In a letter to Bill Wilson, Jung said that he thought that the desire to drink in alcoholics was an expression of the desire to connect with God.
“His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.” (Language of the Heart, page 410)
This is flattering. Are we special, because we want to connect with God, yet others do not? Why do they not drink the way we drink, then? Is it that alcohol does something special for us it does not do for others?
Someone who is gagging for a cigarette and smokes will feel a tremendous relief when they smoke, and that relief will be quantitatively and qualitatively different from the feeling of someone who is not addicted but likes a cigarette. Now, it would be hard to assert with cigarettes that that particular elation is somehow akin to spiritual ecstasy. It is plain that this ‘pleasure’ is really, in great part, tremendous relief from cravings. There’s the neurological kick from the substance plus the relief. Tremendous but hardly transcendental. We certainly have the physical craving for alcohol after the first drink, but there is a form of physical craving before the first drink generated by the thwarting of the desire to drink. There is no craving if one drinks as soon as one wants to drink. As Grady O’H says: you can’t experience the obsession and the craving unless you resist them. If one resists, the system generates great pain and dissatisfaction—restlessness, irritability, and discontentment (‘RID’)—until the person relents and drinks. That RID is generated, as it were, by the poison the parasite releases into the host in order to compel the host to act in a certain way, namely to drink. The smoker is not trying to connect to God by smoking. The alcoholic is not trying to connect to God by drinking. The first drink relieves a craving—the physical craving proper when alcohol has recently been in the system or the RID, which is an expression of thwarted desire, not for God, but for alcohol.
There is another reason why I think that Jung was wrong. I had moments of connection before and during drinking, which were real connections with the divine, entirely wholesome, lasting in their impact, untouched by later experience, and entirely without negative side effect. It was simply untrue that I had not had such connections in the past, with alcohol thus providing a first window into the realm of the spirit, as it were, albeit a false one. I was a wind musician, and I remember, at fifteen or so, playing in a performance of Dvořák’s Wind Serenade and experiencing a connection that now I can see as a connection with the Divine. I also experienced great elation, on occasion, in genuine response to an experience in the world: Skryabin, Respighi, Sibelius, and other composers would elicit that in me, as a performer or as a listener. Now let’s compare this to drinking. I had feelings of elation and thrill, but they were flashes, transitory, accompanied with an uneasiness, a dark flipside, that I could hold at bay only with difficulty; they soon yielded to bestial, subhuman wildness directed by intelligence unmoored from my humanity. These elations were pale in comparison not just to a direct connection with God in, say, prayer and meditation but in comparison to the genuine channels of connection with the Divine that I was already experiencing in my life. Now, here’s the kicker: I was fully aware during my drinking that the alcoholic drinking was preventing those other channels from being activated. I knew there was more to life than the material, and I had numerous ways of connecting to that ‘more’, I knew alcohol was not providing it, and I knew that alcohol had actually blocked those channels: those doors were now locked to me, and that was one of the most depressing aspects of my progressing alcoholism. It is simply not plausible to say that I was drinking because it did something for me that nothing else did. I was fully aware that it was not doing anything near what other things did for me, and was rendering those things inaccessible, and yet I was doing it anyway. Weeks into my drinking I recognised that alcohol was inducing me to exchange goodness for nothingness, but I knew I was powerless to resist it. I continued to drink with heavy heart. Alcohol was actually preventing me from pursuing a quest for connection with the beyond. I was acting under compulsion, not an agent seeking and finding.
Does the spiritual solution to alcoholism not suggest, however, that there was a spiritual problem?
Let’s get one piece of nonsense out of the way: the logic is often invoked that a spiritual solution implies that the problem was spiritual in nature too. But this works only if solutions are axiomatically symmetrical to the problem. Most solutions are not. The solution to all sorts of physical problems is quite asymmetrical to the problem that presents: joint problems are sometimes solved by muscle stretching; psychological problems are often solved by physical exercise, self-forgetting, and social involvement; loneliness is often solved by solitude in nature; darkness is solved by light, not an equal and opposite darkness.
The spiritual solution involves the disconnection from the ego as the source of direction and reconnection with God as the source of direction. It’s remarkable how AA groups that are militaristic in their outlook and approach, where God is mentioned but rarely, and the system is really one of discipline, falling in line with the group’s dictates, actually work remarkably well in helping alcoholics stay sober (cf. the Pacific Group, the Atlantic Group, the UK Road to Recovery groups), and I do believe God is working through such groups, but the spiritual experience aspect really is secondary to the system of subordination. The system is one of surrender to something other than oneself, and the key aspect is the ‘other’: it really does not matter what I surrender to, as long as I’m no longer in charge. The alcoholism cannot then ‘get back in’, because it requires me to be able to yield it. Once I’m yielded to a system, I have no further yielding capacity. My first sponsor, Doug, said all I needed to know about God was that I was not God, and that really did work terribly well for a couple of years.
Conversely, having lots of genuine connections with God, spiritual practices, and so on, will not guarantee sobriety, without discipline, without the surrender of the self.
Over time, the two come together, and durable recovery arises out of a surrender to God in terms of discipline and a surrender to the spiritual way life philosophically and morally, which opens the door to realms of metaphysical experience, which makes the dots of metaphysical experience everyone has join up into an endless fabric. But note the nature of AA’s spirituality: Bill and Bob recognise in Chapter 11 that they must become spiritually active, so they go to a local hospital. The key element is switching from the self-centred lives of Jim and Fred to the service-centred life of carrying the message. The eyes are not on God but on the still-suffering alcohol. God is a wind from behind that pushes us forward, against our will once we’ve handed over the keys, not our goal. Our goal is terrestrial, not divine.
As a by-product, the general uneasiness and futility of the human condition experienced in a purely materialistic way is solved, and the person becomes entirely integrated. But this is the magical bonus. The bright spot in Chapter Seven is not a moment of divine revelation on a pilgrimage or before an alter or during a Zen sesshin but connect with newcomers and with each other.
Alcohol solved nothing. Alcohol didn’t do a damn thing except give me an animal thrill plus a relief akin to the removal of tight shoes: alcoholism creates its own desire; it creates the problem it then promises to solve.
Life is the only solution to anything, and to grab it, God is necessary to halt and keep halted the addictive process.