the financial gain to allow me to, if I remember, spend another three hours studying the probability of choosing a probable winner in an environment or event.
Now that I have sought to gain money and have a hope attached to it, I have to check my rear to see if there really is something or someone watching and influencing me, because throwing my fate on a game of chance really is uncharacteristic of me. Perhaps the shopkeeper saw something within me, or near me, after he asked his brain to check. Perhaps he was even prescient but lacks the capacity, or more likely, the experience, to extricate disjointed information from the cacophony of stimuli that is the physical world.
Perhaps then he really was surprised when I told him I had lost only £1.33. Strangely, I would be embarrassed to tell him I threw money at a game of chance. Perhaps he is right; for a brief moment I was a gambling addict; a lottery? A lottery that I would never even consider watching? I wasn't even seeking a dopamine hit from anticipation! Me? Really?
