Disintegration via Drink
I come from a line of alcoholics.
Alcoholism is the white man's disease and an affliction known to the poor and the rich, the intelligent and the criminally stupid. It seems especially pronounced in northwestern Europe, and people with ancestral roots in this region have spread the love of drunkenness all over the globe.
Yes, drunks have been a part of every nation and culture, but ponder for a moment the loving devotion with which Europeans have crafted every conceivable sort of brandy, whisky, cognac, wine, beer, ale, etc. China and India have nothing on the West when it comes to the production, variety and creativity of alcoholic beverages.
Drunkenness is sometimes associated with being Irish, but they've no monopoly on it. England, Scotland, Wales and so on are home to plenty of drunks, and in any contest over numbers, I expect the breakdown to be somewhat even. There are lots of videos and pics of Brits puking, staggering around, fighting and carousing while under the influence.
According to ChatGPT, the United Kingdom has a higher rate of heavy drinking than the Scandinavian countries. People don't generally think of Sweden as a land of drunks. The Nordics are usually seen as thriftier, more upright, more somber than their cousins to the west. AI suggests that the numbers support this perception.
Alcoholism among the Anglo-Saxon peoples is a male-dominated sport. There are, of course, female drunks, but like everything in life, they are underrepresented in either the good or bad categories, tending instead to clump in the middle. Traditionally, women did not have the luxury of alcoholism since they had children, but as fertility has fallen, it's not unusual to see more and more women binge or nurse a drink perpetually like the men. More free time, more disposable income…
Men have more geniuses, an advantage in IQ and other hormonal drives which cause them to seek out and explore. For northwestern European men, the mental energy required to plan and survive long winters has given them a solid foundation for neuroses. The future orientation comes with an attendant power of reflection on past successes and failures. All of these are found in varying degrees among the races of men, but northern European men seem especially shaped by evolutionary pressures to always be thinking or planning. Europeans are inventors, artists, explorers, scientists to such a degree that the West has conquered the planet with its ideas and technologies. The cost? The inventiveness, can-do problem-solving for a harsh environment creates neurotic men in need of ad hoc home remedies.
No boasting is intended here, since the mental tools involved exact a heavy toll on their users. I've heard various arguments advanced by drunks about the critical, life-saving role alcohol played in Europe during times when water purification was impossible. Dank, fetid water in those times transmitted deadly pathogens that could kill a man and his entire family; distillation and brewing were ways to purify water. Oddly enough, I've never read about this in other parts of the world, such as Africa, India, or China. Brewing and fermentation were no doubt used, just not on the scale and with the devotion seen in Europe.
Monastics in central Europe were known to live off "liquid bread" during Lent, and this was probably convenient too since some of the monasteries produced beer and ale as a means of supporting themselves. The quality and variety of European beers meant that monasteries could not only be self-supporting, but revenue-generating. Unlike the sangha, self-sufficiency through labor meant that a lot of male sexual energy was diverted into various crafts and other economic activities, leaving us of European heritage with a culture of alcohol. The Trappists still make their own brews, and when I was an active drunk, I would enjoy them from time to time. Well crafted and with higher production quality owing to centuries of strict manufacture standards. Becoming inebriated on a Trappist ale linked you to centuries of drunks who had enjoyed the same recipe and artesian devotion before passing out on the floor.
Western monasticism takes various forms, with some religious orders like the Cistercians being isolated from the laity while others hold varying degrees of contact. The sons of St. Benedict founded schools and higher learning centers, so there were always points of daily contact with the laity. Not every monastic order was producing intoxicants, but there was a general acceptance of alcohol as just as essential as water to European life.
One cultural historian noted that before the modern age, Europeans were using weak beers and ales so frequently that most of them were probably tipsy throughout the day for most of their lives. The fear of tainted water meant one would drink weak brews which were cheap and plentiful in lieu of a cold glass of (possibly lethal) water. It also meant alcoholism, or at least alcohol dependency, was an accepted part of the ordinary European's existence. Given the short, nasty and brutish nature of life, a few decades of being high, capped off by death, was probably the norm. You could live most of your life enveloped in an extra layer of heedlessness. I was told when a child that German women would rub beer on their baby’s gums when teething began, to keep them sedated.
The Western monastic tradition is very different from the Buddha's vision of the sangha, which saw monastics as begging for food once a day to remain in constant contact with the laity. The terms "cloistered" and "non-cloistered" were never used in conjunction with the local sangha. Dhamma was seen as a gift to be shared frequently with the ordinary people who were too overwhelmed by responsibilities to devote time to practice. Self-sufficiency would mean turning the sangha into an economic enterprise, which is, by nature, time-consuming and detrimental to practice.
The luxury of a cushion and several free hours every day to devote to meditation is a modern thing of the past 100 years; the schools changed their ancient posture towards lay practice by actively encouraging it. Today, it's not too far-fetched to believe that there are accomplished practitioners who live outside of the sangha. We've gone from a world of people reliant on beer for hydration to one where every variety of water is available at the grocery store, and time to do the work that leads to eventual liberation. Maybe there are laymen who die every day, just moments after awakening.
Alcohol is the poor man’s escape from the grind of consciousness. For most of us, life is a constant, low-grade stress over bills, job situations, relationships, and “the future.” What will happen next week? Will I get prostate cancer? Will I be replaced by an H-1 B at my job? Will I be able to pay off my mortgage early? Is my wife banging her manager? Is her manager banging her?
Technology hasn’t really reduced stress at all; in fact, it’s magnified it. The threat of technology means non-stop surveillance, to the point that many of us just don’t care anymore. I imagine during Soviet times, there was a kind of relief when the secret police showed up late at night to "disappear" you into the wilderness. There was fear and terror, but also a feeling of completion, like Christ saying on the cross, “It’s finished.” The stress of inconstancy gives way because your immediate future is very constant, very set, and the vast majority of humans, theists or not, harbor a profound suspicion that the nihilists may be right.
Technology is now so embedded into our lives that we speak of the constantly connected default state. We are exposed to streams of data about the macro world, politics, entertainment, and trends, but locally, our space is empty. Local space is empty space, and the connectivity we really need is absent.
The low-grade stress flares up during health problems, divorces, break-ups, firings, etc. The inconstancy and terribleness of existence is masked by our day-to-day mental processes, which construct useful narratives as the ego cultivates its sense of permanence, of eternality. The whole recipe, the concoction of stress, anxiety, future-reading, past-analysis, false eternalism, and death-wishing, leads the mind to become, for many, a non-stop torrent of noise.
What led me to meditation and, eventually, to the feet of the Lord Buddha, was seeing, viscerally, that my thoughts, my consciousness, had turned into a raging river of gibberish. Endless loops, phrases, obsessions, all leading to nowhere and offering nothing but misery. I began examining recurring phrases that had worn themselves into my mind, to understand how to break them, to stop the flood. I was not a Buddhist and was only vaguely aware that the East had spiritual traditions that could tame the mind. I had my own mantras, and they were awful.
I had practiced yoga in my living room at night with a DVD player in a large city for over a year. My exposure to “altered mental states” became untied from booze and started here with stretching.
After spending months working at it, I could make it through the DVD workout for 45 minutes to the end. So I picked up another one and did that because it was harder and required more focus. After completing the session, I would lie supine on my mat, feeling the earth as my foundation even as my mind settled into calm.
It was calm. It was calm.
I was calm.
One of the problems with any vaguely spiritual practice — and the yoga I did was Westernism through and through — is that it peels back layers of the self, revealing yet more unpleasantness. So you can do yoga in a Western secular context and still trigger some spiritual side effects.
Yoga can make one feel calm and relaxed for a bit, but it also — much like meditation — can bring up anger, ill will, sloth/torpor, etc. There is apparently a body of literature on this in early Buddhism, wherein spiritual practice opens up the closets and attics of the heart. Spiritual practice is effective if it rifles through the closets, hidden trunks, and forgotten spaces, flushing out the negative. We think the practice is supposed to heal all wounds, and it can, but only if they are drained of pus first.
People think meditation is a balm for the spirit and it is, but it’s also a drive-by shooting into Mara’s house late at night. When you undertake any spiritual practice seriously, you probably do so as a therapeutic, but you are also dog-whistling to the entire cosmos your intention to depart the wheel. The cosmos does not like this. At all.
You are in a bad place on the inside even while everything on the outside looks okay. The practice will rouse those darker parts of you, cause them to perk up and look at your new resolve more intently. So long as you slumber, they remain low-energy, only putting out enough effort to keep you where you are: locked into samsaric existence, with you as a little kitten pinned under the paw of a large German shepherd. I guess for serial killers, politicians, psychopaths, the kilesas are probably more active, but for most of us, they are low-grade, having flare-ups whenever someone crosses us or something appears which tickles our greed. There will always be an Epstein class of cravers who play at the professional level, at an altitude we cannot and should not try to imagine.
I gave up yoga, but always wanted a substitute practice that would get me there without leaving me tired and sore the next day. And with yoga, I was always tired and sore. Non-stop. Take a hot bath with magnesium salts, still feel tired and sore. Drink plenty of water and take vitamins, still sore. Live a vegan lifestyle, still feel tired and sore.
Tired and sore won out. I threw in the towel on yoga, stuck with aerobic exercise.
For some people, the frequent routine of stretching leads to a kind of permanent flexibility that is easier to maintain. For me, yoga just became a low-grade constant nuisance on the body. I was still left with the problem of the racing mind, the unhappy mind, the knowledge that I was just an empty pattern, a shadow on the wall for the other 23 hours of the day. Even in sleep, the mind is active, editing reality through dreams.
Visualizing yourself as a shadow is not skillful in certain contexts; in others, the genuinely arrived-at realization of being not even a shadow would be the cause for stream entry or better. This negative feeling of insubstantiality is rooted in fear, anxiety, depression, despondency. It is the Near Enemy of the real deal, the one which finds the insubstantiality of it all to be the root of liberation.
The thing with spiritual realizations is that, while they are tantalizing goals of early practice, as you do the work, they become less important, less vital. You walk the path and the path rewards you with each step, even if it’s a struggle at times. If I can do just this one thing right now, in front of me, then I won’t worry about stream entry. Stream entry will take care of itself. I will be in the stream and then it will be: of course I am in it because I followed the path that ran through the fields, through the forests, to its cool waters.
I suspect that this is the way of awakening. The dross slowly melts away, and as it does so, the general force of craving goes with it. Not all at once, but slowly. That is the fruit of practice: to become less passionate about objects, situations, relationships. To be passionate is to suffer. It’s in the very Latin origins of the word - patior, pati, passus sum.
Compassion: To suffer with someone who is undergoing hardship. To endure, to bear with another in empathy. Compassion for oneself is the ability to suffer with yourself, as you suffer. Always have compassion for yourself during your practice before you extend your heart to others. That’s the counsel I’ve read, and it is wise.
But to be passionate about something is to be overtaken with emotion, to become enslaved, enthralled, or otherwise beholden to a mental edit of one small, unimportant aspect of unreality.
The alcoholic or the one prone to alcoholism has no spiritual tools to deal with the problem of the mind. The problem is not “your sins,” “your relationship to God and his divine plan for you,” “your dark night of the soul.”
Dark night of the soul is one of those nuisance Westernisms that pop up frequently now. It means everything and nothing. It is overwrought, an ego-reinforcing narrative rather than an honest, unbiased recognition that the path pulls scales from the eyes, letting you see things differently, more clearly. The disconnect between your grand mental redaction of reality and what it really is can be quite unsettling, but if you get bogged down in marveling at it, you will just start the creative edit process all over again. I am this, this is me, this is mine, here’s my story.
The practice is hard, easy, simple, subtle, plain to understanding, hard to grasp, esoteric and hidden. It is inconsistent at first, but like playing piano or tennis, it becomes easier, more rewarding, more valuable than anything in your life, including your own family. There are transitions which can be jarring as you realize for yourself that your illusions are just that, illusions. The Dark Night of the Soul is just maudlin in my experience, a way of anchoring yourself to the starting line when you should be running the race. In developing awareness of impermanence in your day-to-day activities, existential categories like these fade into the noise they really are.
Those things I mentioned are conceptual frameworks that do nothing besides keep one on the treadmill of ideation, of ruminating and conjecturing. You will exhaust yourself mentally and emotionally over the pointlessness of your routines and your struggles. Or, you may never even see them as this at all. You will scurry like a mouse from one maze to the next, always in search of a little safety, a little food, and never ponder too deeply the insanity of it all. When I look at most people, this is what I see.
Alcohol is the solution many of us find because we are poor men living in a materialistic age, a post-Christian world where Mother Teresa’s story of being abandoned to the silence of her god is just not interesting. It isn’t going to cut it, but this bottle of wine is here right now, and for a few moments, it can numb you to the predicament you have, however you choose to frame it.
Tomorrow, you will shit, shower, shave, brush your teeth, drive to a job you don’t like, to be with people who are only there because they, like you, have to maintain their carcasses. Wine gladdens the heart; drink it now, let it warm your body, soften the edges of your mind. It will pull you down into dark, velvety relief. Like all things, it’s not permanent.
Sitting on your couch every night and drinking wine is a kind of samadhi. Think of it as the Near Enemy of samadhi. It makes you calm; it gives the impression of increasing your awareness, at least, until you tip over into full-on tipsiness or inebriation. A drunk may only ever feel truly aware after his first few drinks. He will perk up and become attentive to internal and external things. Like I said, alcoholism is the Near Enemy of the mindfulness developed in the practice. Similar in some respects, but categorically opposed to it.
