Hello to my old friends at the BeliefNet AA forum. There is a reason I haven't posted in a long time, and that reason is complex but simple. Getting sober killed my higher power.
When I first got sober, I was very spiritual, praying like crazy that I wanted to stop drinking, but I had a problem with this: when I finally stopped, I realized with striking clarity that I didn't stop drinking because I had been praying, and that praying was helping me stay sober once I did, no. I stopped because my body couldn't take alcohol anymore. I simply stopped, period.
But during those first few years I embraced the whole Higher Power routine, praying everyday. Some issues arose eventually, however, partly why I stopped posting. One, I could never get used to the meetings, so I never really embraced the "help your fellow alkie" custom. Two, I can't stand church. These two reasons kept me locked in only half of what the concept of healthy spirituality should be: I prayed, but I wasn't involved with others who did.
This didn't stop me from staying sober, however, yet as time wore on, a curious thing began to occur. My mind grew clearer and clearer from abstinence, and with my return to the college, I began a new adventure in learning. Day after day, I still prayed, but my coherence began giving me strange sensations when I prayed. Finally, I became so annoyed that I realized, I didn't believe in the existence of a higher power, and I didn't think I ever had. Every time I prayed, why was I praying to something that didn't exist?
These thoughts were difficult to struggle with for a while, because I had been raised around people who believe in supernatural entities and I had actually embraced Christianity, so at first I knew not how to react. My lessons at the college (much to the humor of some reading here, haha) eventually lead me to ol' Chuck, yep that's right. Darwin said in a passage that the breathtaking view of the forest was truly, indeed, angelic, but only in the sense that nature's magnitude overwhelmed the senses. Consequently, my intensive studies of the neural network and the pervading existence of brain chemicals further bolstered my view of religion and higher powers. In short, I've become somewhat of an existentialist.
These feelings I can't help, and I certainly still maintain that the smashing of the self is imperative, but my higher power has changed from that of being something supernatural, to that of simply being the power of the forces that govern nature; I am infinitely small to these forces. But for the life of me, I simply don't believe in the afterlife or any of that stuff. I am agnostic, however: I'm willing to believe, and I certainly don't intend on frequenting the militant-insane-agro Atheist board. When I think of matters closely, there is nothing I've ever seen in my life that has led me to be assured the supernatural exist: no ghosts, no visions, no nothing. Déjà Vu I attribute to brain chemical slips that make one "feel" like something has happened before, and of course dreams are explained away in any brain study manual.
What's funny about this revelation is that I now remember speaking with several doctors and surgeons over the years, and I clearly remember how most of them are essentially atheists, often looking on their patients as tribes-people caught in the throes of religious superstition.
So this is what sobriety has done to me, turned me into an existentialist. Maybe that might change someday, but for now that is just the way it is. Oddly, I feel refreshed and enlightened. I feel much better confronting how I feel about religion, but I know telling this to someone who is Catholic would be good for a barrel of laughs, or a lengthy discourse on how I'm going to hell, depending on who's observing.
It seems that by killing off your "higher power" you allowed your inner power to come alive.
Dave - Just a Man in the Mountains.
I am a Humanist. I believe in a rational philosophy of life, informed by science, inspired by art, and motivated by a desire to do good for its own sake and not by an expectation of a reward or fear of punishment in an afterlife.
It seems that by killing off your "higher power" you allowed your inner power to come alive.
That just the thing, I didn't kill anything: sobriety did. It's like be stoned and drunk while being a Democrat, and then sobering up and realizing with horror, "Holy crap, where am I? What have I voted on!?"
Cherubino, if understand correctly, the Zen have been atheists all along, yet as humans, there still has to be a way to find inner peace, hence the meditation and chanting?
Are there a lot of young Buddhists who are up and coming newcomers to the reprobate world of hardcore drinking and alcoholism? I doubt this, but Monotheistic Religions are chalk full of them.
I don't know what part of the country you're in, but I've travelled a bit and attended enough AA meetings just around New York and New England to realize that the notion of the higher power varies greatly across a wide spectrum of regional and cultural idioms. In Boston the accent is definitely Catholic and the groups are structured like mini-dioceses, while in southern Connecticut you've taken step 3 the day you announce that you've got a therapist.
My closest AA friend spends his winters in rural Georgia and summers here in central New Hampshire, and he tells me that we're definitely at the Zen or Emersonian end of the spectrum. Among AA-ers in this neck of the woods the Tao Te Ching has about the same status that the Bible does in the Bible Belt. We have one fellow around her who cites Scripture from time to time, and it's always amusing to me to watch other people in the room distance themselves from all that just with their facial expressions and body language.
My problem with AA is the reliance on a higher power. This may work for those of the Judeo-Christian traditions, but it runs counter to my Buddhism. Yes Buddhism has the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, but the are not creator gods. They are enlightened beings. The gods are seen to be still caught up in their delusions and are not parts of faith.
As far as I know, no one in AA has ever kept track of what I believe or don't believe. And even if they have, there's not a freakin' thing they can do about it except have an opinion. I don't know where this idea comes from that AA has within its ranks some sort of a doctrinal enforcement squad, but it doesn't, and AA as a whole confers no teaching authority on those who posture themselves as theologians-in-residence.
I've had no trouble adapting the principles behind the theistic metaphors in the AA literature to my own revovery and hardnosed iconoclasm, and I know dozens of others who've done the same.
to ashavahista, I thought Buddhism was wellness within the self; I had no idea there were gods in Buddhism, to which, if there are, then I can't be a Buddhist then because I can't bring myself to believe in the supernatural.
Cherub, you're right. I really have narrowed my understanding of Zen followers to being robed philosophers living in the mountains of Nepal.
That brings me back to square one, where if anyone who followed any religion they believed in with sincerety, they wouldn't become drunks in the first place.
Whatever the case, I'm tainted with regard to spirituality. My agnosticism has me "hoping" maybe something exist, at times, but like I say, I'm just tainted...contentedly.
Can you direct me with a link to the exact meaning of what Jung meant by God taking a turd on the Church? I can't find that thread and I'm interested in what he means by this.
As I said before, I think a lot has to do with local AA lore wherever one is in the country. One of the legendary oldtimers here in New England was a newspaperman named Lew Waterman. Lew died about 20 years ago, but a few of his sponsees are still around, some with 40 years of sobriety and more.
Anyway, back in about the mid 1950s Lew wrote his own rendition of the Tao Te Ching using contemporary English translations and gave a mimeographed copy of it to everyone he sponsored. Some of those copies are still floating around.
By sheer coincidence and perhaps a year before I ever heard about Waterman, my own choices for spiritual reading were Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao, and Thomas Merton's The Way of Chuang Tzu. These were my morning meditation readers for the first several years, and then in about '97 I added Sogyal Rinpoche's Tibetan Book of Living & Dying and, as a daily reader, short excerpts from it in Glimpse After Glimpse.
This is, after all, the neck of the woods that produced Emerson, Thoreau and Frost, and their idiom of iconoclastic Yankee understatement is still reflected in the way we talk in everyday conversation. And I'm not saying that people like Lew or me are a statistical majority here, either in AA or in the overall population, but merely that imposing one's beliefs on someone else is a notch or two down the ethical scale from shoplifting or littering.
But we're a socially respectable ilk on the local scene, and in the rare case where some itinerant Bible thumper has tried to convert us, the most stubborn and vocal resistance has more often come from one of our resident Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists or Congregationalists than from us rank & file agnostics. What we all do commonly regard as sacred here is privacy, and it's deeply ingrained in our values. But thou also shalt not spit on Thoreau, as some overeager fundies and evangelicals have learned the hard way.
That quote from Jung is from his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Let me try the link again:
I find AA agnostic - in the sense of we don't care. It doesn't seem to matter what people profess their "faith" to be. There are many PEOPLE who may try and say different, but my belief that deep down with everyone is where this power can be found. It was there that I found this power. Heck, the Big Book says as much. I know I'm not the only one who found the power within.
It seems the most significant thing I can do is let go. Surrender. And it doesn't seem to matter what we surrender to. Heck, posting on this thread we have a militant atheist, a former priest, a Buddhist, a professed agnostic and myself. People who are sober, inspite of the seeming "differences". That suggests to me that these differences are NOT significant.
Mike
******************************************************* "When I've learned enough to really live, I'll be old enough to die" - Johnny Cash
