Letting Go of Anger and Emotional Disturbances

"It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us. If somebody hurts us and we are sore, we are in the wrong also. But are there no exceptions to this rule? what about "justifiable" anger? If somebody cheats us, aren't we entitled to be mad? Can't we be properly anger with self-righteous folk? For us of A.A. these are dangerous exceptions. We have found that justified anger ought to be left to those better qualified to handle it."

-- The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 90 --

Why this "spiritual axiom?" Is it not because anger, and particularly "justified" anger, is inimical to our spiritual health and is always poised to delver us back into "the bondage of self" which lies at the root of our problem?

Each time we are "disturbed" - whether by anger, greed, jealousy lust, or some other emotion - it is a sure sign that we have a Step One problem; that is, we are right in there, again, trying to manage our lives (and the people in our lives) in a futile search for self-satisfaction and ego-gratification. In the famous passage on acceptance (at page 417 of the 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous), we read that:

"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." (Emphasis added.)

Notice that in both these passages we are talking of being "disturbed."  Identifying and recognizing when, in fact, we are disturbed is thus the key to dealing with an ever-varying world that is beyond our capacity (or calling) to manage and control. The solution to this Step One problem thus lies in the renewed application of Step Three. When we realize that we are disturbed, we need to act on our decision "to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God" as we understand Him. But how should we act in the face of such disturbances? Fortunately, we have instructions on what to do in such instances.

"(I)t is really easy to being the practice of Step Three," we read. "In all times of emotional disturbance or indecision, we can pause, ask for quiet, and in the stillness simply say: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Thy will, not mine, be done.""

[The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, pp. 40-41.]

There is nothing we can "change" in an instant other than our attitude - i.e., the level of our consciousness and thought. Thus, when disturbed we need to immediately move from the egoic resistance to life's circumstances, to higher consciousness and an acceptive, radical non-resistance to what is. ("To argue with 'what is' is insanity," said the philosopher-Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, "yet the thoughtless cannot resist doing so.")

Next, we must have the "courage" - which may only be found beyond the fear-based ego - to make the switch from egocentric to God-centric consciousness. Here, we must "take heart," which is the fundamental meaning of 'courage', a word that comes from the French and Latin word for 'heart' - 'cour.' ("Fearlessness," Gandhi observed, "is the first requirement of spirituality. A coward can never be moral.")

Lastly, we must know "the difference" between what we can and cannot change at the moment we are disturbed. It is, thus, essential that we know there is the small "self" of ego-consciousness, and the higher "Self" of God-consciousness, and that there is a vast different to the thought processes and emotional reactions of both states. For it is only in this latter 'self-less' state that we can "accept that person, place, thing, or situation" which disturbs us "as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment."

At Step Three in the 'Big Book' we read:

"This is the how and why of it. First of all, we had to quit playing God. It didn't work. Next, we 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 such a 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 or the hereafter. We were reborn."

 Thus, if we ignore the "spiritual axiom" that in all instances of emotional disturbance it is we who are upset, all this falls away, and we are once again assuming sole responsibility to manage and direct a life which will immediately and rapidly spiral out of all control, resulting in emotional outbursts and actions we will later regret and have to make amends for - or it may result in much, much worse.

"Ego-Deflation" and "A New State of Consciousness and Being"

"Maybe there are as many definitions of spiritual awakening as there are people who have had them. But certainly each genuine one has something in common with all the others. And these things which they have in common are not too hard to understand. When a man or a woman has a spiritual awakening, the most important meaning of it is that he has now become able to do, feel, and believe that which he could not do before on his unaided strength and resources alone. He has been granted what amounts to a new state of consciousness and being. He has been set on a path which tells him he is really going somewhere, that life is not a dead end, not something to be endured or mastered. In a very real sense he is transformed because he has laid hold of a source of strength which, in one way or another, he had denied himself. He finds himself in possession of a degree of honesty, tolerance, unselfishness, peace of mind and love of which he had thought himself quite incapable."

"The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, pp. 106-107 --

In William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience," a book that Bill W. was referred to in order to reassure himself as to his sanity and the authenticity of his sudden spiritual awakening, the author convincingly points out that there are many, varied states of consciousness and being of which we are usually quite unaware.

"(O)ur normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it," James observed, "is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness. . . . No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."

[Wm. James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 388.]

Of course, for the alcoholic addict the requisite stimulus that beings about the mental rearrangements that are requisite to experience this "new state of consciousness and being" - in reality - is "ego-deflation at depth."

"Ebby brought me a book entitled "Varieties of Religious Experience" and I devoured it," Bill recalled in a talk he gave to a medical committee on alcoholism.* "Written by William James the psychologist, it suggests that the conversion experience can have objective reality. Conversion does alter motivation, and does semi-automatically enable a person to be and to do the formerly impossible. Significant it was that marked conversion experiences came mostly to individuals who knew complete in a controlling area of life."

Thus, it is no mere coincidence that the opening words of The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions ask: "Who cares to admit complete defeat?" It appears to be only through complete ego-deflation, the convincement that of our own self-conscious thinking we have no solution to our addiction, that the alcoholic addict may open himself to the same "conversion" or "spiritual awakening" that can, if acted upon, restore him or her to sanity.

In one of the stories in the back of the 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous, the author states that we "hit bottom" only when we stop digging. It appears, I would suggest, that so long as one has any reliance upon the twisted, self-conscious thinking of the ego, one is still "digging" and, therefore, does not have the requisite "open mind" that is necessary for spiritual awakening and recovery. Indeed, the first 44 pages of the 'Big Book' are devoted to shattering all the possible "outs" that the alcoholic addict may be considering.

Yet, remarkably, through this process of "ego-deflation," when the alcoholic admits to his innermost self that he has no further "Plan B," he opens him or herself up to a radical shift in consciousness, the requisite "stimuli" of utter desolation and despair has then been applied.

"In the extreme of melancholy," William James observes, "the self that consciously is can do absolutely nothing. It is completely bankrupt and without resource, and no works it can accomplish will prevail. Redemption from such subjective conditions must be a free gift or nothing, and grace . . . is such a gift" - the free gift of "a new state of consciousness and being."

[Wm. James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 244.]

"But for the grace of God," the alcoholic addict in recovery often remembers, "there go I."

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

(* From the pamphlet, "Three Talks to Medical Societies by Bill W., Co-Founder of A.A.," pp 14-15.)

Spiritual Conceit and Prejudice: From Closed to Open-Mindedness

"Instead of regarding ourselves as intelligent agents, spearheads of God's ever advancing Creation, we agnostics and atheists chose to believe that our human intelligence was the last word, the alpha and omega, the beginning and end of all. Rather vain of us, wasn't it?"

"We, who have traveled this dubious path, beg you to lay aside prejudice, even against organized religion. We have learned that whatever the human frailties of various faiths may be, those faiths have given purpose and direction to life. People of faith have a logical idea of what life is about."

[Alcoholics Anonymous, page 49.]

Religion - from the Latin 're' + 'ligare' - means to retie or reunite, and all of the world's great wisdom traditions lay out methods and practices by which this reunification of the individual with a Power greater than his or her "self" may be accomplished. Thus, there is nothing in the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous that need threaten the religious newcomer. It is more often than not, I suspect, the non-religious or decidedly atheistic newcomer that is threatened by all this talk of a God of one's understanding. I am sure that many, like me, were nearly fatally put off by all mention of a Higher Power.

When I got my first sponsor in A.A., he told me that I had to look beyond the First
Step and its admittance of alcoholism and unmanageability, that I had to look at the Step Two. Being swift on the uptake, I immediately asked him the absolutely wrong question: "What is God?" Of course, at this stage I was not even concerned with God. Step Two merely suggests belief in a power greater than one's "self." I would have been far better served, it turns out, to have asked him what was meant by "self."

As it was, my first sponsor gave me the old fob, by explaining that "God" in his view was "Good Orderly Direction." Don't get me wrong, my first sponsor thus made A.A. "acceptable" to me. But for ten years after his premature death I chased after getting some kind of "good orderly direction" in my thinking, and the two university degrees and professional training I received culminated in a near-fatal suicide and admittance to a psychiatric facility. This is the power that "self" unchecked can have - without picking up a drink.

I was fortunate, indeed, to have an A.A. "old-timer" - not ironically, my first sponsor's best friend - reach out to me and reclaim me from the ash heap of the life I'd burned through. With a new sponsor, one who had drank after 15 years, and at that time had achieved another 15 years of the very best sobriety, I worked through the Twelve Steps again, this time with a truly open mind. With his assistance, and the later assistance of two 35-year A.A. veterans - one who showed me "what" it was I was in need of, and the other who taught me "how" through meditation and prayer I could find it - my eyes were finally opened, and I was able to experience the spiritual awakening others had experienced.

My mind had been closed by "prejudice" towards all things "spiritual" or "religious." While we are told to "be quick to see where religious people are right," I could not get beyond where they were so clearly wrong.* After all, with my education and scientific background, I knew that dinosaurs had existed, and that all the evidence showed the universe to be about 13.8 billion years old. But I was wholly ignorant of the "religious experiences" that have manifested in individuals since time immemorial, nor was I a believer that just such an experience was what restored alcoholics to sanity and emotional sobriety. I did not know anything of higher states of consciousness (other than being an alcoholic and drug addict for 20 years!), nor did I have any notion of the connection that these higher states of consciousness and being have with spirituality, the God of my understanding, or my recovery from alcoholic addiction and final restoration to sanity. But I was set to learn.

"There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others," wrote the great psychologist, William James, "in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of  happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away."

[Wm. James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," page 47.]

An eternal present. Who would have thought?

Of course, many had. Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman Emperor more famous for his Meditations than his victories on the Teutonic battlefield, pointed out that "all we have to live or lose, is this ever-passing present moment."

Could it be, I wondered, that what science, psychology and religion all point to is a spirituality of the present moment, and that consciousness itself, is an integral (or, perhaps, the integral) component of the universe? Could we be, in fact, as Bill describes above, "spearheads of God's ever advancing Creation?" It sure seems, I found out, that we are.

"At bottom," James observes, "the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether?"

Could I discerningly accept as true whatever science provided evidence for, yet remain unswayed by the "religious" or "spiritual experiences" - including eventually my own - reported by men and women throughout the ages?

"It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one," James points out, "whether one accept the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints. The difference is as great as that between passivity and activity, as that between the defensive and the aggressive mood."

"Gradual as are the steps by which an individual may grow from one state into the other, many as are the intermediate stages which different individuals represent, yet when you place the typical extremes beside each other for comparison, you feel that two discontinuous psychological universes confront you, and that in passing from one to the other a 'critical point' had been overcome."

[Wm. James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," pp. 42-43.]

 For me, it took a crisis in life to get sober. Being close-minded, however, it took a greater crisis deep into my sober life for me to reach the 'critical point' that James referred to before I was restored ('somewhat') to sanity. When sharing my experience, I emphasize the need to set aside prejudices and develop an open mind - the sooner, the better - and to question what concepts such as "self," "sanity" "consciousness" and "a Power greater than ourselves" mean.

"Seek until you find," I was advised by one of my old-timers, "and study all religions until you can see the sameness in them all." Or, as Bill advises in the 'Big Book," "(b)e quick to see where religious people are right."*

* Alcoholics Anonymous, page 87.