An interesting phenomenon of reality is our individual compulsive obsession with parts of reality, or sensory perception, which we often refer to as addiction.
My theory is that these fixations merely serve to distract from the chief fixation and that being God/Source. This is because, in a material world in which truth is based on sensory understanding, any fixation on our Source/God is obscure, while fixation on apects of sensory perception (sex, food, drugs, money, power, fame, etc, etc) are much more easily assimilated into the mind as available resources. God/Source is also an available resource, yet not so easily assimilated due to the reliance on sense impression as the ultmate source of what is true or false.
I have spent many years working with drug addicts and alcoholics (which resulted from my own addictive experiences). One thing I have found quite remarkable is that once the compulsion is surrendered, an extreme fixation on God/Source seems to naturally come to the fore. Notice the 12 steps of AA/NA and step number two which, after admitting we are powerless over our extreme compulsion, requires that we make "a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him." The addiction to God replaces addictive substances as the extreme fixation and the road to recovery.
Thus, the poet Blake's statement, "the road to excess leads to wisdom." Of course, this makes sense as we surrender the extremes of sense data for the extreme of God data. Either way you cannot extract yourself from an extreme of some type since this seems to be the natural tendency of the mind to fixate on aspects, or parts of reality (as Freud demonstrated). Although we seem to strive for balance in our lives (and, in fact, often fixate on attaining that) I believe this to be essentially impossible since, as the needle tends to fluctuate between two poles, we are never fully balanced, but simply fluctuating back and forth between extremes (which are defined as whatever we have determined are meaningful to us) allowing the illusion of seeking balance.
I believe that by "wisdom" Blake is pointing to the aspect of God that is our very Being. Thus, as he seems to point out, going to the extreme in discovering that aspect of "self" must eventually occur for true freedom (from the extremes of sense impressions) to be experienced. Lackadaisical attention to God/Source will only result in continued bondage to the suffering of sensory perception which easily lends itself to compulsion/addiction. We only have available the choice of two extremes so go ahead and pick one. Eventually the choice will be God and many report that this is certain, so why resist. The important part is that to attain "wisdom" the fixation must be to a personal intuitive resonance (the poetry of Blake reflects this) and not some scriptural interpretation that reveals someone else's fixation.
Just some thoughts for critical review...
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