Spiritual seeking, Addiction and the Search for Truth, Dr. Gabor Maté

my name is Gavin Mattei I'm a medical doctor no longer working as a physician I'm traveling and speaking based on my four books that address addictions mind-body health parenting child development and ADHD and I facilitate seminars he needs some healing retreats and I speak to a lot of people across North America well it's almost Sorum Italy whoo-hoo stresses that in us there's a innate drive for truth truth not to liberate us all the weight will truth not because it's interesting although it is but it's truth for its own its own sake and if I look at my own trajectory as a medical doctor and and then you know right here it's all about what is the truth of things what is the truth of illness what is the truth of addiction what is the truth of mental health or mental illness and of course to deal with something and to help people with a problem you have to know what the truth of that problem is but I just find the truth in itself a value and I would say that my own personal development it has all been oh that search for truth and of course I've taken all kinds of detours and blind alleys have popped up and so on but I really have been committed to truth I can say that now with some satisfaction far from having attained it I'm not saying I've got there I'm just saying that that's been I'm motivated a force behind both my personal work in my professional work and I just find that intensely vital in a sense that it really is life-affirming and life-giving and and it releases all kinds of energies that I appreciate first of all I don't know what and I caught totally or I merely might say but is Roger Shanti but they might say something like the seeking itself is a stance of deficiency because you're saying you haven't got something in other words you're not in touch with their own wholeness so creating more problems for yourself by put yourself by positing yourself as a seeker that's willing to look at it I'm not sure that's what they would say but ever heard similar statements seeking as long as it's in the service of truth is great if it's an assertive certainty it can be limitation so people can use that truth seeking both to deepen their relationship to reality or to actually limit their relationship to reality and I think it's another california-based Buddhist teacher psychologist John Wellwood who talks about what he calls a spiritual bypass and I've seen a lot of people using a spiritual bypass to get away from themselves so that the so called spiritual seeing itself and the singing of transcendent experience and the self definition is a spiritual seeker can be a way of avoiding contact with their to ourselves even though it's being done in the name of contact with the torso and particularly in the realm of illness and given my conviction and my findings over and over again that that illness is an expression of the avoidance of truth on the emotional level some people can displace dealing with their emotions by putting all their energy into finding the spiritual truth and that's what I believed you all would call spiritual bypass and what that means is that those people will have beautiful deaths but shorter lives because by not dealing with the emotional reality they are disabling their immune systems and hormonal apparatus and they're interfering with the energetic expression of who they are and with thee that means interfering with their cardiovascular system and nervous system and so on so it all depends on what we mean by spiritual seeking and we do have this separation particularly in the west of if your spiritual seekers does that mean we're not supposed to be anger anymore does that mean that where we have to be serene all the time which is just a way of emotional repressing yourself so I would regard myself as a special secret in a sense that I I keep looking to people like almost like I just want to learn things from and to give me guides to understanding myself better understand my relation to the world better but at the same time the work has to be done on multiple levels and if it's only on the spiritual level it can be a little restriction of our full experience it's not radical to say that addiction is an expression of spirituality but it's again a limitation to just split it that way I think addiction is multiple dimensions it's got physiological dimensions emotional dimensions social and relational dimensions cultural dimensions and certainly the spiritual one now these are all related it's not like this here and there and there and there these are all related fundamentally in addiction there's always significant emotional and psychic pain so addictions are always an attempt to escape from pain based on life experience when we were vulnerable and helpless and small it is also an expression as a result of that early pain we've become disconnected from our sense of unity and wholeness so there's a spiritual void so the addictions are an attempt to somehow satiate and fill that spiritual void it works on many many other levels certainly one can show that it works on a level of brain physiology that the certain disordered brain circuits but are both predate and are then exacerbated by continuing addictive behavior so it's but I say what addiction is like you want to understand you can only understand it if you take a weak kaleidoscopic approach to it and every time you see something shake up the kaleidoscope again and look again you're going to see something different but it's all going to be part of a larger picture and again spirituality emotions physiology and many of the factors all go into what addiction is so on a spiritual level certainly it's an emptiness and disconnect from not from belief but from faith and a lot of people with addictions of all kinds of religious beliefs but they have no faith whatsoever because as soon as you have faith what does that mean it means that you're connected to source in which case why they need to add anything else to that so genuine faith precludes addiction an addiction means that there's no faith but they can be all kinds of religious belief addiction is very much a modern phenomena and it has to do with dislocation so when people are dislocated from their connection to themselves from their connection to tribe to culture to clan the society from their land from their home that's when addictions happen so there's been drinking in Western society for a long time thought the veers as a matter of fact I mean drinking was known to the ancient Greeks and and there is a call surround drinking even the Dionysian cults involved a lot of drinking but you can't say that there was much addiction on a social level because you can drink and get drunk without being an alcoholic and people would even use alcohol for spiritual purposes so or if you look at North America you have the native population that used peyote in some areas used alcohol in other areas use tobacco almost universally perhaps other psychedelic plants but they're using them ceremonially the Seminole the ceremonial use of a substance is the direct opposite of it's addictive use with addictive use is all about seeking oblivion seeking separation seeking hiding from reality ceremonial use is about connection about gaining more access to what's real and what's greater than the self addiction is all about serving the self or forgetting it ceremony uses all about opening into the greater self now why wasn't there addiction here in North America even though they were substances here that could have been used as addictive outlets because this location hadn't happened yet now with contact or colonization there's a tremendous and traumatic and rapid dislocation of the native population they're dislocated from the land literally not just dislocated once but serially dislocated no Sooners once we sign then they're again forced to leave the new treaty lands and move into more restricted and straitened circumstances their spiritual ways are forbidden to them so that is located from the culture they're taken away from their families residential schools and all that now you have in my country Canada or in your country the u.s. a huge problems of addiction in the native population amongst the population that didn't know the meaning of the word because of this location or you can look at China today where 50 years ago there's virtually no addiction now it's getting worse and worse all the time because of the rapid economic changes that the culture cannot keep with keep up with people are being dislocated in their multiple millions from their lands when their villages move into cities rivers are being then village living flooded increasing problem with addiction and all its negative consequences like HIV transmission and so on so the real driver of addiction on the social level is is dislocation or in England in the 18th century it was the rise of industrialism and the dislocation of people from the villages into the big cities away from their homes away from the families into the factories that's when the gin crash started that's when alcoholism really began to to be a severe social problem again it's almost who says that the biggest calamity is not what happened to you as a child but that as a result of what happened you lost the connection to yourself so that lost connection to yourself will have many potential outcomes one of which is addiction it's not the only one but certainly is one of them one of the major ones and it's so it's it's always about separation from your essence from from other people from society from culture the reason we suffer is because our true nature cannot be expressed on the circumstances that deny our true nature if we're wired for disconnect we wouldn't suffer when we're disconnected so it's just the opposite we're wired for attachment we're wired for connection for belonging for unity that's our we're wired and I think our suffering occurs when our true nature cannot manifest itself studies in mice recently have shown that you can traumatize the grandfather and the trauma the anxiety will still show up in the grandson even though the grandfather never met the grandson not that my son have much to do with the grandparents anyway but it's passed on biologically not genetically but biologically and that's same with human beings as well I don't know about healing past generations people talk about that the Native Indians Aboriginal people in North America and I work with them a lot because of my work with addictions and illness they talk about healing the ancestors ceremony when we heal ourselves we're hitting the whole generations going backwards I appreciate that thought I don't mean have a way of making sense of it in terms of my own way of thinking but I know that healing can certainly happened amongst people who are alive and in touch with each other primarily by being in touch with everybody getting in touch with themselves and that's what healing is and then the word for healing itself comes from the anglo-saxon word wholeness for all so he getting his wholeness and that means integrating all the parts of yourself I'm not having it just what already land called the divide itself so that we're actually whole which we are but we don't recognize it so healing is actually recognizing our wholeness and by the way when we do they realize that nothing was ever broken if nothing was ever broken therefore there was nothing bad that ever happened to us because I mean if it did you know if I fit for wholeness was never destroyed then there was no damage if there's no damage then there's no sinners and there's no perpetrators well I think first of all you have to look at that question both an individual and a social level so it's quite alright for your night is sitting sunny San Jose at a well-appointed hotel and talked about our sense of victimization in quotation marks it's quite different being a a black sharecropper or uneducated placed in some town where there's still racial discrimination and economic inequality and and and severe police control as we know is the case over many places in the United States so that so there are people who are genuinely are victimized not just by social values of it by social structures we're all victimized in a sense by social values and cultural dislocation but some people are specifically and more severely victimized so we have to make that distinction now how do you stop being a victim you stop being a victim and you're no longer at the effect of what's being done to you or what has been done to you so on a social level I for example in a place called Ferguson where this young man was killed and there's been all this social movement against that and people demonstrating coming together supporting each other so they're saying I'm not gonna be victims anymore we're not we refused to be at the effect of how you see me I'm not gonna see myself the way see I mean I'm not gonna behave like you see me and I will not be intimidated by how you see me so on that level of social oppression there's to be a social response then there are many people to come from such backgrounds who end up being in jail and they need some participate in the meditation program and all of a sudden there's a movie called the Dharma Brothers which is about every passion and meditation program in a southern maximum-security prison and these people have the ten days have completely flipped around themselves and of life lot they've dropped a lot of hostility rage they would have much more respect to themselves and nothing about their external circumstance has changed or changes their perception so that's available to people in the maximum-security prison under terrible conditions in a southern Jail it's surely available to the rest of us it's a question are we going to avail ourselves of that work and and and are we going to put ourselves in the presence of teachers that can lead us there so victimization is not just what happens to it it's actually how we respond to what happened to us and to what extent we are ourselves to be defined by it by by by what happens yeah this is a question of devotion and passion versus versus addiction and particularly as regards the guru devotee relationship so you can never tell from the outside or at least not superficially what is addictive behavior and what is simply healthy behavior you can look at two people jogging in the street one who could be jogging because they just find it's beneficial to their health their better shape they feel better about themselves it's a way of releasing energies that have built up it makes them happier and more connected somebody else could be be jogging out there at the same pace at the same time who is jogging out of addiction because for then the exercise is to escape from themselves to escape from their personal relationships with having difficulties how do we tell the difference it's not in the external behavior it's the internal relationship to it and so they will question an addiction an addiction is any behavior that one craves find some pleasure or relief in temporarily but as negative long-term consequences so when it comes to the Guru that with the relationship the question is first of all are the negative consequences and if so can't you know an addiction is addiction when you can't give up give it up despite the negative consequences so and some go without with the relationships there could be a mutual addiction the addict sorry or the devotee might need the glue to fill a hole in their life just as the Guru might need the devotee because if I'm not a guru Who am I and I shouldn't experience that like when I go on speaking trips and I speak with hundreds of people you know in cities over a week you know I speak to a couple of other people and I go home and if you look on emptiness oh that's my addictive side there even though when I was there I spoke the truth and I help people and people were inspired and grateful I get home I'm irritable and empty that's cause I'm needing that to fill me and that's an addictive relationship to work that in itself is good it's very interesting with spiritual teachers just how often just how often there's actually exploitation that happens a very famous Roshi who just died at age of 104 in California very famous people his acolytes a couple years ago was reported in New York Times that has been groping women who are coming to him for decades and his followers would say to the woman why you so attached to your body if he wants to touch your breasts let him touch your breasts so the name of spiritual liberation they're actually advocating that women should subject himself to sexual exploitation the amazing thing is that this guru this Roshi was actually a highly accomplished spiritual practitioner I myself attended one of his retreats at 10-day retreat is a deep speaker he's clearly a deep spiritual experiences but clearly there was some emptiness with him that had to be filled by his controller or access to women's bodies so he can have this amazing spiritual insight and you know one good name half a dozen examples of that a very famous revered spiritual teachers with one normally rely but you still have many many many followers who revere them in memory and recall them with absolute gratitude and devotion but who were alcoholics menthe serial sexual exploiters of their female clients or their male clients without matter so just because you've got a lot of spiritual insight and you've even attain certain spiritual states as long as you're incomplete and you're not aware of your completeness and you don't accept it then there's the risk of your going to use anything to fill yourself with so that could be the sexual contact it could be simply that people are listening to me and they love me so you can be a both an effective guru and the abject addict at the same time and so at the same time you can also have spiritual teachers who really are integrated in that either there have found their wholeness or they're completely aware of their lack of wholeness so not gonna they're not going to try use others to complete themselves they'll just be looking to find themselves even as they teach others and from the outside although energetically you can usually tell what's going on if you're sensitive enough but just by looking from the outside it's sometimes difficult to tell the difference well there's a lot of programming you know and and we're trained very early and we're trained not even by people who have any ill intentions but just people who are themselves emotionally defended or suppressed or spiritually blind and then in order to maintain our to wait our parents or in the case of my children me so we train our kids not so much through our intentions which are usually really good but who we are actually able to be in their presence and then I have to adjust to who we are they have no choice but to adjust oh we are so a lot of training is unconscious it's done by unconscious people to people who in turn their eternally unconscious so certainly healing has to do with consciousness and that's why the teachings of Mohammed Ali and another other pioneers you might say is so crucial because it's all about undoing the programming and how many releases some where that liberation is actually the temporary freeing of the personality from the past so you can actually in the present and you know now some people maybe are able to be always in the present I'm not one of them but I'm still able to be the present much more than it used to be able to when I say be present I mean consciously present so clearly there's some healing capacity that stays with us and this is a part of us and which allows us to let go of the past not react the way I was programmed not be upset what I used to be upset about not interpret things the way I used to interpret them but just to look specially at every moment and see well what is actually going on here without implicit memories and programmed assumptions governing my reactions but that's the work the work is to liberate ourselves in the past I hesitate to talk about those terms because I cannot say that I've consciously had any kind of an Enlightenment experience you know I know people have had these direct experiences where it's all energy and they realize that everything is an illusion except the energy and the unity I know my wife has had such experiences and that's what I call an alignment experience I have not had those experiences so I don't use those words very very I don't want to teach people what's something that I cannot be confident that I've had the experience of so I teach people when I speak about what I have experienced though enlightenment also could be just the capacity to be in the present moment without assumptions without imposing interpretations well that I can say you know I've had some experiences but because I certainly don't perceive myself as a spiritual teacher I don't use those terms very often it's not my language and it's not it's not where I lead people well you know the there's always the question of what's really going on you know like I want to I don't have any fresh new universal questions I mean I mean the Greek playwrights asked every question there's two ask in terms of the global Universal dilemma of human life so I could repeat those questions and yeah I'd love to know precisely how the universe got started or I love to know precisely what will happen to me or the energies that are currently are associated with this political body what will happen to all that when I'm no longer amongst the living but I will consume I said those questions too much you know what the question that I keep always asking is whether I'm looking at society we don't look at politics what I'm looking at myself anybody I'm working with or interacting with just what's going on here and that that's a fresh question every moment and it's never answerable how do percent certainty until one has a direct experience of it and then usually the answer is there's nothing going on you know but I'll leave that to people who have had that experience so I think the key issue is the curiosity is the ongoing inquiry about just what is the nature of what is occurring well I think let's go back to what I said before people have an innate yearning and affinity with the truth and I have in my own way in the areas that I've studied and experienced and researched and thought about I'm capable of speaking some important truths about human health or addiction about how the mind develops about how we interact or react with the world or react to the world I can speak from strewth about that that people recognize as truth so that's why they come just as I will go on listen to somebody who for me can speak such - so I read their book so I will seek out their teachings so I think it's that universal and even though not universally realized not universally experienced but universally present nature of us that that is simply wanting the truth wanting itself as almost would say I think so you know I've been given some gift with that I know that I have it's a gift in the sense that I've honed it and I've worked at it and I can if I if I need credit I can give it to myself for that but really it's a gift and and to the extent that I'm able to manifest it people naturally want to gravitate towards it in other words they're seeking their own truth and and they perhaps believe and I think rightfully that I will be of some support to them in seeking their truth that's why people are at this conference that's just people here listen to anybody here speak you

Channel: Science and Nonduality

Views: 338,066

Keywords: Gabor Maté, Spiritual Seeking, Addiction, Psychology

Id: AjuwOf1_63g

Length: 31min 23sec (1883 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 29 2017