But upon entering AA we soon take quite another view of this absolute humiliation. We perceive that only through utter defeat are we able to take our first steps toward liberation and strength. Our admissions of personal powerlessness finally turn out to be firm bedrock upon which happy and purposeful lives may be built.
Absolute humiliation
Humiliation: being brought to ground level.
Absolute humiliation: being brought absolutely to ground level: not a millimetre above or below.
Humility is the state of being at ground level.
Humiliation is the process of being brought there.
This can be and upward or downward motion, from morbid self-abasement or from conceit.
Utter defeat
= complete defeat (first paragraph)
Personal powerlessness
The powerlessness is powerlessness when I am left to my own devices. I'm not powerless in reality, because power is available.
Purposeful
The purpose is there but is not mine to discern. Per Step Eleven, I find out only what to do today. When I look back, each decade actually took care of itself. Each passes and disappears and takes with it all its drama. Even the bulk of the memories of each fade. All that is left is fridge magnets. All that seemed so important is gone. What remains is God's purpose, and that cannot be discerned, even in retrospect.
We know that little good can come to any alcoholic who joins AA unless he has first accepted his devastating weakness and all its consequences. Until he so humbles himself, his sobriety—if any—will be precarious. Of real happiness he will find none at all. Proved beyond doubt by an immense experience, this is one of the facts of AA life. The principle that we shall find no enduring strength until we first admit complete defeat is the main taproot from which our whole Society has sprung and flowered.
Good can come
The good does not arise from within the illusory material world. It breaks into it like a dawn into darkness. The darkness was merely the lack of light. Good does not come from within darkness. This is why Steps Four and Eight are about disclosure not analysis: there is no treasure in the darkness. The treasure is what is left when the darkness is dispelled. This is why any form of mental healing ('psychotherapy') that does not involve the abandonment of the entire illusory thought system and its replacement with recognition of and engagement with a higher reality, namely the only true reality, is doomed. You can rearrange the darkness all you like, but the light, the good, must come from without. It does not emerge from the broken system itself.
His devastating weakness and all its consequences
Weakness = reliance on the ego and its direction (of which the impulse to drink is but one manifesting aspect)
Consequences = the progressive self-consumption of the mind starved of external input. Alcoholic drinking, yes, but, even if that is eliminated, there are a thousand other obsessions, preoccupations, and destructive patterns that are persistently returned to.
The alcoholic drinking is the symptom of the underlying problem: the reliance on self, on the wrong mind's mis-creations. Until that reliance is broken, the prospect of a return to drinking is ever-present.
In fact, in the presence of any activity that dulls the mind and its ability to realise its categorical error in choosing separateness, identity, materialism, the ego can delay almost indefinitely the admission of complete defeat. Any mood- or mind-altering chemical, whether licit or illicit (the biochemistry does not care); any acting out, particularly with sex and romance, food, and gambling; the obsessive use of devices and apps ... all of these will daze the mind and prevent it from focusing accurately.
The full horror must be seen and felt, and this cannot be circumvented.
Anything that holds me a millimetre above ground level, the place of humility, might as well be holding me a thousand miles above it. I must be locked in place for the device to be activated, for truth to become apparent in a way that mobilises my action.
When first challenged to admit defeat, most of us revolted. We had approached AA expecting to be taught self-confidence. Then we had been told that, so far as alcohol is concerned, self-confidence was no good whatever; in fact, it was a total liability. Our sponsors declared that we were the victims of a mental obsession so subtly powerful that no amount of human willpower could break it. There was, they said, no such thing as the personal conquest of this compulsion by the unaided will.
Personal conquest of this compulsion
The wrong mind that tells me to drink, or hate, or worry, if it is the only mind I have available, will not sign its own death warrant; it cannot and will not argue itself out of existence. If one drop of the poison remains in the system, if one 'lurking notion' remains to propagate itself, relapse a matter only of time.
In a corrupted version of Othello with the ego's rules, if there are any black tiles left, all of the tiles will eventually turn black. White cannot win against black. The only solution is for the game to be abandoned.