Paul Hedderman: Addiction, Recovery, and Spiritual Awakening

See our first video clip of Paul Hedderman below.

While watching Paul Hedderman's initial interview videos, something became very clear to me: lack, the unique characteristic of belief in separation, is the key motivator of our suffering. One gross example of this is drug and alcohol addiction.

It is our belief that we exist as separate, individual body/minds that is the source of all of our suffering. Think about this:

What everyone wants, without exception, is happiness.

Whether we are at work, recovering from illness, taking a vacation,enjoying a first date, playing with children, riding a roller coaster,attending the funeral of a loved one, dancing all night, even paying our taxes, underneath it all is either fear of losing something or hope of gaining something.

This fear and desire are actually  two sides of the same coin: the coin of happiness.

Happiness motivates all of our human behavior, both the pursuit of those things we believe will make us happy and our resistance to those things we believe will not.

A closer look at our happiness programming  reveals some very interesting clues regarding the nature of our journey here in life.

The desire for happiness necessarily implies that we are missing something, that we are incomplete as we are.  This sense of  incompleteness motivates all of our behavior. If we already felt whole,  there would be no seeking at all. There would necessarily have to be peace.

Think about this.
Seeking is being a human being.
They are synonomous.

When we investigate this desire for happiness, our initial intuition is to turn outward, to focus outside of ourselves.  If we believe that what we are is unsatisfactory, then, it would stand to reason that what we need is outside of ourselves.

The genesis of this idea comes from a core belief: it is the belief that “I am separate.”  We must be separate to be incomplete, right? We must be separate to even look for something outside ourselves, right?

This is a very powerful belief.

The belief that something, outside of us, can complete us, make us happy, can only occur if two criteria are met:

1.    That I am separate, that there are boundaries in which I am contained, and,
2.    That, within this container, I am incomplete and need the addition or subtraction of something in order to find peace and happiness.

Although this may sound  conceptual and inconsequential, the implications of these two basic ideas lie at the root of all human suffering.

All human beings are attempting to complete themselves with whatever they are trying to acquire: a family, a new girl friend, a new boyfriend, a career, a new car, a new home,  vanity, more money, drugs and alcohol, overeating, too much television, gambling, a feeling,…even spiritual enlightenment.

Paul gets this.

And thus started a new journey, to a documentary regarding addiction, recovery and spiritual awakening. We'll discuss this project more in the upcoming newsletters, but, for now, here is our first clip of a rising star on the non-dual horizon: Paul Hedderman.