Life Is Inherently Unmanageable

Do not be fooled by the delusion that somehow life has suddenly become "manageable" now that you have stopped drinking and/or drugging. This is the last of the "three delusions" that are identified in the 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous. Admission that one does not have the requisite power to "manage" one's  life is the completion of Step One. In reality, life becomes wholly "acceptable" to us, rather than "manageable" by us. In seeing this, the description of the individual as an "actor" at pages 60-62 of the 'Big Book' is most helpful.

"Most people try to live by self-propulsion," we read. That is, we try to manage life and all its details in order to satisfy the desires and quell the fears that arise through our constant discursive thinking - i.e., the fears and desires of the false, egoic self. In doing so we may have the best intentions. That is, if life's circumstances turn out the way we try to shape them, the results will be good for everyone, even ourselves. (But remember the old adage: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions.")

In trying to give effect to our plans and schemes we must, of necessity, try to influence and direct the thoughts, words and actions of others, for "no man is an island." In doing so, we read, we "may sometimes be quite virtuous . . . kind, considerate, patient, generous . . . even modest and self-sacrificing." Driven by what we think is necessary or desirable, we will do almost anything to have life proceed as we wish it to. And, if being the good guy doesn't work, we "may be mean, egotistical, selfish and dishonest." In short, we will do almost anything that is required to have life come off as we want it too; and, if it doesn't, we are likely to become "angry, indignant, (and) self-pitying."

"What," we are asked, is the actor's "basic problem"?

"Is he not really a self-seeker even when trying to be kind? Is he not a victim of the delusion that he can wrest satisfaction out of life if only he manages well?" (Emphasis added.)

 In his Meditations, the Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, made the apt observation that: "Life is inherently unmanageable." (Emphasis added.)

It is most helpful, I find, to remember two things: (a) that "(t)he problem of the alcoholic centers in his mind" ('Big Book,' page 23); and, (b) that "lack of power (is) our dilemma" ('Big Book,' page 45). We lack the inherent power to manage life and all its many aspects; yet, when identified with the ego, and attached to its stream of incessant thoughts, we continually fall into the trap of thinking that we can - and must - shape the circumstances and outcomes of our lives. Doing so, we react to life instead of responding to it. And, typically, we react rather poorly.

"(A)cceptance," we read, "is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation - some fact of my life - unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God's world by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life's terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and my attitudes."

Acceptance of life's inherent unmanageability allows us to give effect to the "three pertinent ideas" set out at the end of the "How It Works" reading. Both "before and after" we give up alcohol (and/or other drugs), it must be clear:

(a) "That we (are) alcoholic and (cannot) manage our own lives."
(b) "That probably no human power (can relieve) our alcoholism."
(c) "That God (can) and (will) if He (is) sought."

Admission and acceptance of these three principles allows us to move forward to Steps Four through Step Nine which will effectively deflate our ego (and its sense of separateness), relieve of us of our old ideas and way of thinking, and thereby enable us to experience a "spiritual awakening" within our Being that truly allows us to "accept life on life's terms."

* * * * *

(Note also: The description of "the actor" applies not only to the alcoholic, but to "most people" - i.e. to so-called "normal people" - as well. When we understand that virtually everyone we encounter is self-identified and ego-centric, it helps us to understand and be unaffected by their often-times odd attitudes, their seeming eccentricities, and their selfish or self-centered behaviours. In seeing this, we are enabled to truly forgive them their "trespasses," knowing that they too are merely victims of the ego's "delusion" that they too can "wrest satisfaction and happiness out of life by managing well," and that therefore they must manage life at all costs.)

Acceptance: An Old Take On a New Perspective

(A)cceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation - some fact of my life - unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God's world by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life's terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and my attitudes."

[Alcoholics Anonymous, page 417.]

Bill W. once commented that the only thing original in A.A. was the ability of one alcoholic to relate to another alcoholic at depth, and that all the rest had been borrowed from other sources. Not a surprising comment when one considers the universality of true religious or spiritual insights and teachings.

On "acceptance" we have the oft-quoted passage, above, from the story "Acceptance Was The Answer" in the back of the 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous. Below, is a similar passage on the need for acceptance of people, places, things and situations as they manifest in our lives, this time from Marcus Aurelius, a Roman Emperor more famous for his Meditations than for his then-renowned victories over the Germanic tribes.

"If you are distressed by anything external," writes Aurelius, "the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment. If the cause of your trouble lies in your own character, set about reforming your principles; who is there to hinder you? If it is the failure to take some apparently sound course of action that is affecting you, then why not take it instead of fretting? 'Because there is an insuperable obstacle in the way.' In that case, do not worry; the responsibility for inaction is not yours. 'But life is not worth living with this thing undone.' Why then, bid life a good-humoured farewell; accepting the frustration peacefully, and dying like any other man whose actions have not been inhibited."

[Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations," VIII:47.]

Of course, Marcus Aurelius, was a philosophic stoic, a mindset that is increasingly uncommon in a culture that tells us we can do anything, achieve anything, be anything we want if we just apply enough power and have enough fortitude to prevail. But "lack of power," remember, "was our dilemma." Fortunately for him (and for us), this 'philosopher-king' recognized that all power comes from a higher Power - i.e., the divinity within himself.

"Take me and cast me where you will," he writes, "I shall still be possessor of the divinity within me, serene and content so long as it can feel and act as becomes its constitution. Is the matter of such moment that my soul should be affected by it, and changed for the worse, to become a cowering craven thing, suppliant and spiritless? Could anything at all be of such consequence as that?"

[Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations," VIII:45]

Wise words from a wise sage. Further wise words, with which I will close this posting, concern Aurelius' take on that "Great Reality" which each of us, knowingly or unknowingly, have "deep down within us;" the higher Power which, in this passage, Aurelius calls his "master-reason."

"The master-reason is never the victim of any self-disturbance; it never, for example; excites passions within itself. If another can inspire it with terror or pain, let him do so; but by itself it never permits its own assumptions to mislead it into such moods. By all means let the body take thought for itself to avoid hurt, if it can; and if it be hurt let it say so. But the soul, which alone can know fear or pain, and on whose judgement their existence depends, takes no harm; you cannot force the verdict from it. The master-reason is self-sufficient, knowing no needs except those it creates for itself, and by the same token can experience no disturbances or obstructions unless they be of its own making."

[Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations," VII:16.]

"When force of circumstance upsets your equanimity," Aurelius advises, "lose no time in recovering your self-control, and do not remain out of tune longer than you can help. Habitual recurrence to the harmony will increase your mastery over it."

On Awakening . . .

"On awakening," we read in the 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous, "let us think about the twenty-four hours ahead. We consider our plans for the day. Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives. Under these conditions we can employ our mental faculties with assurance, for after all God gave us brains to use. Our thought-life will be placed on a much higher plane when our thinking is cleared of wrong motives."

In this passage on 'awakening,' we are urged every day to return and give thought to our 'spiritual awakening,' and therefore it is not mere coincidence that the discussion centers around our motives. For in reading page 27 of the 'Big Book' (below), where Carl Jung explains what a 'spiritual awakening' consists of, we see that the plane of one's thoughts and one's motives are the central feature of his description.

"Here and there," we read, "once in a while, alcoholics have had what are called vital spiritual experiences. To me these occurrences are phenomena. They appear to be in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements. Ideas, emotions and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of these men are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them."

[Emphasis added.]

The alcoholic addict is a victim of his or her own "selfish" and "self-centered" thinking. This does not, perhaps, mean that the alcoholic addict is "selfish" and "self-centered" solely in the normal sense that we think of such terms - i.e., in the sense of greed and a heedlessness to the needs of others - but also (and more importantly, I believe), it means that the alcoholic is in a very literal way 'addicted' to and wholly identified with the inner dialogue and narrative of the self-conscious human ego.

The alcoholic addict (like most other folks), I believe, suffers under the false assumption that he or she is the 'thinker' rather than the person who is aware of the thoughts that move fleetingly and continuously across the field of his or her consciousness.

When wholly identified and dominated by such egoic self-conscious thinking, one's motives will necessarily be focused on alleviating the suffering that this fearful mode of thought (or "attitude") engenders. Whether this is done by exerting all one's efforts to control and mange one's life circumstances and the people in one's life, or whether it is by surrendering to the impulse to escape such suffering by drinking or drugging, the motive is the same: one is seeking only to avoid suffering and gain happiness, however temporary and fleeting.

When such "ideas, emotions and attitudes" are cast away, "new conceptions and motives" naturally arise from a higher plane of consciousness - what the more religious members of A.A. would call "God-consciousness." Gone are the thoughts that dwell on what other people have done, or might do to us, and thoughts of what we may do to raise the plane of our consciousness and help others to realize their own potential begin to take their place. In this process we learn to live "one day at a time" (or perhaps more accurately, 'one moment at a time'), free of the fear-based thoughts about the actions of others that used to dominate us.

This is not a new insight peculiar to Alcoholics Anonymous (or any of its sister organizations), but is an insight that has been with us since humankind began to realize the difference between their thoughts and 'who' or 'what' they are. It is reflected in the Meditations of the great philosopher/Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, where he writes:

"Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will and selfishness - all of them due to the offender's ignorance of what is good and evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of Good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow-creature similarly endowed with Reason and a share of the Divine); therefore none of these things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him, for he and I were born to work together, like a man's two hands, feet or eyelids, or like the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against Nature's law - and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction?"

In striving to attain to this higher plane of consciousness which is devoid of ego, we are told that: "What used to be the hunch or the occasional inspiration gradually becomes a working part of the mind." This shift in consciousness - from egoic, self-consciousness to an inclusive and expansive God-consciousness - is the heart of the A.A. miracle. With it, the obsession to drink or drug (which is the predominant symptom of alcoholic addiction) drops away, and we are enabled to live a contented and purposeful life without the urge to flee from our smaller "selves" via the bottle or through drugs.

"Providence" and the "Obsession of the Mind"

"It is truly awful to admit," we read in the first paragraph of The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, "that glass in hand, we have warped our minds into such an obsession for destructive drinking that only an act of Providence can remove it from us."

In this, the first paragraph of the 'Twelve and Twelve,' we are dealing already with the obsession of the mind. And it no mere coincidence that we are doing so, for "the main problem of the alcoholic centers in his mind, rather than in his body." (Alcoholics Anonymous, page 23.) But what is "Providence," and just where and how are we to find it?

The answer to where we find "Providence," or "a Power greater than ourselves," is found in the middle paragraphs of page 55 in the 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous. There, we read:

". . . (D)eep down in every man woman and child is the fundamental idea or God. It may be obscured by calamity, by pomp, by worship of other things, but in some form or other it is there. . . .

"We finally saw that faith in some kind of God was a part of our make-up, just as much as the feeling we have for a friend. Sometimes we had to search fearlessly, but He was there He was as much a fact as we were. We found the Great Reality deep down within us. In the last analysis it is only there that He may be found. It was so with us.

[Emphasis added.]

"Providence," God, or a Power greater than one's self is thus found "deep down within" the individual alcoholic addict, in his or her higher consciousness. Most alcoholic addicts who remain clean and sober will report that at some time before or after they come into A.A. (or one of its sister fellowships) they realized that they were alcoholic or an addict - i.e., that they have a problem with drugs and/or alcohol. This moment of grace - a moment free from all the calamity, pomp and worship of things that fills our ordinary, egoic self-consciousness - is "the act of Providence" that, if followed up with the 12 Steps, can free the alcoholic addict of the obsession for drugs and/or booze.

The 'how-to' of finding and maintaining one's proper relationship with "Providence," or 'a Power greater than one's self,' is thus found in the 12 Steps, and in the continual process of "self-examination, meditation and prayer" which is recommended recommended by Bill W. in his essay on Step 11 in The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions; while the 'where-to' of attaining and maintaining a conscious contact with "Providence" is found deep down within" one's own consciousness, below and separate from the operation of the human ego, beneath that "painful inner dialogue" we are all all-too-familiar with. It is found in a "conscious contact" with God.

In the Spiritual Experience appendix of the 'Big Book,' we read:

"With few  exceptions our members find that they have tapped into an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power greater than themselves."

"Most of us think this awareness of a Power greater than ourselves is the essence of spiritual experience. Our more religious members call it 'God-consciousness.'"

[Emphasis added.]

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

"All that is from the gods is full of Providence," the great neo-Platonic Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, wrote in his 'Meditations.'

"That which is from fortune is not separated from nature or without an interweaving and involution with the things which are ordered by Providence. From thence all things flow. . . ."

Morning Contemplation for Spiritual Awakening

Marcus Aurelius, one of the founding fathers of Neo-Platonism, a philosophical school that would have a profound impact on the early Christian Church, and the Emperor of Rome, recommended the following contemplation as a morning meditation:

"Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will and selfishness - all of them due to the offender's ignorance of what is good and evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of Good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow-creature similarly endowed with Reason and a share of the Divine); therefore none of these things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him, for he and I were born to work together, like a man's two hands, feet or eyelids, or like the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against Nature's law - and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction?"

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2:1