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Patience, tolerance and kindness do not come easily to me until I retune my mind, and that’s what prayer is.
The meditation part of the equation is equally necessary, otherwise I spend all day engaged in the world and its people and opinions. I enjoy having a quiet space inside myself in which peace and serenity are not contingent on the behaviour of others.
Use this new relationship with higher consciousness to acquire the commodity we all need, especially if we are unaware of it: purpose.
What are the relationships that define you? Who is doing what for you and what do you do for them? Are these relationships an expression of your attributes or your flaws? Likely both but where are you heading and what is driving you? In the language of Arthurian myth, ‘Who does the grail serve?’ Is your relationship with your partner or your mother a canvas for inadequacy or an unexplored dependency?
The most important things are too deep and simple for words, they are the province of poetry. In each of our lives these unconscious patterns guide our personal myths.
I now know that other people’s approval can’t make me and their disapproval can’t break me.
Through this program you can contact the part of you that already knows what you have to do. Create the stillness for the aspect of your consciousness that knows what it has to do to be heard.
We’ve learned to live with shame and pain, we’ve learned to live disconnected, cast out of Eden. We have forgotten that we can return.
And because what we are dealing with is a spiritual condition – a post-religious spiritual calling – the inner condition is what we must address.
The point of undertaking this program, of picking up this book, is to change the way it feels to be in your own head because on some level you don’t like it in there. It is making you unhappy. You think thoughts and feel feelings that are unpleasant to experience.
Implicit in this is the ability to be at ease alone, or in company, settled, not tied to the world by a million invisible strings that can jerk you out of your serenity at any moment.
At my age, both biologically and in terms of recovery, a sense of ease and comfort with solitude is important.
In prayer and meditation we observe this crackling grid of fast thought. We do not automatically accept this thinking as correct or as a basis for future beliefs and actions.
One consistency that I have observed in meditation is that it is practised with an attitude of self-compassion, that we accept that the mind wanders and don’t get put out by it. That we give up any expectation of what meditation should be and allow it to be what it is.
Meditation is the cultivation of an ignored and latent aspect of yourself that will cradle you as you re-enter the world of material affairs.
This reminds us that the demands of the ego will never lead to anything other than suffering. Desire is suffering. We are free though to relinquish these petty, trivial desires and attune to a new frequency where our life has greater purpose than ‘I wonder how I’d look in a new hat?’
For me Step 11 is a new conscious connection, a new way, a life that is aware and lived along spiritual lines, a life in which I accept my fallibility and the fallibility of others.
In conjunction with Step 10 I check how often I am pulled out of myself and reclaimed by my old ways of thinking, the ‘defects of character’. I stay connected to others who are farther down the path than me. I try to remember ‘there is nothing to get’, ‘none of this is real’, ‘it’s only a dream’.
In my working of Step 12 is the understanding that I will always default to self-centredness; if I don’t work on my mental and spiritual state I automatically become selfish and indifferent to the suffering of others. A friend of mine says, ‘The spiritual life is like rowing a canoe away from a waterfall, if you stop rowing you are pulled backward.’
In this step is the confirmation that the point of this process is to induce a spiritual awakening, that our problem was living in an egocentric and self-centred prison and that our new motivation is the desire to help others.
Somehow the people who composed these steps knew that those who came after would sabotage their own salvation, and that we’d leap out of the lifeboat and back into the sea of illusory suffering any chance we got.
We need the pain to remind us, the ego is a subtle foe, the Higher Self gives us peace of mind and the ego takes the credit and sends us back into the wilderness.
The awakening that I have had is ‘to be happy I must have purpose’ and that purpose cannot be any of the things I’ve already chalked off my long list of indulgences.
Could it be that this consciousness is universal? That the field of consciousness that houses my individualism houses yours too? Is this what is meant by we are all one? Is this why when I am kind to others, I feel peace and ease, having reached beyond the boundary of the corporeal and into the unbounded, back to the infinite, back to my home?
What I used to think of as happiness was merely distraction from the pain. The pain of disconnection, of separateness from you. All longing, all yearning, all thirst, flung on unworthy surrogates, false idols, unsated by unworthy objects, still pulling us unwillingly back together.
the way of the self leads only to suffering, the way of love is salvation.
The love is the defiance. Become what you are supposed to be, unbounded, hack through the erroneous codes of your malignant program. We defy them through our kindness, we defy them by reaching out a hand in love, we defy them by loving them, by knowing there is no them. There is nothing to get, there is nowhere to go, that only love is real and we prove this with our lives.
When I have faced serious challenges in recovery the program has been at its most powerful. This is when I know to surrender, that I do not try to navigate my way out of personal pain using the maps I have drawn up myself. I use this program.
If you’re getting advice from another addict and it isn’t coming from the program, then you’re listening to a junkie.
Joseph Campbell says that when we are enraged or gripped by jealousy or lust, these supernatural energies have us in their grasp.
To be available to people who really need you, to be there ‘to carry the message to the addict who still suffers’, is to know a new purpose.
We now live to be connected, awake and of service. When I wake up, I tune in. When I go out, I know I will be challenged.
If your goal is perfect peace, I think that may only be attained when the lights go out. Perhaps in death there is freedom. But if what you want is a way of being in this world with your drives and our culture’s demands then this program will make your life first manageable and then beautiful.
This energy, this mercurial and impersonal power, in conjunction with the personal ego somehow conspires to find a destructive outlet. Perhaps because the ‘shadow self’, the unconscious and pre-linguistic mind, recognizes that the ego is a barrier between the individual Self and this greater, impersonal power and has to immolate the barrier, has to burn it, discharge it. Perhaps this destructive drive in essence, which we call addiction, or a suicidal tendency, knows that ‘I’ is not ‘self’; that in fact the self has to go, self has to be destroyed for the Higher Self to be realized and if
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The ‘disease’ itself is not bad. It is trying to get somewhere, it is trying to take you somewhere, it is trying to free you from the illusion of the individualized, ego-defined life.
If you feel that yearning and that you’ve never quite fitted in this world then you should give yourself and this program a chance because the yearning itself is real, it’s trying to lead you home.
‘Limitless consciousness, source of all light and love, please lay aside for me doubt and prejudice and give me
willingness to believe that you can solve this problem, too, the way you have solved other problems.’
‘Divine Power, Supreme Truth, love within and without, guide me to a new way of being. Help me to put aside all previous thoughts and prejudices that I may be open to a “New Way”. I ask the creative power deep within me to guide me towards the person I was always meant to be, to seek out relationships and experiences that will move me closer to this Truth.’
I know I cannot be happy pursuing instinct and will. I devote myself to channelling love, to serving beauty.
