Let's review: Only the brokenness of my psyche separates God and my Self. The Solution to egotism isn’t spiritualized egotism. Nor is a god of my own making a higher power. In early 12-stepping, I was unwittingly making those two mistakes. When recovery established itself as part of my spiritual journey, I hadn’t seen my mistakes, and I didn’t realize the extent to which I already had what I needed.
In recovery, we talk about problems, and we make bold to claim they have a solution. The symptoms of OCD, of which I was becoming increasingly conscious, made my attraction to a dualistic God concept worse. Calling out to God, “uplifting the mind and the heart to God” as the traditional definition of prayer states—all of these put God at a distance, made spirituality on some level a reaching for something of which I didn’t—nay, I couldn’t—lay hold. People with OCD are always trying to boil things down to the basics, and I had made God an external authority figure whose machinations were mysteries to be plumbed. My spiritual life, from emotional impulsivity to the constant striving for insight, was my diseased thinking in pious clothing.
However, it seems that even the prayers of a false self, addressed to a false god are heard by the true God, and it began breaking down this self-imposed dichotomy. During my years in the monastery, I felt distant from God. I now see it was because the God I was worshipping was a self-made, ultimately false concept. I had moments of breaking through my own numbness, though, when I would accurately and cathartically foist what I was feeling on the abyss of divine absence, and in those moments all of the noise in my head would go quiet. Hearing dry leaves blowing across the porch outside my cell was a great privilege, especially when I was normally so caught up in my thoughts as to miss that entirely. Those few moments of genuine contemplation gave me the resources to see the ways my self concept and God concept were part of my problem.
I had heard the world, I’d been given moments when the noise of my false-self abated and I was, at least briefly, pure perception. The God that reached out to me then was truly a power greater than myself. This is the God that I still follow. Increasingly, he began to show me that my thoughts about the world were not the world.
When I attended ACA in Charleston, we all took care of one another. I didn’t need a sponsor: there were a good number of people in the group that I trusted to straight talk me.
It stymied me. I was doing all of the things the program told me too, and I was not getting better. I got angrier and angrier at God, more and more disillusioned with the 12 steps. Back in Charleston, I had made as “searching and fearless” a moral inventory as I could. I met with a friend, (a 12 stepping sex addict, who gave me the 24 hour sobriety token that I have in my pocket as I write this), and—over burgers and beer, no less,— I’d taken the 4th and 5th steps. I listed my faults over french fries, washing them down with a Fat Tire beer while I admitted them to God, myself and my friend. We laughed at the irony of it.
And like so much of the work I did in those early years, it yielded zero serenity. I could admit my faults to another—but so can any overly neurotic child, any newly dry drunk driven by remorse.
When I moved to Chicago, the vibe was much cagier—ACA’s there were focused on living the steps, but less willing to reach out. I would go to meetings, say my goodbyes, and leave. People in recovery talk about the dread of asking for help. They speak about “picking up the 1000 pound telephone.” Well, in my early days in Chicago, having identified a few people I thought I could trust, I would both pick it up and dial. Over and over again, I would get answering machines at most.
It’s been five years since my South Carolina friend and I had that beer. It has taken me this long to see why it didn’t work: I’d enumerated my faults, but I thought living a virtuous life was the solution. I wasn’t working steps 6 and 7. I hadn’t asked God to remove my shortcomings, much less done so humbly, and I hadn’t become entirely ready to have God remove them.
Unlocking the solution entailed admitting that I had heard the world, but I had not yet begun to hear myself. Contemplation had reduced the noise in my head enough to connect with my surroundings, but “refraining from acting Egotistically” was not the same thing as “being myself” anymore than “not drinking,” for an active alcoholic, is the whole of recovery.
Bill Wilson, in a now famous 1958 AA Grapevine Letter, spoke of emotional sobriety—the healing of the psychic wounds that made people drink in the first place. For Adult Children of Alcoholics, who may not have chemical addictions, recovery means emotional sobriety or nothing at all.
Around the time when the phone began weighing 1000 pounds, I began to notice separate voices in my own psyche…raging voices, belonging both to a child, it seemed, and to an adult. In my more enlightened moments, I could listen to that rage, rather than stuffing it, and speak gently to that rage, rather than ridiculing it. When i first heard about “the inner child” that most ACA’s face the task of “reparenting,” I laughed. It seemed to be a strange, institutionalized version of “multiple personality disorder.” But, more and more, noting, and beginning to work with my mind’s distinct voices laid bare the work (as yet undone) to form a healthy ego. Listening to the “dysfunctional family” I’d internalized helped me to see that my God concept needed work. Doing those two things enables me to approach steps 6 and 7 with new hope that they’re realistic for me.
I could not “humbly ask God to take away my faults” because I viewed him dualistically: as a being separate from myself who may, or may not act when I need him to. After five more years of paltry contemplative living, while it’s true that the transcendent God is an intelligent, benevolent and personal force, his transcendence is more the ground of my own being than a whole separate being whose favors the faithful curry at cost of great personal effort.
To whatever degree I have acquired the non-dualistic mind of Christ, I’ve found both God and the redeemer inside myself. They aren’t separate from me, they’re the source and summit of my better self, the mahatman.
The message of steps 1-3 is “admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery. I am hoping that “admitting you’ve distanced yourself from God” is the first step to allowing him to come closer. I know that God cannot do for me what I’m unwilling to do for myself. So “humbly asking God to remove my defects” looks more like “humbly asking my better self to willingly give up my faults.”
And these days, I know that the solution to my vices isn’t an extreme and willful pursuit of virtue, it’s growth in non-attachment. Attachment to Ego makes me cling to the things I don’t like about myself, and push back against them virtuously, even as I’m disgusted by them.
My assessment of my faults, as I approach steps 6 and 7, is deeper and more systemic than it was when I worked steps 4 and 5 years ago.
In buddhism, they’re called the three tanhas: the thirst for pleasure, the thirst to be, and the thirst to not be.
My deep seated sense of insecurity gave rise to an addiction to affirmation and the character defect of lust—rather than addressing the roots of the issue, I was mediocre at both celibacy and womanizing. Thirst for pleasure, here I come.
My deep seated sense of abandonment by God gave rise to creating an entirely separate self, whose fuel was the sufficing of needs that couldn’t shore my identity up. Thirst to be, here I come.
My deep seated sense of my own deficiencies led to that ego using substances to shore them up. It is instructive that I became conscious of my ego on exactly the same day I first considered suicide. When I indulge in my own addictive behavior, my ego would be, for a moment, silent. Thirst to “not be,” here I come.
I am only beginning to gauge how far my attachment to the tanhas has warped my character. But in recovery, ACA’s say their character defects become the “stuff” of recovery. Where I once forced myself on a god I simultaneously made up and pushed away, I’m becoming open to the true God, who reveals himself to be presence when I am present to myself. Where I once felt my existence rested on desire being fulfilled, I now know that existence is just a bunch of desires laid bare. And where terror of my false self made made me prize self-extinction, I now know that will come from non-attachment alone.
So my true self is waiting, right now, for me to let go of my own falsehood. All that I really am, all that’s God, and Christ, and Health: all these will be what’s left when, finally, I learn to let go.
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