It’s been almost 8 months since I posted on addiction here and in the last 24 hours, a lot of new and important stuff has come together for me.

Things that one becomes addicted to are poisonous, or become poisonous when taken excess. Nicotine, cocaine, opiates, amphetamines, etc., are poisonous in any quantity. Alcohol is poisonous in large quantities. THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, becomes poisonous at ridiculously large doses, which is part of why so few people really get addicted to pot.

I see a pattern here: the strength and gravity of an addiction is directly related to how poisonous the substance is.

Why would this be the case? Why would our own bodies develop addictions most strongly to those substances which are most harmful to us?

I believe that it comes down to the structure of judgment. (Since all addiction is really judgment anyway.) Judgment is a complaint that something, or someone, or some group of things or people, should not be the way they are. Judgment feeds on itself: you judge; judgment is bad, wrong, evil, sinful, whatever–which is more judgment! (Note the emphasis on “are”: a judgment assumes that the way the judge perceives things is actually the way they are, which is frequently wrong.)

When I first learned how this worked, I’d fall into this trap all the time, passing judgment on people who were passing judgment on others, then passing judgment on myself for having judged those other people, then judging myself for judging myself, and then I was off to the races! It can be a really vicious cycle! But what’s this got to do with heroin? Keep reading.

What does a doctor do if no one is sick? What do managers do when their business is running smoothly without their intervention? What does a fighter do after he’s beaten everyone? What did Elvis do when he reached the top? What do you do when who you have defined yourself to be is suddenly obsolete?

(What actually prompted this line of thought was my long-time involvement with Affirmation: Gay and Lesbian Mormons. I’ve been thinking for a few weeks now that everything to do with religion is becoming toxic to me, but I have such a hard time not jumping into the conversation again, reading the latest thing that so-and-so wrote, putting my two cents in, and I realized that I don’t want to spend my whole life fighting for equality; I just want to be equal, and then I have other problems that are worth working on.)

I can’t describe to you the cravings I felt to go back to church, and even more, to the temple. I did go back to church a few times, and found it every bit as poisonous as when I’d left it before. I couldn’t stop reading the posts people would make about Mormonism, homosexuality, homosexuality and Mormonism, BYU, Zion, all of it, it just sucked me in. I actually plotted ways I could steal a temple recommend and go back. I’m glad I didn’t now. That would just be feeding the addiction.

In order to tolerate nicotine, your body has to develop a resistance to it. It resists and resists and then discovers there’s nothing to resist–but wait! We have all this infrastructure built for resisting! We have to have something to resist! Gimme another cigarette! (Imagine the hundreds of thousands of people who would suddenly be out of work if, in the United States, we suddenly went to a single-payer health care system: people who file claims, process claims, deny claims, stamp the claims denied, file them in appropriate places, answer the phones, and design and build the monumental structures needed to keep all this going! This health care system is killing us and we can’t get rid of it!)

I believe this is why countries in the Middle East are constantly descending into chaos: they spent so much time fighting the Ottoman Empire, they don’t know how to not fight anymore. They have to have an enemy!

And me! I spent so many years developing the tools and the practices to survive in the church, and it keeps gnawing around the edges waiting for something to chomp at, and without the church, it’s getting bored and looking for something else to chew on. Something else to judge. To resist. To fight. To endure. To survive.

Please tell me if this makes sense at all. I believe I’ve laid out here why, logically, all addictions begin with judgment, which might be the most important thought I’ve ever had in my entire life.

(PS – If you’re thinking that chemical addictions aren’t judgment, because chemicals can’t judge, I disagree. The chemicals in your body are incredibly complex, and have an emergent quality to them, like your brain does. I believe that, when you develop a resistance, tolerance, and dependency on a chemical that is bad for you, the emergent quality of your body’s chemistry lab is essentially saying “this should not be here,” in a language we don’t understand yet.)

(I’m going to operate inside of a “believing” context for this entry. This is a comment I made on a Facebook post and I’m rather proud of it so I’m putting it here for posterity.)

A True Prophet is one who speaks what he has been told to by God, without making any timid concessions to the popular opinion. I see no such thing happening from any LDS church leaders. On the other hand, the bit about them saying flattering things, and we give them our substance, gold, silver, fine clothing, and find no fault with them–that sounds a lot like present-day church leaders.

When’s the last time there was a real Revelation in the Church? Something worth adding to the D&C? I reckon it’s been a long time. Spencer W. Kimball explicitly stated that Declaration #2 wasn’t revelation; Wilford Woodruff explicitly stated that Declaration #1 wasn’t revelation. The Proclamation on the Family explicitly claims to be the opinions of the men who wrote it, and not divine in nature (hence “We […] proclaim,” “we declare,” etc.) Section 138, while nice, is an account of a personal vision given to Joseph F. Smith, which we canonized because it happened to the president of the Church. But it doesn’t contain instructions or words which he was commanded to say to the world.

How do you deal with Section 132, in which God himself (“Alpha and Omega,” v. 66) says that there is more He wishes to tell us on the subject of eternal marriage–a prophecy which has never been fulfilled or even acted upon? (v. 66 again) How do you deal with the fact that God, who knew we’d be having this debate 170 years hence, saw fit to leave the sealing promise gender-neutral? (v. 46-48) How do you explain that the Church’s position on homosexuality, which didn’t come to exist until the 1960’s, almost perfectly matches the most popular opinions of that day? Remember, Section 89 said that smoking was bad for you back when doctors thought it was good for you–that’s a character of genuine revelation. How do you explain that the best guidance of church leaders until very recently was that we gay folks should try to change, something which has, as far as I can tell, never worked? How do you account for the discrepancy between this promise, which never turned out, and other promises God has made, which did turn out?

If you’re not supposed to question the Prophet, then why does God bother giving us the Holy Ghost, or the gifts of Discernment dispensed liberally in the Temple? How will you explain yourself before God if he tells you that what you did wasn’t the right thing? Will you say you were “just following the Prophet”? Do you think God will reward you for that? If so, why? What sense does it make for God to reward you for following someone who’s been led astray?

The Astute Consumer and the Clever Hacker have been at it for ages. This week, the Astute Consumer has gone to the store and bought the new Totally Secure Computer, with the new Trusted Program Moderator, which makes it literally impossible to execute any program on the computer that hasn’t been signed by a trusted provider with their private signature.

What the Astute Consumer doesn’t know is that the Clever Hacker has found a weak spot in the computer’s design: the BIOS code is not signed, so the Clever Hacker has replaced the genuine certificate of authority for the computer with his own.

Now, here’s the really clever part: the Clever Hacker knows that if the computer steals the Astute Consumer’s credit card number on the first try, the Astute Consumer will realize the computer was compromised from day one, and take it back. But, if he’s able to make 99 transactions securely and the 100th one compromised, he will assume that the problem was on the other end. After all, he trusts his computer’s trusted authorities! They have done him right 99 times! Much easier for him to believe that the big box store’s online presence has been compromised than that his Totally Secure Computer, which has served him faithfully and securely, is ever not secure.

With any luck, the Consumer will cancel that credit card and get a new one (but not before the Clever Hacker has bought thousands of dollars of merchandise) and continue using his compromised computer. The Clever Hacker only need include a plausible delay between information thefts to maintain, for the Consumer, the illusion that his Totally Secure Computer actually is.

There are two parts to this exploit:
1. By getting in at a low enough level, anyone can become “trusted.”
2. By behaving well almost all of the time, you can easily convince the person you’re trying to fool that any bad behavior is actually coming from another actor.

Now here’s the clever part of this post: you may have thought I was talking about computers, but no, not really! I’m talking about religion.

Religion always seeks to get in at the lowest possible level: children. They may hold off on baptism until a slightly older age (though never the age of majority) but the indoctrination starts As Early As Possible. How soon after birth does a baby see his first picture of Jesus?

Religion also seeks to do people right most of the time. Individually, this is because people really do have the best of intentions and want to help people as much as possible. But institutionally, the motive is completely different: the institution does good things always and only in order to justify, excuse, and allow the bad things to continue. It does the minimum amount of good necessary to keep people coming back–to maintain trust in the eyes of its people–in order to maximize the bad it can do to people. It will only stop doing bad when faced with an existential crisis, either by driving too many people away, or under pain of sudden dissolution.

(This is one of the rare cases where it’s worth distinguishing between the church and its people, because in this case, the motivations of the whole have an emergent quality, rather than representing the motivations of all the individuals in aggregate. The church, as an entity, is motivated by the preservation of its own identity first and foremost; being right, looking good, absolving itself of responsibility, etc.)

For three years, I oversaw a small group of gay Mormons and former Mormons with weekly meetings and occasional special events. I met a lot of people in that time, and noticed a striking pattern: the desire to “reconcile” faith with sexuality seemed to be exactly inversely proportional to the severity of pain that had been inflicted on them at the hands of their church. We had people who would defend the church nearly to the death (they were most annoying) and refused to even hear the complaints of people who had actually been wronged by church leaders. There were those, on the other hand, who underwent shock treatment at BYU (yes, it happened, I’ve seen the scars on their arms) and who never wanted to see another LDS chapel, book, or person ever again–though most of them, predictably, stayed far away from our little group. The amount of hostility towards the church was completely predictable as a function of how hard the church had kicked them. The more frequent and severe the abuse was, the more likely the person was to revoke their trust of the church.

The church will continue its abusive behavior until it faces an existential crisis, such as a sufficiently large lawsuit, the loss of enough members (don’t try organizing for it; the scale required is much too large) or other colleges refusing to play against BYU because of their policies.

“Not being done out of hate” is not an excuse to take rights away from someone. The inquisition was not carried out because of hate; it was carried out to save peoples’ souls. Translated from the original Latin, “… for punishment does n…ot take place primarily and per se for the correction and good of the person punished, but for the public good in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the evils they would commit.” That it was not done in hate in no way detracts from the millions of people who died for it.

Witch hunts were not carried out for hate. They were carried out for fear that somehow the actions of people who thought/believed/acted differently than oneself would somehow bring doom to those around them. Just like gay marriage is a threat to heterosexual marriage.

When you get to Heaven and God asks you why you worked to take away rights from your brothers and sisters; why you worked so hard to treat them as less than you and to teach your children that those people do not deserve the same rights as you, remember to tell him that it wasn’t done out of hate. I’m sure he’ll understand.

Two buzzwords, I’ll grant, and what I want to do here is to take the buzz out and leave something meaningful where the buzz was. (Buzz is, to steal a phrase from our incompetent previous Chairman of the Federal Reserve, irrational exuberance. Being excited for no good reason. Seeing something as A Good Thing and maybe not knowing why.)

Enlightenment is impossible to describe completely. There’s nothing I can say that will leave you, the reader, aware of the experience of being enlightened, without you having the experience yourself.

Enlightenment happens in an instant and happens to the degree that it does. That is, from one moment to the next, you are as enlightened as you are, and a moment from now, you may be more or less enlightened than you currently are. What is actually is, is a realization of something profound about the nature of your life, or of your experience. There are many of them. What you realise is not a truth; it may not even be true. It may be ridiculous, nonsensical, or paradoxical. What makes a realization into an enlightenment is the drastic and sudden change it brings to your experience of your life.

When you are enlightened, nothing actually changes, in the sense that before and after enlightenment, your life is exactly the same. When you are enlightened, everything changes, because your perception of everything is instantly and completely altered. It’s you who are doing the changing, and you change completely, even though you actually don’t change at all. “Before enlightenment, chop wood, haul water. After enlightenment, chop wood, haul water.” -Lao Tsu

Life becomes light and easy. Things that were challenging are easy. Pain ceases to cause suffering. Serious things are funny, and the seriousness with which you approached them is fucking hilarious. Everything becomes something worth laughing about.

Enlightenment is worth pursuing, though pursuing enlightenment won’t bring it about. In fact, chasing enlightenment is one sure way to keep it from happening. But now I’m getting off on a tangent.

Transformation is different from enlightenment. In transformation, things change. You change. The world around you changes. It’s tempting to say that transformation is applied enlightenment, but enlightenment cannot be applied to anything, or used by or for anything. Transformation, on the other hand, is really useful. It’s worth doing. Transformation brings about shifts in the nature of ones’ self, ones’ surroundings, and the world in which one lives. It is a process, rather than an event, and I’m pretty sure it’s never finished. There is always more that remains to be transformed.

The work that I am undertaking is aimed at causing transformation within and around myself to the greatest degree possible. Enlightenment is worth having because transformation without enlightenment is a total bummer. It’s basically intolerable to put yourself through the wringer that transformation is, without some degree of enlightenment to make it… well, light!

Who I am is the possibility of a world that works for everyone. I postulate that enlightenment and transformation being present in the world are the most important parts of making that vision into a reality. In service of this possibility, I am dedicating as much time and energy as I can, with integrity, to causing enlightenment and transformation among all the people I can.