Possession Room

The Possession Room happens to be filled with a lot of possessions, but that’s not how it got its name. What draws you into the room seems to be the possessions, the things. But that’s not it. What draws you into the room is the desire to be possessed, to be taken over by something that feels larger and more powerful than yourself.

Sexually, it is the longing to submit, to be held down and split open by a lust that will not take NO for an answer. Spiritually, it is the longing to prostate before the throne of God.

In the present age, this spiritual longing is every bit as disreputable as the sexual one. The politically correct God, like the politically correct man, is nice – so lame in niceness that our longing for possession must mean we turn to the devil. And that’s what it usually does. The longing itself will not take no for an answer. If the need for possession can’t submit to a God or a lover, it will find something less scrupulous to enforce its surrender. Quite often, that “less scrupulous” thing is addiction.

The object of it – alcohol, drugs, overspending, overindulgence in anything at all is beside the point. What we are really seeking from any addiction is the addiction itself: the loss of control, the helplessness in the face of something that feels more powerful than our own conscious will.

We want a badness that is better than our best idea of good. We want this badness not because we love badness per se, but because our best idea of good is too feeble, too boring, too goody-goody to shake us to our very core. This is why Twelve-Step programs begin with “hitting bottom.”

The bottom is not merely the degradation of the complete loss of control, but a pleasure at that loss, and the authority over that pleasure. What addiction really wants is what it finally gets when it “hits bottom,” the quality of surrender itself.

Addiction wants to strip you of your false pride, of every stratagem and artifice. Insofar as this decent is a spiritual journey, you imagine it must be leading you to the devil. But if you go all the way to the bottom, you find yourself delivered, all naked and quivering and defenseless, into the embrace of the Divine Mother.

The bottom is her dwelling place and falling is the expression of your devotion to her.

You have to surrender because She cannot compel you. You cannot buy HER love and you do not have to. When you relax into Her, you relax into yourself as well. It is the deepest possible relaxation. No matter how much we yearn for what is down there, everything inside us that is sane and rational resists the plummet downward toward bottom.

To get there, we need ballast. Any kind of pain – illness, loss, failure, disappointment – lends us weight and take us down. But it is addiction, especially, especially, that expresses our latent devotion, because indulging our addictions we actively participate in our downfall.

Only when it has carried us all the way to the bottom does addiction relinquish its grip on us for it will not quit until it has accomplished its purpose.