Disillusionment is the key to overcoming the most difficult addiction to overcome: the addiction to illusion. People don’t even realize the addiction exists. They don’t even know that what they take for reality is, in fact, illusion. And even when they do realize that what they take for reality, is in fact illusion, they don’t suspect that they are addicted to it until they try to get away from it.

What is the illusion? That we are all separate, when in fact we are all one. It is also illusion that makes us identify with our physical bodies, which is but a passing show, rather than with Consciousness, which is the essence of our eternal and formless being. And it is illusion that prompts us to seek happiness through external stuff, which is too is nothing but a passing show, rather than through love, which increases when shared with others.

It doesn’t seem like an addiction because everybody, more or less, seems to be living the same way. The ups and downs, the excitement and boredom, seems to be what life is about. But Henry David Thoreau summed it up perfectly when he said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

But perhaps this quiet desperation is a blessing in disguise. It works as a mechanism that eventually wakes us from our sleep, as a bad dream is likely to wake us just from the sheer panic.

Eventually, perhaps years, perhaps lifetimes, we become disillusioned with the experience of living life on the surface. It’s like a kid who has a free pass to ride the roller coaster all day, every day, for the whole summer. Eventually, he has enough of the excitement and starts to wonder what else there is to do in the amusement park.

Sooner or later, we all seek something more to life that what life on the surface offers. We get tired of conflict and rivalry and separation. Sooner or later, we are all destined to conclude, “I’m more than this.” That is the disillusionment that helps to break the addiction to the world of illusion.

The Divine Presence, which functions in the life of every person — consciously or unconsciously – has this as a primary role: to awake us from dream that has us spellbound. This awakening might come from a spiritual revelation. It could come from great inspiration. It could also come from tragedy and loss, what Robert F. Kennedy once called the “terrible grace of God.”

But for the most part, the Divine Presence guides us through countless experiences of the mundane that eventually help us to reach a certain level of spiritual maturity. This leads us to naturally turn towards the inner path. We withdraw our consciousness from the allurements of the world to the inner experience of being. Love becomes more than a word or a theory; it becomes a reality of the deepest significance. What formerly were ordinary moments become surcharged with meaning. Life becomes an adventure of the spirit.

But the tug of war with illusion doesn’t go away. The temptation to get caught up in the allurements of the world can be hard to permanently break away from. It can be like the person who quits smoking, time after time after time. And with each relapse into the patterns of the past, he suffers. But this is the suffering that eventually leads to the end of suffering. It is like the thorn that removes the thorn, or the surgeon that wields the scalpel to remove the malignancy.

In my own life, it was suffering, both physical and emotional, that initiated me onto the spiritual path.

Leading up to the physical suffering was a lot of emotional suffering. My father had died. My girlfriend got involved with someone she met at one of my gigs. The band I was in broke up (a band I joined at the cost of quitting college).

And then came the physical suffering. I had developed appendicitis and Crohn’s Disease simultaneously and was hospitalized for 20 days – with every day accompanied by severe pain. By the time I left the hospital I was down to 95 pounds. And I was also told at this time that a plan I had to join the United States Air Force band would not be possible because of my physical condition. I had the status of 4F.

So I had lost just about everything. But when that world collapsed around me, a new one unfolded. I became inspired and hardly slept for the next three months. I began reading spiritual literature from Eastern as well as Western traditions: Bhagavad Gita, the Discourses of Meher Baba, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poetry of Rumi and Hafiz. My music went to a much higher level of creativity. I began writing poetry and short stories. I went back to college. I started studying meditation and yoga. My life stepped up to a higher vibration.

But my life didn’t work perfectly. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I had a lot of setbacks and fallbacks to old patterns. I went through marriages that failed, experienced financial challenges, and spent too much time playing poker and watching basketball and football and being overly involved in politics.

But one thing never changed: the thirst for inner knowledge. With each setback and failure in life, with humility, I would gather myself together and set out on the path once again to experience life at a deeper level than before. It’s an adventure that never grows old.

Life is not so much about success and failure as it is about consciousness. When we grow from a defeat, have we really lost? And if we fail to grow from winning, have we really won? Sometimes great outcomes manifest from loss and suffering, especially it that outcome is a fuller embrace with the Divine Presence.