Addictions come in various ways. Although I presently am not into the BIG addictions like drinking, smoking, using drugs, gambling or having enormous amounts of sex, I notice other addictions which may be milder and less damaging, but they seem to become more important the further I seem to progress.
A reader familiar with the SSOA-paradigm will probably know about the concept of the kumaras. You could consider the kumaras to be 7 fields which absorb energy, chi or attention away from your system towards these fields. On the Kumaraspage you can read more about them. One of the kumaras is called the Kumara of Lust. This Kumara deals with all kinds of addictions.
The thing that I find most useful the last couple of days, is that I could get into a certain addiction without hardly realizing it. There I would be, losing chi to certain behavior or certain thought patterns without knowing it. So, from now on I try to (or should I say 'I intend to'?) pay more attention to this kind of behavior.
These small addictions I noticed are hardly worth mentioning, but they did cost me more energy than they deserved. One of the addicted behaviors have to do with the tendency to check if someone has emailed me back. Whenever I had an interesting digital conversation with someone, I noticed that I was curious to read a response. This resulted in checking my email box far too many times a day. It is not only the actual act of opening your inbox, but it is also about all the thoughts about the possible answers. The possible anxiety about what the other may think about what you've written, the desire to learn what the other may say about certain things. The excitement of reading interesting thoughts. It is this combination of things that make it into an addiction. These thoughts put my attention away from my own process.
Another digital addiction concerns the desire to see if there are any updates on certain sites. In my case I check to see if there are new articles published on the SSOA-site. And when I sit behind my computer there are other sites that I check to see if there's anything new on them. This often takes too much time and I intend to do this procedure not more than once a day and ideally only once a week.
Now I try to leave my computer off more often. I have taken out my old notebooks and perhaps I am going to start writing in the old-fashioned way again, somewhere in the living room, or when the weather turns a bit warmer, somewhere outside in the forest, or near a river or a lake. These surroundings are far better for me, although I might end up getting addicted to these environments!
UPDATE October 2006: Recognizing the Automatic Pilot
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