The monkey observes and learn, and it seeks to do things that alter the mood and dissolve emotions. The monkey’s reason for doing something is because it felt so good last time, it doesn’t go into the details of health or finance. It is given that the monkey enjoys pleasure and will seek pleasurable activities when possible. What is less known and more peculiar about the monkey, is that more than it craves pleasure, it craves the avoidance of pain, any pain and especially and above all else emotional pain and existential agony. For the monkey, emotions and feelings are basically living and dying, pleasurable emotions are living and painful emotions are dying. The monkey avoids dying first then seeks living, basic survival instinct. This is why the monkey avoids painful emotions, painful feelings and pain at all cost, it is the fear of death that motivates the monkey. The monkey has associated smoking with avoidance of painful emotions, the avoidance of death, and it doesn’t take long before the monkey feels the compulsion to smoke (the compulsion to suppress emotions, to avoid death) because it can’t manage feelings without it and finally the monkey will smoke, whether we like it or not, or else there will be an unimaginably terrible event that is too scary to even imagine, even worse than death. What can be worse than death? For the monkey, a slow painful death is worse than death. Feeling those painful emotions now, is an eternity to the monkey, it is dying and the longer the monkey is stuck in those emotions the closer it comes to death. It’s best to let the monkey have its way, let it have the cigarette. Ironically, the monkey associates the cigarette with living, because the cigarette suppresses the painful emotions that feel like dying. The monkey is unable to see a world where the emotions flow like ocean waves, the monkey is a slave to the ebb and flow of the waves of emotions. Only the human mind can imagine a future where the storm of emotions has passed and a calm has taken hold inside the mind.

It is so easy to anchor the smoking habit in the subconscious mind because of the monkey’s obsession with avoiding pain. The monkey is preoccupied with avoiding pain and when it finds something that suppresses pain, the monkey will not stop focusing on it. That something can be smoking or something else pleasant (pain suppressing) like eating an ice-cream or having a beer. The monkey will easily fall into the habit and it is often long after the habit has been anchored deeply in the subconscious mind that we consciously notice what is going on. We wake up one day and next to us we find our freshly coughed up lung lying on the pillow next to us after years of smoking, we wake up one morning and our liver just doesn’t show up to work from all the years of drinking, we wake up one morning on the pavement having lost all our money and trust as gamblers. We hit rock bottom when that something that was supposed to ease our pain becomes a habit and eventually the amplifier of pain. Part of the fun of smoking is magically sucked out and it becomes part of the mundane life we were trying to escape, finally becoming the thing that hurts us most. This is the progression of addiction. The monkey lives in the past where the cigarette did release tension and did give a feeling of well-being, where the beer was refreshing and the winnings were forthcoming at the casino. The monkey has tamed the human and the result are what can be expected when the animal rules the intellect, unintended consequences become reality and impulses become the law. When we tame the monkey we will be free and for that we need knowledge and understanding of the monkey.