ajay0
Well-Known Member
An insightful article by Joan Tollifson on the nature of addiction, on how capitalism focusses on creating desires and addressing them rather than needs, creating an artificial psychological sense of lack in the process and thereby pleasure addictions...
Joan Tollifson is a spiritual teacher whose background includes Buddhism, Advaita, nontraditional meditative inquiry, radical nonduality, martial arts, somatic work, addiction recovery, political activism, visual arts . She is a student of Toni Packer, a teacher of zen buddhism , and have authored books and articles on meditation, nondual philosophy and openly shares her own experiences with addiction, depression, cancer, aging, disability, and other life adventures.
Addiction and Compulsion
This site is about seeing through the illusion of separation and waking up to the boundless wholeness that is all there is. Joan Tollifson has an affinity with Advaita, Zen Buddhism and radical nonduality but has her own unique and original expression. She points to the simplicity of what is, as...
www.joantollifson.com
It should be noted that seeking pleasure and avoiding pain are survival mechanisms that make perfect sense in a purely biological context, but no other animal smokes and drinks itself to death. Obviously, what begins as a natural survival mechanism can get in some way displaced, misdirected or exaggerated in human beings with our complex capacity for imagination and conceptual abstraction.
Capitalist-consumer society, which is a creation of the human mind, actually cultivates addiction. Paul Mazer, a Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers in the 1930s, was quoted in a documentary as having said: "We must shift America from a needs – to a desires – culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed…Man's desires must overshadow his needs." And I believe it was the current CEO of Apple whom I heard in an interview describe their mission as "creating something you didn't know you wanted that once you have it, you can't imagine living without."
Capitalism and the advertising industry have devoted themselves to creating a sense of lack in virtually every aspect of modern life from politics to spirituality, and then offering to fill it with things we don't really need that won't really make us happy. It’s no surprise that addiction is a major problem. - Joan Tollifson
Joan Tollifson is a spiritual teacher whose background includes Buddhism, Advaita, nontraditional meditative inquiry, radical nonduality, martial arts, somatic work, addiction recovery, political activism, visual arts . She is a student of Toni Packer, a teacher of zen buddhism , and have authored books and articles on meditation, nondual philosophy and openly shares her own experiences with addiction, depression, cancer, aging, disability, and other life adventures.