Why You Keep Doing What You Want to Give Up

Why do we keep returning to a habit even when we understand its consequences and have already decided to give it up? In this conversation with Olga Stolyarova, I suggest looking at dependence more broadly than the habit itself: through struggle, anxiety, impulse, physical craving and the state of observation.

Using the examples of coffee, smoking, food, recurring thoughts and other familiar states, I explore where the line runs between physical and spiritual dependence, why endless struggle can itself become a source of suffering, and what changes when a person stops merely forbidding themselves an action and starts observing where the impulse comes from in the first place. The conversation is first and foremost a spiritual view of what is happening and does not replace professional medical or psychotherapeutic help with addiction.

A spiritual view of dependence

– The topic of dependence as a form of suffering — including when a person struggles with some kind of dependence, whether it is smoking, alcohol, coffee, all the way up to the most serious addictions. Why does a person become dependent? What energies influence this? And what should a person do who is trying to cope with some dependence? How should they look at it?

– We will, of course, examine this from the spiritual side. I think there are a great many psychological methods, solutions and descriptions of this construct. I always encourage people to look from another side — or rather not from another side, but a little more broadly at everything that is happening.

I have a close friend — he is also my student in various programs — and he devoted a great deal of time to coffee: to the notion of coffee, to the dependence on coffee itself and how difficult it is. He told me he had read books on the subject — he had a whole construct for how he perceived coffee.

He often comes to visit me, we have seen each other a lot in recent years, and we have been friends for probably thirteen years. At least here in America, he is one of our family’s most frequent guests. And he didn’t like that I drink coffee so easily and say that this coffee doesn’t matter at all. He really didn’t like it, it really irritated him — because he was constantly struggling with it. He arrives and says: “I don’t drink coffee.” I say: “And I’m going out for coffee now.” I go out for coffee, although I don’t drink much of it: one cup a day, sometimes two, but mostly one. I can go without it altogether. And yet in my case it is clearly a dependence, without a doubt.

Let me explain this to you now. It is very important what we mean by dependence: physical dependence or spiritual dependence.

Usually, when he came to visit, he would start drinking coffee, and I would say: “But you don’t drink coffee, so why are you drinking it?” He would say: “I’m doing an experiment for myself right now.” He was always running experiments — drinking coffee or not drinking it — but he was constantly in a state of endless anxiety. The kind of anxiety you are describing now: you buy coffee and feel anxious about it, you don’t like the action, it irritates you. You see a problem in the whole thing.

You know my frequent example: a person wants to quit smoking for several years, struggles with it, struggles, quits, doesn’t smoke for a month, and then starts again and keeps on smoking. What do I always say? “Why did the person torment themselves? They could have avoided tormenting themselves for those two years, avoided it afterward and avoided it from then on.”

And at some point I gave my friend, I think, a fairly good explanation of what was going on. I told him:

Never! Drink fifteen cups a day if you like — it won’t swallow you up, it won’t be able to take you. Will you feel unwell? Of course you will, from fifteen cups. And some people feel very unwell after just one. The question is whether you understand the level of this influence on you from the point of view of the spiritual world.

What should even count as dependence?

People talk about the difficulties with coffee — and then go straight off and drink a Coca-Cola with ice at six in the morning. Or mineral water with ice — knocking back a whole glass of ice. Or they replace it with watching a TV series. Or they walk around grumbling all day long — at someone, at the world around them, unhappy with their boss. So which is better: to have a coffee or to be unhappy with other people? Probably to have a coffee. Right? At least with coffee, the question of dependence concerns only you.

By the way, as for coffee in general, I think it has already been proven by everyone, everywhere possible and impossible: a basic cup of coffee a day is medicine, provided you haven’t poured milk, sugar and whatever else into it. It is medicine, it has a huge amount of benefit. Does it have a certain influence? It does, but many things have an influence. There is an influence when you eat bread, and when you eat bananas. The question is how much of all this you eat, consume, drink, how much of it gets into you.

And is there more harm from a cup of coffee a day or from living in a city with the window open while a thousand cars drive past every day — in terms of air pollution? Or does a state of things left unsaid with your husband or wife affect you less or more than a cup of coffee a day? What do you think? Does worrying about your children every day affect you less or more than a cup a day? And is this daily worrying a dependence or not?

• Is wanting good weather a dependence or not?
• Is wanting to go on vacation twice a year a dependence or not?
• Is the constant need to work a dependence or not?

So what is real dependence? These are enormous dependencies. You know, I grow a great many plants and spend a lot of time in the garden. Is that a dependence or not? You have been working for me for almost two years. Are you dependent on me, on my content, on being around me — or not? This is a very important question and an important point that I told my friend. I will repeat it once more: you as a human being are greater than this, and you need to be very calmly and clearly aware of it.

Don’t give it importance, don’t give it endless significance. Learn to see the many dependencies that you have in your life.

And believe me, Olya, there are far more of them and they are far broader than the plainly visible coffee, tea, bread, sugar or anything else. There are far more of them. At the very least — dependence on the very notion of life. Dependence on the state of good health. What coffee? Simply dependence on the state of good health.

Let go of the struggle and start observing

So, you can stop drinking coffee very easily. And here you simply need to be very calmly aware for yourself whether that is easy for you to do or not. If you don’t know the answer — test it. Don’t drink coffee for two weeks, if you can. If you can’t — you have tested yourself, too. You don’t know the answer — then test it. Say: “Starting tomorrow, I won’t drink coffee for two weeks.” You didn’t drink it for two weeks — everything is clear, everything is understood, everything is fine.

Spiritual dependence

Can you feel somehow off if you haven’t had your coffee? Of course you can, because there is an influence on the physical body. It is the same as stopping eating. Or if a person has endlessly eaten fatty and sweet foods, desserts, drunk all kinds of drinks, washed everything down with sugary tea during meals — it is hard for them to switch to plain food, to eating foods separately, to greens. It will be hard for them to make that switch; their body will want something else.

An approach to working with dependence

In general, if you take food, then coffee is just some small part of what is happening. But I suggest you step back from that and look a little more broadly. Suppose you have looked at yourself and seen that you can’t get rid of coffee or cigarettes. Fine, say: “I can’t get rid of this, I will live with it.” But don’t describe it as a great, cool, necessary action for you. That is like saying coffee is such a super benefit, so I will drink coffee. There is benefit there and there is harm. It is important that there is harm. And then the influence and the level of that harm matter.

And if you have calmly acknowledged it and simply left it as something that happens, you don’t tell everyone around you that you are fighting it, trying or have already overcome it — then you are simply observing it as the normal, natural course of life.

Imagine: you go outside, and negative, violent thoughts arise in you — to harm someone or yourself. There are a huge number of people who constantly have fairly specific thoughts. Or a person walks along and wants to cheat on their husband or wife. Constantly. Such thoughts just arise. Another person has a thought, they say: “I don’t want to do this,” — but the thoughts arise. They don’t want to — they have already filled every diary five hundred times with “I don’t want to.” And the thought keeps arising just as it always did.

A person says: “I won’t go skydiving, I definitely don’t need that.” But the thought comes: you need to jump. A person says: “I’m doing fine at this job, I’ll keep working here for the next twenty years.” But the thought comes and says: “Quit tomorrow, you need to change jobs.” It keeps coming, it is constantly in their head.

Once again: I am talking now about the case when you are aware that this is a problem. Because a huge number of people, of course, are not aware of any problems at all. No matter how much you tell them, people are not aware of it. A person easily, absolutely easily closes their eyes to it and is not aware of it. In the world, people are ready to destroy billions of people for the sake of their own state, for the sake of their ego. What matters most is their own opinion and their own state, not everything else.

But if a person is aware that this is a certain problem or some destructive perception, or doesn’t understand at all where these thoughts come from, — they begin to observe them, to look at them from the side. Exactly as you do with coffee. What should you do? You should stop fighting coffee and look from the side: where does my desire to give up coffee come from at all, and why?

Imagine that you are looking at it from the side — searching for the energy behind it. Where did it come from, why did it even occur to me this morning in the café to worry about whether I would buy coffee or not? Where did the very thought of worrying come from?

After all, with your worrying you most likely did yourself far more harm than with the coffee itself.

Moreover, you and I know that this worrying can spread not only to you — over hours, days and nights, poor sleep, disrupted eating and everything else. It can spread to your work and to everything else. It can spread to other people. Because of this worrying you can bring harm to other people as well. Just imagine: the very fact of worrying about coffee can cause other people more harm.

Exactly as I told my friend: “Enough worrying about this coffee already, you’ve blown my head off with it. You’re blowing your own head off, and now you’re blowing other people’s too. Forget about this problem at least for a while. Stop being in a state of worry, let it go, make a choice for yourself. If you don’t want to drink it, don’t drink it and forget about it. What difference does it make to you what other people do? That is their choice. You think about yourself.”

And you observe and look: where did this worry, this agitation, come to me from at all? Did other people in this coffee shop bring it to me? Did the people around me bring it — my friends or girlfriends, or someone else? Did the internet bring it to me? Is my spiritual system in a state of a certain agitation? Or is this an impulse of agitation that has come over from some other plane altogether, and its cause is entirely different?

The task is simply to observe it from the side: not to find the cause, and not even to resolve it, but to look at it this way. This is one of the simple actions. In general there are also complex actions: finding the cause is always a complex action. It seems easy, and yet it seems impossible — it can be either. The most important thing is to look at it from the side. What kind of energy is this at all? Why is it present in me today?

It is the same as when you start thinking about some person or about your relationship with them. Why is this person present in the space? Where did they come from? Did I bring them here, or did they come into my thoughts on their own? Or did someone else bring them to me? Why am I thinking about this today at all? What is it?

And this is not a search for a problem and not a search for a solution. It is the formation of a stable pattern of behavior and a habit of observing everything that is happening. And then coffee will not be your dependence at all.

Because if you understand that your worry came from seeing that after coffee your side will start to hurt or that you will end up having a certain operation — if you have that understanding, you will begin to relate to all of this completely differently. It will not be an abstraction: “Is this bad or good?”

Of course, you must in no way forget about psychophysical dependence, the dependence of the physical body. You must not forget about it. And of course you need to find different solutions for yourself.

For example, one of my issues is a fairly common habit: I often buy coffee not because I want to drink it, but because the very act of going to a certain place is part of my life. It doesn’t matter whether it is a ritual or the fact that you are sitting somewhere, and so on. And you sit in spaces where you have no choice other than to buy coffee, because there seems to be nothing else to buy there. Although, probably, you can always drink water. Though not always either: often it may only come from the refrigerator, and I, for example, don’t drink cold water. And that, too, is a question of the next level. Then I understand that the question is probably not about coffee but about encountering certain spaces.

But once again: the example I gave is one of the micro-aspects of any person’s life. Because a person lives within the causes and effects of karma, of their whole spiritual system, of heredity, of their actions in this life, and the dependencies there are of a completely different order.

External influences of energies on a person

There are things you will never cope with, never at all. But one thing will be replaced by another. Imagine that in your system there is a current of energy that is meant to carry darkness. This darkness will express itself in social action through certain events in your life. What difference does it make whether it expresses itself through coffee, through cigarettes or through something else? Of course, I am moving into a certain abstraction here. What is coffee? It expresses itself through something specific, through a certain state.

What you need to deal with here is not coffee and not cigarettes — you need to deal with this current of energy. Then you will have the strength to switch off any dependence at any moment.

For example, I have never smoked in my life. Never. Why? Because I read some books or was a smart person? I watched people around me who smoked cigarettes constantly. And for me — absolutely zero. Or the other way around: I never drank coffee until twenty — what twenty? — until thirty or later. Not at all. I don’t even remember until what age anymore. I didn’t drink coffee at all. What coffee? It even seems to me that people didn’t drink coffee before thirty. You are just of a different age.

You are under thirty now, and you are thinking: “Alexander, what are you even talking about?” After all, the question about coffee is being asked by a young woman under thirty. But it seemed to me that coffee somehow didn’t exist in my youth. As if it wasn’t sold anywhere, as if it wasn’t there at all. And at my parents’ home there wasn’t exactly a coffee-drinking culture — I don’t remember our family having such a culture at all. Although coffee machines actually appeared a very long time ago, I think. We, by the way, got a filter coffee machine in 1991, I think, maybe 1992. I just don’t remember anyone using it. Maybe someone did. Probably at some point the filters ran out, and no one used it.

Back then I was in a far lower state of awareness than I am now. And now I drink coffee. Isn’t that strange? There you have the different energies of influence. Do you see what the point is? Different energy, different circumstances, different combinations of circumstances, different influences.

In the same way, I know people who have never tried alcohol in their lives. There is nothing good in it. Nothing good at all. It destroys instantly. A micro-dose destroys instantly and stays in the astral body. But what state does a person need to be in to understand this? You need to be in a state of awareness — or not have this energy influencing you.

And here it is no longer only about awareness. On the one hand, it is about awareness, and on the other hand, we know a huge number of people who have never consumed alcohol in their lives. They never even had an impulse or a motive for it; this energy never showed itself in them in any form. That doesn’t mean these people are super-developed. It doesn’t mean they are somehow colossally wise. This energy simply didn’t show itself in them.

I always suggest that you pay attention to this: I know such people who are very narrow-minded, closed off. There is no question of true development of life with these people. But they haven’t drunk alcohol and don’t want to. And not because their body doesn’t tolerate it — they have never had any impulse for it. Nor the circumstances, for that matter.

After all, there is also the combination of circumstances — you and I understand that. There are people who started using drugs on their own initiative, and there are those who started because, for example, they were forced to. The combination of circumstances can be completely different. But it is not a question of reading books, of intelligence and consciousness. Although, once again, of course, if a person is in expanded perception, in conscious perception, they will make various decisions in a completely different way.

That is why you should be very calm toward people who, among other things, drink coffee — including people with expanded perception. Because you never know whether it is a dependence for a person or simply some action they take. From what impulse are they doing it?

And here is the truth to tell yourself: are you doing this from strength or from weakness? From a state of absolute understanding of what is happening, or from egoistic certainty?

Then the question is: is a person who is in egoistic certainty capable of realizing that it is egoistic certainty and not healthy truth? That is the problem. It is a big problem. To see and find such patterns, you need to be engaged in very serious work of constant awareness of a huge number of things: constantly seeing in yourself the different aspects of arising states — anxiety, envy, doubt, irritation, anger, resentment.

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