A friend once told me that when he was nine, hanging out after school, some boys insisted they had to walk across the neighborhood to watch “a girl fight.” He assumed the girls were older, maybe middle schoolers. The boys were giddy: they claimed clothes would rip, and they’d get the thrill of seeing girls half-dressed.
My friend refused to join them. He didn’t want to see a fight. But in that moment he was struck by a recurring fantasy: the wish to be invisible, to slip into girls’ rooms and spy. That impulse stayed with him for years.
Decades later, YouTube would grant him such invisibility. Millions of young women had become willing exhibitionists. He became addicted. The voyeurism consumed him, draining his time, corroding his relationships, creating a double life thick with shame and self-loathing. He even dreamed of damnation, his soul circling a pit dug by his own compulsions.
Addiction ruins us because it hijacks our agency. Urges swell until they dictate every move. Writing about this in Lessons for Living, Phil Stutz explains: “When you behave as if there are no consequences, you’ve lost your sense of the future. Immediate pleasure is all there is. Without a future, life becomes meaningless.”
Stutz names the inner saboteur “Part X.” This demon convinces us that we can’t survive without indulging our urges. But Part X is a liar.
Why do we fall for it? Stutz argues that it’s simple: “It’s human nature to want a reward for our pain and effort.” We grow restless waiting for pleasure to arrive. Faith and patience feel intolerable. Part X whispers that we are special, entitled to gratification now, free from universal law. Faith is unnecessary.
And so the cycle begins. Faith collapses, the urges tighten, and soon we are hooked, yoked to Part X. Stutz warns:
“Unstopped, this force turns your impulses into addictions. Every lower-channel impulse takes you outside yourself for gratification. But we are spiritual beings, and the only real satisfaction comes from connecting to higher forces. What you call these forces—God or flow or the unconscious—doesn’t matter. These are infinite forces, found only inside ourselves. The more you go out into the material world, the further you get from these forces and the emptier you feel. To one degree or another, we all feel this inner emptiness, this hole inside. Part X lies, telling us to go outside ourselves for one more joint or piece of cake or outburst of rage—this will finally fill up the hole. Then we take ourselves even further from the inner forces that could actually satisfy the emptiness. It’s an escalating cycle. The more we act out our impulse, the bigger the hole gets.”
This is addiction’s essence: trying to fill an infinite hole with finite scraps.
Freedom doesn’t come cheap. Stutz insists that change is brutal because deprivation feels unbearable. Part X insists suffering is intolerable. The only way forward is to flip the script: to see deprivation itself as reward. To starve the demon is to grow strong. As he puts it, “Each time you retrain your impulses, you close off the lower channel. A dynamic inversion occurs—when you curb the impulse you invert its energy, holding it inside yourself. This energy gets transformed and then emerges in a more powerful form through the higher channel.”
The difference is palpable. In the lower channel, you rot in a swamp of shame, fatigue, and alienation. In the higher channel, you live with integrity, vitality, and connection. One road leads to corrosion, the other to grace.
To walk the higher path requires humility: admit your condition, seek higher forces—God, Flow, your own language for the divine—and retrain your impulses. The more you resist, the stronger you become. Each act of resistance is an investment in yourself, a deposit of energy and purpose.
The strategy includes visualization. Stutz recommends imagining not only your degraded state after indulgence—the lizard eyes in the mirror, the soul hollowed by shame—but also your rescue: “Imagine that a host of spiritual guides descend to lift you out of the lower channel. I see them in white robes; you can use any image that works. If the concept of guides bothers you, think of them as pure forces from out of your own unconscious. Finally, imagine yourself walking out into the world with these guiding figures. Your purpose is to be of service to the world. Again, teach yourself to quickly create this feeling of being of service. Service is the most direct way to open the higher channel.”
This is Stutz’s religion: service as salvation, energy as grace, the higher channel as the place of renewal. It mirrors Judeo-Christian patterns of death and rebirth: die to the old self, be born into the new. Paul himself would likely reject it as a man-made scheme, but the parallels are striking.
Whether believer or skeptic, the conclusion remains: renounce the lower channel, resist Part X, and live in the higher one. Only then can you taste true courage, creativity, and purpose.
Cinemorphosis 