The real threat to mankind’s peaceful, productive, existence is his own brain. This is true for us as a species and for addicts recovering from addictions. We face a determined opponent to our restoration. The good news is this opponent is easy to keep an eye on. All we need to do is look in the mirror. That’s the person, or I should say – the personality – who’s trying to kill us.

More often than not the reflection succeeds in bringing the real person to the breaking point. There is one thing that makes this enemy of sanity so relentless and seemingly all powerful: It performs it’s task automatically, constantly, it never ever lets up. This assault on our sanity continues round the clock and will never let up unless we manage to gain control of it.

I consider myself lucky in that I’ve always been aware that there was something vitally wrong going on with my brain. That said it’s still incredibly hard to change it. Changing the brain is so hard that it very rarely happens from the inside out. This is understandable when we consider how the brain learns. It learns mainly, at least in the current culture, from the outside in.

One only need ask the question, “What have I taught my brain?”. Or, “What have I taught myself?”. The whole idea of allowing people to teach themselves, or decide for themselves, is anathema in our societal system. There are laws in place to insure that everyone be taught – how to think, how to be a part of society, what’s good, what’s right and so on.

You can say the thoughts coming forth out of your brain are “Your Thoughts”, but are they?

Knowing what I know about the brain, thoughts, people in general and addiction – I’m going to tell you how – in my opinion – we can best deal with “Our own worst enemy”. The reason I’m at this again today is I recently had another – brain episode. So it’s really fresh in my mind.

The goal, as I see it, is to move from victim-hood and servitude to being the boss. This – victim-hood and servitude  -  isn’t just a condition for we who have experienced addictions. Addicts have one thing – not – in common with the rest of the people in our societies. We got addicted to some chemical substance. That’s it, that’s where the disparity ends.

I’ve heard people in 12 step recovery groups blame their behavior on “My alcoholic brain” or “My addict brain”. This is pretty much nonsense. It’s a brain. We may have depleted the brain nutritionally to the point of relative dysfunction. We may have let our brains and thoughts go places and create ideas that are extremely unhealthy – but – so have non-addicts. Crazy thinking is just crazy thinking.

To understand the degree of seriousness in this discussion on the dysfunctional brain we only have to fully digest and accept one basic truth. Every thing that is wrong in the world today, without exception, is a direct result of the brain. There are very few absolute truths, that we know of, but I consider this to be one. Excepting this one absolute will set the stage for complete restoration and freedom.

The second step in taking charge of things is to understand something about the brain and “it’s” thoughts. Thoughts don’t get changed, they get replaced. The term changing my mind is really misleading. You hear people say it all the time – I changed my mind about this or that. Is that even possible?

First off, what is mind? Are we considering mind as – my ideas? The “What is Mind” discussion is really long and confusing and does no good for us who just want to get a grip on our thinking. We could say someone is in a certain state of mind. But how would we get there? Can you form a picture of mind? Okay lets look at brains, thought and taking charge.

Thoughts don’t change. Thoughts are nouns and they are what they are. “I think I like this” or “I don’t like this”, never change.  We may dispose of a thought, take it off the active list, it may be replaced with I like this, but, I don’t like this is still what it is. We’ve simply decided not to use it. We replaced it because it no longer worked for us.

All thought – our thought life – is like that. Now lets dispense with a type of thought that has nothing to do with our problem. I like asparagus is not an issue. Sensory likes and dislikes are perhaps the only things we ever decide for ourselves. We do it because we can’t not do it.

The type of thought we need to address is thought like – I like democracy. Or I would rather be sober. Where do these thoughts come from? How do we learn them? Remember I said we learn from the outside in. This type of thought we’ll refer to as opinion or belief. Opinion and belief are optional. They are subject to replacement.

Saying – my belief’s aren’t subject to change – is a belief. Saying – it is my firm opinion – is an opinion. Opinions, beliefs, outlooks, thoughts on, ideas concerning – is all brain stuff. All these things exist solely as a product of the brain function we call thought. The first thing we must do before we can do anything by ourselves, for ourselves and on behalf of ourselves – is pay attention to every move the thinking brain makes.

I say the thinking brain because most of what the brain does doesn’t involve thinking. We must find out what the brain is thinking and why.

Now comes the simple part. The hard part is getting past the defenses and obstructions the brain throws up to stop us from getting to this point. And, just because we got to this point, don’t imagine the brain is just going to roll over. For addicts hoping to recover – this is the fight of your life. An actual fight for your life. If you lose this battle you could end up dead. Your brain can very well kill you.

The simple part is this: Replace the thought. The difficult part is paying attention to the brain as it’s throwing up thoughts for us to look at. It’s annoying, sometimes depressing, sometimes frightening. Most people try and ignore it. Most people try to do something to drown it out. This is done through some form of activity. This accomplishes nothing in the way of healthy self assessment and change.

Remember – thoughts don’t change – but they will hide. To deal with a thought we have to choose it’s replacement. As we pay attention to our brains activity we’ll soon notice a thought we don’t want to have. I should say – we don’t want to experience. A better way of saying it would be: We will notice a thought – the brain has – that we don’t want to experience.

When we recognize this thought we pounce. If we don’t it will hide. We have to jump on it and hold it in our inner vision. For example, we may notice this – Man, this world sucks. We must instantly replace that thought with our vision of a perfect happy world. I use this as an example because this is one of my habitual thoughts. I had to come up with a picture I could use as a perfect happy world, and to tell the truth it’s not all that clear, but I have something to throw at the “Life Sucks” thought.

As we continue to practice this replacement exercise the replacing becomes habitual. There is nothing better than a healthy habit. Some positive action we don’t even have to think about. What happened to me lately is I started to drift. I got tired of “Having” to do something – just to be okay.

Maybe there is another way. People have told me there are other ways. None of them worked for me. The only way I’ve found to deal with negative thought is to “manually” replace it with the positive thought of my own choosing.

There are some audio tools you can use to aid in this. These I call “Meditation Helpers”. If we get our headphones and sit down for 15 or 20 minutes a day and dream up a perfect happy world vision, not only will we have one, we’ll have something to replace those  ”life sucks” thoughts with.

As far as I know this is a never ending process. That’s not so surprising since life itself is a never ending process. The only choice we have in this is how we use our collective moments. We’re going to spend all our time doing something. We can do as we’re told, think as we’re taught. Or we can create ourselves as we choose. We just need to recognize that the process is going on and being delivered up to us constantly via the brain.

The only way to recreate yourself is to get started…