Transcending Co-dependence

Transcending Co-dependence

[00:45] We Cannot Live Without Dependency

Thank you for listening to my podcast, The Vedic Worldview. I’m Thom Knoles. I hear a lot about codependency, codependency, codependency, and, you know, an entire brand named CoDA, the codependency organization. And all of this is entwined with 12-step programs, you know, Alcoholics Anonymous and all the other anonymouses.

And by the way, as somebody who knew one of the co-founders of the 12-step movement, Bill W, who was a meditator, I’m extremely appreciative of that entire angle of how to rise above addiction.

From the Vedic perspective, language is a very, very important thing in getting the languaging right. And we have vilified the word dependency, I believe, and we need to really, once again, give it the sanctity that it deserves.

To be dependent on a thing is human life. We cannot live without dependency. There are good dependencies, and there are dependencies that are bad. So, to use the Vedic language, we say life-supporting dependencies and life-damaging dependencies.

What’s a life-damaging dependency? Well, it’s a life that is something which you engage in, and not necessarily a substance. It could be, and most frequently it is, but it could be a set of behaviors that are life-damaging. Life-damaging dependencies: always by embracing whatever it is, the behavior or the substance, which is giving you an illusion temporarily of having discovered the nectar of life.

The externalizing of the nectar of life, putting that into an externalized form, like a behavior or a substance, and then when I have the nectar, then I have completeness and capability, for however long the nectar supplies it.

And the nectar could be negative behaviors. By negative behaviors, I mean behaviors that cut across the interests of other people, that I’ll allow you to have freedom of expression for a period of time, but at the cost of somebody else’s interests and their evolution.

[03:32] Co-addicTion

So, life-damaging dependencies, there’s another name which is perfectly adequate, and we don’t need to call it dependency. And that name, which is perfectly adequate, is the word addiction.

And then we have life-supporting dependencies. What are they? It’s incumbent upon us to drink a certain amount of clear fluid every day, preferably water. It’s incumbent upon us to have a spectrum of nourishment that provides us with all the raw materials and trace elements that allow us to do justice to this beautiful machinery of creative intelligence with which we’ve been endowed.

It’s important for us to find love in whatever form we can find it, if it’s a sustainable form of that expression and that experience. And so these are good dependencies, life-supporting dependencies, and there are many, many, many of them. And so to use the word dependent and dependency purely to denote or to connote addiction, I believe, is a misuse of the word dependency.

However, having said that, there is such a thing as being co-addicted, or as people say, codependent. And co-addicted is a very interesting, and I’m going to use the word co-addicted instead of codependent. I don’t like using buzz terms that have been created by people. I like to be very definitive in my speech.

Co-addicted people are people who have found a working relationship, one with his or her own addiction or addictions, and another with his or her own addictions, and they have what is basically a relationship of convenience. It is more convenient to be enabled to participate in one’s own addictive behaviors, provided that one is tolerant of the addiction of the other with whom one is in relationship.

“And so, I acknowledge that I have these addictions. I may not have even acknowledged that they are addictions, but I acknowledge that I have these behaviors that are essential to me. And provided that you let me get away with those and turn a blind eye to them or minimize your comments about them, please, then I will minimize my comments about your very obvious addictions to either substances or behaviors.”

“And we’ll do a deal. It’s a bargain. I won’t mess around with you and your addictions if you don’t mess around with me and my addictions. And we’ll, we’ll continue on greeting each day and get through the day.”

[06:42] Freedom from the Tyranny of Addiction

And if our only goal is simply to get through a day, then this can work for a period of time. But we’re courting disaster because, eventually, what’s going to happen is my neediness and your neediness are going to go at cross-purposes with each other, and they’re going to be tempests, storms.

And the storms will appear in the form of arguments. They’ll appear in the form of conflict. Lots of loud noises. Lots of, “You’re the one. You’re the one that…” “Oh, no, you’re the one that…” “No, you are the one that…”

Whenever we hear that “you’re the one” thing, this is the sound of co-addictive behaviors interacting with each other and trying to figure out, “Can we keep it up for long enough that we greet new days together, and I’m tolerant of you, and you’re tolerant of me? Or is our mutual tolerance of each other coming to an end, and I have to find someone else who can tolerate me, and you have to find someone else who can tolerate you?”

And so it’s a rather stormy approach to getting through days, and I’d like to offer an alternative to it. It’s not necessary to be addicted. There are many, many great ways to rise up and, in a communal fashion, regain freedom, to gain freedom. Maybe regain it or gain it for the first time in your life. Freedom from the tyranny of an addiction. 

Addiction is a tyranny in which we have given power to something other than our own big Self, given power to something other than our own deepest, inner creative intelligence. We’ve given power to other people. We’ve given power to substances. We’ve given power to certain behaviors that are obsessive, and we haven’t given power to our own deep inner contact with Cosmic Intelligence.

And so, in Vedic Meditation, we break the symmetry of all this. There’s a certain symmetry in it, in that it’s a kind of functional, you know, like a square wheel. You can make it turn, and it flops onto the next flat surface, and you can make it turn, and it flops onto the next flat surface. It’s just not a very frictionless movement, very jerky forward movement, the square wheel.

[09:36] Going Beyond the Constraints of Individuality

There’s a way that we can either regain or gain; we can either forge for the first time or rehabilitate this. But one of the pivotal things is, as in the 12-step program, they have step 11, which has to do with transcending. It has to do with meditation. It has to do with going beyond the constraints of your individuality.

When we do go beyond the constraints of our individuality, the best way of doing that is the practice of Vedic Meditation. We sit comfortably, quietly in a chair. We practice a very specific technique that’s been here for thousands of years, and that is, when you’re trained properly in it by a qualified teacher, you’ll learn how to step beyond thought entirely, how to step beyond thought and action and behaviors entirely. And what you’re stepping into is a nectar of pure consciousness.

Your inner, personal connection with your own big Self; that aspect of you that is everywhere. The everythingness, the everywhereness, the big Self. The big Self is Unified Field. It is your Self. It’s not other than you. It’s not the big Other, capital O. It’s the big Me. It’s the big Oneself.

Each one of us is a product. We are an undulation of an underlying ocean of consciousness, and when we practice Vedic Meditation, which is a simple mental technique. You just do it for 20 minutes, twice a day. It’s very systematic, and it works for everyone. I hear some people thinking right now, “But maybe that won’t work for me.” Yes, it will. I’ve done a lifelong search of 58 years, trying to find one person out of the tens of thousands I’ve taught, who this won’t work for, and I’ve failed to find anyone, whether they be incarcerated prisoners who are heroin addicts, whether they be heads of state, kings, queens, presidents, prime ministers, whether they be billionaires, whether they be paupers, living under a bridge somewhere.

[11:56] Vedic Meditation, Easier Than Just Having Everyday Thoughts

It doesn’t matter who they are, what they are. I haven’t been able to find anybody this doesn’t work on. I’ve done an exhaustive search through the whole of humanity, multiple continents all over the world, hoping one day I would find one person who wasn’t able to practice Vedic Meditation, and I have to say I’m a complete failure.

I haven’t found it, because everybody I teach this to, it has a revolutionary effect on their life. So I’m happy to say that I’ve failed to find anyone who this doesn’t work on. And my colleagues tell me they experience the same thing. Absolutely everyone they teach, including people who are convinced that meditation’s “not for them,” find it absolutely for them, once they learn it properly.

You have to learn it properly, and then you have to actually practice it. You can’t just learn it and not do it. You have to learn it and actually practice it, and practicing it is not a chore.

What does it involve? You get to a chair, and you close your eyes, and then you do something which is easier than not doing it. It is easier to practice Vedic Meditation than it is to sit in a chair and think thoughts. It’s much easier to sit in a chair and think thoughts than it is to run around. So running around is hard compared with sitting down in a chair and just having everyday thoughts.

But sitting in a chair and having everyday thoughts is hard work compared with allowing Vedic Meditation to be your experience, where you step beyond thought and experience Being, pure consciousness, Being. What that does is it gives you the capacity to begin participating in all of those systematic techniques that already exist for helping you to break addiction.

For some people, not for all, learning Vedic Meditation alone is enough for them to break the addictions that have been plaguing them. Others will require some community approach. By community, I mean communal approach, some fellowship provided by 12-step programs, for example, or perhaps even residential rehabilitation.

But the practice of Vedic Meditation added to this is like giving the finest nourishment to anything. It’ll make whatever it is that you’re doing to break your addictive behaviors, or break your addiction to substances, functional.

[14:38] You Have to Start with Yourself

So, how do we break so-called codependent behaviors? We start with ourself. We don’t start with the other person. It’s a classic addictive mentality that says, “Okay, I acknowledge I’m addicted, and my partner’s addicted, and we’re co-addicted to each other and our behaviors, and we get through days by doing this kind of thing that we do. We tolerate each other, and there seems to be some fruit of this tolerance of each other that is: tomorrow, there will be a tomorrow if we keep tolerating each other.”

How do you break that? You don’t start with the other person. You don’t start with, “Okay, when you break your addictions…” or, “I’m going to get you to break your addictions, then I’ll break mine.” No, no. You have to start with yourself.

You start with yourself, and starting with yourself starts with acknowledgement that on your own and by yourself, you’re helpless. One of the fundamental tenets of rehabilitation science and art: you cannot actually do it by yourself. You need to seek guidance and help from someone who, unlike you, is no longer addicted or has never been addicted.

And so either someone who has never been addicted, which is a rare find, and who knows about addiction, or someone who has been addicted but now has come out of it and understands all of the sneaky ways in which you’re variety of addictions is going to want to seduce you back into your addictive state.

And so acknowledgement that on your own, you’re rather helpless. And so then, having the humble moment of understanding that you’re going to need to seek some help.

But do learn Vedic Meditation. If you haven’t learned it yet, then you need to learn it because it’s going to make this process, through which you have to go, a far more frictionless one, where you can have liberty to be self-sufficient.

Liberty to be a self-sufficient, self-determining person, who then is a delight to be in a relationship with for anyone else who, like you, is self-sufficient and self-determining.

Two people, self-sufficient and self-determining, can have a wondrous combined way of relating, an alliance, as I call it, that gives them the capacity to meet the need of the time collectively, as a couple, say, in a way that is far more powerful than any one individual is able to do just on their own.

We enjoy alliances, but having a co-addictive relationship is not really an alliance. What it is, is two people who have this mutual agreement to continue tolerating each other, just to get through a day. It’s baseline survival.

[18:09] Survival vs Progress

Now this brings up a subject which is a favorite of mine, and it allows me to highlight this particular angle and this subject yet again. And that’s the subject of survival versus progress. The whole world believes, incorrectly by the way, that if only you can survive, you know, like have the basics: food, water, shelter, and a modicum of education, then having got the survival basics, basic needs in place, then you can progress.

And actually, as tempting as it may be to subscribe to this point of view, it is dysfunctional, and it doesn’t lead to evolution. The truth of it is there is no model in nature that demonstrates to us that merely surviving grants you continued survival.

What grants you the right to survive is that you are progressing. What does progressing mean? It means progressive change is being embraced, is being lived. You are actually evolving. To evolve, to progress, and to change from less sophisticated to more sophisticated is the technique that ensures survival.

Survival is granted to those who progress. Progress is not granted to those who merely survive. So merely surviving is not a formula for progress. Progress, on the other hand, is a formula for being granted survival. We cannot survive if we don’t make ourselves relevant to the evolutionary force of nature.

Nature has an evolutionary force. It makes a demand on us. It’s the Cosmic law: you must evolve, you must progress. You must expand your repertoire. You must expand your territory of influence. You must increase your capacity. This is you being relevant to the Cosmic law, which says in one word, evolve.

[20:50] Survival is a Product of Evolution

If you do evolve, if you are an evolving component of the one indivisible whole consciousness field and what it’s up to in the storyline of creation, then you get to survive. So you can survive to the extent that you’re relevant to the Cosmic law, which says evolve.

Otherwise, if all you’re trying to do, which is what co-addictive relationships are attempting to do, “Man, we’re just trying to get through another day.”

I talk to these people all the time, and they’re just talking to me about how we got through another day. “We got through another day, and the world around us is a complete mess. And our neighbors are scared of us, and we don’t seem to be contributing much to the consciousness of the world or the evolutionary status of the world, but we got through a day.” Not enough. Not enough. We have to have that big R tattooed on us. Which, and I don’t mean literally, you don’t have to go and get a tattoo, but branded on you: R: Relevant. Relevant.

Relevant to the Cosmic law. Ever-increasing expansion of consciousness, creativity. Ever-increasing capability to bring aid to the world and bring aid to others.

This gives you the right to continue surviving. So survival on its own is not a right. Survival is a product. Survival is a product of evolution. Evolution is not a product of survival. That’s a very important point.

Jai Guru Deva.