Eckhart Tolle explains how alcohol lowers consciousness and allows the pain body — a field of accumulated emotional pain — to take over. He frames addiction as compulsive identification with unconscious patterns rather than a failure of willpower.
Transcript
The person who promises not to do it again is not the person who succumbs to the temptation every time. There's a totally unconscious entity there. Uh that so so you cannot say you broke your promise. You promised not to do it again. It's not even it's not the same. There's a dark unconscious entity living through him. Uh, Robin from Reading, CT, is that Connecticut perhaps? Um, says, "I have been practicing the art of conscious awareness with increasing success as it pertains to my daily life and its situations. Congratulations, He could. However, I have had there's always however, of course. However, I've had recurring bouts of intense anxiety that occur in the middle of the night. Try though I make to use the techniques of conscious breathing, feeling my body's aliveness and looking for the spaces between the thoughts. I cannot stop the deluge of thoughts and emotions. I wonder if this is where you would recommend staying with the feeling no matter how intense it seems to get. If so, how is this possible when the thoughts seem almost inextricably intertwined with both the emotions and the tangible energy coursing through my body? In addition, does this occurrence somehow mean that what I'm doing in my daily practice is actually transferring unresolved fearbased energy into the into the time my body is at rest. Very interesting question. So he is fine during the day quite living quite consciously but he gets attacked almost at night by intense fear anxiety thoughts racing thoughts and so on pain body. Now one thing is certain and that is that when you are at times when you are at a lower level of consciousness the attack the pain body or the egoic entity or both in conjunction can use that opportunity to to gain the upper hand again and to especially if you've been practicing uh presence Now when your consciousness is lower it the reason for this could be for example that you have indulged in alcohol and so you've been drinking and that has lowered your level of consciousness and then suddenly you're being attacked by the pain body. It can it it knows that you nothing much you can do now and this is the reason why quite often al various can affect humans in various ways. One is it can make you feel better for a while until it makes you feel definitely worse if you take more and more. It's like so um it can make you feel forget your problems. So it lowers your level of consciousness and then maybe you're not being attacked by the pain body. It's fine. Doesn't happen to everybody. You just feel some people start singing and dancing or doing weird things. Life is suddenly easy. They can't do much thinking anymore. But then others and this is not uncommon experience becoming extremely entering extremely negative states. Often it can be anger and violence. Many many crimes are committed under the influence of alcohol. It lowers your it can it lowers your consciousness. And when your consciousness is lowered, the unconscious um gravitational pulse can manifest much more easily because it your presence is lowered and then you suddenly you get taken over by your pain body and then the pain body lives through you and speaks through you and you start shouting and and maybe even attacking people becoming nobody people wouldn't even recognize. ICU when and this happens it's not happens to millions of people uh periodically they they they lose the perhaps relatively little consciousness that that they had in ordinary life but enough to not make them do dreadful things. But then they drink and then be they become totally unconscious and they commit bad dreadful acts of violence or whatever it may be. And some people do it periodically. If you have ever lived with an alcoholic, you know how it is. It happens. He becomes violent. It could be she too but he becomes violent and then the next day he says I'm terribly sorry because bit of consciousness has now come back so he looks back and see what he did he says I'm terribly sorry I'm I promise you it'll never happen this I've had enough now it will never happen again never. And then the partner says okay and two weeks later same thing happens because something in he took his mind said just one drink because you've had a rough day just have one. Okay but after one there's a level of conscious already gone down a little bit. Well let's have just one more. And the same cycle starts again. The person who promises not to do it again is not the person who succumbs to the temptation every time. There's a totally unconscious entity there. Uh that so so you cannot say you broke your promise. You promised not to do it again. It's not even it's not the same. There's a dark unconscious entity living through him. So um unless he's prepared to do something about it, it's better to separate yourself from a person. Sometimes the person needs to to reach the limit limit of uh uh self-destructiveness and until perhaps he finally begins to wake up.