“If my life is in chaos, I will look into myself for the cause and cure and use the Twelve Steps to improve my shortcomings.” (March 17, ODAT)
What is the cause?
Whenever I am upset or troubled, my instinct is to look outside myself for the problem and the solution.
The problem is always really conscious separation from God: I think I’m on my own and have to battle through with my bitter little smile and my ‘tools of the programme’.
When I’m in trouble, I tend to talk to people at length. This is me worsening the problem. It’s like blowing up an air mattress of misery for me to lie on, Heine’s mattress grave. I’m filling the space around me with yet more me until all I’m aware of is my own circling, incoherent narratives. And if you were to record me speaking when I am in such a condition, you wouldn’t hear the word ‘God’ very much. [As soon as God is brought into the conversation, that’s the end of the monologue.] But you would hear lots of ‘reasoning things out’. That’s my atheism and self-reliance. That’s the solution proposed by the problem.
At some point, I get sick of all of that, because it does not work, and realise that the divine spark within me is yearning to return to and cleave to God, and, unless I listen to its voice and obey the commands that are brought down from heaven to enable it to return to where it came from, I will continue to founder.
As soon as I place the restoration of that divine spark to its true place as the main objective of my activities, things start to resolve.
The external problems, to the extent they exist, start to dissolve like an abating tornado (which, after all, was just regular air and moisture filled with fast-moving [ego] energy), and it is revealed that everything was fine all along.
Bang goes all the victimhood, blame, and slavery to the world and its people.