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15

Paradise Lost: Mindfulness

and Addictive Behavior

Thomas Bien

Whether the ground beneath our feet is heaven or hell depends entirely

on our way of seeing and walking.

–Thich Nhat Hanh (2001)

In the Beginning was Paradise

According to the stories of many cultures, the human beginning was a time of

ease and wonder, free from hard labor, struggle, strife, and the alienation and

fragmentation we know today. Sometimes this perfection is projected into

the future—a New Jerusalem descending upon the earth, the city of God, or

a heaven we enter after death. Sometimes it is viewed as the possible result

of human effort, a tradition spanning from Plato’s Republic (ca. 360 B.C.E.;

Hamilton and Cairns, 1969)
and Thomas Moore’s
Utopia
(1516), to James Hilton’s Shangri-La, (1933) and B. F. Skinner’s
Walden Two
(1948), among

many others.

In a Buddhist context, paradise is always available, but it cannot be found

in the future or in the past. It is only available in the present moment, in

that brief moment of perception before we split the world into judgments

of pleasure and pain, gain and loss, desire and aversion. With these comes

the sense of I or ego, the feeling that “
I
like this and want more of that

for myself,” or “
I
dislike that, and want to avoid that.” This sense of I is the

flaming sword blocking our return to the garden. It is the sense that we are a

separate, unchanging entity, cut off from everything and everyone else, a bit

of flotsam and jetsam floating haphazardly in a meaningless universe.

In Buddhism, paradise is found the moment we reverse this process. Par-

adise is found when we re-enter the present moment deeply and clearly,

without being caught in either desire or aversion, without the narrow point

of view of the separate and alienated self that wants and wants and wants,

without our habitual mental patterns of judgment or blame. This kind of

perception is called mindfulness. And with mindfulness, paradise is available

here and now. Indeed, it can only be found here and now—not in the mythic

past, not in the eschatological future, and not even as the result of human

social engineering—important as such efforts may be for other reasons.

This human tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain is neither wrong

nor evil. It even has a certain necessity about it, a certain utility. Life requires

such a capacity. Only, when coupled with our large brains, it becomes a

capacity that can easily run amok. It is impossible that this endless process

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of struggle can ever yield peace. For peace is not found by constructing a

world that contains only pleasant experiences and avoids all pain. To find

peace requires wisdom, and wisdom teaches us that the foundation of peace

lies in acceptance of the fundamental nature of human life—that good and

bad, pleasure and pain, gain and loss are both necessary and inevitable. When

we accept this plain fact, avoiding the extremes of either futile struggle or

nihilistic passivity, we can come into the present moment, and be fully alive.

Addiction
as
Avoidance

Addiction in the narrow sense entails the use of substances to create an

altered state of consciousness, and to do so in a way that is both compulsive

and destructive. But in the broadest sense, all human beings are addicted. We

are addicted to compulsive patterns of pleasure seeking and pain avoidance.

When the Buddha said that “all worldlings are deranged”
(Goleman, 1988),

this is exactly what he meant. Our non-acceptance of the nature of reality,

the
suchness
(Sanskrit:
tathata
) of things, yields an endless struggle to create

a world totally free of pain and full of pleasure. The addict just happens to go

about this in particular way—with drugs and alcohol—or by extension, with

behaviors like gambling or sex. This is just one form of the essential human

problem of the aboriginal splitting of the perceptual world into opposites.

The addicted person is someone who hopes to find a simple solution to

this existential dilemma. Life hurts, he feels, and he wants to avoid this pain.

He likes pleasure very much, on the other hand, and wants to find more of it

in an easy, reliable, readily repeatable way. Whatever the drug of choice, the

intention is to avoid pain and increase pleasure.

And it works. Drugs do, at least temporarily and in the short term, provide

pleasure. They also provide a rather complete respite from our worries and