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There is something in you speaking to you and you don’t understand it because you’ve never learned its language. So we try to palm it off with porn and consuming but it is your spirit calling and it craves connection. Spend time alone, write, pray, meditate. This is where we learn the language.
That is where we find ourselves now: finally ready for a different kind of inner life, a different relationship with ourselves and as a result, different relationships with others.
if I am doing nothing the negative magnetism of my condition will be exerted.
Being saved from what? Being saved from the incompleteness of a life lived within the false structures of ego, maintained by a culture that insists material fulfilment is a possibility. If only you can get the right trainers, the right car, the right girl, the right job, if people would respect you, not reject you, protect you, if you could be like Sophia Loren or Sean Penn or Muhammad Ali or Lady Gaga or thinner or someone else, anybody else, always reaching outwards, always legitimizing the twitching and unfocused drive that will not let you abide.
We all live in our minds and we have allowed them to become poorly tended.
Prayer is, for me, a setting of intention.
‘Praying only for God’s will for us and the power to carry it out’
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?’
Having prayed for gratitude, I pray for courage, a willingness to no longer inhabit my old ways of thinking, not to see the world as a resource for my
To be honest about where you ‘lost contact’ with your higher purpose, where you became once again consumed with resentment, greed, lust or whatever is your poison. This
Now my problems are the challenges of a man with a truculent brain that tends towards self-centredness who knows that all fruits of the ego are tasteless.
I get ‘out of myself’ in a way that is not harmful and connects me to the Great Reality.
(Do I want to be more than a tangle of greed, need and fear?)
E.g. I know I cannot be happy pursuing instinct and will. I devote myself to channelling love, to serving beauty.
‘What I used to think of as happiness was merely distraction from the pain. The pain of disconnection, of separateness from you.’
Become what you are supposed to be, unbounded, hack through the erroneous codes of your malignant program.
am able to alleviate fear through prayer and meditation, the continuing knowledge that my life is not just my engagement with external phenomena.
‘I don’t know if I’ll ever return to using drugs or drinking or promiscuity or the selfish pursuit of money and reputation but I do know that when I live my life, one day at a time, and follow a simple program I am a more whole and useful man.’
Somehow, through moderating my interaction with the material and sensual, I have come to personally know a different type of consciousness that seems kind of close to what Shakespeare, Augustine, Mohammed, Siddhartha, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Rumi, Jesus and a few thousand other thickos and conformists refer to as ‘God’. Bear with me. These are secular times.
Anyone can do it
Step 12 is a commitment to live in accordance with the Higher Self that we discover while undertaking the preceding steps. We may never be perfect but perfection is our aspiration. To become the most beautiful version of ourselves that we can possibly be. To build a life, a family, a community, a world, on spiritual values. This is less grandiose than it sounds. Step 10 and 11 keep us aware and plugged in. Step 12 ensures that we are doing good works. That we do not revert to the old idea of life, that our life is a pit that need only be filled with pleasure. That if we decide to follow this
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When I wake up, I tune in. When I go out, I know I will be challenged.
What began as an opportunity to be free of my most obvious outward problem, chemical addictions, turned into, with very little authority from me, a total excavation of who I am and what it means for me to be a human in the world.
‘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.’
Mantra (put this into your own words) ‘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.’
The list
We can usually identify the root of pain and spiritual discomfort within these areas.
