Paul's Blog

To any alcoholic reading this, who is still drinking, still abusing alcohol, still suffering from all the pain, problems, madness and humiliations that alcohol abuse causes, I would say the obvious: "Stop drinking now !!" By 28 it was so obvious I had a serious drinking problem, I was an alcoholic then at 28 who had just for the first time achieved 3 months sobriety since finishing high school; I had just completed 3 months in rehab in about April, 1991, but I went back to drinking....... I could have stopped drinking at 28. If I had done that I could have avoided so much further suffering and further serious troubles !! For many years my thinking was so WRONG. Countless times I said to myself: look !! I have all these other problems and I am drinking to cope with all that.......but very, very rarely reflecting how many of the problems in my life were being caused by alcohol abuse. I did have other problems but drinking excessive alcohol never really helped but just...

At 9am on Wednesday I had a tooth extracted. I have not smoked a cigarette since. The main reason is fear of a "dry socket" which is supposed to be quite painful. I am on nicotine patches and I am surprised I don't feel more like a smoke than I do. To think with the help of nicotine patches and or nicotine gum I could have given up smoking 5, 10, 15 or 20 years ago !! Since June 1984, when I was 21, I have smoked about 99.9% of days since then. Almost 34 years of daily smoking. I am 55 now. Since 40, about 15 plus years ago, I have had many, many periods of time alcohol free. Gambling was never a problem for me. When I was younger I tried most illegal drugs without getting addicted to them, like I got addicted to alcohol and tobacco.

The 11th Step: We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God; asking only for knowledge of His will for us, and the power to carry it out.

I believe it is quite easy to define what an alcoholic is; an alcoholic is someone who drinks too much, too often, and whose drinking causes problems. When an alcoholic stops drinking look at what is at stake for the alcoholic to stay sober: His sanity; his physical health; his freedom; his reputation; his relationships; his finances; and having a good chance of leading a relatively stable, normal life with some dignity.

".....Two of the most important ideas that are generally credited to Freud had been spelled out fully by Schopenhauer before Freud was born. One was the notion of the Unconscious; not just the concept itself but an extended argument about it which Freud repeated. The argument is that most of our motivation is unconscious to ourselves; that the reason why it is unconscious is that it is repressed; the reason why it is repressed is that we do not want to confront it; the reason why we do not want to confront it is that it is incompatible with the view of ourselves which we wish to maintain; and therefore a great deal of motivated energy goes into either keeping it repressed or allowing it to surface only after it has been cleaned up and made falsely presentable to our conscious minds. This argument is the core of Freudianism........The second seminal idea .......in which Freud was clearly preceded by Schopenhauer is that of the omnipresence of sexual motivation. Schopenhauer argued ...

"Spinoza was probably the first person in European thought to introduce the idea that discovering what the hidden sources of your feelings and actions are will in some significant sense be liberating .........It is liberating because it puts you at one with yourself. It frees you from the frustration - and therefore from the rage and unhappiness to which frustration gives rise - induced by being at the mercy of forces you do not understand. It leads to acceptance, and that in turn to a lack of feelings of constraint, and this greatly increases your happiness - indeed, it is the secret of how to be happy. This thought has cropped up again and again in different guises ever since. For instance, it is central to the ideas of Freud and psychoanalysis." From "The Great Philosophers." by Bryan Magee. pp: 105-106.

The central Christian belief is that Christ's death on the cross has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.

"Marx's materialist conception of history is the central idea in Marx's thought. He saw the development of history as determined by the forces of material production. So the material side, the forces of production, dominate the mental side of our life. Our ideas, our religion, our politics, all flow from the kind of economic structure we have in our society. That is an inversion of Hegel's view of history. As Marx himself said, he had stood Hegel on his head. For Hegel, of course, it was the development of Mind that led to the formation of particular societies and particular historical epochs." Peter Singer.

"The Communist Manifesto will remain a classic, if only because of its brief but still quite unsurpassed depiction of modern capitalism. Marx was the first to evoke the seemingly limitless powers of the modern economy and its truly global reach. He was the first to chart the staggering transformation produced in less than half a century by the emergence of a world market and the unleashing of the unparalleled productive powers of modern industry. He also delineated the endlessly inchoate, incessantly restless and unfinished character of modern capitalism as a phenomenon. He emphasized its inherent tendency to invent new needs and the means to satisfy them, its subversion of all inherited cultural practices and beliefs, its disregard of all boundaries, whether sacred or secular, its destabilization of every hallowed hierarchy, whether of ruler and ruled, man and woman or parent and child, its turning of everything into an object of sale." Gareth Stedman Jones, in an introduc...

Our lives are a sum total of the choices we have made.