Compulsion

What is the function of a compulsion? In organizing the minutia of experience and by insuring predictability for the senses, a compulsion creates (from the four walls of the imagination) the staples of security and comfort. Certainty is purchased by intervention, some sort of deliberative act that assumes magical association while performing the very real and "beneficial" task of demonstrating the potency of identifying one's own self as the locus of--if not power--at least choice. One can engage with a variety of tactics, but when infected by compulsivity and its aggressive, "present-tense" thinking, one leaves one's self, incomplete. The delusion is obvious but the satisfaction becomes irrational; one wants the idea of control since one knows that actual control is impossible. Simple, and perhaps inelegant, this statement is both empirically and intuitively "true." The addiction model makes a mistake in presuming progress in moving behaviors when behaviors whether they be perceived as negative (an addiction) or positive (a hobby) are the attachments to identity that detach one from the great ellipsis (AKA God). There is no logic in supplanting one compulsion with a second and calling this success. The trouble with compulsion is not contained in the specific acts and rituals that manifest but rather in the spontaneity and breadth of experience that, in mistaking fear for armour, the individual loses altogether. Rather than anticipating the demise of one's ambitions, one does well (and privately, much better) to cogitate on "movement" as opposed to "decision." We can learn more by listening to the potentialities and challenges in other histories or by sitting with another in silence while being mutually unburdened by that silence or, perhaps--having had the foresight to not rehearse anything, to stumble, ungoverned, into some situation that, at least for the moment feels both like "control" and "freedom."