Immediate Cognition

 Instinct:  An intuitive reaction not based on rational conscious thought.

Rational, conscious thought.  Hmmm.  I like that.

Intuition: Immediate cognition without the use of conscious rational processes.

There are so many good hard rock band names here I hardly know where to start but Immediate Cognition is going to be hard to beat.  It sounds like something you'd hear on an old NASA tape as a rocket to the moon reached ignition: "We have immediate cognition."

Reading from Step Four in the 12 & 12 today produced these gems in the first three pages of the Step:

Instincts on Rampage.

Collision of Instincts.

Misdirected Instinct.

"Every time a person imposes his instincts unreasonably on others . . . "

Just rack up those band names.  I mean . . . Instincts on Rampage?  Are you kidding me.  That group would have like five lead guitarists.  If you had a Finnish Death Metal festival in an abandoned nuclear waste cave 2 miles underground you could do worse than leading off with Instincts on Rampage and then having Collision of Instincts and Misdirected Instinct follow them wham, bam, thank you, ma'am.  

Whenever I read about the alcoholic and his or her instincts I'm always struck by the tension between these instincts that all of us have - for sex, money, and prestige - and the overwrought application of these instincts in the average active alcoholic.  It's not that the instincts are bad but that we take them out to the Nth degree and we do it on both sides of the fucking degree.  We hoard money or we waste it.  We act like sluts and then we act like monks.  It's never in between with us.  Reading this Step always reminds me that when I came into A.A. I felt like I didn't have the basic tool kit for life that most of you seemed to possess.  I didn't get it.  I didn't get anything.  I was totally lost.

Well, that's what this literature is for.  It's the toolkit.  It contains the instructions.