One way or another, we all suffer over things that we can't stop doing to ourselves or to others. Adding to the conflict inherent in self-compromising behaviors is the fact that it's frustrating beyond belief since most of us (in some way) have built a business, worked, and succeeded in some place - won accolades, impressed our friends - and we've weathered storms.
And if all that's true, then why is it that we can't stop doing things, thinking about things that torment us? Let alone actually involving ourselves in some kind of behavior that is undeniably self-destructive?
The reason this is frustrating to us is because we do have a kind of self-will -- an order of our self that can make almost anything that is imagined come to pass... if it's desired enough anyway. But there's one thing about that level of will -- about desire and the things it imagines and accomplishes -- that I hope you'll see with me. There is one thing that desire can't do. It cannot make us whole.
We've all tried! There's a long list of things that we've imagined, planned, and maybe accomplished, believing that when we got to the end of that line, we'd be liberated from the feeling of being inadequate or in some way missing the mark. But desire doesn't bring an end to that feeling of being incomplete, regardless how many times we complete our goals. And why is that? Because anything that we imagine as something needed to make us feel free or whole appears within us from out of a level of consciousness that in and of itself isn't whole.
If I have a pain because I haven't produced what I thought I should, or other people have looked at me and doubted my skills, and I have this drive to prove that I am what I imagine myself to be, where does that drive come from? What is it that's moving me? The answer is that it's something that feels incomplete as it is. And so that same consciousness imagines some way in which it will complete itself. But what is incomplete in and of itself cannot complete itself by itself. That's the will that we presently serve, which is why we need a new will.
We place our hopes in what we want to become, failing to see that whatever it is we imagine we need to become is already an image in our mind, some of which we've accomplished, and if it could have made us whole the first time, it would have. But it can't.
Not only is this lower level of consciousness powerless to heal us, to make us whole, but when we (unknowingly) identify with its will -- its promise to set us free when at last we become what it imagines -- we are literally (mistakenly) agreeing to live as a captive in its world of imagination. That's why so many of our dreams are seemingly shattered the moment the conditions that we created collapse... and then we find ourselves struggling again to make ourselves whole.
So, one thing should be clear if nothing else. We need another order of will -- not one that does what it now does that promises freedom from self-defeating behaviors, from our addictions. No. This new order of will doesn't have to do that because it's already free. It is a will that is already whole and cannot be made to act against itself. Our task is to awaken to this higher order of self and let it set us free.