Overcoming Our Fears and Desires

"Since most of us are born with an abundance of natural desires, it isn't strange that we often let these far exceed their intended purposes. When they drive us blindly, or we willfully demand that they supply us with more satisfactions or pleasures than are possible or due 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."

-- The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 65 --

Fear, we read at Step Seven in The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, is the "chief activator" of our defects of character. But what, we should ask, is the root of this self-centered fear? In Step Six, above, Bill W. suggests that the root cause of fear is desire - in this instance, otherwise natural desires that far exceed their natural bounds. Such overblown desires, he notes, are "the measure" of our character defects. That is, our blind desires create the mental room for our character defects to manifest and operate.

This is unsurprising, for if we look at the resentments list in our Step Four inventory we will see again and again that the action of others had impinged on our desires - our desires for security, for sex relationships, for personal relationships etc. These are (as Bill notes) natural desires; however, to the extent that we demand more security, more personal relationships, and more sex "than is possible or due to us," we create a fear that we will never have enough - enough security, enough money, enough friends, enough sex etc., etc., etc.

And just to the extent that these overblown desires manifest in fear, will we act act self-centeredly in response to them, trying vainly to satisfy and fulfill desires that are in all reality unquenchable. Chasing these desires we are, thus, stuck in a rut of our own making. "Living upon a basis of unsatisfied demands," we read, "we are in a state of continual disturbance and frustration. Therefore no peace was to be had unless we could find a means of reducing those demands." (Twelve and Twelve, page 76.)

How then do we go about reducing these demands? The answer it seems is, not surprisingly, right in the Steps. If we continue to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, we will experience a freedom from these desires gone wild.

Not convinced? Consider for a moment the propositions and promises we read concerning Step Three in the 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous (at pp. 62-63):

"(W)e decided that hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our Director. He is the Principal, we are His agents. He is the Father, and we are His children. Most good ideas are simple, and this concept was the keystone of the new and triumphant arch through which we passed to freedom."

"When we sincerely took this position, all sorts of remarkable things followed. We had a new Employer. Being all powerful, He provided what we needed, if we kept close to Him and performed His work well. Established on such a footing we became less and less interested in ourselves, our little plans and designs. More and more we became interested in seeing what we could contribute to life. As we felt new power flow in, as we enjoyed peace of mind, as we discovered we could face life successfully, as we became conscious of His presence, we began to lose our fear of today, tomorrow, and the hereafter. We were reborn." (Emphasis added.)

To the degree that we seek and perform God's will for us, rather than relying on our own narrow selves, life itself will provide what we need, but not necessarily what we want. Our choice then, is whether we rely on self-will or God's will. If we rely on God's will, not only will we find that we have what we "need," we are also promised that we will "lose our fear of today, tomorrow and the hereafter."

Thus, conscious faith in the efficacy of "a Power greater than ourselves" to provide what we need is the solution that removes the desires that underlie our fears. Thus in relying on the God of our understanding rather than our self-centered thinking, we are released from the cycle of fear and desire that activates our character defects. We are then, in effect, "reborn."

Chasing Our Desires

Chasing our desires is like blindly chasing dragons. Unexpectedly, they turn on us and we get burnt. Moreover, spiritually it is an impossibility to fulfill our desires, as for every desire or demand that we satisfy, new desires will always arise to take their place. Thus, the alcoholic addict in recovery is threatened as much by his or her success in seemingly conquering life, as he or she ever was by active addiction. The stories of countless A.A.'s contained within the 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous and within the confines of our meeting rooms makes clear that, both before and after our active addiction, life remains unmanageable.

The basic problem with our seeking to fulfill what seem to be natural desires by our own means is that, as it so ably expressed in The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions: "Instead of regarding our material desires as the means by which we could live and function as human beings, we (take) these satisfactions to be the final end and aim of life."

[The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, p. 71.]

Mistaking the drives created by our desires in such a manner makes for an obsessive compulsion in the ego to see that all our desires are met, with the fear that they will not be met triggering our acting out in accordance with our character defects in a vain effort to satisfy the unsatisfiable. "The chief activator of our defects has been self-centered fear," we are reminded, "primarily fear that we would lose something we already possessed or would fail to get something we demanded."

[The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, p. 76.]

"Living upon a basis of unsatisfied demands," The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions continues, "we were in a state of continual disturbance and frustration. Therefore, no peace was to be had unless we could find a means of reducing these demands."

Since we cannot long stand being in a disturbed and frustrated state - particularly if there seems to be nothing more we should want - finding an inner peace devoid of further desires and their emotionally crippling demands is an imperative if we are to survive our own defects of character.

"Since most of us are born with an abundance of natural desires," Bill writes in his Step Six Essay, "it isn't strange that we often let these exceed their intended purpose. When they drive us blindly, or we willfully demand that they supply us with more satisfactions or pleasures than are possible or due 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."

[The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, p. 65.]

Instinctive desires run wild thus create the mental and emotional space for the ego (or our "self-centered thinking") to operate in. And it is these desires that we must let go of, as they invoke within us the old "ideas emotions and attitudes" that will lead us back into addiction. Therefore the question is, having once "turned our will and our life over to the care of God as we understand him," are we willing to do so continually, leaving our will and our lives (along with our insatiable desires) to be managed by a Power greater than our narrow, egoic "selves"? Steps Six, Seven and Eleven are critical for this continual process of self-forgetting.

Putting aside our desires, and seeking to free ourselves of "the bondage of self," we begin to replace the self-seeking of the ego with a conscious contact with God. Completing the Steps, making amends  where possible, continuing to take a daily inventory, and beginning the sincere practice of prayer and meditation makes this possible.

"There is a direct linkage among self-examination, meditation and prayer," we read on page 98 of the The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. "Taken separately, these practices can bring much relief and benefit. But when they are logically related and interwoven, the result is an unshakeable foundation."

By seeking to forego our desires in favor of meditation, prayer and a continuing self-inventory, in this manner, we may be granted what amounts to "a new state of consciousness and being" that is truly desireless and therefore fulfilled in its basic nature.

[The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, p. 107.]

Step Six: Aiming at Perfection

"We aim at perfection," my sponsor often says, "knowing that we are going to fall short." This, of course, is the gist of the message in the Step Six essay in The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, which helps us examine if we are "entirely ready" to have all of our character defects removed by the God of our understanding.

Step Six, in essence, asks whether we are ready to lead a wholly spiritual life - a decision that is difficult for all of us.

"(I)t seems plain," we read, "that few of us can quickly or easily become ready to aim at spiritual and moral perfection; we want to settle for only as much perfection as will get us by in life, according, of course, to our various and sundry ideas of what will get us by."

 Accordingly, "the difference between striving for a self-determined objective and for the perfect objective which is of God," is a mark of whether we are "entirely ready" to have our character defects removed through our efforts and with the grace of God. "The key words "entirely ready" underline the fact that we want to aim at the very best we know or can learn," Bill notes.

The difficulty with Step Six, it seems, is that when we honestly look at ourselves, we see that we are almost wholly reliant upon our habitual attitudes to get by, and to "manage" our lives and our interactions with others. Is there much difference between the man who projects a surly and -ill-tempered persona to keep other people walking on eggshells, and the beautiful woman who is alternatively flirtatious and coy in order to get her way with others? And what about the person who projects the image of being meek, mild and deferential? All these, and so many other roles we play, are the stuff of the tragedies and comedies of all ages.

Taking Step Six means that we become ready to drop these false personae and, with faith, allow our true "selves" to emerge from the shadows cast by the false egos we have habitually presented to the world. It is when we becoming willing to take what seems to be a huge risk in presenting our real character, that we embrace the aid and assistance of a Power greater than our small, self-cenetered egos. "This," we read, "is the exact point at which we abandon limited objectives, and move toward God's will for us." But we do not do so alone.

"Draw near to God," we read in the Scriptures, "and God will draw near to you." (James 1:8) As the great American Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson observed:

"This intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space and not subject to circumstance. Thus in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contradicted."

"If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step so downward, is a step upward. The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.

"All things," Emerson observes, "proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves himself of power, or auxiliaries; his being shrinks out of all remote channels, he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death."

"The perception of this law of laws," Emerson suggests, "awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is mountain air."

["The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson," Modern Library Classics, pp. 64-65.]

"(A) blufffing of oneself will have to go the way of many another pleasant rationalization," we read in the Step Six essay. "At the very least, we shall have to come to grips with some of our worst character defects and take action toward their removal as quickly as we can." And it is Step Six which "is the exact point at which we abandon (such) limited objectives, and move toward God's will for us."

On Desire, Fear and the Activation of Our Character Defects

In Step Four, we see how the word "fear" occurs again and again in the third column of our resentments list. Then, again, on the last page of the Step Seven essay in The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, we read: "The chief activator of our defects of character has been self-centered fear - primarily fear that we would lose something we already possessed or would fail to get something we demanded."

But why are our lives shot through with fear? If we re-examine the fourth column of our Step Four inventory - what our part was in the situations we are still resentful about - we can ask why we have these fears, and the answer will almost inevitably come back that our basic interests or desires are threatened.

In the examples given in the 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous. fear is bracketed three times beside 'self-esteem' and once beside 'security.' This prompts the question: Do we not have overbearing desires to be seen and treated in a certain fashion? Do we not willfully demand that other people see us and treat us in the manner we demand?

Step Six in The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions suggests that we do.

"Since most of us are born with an abundance of natural desires," we read, "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 pleasures that 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, our sins."*

Thus, while fear is "the chief activator" of our character defects, it is our desire-fuelled demands upon life and other people that is "the measure of our character defects," that create the mental space for our fear-activated character defects to become operative.

If we do not have a desire about how we wish to be seen by others and stake our self-esteem on it, for example, then we can have no fear that we will not be perceived in that specific light. The same is true for the myriad of other desires about the amount of money we want, the personal and intimate relationships we crave, and the social positions we want to hold. This, of course, is the reason why all of the world's great wisdom and religious traditions identify our desires as the root of our human suffering.

Thus, in the Gospel of Luke, we read:

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will put on. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds!"

"And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest?"

"Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass, which is alive in the field today, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith!"

"And do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, nor be worried. For all the nations of the world seek after these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, seek his kingdom, and these things will be added to you."

[Luke 12:22-31]

Similarly, according to the Buddha, the cause of our suffereing is our identification with the mind, and just so long as we live in the mind, then the desires of the mind will coninue, and with each desire further suffering. Desire, according to the Buddha, is the root cause suffering, and so he taught the path of witnessing the desires and, thus, going beyond the mind.

To this effect, the Buddha taught:

If you are not awakened, desire grows in you like a vine in the forest. Like a monkey in the forest, you jump from tree to tree, never finding the fruit - from life to life, never finding peace. If you are filled with desire, your sorrows swell like the grass after the rain. But if you subdue desire, your sorrows shall fall from you like drops of water from a lotus flower.

And, on fear, the Buddha notes: "The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you freed."

If we fearlessly face the proposition that God is either everything or nothing (see page 53 of the 'Big Book'), and we answer in the affirmative, then we can begin to realize that there is no other desire that need be filled. And if there are no desires, there is no fear that our desires will not be fulfilled, and therefore no activation of our defects of character through the action of our egoic self-consciousness.

While fear is, thus, the "chief activator" of our defects of character, without our self-centered desires, there can be no fear.

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

* Many people shy away from the words "sin" or "sins." The term originates from a Greek archery term for when an archer misses his target, presumably to the left (as the Greeks called the right hand 'dexterous' and the left hand 'sinister'). Thus, the word "sin" is originally a metaphor for when our thoughts miss their mark. Understanding this, helped me to stay open-minded about the concept of "sin" (particularly regarding the 'seven deadly sins' of pride, greed, anger, lust, gluttony envy and sloth, as discussed in Step Seven in The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions), as - like alcoholic addiction - "sin" implies a physical and mental shortfall, rather than a moral failing per se.

Fear and Desire Create the "Bondage of Self"

In A.A.'s Third Step Prayer, there is a line where the alcoholic addict asks whatever G_d he or she has an understanding of to, "Relieve me of the bondage of self." What is "self"? And what is it that constitutes "the bondage of self" from which relief is sought? How and where is relief from this "bondage of self" that lies at the root of the alcoholic's addiction to be found?

It is the thoughts of fear and of desire (or craving) that create the "bondage of self". But to understand this it is perhaps necessary to understand that "self" in this context is not what we consider that word to mean in its ordinary sense - "self" as in our sense of "me" or the person that "I" am. Rather, in the sense that Bill W. writes of in the basic texts of recovery (the books Alcoholics Anonymous and Bill's later volume of essays, The Twelve Steps & Twelve Traditions) "self" is the human "ego" - "ego" not in the way it is commonly used as a synonym for pride or one's sense of self-esteem, but rather "ego" in its original meaning as "the part of the mind that reacts to reality and has a sense of individuality", according to The Concise Oxford Dictionary.

The use of the word "ego" to denote pride or one's "sense of self-esteem" is a later use of the word that came into popular usage after Bill wrote the Alcoholics Anonymous text. ( Bill was trained as a lawyer though he never practiced law, and as a former - or recovered - lawyer, I can attest that he demonstrates a lawyer's precision in the way he writes and chooses his words.)

At p. 63 in the Big Book, describing the real dyed-in-the-wool alcoholic as an "actor", Bill writing in 1939 observes, "Our actor is self-centered - ego-centric, as people like to call it nowadays." And, there is the basic problem, the part of the alcoholic's mind that reacts to reality and gives the alcoholic his or her sense of individuality has as its frame of reference what has been described as "the lonely universe of individual consciousness". The alcoholic's thinking mind is stuck in "the bondage of self". Thus, it makes sense when Bill declares that "the problem of the alcoholic centers in the mind," more so than the body. To arrest and treat our alcoholism or other addiction, we therefore need to address the problematic thought patterns that lurk within and can takeover our minds and, thus, our means of relating to this world.

To find relief from the suffering of our addiction- be it active or inactive, yet untreated addiction - it is necessary to move away from self, from identification with and bondage or attachment to our sense of individual consciousness, to a deeper part of the mind. We must tap into that "unsuspected inner resource", described in Appendix II of Alcoholics Anonymous, that many of the early, more religiously-minded persons who found recovery from addiction through the Twelve Steps referred to as "God-consciousness".

To shift one's consciousness from a sense of individuality based in the human ego, to a conscious contact with what Bill describes as "the Great Reality" within each of us is the purpose of the 12 Steps. They give us the methodology to access within the depths of our own being "a power greater than our (seemingly individual) 'selves' that will restore us to sanity." But to do so, it is first necessary to face, face down and be rid of the two strains of thought that create and sustain the human ego, the two conditioned drives that create our sense of helpless individuality and causes us suffering: fear and craving. Or to "uncover, discover and discard" that which blocks us from the deeper unitive consciousness beyond ego, as Chuck C. so famously described the process of recovery from addiction in his talks and wonderful book, A New Pair of Glasses.

Overcoming the desires (or cravings) and fears that fuel and foster the unquenchable thirst of our human ego is the essence of Steps 6 and 7. However, to better understand how our desires or cravings foster our fears and trap us in the suffering of our lonely egos, it is helpful to first turn to the lists in the "moral inventory" that we asked to write down in Step 4 in order to get a good handle on what our cravings and desires are really for.

The part of the Fourth Step inventory that always seems to get the most attention are the columns in which we list the resentments we carry that "block us off from the sunlight of the Spirit." And of those columns, it is perhaps the column that lists what the actions of others have affected - our personal relationships, sex relations, reputation financial and emotional security etc. - that receives the least attention, at least initially. Likely that is because we have been prone to going over these stories we tell about others - whether to our "selves" or anyone who will listen - over and over, ad nauseum. That is, until they sicken us so badly that we must stop doing so.

It is necessary, of course, for us to see what part we played in bringing these hurtful actions seemingly down on our heads, but it is absolutely essential to see how our desires for relationships, security and money etc. have truly warped our minds. We need to see that while still practicing our addictive behaviours, the only recourse we had to alleviate the suffering caused by these desires was to drown them in a vat of alcohol, the haze of drugs or the fast-fading and fleeting ecstacies of other addictive behaviours. Examining how the desire to fill these longings affected us can be an often long drawn out process. Yet the key to understanding this, for me, is found in Step Six, through which we become, "Entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character."

Step Six as it is set out in the Alcoholics Anonymous text is absolutely essential, yet it receives short shrift, being conducted in a mere hour of contemplation after having confronted our "selves" and shared our moral inventory with God and another for the first time and before taking the vital Seventh Step in the meditative state of prayer. The reason for this, I believe, is that Bill wrote the Big Book when he had only three years of experience on this spiritual journey, and he had yet to wrestle down his own 'demons' of fear, desire and depression through the often-time years of spiritual discipline that the Steps require to fully work their ever-deepening miracle.

In his essay on Step Six in The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, written when Bill was about fifteen years sober and after he had emerged from a near-decade long bout with depression (a residual after-effect of active addiction for many an alcoholic and/or addict), Bill closely examines how our desires can separate us from wholeness and lock us in the "bondage of self". Studying the list of our desires and the patterns of actions they have fueled, we can begin to see how acting on these desires has increasingly separated us from others and the whole world in a lonely individual consciousness that is far removed from the underlying God-consciousness that is so freely available to all, though largely unknown, unperfected or simply not experienced by many.

At page 65 in The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, Bill examines the crippling effect that desires can have on our consciousness, affecting our minds and the state of our being with which we approach life. He writes:

"Since most of us are born with an abundance of natural desires, it isn't strange that we often let them exceed their intended purposes. When they drive us blindly, or we willfully demand that they supply us with more satisfactions or pleasures than are possible or due to us, that is the point at which we depart from the degree of perfection that God would have for us here on earth. That is the measure of our defects of character.

I emphasize those last words, as they seem to point to the operative mechanism of "the bondage of self". My desire to have something or someone - a relationship, a job, money, a position in society or whatever - that it is not practical or due for me to possess because of circumstances or life itself will creates internal within my mind for the ego to manifest and operate. Equally, my desire to avoid someone, something or some situation that is either unavoidable or not practical for me to avoid due, again, to circumstances, life itself - or God, if you will - will also lock me in the suffering of bondage or enslavement to my sense of individuality and uniqueness. I will add a new chapter to the same old story that will go on endlessly repeating itself within the not-so-quite airy confines of my mind, creating all forms of anger, pride, lust, greed and/or envy etc.

So much for Step Six. Through my propensity to foster all manner of undue and impractical desires I have laid the groundwork and created the "measure" or made internal room for my ego to take hold and drag me back into self-consciousness, or ego-consciousness, breaking all conscious contact with the G_d of my understanding. I have created the basis for my own suffering. What then activates and perpetuates this suffering?

Desires for what are impractical, impossible or not due to us at any given moment will quickly morph into fear we are told in Bill's essay on the Seventh Step. That, in turn, will energize and set in motion the patterns of thought, speech and action that cause our suffering. "The chief activator of our defects," Bill writes, "has been self-centered fear - primarily fear that we would lose something we already possessed or fail to get something we demanded. Living upon a basis of unsatisfied demands, we were in a state of continual disturbance and frustration. Therefore, no peace was to be had unless we could find a means of reducing these demands."

Fortuntately, we have been shown a means of reducing and possibly eliminating, at least temporarily, these unsatisfied and unsatisfiable demands - unsatisfiable demands, in the sense that what we are demanding is not practical or due to us. That means is the logically interrelated process of self-examination, meditation and prayer that Bill writes of in Step 11. I was told by my greatest spiritual mentor, a man that sought an ever-deepening consciousness of the divine order of this universe until his dying day, that we are or should be constantly in the process of doing Steps 3, 7 and 11: affirming and invoking that deeper God-consciousness that forms the basic fabric of our being, recognizing when we hav reattached to our desire-fueled fears that strip us us of conscious contact withG_d's grace and seeking a return to that grace through the process of self-forgetting in contemplative meditation.

This is the only method that I have learned or been shown - and I have achieved some great material and financial successes and successes in my personal, social and familial relationships through my own efforts and other methodologies- that has brought me any degree of deep or lasting peace of mind. I know that recourse to the eternal within brings me to a consciousness of serenity in both my mind and my surroundings. It brings me to an inner place where I lack nothing and want for nothing, where fear and desire subside, wane and are gone so long as I remain there.