Last week I recommended the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know” to my friend, Chris. We were having dinner at the Roaring Fork in San Antonio, TX, and discussing things I enjoy discussing–like waking up. Chris hadn’t seen the movie, so I strongly encouraged him to do so. Chris watched it that night.

We had an interesting email exchange about it. (Not hard with Chris: he is exceptionally bright and articulate and warm.) There is a scene in the movie about addictions that I found quite fascinating. The scene has to do with ‘anything you are not in control of is an addiction: that includes your thoughts and emotions. If you are not in control of your thoughts and emotions, you are addicted to them.’

Chris said this in his email:

“Yes, the conversation about addiction was intriguing; I have been thinking about that and the conversations about how our thoughts are constantly creating at the quantum universe level and if thoughts do that to water, imagine what we are doing to ourselves … you have to wonder why there are addictions to begin with or if they serve some purpose in the larger scope of things …”

Below is my response. I don’t know if it is ‘right’, of course. But if you have some thoughts about this, and it is relevant to what you are seeing in your life half way through this year 2009, please do comment.

Chris,

Finished The Alchemist. Awesome. Thank you for the gift. Just the message I needed just now.

To your point about “you have to wonder why there are addictions to begin with or if they serve some purpose in the larger scope of things …” here’s my hypothesis:

Addictions are necessary because of the principle of free will. I do not know why free will is essential to the grand scheme of things, but it seems to be a very powerful aspect of life. Therefore, I assume it has a purpose.

To me, free will is the opportunity we each have to submit to our soul. When we are in human form, a portion of our soul is used to “light” the form and keep it alive. The other part of the soul stays at the soul level. Let’s call that level mission control. The soul at that point is no longer in full control of the form. Let’s call the human form (mental, emotional and physical bodies)  the lunar landing module.

So, free will is the process of waking up that we are a lunar landing module, of remembering we lost connection with mission control, and in losing that connection (upon birth and the ensuing ‘domestication of the human being’ process, we forgot there even was/is a mission control.

Well, at some point there is the ‘knock of spirit’–some static in the airways we can barely hear through the clicks and beeps of form-life–and we hear a garbled message and recognize it as mission control, and we remember that we once knew there was a mission control… and just forgot. But it is very vague at that point–we don’t fully remember yet, what mission control is–just that there is something familiar about it (that assumes we haven’t soiled our pants when we heard the message and realized that we aren’t alone out there (here).)

Well, in that long time span of forgetfulness of 20, 30, 40, 50 years or more, the little computer in the lunar landing module took on a life of its own, thinking it is THE computer. And we try to get the computer to start honing in on that signal, we have a gosh awful time wresting control away from that lunar landing module computer because it has developed ‘artificial intelligence’–a ‘mind’ and a ‘will’ of it’s own.

That’s where the ‘addictions’ come in. But let’s save that for later…

I suppose–only because I have a prejudice for believing that there is some grand scheme of things–that we have a choice as to what to do when we hear that garbled message. Like one option is to be terrified and to believe that aliens are transmitting on our channel, that we will be annihilated if they find us, and we simply jam that channel and continue bumping along on the moon hitting one lunar rock after another.

Another option is to listen. And to decide to take over the programming of that lunar landing computer and utilize all its wonderful power for a new task–and it is quite sufficient for the task–to hone in on that scary signal and begin to receive it more and more clearly and encounter the reality that we really are not alone out there (here). We can then begin to use it to decide what to do with the message, and to act on the message–to ‘ground’ the message from mission control through our actions.

That’s free will: it is the possibility and potential of making a decision to connect to the signal and to submit to the message, or the decision to not. And, I suppose through the Universal Intelligence watching what happens when one does and when one doesn’t do that, the Universal Intelligence learns something about Itself that it is missing.

That’s the long story. So if following the knock of spirit and submitting to the command of the soul–basically surrendering our human form/vessel (mental, emotional and physical bodies) to the soul is the ‘light’ of the phenomenon known as free will, then the ’shadow’ of that phenomenon is addiction. Addiction is what happens when the ghost in the machine remains in control, and we remain obsessed with anything other than the one thing. The one thing, of course, being to fulfill our destiny, to become Sons of Man. And that requires co-operation between mission control, the lunar landing module, and that mysterious person piloting that fragile and remarkable little vehicle.

With much warmth,

Your friend,

Otis