Whether you are aware of it or not, everyone has the same problem with food—and sex, too! Some people are more aggressive, and as potential pacesetters are quick to take the initiative; they sense the need of others, so they put on a front and pretend to feel no embarrassment.

They do so hoping that others will follow their lead, and help them to overcome the embarrassment they pretend not to have. 

That is usually why you get hungry watching others eat, because at one time or another you have used someone who needed to enjoy food to help you get over embarrassment. It may have originated with mama’s anxiety for you to eat for her own relief.

This same principle applies to just about every vice you have. Think of the implications. You can never really have a normal appetite for anything; you will always feel an inhibition, caused when you sense that appetites are promoted and used by others for their own satisfactions.

You will never be able to prevent people from arousing and using you; neither can you resist the “charm” of using them. When you do use them, you will accumulate anxiety that you will discover when you stop using them for an instant, or when you try to give them up, which in turn drives you to use-love them more. 

Think of the numerous ways this conditioning is exploited: newspapers, TV and radio media, magazines, books, films, advertising, pornography, politics, etc. Through highly sophisticated practices of arousing weak­nesses and assuring them, people are dehumanized for profit. 

Remember, too, that whatever object is associated with a temptress creates an equivalent hunger for the object associated with her. But you will never discover this trick as long as you keep buying the sex object and gratifying your promoted needs with “her.” 

Again, see the principle. Guilt and passion increase whenever you try to see normality in your present hunger! Once caught up in this cycle, you eat, drink or copulate without ever finding complete satisfaction. You acquire many vices, under which are buried the original embarrass­ment.

Each cure becomes the next problem that needs curing. And a profiteer leads the way, who specializes in making your base needs acceptable to you. 

When our natural senses reach a point of diminishing return—when they make us more guilty and anxious and then make us “innocent”—at this point we can be initiated into the world of drugs and drink. “A “friend” usually appears on the scene, offering us a “free” drink, pill or cigarette. 

"Anything you use to escape anxiety causes a hang-up with it, then a guilt over it and a need to use it again... Trace it all back to the basic practice of escaping each present moment. "

Obviously he does not make this gesture out of the goodness of his heart, but out of an overriding compulsion to tempt you, to make himself feel comfortable in his perver­sions, even as he has been tempted and used by others.

The moment you join him, he is freed from the embarrassment of smoking or drinking, which themselves cover the embarrass­ment of a multitude of sins. He needs you to be like him! 

But your own unhappiness has made you ready for what he offers. Anything you use to escape anxiety causes a hang-up with it, then a guilt over it and a need to use it again, or something even “better.” Trace it all back to the basic practice of escaping each present moment. 

The principle, you see, is the same for cigarettes and drugs as it is for eating and sex and wrong living, all of which lead you to the abyss. For example, once you begin smoking, you are more guilty for using the smoke to escape whatever you are hiding behind the smokescreen.

Now you have got to smoke, simply to prevent that anxiety from emerging. But soon you have the anxiety of smoking to deal with, as well. 

When your fingers reach for that cigarette or bottle, it’s a sign that the Inner Presence is making you aware and anxious. So you smoke to forget the guilt of smoking, or drink to blot out the anxiety of drinking.

There develops a whole chain of evasions, beginning with emotion, then eating, sex, and so on—but especially emotion. Anger makes you reach for a cigarette or drink—but so do “love” and happiness.

You drink to celebrate, because whatever it was that made you “happy” built up your ego and went to your swollen head, and you were guilty of the “high” of happiness.

You reach for a cigarette after a “hearty.” meal and some sex after that, then a fight after that, followed by a drink, more fighting, more sex.... And then what?