[Music]
As a medical doctor, I worked with some very very addicted people people,
people who use heroin,
cocaine
alcohol
crystal meth
and every drug known to man .
And these people suffer:
they lose their health
they lose their beauty
they lose their teeth
they lose their wealth
they lose human relationship
and in the end they often lose their lives.
And yet nothing can force them to give up their addiction.
The addictions are powerful
and the question is why.
If you want to understand addiction,
you can't look at what's wrong with the addiction,
you have to look at what's right about it.
In other words, what is the person getting from the addiction
that otherwise they don't have.
And what addicts get
are relief from pain, the sense of peace,
a sense of control, a sense of calmness
very, very temporarily.
And that's why the real question in addiction is not
why the addiction, but why the pain
If you want to ask the question of why people are in pain,
you can't look at their genetics,
you have to look at their lives.
And in the case of my highly addicted patients,
it's very clear why they're in pain,
because they've been abused all their lives.
They began life as abused children,
physically abused, neglected, sexually abused,
abandoned over and over again.
And that's why the pain.
The human brain develops in interaction with the environment.
The kind of environment that a child has
will actually shape the development of the brain
[Music]
The Buddhists have this idea of the hungry ghosts.
The hungry ghosts are creatures with large empty bellies
and small scrawny necks and tiny little mouths.
So they can never get enough,
they can never fill this emptiness on the inside.
And the addiction is all about
trying to fill that emptiness from the outside.
[Music]
From that perspective you can understand that there's many many addictions
Yes, there's the addiction to drugs
but it is also the addiction to consumerism,
the addiction to sex,
to the Internet,
to food.
For each person there is a different way of filling the emptiness
[Music]
but the emptiness always goes back to what we did the get
when we were very small.
[Music]
Many of my patients were actually First Nations Indian people
and they are heavily addicted
because their lands were taken away from them
and because they were killed and abused
from generation to generation and generation.
If you can understand the suffering of these native people
and how that suffering makes them seek relief from pain
in their addictions,
what about the people who are perpetrating it?
What are they addicted to?
Well, they're addicted to power,
they're addicted to wealth,
they're addicted to acquisition.
They want to make themselves bigger
The addiction to power is always about
the emptiness that you try and fill from the outside.
[Music]
If you look at the story about Jesus and Buddha,
both of them were tempted by the devil.
And one of the things that the devil offers them
is power.
And they both say no
because they have the power inside of themselves,
they don't need it from the outside.
They don't want to control people,
they want to teach people by example, not through force-
So they refuse power -
Jesus says the kingdom of God is within,
that the power is not outside of yourself but inside
And the Buddha says: "Don't worship me,
"find a lamp inside yourself
"be a lamp unto yourselves, find the light within"
And so as we look at this difficult world,
let's not look to the people in power to change things
because the people in power are very often some of the emptiest people in the world.
We have to find that light within ourselves.
We have to find the lightness in humilitiy
and in our own wisdom,
in our own creativity.
if we find that light within,
if we find our own nature,
then we'll be kinder to ourselves
and we also be kinder to nature
[Music]
(We are social beings.)
(When we feel disconnected or alienated)
(we experience pain.)
(Addiction, depression, anger, and violence)
(are different ways we react to pain.)
(To heal our society and our world)
(we must heal the emotional wounds at the roots of our pain.)
(Support the creation of other stories like this:)
(https://www.patreon.com/sustainablehuman)
(This video was produced as a gift to humanity)
(by Chris and Dawn Agnos.)