I've mentioned my struggles with addictive behaviors, which, in one form or another, have been an issue for many of the people in my family. So a couple of weeks ago, I decided to try the monthly Habitual Patterns meeting at the Shambhala Center, which they describe as follows:

Habitual Patterns is not a 12-Step program, though it welcomes those who are in 12-Step recovery and encourages a dialogue on ways to approach and understand the 12 Steps from a Buddhist perspective. Habitual Patterns is also not a substitute for other recovery systems, but rather an addition to those supports. The group is not restricted to Shambhala sangha members, and welcomes anyone who is interested in further exploring the relationship between meditation, dharma, and recovery from addiction or alcoholism.

At first, listening to people speak of their struggles with serious drug addiction, I felt like something of a poseur, but as they continued to speak, I felt more and more comfortable. They all spoke of the same dawning understanding of addictive, habitual, and regrettable acts, behaviors, and patterns as the product of our attempts to create and protect a sense of a real and permanent self. As I suggested earlier (with a helpful clarification from Marijo), addiction to that self is at the root of all addictions (and of all suffering).

As I listened to everyone around me speak of the "Three Lords of Materialism" in their lives, the strangest thing happened: I went from thinking about and analyzing what people were saying to identifying myself with the discussion. I wasn't a person sitting in the room--I was the conversation filling the room. I felt a welling of emotion that swept up through my face and into tears. This was not enlightenment, but it was the closest I'm likely to get to it for a while. It wasn't an idea--it was an experience. I felt the reality of my self and its "habit energy" as delusions that lead to suffering. And rather than feeling lost or disoriented because of this detachment from my self, I felt the joy of prajna. I felt tremendous compassion for everyone in the room (myself included), without a sense attachment to any of them (myself included). This is where the inadequacy of words becomes especially difficult. If I say that I experienced sunyata (typically translated as emptiness), that might suggest that I had transcended something or made some sort of escape (achieved emptiness in a negative sense), but that might fail to suggest that I had clarified my view or identified with all (achieved emptiness in a positive sense). Sunyata, prajna, Buddha--it is always there, and if we let go of everything that is not (and is) that, we'll let go of our suffering along with it.

As the Shambhala Center puts it, "Habitual Patterns is not a 12-Step program." In fact, there are ways in which it's a fundamental refutation of Judeo-Christian-based 12-Step programs. Many observers (David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest most extensively and effectively among them) have suggested that 12-Step programs are a means of exchanging one addiction for another, of taking an ego that has surrendered itself to the Substance and giving it over to the Higher Power instead. There's an underlying pessimism in the notion that a person with the Disease can no longer be trusted, that they must give themselves over to meetings, cigarettes, bad coffee, and the Higher Power so long as they hope to be sober. Aside from the possibility that the cure might be less healthy than the malady, there's a hopelessness in being forced to choose among addictions, in not being able forego addiction.

Buddhism, on the other hand, has no higher power--there is only delusion and reality. According to the Buddhist idea of karma, each of us alone is responsible for our acts, words, and thoughts and their consequences among the delusions which most of us experience as reality. Once we understand those delusions as such, karma ceases to be a factor. For Buddhists, addictions to any substance, idea, or state of mind are forms of an addiction to the self and thus delusions. To exchange an addiction to heroin for an addiction to meditation would be dubious progress. Where 12-Step programs seek to simply change the addictions of some defective egos, Buddhism seeks to end our addiction to our ego and free us all from the suffering that addiction causes.

I've heard recovering addicts say that they're only really comfortable with other recovering addicts. I had assumed that this was because they felt that only someone who had shared their harrowing experiences could understand them, but I'm starting to suspect that the reasons are broader than that. There can be a refreshing lack of pretense among those who have squarely faced the truly appalling acts that are often the side effects of serious substance addiction, who know what they themselves (and, by extension, all of us) are capable of, and an equally refreshing unwillingness to judge others. In the absence of pretense and the impulse to judge (that is, where the recovering addict doesn't fall prey to chronic self-absorption), they can address the deep, meaningful questions of life clearly and simply. For them, answering those questions can be a pragmatic necessity, rather than an abstract amusement or a means to superiority. If you have a real personal interest in those questions, you're likely to find a far more satisfying and emotionally relevant discussion of them among recovering addicts (or other survivors of profound existential trauma) than you are in a graduate seminar. I wonder if that's why Sonia finds the conversations at The Centre for Living With Dying so "comforting."