The Obsession of the Mind

"We know that while the alcoholic keeps away from drink, as he may do for months or years, he reacts much like other men. We are equally positive that once he takes any alcohol whatever into his system, something happens, both in the bodily and mental sense, which makes it virtually impossible for him to stop. The experience of any alcoholic abundantly confirms this."

"These observations would be academic and pointless if our friend never took the first drink, thereby setting the terrible cycle in motion. Therefore the main problem of the alcoholic centers in his mind, rather than in his body."

The two paragraphs, above, taken from pages 22-23 of the 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous, address the effects of the physical and mental cravings of the body for more alcohol once drinking has commenced; but, more importantly, they address the obsession of the mind for alcohol when the alcoholic addict is not drinking.

The word 'obsession' comes from the Latin obsidere, meaning 'to sit down before' (as an army sits down before a walled fortress, besieging it.) Its original fourteenth century English usage was to denote "being assailed by an evil spirit or fixed idea." Both the origin and first usage of the word 'obsession' are particularly apt, for how many of us did not at first struggle or ceaselessly fight with the seemingly ever present idea that taking a drink or drug would fix the way we were feeling? Was the thought of drinking and/or getting high not a strong and frequent temptation?

For many of us, we were like a city under siege and the thought of drinking or using was more or less constantly with us during the first weeks or months of recovery. Even thereafter, many (and perhaps most) of us were left with a mind highly susceptible to other obsessions, once the obsession about alcohol and/or drugs lifted. How many people, for example, have replaced their obsession for drugs or booze with an obsession for physical fitness, or an obsession for work, relationships or money? Quite a few, in my experience. And the list of such 'replacement' obsessions is both incredibly long and fraught with peril.

How then do we lift the siege, so to speak, of our obsessive minds. In its paradoxical way, the 'Big Book' indicates that the answer to this "main problem" of the alcoholic (which, after all "lies in the mind") is also internal.

On page 55 of the 'Big Book' we read:

". . .(D)eep down in every man, woman, and child, is the fundamental idea of 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 is thus, by accessing the hidden dimension of God within us, by attaining to a lasting peace and quietness, that we are relieved of the raucous obsessions of the mind that drive us wildly. It is a reality that we can in fact become spiritually awakened and attuned to a deeper consciousness than that of the obsessive mind of self or ego-consciousness - whether such a spiritual awakening occurs suddenly or gradually evolves.

In the Spiritual Experience appendix to the 'Big Book' we read:

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

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

 Thus it is that the higher spiritual mind of man, replaces the lower obsessive mind of the ego, or self. And with that, the obsessions for alcohol, drugs or their replacements can be expelled. As Carl Jung put it in his famous letter to Bill Wilson:  "The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum." That is, the experience of God rather than alcohol is that which solves our all-too-human dilemma.

Our Delusions and Obsessions

"Most of us have been unwilling to admit that we were real alcoholics. No person likes to think he is bodily and mentally different from his fellows. Therefore, it is not surprising that our drinking careers have been characterized by countless vain attempts to prove we could not drink like other people. The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death."

"We learned that we had to fully concede to our inner most selves that we were alcoholic. This is the first step in recovery. The delusion that we were like other people, or presently may be has to be smashed. (Emphasis added.)

-- Alcoholics Anonymous, page 30 --

These opening paragraphs are amongst the most important paragraphs in the entire 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous. They identify (a) how we set about taking Step One, and (b) the delusionary and obsessive nature of the disease of alcoholism.

The first two chapters are concerned primarily in painting an identifiable picture of the alcoholic and in broadly outlining the fact that within Alcoholics Anonymous we have found a common solution to the problem of our alcoholic addiction. In fact, the second paragraph tells us just how we begin this process of recovery from our addiction: i.e., by "fully conceding to our innermost selves that we were alcoholic." This speaks to the first half of Step One, but it is a beginning point, or, better yet a "rallying point" upon which we can all agree.

The first paragraph speaks, more than anything else, to the craving for alcohol that arises each and every time that the alcoholic addict drinks. Once our system gets its hit of alcohol, the phenomenon of craving arises and we have little or no control over how much we will then drink. Our brain and therefore our whole body crave more. Thus, despite earnestly wanting to control and enjoy our dirinking like other non-alcoholics appear to do, we lose all control. And despite our best efforts and intentions we will crave more and, in nearly all instances, we will drink more. The illusion (or delusion) that we will one day again control and enjoy our drinking has to be smashed. Alcohol addiction is a progressive and fatal disease.

The second paragraph, above, is even more subtle. Having fully conceded to our innermost selves that we are alcoholic, it begins to speak about the obsessive nature of the alcoholic addict. At first, when not drinking, the alcoholic addict obsesses over booze. Even in sobriety, instead of obsessing over wehn and where he or she is going to drink, the alcoholic obsesses over the fact that he or she is not drinking.  This becomes crucially important, because it is far too easy to substitute another obsessioin  - for work, sex, gambling, exercise, you fill-in-the-blank - to replace the obsession over booze (and in many instances, drugs) once that obsession lifts.

Quite clearly, we are told that we are not like other people, nor will we be. Not only does the phenomenon of craving arise once we begin to drink, but over the years of drinking addictively, we have developed a mind that has become obsessive by nature. Even when not drinking, and even more in the beginning of our recovery from alcoholic addiction, our minds are all too easily preoccupied with obsession, mainly an obsession over how we are going to run our lives in a way that is satisfactory to us. (Later, at page 61 of the 'Big Book,' we will read how the alcoholic addict is "a victim of the delusion that he can wrest satisfaction and happiness out of life if he only manages well.")

Putting all this together, and facing these illusions and/or delusions, we are enabled to admit "to our innermost selves" that we are alcoholic and cannot manage our own lives - i.e., the First Step in our recovery from an otherwise progressive and fatal disease of the mind and body. "We are convinced to a man," we read at the bottom of page 30, "that alcoholics of our type are in the grip of a progressive illness. Over any considerable time we get worse, never better."

Even with this said however, we are told that "(d)espite all we can say, many who are real alcoholics are not going to believe they are in that class," and that "(b)y every form of self-deception and experimentation, they will try to prove themselves exceptions to this rule, (and) therefore non-alcoholic."

Our hats are off to such people. "Best of luck," we say. But most of us will simply save them a chair in their home group, trusting that once exposed to A.A. they will of themselves become desperate enough to return and hopefully find the common solution we have found for all.

A Thirst of Our Being for Wholeness

The word "addiction" has the same Latin root as the words "diction" and "dictator" - 'ad' + 'dicere' - which means, essentially, that the addict really has "no say" in his or her behavior.

At heart, a spiritual malady, the "false spirits" of alcohol, drugs, sex, or what have you, gives the addict a taste of the divine, but he or she is never allowed to remain. And, over time, it takes more and more of that which he or she is addicted to, just to get a glimpse of the state of peace and good feeling that was once achieved. Eventually, even a glimpse will be out of reach of the then hopeless addict. And then the individual, once fully addicted, really has no say in how this process inevitably works out.

The thirst of the alcoholic, Carl Jung explained to Bill Wilson, is "the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval terms: union with God."

Addiction is thus a "separation" of our consciousness and being from Wholeness, and unless we can overcome the duality of the false ego of the seeming "self" and our true state of consciousness and being, we will once again try to approach the divine with whatever our drink or drug of choice may be.

Ram Dass - a spiritual teacher who knows a thing or two about addiction - puts it this way: "What you find out with most addictive things (is) that they give you a short rush but they don't allow you to remain at home. They just allow you the taste of it. And then the minute you get thrown out, you go to heaven but you can't stay because you didn't come in through the right way."

However, Dass notes, "(w)hen you start to stand back and see your predicament and see what you are doing, there is a way from a spiritual perspective in which you begin with that slight bit of awareness to extricate yourself from the chain of reactivity" that keeps you in addiction.

"When people come to me with addictions," Dass says, "I'm inclined to say, start doing spiritual practices. Start doing the studies that will allow you to see yourself in a new way, that will allow you to understand what that hunger is you are feeding in a new way, to just get a little different perspective on it."

"The line I always use," he says, "is, "How poignant I am! How poignant the human condition!"

The Ability to Give and Receive Love

 

The 12 Steps have much to teach us about that highest of human emotions, love.

Displaced, misplaced or suppressed as it may have been, we find once more (or, perhaps, for the first time ever) the ability to consciously give and receive love as we grow in the Steps and in the unconditioned love of a Power which is always greater than the self. Indeed, the ego, based as it is on fear and unfulfillable desires, is not capable and knows nothing of love in its purest sense.

Is this truly possible?

"We found," we read in the 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous, "that we had been worshipers. What a state of mental goose-flesh that used to bring on! Had we not variously worshiped people, sentiment, things, money and ourselves? And then, with a better motive, had we not worshipfully beheld the sunset, the sea, or a flower? Who of us had not loved something or somebody? How much did these feelings, these loves, these worships, have to do with pure reason? Little or nothing, we saw at last. Were not these things the tissue out of which our lives were constructed? Did not these feelings after all, determine the course of our existence? It was impossible to say we had no capacity for faith, or love, or worship. In one form or another we had been living by faith and little else."

[Alcoholics Anonymous, page 54.]

Yet, in the throes of our addiction, even these loves were insufficient to bring us back to a sense of reality. Despite our loves, the gratification of our cravings and soothing the obsessions of the mind dictated that, finally, we could love no more; and, if it were not for recovery from this seemingly hopeless state, perhaps we would have, sooner or later, rendered ourselves incapable of either giving or receiving love for all time.

Now, having recovered this, our natural ability to love, what are we to make of it? To what extent do we exercise our capacity to give and receive love? And, how do we perfect, or attempt to perfect it? This is the great human challenge, and the great opportunity for spiritual awakening.

In The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (at pp. 92-93), we read:

"Not many people can truthfully assert that they love everybody. Most of us must admit that we have loved but a few; that we have been quite indifferent to the many. As for the remainder - well, we have really disliked or hated them."

"We A.A.'s find we need something much better than this in order to keep our balance. The idea that we can be possessively loving of a few, can ignore the many, and can continue to fear or hate anybody at all, has to be abandoned, if only a little at a time."

"We can try to stop making unreasonable demands upon those we love. We can show kindness where we had formerly shown none. With those we dislike we can at least begin to practice justice and courtesy, perhaps going out of our way at time to understand and help them."

To summon the courage and will to do these things, to bring us to the state of consciousness in which love which is not only unconditional but unconditioned begins to dominate our thinking and motives, we can meditate upon our Eleventh Step prayer.

"Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted," we read, "to understand, than to be understood - to love, than to be loved. For it is by self-forgetting that one finds. It is by forgiving that one is forgiven. It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life."

 In striving, mentally and then practically, to comfort, understand and love, to forget "self" and to "die" to the ego, gradually and/or suddenly we will awaken to the greater consciousness within us. We will find, as we read in the "Spiritual Experience" appendix, "an unsuspected inner resource" within us that can change our way of thinking; and we will enter what Bill W. describes as a "new state of consciousness and being" (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 103.)

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

The way of love is not
a subtle argument.

The door there
is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn it.

They fall, and falling,
they are given wings.

Let you throat-song
be clear and strong enough

to make an emperor fall full-length
suppliant, at the door.

<< >>

I have phrases and whole pages memorized,
but nothing can be told of love.

You must wait until you and I
are living together.

In the conversation we'll have
then . . . be patient . . . then. 

-- Jalalludin Rumi --
(Coleman Barks, "The Incredible Rumi," pp. 243-244.)

About Recollection and the Obsession of the Mind

"The problem of the alcoholic centers in the mind."

At my home group, we have a "Solution" table that goes through the "There Is a Solution" chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous' Big Book. Last night we went through what may be perhaps the most important pages in the chapter: from the middle paragraph on page 22 pages to the end of the italicized paragraph on page 24. These pages deal with the mental aspect of this two-fold disease. they deal with the obsessive nature of the alcoholic/addict's mind.

While the physical suffering of the alcoholic addict, as manifested in a "craving" for "more" while he or she is under the influence (and even while detoxing), is tragic, progressively more powerful,  potentially fatal, the craving stops in short order. What drives a sober alcoholic to start up again is the "obsession of the mind." This "obsession" is a mental preoccupation with the relief which the booze and or drugs used to provide, but which can no longer be found. Booze or drugs are solutions that no longer work.

(Let's face it: If booze or drugs still worked for us by doing what they once did, we wouldn't need "a solution," we'd just continue to drink and drug. As is stated on page 30 in the "More About Alcoholism" chapter: "The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death.")

Page 23 plainly states that, "The problem of the alcoholic centers in the mind." This statement is one of the most important passages in the Big Book, and it needs to be understood. The Steps can only be effectively taken if this is understood. We will only rely on a Power greater than our "selves' to the extent that we realize our alcoholic/addictive self-consciousness (or, "ego") is the problem, that the "problem" - i.e., that the illusory "obsession" that booze and drugs might once again provide relief - "centers in the mind."

As we shared, person after person with little or no sobriety - indeed, some who had not even worked the Steps - said that they wouldn't be or weren't able to "remember" the problems alcohol or drugs caused before they started using again. That, of course, is what we hear in too many meetings. But, at least for me, that was not the problem. If I wasn't able to remember what I'd done, I wouldn't have suffered enough to stop, I believe. Certainly, it would have prevented me writing out that first Fourth Step. But more importantly our ability to remember  is not what these passages are talking about.

The italicized passage on page 24 (italicized meaning "this is important") doesn't say we can't remember. We remember all right. It says we cannot "bring into our consciousness with sufficient force" those self-same memories of what we'd done in the past. The memories are there, but what prevents our being able to bring these memories "into our conscience" with enough clout to stop us from drinking and/or using again? Once more, it is the obsessions and obsessive nature of the mind.

The word "obsesssion" comes from the Latin sessare, which means to sit, and the Latin prefix ob, which in this instance means to block (as in obstruct). The example given in the Oxford Etymological Dictionary (which tells us where our words come from) is that of an army - or, I assume a Roman Legion - that sits outside of a walled city or fortress besieging it by allowing nothing to come in, and nothing to come out. (Doesn't this sound familiar?)

The reason why we cannot bring our memories of what happens "into our consciousness" with "sufficient force" to start the whole cycle of using and drinking again is that "our consciousness" is already full. Our minds are besieged by the seeming or imagined calamities with which our our ordinary "self-consciousness" ( or, our "ego" in the sense it is discussed in A.A. literature) continually  bombard us, destroying any peace of mind we might have and forcing us to find whatever form of relief we can. All too often, however, that relief comes in the form of drugs and/or booze.

It is because of the mind's preoccupation with all these calamitous disasters (and seeming or imagined disasters) that we will drink or drug again to find relief if we do not do something about the attachment of our mind to, and its identification with, the ever suffering self-consciousness of the human ego.

To stop the obsessive nature of the human ego - what Bill variously describes in The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions as that "painful inner dialogue" or the "terrifying ghosts" that produce an overwhelming sense of "anxious apartness" - and to overcome the ego through reliance upon a higher and deeper consciousness that exists within each of us ("Our more religious members call it God Consciousness.") is what the 12 Steps are intended to do. In the words of the late but inimitable Chuck C: We "uncover, discover and discard" those old thoughts (ideas) and thought patterns (attitudes) that separate us from, and prevent our accessing, this deeper higher, consciousness.

Remember this: "Many of us tried to hold onto our old ideas, but the result was nil until we let go absolutely." Nothing changes if we do not let go our old ideas and ways of thinking. This is the only "absolute" found in the first 164 pages of the Big Book. Through the persistent and logically interrelated application of "self-examination, meditation and prayer" we are enabled to deflate the obsessive "human ego" (not pride, but "self" consciousness) and the suffering and separation from our fellows and G-d that the ego causes.

But, "nothing changes, if nothing changes.> We must let go of our old "ideas, emotions and attitudes" and allow a Power greater than our "selves," greater to our egoic self-consciousness, to replace them with new "conceptions and motives." (See how Carl Jung describes the "phenomena" of "vital spiritual experiences" on page 27 of the Big Book.)