What is addiction?

Addiction is that dedication around which everything else gets transfixed. It is inevitably harmful because, even when massively inclusive, the processes it transfixes demand an autonomous logic. Rehabilitation therapies teach addicts to build ghosts so that they end up addressing those processes in their autonomy-seeking terms, inevitably clumsily.

A true addict can only survive by substituting the dedication with one that suits the transfixed processes. A man cannot live alone with ghosts!

Thus a usual rate of relapse of about 90 percent. To his insides, an addict will always know: "it was worth it." Maybe it is this knowledge that allows some part of that 10 percent to do away with ghosts and substitutions and bravely live with the concequences of this transfixion.

Pezer wrote:

Addiction is that dedication around which everything else gets transfixed. It is inevitably harmful because, even when massively inclusive, the processes it transfixes demand an autonomous logic. Rehabilitation therapies teach addicts to build ghosts so that they end up addressing those processes in their autonomy-seeking terms, inevitably clumsily.

Therapies are invariably references to the drug use and thus stimulants of themselves.

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A true addict can only survive by substituting the dedication with one that suits the transfixed processes. A man cannot live alone with ghosts!

Thus a usual rate of relapse of about 90 percent. To his insides, an addict will always know: "it was worth it." Maybe it is this knowledge that allows some part of that 10 percent to do away with ghosts and substitutions and bravely live with the concequences of this transfixion.

Perhaps philosophy can become the means whereby such courage is rewarded.
That would not be a humble function.

Bonfires will be needed, yes.
"Meat right off the bone"

"There's no such thing as addiction. There are things that you enjoy doing more than life." --Doug Stanhope

Heh, Stanhope is good. The ultimate joke is that those things, too, are from life. Opium from the poppy flower, just as adherent to sun cycles and water and care as the mushroom or the rose. Pot from the wild weeds of the rain forest. Barley that enjoys the earth so much, sugar cane! The sweetest of things, and grows like wildfire.

When I got high, I always thought of it as the true communion. Until I simply started to become like the plants, and then I ran fast.

Aztec priests were the only ones alowed to do shrooms, and peyote is still religiously used in parts of Mexico and the US.

Personally, I see it as plants communicating with us through the simplest of ways self-valuings communicate: attack. And thus, the meeting points of convergent evolution provide a bonfire where all breathing things can sit. "Aren't we awesome?"

Capable wrote:

"There's no such thing as addiction. There are things that you enjoy doing more than life." --Doug Stanhope

Do you really believe that?
There's a hugh difference between an addiction (think of a monkey on your back refusing to let go as it bites down hard on your neck almost every moment) and enjoying particular things more than other things.
I suppose that Stanhope wasn't being completely literal in that thought.

Anyway, for those who love and thrive on philosophy, that would encompass life, not be separated from it.

Addiction is different depending on the substance, something not many of these pathetic psychologists ever recognize.


Someone who isn't me has been addicted to opiates for more than a decade, at first purely to treat the effects of nerve damage. Purely as a matter of theory, I would say that all other drugs- amphetamines, for example, provide you with a crystal clear surge of this or that feeling, but opiates give you a blank template out of which you can construct your very own dream and reality. The opium high has no quality or character, it is ghostlike, ethereal, hard to describe: over time, you learn to appreciate a few of its innumerable properties and to ignore others, building your own private universe out of it that you can always return to. Every pill also gives another piece of your soul to Opium, until there is no soul left and in order just to be yourself and get that soul back you have to take the drug. Things you like to do and know you like to do, are suddenly unenjoyable without the drug. But opium actually teaches you something- unlike every other drug. It teaches you that all pleasure is meaningless and an illusion- that in fact all reality is meaningless and illusion... for the pain which opium treats is meaningless and an illusion. And that you might as well take the pills, for the pills provide you with pleasure itself, unincarnated and abstracted pleasure- if there is something wrong with consuming pleasure directly, consuming it indirectly through a big mac or a jerk off session isn't going to morally restitute anything.



And really, imagine that someone really did like opiates more than life. How would you distinguish that from them being addicted? What would the difference be, between liking them more than you like being alive, and on the other hand having this imagined mental illness called addiction? Or is the argument that life is intrinsically so wonderful that nobody could possibly prefer something to it?

If my rehab was right about one thing, it is that all addictive processes are the same, regardless of the drug, corroborated by how perfectly I relate to your description. The difference is that, as different drugs offer different palates for universe building, the radically altered personality is different for each drug, and even each person. The soul can be eaten in this or that direction, but it never truly fades, only evolves.

You can't love being high more than being alive, being alive is required for getting high. You may simply love living that way so much that you cease to care about imminent death, the pleasure is overriding. There is nothing wrong with getting high or getting high as fuck, quitting drugs is never at bottom a moral decision but a practical one. It happens when the addict values something more than getting high which is threataned by getting high.

Pezer wrote:

It happens when the addict values something more than getting high which is threataned by getting high.

Such as getting higher the next day.

Or the next decade. Or the next life.

This is sensible, and yet Parodites describes a case that is different as it refutes the notion of practical concerns, that is to say, the notion that praxis could be separated from meaning, in a case where meaning is the realm claimed by the drug - this is the case where the organism does not care to 'return' to anywhere, it only serves the state in which it has arrived, and builds a world out of this state, a world that becomes a philosophy. This is a commitment to the drug that no rehab theory will endorse and that will not coincide with attending a rehab session. It corresponds rather to my shamanistic notion of being, which is that we are experimental chemical processes, and that drugs are part of that as much as food is, that foods are drugs, that drugs are just drugs that aren't food for anything but 'mind'. Heroin is purely physical, it seems to me, cocaine is mental and emotional, mdma is physical and emotional, weed is very mental and physical, bypassing emotions, alcohol is emotional, so weed with alcohol is especially powerful in distorting the personality. I don't think you can even get addicted to that combination (I menn really drinking and really smoking), unless you throw cocaine into the mix to stable things. Many people are addicted to that triplicity. It seems to work pretty well, the amounts of each substance consumed are less when all three are available. The pathways are too compelling to get stuck on any one.

Submission to a drug is like submission to a god that actually performs the thing he was submitted to for. Nonetheless it takes a part of the soul. Therefor it is wise to create things under the influence, externalize the transaction. A triadic relationship between the man, the drug and the world - art that draws man out of himself in turn. Drugs are the birthplace of communion.

Capable wrote:

This guy just smokes because it's cool.

Im thinking of getting one of these vaping e-cigarette things. Technology is only chemistry endowed with other means.

Neurofeedback is a weird thing to be addicted to.

Also, neurotransitter-supplements. Not dopamine but the entire transmitters.

I once had a few weeks of that and I woke up once out of two simultaneous dreams. It felt like my brain was pasted together at the moment I woke up.

It felt like there was more where that came from, and yet I took it as a sign that I had been reunited, at least in an instance.

The true addict, the one who has abolished anything in the soul but taste for drugs (yes, including food, a complete breath of the body with nature), will always favor a better high to a constant high. A true addict, whose drugod commands fully, will easily dedicate many lives for a path that can increase the high manyfold. How many times have us addicts turned down an immediate drug for a higher quality one that requires waiting? The addict is as addicted to getting more high as he is to getting high itself. Rehab, like any sham, includes a good many truths: don't us addicts appropriate many of their terms? Tolerance is a good one.

This nature of drugtaking you describe is not recreational, it is shamanic, and it is what I dedicate my life to. As Simon Bolivar said: if nature is against us, we will fight it and submit it. If society hinders my drug taking, I will fight it and submit it. Because they would dig it too, if they valued life over death as an addict does.

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if they valued life over death as an addict does.

The heart of the matter.

You would think that heroin and opiates are purely physical, but they are not, for painkillers kill emotional and intellectual pain just as much as they kill physical pain. Opiates work on a part of the brain that connects the immediate self with what is happening to it, so when you take them you are still in as much pain as you were, but your ego no longer feels connected to the pain- you enter a kind of disassociated state, like the pain is only happening to your body but not you, not your mind. It does this with emotions as well, disassociating you from them. With opiates you can choose to feel or not feel, you can choose to connect with your emotions and sensations or simply remain removed from them, like they are happening to an alien presence that is not yourself. Opium is also an inspirant, and the whole romantic period of writers and composers used it for that purpose. Nietzsche used it often.

"'What about opium makes one sleepy? A sleepy quality' this answers nothing." Something like that. This is important: to Nietzsche, something like this was as much philosophy as anything, if not more. How do you answer that question? This is philosophy.

Post-shamanism.

Parodites,

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Addiction is different depending on the substance, something not many of these pathetic psychologists ever recognize.

Perhaps - perhaps not. Addiction is still at bottom addiction, in my book. How the body is affected by the different substances may be different, but addiction is still in most cases, a deeper sign or symptom that something is lacking in one's life, in some way, that a person is not being fulfulled, experiences loss, is running away from pain and suffering, is trying to suppress/repress their consciousness.

Perhaps in the case of someone who has become addicted to pain killers where real physical pain is/has been, that can be considered different but perhaps not so much. Physical pain is basically no different than emotional pain. They're still pain. Pain killers are still drugs in order to escape something - the pain. Both are still are a monkey on the back and difficult to get rid of.

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And really, imagine that someone really did like opiates more than life. How would you distinguish that from them being addicted? , and on the other hand having this imagined mental illness called addiction?

As for the first sentence, perhaps, only perhaps, that might depend on how much one uses them. If only occasionally, then probably not an addict. Like the difference between an epicurean and a hedonist. I think that all addicts are hedonists in a sense.

Addiction is NOT an imagined mental illness except for someone in denial just as alcoholism is also a mental illness. When the brain and the mind are not functioning at the optimum and far below it, I can call that mental illness. The person is ill, both physically, emotionally, mental.

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What would the difference be, between liking them more than you like being alive Or is the argument that life is intrinsically so wonderful that nobody could possibly prefer something to it?

As for the first part, I would have to say extremely bad judgment and a lack of cognitive thinking.
They are still a symptom of something deeply missing from the person and that one prefers a slow suicide to conscience living. I don't mean to be harsh here. i realize that each case is different and there is no such thing as black and white. There are many shades to it and circumstances.

No, clearly life is not so wonderful but there are many different paths that one can take given that we've seen the sometimes tragic and chaotic struggling of those people who do not resort to drugs.
But we're all different.

I don't understand how we sometimes actually romanticize and hold sacred those very things which can destroy us.
We also romanticize about how very strong we are in the things which we do but in actuality, we're being weak and short-sighted and unloving toward ourselves. But we choose to live in the matrix of a different kind.

The question is not whether life is wonderful or not, it is whether anything else can be known. The answer is a resounding no.

The underlying blasphemy in christianity is that a MAN died and came back to life from something else. The greeks and the egyptians didn't envision a death, but a life that went on in some other form but with the same continuing logic of life. Nietzsche called that christian principle decadence, and Leibniz was quite effective at countering it from within.

Life is boring and empty to me, it has been since my first memories. All the books I read, even from the supposedly greatest authors, leave me unfulfilled and wanting something more, while people for the most part disgust me; I take no pleasure in anything, not even the basic things like food, as the trigeminal neuralgia makes eating quite unpleasant. I don't like going places or seeing things, in fact I prefer not to leave my house at all. If I had ten billion dollars I'd give it away- not as some kind of statement that I am above the goods of this world, and definitely not to do good, but simply because money is only as good as the things you can buy with it, and there is nothing I want. As far as mental illness, there is no standard or healthy measure, there is no normal cognitive function to compare the supposedly diseased one to. A raving homeless schizophrenic in our era might be a revered Delphic oracle in another era. The science of the brain is in its earliest infancy, and we hardly even understand what individual chemicals and brain tracts do, let alone what they do in combination with one another: as far as I'm concerned, the psychology utilized by most in our era is a load of horse shit. The Greeks said there were two kinds of madness- a good madness sent by the gods as a reward and divine inspiration, and the bad madness sent as a punishment for hubris. Our civilization is an un-natural artificial construction that antagonizes everything that comes naturally to us, a bleak landscape of sterile clinical whites painted on whites; a collection of meaningless routines and monotonous hours upon hours in which humans are made to work for a wage like indentured servants: being insane in there doesn't mean much. The only things "someone who isn't me" ever liked about this existence are his own thoughts and books, women, and painkillers. Everything else is a bit shit. Personally, I left this meaningless parade of talking monkeys behind a long time ago- life to me isn't out there, in the smell of flowers or the night sky or wherever you think it is, it is rather constituted by my own pathos and thoughts, in which I prefer to dwell alone. Besides blowing a fat load on somebody's face, the only other source of physical pleasure for someone who isn't me, may perhaps be opium. But I'm being intentionally mordant- all I mean to say is that you should listen to what addicts say about addiction rather than what psychologists say about it. If it's alright to inject your brain with zoloft to balance your shit out, why not percocet or vicodin? At any rate, addiction may often be the lesser of two ills. As long as I am writing and have various substances to keep me occupied, I am rather happy. I'm not an addict or drug user anyway- I of course just know a guy who is. Plus my body is the hedonist, my mind is indifferent to pleasure and pain, unfortunately my body gets in the way of my mind if I don't keep it content. I like my own life, I'm just not sure about everyone else's.

I just want to say, don't mean to be an asshole, everything you contrasted to life is life.

I just want to say, don't mean to be an asshole, everything you contrasted to life is life.

So you dig yourself? I dig myself too. I mean someone who whaterthefuck with your codes. With philosophy, I saw how myself didn't come from myself. Maybe you spontaneously generated, thoughts and all included.

It's certainly true that using opiates is infinitely better than antidepressants, these simply turn man into machine that obeys his daily hollownesses, and also that life, in terms of its bells and horns and friday night meetings, is utterly void without the sort of life the philosopher makes his own, being sprinkled among it in small bits, that form the magic of the night and the reason for the music, in all its frail and botched attempts.

For a philosopher to be present among women around certain times of the months, if it is made known that he is what he is, is to cause Maenaic frenzy. This is why many philosopers like to consort with 'witches', as they are irreverently called, and quite reverently burned.

Pezer wrote:

With philosophy, I saw how myself didn't come from myself. Maybe you spontaneously generated, thoughts and all included.

But value ontology basically says that we do come from ourselves. That our history comes from what we are. This is the end of all revenges.

Pezer wrote:

I just want to say, don't mean to be an asshole, everything you contrasted to life is life.

Indeed, as I said, I quite like my life, it's just that I'm not sure about everybody else's.