A Little Too Much Is Way Too Much

Have you ever been intoxicated? So drunk that the world is spinning around, making it difficult to find the door? The threshold is next to impossible to walk through. I have been there, more times than I can remember or would like to admit. Often I would make promises, like a soldier in a foxhole, promising if only I make it through this I will never take a drink again. Many of us do this, making these promises, and after getting out of the situation going back to the old ways.

To be intoxicated is to be toxified, made sick. We become so ill that we are fooled into believing that to be sick is to be made well. If I can indulge a little further I will feel even better, or in this case made even more ill. We become intoxicated because we are able to forget for a little while what we fear, able to hide in the rapture of forgetting. 

There are many ways to become intoxicated. We can become so with alcohol, with sex, with drugs. Sometimes this intoxication makes us feel confident and powerful, like cocaine or methamphetamine. Like the before and after picture of an anti drug campaign we are changed into something we would have never imagined. Some become so addicted they even lose the capacity to love. The element most intoxicating of all is our own opinion.

Our opinion exists in us as a tool to support us through life. The brain makes generalization to make life simpler. Becoming aware of pitbulls, having been bitten by one once we may avoid pitbulls and begin to see them all as bad. We may find ourselves perking up anytime we hear of the bad behavior of pitbulls. We may even dedicate ourselves to their destruction. This is the way of toxic opinion. 

There is a point when we lose sight of reality. We come to believe that the opinion, like a roadmap, is reality itself. If the roadmap says to turn right and cross the bridge, and there is no bridge there but we turn right and drive into the the river we are living as though opinion is more important than reality itself.

It doesn't matter if you are right in your opinion. It may be that the road map you follow is directing you to where you actually want to go. However if you are not looking at what is, if you do not recognize your opinion may in some instances not be accurate, you will become lost. If you feel your opinion is absolutely right and that the end justifies the means, you are almost certainly wrong.