Relieve Me of the Bondage of Self

" . . . (T)hinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence."

-- Eckhart Tolle --
("A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose")

The fears and desires of a mind prone to obsession, like the mind of the alcoholic addict, cloud out all reality. If unchecked, such fears and desires may drive the sufferer in any of a hundred different directions, none of them good, thereby reinforcing the habitually obsessive nature of a mind that is already afflicted.

"Since most of us are born with an abundance of natural desires," we read in The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, "it isn't strange that we often let these far exceed their intended purpose. When they drive us blindly, or we willfully demand that they supply us with more satisfactions or pleasure than are possible or due to us, that is the point at which we depart from the degree of perfection that God wishes for us here on earth. That is the measure of our character defects, or, if you wish, of our sins."

"As a man thinketh," says the proverb, "so is he." A mind that is consistently besieged by non-stop thoughts - which is the definition of an obsession - will direct actions designed to lessen such insufferable thoughts, oftentimes irrespective of the harm that may be caused. Such egoic, self-centered thinking, led as it is by the fears and desires of the smaller self, thus creates the field (or "measure") in which our shortcomings operate.


The challenge for the individual, then, is how to lift the hold such obsessive thoughts have upon the mind, and the key to such challenge is constant self-awareness. Only by constant vigilance of what the mind is thinking, and by an awareness of the emotions that we experience in response to such thoughts, can we begin to lift the siege.

"Relieve me of the bondage of self" may be the most powerful prayer we have to be rid of our obsessive thinking. At once it is a recognition of the problem - i.e., self - and an invocation for intercession by a Power greater than one's self in order to relieve the sufferer. For, as it is pointed out in the 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous (at page 55), we find a "Great Reality deep down within us," but it is only by lifting the siege of the ego that we can effect a conscious contact with this reality.

"(D)eep down in every man, woman, and child is the fundamental idea of God," we read, although this "may be obscured by calamity, by pomp, (and) by worship of other things." It is only by consciously lifting our mind above the ego, above the obsessive thoughts that obscure our true nature and make us miserable, that we are enabled to recover an awareness of our greater Being, and to be returned thereby to sanity.