"Self-Examination, Meditation and Prayer" - Using Basic Recovery Tools: Part III

Bill W. wrote the series of essays that would be published as "The Twelve Steps & Twelve Traditions" when he was fifteen years sober and had emerged from his own 'dark night of the soul' - a prolonged, ten year bout of depression that followed shortly after the "vital experience experience" that led to his co-founding Alcoholics Anonymous with Dr. Bob in the summer of 1935.

To me, Bill's reflections in the Twelve and Twelve on how to work the 12 Steps of Recovery first set out in the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, are an invaluable insight into the deeper workings of a spiritual practice that is designed to awaken a "new state of consciousness and being" in the person who applies this spiritual methodology. And perhaps no passage in the Twelve and Twelve more succinctly sets out the path to follow for a person who is earnestly seeking the spiritual awakening that is necessary to permanently arrest one's alcoholic addiction, than the following passage from Bill's essay on Step 11:

There is a direct linkage among self-examination, meditation and prayer. Taken separately, these practices can bring much relief and benefit. But when they are logically interrelated and interwoven, the result is an unshakable foundation for life. Now and then we may be given a glimpse of that ultimate reality which is God's kingdom. And we will be comforted and assured that our own destiny in that realm will be secure for so long as we try, however falteringly, to find and do the will of our own Creator. (Emphasis added.)

I hear much talk about the necessity of prayer - and it is necessary - at AA meetings. I hear that we are to pray to the God of our own understanding for help throughout the day, and to give thanks at night. Indeed, the Third Step tells me to repeat the Serenity Prayer each time my emotional state is disturbed or my mind is racing and indecisive. The Third Step and Eleventh Step prayers are specifically laid out for our daily use.

Yet,while effectiveness of prayer is often and loudly touted, too often the necessity of meditation - the need for a quiet time of contemplation in the morning and evening - is not mentioned . . . let alone emphasized. Sometimes, even old-timers seem to scoff at the notion that meditation is a basic recovery tool that is necessary and required to achieve the emotional sobriety we all eventually require It is as if the practice of meditation is seen as some strange foreign "Eastern" tradition that was not a fundamental aspect of every religious tradition - West and East - including the Christian tradition.

Indeed, "self-examination, meditation and prayer" are three vital components of each of the world's great wisdom traditions. How then do we 'logically interrelate and interweave' these three ancient practices?

I suggest, as was shown to me, that first thing in the morning the spiritual aspirant looking for recivery from any of life's varied addictions sit in a straight backed chair for a 10 minute period of meditation. I was instructed by a man with over three decades of sobriety achieved through daily periods of prayer and meditation to count the breath. (Indeed, this is a fundamental technique of both Buddhist and Hindu yogic practice, as well as a technique used in many Christian, Jewish and Muslim schools.) This appears to be the technique that Bill himself was shown by his sponsor - Ebbie T.

In "The Man Who Sponsored Bill W." Ebbie recalls how he was shown a simple method of morning meditation by Rolland H. and the Oxford Groupers that had come to his rescue, before Ebbie in turn carried the Oxford Group message and methods to Bill.

"Rowland gave me a great many things that were of a great value to me later on," Ebbie recalled. "He had a thorough indoctrination and he passed as much of this on to me as he could. When we took trips together we would get up early in the morning, and before we even had any coffee, we would sit down and try to rid ourselves of any thoughts of the material world and see if we couldn't find out the best plan for our lives for that day and to follow whatever guidance came to us."

Following their period of morning meditation, they would make a simple list, based on the guidance they received during this quiet time, of the things they would like to accomplish during the day - a handy reference when the mind is chaotic! They would repeat this quiet time of meditation again in the evening, sitting for a ten-minute or so period trying once again to rid themselves "of any thoughts of the material world."

Personally, I find it absolutely essential to quiet my mind in this manner first thing in the morning. The clamorous and undisciplined "thoughts of the material world" that arise first things in the morning are the "calamity" that helps obscure the fundamental idea of God within me, as it is within every man , woman and child (AA, page 55). It is my job to uncover that "Great Reality" within me. First by a few minutes of quiet to dispell that obsessive (and oppressive) voice of "self" that can arisen unbidden first thing in the morning. Then, by being aware of my thoughts and emotional condition throughout the day - by the process of "self-examination" or taking a continuing personal inventory of my thoughts, actions and how these make me feel - and asking for relief from the "bondage of self" and repeating the Serenity prayer when I find my "self" emotionally distured or indecisisve, as laid out in Step Three. And finally, by engaging in another period of quiet contemplation, prayer and meditation at the end of the day, to lay that false "self" or human ego to one side before sleep.

I also enjoy, as Dr. Bob, advocated a period of time each day devoted to reading something - anything - of a spiritual nature. But it is this logically interwoven practice of self-examination, meditation and prayer that gives me the unshakable foundation - and gets me out of me. It is when I let up on any of these - particularly meditation, or more immediately, self-examination - that things get shaky.

(See also, Basic Recovery Tools: Part I and Basic Recovery Tools: Part II)

The Four Absolutes - Using "Basic Recovery Tools": Part I

The History and Importance of the Four Absolutes in Recovery's "Pioneering Times"

The "Four Absolutes" were one of the principal tools that Bill W., Dr. Bob and the "Good Old-Timers" adopted from the Oxford Group and utilized in achieving and maintaining the entire psychic change, rearrangement or "spiritual awakening" that allowed them to stay sober, recover from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body and to help others secure the transcendence of the ideas, emotions and attitudes that had fueled their chronic, progressive and near-fatal addiction to alcohol.
I have found it crucial in my own recovery to learn, 'understand' and embrace the origins of the spiritual discipline which are the 12 Steps in order that I might live without suffering - free of "the bondage of self", for however short or long a period I am able to experience that state. Utilizing the Four Absolutes has been a crucial part of this journey.

I have been very fortunate in my struggle with the addictions of the mind that underlay my physical addictions. I had "old-timers" come into my life that rescue me when I was emerging from a teenage and adult lifetime of addiction to alcohol and other drugs of its ilk as a newcomer to the 12 Steps. Other old-timers "re-rescued" me when I was struggling so badly to re-embrace and renew this spiritual practice and achieve the clear state of being that is the "next frontier" of emotional sobriety in my 15th year of sobriety. All of them had a strong basis in their common understanding of the 12 Steps - and all, to a greater or lesser extent, embraced the Four Absolutes.

The Four Absolutes are mentioned only sparingly in the literature approved by the General Service Conference of A.A. - the "founding" organization of the 12-Step Recovery Movement, if you will - and not at all in its two basic texts: Alcoholics Anonymous and the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. The reasons for this are clear. Rightly so, early A.A. group conscience felt that mention of the Four Absolutes would publicly identify A.A. with the Oxford Group at a time when the O.G. had become increasingly more controversial in the public eye. It was also evermore identified with its leader, Frank Buchan, whose controversial views on the emerging political storm that brewed into World War II would permanently fracture the OG. (In 1939, the year the "Big Book" of Alcoholics Anonymous was first published, the OG was reconstituted as "Moral Rearmament". It continues to exist today as the organization "Initiatives for Change".)

Mr. Buchan's very public leadership role in the OG was also one of the principal reasons for the anonymity principle within the 12 Step Recovery Movement. Self- aggrandizement in the public eye, it has been found, can quite quickly fuel the "big-shotism" that has scuppered many a person's recovery and led to many deaths that might have otherwise been avoided had the individual sufferer avoided the 'spotlight', so to speak. That's why Bill W. declined Time magazine's offer to put him on its cover, despite how many suffering alcoholics A.A.'s message may have reached had he accepted Time's kind offer.

The Four Absolutes are discussed briefly in A.A.'s two "personal histories": "Pass it On", the biography of Bill W. and the emergence of A.A. from his experiences in New York, Ohio and later the world; as well as, "Dr. Bob and the Good Old-Timers", which chronicles the birth of A.A. in its "heartland" of Akron, Cleveland and the American mid-west. The Absolutes are also mentioned briefly in the more "general history" of A.A.'s birth, "Alcoholics Anonymous Come of Age".
Most significantly, and as discussed in further detail below, A.A. co-founder, Dr. Bob, addressed the importance of the Four Absolutes to him - their importance to his spiritual recovery and precisely how he utilized them and incorporated them into his life to avoid the sufferings we are all prone to in our recovery from addiction. He did so in his last public talk before his death in 1950. Dr. Bob's last talk was given at A.A.'s 1950 World Convention held in St. Louis and is set out in full in the Conference-approved pamphlet, "A.A.'s Co-Founders."

Perhaps nothing I could write could attest more to the importance of the Four Absolutes in living my recovery, and perhaps for you in living yours, than was Bill's response to the question of why the Absolutes were not discussed in either of the basic texts of A.A. Bill affirmed that the Absolutes would have linked A.A. and the Oxford Group in the public mind, therefore he did not refer to them in drafting either the Big Book or the Twelve and Twelve. Bill did say, however, that the Four Absolutes - the principles of exercising absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness and absolute love - are implicit in each of the 12 Steps. (For a fulsome understanding of the the historical and spiritual roots and development of A.A. and the 12 Step Recovery Movement, generally, I have found no better outside, non-Conference approved source than Ernest Kuntz's book, '"Not God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous", in which Mr. Kuntz critically examines the Four Absolutes and how Recovery "old-timers" and pioneers used the Absolutes in their recovery.)

How Recovery's Pioneers Utilized the Four Absolutes

Bill W. clearly states that our physical addictions are not the addict's (alcoholic or otherwise) problem. Rather the physical addictions we suffer are really the manifested symptoms of a deeper psychological and spiritual problem in the mind and being of the addicted alcoholic.

In A.A.'s "Big Book", Bill examines the addictive 'acting out' that anyone familiar with those in recovery has witnessed near countless times - the alcoholic who wants to but cannot refrain from drinking again, the recovering junkie that jams a needle into her arm one more time, the bizarre behaviour of the workaholic, sex addict or compulsive gambler that brings their 'world' crashing down around their ears as they descend back into their addictive thinking and behavioural patterns, seemingly helpless to restrain themselves from engaging in their old, destructive ways.

"The problem of the alcoholic centers in the mind," Bill writes, at page 23 of Alcoholics Anonymous. If addictions did not center in the mind and in the addict's habitual thoughts and habitual, conditioned ways of thinking about their 'world', refraining from the destructive actions that fuel an addiction - refraining from drinking oneself to death, gorging oneself or starving oneself to death, gambling away all the resources one needs to physically survive - would be a fairly straightforward proposition. But it is not that simple.

A friend of mine, whose former appetite for and addiction to anything that would get 'him out of him' was prodigious by any standards, aptly observed, "God knows. . . . If there is one thing an addict loves, it's a habit!" Our addiction and clinging to our habitually and fearfully conditioned way of perceiving our "selves" and "our world", our thoughts and perceptions, is the underlying addiction. Our thoughts and perceptions, if unchecked, will manifest in the"symptoms" of addiction - be it drinking, drugging, or whatever the addict's particular proclivity for compulsive gambling, eating patterns, sexual excess etc. are.)

Our thoughts dictate our actions and our state of being, or 'Be-ing'. Indeed, they dictate the very state of our consciousness. "As a man thinketh, so he is," wrote James Allen, one of the spiritual teachers Bill relied on in coming to understand and write about his former helplessness in the face of his addiction to alcohol, and how that helplessness had been removed by his reliance on the God of his own understanding - a God personal to him, and to each of us.

The actions we take, the decisions to say or do something  or to refrain from saying or doing something - in short, the exercise of our "will" - are solely based on the thoughts that we entertain in our mind, and the emotions within us which those thoughts produce. Over time, as an addict indulges his addiction, his or her very mind becomes warped and distorted by the recurring thoughts, or obsessions, that drive the sufferer back to the seeming comfort and ease of addictive behaviour. The state of mind and the thoughts of the sufferer, in turn, are dictated by the level of consciousness we sufferers of addiction entertain - by the perceptions and seeming awareness of our 'selves', others and the world that we "live and move and have our being" in.

The Third Step of the 12-Step Recovery Method describes how, "We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him." Bill clearly states in his essay on Step 3 that, "Our whole problem had been the misuse of our willpower. We had tried to bombard our problems with it instead of attempting to bring it into alignment with God's intention for us."

How then do we determine "what God's intention for us" is? Further, how do we go about disciplining the "punishing inner dialogue" and raucous shrieking of our separate little 'selves' - our woefully precious, judgmental and defensive little egos - the seemingly endless stream of thoughts that so disquiet us, the state of our being through which we are driven  to smash life head-on with our actions and words, all in a vain attempt to manage and wrest personal satisfaction and happiness out of a life so bruisingly assaulted?

What methods can we use to determine whether we are once again self-deluded and the decisions we are about to undertake, or are contemplating taking, are in alignment not with the deeper God-consciousness within us - the small, quiet and intuitive voice that is so often drowned out by the addictive quality and soothingly 'rational' and 'logical' common-sense of the addict's ego - but rather such decisions are based in and on our narrow, but strident ego-centric, self-consciousness?


(Ego, as it is used here and was used by Bill in his writings, is not to be confused with 'ego' as meaning our sense or feelings of 'pride' as the word later came to be defined in the years after Bill had written Alcoholics Anonymous, but rather ego is used in its original sense and definition, that being our sense of 'self' or the seemingly real but false sense of separate individuality. I think of it merely as the voice of my reasoning and logic running overtime, the "voice in the head" that Bill credited with investing in him a sense of "anxious apartness".)

In facing critical decisions - in trying to understand whether the decisions they were about to act upon were the thoughts of the ego or their God-consciousness - Bill, Bob and other A.A. pioneers cut their spiritual teeth in the Oxford Group by utilizing the Four Absolutes.

First, take note that God's intention for us, it is fair to say, is that we be relieved of that which separates us from Wholeness, or from God, and that the separating factor is the 'bondage of self" we pray to be relieved of in the Third Step Prayer. It is by having this barrier to others (and to life or God Itself) removed, by breaking this mental barricade between our seemingly separate being and the entirety of God, that we become able to "bear witness" to the rest of humanity and to life itself by acting as examples of God's "power, love and way of life." (No mean or easy feat, and one I find myself making amends for on a regular basis when I fall short.)

Next, knowing that we need to determine at what level of consciousness we are responding to life's challenges with, and in order to help us determine whether the actions or inaction we are considering are self-inspired or God-inspired, we can apply the Four Absolutes. They enable us to determine whether our actions or proposed actions are examples of where we are driven by self-will or if, in fact, we are being guided by God's will.

In his last public talk, which is set out in the A.A. Co-Founders pamphlet, Dr. Bob said that anytime he was faced with making a decision (i.e., the necessity of exercising his will) and he was uncertain what course of action was the one that God would have him take, he would examine that decision by applying the Four Absolutes to it.

The process of utilizing the Four Absolutes to check whether we are about to bombard our seeming 'problems' with an exercise of our self-will, or are in actuality turning the exercise of our willpower over to the care and protection of God, is fairly simple. As set out in a pamphlet entitled "The Four Absolutes", made available through the A.A.'s Cleveland District Service Office, all that is necessary to determine whether we are making decisions and basing our actions on our 'self' will or on God's will, is to examine the proposed action or inaction in light of the four following questions:

Absolute Honesty - Ask your "self": Is this action/inaction true or false?

Absolute Purity - Ask your "self: Is this action/inaction good or bad?

Absolute Unselfishness - Removing "you" and "your" self-interest from the equation altogether, ask your "self": How will this action/inaction affect others?

Absolute Purity - Ask your "self": Is this action/inaction beautiful or ugly?

Doctor Bob said that when he went through this process in times of difficulties or when he was facing difficult decisions he needed to make, the answers and internal guidance he needed to move forward in assurance that he was exercising his will under the protection and care of God would stand out clearly in most instances when the Four Absolutes were applied. If his own application of the Four Absolutes did not yield clear guidance to him so that he could act or forego acting with certainty, he would then consult with two or three individuals he knew to be living the clear, simple, spiritual life he had embraced. When he needed to do so, Dr. Bob knew that the guidance, protection and care he required from God for his continued well-being would always come if the Absolutes were applied with a heart that was open, honest and willing to perceive the uncommonly common sense of the still, small voice within.

The Four Absolutes are thus powerful and too- often unmentioned tools in the spiritual toolkit we each put together in our Recovery. Oftentimes, they have proven to be my most valuable spiritual tool and I have reached to them instead of grabbing the hammer of anger or the duct tape of sloth that I would otherwise have grabbed to deal with my life 'problems'.

Applying the Absolutes brings me back the ability to respond to life instead of merely reacting to it. When used, they help me to "Keep it Simple" and "Easy Do It" without "Think, Think, Thinking" myself into the 'disasters' I have so often brought onto myself and others when exercising self-will in the past.

(See also, Basic Recovery Tools: Part II and Basic Recovery Tools: Part III)

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The books and pamphlet's mentioned in this blogpost, with the exception of Mr. Kuntz's book, '"Not God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous" and the "Four Absolutes" pamphlet may be ordered through the General Service Office of Alcoholics Anonymous in New York, or picked up at most any meeting of A.A. world-wide. The General Service Office link, above, will also enable you to quickly and easily find an A.A. meeting in you local area.

The books Alcoholics Anonymous - Big Book 4th Edition, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age: A Brief History of A. A., Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers and 'Pass It On': The Story of Bill Wilson and How the A. A. Message Reached the World may also be purchased through Amazon.com and delivered worldwide.