“There are those who forget that death will come to all. For those who remember, quarrels come to an end”. The Dhammapad, Chapter 1, verse1.
It is, in my opinion, the notion of spiritual malady as that which separates individual addicts from the larger context of addiction, that is, spiritual malady is the context in which we look at addiction culturally. This is first and foremost a linguistic concern. We want to speak to the context or notion of addiction when trying to develop and convey truths about addiction. This is to say, also, that truths are different from facts in both the linguistic sense as well as in the empirical or phenomenological sense. Language is an attempt to capture experience and appearance of the Other, in a way that can be transmitted to the reader. On the one hand we have the subjective experience of the addict himself, on the other, the nihilistic background that supports or exacerbates the condition of addiction or rather is this condition. Most treatment approaches focus solely on the individual without attempts to reconnect this individual with the cultural conditions in which he is embedded. Of course, to do so would require the individual counselor to understand said culture and its historical antecedents. He would be put in the position of say a cultural psychologist. A psychological historian. It is important to understand that this so called “spiritual malady” is not a personal acquisition on the part of the individual, but rather a notional ideality he is born into and must contend with as the “Other”. Something that is already always there but unconsciously overlooked or unseen. The important thing to realize here is that the problem of addiction lies not solely in the body or mind of the individual addict but also outside. I am aware that certain terms that I use may, on the one hand, seem unconventional, and on the other, used in new or novel ways, concepts unfamiliar to my readers. Therefore, I will use the language that I think best conceptualizes the subject under investigation, which is chemical addiction. To make clear my ideas, I will attempt to explain novel ideas more explicitly as I go.