Beyond the 'Big Book' . . . Beyond the 'Inner Dialogue' . . . Beyond the Confines of the 'Self'

The 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous is, of course, our most valuable resource in early recovery, offering, as it does, a complete guide for rapidly taking the newcomer through the Twelve Steps so that he or she may be released from active alcohol addiction. But how effective is it, in and of itself, for working with the "alcoholic who still suffers" years (and, perhaps, many years) into sobriety as he or she continues to struggle, not with the obsession over alcohol, but with "the bondage of self"?

Realistically, there are many within the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous (and its sister organizations), and many returning to these rooms sober, whose spiritual experiences have not been so "deep and effective" as to relieve them from the obsessive nature of the mind. There are those, too, who have had illuminating spiritual experiences only to fall from such spiritual heights and who continue to struggle to recapture what they once had. These are the "still suffering" alcoholic addicts with minds that no longer obsess over alcohol but, rather, minds that obsess about the ordinary human trials and tribulations of life - the instinctive drives for security, sex and society - in their many varieties. The 'Big Book' is necessarily silent about such men and women, as it was written so early in the experience of the then-recovering alcoholics.

Bill Wilson thought that perhaps the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions would help those, like himself, "who had begun to run into life's lumps in other areas than alcohol." Indeed, a decade or so into his own sobriety, when he wrote the second book, "he was suffering almost constant depression and was forced to confront the emotional and spiritual demons that remain 'stranded' in the alcoholic psyche." ("Pass It On," pages 352 and 356.)

"The problem of the alcoholic centers in his mind," we read in the 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous. Thus, for the alcoholic addict who is "still suffering" in sobriety, it is crucial that he or she comes to terms with the self-centered nature of ordinary human consciousness. That is, he or she must transcend the "egoic self" in order to experience the inner quiet and peace that is inherent to our nature. To do so, however, it is first necessary, that he or she recognize and then learn to let go of the mechanical and learned nature of our 'ordinary' self-centered thinking.

As spiritual teacher and author, William Holden recently blogged on The Huffington Post:

". . . (A)wakening to our original enlightened nature involves interrupting the ordinary flow of linear, language-based, thinking so that we can rediscover "the mind within the mind". Focusing on external circumstances or teachings is not what triggers the moment of (spiritual awakening), in other words. Rather, it is focusing on the absence of internal commentary. Because it is impossible to "think" without words, this practice of stopping the flow of running commentary on our lives involves cultivating a mindset of no-thought (wu-nien) in an attempt to experience each moment as it is without silently talking to ourselves about it."

In the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (at page 98) Bill W. points out that a logically interrelated practice of "self-examination, meditation and prayer" will, in effect, allow the practitioner to access the hidden depths of our being, yielding him or her "an unshakeable foundation" for spiritual living. The Twelve Steps are designed to let us practice this spiritual methodology effectively.

The "maintenance of our spiritual condition" (and with it the ability to move beyond the small and suffering 'self') if practiced over time is the solution to the real problem of the alcoholic addict, the problem centered in his or her mind. It is a solution that all spiritual and religious traditions point to (as outlined in the audio clip, attached below), a solution that moves the alcoholic addict beyond his or her "painful inner dialogue."

If the alcoholic addict still suffering in sobriety is to "move beyond the confines of mere rationalism" and overcome the obsessive nature of the mind, and the problems in life which it presents, he or she may be well advised to look beyond the 'Big Book' and more deeply into the many and varied spiritual and religious paths that complement the Twelve Steps. This may require moving even beyond the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions and other A.A. literature, and further into the realm of the spirit, being quick to see where religious people may be right and making "use of what they to offer: 'Big Book,' page 87.

Love and the Eleventh Step Prayer

"Be the captive of Love in order that you may be truly free - free from coldness and the worship of self. Thousands have passed who were wise and learned but who were strangers to Love. No name is left of them, nothing to proclaim their fame and dignity or to relate their history in the march of time. Although you may attempt to do a hundred things in this world, only Love will give you release from the bondage of yourself."

-- Jami --
("Essential Sufism," p. 115.)

 "When we became alcoholics, crushed by a self-imposed crisis we could not postpone or evade," we read in the 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous (at page 53), "we had to fearlessly face the proposition that either God is everything or else He is nothing. God either is, or He isn't. What was our choice to be?"

If we truly wish to be relieved of the "bondage of self," we must humbly take the position that God is, indeed, everything - that everything we perceive proceeds from, is, and is of, God. This position of non-duality allows us to truly embrace Step Three. We can be assured that our lives (and the world) are all part of a Unitive Whole that mystics, teachers and sages from all the world's great wisdom traditions have identified with a Power greater than themselves.

The great teacher of mystical Islam, the Sufi poet Jami, (above), like the Scriptures, equates this Higher Power with 'Love.' Thus, it is no mere coincidence that in our Eleventh Step Prayer (i.e., the Prayer of Saint Francis, a man profoundly influenced by Sufi teachings) we pray: "Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted - to understand, than to be understood - to love, than to be loved."

Simple on its face, this aspiration is profound in its implications. It is an appeal to have our narrow self-consciousness lifted to an entire new plane - that of a transcendental Love, without conditions or even objects. "For," we affirm, "it is by self-forgetting that one finds. It is by dying (to self, or the ego) that one awakens to Eternal Life."

To love, in the sense meant by Jami, St. Francis, and so many other saints, sages and spiritual teachers, is to truly turn one's will and one's life over to the power of God as we understand Him, to die to self and awaken to the Eternal Self that is the core of our inner existence, to die before dying.

Am I truly ready to take this greatest leap of faith, to truly put aside once and for all reliance on my own narrow self-will? This, it seems, is the central question of recovery, recovery from all of our addictions and from our obsessive, self-centered, lower consciousness.

Forgiveness and Making Amends 101

I found the following passage in Richard Carlson's "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff . . . and its all small stuff," a pithy little book of practical spiritual wisdom. Dealing with reaching out and making amends for so-called "normal people," the topic is doubly applicable to the alcoholic addict for whom addressing resentments effectively and making amends are spiritual imperatives upon which the whole of recovery hinges.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Be the First One to Act Loving or Reach Out

So many of us hold on to little resentments that may have stemmed from an argument, a misunderstanding, the way we were raised, or some other painful event. Stubbornly, we wait for someone else to reach out to us - believing this is the only way we can forgive or rekindle a friendship or family relationship.

An acquaintance of mine, whose health isn't very good, recently told me that she hasn't spoken to her son in almost three years. "Why not?" I asked. She said that she and her son had had a disagreement about his wife and that she wouldn't speak to him unless he called first. When I suggested she be the first one to reach out, she resisted initially and said, "I can't do that. He's the one who should apologize." She was literally willing to die before reaching out to her only son. After a little gentle encouragement, however, she did decide to be the first one to reach out. To her amazement, her son was grateful for her willingness to call and offered an apology of his own. As is usually the case when someone takes the chance and reaches out, everyone wins.

Whenever we hold on to our anger, we turn "small stuff" into really "big stuff" in our minds. We start to believe that our positions are more important than our happiness. They are not. If you want to be a more peaceful person you must understnad that being right is almost never more important than allowing yourself to be happy. The way to be happy is to let go, and reach out. Let other people be right. This doesn't mean that you're wrong. Everything will be fine. You'll experience the peace of letting go, as well as the joy of letting others be right. You'll also notice that, as you reach out and let others be "right," they will become less defensive and more loving toward you. They might even reach back. But, if for some reason they don't, that's okay too. You'll have the inner satisfaction of knowing that you have done your part to create a more loving world, and certainly you'll be more peaceful yourself.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

The passage above illustrates some truisms: (a) that most of us have a compelling, yet unexamined, need to be right, (b) that some people would rather die than reach out and make amends, (c) that reaching out to make amends most usually heals distorted relationships, and (d) that, even if it doesn't, making amends wherever possible will nevertheless give peace of mind to the person who reaches out and makes the effort.

"The alcoholic is like a tornado roaring his way through the lives of others," we read in the 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous. "Hearts are broken. Sweet relationships are dead. Affections have been uprooted. Selfish and inconsiderate habits have kept the home in turmoil. We feel a man is unthinking when he says that sobriety is enough."

Forgiving others for harm done, and then reaching out lovingly to make amends for where we have been at fault are first but necessary steps in cleaning up after such "tornado damage." A lifetime of work may remain to fully rebuild some shattered relationships, but "clearing away the wreckage of our past" is a necessity if we are ever to begin reconstruction.

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.)

Our Life's Contribution: To Comfort, Understand and Love

Ego deflation at depth as a result of spiritual awakening, the "dying to self" of our Eleventh Step prayer, is a rebirth of who we are in our essence, a point made clear in the following excerpt from "As Bill Sees It" (via The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions):

Our New Employer

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 or today, tomorrow, or the hereafter. We were reborn.

But just how do we determine what we can contribute to, rather than take from life? Again, the answer is in the Eleventh Step prayer, where we seek "to comfort, rather than be comforted; to understand, rather than to be understood; (and) to love, rather than to be loved." And, like so many of the other paradoxes we find in living a spiritual life, we find that in practicing such principles, we too find that we are comforted, understood and loved. Who would have guessed?

Why Do So Many of Us 'Balk' At Sharing Our Inventory With Others?

Why do so many of us resist the 4th and 5th Steps? Is it because we are ashamed and fearful of what we will find, let alone having to disclose it to "another person?" Are we afraid that if we share what we might find, we will be more alone than ever?

Bill W. insightfully writes in the "Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions" that we tend to suffer from a sense of "anxious apartness."  Ironically, it is this sense of "anxious apartness" which seems to keep us from taking a deep, honest and thorough 4th Step, yet it is precisely this sense of "anxious apartness" that the Fourthth and Fifth Steps are designed to eradicate.

In an insightful, 'must-see video' from Ted.com, one of those 'so-called normal people',  Dr. Brené Brown (a researcher professor at the University of Houston, Graduate College of Social Work), talks about everyone's  sense of connectedness, shame, worthiness, courage and vulnerability. She notes that we are wired biologically for "connectedness, and that"shame" is really "the fear of disconnection," and an almost-universal emotion.

We are afraid, Brown says, that if someone really "saw" us they would find us unworthy of being connected to. The "courageous" among us, however, she says are those who are willing to embrace their vulnerabilies and their fear of being disconnectedness and ostracized if they allow themselves to really "be seen."

Ms. Brown takes us through the story of her intensive research into "shame,"  shares how this research took her into her own dark places, and tells how the resulting nervous "breakdown" led her to her own "spiritual awakening."




The truly "courageous" are those, she observes, who believe (or, presumably 'come to believe') "their vulnerabilities are what make them beautiful."

The video may perhaps be an explanation to those of us going through the 12 Steps for the first time why Alcoholics Anonymous does not suggest but, rather, begs us "to be fearless and thorough from the very start." And, perhaps it will serve others as a reminder that we are not bad people trying to be good, but that we are sick people striving to get well.

Spiritual Awakening: Filling the "Vacuum of the Soul"

Re-reading the March 1971 "A.A. Grapevine" which commemorates the life and passing of Bill Wilson, the man who first formulated the Twelve Steps as we know them today, I am struck by the deep and moving language of the introduction to that volume. The language describes in scant lines the state of perpetual loneliness and suffering Bill and Dr.Bob survived and recovered from, as well as the "new state of consciousness and being" - to use Bill's description from his essay on Step 11 in the "Twelve Steps & Twelve Traditions" - that they discovered within themselves and shared with the world.

Bill is described as having "found eternal peace" on January 24, 1971. I know, however, that he had witnessed such peace long before his passing. A man of the nineteenth-century whose life spanned the formative decades of the twentieth, Bill witnessed supposed scientific "miracles" from the Wright brothers' first flight to man's walking on the moon, events he famously wrote about and speculated upon in the most famous of his many writings.

"Full comprehension" of what Bill and Dr. Bob achieved, says the anonymous writer of this brief introduction, "is difficult to set down in black and white." "Both men," he writes, "filled the vacuums of their own souls with their 'language of the heart,'" which they then passed on to those of us who are willing to seek out the nuances of that most estranged of human dialects. (Emphasis added.) "Each of us," says the anonymous eulogist in this introduction, "in the lonely universe of individual consciousness" - emphasis added, once more - "must reckon what he or she has taken of the gift that the Higher Power gave to Bill and Bob, the gift they shared with us."

And that is the miracle of the Twelve Steps, the miracle of recovery from all addictions and suffering: that it is possible in this lifetime to forego one's egocentric consciousness and fill 'the vacuum of the soul' with the grace of unselfish love, thus emerging from that 'loneliness of individual consciousness' into a shared and unitive G_d-consciousness we each possess.

Bill was first and foremost a man of science before his conversion experience, and he remained a lifelong student of both physics and metaphysics, as well as the human psyche. He was once interviewed by Thomas Edison for a job at Edison's famous lab, and he writes of grappling with the intellectual problems of nuclear physics and "remote propositions" like Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Yet, he was a man of faith who had an experiential knowledge of G_d.

Einstein, who was always metaphysically enigmatic for a scientist (and a professed atheist who nonetheless sought only "the thoughts of God", dismissing all other thoughts as "mere details"), at one point noted that mankind's "greatest delusion" (delusions being concepts all of us in recovery should be eminently familiar with) is that there is "more than one of us". That is a delusion that Bill shattered over and over many times in his lifetime, always demonstrating and writing of the inherent unity of G_d and the "unsuspected inner resource" of G-d-consciousness he described as being "the Great Reality" existing deep down within every one of us.

The great Seiss psychologist, Carl Jung, in his letter to Bill in January of 1961 - a letter Lois Wilson described as her husband's "most treasured possession" - wrote that the alcoholic's "thirst for alcohol" was "on a low level", the thirst of mankind's being for "wholeness: in medieval terms - union with God." During their lives,Bill and Bob learned how to quench their own existential thirsts for wholeness with a unitive and unifying love that broke them out of the "vacuum of their own souls", demonstrating thereby to all of us that "the lonely universe of individual consciousness" is in fact delusionary, that Einstein was again correct, and that there exists a state of grace in which we all abide, irrespective if we are conscious or unconscious to that reality, in which God (and the universe) constitute a unitive, undivided and absolute Whole, devoid of all relativities.

"The measure of our debt," the anonymous eulogist concludes, "is, of course, drawn somewhere near the limits of gratitude itself, in the infinity of love."