Reducing Ego at Depth through Accurate Self-Survey

Why the necessity of taking both an initial and a continuing moral inventory? Principally, it is because we manufacture our own troubles and problems. "They arise out of ourselves, and the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn't think so." Indeed, the troubles and problems of most individuals - alcoholic addicts and so-called "normal" people alike - are mostly self-manufactured.

"It is a man's own internal defects which often contrive against him and which show their faces in many of the external troubles that beset him," observes philosopher and spiritual sage, Paul Brunton. "Yet it is hard for him to accept this truth because his whole life-habit is to look outwards to construct defensive alibis rather than to engage in censorious self-inquisition."

[Brunton, "The Notebooks of Paul Brunton," Vol. 1, p. 137.]

Does this sound familiar?

"(T)he aspirant who is really earnest about the (spiritual) quest," observes Brunton, "should develop the attitude that his personal misfortunes, troubles and disappointments must be traced back to his own weaknesses, defects, faults, deficiencies and indisciplines. Let him not blame them on other persons or on fate. In this way he will make the quickest progress whereas by self-defending, or self-justifying, or self-pitying apportionment of blame to causes outside himself, he will delay or prevent it. For the one means clinging to the ego, the other means giving it up. Nothing is to be gained by such flattering self-deception while much may be lost by it." (Emphasis added.)

"Selfishness - self-centeredness! That we think is the root of our troubles. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate. Sometimes they hurt us, seemingly without provocation, but we invariably find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later place us in a position to be hurt."

[Alcoholics Anonymous, page 62.]

Even for the non-alcoholic to make significant spiritual progress, he or she must first practice a rigorous self-survey, according to Brunton, not seeking to blame others, but instead facing how his or her troubles originate in the egoic, self and its distorted perceptions of the world and other people.

"He must bring himself to admit frankly that he himself is the primary cause of most of his ills, as well as the secondary cause of some of the ills of others. He must recognize that the emotions of resentment, anger, self-pity, or despondency are often engendered by a wounded ego. Instead of reviling fate at each unfortunate event, he should ananlyse his moral and mental make-up and look for the weaknesses which led to it. He will gain more in the end by mercilessly accusing his own stubbornness in pursuing wrong courses than by taking shelter in alibis that censure other people. Like a stone in a shoe which he stubbornly refuses to remove, the fault still remains in his character when he stubbornly insists on blaming things or condemning people for it. In this event, the chance to eliminate it is lost, and the same dire consequences may repeat themselves in his life again.

[Brunton, supra.]

For those who have done multiple Fourth Step and Tenth Step inventories, and particularly for those who have been on the receiving end of another alcoholic addict sharing his or her Fifth Step, it soon becomes clear just how universal and impersonal the human ego is. Indeed, it can rightly be portrayed as a "false self" - an attitude and identity that is manufactured and/or adopted rather than developed organically. It is only by painful yet accurate self-survey that we may confront and overcome both the supposed "realities" the ego presents to us, and the power its distorted way of "seeing" things holds over us.

"The faith of the lower ego in itself and the strength with which it clings to its own standpoint are almost terrifying to contemplate," Brunton observes. "The (spiritual) aspirant is often unconscious of its selfishness. But if he can desert its standpoint, he shall see that his miserable fate derives largely from his own miserable faults. He is naturally unwilling (at first) to open his eyes to his own deficiencies and faults, his little weaknesses and large maladjustments. So suffering comes to open his eyes for him, to shock and shame him into belated awareness and eventual amendment."

"But quite apart from its unfortunate results in personal fortunes, whenever the aspirant persists in taking the lower ego's side," Brunton notes, "he merely displays a stubborn resolve to hinder his own spiritual development. Behind a self-deceiving facade of pretexts, excuses, alibis and rationalizations, the ego is forever seeking to gratify its unworthy feelings or to defend them. . . . The aspirant must choose between denying his ego's aggressiveness or asserting it. The distance to be mentally travelled between these two steps is so long and so painful that it is understandable why few will ever finish it. It is only the exceptional student who will frankly admit his faults and earnestly work to correct them. It is only he whose self-criticizing detachment can gain the upper hand, who can also gain philosophy's highest prize."

[Brunton, supra.]

Remember! "At some of these we balked. We thought we could find an easier, softer way. But we could not. With all the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us have tried to hold onto our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely."

[Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 58.]

Thus, despite the oft-time bitter and painful nature of radical self-survey, those who persist in taking a fearless and thorough moral inventory are those who overcome the egoic self, and those for whom the full promises of Alcoholics Anonymous become a reality. Beyond the ego, lies true emotional sobriety.

The Birth of a Spiritual Experience

Regarding the taking of Step Five, the author of the 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous suggests that it is at this point in our recovery, when we share our moral inventory with another human being and the God of our own understanding, that we really begin to 'experience' the spiritual awakening which will relieve our alcoholism. At page 75 of the 'Big Book,' the author observes:

"We pocket our pride and go to it, illuminating every twist of character, every dark cranny of the past. Once we have taken this step withholding nothing, we are delighted. We can look the world in the eye. We can be alone at perfect peace and ease. Our fears fall away from us. We begin to feel the nearness of our Creator. We may have had certain spiritual beliefs, but now we begin to have a spiritual experience. (Emphasis added.)

 For those who may have already experienced a certain grace in their recovery, as well as those who have just doggedly pursued their path of recovery by working the Steps, it is at Step Five, we are told, that our spiritual beliefs (and I would add faith) are turned into a palpable spiritual experience.

Why is this so? I would suggest that before taking Step Five, our minds are awash with the fears, resentments and remorse that characterize the content of the ego, or "self." Afterwards, freed of this mental baggage, we can (as is foretold, above) "be alone at perfect peace and ease." "Peace" and "ease" being the characteristics of the higher, God-consciousness of our authentic "Self," rather than the smaller "self" of merely ego-centric consciousness. It is at this point where "the ideas, emotions and attitudes" which were heretofore the guiding forces of our lives may be "cast to one side" and replaced with "new conceptions and motives." (Alcoholics Anonymous, page 27.)

Before Step Five, my resentments, fears, and the remorse I experienced when thinking of past peccadilloes, were wholly my own affair. My greatest hope was that nobody would find out about them, much less confront me with them. After having shared these closely held anguishing thoughts and memories with my sponsor, I gained a certain perspective on my all-too-human condition, and was thus able to move forward to make the amends necessary to solidify my newfound sense of peace and ease.

This is not to say that all resentments, remorse and fear were at once removed, but I became more readily able to see them for what they really are, the thought-stuff of the ego that separates me from everyone and everything. Knowing this, it has become far easier to dismiss such thoughts (and the ensuing emotions they produce) as the merely mental tricks of my smaller self. And, in some instances, the only times when I ever think of certain past actions that once haunted me, it is to help another person struggling with the same levels of shame, remorse, anger and fear that these old thoughts once produced in me.

Step Five was thus, without my knowing it at the time, the beginning of spiritual experience, the beginning of my living - however falteringly and slow - a life of the spirit, rather than a life of mere spiritual belief. And by working the 12 Steps on a daily basis I am enabled to grow within, yet never outgrow, this experience.

Ill-Advised, Yet Effective, Advice: "Don't Drink and Go to Meetings"

To "just keep coming back," to go to "ninety meetings in ninety days," or to simply heed the advice "don't drink and go to meetings" is good, in and of itself, but it is no guarantor that the newcomer to A.A. will survive in sobriety, or stay sober at all. Such well-intentioned advice - dangerous as it is on its face - may, however, backhandedly trigger the presumably intended effect: it may prompt the newcomer to hang around and stay sober long enough to actually take the 12 Steps, if for no other reason than so that he or she may truly feel a part of A.A. And taking the 12 Steps, as so many of us can attest, may save his or her life. The danger, however, lies in giving such seemingly harmless advice to someone who may lackadaisically and discontentedly hang around the A.A. fellowship for years, never really working the A.A. program and never really recovering. He or she, in turn, becomes the person who is most likely to dish out the only partially effective advice above. Worse still, such a "white-knuckler" may actively recruit other disaffected newcomers and actually sponsor them.

"There is a widely held belief in A.A.," writes the author of the "Member's Eye View" pamphlet, "that if a newcomer will simply continue to attend meetings, "Something will finally rub off on you." And the implication, of course, is that the something which rubs off will be (the) so-called miracle of A.A. "

"Now there is no doubt, in my mind," he points out, "that many people in A.A. accept this statement quite literally. I have observed them over the years. They faithfully attend meetings faithfully waiting for "something to rub off." The funny part about it is that "something" is rubbing off on them. Death. They sit there - week after week - while mental, spiritual and physical rigor mortis sets in."

"I believe." he notes, "(that) the real "miracle of A.A.," the "something" that will rub off, we hope, is simply the alcoholic's willingness to act."

"In A.A.," our anonymous reporter explains, "the reporting is clear and unmistakable. "Here are the steps we took," say those who have gone before. The newcomer finally sees that he, too, must take these Steps before he is entitled to report on them. And in an atmosphere where the constant subject is "What I did" and "What I think," no neurotic can long resist the temptation to get in on the action. In an organization whose members are always secretly convinced that they are unique, no neurotic is long going to be contented with a report of what others are doing."

"The 12 Steps are so framed and presented," he points out, "that the alcoholic can either ignore them completely, take them cafeteria-style, or embrace them wholeheartedly. In any case, he can report only on what he has done. Till he does, he knows that he is more a guest at A.A. than a member, and this is a situation that is finally intolerable to the alcoholic. He must take at least some of the Steps or go away. In my opinion, this is the answer to what finally rubs off on the waiting, inactive, hostile A.A. member, and also the answer to why it happens."

"Don't leave before the miracle happens," - another trite saying heard around the rooms of A.A. - may be a more fitting way of putting it; the "miracle" being a willingness to work the Steps and therein find much-needed relief and the common solution to our common problem.

Unlearning Old Ideas and Attitudes

One of the unique, paradoxical aspects of Alcoholics Anonymous (and its sister organizations) is "the reversal of form that A.A.'s educational process takes." As one wizened old-timer demonstrated to me - undoubtedly paraphrasing the "Member's Eye View" pamphlet - there is nothing to learn in A.A., it is a process of unlearning; particularly unlearning our old "ideas, emotions and attitudes" so that new "conceptions and motives" can arise to take their place.

The author of "A Member's Eye View," undoubtedly one of A.A's most helpful pamphlets, puts it this way:

"The newcomer to A.A. is asked, not so much to learn new values, as to unlearn those he comes in with; not so much to adopt new goals, as to abandon old ones."

"To my mind," he notes, "one of the most significant sentences in the entire book "Alcoholics Anonymous" is this: "Some of us tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely." The rigidity with which even some nondrinking alcoholics will cling to the opinions, beliefs, and convictions they had upon entering A.A. is well-nigh incredible."

"One of the major objectives of A.A. therapy," he points out, "is to help the alcoholic finally recognize these ideas and become willing to relinquish his death grip on them."

It was Albert Einstein who famously said that "we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them." The newcomer to A.A. is unlikely to stay clean and sober for long unless she is able to find some relief from the punishing self-centered, ego-centric thinking that is the root problem of her alcoholic addiction. It is therefore incumbent upon us to help him or her recognize egoic thinking by sharing our stories about what it was like, what happened, and what it is like now, emphasizing the changes we have experienced mentally and emotionally as we worked the Steps, and perhaps reserving how we have changed spiritually until he or she is convinced we know what we are talking about. Not all alcoholic addicts necessarily drink the same, but certainly they think the same.

The great psychologist, Carl Jung, in explaining to Rolland H. the nature of the spiritual awakening that had periodically worked to relieve the sufferer of his alcoholism, observed:

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

[Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 27.]

Now, however, we know that not all such awakenings need be sudden and overwhelming, that they can, in fact, be what William James called awakenings "of the educational variety." Therefore, first and foremost, it is necessary for us to allow the newcomer an opportunity to identify with us, to allow him or her to relate to the way in which we drank, thought and suffered, and then, and only then, to present him or her with the spiritual solution we have found to our drinking (and thinking) problem. After all, "As a man thinketh, so he is."

Power, Coercion and Acceptance

In yet another paradox, the first half of Step One - the admittance that we are alcoholic - is perhaps the easiest one to take, yet admitting (and acting like one has admitted) that our lives "have become unmanageable" - the second half of Step One - is perhaps the most difficult of all. After all, from our earliest years on, we have been taught by our society and culture that life needs to be managed, and managed well - or else!

The great analogy of the alcoholic as "the actor" who insists on running all of the show, including, lights, scenery, ballet etc., is startlingly apt when we consider it deeply and see that it addresses the second half of Step One explicitly and directly.

"Most people try to live by self-propulsion," we read on page 60 of the 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous. "Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show, is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way. If only his arrangements would stay put, if only people would do as he wished, the show would be great. Everybody, including himself, would be pleased. Life would be wonderful. In trying to make these arrangements our actor may sometimes be quite virtuous. He may be kind, considerate, patient, generous, even modest and self-sacrificing. On the other hand, be may be mean, egotistical, selfish and dishonest. But as with most humans, he is more likely to have varied traits.

"What," we are asked, "Usually happens? The show doesn't come off very well. He begins to think that life doesn't treat him will. He decides to exert himself more. He becomes on the next occasion, still more demanding or gracious, as the case may be. Still the play does not suit hum. Admitting he may be somewhat at fault, he is sure that other people are more to blame. He becomes angry, indignant, self-pitying. What is his basic trouble? Is he not a self-seeker even when trying to be kind. Is he not a victim of the delusion that he can wrest satisfaction and happiness out of this life if he only manages well? Is it not evident to all the rest of the players that these are the things he wants? And do not his actions make each of them wish to retaliate, snatching all that they can get out of the show? Is he not, even in his best moments, a producer of confusion rather than harmony?

"Our actor is self-centered - ego-centric, as people like to call it today." (Emphasis added.)

Bluntly, or perhaps very, very, subtly, almost everyone of us - alcoholic addict and non-alcoholic addict alike -  try in our own ways to manipulate and shape life in order to satisfy our instinctive drives, staunch our fears, and/or quench our fundamentally unquenchable desires. We in A.A. (or any of its many sister organizations) are very fortunate, indeed, in that we learn that life is inherently unmanageable, it is already organized under a far Higher Power that we often cannot or do not see, and that our task is to accept and adapt ourselves to life, rather than trying to bend it to our own narrow self-interests.

That our futile grabs for power to control the fundamentally unmanageable is all-pervasive, and ultimately futile and frustrating is illustrated in the following passages written by the late, great Sufi teacher, Idries Shah:

"Almost all human organizations," Shah notes, "are power organizations."

"Since the receipt and and exercising of power is imagined to be connected with forceful behaviour," he observes, "people cannot any longer identify a power organization. Consequently they do not understand what they are doing and what is happening to them."

"As an example," he points out, "force and influence are contained in the 'emotional blackmail' situation to exactly the same extent as in one where anger or fothrightness are expressed."

"When people in authority have the reputation for being kind and soft-hearted, others assume (quite wrongly) that the pressure exerted by such people is not pressure at all. If someone says: 'You must do this because I would be disappointed if you did not,' he is saying exactly the same as 'Do this because I demand that you do it.'"

"To say that this fact has been observed already is of no importance whatever, because something which has been said or observed and not acted upon is as good as non-existent as a lesson."

"People try to exercise power upon those 'below' them," he notes. "But people upon whom power is supposed to being exercised are, in fact, by frustrating the effect of that power, themselves exercising power."

"Power situations can only exist," Shah observes, "where there is a contract arrived at violently or otherwise, in which people will do things or else things can be made uncomfortable for them. 'Do this or I will make you uncomfortable' is the formula for both types of power: the power exerted by people above on those below, and the power exerted from the people below upon those above."

"Where there is no such contract," he notes, "where one party can do without the other, NO POWER SITUATION CAN EXIST. Neither can it be deemed to exist. But, faced with a situation in which there is no power ingredient, people CONTINUE TO BEHAVE AS IF THEY CAN COERCE OR BE COERCED."

"In doing this," Shah points out, (people) give themselves away. To any observer who is aware of the power phenomenon, they clearly show that they belong to the power structure and want to operate it. They generally become furiously angry when this is pointed out to them.

[Idries Shah,"Knowing How to Know," pp. 79-80.]

At Step Three, we make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Him. Yet, how often when we are in a situation where there is no effective power that we can personally exert ("a situation in which there is no power ingredient," to use Shah's terminology) do we act as if there is some personal power we can exert to change things? How many of us lean on the horn to let out our frustrations when stuck in slow traffic? How many seethe inwardly or act rudely when forced to wait at the checkout counter as a clerk checks the price of some item or another? How many of us are judgmental and inwardly self-righteous when they see people doing things that they assure themselves they would never do? Almost all of us, I am sure.

Having nominally accepted our personal powerlessness to manage life, and having done (we assure ourselves) our best to turn our will and our lives over to the care of a Power greater than ourselves, we continue to forget our personal inability to manage life and, in accordance with Khan's analysis, we continue to behave as is we can coerce others to bend to our will, or we ourselves continue to be coerced to bend to the will of others.

Accepting the inherent unmanageability of life, and turning our will and our lives over to the care of the God of our understanding - and leaving it there - are ideals that take both great insight and years of practice to even approach.

Overcoming the Paradox of "Self"

Anyone familiar with 12 Step living has undoubtedly noted the many paradoxical concepts that underlie it: the need to surrender in order to win, coming to A.A, because of our drinking only to find out that drinking is not the problem but a symptom of the problem, how sharing our story with another helps us irrespective of whether it helps the other, etc.

Nowhere are the deep paradoxes underlying our program more apparent, however, than they are when we come to believe "in a Power greater than ourselves" only to find "the Great Reality deep down within us." Solving this "paradox of the self" is, I believe, the key that unlocks our understanding of the 12 Steps, and encourages us in our quest to attain and then "improve our conscious contact with God as we (understand) Him."

Merriam-Webster's dictionary has two germane definitions of "self" that lie at the heart of this paradox. Most commonly, "self" is defined as "the entire person of an individual." Secondarily, it is defined as "the union of elements (as body, emotions, thoughts, and sensations) that constitute the individuality and identity of a person." It is this latter definition, rather than the former and more common meaning, that is being used when we talk of "self" in reference to the 12 Steps; a definition that is consistent with the way that the concept of "ego" is also used in the 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous, not as "pride" but as "the self, especially as contrasted with another self or the world." (The Oxford English Dictionary, has another, more helpful definition of "ego," defining it as "the part of the mind that reacts to reality and has a sense of individuality.")

I suspect that many newcomers (and even old-timers) are somewhat stymied in their spiritual development, as I was, because of this underlying confusion as to what is meant when Step Two talks "about a Power greater than ourselves." It sounds like this Power is something exterior to us, rather than a Power that is actually within us, albeit a Power which is obscured by the self/ego and the "calamity. pomp and worship of other things" that are the thought stuff of the self/ego complex.

The 'Big Book' explicitly states (at page 45) that "lack of power" was our dilemma, and that we need "to find a power by which we could live, and that it had to be a Power greater than ourselves." Then it states that "how" and "where" to find such a Power is "exactly" what the 'Big Book' is all about. The "how," I put to you, is through taking the 12 Steps and applying them to one's life, while the "where" is deep down within one's being. In other words, we are not looking externally for a "God of our own understanding," but internally.

Consider the following passage taken from the middle paragraphs from page 55 of the 'Big Book':

". . . (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. . . . 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."

Consider, also, if you will, the following passage taken from Appendix II of the 'Big Book' (i.e., the Spiritual Experience appendix):

"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 this awareness of a Power greater than ourselves is the essence of spiritual experience. Our more religious members call it "God-consciousness."" (Emphasis added.)

From the above, it should be clear that we are not looking for some entity that is wholly exterior to us, but rather for a broad yet heretofore hidden aspect of our very being, that wholeness of our being beyond the limited and limiting egoic self which is co-extensive with God.

At page 53 of the 'Big Book' we are shown how "crushed by a self-imposed crisis we could not postpone or evade, we had to fearlessly face the proposition that God is everything or else he is nothing. God either is, or He isn't."

By looking outside of our being, instead of looking at our being beneath the limiting self of the ego, we are in essence saying that God is not everything. We exclude ourselves from God and create a false duality that cannot be overcome. It is only in looking deep within our being (mainly through meditation, but also through self-examination and prayer) that we find our own God-consciousness, and come to the realization that we are an integral component of all that is.

And by acting in accordance with - and from the place of - this newfound God-consciousness, we are finally able to rightly align ourselves with the world and its inhabitants, and to overcome the necessary suffering caused by the self/ego complex and thinking - a feeling and a feat we had only been previously able to do under the influence of booze and/or drugs when, and if, they still worked for us.

Acceptance: An Old Take On a New Perspective

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

[Alcoholics Anonymous, page 417.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stealing a Little Vicarious Pleasure

"In our belief any scheme of combating alcoholism which proposes to shield the sick man from temptation is doomed to failure. If the alcoholic tries to shield himself he may succeed for a time, but he usually winds up with a bigger explosion than ever. We have tried these methods. These attempts to do the impossible have always failed."

"So our rule is not to avoid a place where there is drinking, if we have a legitimate reason for being there. That includes bars, nightclubs, dances, receptions, weddings, even plain ordinary whoopee parties. To a person who has had experiences with an alcoholic, this may seem like tempting Providence, but it isn't."

"You will note that we made an important qualification. Therefore, ask yourself on each occasion, "Have I any good social, business, or personal reason for going to this place? Or am I expecting to steal a little vicarious pleasure from the atmosphere of such places?" If you answer these questions satisfactorily, you need have no apprehension. Go or stay away, whichever seems best. But be sure that you are on solid spiritual ground before you start and that your motive in going is thoroughly good."

-- Alcoholics Anonymous, pp. 101-102--

Here, Bill W., the principal author of the 'Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, makes not one, but two, important qualifications for the alcoholic addict exposing him or herself to their old stomping grounds, so to speak. First: Is there a legitimate reason for our being at that particular bar, party, reception etc.? And, second: Are we spiritually grounded before we expose ourselves to our old environs? (Remember, as it says on page 85 of the 'Big Book,' "We are never cured of alcoholism. What we have is a daily reprieve contingent upon the maintenance of our spiritual condition.")

When reading the caution, above, I am always reminded of Bill's description of the night in Akron when, in desperation and fearing that he was about to succumb and take a drink, he reached out to make contact with the Oxford Group, and to find through them a drunk - who turned out to be Dr. Bob - with whom he could share his story.

Bill often described how he paced the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel, disheartened by a business deal that had for the moment cratered, listening to the sound of laughter and merriment drifting out of the hotel bar. He thought he might have a ginger ale, or perhaps a drink or two; his thinking being that then he would not have to spend a weekend alone with himself and his thoughts of failure and despair. Thankfully, at the other end of the lobby there was a list of local ministers and a payphone he could use to try and do what would eventually become known as "Twelfth Step work." After several dead ends, he connected with a Reverend Tonks, and through him, Henrietta Sieberling, and eventually through her, Dr. Bob. If Bill had succumbed and gone in to the bar, perhaps just to have a ginger ale and "to steal a little vicarious pleasure," I know that my life, and that of millions of others would have been radically different.

I also remember an A.A. acquaintance who had been through the ringer, but was sober a few precious months and was a regular attendee at all our local morning and evening meetings. His name was Al, and he would always say, "I'm still Al, and I'm still an alcoholic!" One morning he confidently shared how after finishing the part-time job he held, he was stopping at the local bar to read his newspaper and have a ginger ale. After the meeting, I shared with him the advice about having a legitimate reason for being in a tavern etc., and how if he was just there to soak up the vibrations, it probably wasn't a good idea. That was the last any of us saw of him. He undoubtedly died drunk, as it was clear that he didn't have another shot left in him.

When I was new in A.A., I was told by the old-timers, "Hang around the barbershop long enough and sooner or later you are going to get a haircut." It's advice well-founded through long experience, and it has served me well for years. I do not shy away from pubs, parties and receptions so long as I'm spiritually fit and have a legitimate reason to be there. But I've found that hanging out at a coffee shop with friends, or going to a meeting, is a far better place "to steal a little vicarious pleasure," or to outright enjoy myself.