First, your need a bit of basic existential knowledge. Think carefully about this. You experience two selves, one positive, disciplined, and happy, the other weak, negative and worried. So, neither of them are the real you, existence shining as blissful awareness, because they are objects known to you. You know this.
You only have a problem with one of those “selves.” The other one is OK. You want the negative self to go away. But it can’t go away because it is produced by the desire to have only a positive confident self. So, the problem is wanting life to be different from what it is. But life can’t be different. It is always the same. It swings from positive to negative and back, over and over.
Karma Yoga
The Big Picture* is the knowledge that you don’t have control of the results of your actions. You think positive thoughts and you have positive experiences. You think negative thoughts and you have negative experiences. You can’t control the mind because there are too many unknown factors influencing it. The Bhagavad Gita gives more background information that leads to the solution to this basic conflict: it says there are three energetic states of duality: light, medium and heavy (*sattva*, *rajas* and *tamas*). (1) The ‘light” state is a clear, peaceful, self-aware state of the body/mind, which we experience intermittently throughout the day. (2) The “medium” energy is an energetic, dynamic, craving, lusty, state of the body/mind. It has no nature of its own; it is positive or negative according to the values behind your actions. (3) This is a dark fearful lazy fantasy-filled state. The body/mind feels dull, heavy and sleepy.
“So what,” you might ask? So the Gita tells you how to relate to these states, which are out of your control because they are produced by the macrocosmic mind. It gives three metaphors: a fire hidden by smoke, dust on a mirror, and a fetus in a womb. It says you needn’t do anything to remove fire hidden by smoke because the next small wind will blow the smoke away and reveal the fire. There are many examples of this kind of desire every day.
It says you can’t do anything about the fetus in the womb. It comes out when it is ready to come out, so there is no sense worrying about it because it is out of your control. It comes up by the will of God and it will only come out of your subconscious mind by the grace of God.
Dust on a Mirror
But there is something you can do about your craving for nicotine and dope… QUIT WANTING THEM TO GO!. You’ve done all you can do, and you’ve made great progress working on your will power, you’re down to three or four a day from smoking all day long. So don’t beat yourself up about it. Keep up your discipline and throw the dog a bone once in a while; have a nice smoke, or whatever experience you are obsessed about, and get on with your day with a happy clear mind.
A few years back you were hanging out with a crowd of lazy, stoned hippies listening to Ganga Mira, an excellent stoned hippie guru who supplied you with a fine model of lazy, stoned, sex-obsessed hippie. She probably picked up her ideas from Bhagavan Rajneesh, the copulate your way to God guru. Be that as it may, now you are a together person living a good life due to cleaning the mirror of your mind. But you must keep cleaning because new dust settles and you will fall back to that lazy, stoned hippie self. See the duality here. What am I? The old me or the new me? How absurd is that? If you assert your true identity as whole and complete non-dual bliss/full existence shining as awareness in your mind, the problem is solved because there is only one you.
