Reflection
The Thirst for Oneness
Even people with no religion tend to place the root of the spiritual in one very ordinary scene: a baby looking up at its mother. The infant gazes at her as at an angel, and feels itself to be one with the whole world, because at that moment the mother is the whole world. There is no separation, no self and other, no lack. It is the closest a human being comes to paradise, and it is where, I think, the sense of the sacred is first laid down. We were one with everything once, and some part of us never forgets it.
The paradise we have to leave
The trouble is that we cannot stay there. To become a person at all is to leave that oneness: to discover that the mother is not the world, that there is a self here and an other there, and a gap between them that will never fully close. Growing up is, at bottom, this long departure from paradise, the slow becoming of a separate self who must carry its own loneliness.
No child makes that crossing willingly unless something makes it worth making. This is the most important thing a parent gives: not protection, but the desire to grow up, the sense that adult life holds something worth leaving paradise for. Where that desire is missing, where the only adulthood on offer looks like Captain Hook, a child will do what Peter Pan did, and simply refuse.
The false way back
But the refusal takes many forms, and the ones I see most in my consulting room are not charming. When a person cannot leave the oneness, or cannot bear the separateness that leaving it costs, they look for a way back. And there are shortcuts that seem to offer one.
This, I have come to believe, is what addiction really is. The drink, the drug, the binge, the compulsion: each dissolves, for a moment, the separate and painful self, and returns the person to something like the old oneness, the boundless, the merged, the place without lack. Eating disorders do it through the body; love addiction does it through another person; substances do it most directly of all. Each is an attempt to get back to paradise by a shortcut, without doing the growing. And each exacts a terrible price, because the door it opens is a false one, and closes again a little heavier each time.
Spiritus contra spiritum: Jung on the spiritual root of addiction
The most striking confirmation of this came from an unexpected place. In 1961, Carl Jung wrote to Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, about a shared patient. The man’s craving for alcohol, Jung wrote, was “the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.”
The alcoholic, Jung was saying, is not weak or merely self-indulgent. He is thirsting for the same union the mystic seeks, for the lost oneness, and reaching for it through a bottle because he has found no other way. Jung ended with a phrase that has stayed with the recovery world ever since: spiritus contra spiritum. Spirit against spirit. The same word for alcohol and for the Holy Spirit, the low thirst and the high one, contending over the same ground.
The true return
If this is right, it changes what recovery is for. Let me be practical first, because this can be misheard: the drinking, the bingeing, the compulsion must stop, and stopping comes first. Nothing deeper can be built while the false door is still in daily use. But what this understanding changes is why stopping holds. The task is not to kill the thirst. The thirst is not the problem; it may be the truest thing in a person, the memory of the paradise we all began in and the longing to return to it. The task is to stop trying to slake that thirst with what cannot hold it, and to find the real return.
And there is a real one. It is the far side of the whole journey: not the refusal to leave paradise, and not the shortcut back to it, but the earned return. You become a self, fully, with all the separateness and loneliness that costs, and only then can you come back into relationship with the whole, on the other terms that adulthood allows: in love, in meaning, in creation, in whatever a person comes to call the sacred. This is what individuation is, and it is why the deepest addiction work, past the practical business of getting clean, becomes a search for meaning. The person is looking, at last, for the true object of a thirst they had been trying to answer with a false one.
What the work is
So when someone comes to me caught in an addiction, or an eating disorder, or a pattern of love that keeps ending in the same place, I do not only see a behaviour to be stopped. I see a thirst for oneness that has been reaching for the wrong door. The work is to help them survive the separateness they were fleeing, and then to find the way back that actually holds: the one that does not close a little heavier each time, and does not have to be paid for in the currency of a life.
We were one with everything once. The whole of a life, in a sense, is the long work of losing that, and then earning it back.
