From a nondual perspective, addiction is not best understood as moral failure or weak will, but as a pathological rigidity of experiential attractor states. The nervous system becomes stuck in a narrow basin of regulation where certain states are privileged and baseline experience is implicitly devalued. Relapse, in this frame, is not "failure of discipline", but a failure of plastic updating: the system cannot flexibly reweight salience, meaning, and regulation when context changes. Abstinence without plasticity often just substitutes one rigid state for another. Recovery correlates with restored flexibility, not mere suppression of behavior.
A clean diagnostic question follows from this: If the addictive pattern quietly dissolved on its own, how would that feel? For addiction, honest introspection usually reveals grief, loss, or fear of deprivation. The object or pattern still carries a charge of necessity. Non-addictive patterns do not carry this asymmetry: absence does not feel like lack and may infact feel like relief if there was any kind of implicit worry or concern about management or use. This distinction matters more than surface behavior. Addiction is not the presence of desire; it is the presence of necessity: the felt sense that baseline is insufficient without the pattern.
This reframes a common confusion in nondual circles. Nonduality does not require the absence of preference, anticipation, or curiosity. Anticipation by itself is not addiction; it is a basic predictive function of nervous systems. What distinguishes addiction is the devaluation of baseline and the over-weighting of one class of states ("this state is better, more real, or necessary"). When baseline feels complete while resting, and modulated states are experienced as different textures rather than upgrades, the system is not learning dependence. It is learning reversibility. That reversibility is the deepest anti-addictive learning signal.
This also clarifies the often-cited Alan Watts example. Nondual insight ("what is, is") can be misused to bypass functional feedback ("therefore whatever I do is fine"). Nonduality does not erase consequences, nor does it make patterns self-correcting. The difference between insight and bypass is responsiveness: when feedback is ignored, patterns freeze; when feedback is integrated, patterns remain plastic. Nonduality plus denial stabilises pathology. Nonduality plus responsiveness stabilises regulation.
From a systems view, equanimity is not emotional flattening. It is non-ownership of reactivity. Activation can arise; stress responses can appear; anticipation can happen. What dissolves is the belief that any state is required for wholeness. Mechanistically, this prevents salience over-weighting of any one attractor, blocks identity fusion with internal states, and preserves bidirectional plasticity. The nervous system does not learn "this is better than that"; it learns "this appears differently, but nothing is missing." That learning collapses the main drivers of addiction: chasing, tolerance, and narrowing of options.
Addiction can be understood as a rigidity of experiential attractor states with devalued baseline. Recovery is not abstinence alone but restored plasticity. Anticipation without necessity is not addiction. Desire without lack is not attachment. Nonduality does not remove preferences; it removes the belief that any preference completes the self.