Did you know that we, as individuals, families, communities, societies and cultures can be addicted to emotional states? Yes. We can be. And many of us are whether we are consciously aware of it or not. What’s more, we use each other for our fixes. And once we get the sensation that we’re looking for, we come down. And if we don’t get it, we go off. And like most addictions, it takes increasingly more hits to get our fixes. I guess that would be cool if we were addicted to love, justice, and ecstasy of knowing that we are all connected. But we aren’t. We’re addicted to the illusion of our ascension through the diminishment of others. We think we’re getting higher by making others lower. But we’re really just being deceived by emotional reruns.

Don’t get me wrong, I realize that all of our emotions exist for a reason. So they have a kind of potency that is difficult to resist. They are supposed to tell us a true somatic and holistic story of what we’re actually experiencing in consciousness in real time. But most of us are not present enough with what’s actually happening so that our emotional states that we think are real are just fabrications of past experiences projected onto the present moment. We’re basically hallucinating most of the time.

Now maybe it’s because I’m technically “neuro-divergent”, but I have witnessed this all of my life and have tried different approaches to navigate it in my efforts to be more relatable. At first I was just curious but felt no need to participate. Then I was perplexed because when I started school people would often attack me for seemingly no reason simply because I didn’t want to engage in many of the activities that they gave their attention to. At some point I got frustrated with that. So for years I used to just call people out and tell them that their so called feelings weren’t real because I didn’t realize how real they felt to people. I legitimately thought that waking them up was just a matter of telling them. But when I realized that wasn’t working, I felt defeated. So I decided it was best if I kept to myself. Then I met a woman who seemed to “get me”. So when she asked me if I thought it was fair that I could see people struggling but was choosing not to engage, I felt a sense of conviction.

That’s when I started trying to get better at articulating what I was witnessing so that perhaps I could serve people who wanted to have more authentic and present moment encounters with themselves and others. Often when it actually hurt me to do it. I tried calling people forward. I used the same tools of projection used by people to protect themselves from getting hurt again since I knew that and used them to see people in their highest potential even when they were acting like the very opposite. That backfired because it turns out that some people think kindness is weakness. So they just keep pushing and pushing trying to get that score of emotional gratification. So, I learned to walk away. Or as Jesus put it, “Kick the dust of your feet”, when I realized that I did all I can and just can’t do anymore.

And now, in the wake of seeing so much rampant delusion in the name of only God knows what, I’m back to being curious. But, I’ve also given up in some way. Or perhaps the better word is surrender. After I tried everything that I can think of, I realize that all I can do is be like a child and love without expectations and do my best to stay emotionally sober in the moment that I’m in. Saying this in the context of everything that’s going on in the world, I won’t act like I don’t feel tempted to use some other people to get my fix of my go to emotion which is anger. There’s so much to choose from, especially looking at some of these folks calling themselves leaders. They’re more like dealers getting high on their own supply and taking a bunch of us along with them. But at the end of the day, my preference is to live from a place of highest possibilities and invite others to do the same.