Alcoholism - a fault in Essence?

Gurdjieff describes the Essence as being "everything that we're born with". In contrast to Personality and False Personality, which are formed in childhood as a result of our interaction with our environment, Essence is the kernel of our Being and is already present in us at our birth.

Essence is born immature and needs educating, and normally this is the task of the Personality. We can see Essence in a very young child, who is spontaneous and innocent, yet in need of guidance and protection. In the Work, our Personality begins to feed our Esssence as we develop awareness and consciousness and see what needs to be done so that Essence may grow up and take its rightful place as the source of our behaviour.

But G said that Essence may be born with a fault that needs correcting. And I'm wondering whether this might be true of alcoholics - are we born with a fault in our Essence? Or is this terrible disease a result of environmental influences, and therefore part of Personality and False Personality only?

When I write of alcoholism, I'm including drug addiction as well. There are less immediately life-threatening addictions, too, such as gambling and codependence. But alcoholism (along with addiction to drugs) is the most immediately dangerous form of addiction. Without help, it will kill you. Millions of people die each year from the disease, and it takes enormous amounts of help as well as constant effort to overcome it.

Of course, we can argue, as Richard Rohr does in "Breathing Underwater", that we're all addicted to something. Some people are alcoholics, others may be workaholics or addicted to shopping. But while this may be broadly true, it's no help in trying to understand alcoholism, which is such an extreme form of addiction, involving a life-or-death struggle and requiring the help of a Higher Power in order to recover.  Alcoholism kills.  Not many people die from buying too many designer handbags.

But does this disease originate in the mind or in the body? And if in the mind, what part?

Brain scans and other investigations show clear differences between the brains of alcoholics and those of "normal"people. Different areas of the brain light up in response to stimuli; different chemicals are found in the blood; different patterns of behaviour are observable. 

But, just because we can see changes in the brain and its chemistry, this doesn't necessarily mean that alcoholism results from a purely physical defect. After all, such differences could be the end result of years of living in a depressed or addicted state, probably exposed to depression and addiction in the family of origin, since such diseases do run in families. An alcoholic parent raises his or her children very differently from the way a normal, non-addicted mother or father would behave. And this in itself might be enough to cause the different brain patterns and chemistry we can observe.

So which comes first?

One interesting and disquieting piece of research suggests that the brains of children as young as eight can show the beginning of unusual patterns that would indicate alcoholism in adults. But again, is this cause or effect? And what can we do with such findings? Even if they are found to be infallibly predictive of adult behaviour, would that give the State the right to ban alcohol and begin early therapy in such children?

Twin studies give more indication of the physical origins of alcoholism. Identical twins, sharing the same genes and separated at birth, will usually show similar behaviour in regard to drugs and alcohol later in life, even though their family environments have been very different.

The physical differences in the brains of alcoholics include the apparent lack, or the inability to process, endorphins that in normal people create a feeling of calm and wellbeing. Serotonin and dopamine are either present in much lower quantities, or the receptors that process them are defective or in short supply. The result, for the alcoholic, includes feelings of jumpiness, anxiety, depression, anger or chronic fear. This is why the alcoholic is sometimes spoken of as having "a skin too few". That's exactly what it feels like. And I talk from experience here, as a recovering alcoholic who will, please God, soon celebrate her 25th AA anniversary.

These differences account for the strong, ungovernable urge to drink to ease the pain. Drinking is a learned behaviour, a way of self-medicating. Alcoholics commonly report experiencing extreme euphoria after their first drink, at least in the early years of the disease, a form of relief from the mental stress that other drinkers don't experience, at least to that degree.

And the brain of the alcoholic then goes on to play a nasty trick: it loses the ability to discern when to stop drinking. Control goes, and it's not a problem of will-power. The brain simply doesn't recognize the need to stop drinking, as happens with normal, social drinkers.

 It also malfunctions in terms of memory; in an alcoholic blackout, the drinker can seem to be perfectly normal in speech and behaviour, and yet the brain is laying down no memories at all. Later, it's impossible for the alcoholic to recall what he or she did, and although this often seems like a cop-out to friends and family, it's literally true. The alcoholic will never be able to remember what they did, because the memory is simply not there. 

If alcoholism originates in the physical body, there should be indications of the disease in our DNA. And recent studies suggest that in fact there are. Different combinations of genes seem to be present in alcoholics and addicts, as compared to the DNA of those not addicted to these substances. Different physical reactions occur in relation to alcohol or opiates in individuals with these patterns.

So, although we can't say for certain whether the origin of the disease is physical or mental, I believe there are now enough indicators to say it is, most likely, a physical problem before it becomes evident as a psychological disease.

And if so, does this mean that alcoholism is a fault in Essence?

It would seem that it is. Perhaps it is the fault that we alcoholics have incarnated in order to overcome. Perhaps we took on this struggle willingly, seeing how dangerous the disease is and how it affects generations of families. Could it be that we chose to live life as an alcoholic, knowing the high risks, but knowing, too, that we could receive help from Conscious Humanity, our Higher Power, if only we remember to ask for it?

Or could it resemble the Sufi vision of life between incarnations - that as a soul begins its descent from the heavenly realms into its conception on Earth, it meets returning souls who ask it - perhaps implore it - to do battle with the very fault that the returning soul was unable to completely overcome? 

There's much to ponder here. I don't know the answers. But, if alcoholism is indeed a fault in Essence, the good news is that it can be alleviated and prevented from causing further damage, as long as the alcoholic remains aware of his or her spiritual needs and dependence on God.

Before the 20th Century, recovery from alcoholism was very, very difficult, perhaps impossible. Today, we have the Twelve Steps, AA, and NA, and it may be that we alcoholics incarnated now because at last real help would be available to us in our daily struggles.

Thank God for those Steps.