Sunday, April 27, 2025

More Promises . . . So Many Promises . . .

"We realize we know only a little.  God will constantly disclose more to you and to us.  See to it that your relationship with God is right, and great events will come to pass for you and countless others.  This is the Great Fact for us."

I have a young friend in my morning meeting who is trying to settle into a career.  She left a job selling alcohol to one selling energy drinks, a more appropriate position, granted, but she didn't enjoy the new work and decided to take an offer with a milk company not long after leaving her first job.  I relate to this Need for Speed, this desire to get more of what I want and avoid more of what is painful.  My  problem is that after I've prayed and meditated on a decision or action, after I've talked to friends and sponsors and trusted advisors, after writing about the choice I'm facing, I sometimes mistake my spiritual fitness - my perceived spiritual fitness - with some misguided guarantee that I'm going to get what I want and avoid what I don't want.  

Shee-it.  That's not how spirituality works.

Friday, April 25, 2025

The Bludgeoning

Faced with alcoholic destruction, we soon become as open-minded on spiritual matters as we had tried to be on other questions.  In this respect alcohol was a great persuader.  It finally beat us into a state of reasonableness.

Thirty eight years of meetings and I've never heard anyone say: "Everything in my life was great: wife loved me, kids worshipped me, superstar at work, plenty of money and a nice place to live, no troubles with the law outside of an occasional parking ticket . . . . what the hell - I think I'll go to Alcoholics Anonymous." We have been beaten into a state of reasonableness. We do not come into The Rooms on a winning streak.


Beat: Strike repeatedly and violently so as to hurt or injure, typically with an implement such as a whip or a club. (Ed. Note: I thought an implement was like a spatula or stir stick. Apparently it can also be a club for beating alcoholics.)


So it is by circumstance rather than by any virtue that we have been driven to A.A.  Chances are that the alcoholic has become convinced that he has more problems than alcohol, and that some of these refuse to be solved by all the sheer personal determination and courage he can muster.  A dependence on a higher power was their chief source of strength.


We were in a position where life was becoming impossible and if we had passed into the region from which there is no return through human aid, we had but two alternatives: one was to go on to the bitter end, blotting out the consciousness of our intolerable situation as best we could, and the other, to accept spiritual help.


To be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not always easy alternatives to face. 


Under the lash of alcoholism . . .  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.


Death or spirituality? THIS is a difficult choice?! We really ARE hardheads.


Recovering alcoholic: "Okay, here are your options. Keep drinking and end up dead, in jail, or a mental institution or accept some kind of spiritual assistance." Newcomer (long pause): "Can I get back to you on that?" Yeah, we're not the sharpest tacks in the box.


Why don’t you try some more controlled drinking?


Absolutely unable to stop drinking on the basis of self-knowledge.


We alcoholics have lost the ability to control our drinking.  We know that no alcoholic ever recovers control.


However intelligent we may have been in other respects, wherever alcohol has been involved, we have been strangely insane.


Most of us have tried everything. Everything. Whatever you're thinking of trying that will enable you to keep drinking and drinking responsibly someone here has tried out. You're probably out of options but go ahead . . . try something else.


Someone who knew what he was talking about once remarked that pain was the touchstone of all spiritual progress.


Thursday, April 24, 2025

I Wish . . . I Wish . . .

 As I was going up the stair,                                                                                                                           I met a man who wasn’t there.                                                                                                                  He wasn’t there again today.                                                                                                                       I wish, I wish he’d stay away.

This is me.  I'm a nursery rhyme.  I'm mad at people who aren't there and then I don't want them to come back and this makes perfect sense to me.



No, Seriously, I'm Not God?

 No man, we saw, could believe in God and defy him, too.  Belief meant reliance, not defiance. 

Defiance is an outstanding characteristic of alcoholics. (Editor's Note: I love the use of the word "outstanding." It almost sounds like we're praising our defiance. "Good job, Seaweed. Outstanding defiance.")

Much to our relief, we discovered we did not need to consider another’s conception of God.

Reliance: Confident or trustful dependence.

Defiance: Bold disobedience; open defiance.

We do talk a lot about God. We do allow everyone to come up with a Higher Power in whatever shape, guise, or form that makes sense to them. We do make it hard to argue about why it's impossible to come up with a working Higher Power. We are irritating as hell a lot of the time.

In belaboring the sins of some religious people, we could feel superior to all of them.  Moreover, we could avoid looking at some of our own shortcomings.  This, of course, is the process by which instinct and logic always seek to bolster egotism, and so frustrate spiritual development.


We saw them meet and transcend their other pains and trials.  We saw them calmly accept impossible situations, seeking neither to run or recriminate. 


There are many, many references in the literature to our tendency to lump people into overly broad categories, to stereotype them. In any group you're going to find people in the middle and people lurking on the dark edges. If you want to find a reason to reject something you'll find a reason. The task is to find the good and set aside the bad, whatever your definitions of those categories might be. Quit focusing on the negative and start accentuating the positive. Which is a song, I think.


Knowledge was all-powerful.  Intellect could conquer nature.  Since we were brighter than most folks (so we thought) we could float above other people on our intellect alone. 

The first requirement is that we be convinced that any life run on self-will can hardly be a success.


How persistently we claim the right to decide all by ourselves just what we shall think and just how we shall act.  We are certain that our intelligence, backed by willpower, can rightly control our inner lives and guarantee success in the world we live in.  This philosophy of self-sufficiency is not paying off.  Plainly enough, it is a bone-crushing juggernaut whose final achievement is ruin.


Bone-crushing:  Powerful or constricting enough to crush one's bones; extremely painful, troublesome, or costly.

Juggernaut:  A massive inexorable force that crushes anything in it's path; a force considered to be merciless, destructive, and unstoppable.

Ruin:  The state of disintigrating or being destroyed.


Lots of very smart people never get sober.  Lots of people who have achieved a lot in the physical, material sense by working hard and applying their will in a fearsome boa constrictor death grip never get sober.  Lots of people who are too smart and too willful die of their disease.  No one too dumb to get it.




Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Wait a Minute . . . I'm NOT God?

This is the how and why of it.  First of all, we had to quit playing God.  It didn’t work.

We had to fearlessly face the proposition that either God is everything or else He is nothing.  God either is, or He isn't.


For an organization that insists it has a message which is spiritual in nature we do talk an awful lot about God with a capital G. It is a great conundrum. I see the whole God component as the source of recovery for most of us who claim Alcoholics Anonymous as our guiding light while simultaneously being the factor that drives more people away than any other. As a kid who grew up believing in a God I confess to struggling sometimes with this resistance. I get it if someone doesn't want to believe in some kind of official, rules-based God but to deny that there isn't some kind of power greater than my own self designing things or running things or overseeing things strains my credulity from time to time. As a scientist I've studied how the body works in detail and the complexity and beauty of the whole operation astounds me. To think this is somehow random is hard for me to do. But that's just me. I don't even talk in such generalities in a meeting. I don't want to give anyone an excuse to walk away from The Rooms even if I think that the excuses are sometimes flimsy.


Lack of power, that was our dilemma.  Faced with alcoholic destruction, we soon became as open minded on spiritual matters as we had tried to be on other questions.  In this respect alcohol was a great persuader.  It finally beat us into a state of reasonableness.


The minute I stopped fighting or arguing, I could begin to see and feel.  We trust infinite God rather than our finite selves.  We are in the world to play the role God assigns.  Just to the extent that we do as we think he would have us, and humbly rely on him, does he enable us to match calamity with serenity.


Destruction: The action or process of causing so much damage to something that it no longer exists or cannot be repaired.

Calamity: An event causing great and often sudden damage or distress; a disaster.

Beat: Strike repeatedly and violently so as to hurt or injure, often with a club or whip.

Fight: Take part in a violent struggle involving the exchange of physical blows or the use of weapons.

Argue: To express diverging or opposite views, typically in a heated or angry way.


I think I'm just going to let the definitions speak for themselves as a rationale for trying to avoid finding a Higher Power to lean on.


Why can’t we take a specific and troubling dilemma straight to God, and in prayer secure from Him sure and definite answers to our requests?


We have seen A.A.’s ask with much earnestness and faith for God’s explicit guidance on matters ranging all the way from a shattering domestic or financial crisis to correcting a minor personal fault, like tardiness.  The thoughts that seem to come from God are not answers at all.  They prove to be well-intentioned unconscious rationalizations.


I get it that people who fight the concept of a "god" can take a look around and find religious figures who behave in non-godlike ways. It's not hard. There are plenty of flawed people in the world and some of them have a public presence so if you're looking for reasons not to do something you'll be able to find them. Personally, I think most of these folks have good intentions. Personally, I think I have good intentions. I have heard, however, that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.


We discover that we receive guidance for our lives to just about the extent that we stop making demands upon God to give it to us on order and on our terms.






Tuesday, April 22, 2025

An Allergy and An Obsession

 Absolutely unable to stop drinking on the basis of self-knowledge.

The delusion that we are like other people, or presently may be, has to be smashed. 

Why don’t you try some more controlled drinking?


The tyrant alcohol wielded a double-edged sword over us; first we were smitten by an insane urge that condemned us to go on drinking, and then by an allergy of the body that insured we would ultimately destroy ourselves in the process.


. . . their problems pile up on them and become astonishingly hard to solve.


A beloved sponsor once recommended that I ask new people to read The Doctor's Opinion which helps explain what the problem is for alcoholics. We have an "allergy" to alcohol - we react to it in a distorted and exaggerated manner - and we have an "obsession" as well - once we drink our minds are drawn to more alcohol like a moth to a flame. We vaguely understand that we're going to die if we fly into the flame but this fear is overrriden by the desire to drink more. We are not like other people. We are definitely not like other people. We are so not like other people and it's the combination of allergy and obsession that's so confounding. We use the peanut allergy analogy a lot: someone eats some peanuts and has an allergic reaction. Their throat closes, they gasp for air, they almost die. Then . . . they go out to the peanut store and buy several large bags of peanuts in case someone "stops by" and wants to eat peanuts.


. . . so far as alcohol is concerned, self-confidence is no good whatsoever.


He has been convinced that he has more problems than alcohol, and that some of these refuse to be solved by all the sheer personal determination and courage he can muster.

 

The Rooms are full of smart, hard-working men and women who deal with life in perplexing and self-destructive ways.  Most of us find we can't think our way out of this mess.  We can't "buckle down" and solve the condundrum by "working harder" and using our willpower and intellect.  We're smart but we still can't find the inner resources to quit drinking.  It's baffling.  We can't figure it out.  We don't get it.  We're fucking confused as hell.


Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol.  The sensation is so elusive that, while they admit it is injurious, they cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false.


I was anxious, confused child and young adult, drowning in worry and fear, and then I drank some alcohol and the world made sense just like that.  I was relaxed and confident and self-assured.  I was momentarily pissed that the adults had kept this marvelous solution to all of life's problems from me but a little more alcohol solved that resentment right quick.


True:  In accordance with reality.  (How great is THAT definition?)

False:  Incorrect.  (I'm LMAO here.); Not real, but made to look or seem real.




Sunday, April 20, 2025

WAY Too Much Talk About Free Throws

"The Buddha changes his entire way of practice.  He began to nourish and honor his body and spirit.  He remembered that he could rest in the universe rather than fight it.  He realized that awakening is never the product of force but arises through a resting of the heart and an opening of the mind.  There are two parallel tasks in spiritual life.  One is to discover selflessness, the other is to develop a healthy sense of self, to discover what is meant by true self.  Both sides of this apparent paradox must be fulfilled for us to awaken.  We begin to see how our own defenses and the wishes of others have eclipsed a true grounding in our own deepest experience.  Gradually, we can cease to identify with these old patterns and allow for a healthier sense of self."
Jack Kornfield

Paradox:  A seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well-founded or true.

Oh, yeah.  Develop a healthy sense of self while beginning a lifetime devoted to selfless behavior.  Good luck with that.

Here are some thoughts by the Buddha on growing a spiritual practice . . .  

"The Buddha very frequently described spiritual practice as the cultivation of good qualities of heart and character.  Repeated cultivation is a basic principle of most spiritual and meditative paths.  In repeated meditations we can learn how to skillfully let go of fearful or contracted identities.  Whatever we practice we will become.  We can choose to strengthen our courage, loving-kindness, and compassion, evoking them in ourselves through reflection, meditation, attention, and repeated training.

Repeated.  Practice.  Cultivation.  There isn't a lot of sitting still in these concepts.  Rather there's a lot of . . .  well . . .  practice.  Repeated practice.  I played basketball in high school.  I played because I was tall and not because I had any physical qualities that made me a good basketball player.  I couldn't jump very high but I was taller than you so I got the ball a lot.  I also couldn't shoot the basketball what with all of the opposing players slapping at the basketball and shoving me around and putting their hands in my face but I did get fouled a lot because I understood that if I was between you and the basket I either got the basketball or you had to foul me to get to the basketball yourself and this meant Free Throws!  I liked free throws a lot.  No one could fuck with you when you were shooting free throws and I shot a lot of them and I made almost all of them.  Most of the time I had more points from shooting free throws than I did making baskets and this is no small feat because you get two points for scoring a basket but only one for making a free throw.  I'm pretty good at math so I knew I had better not miss too many free throws if I wanted an impressive box score and even then I never had an impressive box score.  Guess what I did when I was in the gym?  I shot a lot of free throws.  I practiced making free throws.

Practice:  The act of doing something regularly or repeatedly in order to increase your skill at doing it.

This is why we call it spiritual practice.  Most of us have lived less than exemplary lives of selfish behavior and most of us find we can't turn around this kind of self-centered behavior without a lot of practice.

Get to work, man.