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And that’s why, left without a solution, the addict will always go back to his or her drug of choice. Not because they want to but because they need to.
The addict is not out to have fun. The addict is trying to stay alive the only way he or she knows how, by using the only thing he or she has found that works.
Using does not cause addiction. Addiction is a pre-existing condition that drives a person to use. The addict actually uses in order to relieve the symptoms of addiction.
They are many and varied, but they can be summed up as an overall and pretty much constant feeling of extreme discomfort and uneasiness.
In so many words, we have already said that the addict has a fundamental inability to live peacefully and contentedly and uses his or her drug of choice to induce a temporary state of relief from his or her deep, incessant discomfort with life.
So, too, the fact that addicts are miserable when not using is a symptom of the problem.
The addict is sick with a yearning for God and can only become well by having some contact with God.
All human beings have a deep-seated need for spiritual contact. But most people can also live their lives without it. Addicts are people who, for whatever reason, are unsettled to the core and cannot handle the business of life without maintaining a continual and acute awareness of the Divine.
In other words, for most people, spirituality is a luxury, something to be sought after more “basic” needs are met. Addicts are somehow different in this respect in that for them, there can be nothing resembling a normal life if their spiritual needs are not met first.
What makes an addict an addict is the combination of two factors: (1) they are profoundly disturbed and unsettled with their own existence as an entity apart from God; and (2) for reasons unknown, they can somehow briefly simulate relief from this condition by taking their drug of choice.
Addiction is idol worship in the most fundamental sense of the term—turning to something other than God to do for you what only God can do.
God was always Something even before He created the world and will always be Something with or without a world, but the world and everything in it was once nothing.
Human creativity is not real creation. As humans, we can change one something into another something.
we believe that the universe has a beginning, we must say that God started by taking nothing and making it into something.
Or, should we say, your true and natural state is to have no existence of your own and to exist only as He exists, within the totality and oneness of God.
The only solution is to start to rise above the self, to transcend it. This is the essence of spirituality and having a conscious relationship with God.
The knowledge that they gained was self-knowledge, the awareness of their own existence as something separate from God.
What they experienced for the first time were all of the feelings of feeling, which are not really feelings at all but a subjective interpretation of objective experience. No longer could they just “be.” They were forced to be aware of their own reaction to stimulus.
It is inextricable from the human condition that we feel awareness of self.
It comes from feeling separate from God and can only be relieved by feeling at one with Him again.
If humanity’s fatal flaw was self-consciousness, it could be remedied, he thought, by destroying consciousness. Immediately after disembarking from the Ark, “Noah . . . planted a vineyard. He drank its wine and got drunk” (Genesis 9:20–21).
Prophecy is the condition of being a completely open and unobstructed conduit of the Divine. This was Sarah’s essence.
Sarah never had to second-guess herself when making a difficult decision because her self was never part of the decision to begin with.
It’s not that the ego is inherently evil; it’s just the source of evil. The ego says, “I exist. God is bigger, stronger, and older than I am, but I also exist.”
God is not really Everything. But the definition of God is complete Oneness.
When we realize that God is truly Everything, we are released from E.G.O., and likewise, when we let go of E.G.O., we feel how God is truly Everything. Most people would call this “enlightenment” or some other fancy word. The recovering addict calls it sobriety.
The addict’s role in recovery is thus really no more than to just get out of the way so that God can make recovery happen.
Active addiction is self-help (“I take care of myself the only way I know how, because no one else can or will”). Recovery is God-help (“I can’t continue trying to do for myself what only God can really do for me”).
As the Torah explains, medical treatment is just a way of opening a natural pathway for God’s healing powers to reach us in a nonmiraculous way.
Recovery is faith healing in the truest sense. Recovery is about opening yourself to God so that God can do whatever He needs to do with you so that you can best live your life.
addiction itself is an essentially spiritual malady and thus treatable by the application of overtly spiritual practices.
They train a person to get away from ego and become available for a conscious relationship with God, thereby alleviating the obsession with self-destruction as a means for relieving existential discomfort.
The addict is a person in desperate need of learning how to live.
Yes, the Steps are spiritual. But they are spiritual principles determined by seeing what actually works. The Steps are, if you will, a scientific study and application of spirituality.
The Midrash says, “If a person should tell you there is wisdom among the nations, believe it . . . But if he tells you there is Torah among the nations, do not believe it.”
Wisdom refers to human insight while Torah is Godly revelation.
Maimonides, who said: “Accept the truth regardless of its source.”
The program was already in practice; it just needed to be put into the right words.
recovery is between God and ego, the selfless and the selfish. By getting away from ego, one gets better; by becoming wrapped up in ego, one does the exact opposite:
The Steps are a prescription for a spiritual way of living.
addicts are always looking for an excuse not to recover. It’s part of the disease.
Rather, addicts typically feel so unusual, so special, that they have difficulty believing that anything normal, popular, or universal can be of any help to them.
Not all theologies hold these views, but the program does. He is a Power; He can affect our lives; He is caring; He has a will.
Once he was able to accept his dependence upon something outside of his own ego, he had already begun his journey toward finding God.
while Step Two does not tell us that we need to believe in God per se, it most certainly begins to lead us in that direction.
“I left that house and the oak tree stayed behind. But what do you know? God came with me.”
What I am merely trying to point out is that for all of us, belief is a process.
But if one is honest and one continues seeking, one will find true faith in the end.
This method of arriving at faith in God through a gradual process of deduction was exemplified by the spiritual quest of the world’s first champion of monotheism, Abraham.
Laws Concerning the Prohibition of Idolaltry:
