Survival of the Coolest

Rating:
Summary: Journey of a soul
Review: I really liked this book because I learned about how the mind works to keep the body, mind and soul enslaved in addiction, and redmeption. The writing was so smooth and flowed so nicely it was easy to read and a joy to read. I liked this book alot and is why I've bought two more to give as gifts.

Rating:
Summary: "Survival of the Coolest"---An Appreciation
Review: Powerful, poignant, shocking and real, William Pryor's Survival of the Coolest is an addiction memoir that not only tells a courageous and riveting story, but also attempts to penetrate to the very heart of the cause of addiction.

William's story begins with a look into his privileged, yet emotionally empty, background. With the legacy of English landed gentry on his father's side and the Darwinian-Bloomsbury heritage on his mother's side, William could not help but feel the pressure of his genes. As a great-great grandson of Charles Darwin, he was expected to live up to this god of science and to excel in whatever he did so that family appearances would be maintained. Unfortunately, young William found that parental love was linked to an excellence that he could not meet. And so, he grew up feeling empty, isolated---invisible.

Yet, William was blessed with his own extraordinary gifts of creativity, sensitivity and intelligence that cried out for a supportive environment. As a result, he was forced to look outside of the family nexus in order to seek his identity and something that could "fill the hole in my belly." And so, he plunged into the Beat Culture of the early sixties where he could mix with the artists, the poets, the musicians and the philosophers---the rebellious social/cultural visionaries who lived on the cutting-edge. Syd Barrett and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Donovan and Mick Jaggar were among those who, in one way or another, interacted within his circle. William reveled in Jazz and saw its rebellious vitality and creative immediacy as "...the refreshing opposite of the classical stiffness of home. How strange: my heroes were black Americans: Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk! The only white was Gerry Mulligan and he was a junky" (16).

Unfortunately, one of life's realities is that anything that is good must also have its dark side. And so, it was here, in this exciting new world, that William began his slide down the steep slope of addiction. He experimented with numerous consciousness-altering chemicals ranging from opium to cocaine to alcohol and much that lay in between. He became hooked in 1963 at the age of 18 and struggled through addiction hell for twelve years until, finally, at the age of 30, he was able to crawl through to the other side.

Explicit in detail, genuinely human and deeply insightful, William's description of his life of chemical dependency gives the reader a clear picture of the losses, the struggles and the humiliations that accompany an addict's life. Above all, he writes of the pain of having to spend one's entire life in constant search for the next fix just to feel "normal" again. Yet, every fix perpetuates the vicious cycle of pain and relief: "Addiction feeds on itself: you need the stuff to wipe out the pain of needing the stuff (23)."

In 1967, after four years of addiction, friends led him into the sphere of an authentic Indian mystic. Upon making the trip to India to see him, he became convinced that real spirituality, which is gained from conscious contact with something deeper within one's being, is the answer to the search for real meaning and happiness in life. He returned home convinced, but his addiction had to run its course.

Ultimately, William's story is a positive one. He acknowledges that positive things can come from negative circumstances. Nothing is ever a waste of time. William's spiritual life is the source of this positive attitude and, along with it, the insight into what he sees as the basic cause of addictive behavior.

According to William, all addictive behavior, which includes not only drugs and alcohol, but also addiction that is based upon sex, gambling, shopping, eating disorders, workaholism and so forth, originates from a fundamentally universal human condition---the need to fill the "gnawing hole in [the] belly." Addiction is the hell of desperately trying to fill the loneliness, the emptiness, the dry wilderness within the soul. This is the "original pain," the "root pain," "the great nostalgia" with which each of us is born. It is the primary precursor pain of all addictive behavior. If a child receives enough love early in life, it is easier to cope with this pain; if not, then it becomes overwhelming. Each of us, out of necessity, has become very skilled in developing our own ways of coping with it, of hiding it, and distracting our attention from it.

Why this pain, and what is this pain? It is a known truth that, whether we are conscious of it or not, everyone is actually always seeking something more in life. Perhaps this is a symptom of a longing for transcendence, of reaching beyond our selves into something that is far more essential. William writes that this pain is "the ultimate blues or bireh in Sanskrit: the pain of separation from the source, an elemental reminder of the origins of my being" (214). And so, the way that we deal with the pain can either be the cause of addiction or the means to the ultimate cure of the human condition. William says it best:

"My recovery, my going back to a state of health, has revolved around the position this pain holds in my inner life, around how I hold it, what I do with it. It cannot be made better, but it can be either grasped or shrunk from...[this pain] goes beyond, to the purpose of life. Grasp it and you're in love and living dangerously. Deny it and you're merely existing." (211-212)

Furthermore, he adds:

"I am not a negative, and both 'alcoholic' and 'addict' are negative. I can now mother the child my addiction gave birth to, the child of creativity. The only incurable illness I have is the great nostalgia, the longing for the yearning, and this I welcome!"(220)

Thank you, William, for opening my eyes!