Chapter 4
WE AGNOSTICS
In the preceding chapters you have learned something of alcoholism.
This is one of the biggest understatements in the book. No stone has been left unturned; no aspect of alcoholism I can think of has been neglected; almost no detail has been omitted. The material is extensive, is approached repeatedly from multiple angles, and is exemplified with stories about actual people and with parable-like tales. The errors are few.
This is not merely to eulogise the book. It is to prepare for another point.
The authors have set out a comprehensive picture of alcoholism. Notice what is absent from this:
- Any mention of a spiritual malady and therefore
- Any notion that a spiritual malady is a component of alcoholism
- Any connection between alcoholism, on one hand, with the individual’s upbringing, character, morality, physical state, and emotional state in general, separate from their alcoholism.
The spiritual malady is crucial to recovery, but the book will introduce it gradually from Step Three onwards, as the obstacle to God and thus sanity.
We hope we have made clear the distinction between the alcoholic and the non-alcoholic. If, when you honestly want to, you find you cannot quit entirely, or if when drinking, you have little control over the amount you take, you are probably alcoholic.
The twofold illness has two components: the inability to stop altogether when an honest wish arises (mental obsession) and the inability to control the amount once one has started (physical craving). That’s it.
The tests are set out as alternative tests (‘or’) not cumulative tests (‘and’).
Let’s consider what that might mean. Let’s say someone is compelled to drink daily but only drinks one drink. According to the test, taken at face value, this would render them an alcoholic. But they hardly match the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde description on pages 21 to 22 or one’s intuitive sense of what an alcoholic is.
Similarly, someone who goes off the deep end when drinking but can stay happily away from it is not an alcoholic ‘of our type’. Note what the book has said previously: “But the actual or potential alcoholic, with hardly an exception, will be absolutely unable to stop drinking on the basis of self-knowledge.” (Page 39) Alcoholism—as previously defined—essentially includes only those who cannot ‘refuse drinks’.
What are we to make of this anomaly?
There are two possible conclusions: the authors made a bad mistake, or the ‘or’ is really an ‘and’.
Let’s see what we have when we replace ‘or’ with ‘and’.
The test now catches only those who (a) are compelled to drink and (b) are compelled to drink excessively.
The test is now consistent with the previous chapters.
If they meant ‘and’, why did they say ‘or’?
Oscar Weiss, one of the first one hundred, claimed that this, and other textual elements, were designed to catch out alcoholics; they were, to use his phrase, ‘drunk traps’. This is as reported by Joe Hawke.
Catch them out at what?
Well, when I’ve taken sponsees through this passage, I’ve discovered that those who have a reservation either about the physical craving or the mental obsession, carefully reading the test and realising they can apparently pass the test by meeting only one of the two tests, reveal their misgivings about the failed test, believing themselves able to continue as bone fide alcoholics and proceed throughout the book without this misgiving getting in the way.
Now, once the misgiving is revealed and assessed, it turns out in every case that the misgiving rested on a misunderstanding of the element in question, namely the physical craving or the mental obsession, and it was jolly useful that we caught the misgiving in its infancy. Every individual in question has resolved the misgiving and been able to pass both tests with flying colours.
Weiss’s reported assertion is that this feature of the text was designed on purpose to catch out such individuals. But is that reasonable?
Firstly, there is no indication that authors intended to write insincerely. There is every indication that the opposite is true. The book itself, on numerous occasions, makes clear that they wish to make things plain rather than abstruse. Believing they would not have the opportunity to talk to most people who would read the book, and hoping that such people would then take the book and use it to recover, they wished to leave the reader with no doubts. They are plain, not obscure, in their use of language. Sometimes the writing is bad, but it’s never tricksy.
Secondly, the book was written for people to ‘take themselves through the programme’. A confessor would be needed, but that was it. It was written, essentially, as a crash course in recovery plus a training manual on how to help others. What we now call sponsorship and what we now call taking people through the book simply did not exist as such in 1939. Obviously the process of taking people through the book could not exist before the book was written. The notion that elements of the book were written due to their anticipated usefulness in a process that did not exist and was not envisaged for the intended recipients of the book is farfetched, to say the least.
Why else might the test have been watered down in this way?
Frequently, the book hedges, i.e. stops short of blunt, categorical statements. Bill’s original version of the first chapters was blunt in the extreme, but advisors suggested he make it more polite and less confrontational through the use of hedging. Note the ‘rarely’, the ‘probably’, and other devices.
The most plausible explanation is that this is one such device.
The hedging is there to cast the net wide, on one hand, and to blur the picture to prevent attack by hostile readers. Categorical statements can easily be attacked; ‘never’ statements can be contradicted with a single counterexample; ‘rarely’ statements cannot be contradicted except by a systematic statistical analysis. By blurring the picture, the book is protected from attack from the cynical, malign, or contrary.
An alcoholic reading the book who finds themself defined as an alcoholic because of the ‘or’ conditions (i.e. they meet one condition but are sketchy about the other) will then proceed through the rest of the programme, and they will likely resolve the other condition over time. This way, we keep such a reader in the game.
This is the most plausible explanation I have found.
If that be the case, you may be suffering from an illness …
The book uses the words ‘illness’, ‘malady’, ‘sickness’, ‘condition’, but not ‘disease’, except in the phrase ‘spiritual disease’.
Bill, in 1961, wrote:
“We have never called alcoholism a disease because, technically speaking, it is not a disease entity. For example, there is no such thing as heart disease. Instead there are many separate heart ailments, or combinations of them. It is something like that with alcoholism. Therefore we did not wish to get in wrong with the medical profession by pronouncing alcoholism a disease entity. Therefore we always called it an illness, or a malady—a far safer
term for us to use.”
However, the Preface to the Second Edition, written in 1955, uses the word ‘disease’, and several of the first edition stories (e.g. Hank P’s ‘The Unbeliever’, plus ‘A Feminine Victory’, ‘The Fearful One’, ‘An Artist’s Concept’, and ‘Alcoholic Anonymous Number Three’) use the word, and Bill himself uses the word five times in articles published in The Grapevine, later collected into Language of the Heart.
Dr Bob also liked the word ‘disease’. To quote Ernest Kurtz:
“A supplementary note on the meaning of disease in early Alcoholics Anonymous, at least to its most medically educated member: In 1938, while preparing the manuscript of the A.A. Big Book, Bill Wilson asked Dr. Bob Smith (a proctologist) about the accuracy of referring to alcoholism as disease or one of its synonyms. Bob’s reply, scribbled in a large hand on a small sheet of his letterhead, read: “Have to use disease—sick—only way to get across hopelessness,” the final word doubly underlined and written in even larger letters (Smith [Akron] to Wilson, 15 June 1938).
Kurtz is helpful in pointing out that lots of the ideas in early AA do not map easily onto ordinary concepts or are particular to alcoholism so cannot be understood fully by analogy, but analogies—and their terminology—are used to aid understanding.
Thus, the near-synonyms for the word ‘disease’, the word itself, ‘allergy’, ‘moral psychology’, etc., are to be seen as aids to understanding rather than scientific, watertight terms.
One thing is clear, however, as Kurtz points out in his essay, ‘Alcoholics Anonymous and the Disease Concept of Alcoholism’, early AA did not establish or promulgate the disease concept, although some of its members later did so.
To sum up, the Big Book shies away from the disease concept but contents itself with a less scientific presentation of alcoholism using quasi-medical words as a metaphors.
… which only a spiritual experience will conquer.
To conquer the physical aspect, it must not be activated.
This requires conquering the mental aspect.
This means that the mind (which will necessarily become mesmerised at some point by the thought of a drink) must be disconnected from the transmission so that it does not drive the car.
In other words, God has to press down the clutch.
When I’m mesmerised, I’m tagged out: there’s no relying on me.
The spiritual experience can be defined as the establishment of a mode of life in which my actions are driven not by my mind but ultimately by God, largely through the discipline and habit of a system for living that I am consciously, deliberately surrendered to.
When push comes to shove, when the thought of a drink occurs, the God-programming kicks in and directs my actions towards safety, and my mind eventually falls back in line.
At no point do I resume my position as the Great Poobah, the Grand Vizier, the Chairman of the Board, the Captain of the Knowing of Things. I’m the chief pot and bottle-washer. My job is the doing of things, not the directing of things.
This is the essence of a spiritual awakening.
People who try to have a spiritual experience through meditative techniques that dissolves one’s sense of reality, or through psychedelics (whether macro-dosed or micro-dosed), or through cacao ceremonies (‘cup hands, drinking chocolate’, as the slogan ran), or any other method of peeling back the surface of the universe to reveal its true nature, are perhaps barking up the wrong tree, or sometimes simply barking. Acquiring a knowledge of the true nature of things (e.g. through the far more robust A Course in Miracles) is splendid but profoundly destabilising and arguably only for those who are already stably locked into a mode of living that is focused on the destruction of self-centredness in everyday living and practical work for others. Purely spiritual work is sometimes part of the journey, but I don’t think I’ve ever met a single person who attributes their adoption of the requisite service-based structure of living to the insight (gained by spiritual or chemical means) that the material world is a thin veneer on reality—in fact this insight often promotes a disarming indifference to the material and the people in it and can leave people to go quite mad in indolence, whilst everyone else has to do the work and pick up the pieces.
No, the flashes of insight are fascinating and can add an edge to the experience, but the essence is the turning of one’s oar upside down (to use an image of Clancy’s), and to switch from being focused on my welfare and others’ conduct to being focused on my conduct and others’ welfare.
Five good practical signs of a spiritual awakening having taken place:
- Keeping on top of the household laundry
- Filling in one’s tax return promptly and entirely honestly
- Looking out for newcomers at meetings and making sure they’re included
- Earning less money and spending more time in sometimes dull service pursuits
- Spending a lot of time explaining the Big Book to others
There’s nothing startling or transcendental about any of these.
To one who feels he is an atheist or agnostic such an experience seems impossible, but to continue as he is means disaster, especially if he is an alcoholic of the hopeless variety. To be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not always easy alternatives to face.
What is disaster? Starting to drink again—and potentially never stopping.
We have a direct indication here that the ‘living life on a spiritual basis’ presupposes a belief in God and entails a life based on God’s will, not one’s own selfish will.
The atheist or agnostic lacks the presupposed belief.
Here, I’m going to use the definition of atheist as one who is certain that God does not exist or so thoroughly lacks evidence for the existence of God that the question need not be posed; and the definition of agnostic as one who declares the un-answerability of the question as to the non-existence of God. There are, of course, other definitions, and there is also the category of the flip-flopper back and forth between faith and its absence or the person who is uncertain and conflicted. I will focus chiefly on the atheist and agnostic proper, although, with some adaptation, the principles applicable to these two apply also to the other categories.
I was definitely atheist, and after a while in AA moved towards agnostic. Agnosticism ultimately yielded to knowing that a metaphysical realm exists and that Someone Who can be adequately termed ‘God’ holds sway in the metaphysical realm.
The choice was thus between certain death—with only the timing subject to uncertainty—and something impossible, namely living life on a basis the chief condition for which I could not meet.
But it isn’t so difficult. About half our original fellowship were of exactly that type. At first some of us tried to avoid the issue, hoping against hope we were not true alcoholics. But after a while we had to face the fact that we must find a spiritual basis of life—or else. Perhaps it is going to be that way with you. But cheer up, something like half of us thought we were atheists or agnostics. Our experience shows that you need not be disconcerted.
Once I became really clear about the inevitability of resuming drinking without the God-based life, the choice between the two alternatives did in fact become easy. One yields the un-yieldable ground out of necessity; one starts to think the literally unthinkable; one burns the logs of the cabin wall in the fire because one will die of cold anyway; one spends one’s capital on a loaf of bread, because otherwise one will starve to death. That is how it appears: that one is going to have to give up the ‘really vital thing’, which is holding everything together, the belief in self, and all that goes with it, for the expediency of not resuming drinking.
This is where necessity trumps pride, supported by reason. If one dies of alcoholism, then one’s avowed atheism dies with one, and what good will it do anyone then? Best to drop it and at least save the ship at the cost of the cargo. It turns out that the idea that has to be dropped is not the ‘really vital thing’ but are terrible ballast that is weighing one down. I was not really being asked to sacrifice the ground, the logs of the cabin wall, the capital, but only a single notion.
What does this require? Dropping the certainty of the non-existence of God.
This was made easier once I understood the flawed nature of my atheistic certainties.
As an atheist, I was by definition ignorant of the metaphysical realm. On one view, I denied its existence a priori (i.e. arguing from principles), and on another view I dismissed the question on the basis that I simply lacked sufficient evidence to ask it.
The arguments a priori would hold only if the principles in question were comprehensive and correct and put together properly. But could I claim that? I was wholly untrained in philosophy, theology, metaphysics, and ethics, and I was schooled chiefly in literature written by atheists or believers whose belief did not often find its way into their novels and poems. It was clear that my edifice was based on flimsy foundations. I had heard one side of the case only. I had read Russian but neglected the one author—Tolstoy—who might have opened my eyes to the question.
The arguments based on lack of experience were also flawed. What did I think that evidence would look like? Well, the metaphysical by definition cannot be measured physically. It is metaphysical, not physical. One cannot measure love with a protractor, hate with a slide rule, and gratitude with a set of scales. Clearly any evidentiary experience would be metaphysical, but had I made any effort to acquire such experience or to take cognisance of the experience of others in this regard, without a cynical eye? I had not.
Once I understood that my conclusion was not entirely without merit but was unduly hasty, I could unwind it and go back to the stage of seeking evidence.
I did not need to discard anything at all except certainty—I merely had to recognise that such data as I had and such reasoning as I had employed were a small fragment of what would be required to arrive at a robust conclusion.
On that basis I could re-enter the examination and undertake a journey of gathering more evidence, that journey, of course, being the remainder of the Steps.
If a mere code of morals or a better philosophy of life were sufficient to overcome alcoholism, many of us would have recovered long ago. But we found that such codes and philosophies did not save us, no matter how much we tried. We could wish to be moral, we could wish to be philosophically comforted, in fact, we could will these things with all our might, but the needed power wasn’t there. Our human resources, as marshalled by the will, were not sufficient; they failed utterly.
Morality and philosophy are necessity but insufficient, like many other things (self-knowledge, human aid).
The problem one faces is essentially one not of information but power. Once one has the information that the first drink is a bad idea because one doesn’t know where it will end, and one continues to drink, the problem is not lack of information but lack of power.
Thus, having joined AA, I had knowledge, I had human aid, I had an adequate philosophy of life, I had an adequate moral compass, I had a kit of tools, even spiritual tools, I had a restored faculty of reason, but that was not enough. What was missing was power. The ingredients were in the pot, but there was no heat under the pot to cook the stew.
The system would be hijacked by the compulsion to drink, which would sweep all of these assets aside and operate in accordance with another imperative, and the hijacker, through the operation of the physical craving, would turn indefinite hostage-taker.
Although recovery more generally and the remainder of the programme more specifically will indeed yield knowledge, an overhaul of the cognitive faculties, a refinement of the moral system, and the embracing or expansion of a philosophy of life that leads neither to the gutter nor to the cliff edge, the chief commodity it channels is the power to resist the alcohijacker when he starts waving his Kalashnikov.
The alcohijacker is more powerful than me, so I need something more powerful than the alcohijacker, and that more powerful is not just a something but a Someone.
Lack of power, that was our dilemma. We had to find a power by which we could live, and it had to be a Power greater than ourselves. Obviously. But where and how were we to find this Power?
A power by which we could live—in the sense of not taking the potentially fatal action of drinking.
Necessarily, this is a power greater than the individual’s own power (= the combination of wit and wherewithal, sense plus oomph), and greater than the ‘ourselves’ of the group, the fellowship, or humanity.
A group and the fellowship may be channels for the Power, but the Power is working through the group and the fellowship and the individuals in it: the power does not originate in or reside in the ‘selves’, and the aggregate of ‘selves’ is still not enough. Two people, together, are not taller than one person. Two people together have no more power over my alcoholism than one person. The two may act as a channel, but they become incidental; the Power, if sought, would work even without them.
If you want evidence that the group and the fellowship have insufficient power, one need look only at the fact that people come to AA and drink again.
Yet does anyone sincerely give themselves to God, renounce self, and take the necessary actions of the Steps, promptly and diligently, to clear the ground and put this into practice, and fail in the long run? Not that I have seen, from the patchy information I have—one of course has only second-hand access to others’ experience.
I have seen people do quite well for a while on an essentially atheistic view, treating the group or the fellowship as the Higher Power, as I did for a while, but that’s just kicking the can down the road. Maybe the can should be kicked down the road, but many people cannot continue like that forever, and the increasing understanding of the nature of material reality and material life will ultimately render many people cynical, nihilistic, and disillusioned. The material world corrodes the spirit. At some point a more expansive view of the universe than of a mechanistic system with a few spiritual gimmicks is required.
I’ve known people with apparently atheistic belief systems (particularly those who live in East Asia and follow religions without what we might think of as God), but detailed discussion usually reveals a belief in realms and powers beyond the physical with just as sterling and effective attributes as the God the monotheist believes in.
What might not work in the long term is a rationalisation of what goes on in meetings and the fellowship is a purely biological plus sociological phenomenon, in other words a reductionist approach that treats the apparent power of AA as reducible to measurable phenomena, with the ‘God’ of AA an illusion that emerges from the material system. Again, this might work for a while (cf. the can-kicking), but there will likely come a time that comfort and trust in opposition to one’s own assessment is required. There will be the need for an absolutely letting go. And it’s far easier to let go to a person in the form of God than to a void.
Well, that’s exactly what this book is about. Its main object is to enable you to find a Power greater than yourself which will solve your problem. That means we have written a book which we believe to be spiritual as well as moral. And it means, of course, that we are going to talk about God. Here difficulty arises with agnostics. Many times we talk to a new man and watch his hope rise as we discuss his alcoholic problems and explain our fellowship. But his face falls when we speak of spiritual matters, especially when we mention God, for we have re-opened a subject which our man thought he had neatly evaded or entirely ignored.
First point: the point of the book is to find a power greater than oneself—which I’m going to refer to from here on in as God. The chief purpose is not an introduction to the fellowship, sorting one’s life out, learning to live sober, or any other perfectly worthwhile and related matters, but establishing a relationship with God. This, therefore, is the overarching aim of the whole of the AA experience.
There is also a presupposition that the programme is moral in nature (cf. Step Four—a moral inventory). Sometimes the idea is expressed that there is no morality in AA, there is only what works and what does not work. I disagree with this, and the Book appears to, as well. Another good example of this is on page 86, where there is reference to asking God for forgiveness, which, of course, is required only for things that are morally wrong. Errors require not forgiveness but correction. In other words, the programme does hold a position on right and wrong, which can be broken down into four propositions: there is such a thing as right and wrong, certain things are universally right and wrong, certain things are right or wrong for one individual but not another, and we should do what is right.
The three chief aspects of the programme might be summed up as altruistic, moral, and spiritual (the order not having significance, as the three are mutually dependent).
The passage lastly concedes that people are horrified to discover they have to re-open the closed topic of God or the non-topic of God. When the thought of drinking is more horrific than this, then one can proceed.
We know how he feels. We have shared his honest doubt and prejudice. Some of us have been violently anti-religious.
It is entirely natural to come to the programme with doubt and prejudice.
No one is criticised for that; but one must recognise that the position of doubt and prejudice is not, at this point, helpful.
If one recognises that (a) one is an alcoholic and (b) alcoholics cannot be helped by human power—their own or that of others, one is left in the position of adopting a spiritual way of life, or else. If one refuses the ‘or else’ (alcoholic death), like it or lump it, the spiritual way of life is the only option: doubt should yield to investigation, prejudice (i.e. judgement in advance of a full obtainment of the facts) must be unwound, and the violence of anti-religiosity has to be set aside as irrelevant to our purpose.
To others, the word “God” brought up a particular idea of Him with which someone had tried to impress them during childhood. Perhaps we rejected this particular conception because it seemed inadequate. With that rejection we imagined we had abandoned the God idea entirely.
It is sometimes said by believers that they also do not believe in the God that some atheists disbelieve in; in other words, the notion of God considered and rejected by some atheists is often one that no actual believer worth their philosophical salt does believe in.
Any anthropologist will tell you that there are incalculable ways of looking at—and for—God; it would be a shame to reject the mountain because one path up it turns out to be overgrown with brambles or have a rattlesnake coiled up on it. The particular conception with which one had been impressed was not handed down from on high but was simply an accident of birth. If one had been born in Mogadishu or Trondheim, there surely would have been a different impression.
The generalisation from that particular experience to all possible ones is simply a false generalisation, in the same way that judging the French based on one bad experience with the overnight receptionist at the Hôtel de Seine is a false generalisation. One must accept the experience but recognise it is not necessarily representative. This re-opens the subject.
In Step Two, therefore, my job is not to try to leap from one theological mountaintop to another but to climb back down to the plains and approach the question from scratch, from the ground up.
We were bothered with the thought that faith and dependence upon a Power beyond ourselves was somewhat weak, even cowardly.
The reason this is false is two-fold.
Firstly, human society functions better if each person is given roles in which they specialise; I’m sure we’re all doing a bit better than we might do if we all had to generate our own electricity, make our own iPhones, and grow our own artichokes. Right dependence represents a judicious pooling of strengths.
Secondly, reliance on God does not result in the avoidance of responsibilities but rather the more robust, energetic, and cheerful assumption of those responsibilities.
Looking closer to home in AA, one sees people who believe in God being stronger and braver than they were before and succeeding better than most robust atheists. The thesis of weakness and cowardice is dead in the water in practice.
We looked upon this world of warring individuals, …
This seems so plausible on the surface as an argument against the existence of God.
However, look at the manipulation. The world also contains bunny rabbits, cooperation, peace, flamingos, stability, microwave ovens, Edmund Spenser, fairy lights, capybaras, and stretch denim. We are asked to accept the premise that the world consists only in warring individuals, and to infer the non-existence of God from that. But the ego has blanked out everything but this. A world ‘of’ warring individuals. Like a mountain ‘of’ cheese: consisting in nothing but cheese.
This is not the case. Let’s tell the truth: ‘We looked upon this world that contains, amongst other things, warring individuals …’.
How could the non-existence of God be inferred from this? Is there a threshold of the number or proportion of warring individuals only beyond which the non-existence could be inferred? Or would two people who disagree with each other be sufficient? Why not look at all things in the world to form a view? Why pick that item in particular? Why not, like Alice Thomas Ellis did, infer the existence of God from the versatility of eggs? Why are ‘warring individuals’ better theological evidence than penicillin or plumbing?
The argument starts to collapse.
But the essence of the argument is this:
“If there were a God, He would not allow this.” This presumes that, for God to exist, there must be no free will, that God can exist only in a universe without free will, because, if free will exists, people will obviously be free to war with each other. If God existed, He would necessarily prevent the individuals from warring.
In other words, the existence of God is predicated on an entirely rigorous determinist theology that would make even Calvinists shudder, on the presumption that only such a theology would be valid, but it is not valid, so there is no God … but if there is no God, then there is no theology, no science of God. The argument cuts off the branch it is sitting on: it’s premise presumes the existence of God with a concomitant theology, its conclusion denies the existence of God, and so its conclusion invalidates the premise. It’s a snake eating its own tail: an unsatisfactory meal indeed.
Now, the point of saying all that is this: How many people in the world use the existence of evil as an argument against the existence of God? Many. And yet how many such people have thought it through in the above manner?
This example of Bill’s is stunning: it serves to illustrate the ego’s mechanism of throwing down a manipulative rhetorical statement in order to hoodwink one, mesmerise into believing in it and not in God. Note that the ego will even use one’s belief in goodness as a lever: we are disappointed because we are moral and dislike war. It does not need to use evil for its purposes. It will use even virtues.
Its cleverness sends shivers down the spine. The ego deactivates the ‘serious and effective thought’ discussed on page 37, way before a drink.
warring theological systems, …
Another ego trick!
The systems, of course, do not war. Some people war, and usually to the horror of most their co-religionists. Vegetarians, train schedulers, and atheists have also warred. It’s not the theologies that are to blame—it’s the individuals. The ego blanks that out: it overattributes blame to ‘systems’ when individual wills are really what is at play. Court systems know this. Charges are pressed against people, not systems. Whole—atheist, one might add—ideologies are based on such egoic systematisation of the world into deterministic matrices in which individual human will plays no part at all. Why? Because once one realises one has chosen, one can choose again, and the ego, which has been chosen for, is at risk if one chooses again, as the only other candidate for choice is God; the ego is the denial of God; God cannot see the ego, for God cannot see what does not really exist.
Anyway, back to theologians; of course, most of the time, theologians are not at war. They’re usually getting on with their lives, just like non-religionists.
And back to the systems; these, in themselves, are remarkably similar, beyond ceremony and appearance: know your place, be kind to others, seek the common good, come together regularly with others, eat meals with them, don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t cheat, don’t consume more than you need, clean up your own mess, don’t rail at everything, calm down. The exceptions are remarkable precisely because they are exceptions.
But there’s a deeper level.
The theological systems are all agreed on a couple of points: (1) there is a realm of the metaphysical (2) the realm of the metaphysical to some degree trumps the realm of the material in terms of permanence and significance. Almost nowhere and nowhen—except in societies with iPhones, cheap drugs, and Netflix—has there been any extensive denial of the metaphysical. The presentist chauvinism of assuming one’s own time and place to be the pinnacle of civilisation, the point towards which all so-called progress has been progressing, must be set aside.
But the ego is content with its silly syllogism: there is war between different groups with different religions, if there were a God, this would not be the case, therefore there is no God.
and inexplicable calamity, …
Behind this is the question posed by theodicy: if God is (a) good and (b) omnipotent, why do bad things happen? There are lots of books on the topic. Attempting to solve this before coming at Step Two is unwise: it involves the ability to think dispassionately and clearly, and doing so is hard when the house is on fire. It is best to postpone this good theological question until much later, and certainly not to make the adoption of the programme depend on it.
What God is, what the universe is, and how everything operates are big questions, and they are not the business of Step Two.
Step Two is at a much lower level: can whatever helped Marjory and Clive stay sober help me stay sober, too?
with deep skepticism.
Caution in taking on new ideas is wise, and I’ve learned to be careful who I listen to.
But a universal scepticism that has me rejecting everything but my own settled beliefs is not sound; if I beg the question by presuming a priori that believers are wrong and looking for flaws, I will find them, just as the paranoid person who, when presented with the claim by others that they are not in fact stalking him, says, ‘that’s just what a stalker would say’.
Rather than begging the question, I have to look at the ideas presented with an open mind and without having come down on the side of disbelief before I even begin. I have to uncross my arms.
We looked askance at many individuals who claimed to be godly.
Or, in today’s parlance, ‘bombastic side eye, criminal offensive side eye’.
A person’s failure to work the programme in practice despite good lip service in meetings does not invalidate the principles of AA, but rather proves them. Action has consequences, and so does inaction. When I’m all talk but no action—when I’m all baubles and no tinsel—I soon suffer the effects, which proves that the talk is right and the walk is wrong.
Aside from those who claim to be godly, there are those who are in fact godly, and it is the comparison between the theoreticians of godliness and the practitioners of godliness that is so instructive and settles the matter.
The gap between the ideal and actual human performance is inherent in everything one is attempting to learn from other people. All examples and teachers have clay feet. The imperfectly drawn triangle does not invalidate the principle of triangles.
Once I’ve performed the comparison and seen that those who apply the programme do better as a result, the question shifts back to me: might I profit from the ideas and practices on offer?
How could a Supreme Being have anything to do with it all?
The rhetorical question—the last bastion of the almost-defeated ego!
If one actually wants an answer to this question, there’s plenty of theology to go and read. That was suggested to me. It turns out I was not really interested in this question but was merely trying to avoid facing Step Two.
But alcohol was coming up fast on my heels. That refocused the question, away from the overall theological design of the universe to whether there was a power available to keep me away from a drink.
And who could comprehend a Supreme Being anyhow?
This is the agnostic position, proper: the implicit declaration through the use of the rhetorical question that the question cannot be answered so there’s no point in asking it.
I’ve even heard speakers on Step Eleven start off with this line, and one wants to say, ‘Well, if you don’t know anything about God, maybe you should have turned down this gig.’ One is attending the event on Step Eleven precisely to hear someone talk on the subject, not to invalidate the subject itself. Just because one doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean one knows nothing or one shouldn’t at least try to learn a little. False humility is pride in reverse.
The reason why the question needs to be addressed at all is the key question of how to avoid the first drink. Although one technically need know nothing about God to continue, if learning a little helps, why not learn a little?
What can be known is only a fraction of the truth, but that fraction is of incalculable value.
Yet, in other moments, we found ourselves thinking, when enchanted by a starlit night, “Who, then, made all this?” There was a feeling of awe and wonder, but it was fleeting and soon lost.
Appreciation is entirely non-rational. There’s no evolutionary advantage I can see in appreciating a starlit night. Apart from appreciation, other faculties such as consciousness, reason, morality, love, aesthetics, and more, which seem to distinguish humans from animals and machines, are hard to reduce to biology and deterministic laws of cause and effect, producing results beneficial to propagation of the species through natural selection. In other words, there are holes in the materialist cosmos, and the holes reveal something real and existing beyond particles and purely physical forces, like the light that shines through a moth-eaten blanket one is sitting under.
Such experiences overlap with the numinous: the uncanny sense of the presence of something or someone divine or otherworldly (read ‘Nuns and Soldiers’ by Iris Murdoch or ‘The Wind in the Willows’ by Kenneth Grahame for particularly good examples of this phenomenon), and they call for a response; there is, in other words, a case to answer here. If we’re just deterministic machines, why are people bothered and depressed at the notion that they might be just that? Most people sense that we are more than that; that is the first premise, the basis of the question to be answered.
There is then the question of causality: grant that everything is joined in a chain of causality, infinitely complex and unfathomable, stretching forever in both directions, and to the end of the universe, we haven’t explained anything at all. We’ve explained everything but nothing. We haven’t explained why anything is there in the first place, why these laws exist and not others. Determinism has a logical explanation for everything except why everything, including the laws of nature, exist and have the nature they have. It actually explains nothing—it’s a denial of explanation. It gives causes but no reasons, and reasonless causes simply kick the question infinitely down the road.
Thus, the ‘Who, then, made all this?’ brigade are on to something.
What I learn from this paragraph is that the blithe dismissal of the questions of the nature of the universe and the reason for the universe is not good enough. The case is too strong to be dismissed before being heard in court.
Yes, we of agnostic temperament have had these thoughts and experiences. Let us make haste to reassure you. We found that as soon as we were able to lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, we commenced to get results, even though it was impossible for any of us to fully define or comprehend that Power, which is God.
The usual logic of the book is in evidence here: ‘How you are is how we were, but we’re different now, and here’s what we did.’ That’s the essential structure and reason for the effectiveness of Twelfth-Stepping: one takes the Steps because others, who were once like we are now, did so and got better.
To lay aside prejudice means to suspend the judgement. The judgement goes back on the shelf; the document goes back to draft form; the pie dish goes back in the oven; the painting goes back on the easel. The aggregate thoughts, beliefs, and ideas of the agnostic remain, for the moment, intact, but they are recognised to be just a part of the picture, not the whole picture. Any or all may be overturned, dislodged, altered, or reconfigured.
The next part: is the willingness to believe in a Power greater than ourselves.
Belief flows automatically from an assent to the truth. If one does not believe something to be true, how can one be willing to assent to it and maintain the loyalty to truth and reality?
The notion is really a shorthand.
Someone arrived at this point has data pointing in two directions. One dataset suggests there is no God. Another dataset suggests there is a powerful, as it were divine force operating in the lives of others, which, if not really metaphysical, at least is of an order of power normally attributed to the divine. In other words, the data cannot be reconciled. The willingness to believe is really a willingness (a) to not dismiss out of hand this second dataset suggesting the possible existence of God and (b) to take actions to gather further data, in the hope this might resolve the question.
Willingness, throughout the book, is associated with action. The willingness is the willingness to take action, therefore, which produces the events that constitute further evidence. The results are thus twofold: there are the practical results of taking the Steps in terms of the improvement in one’s life and then the results in terms of strengthening the case for the existence of God.
The last part is important: no one can fully define or understand God, so the failure to do so—essentially the fact that questions remain—is not a sign that the process has stalled or come to a dead end. Bishops have unanswered questions, too.
Much to our relief, we discovered we did not need to consider another’s conception of God.
This is a great way of avoiding ‘touching the material’ of bad experiences with religion in the past. If theological ideas are raised when one is ‘doing the programme’ which remind one of other times, other people, and other systems, one can simply set this aside and come back to the task at hand. The past need not be dealt with at this point. One need not prove anyone wrong. One need only look down a path and say, “No, not that way for me.” Fortunately, there are plenty of paths.
Our own conception, however inadequate, was sufficient to make the approach and to effect a contact with Him.
Concepts are fixed. Conceptions are alive, organic, mutable. This allows the conception to grow as one grows.
It has already been admitted that God cannot be fully defined or understood, so the incompleteness of the concept or conception is not an obstacle.
Some very simple notions of what God is:
- Not me.
- What keeps people sober.
- What keeps people out of the boozers.
- Spirit.
- Love.
- Good Orderly Direction.
I certainly have found it important not to materialise it too much. ‘Group Of Drunks’ is material, and neither individual drunks nor groups can keep me sober. People wanting to be fixed by going to a meeting can be very disappointed, as was I, when, to my consternation, I repeatedly found myself drunk.
In summary, the system works even when the conception is inadequate, but the conception does need to be a conception of a metaphysical force or entity.
As soon as we admitted the possible existence of a Creative Intelligence, a Spirit of the Universe underlying the totality of things, we began to be possessed of a new sense of power and direction, provided we took other simple steps.
It is perhaps a mistake in the book that it narrows the open definition of God to ‘Creative Intelligence, a Spirit of the Universe underlying the totality of things’. The question of creation is thorny, and one need not resolve that question to start actually trusting a Higher Power. If one is going to seek direction from a Higher Power, intelligence of some sort is presumably a characteristic of that Higher Power, but the particularly human association of the word ‘intelligence’ can be off-putting for some. ‘Spirit’ tends not to bother people, but the phrase ‘underlying the totality of things’ brings the reader into metaphysical or theological territory where questions of the relationship between God and the material world come into play, and again, it’s possible to get bogged down or find the way quite blocked.
If one finds these phrases helpful additional aids in grasping the idea of a Higher Power, then, of course, one is free to adopt them. However, for those who develop spiritual dyspepsia when considering the ideas suggested by these additional descriptions, one might overlook them and stick with something simpler and less evocative or defined, or perhaps avoid definition altogether.
One can start with ‘what keeps me sober and gives me direction and power to live’, in other words defining God by what God can do for one, not God’s actual nature.
The activation of that direction and power is also in the hands of the individual: the taking of other simple steps, namely the remainder of the Twelve Steps.
We found that God does not make too hard terms with those who seek Him.
If what was meant was that God does not make terms, ‘too hard’ would be redundant.
If what was meant was that God does not make hard terms, ‘too’ would be redundant.
This means that God makes hard terms, but they’re not too hard.
People read this line as meaning, ‘It’s easy to fulfil the terms.’ That’s not the case.
The relinquishment of the right to direction the course of one’s life, one’s actions, the content, and the outcomes, the 100% confession, the 100% forgiveness, the 100% making of amends, and the devotion of a significant chunk of one’s free time to helping others by carrying the message is hard. If a person is not up for that, I would understand. Though there is a singular consequence of the rejection of the offer and its terms: resumption of active alcoholism, and its corollary, the possibility that the juggernaut may never again stop.
To us, the Realm of Spirit is broad, roomy, all inclusive; never exclusive or forbidding to those who earnestly seek. It is open, we believe, to all men.
Open, indeed, to all people. Note that it is indeed exclusive and forbidding to those who do not seek it or seek it earnestly. This is not a comfortable line. What is the earnest seeking? It means seeking above all else, to the exclusion of everything else, because it is only through this narrow doorway that the everything else can, in any case, be rewon. Because of alcoholism, one’s whole life lies on the other side of a wall, and the relationship with God is the lozenge-like gap through which one must slip to be restored to life at all.
When, therefore, we speak to you of God, we mean your own conception of God. This applies, too, to other spiritual expressions which you find in this book. Do not let any prejudice you may have against spiritual terms deter you from honestly asking yourself what they mean to you. At the start, this was all we needed to commence spiritual growth, to effect our first conscious relation with God as we understood Him. Afterward, we found ourselves accepting many things which then seemed entirely out of reach. That was growth, but if we wished to grow we had to begin somewhere. So we used our own conception, however limited it was.
This is a helpful idea: to set up, in one’s mind, a register of definitions for spiritual terms that one can use in order not to have the words tainted by what others may mean by them. The more objectionable a term, the more urgent it is to find a working definition that strips it of its disagreeable associations.
Then, a promise: this suffices.
Then, another promise: progress will be made, and more and more answers will fall in place to the previously unanswerable questions, cf. the above passages on warring individuals and theological systems, hypocrisy in religious or spiritual circles, or the problem of pain.
It is like doing a jigsaw puzzle. One can’t pick up just any piece and demand that one find where in the puzzle to place it. At least one adjacent piece must already be present first. One must start with the edges then gradually work towards those middle pieces. Most questions people have about God simply cannot be answered straight off the bat, as the adjacent pieces are not yet in place; the individual will simply have to be patient.
The common thread running through the chapter: How do you eat an elephant? One mouthful at a time. You don’t try and consume the whole elephant at once by sticking the trunk into one’s mouth and sucking really hard. An elephant is not a noodle, and theology is not a piece of French vocabulary.
We needed to ask ourselves but one short question. “Do I now believe, or am I even willing to believe, that there is a Power greater than myself?” As soon as a man can say that he does believe, or is willing to believe, we emphatically assure him that he is on his way. It has been repeatedly proven among us that upon this simple cornerstone a wonderfully effective spiritual structure can be built.
To believe normally means to assent to a proposition on the basis that we have discerned that it corresponds to the truth. Your assertion that the cat is in the pantry I believe because I have gone to look, and the cat, indeed, is in the pantry. One can believe based on evidence one has acquired, reasoning from first principles, or by authority. Even in the third case, one is believing what the authority says because (a) one has acquired the evidence that what the particular authority says is generally true or because (b) one reasons from first principles that authorities of that category are to be relied on. In other words, belief is based on an assessment of whether a proposition corresponds to the facts. It is secondary to that assessment. One cannot simply bypass the assessment and leap straight to belief.
One can be willing to go to the supermarket, which means one is prepared to take that action. One can be prepared to die for one’s country, which means one is prepared to submit to that experience. But willingness relates to acts of the will, and belief is an inference, not an act of the will. One cannot will an inference.
What could this question mean, therefore? How can a person be willing to believe? As indicated before, this is a shorthand way of expressing a slightly more complex idea. The person at this point already believes on authority that a Power greater than themselves must exist, or the authority (the home group members or the members of AA as a whole saying they believe in God and explaining why) must be fraudulent, mad, or thick. With enough experience of AA, however, it is hard to assert that all AA members are indeed one of those three things, and that the lot of them are wrong. The person is this compelled by force of reason to believe that Sally has found a Power Greater Than Sally, Nigel, a Power Greater Than Nigel, and AA members, a Power Greater Than AA Members. Why? Because observation and reason tell them so. This belief, for the individual, is as yet impersonal. They’re examining something outside themselves, and that has no impact on them. It’s quite a different question looking at whether I believe in a Power Greater Than Myself, and whether that Power can achieve, for me, the unachievable.
The journey that starts with being willing to believe is thus the journey that goes from the abstract, impersonal, over-there belief that there is a Power Greater than Them to the concrete, personal, in-here belief that there is a Power Greater Than me. There’s a terrible Catch Twenty-Two situation: to get the experience of that Power, one must usually take actions, and quite a lot of actions. One has to peddle hard, sometimes, for the dynamo to come on and light up the road ahead. Being willing to believe therefore means being willing to take the actions indicated, riding, as it were, in the dark, to establish a relationship with God, and to take such actions based on observation, authority, and reason, but not yet personal experience. A little faith, a little trust is required, but only a little: enough to take the actions. Once the actions are being taken, the experience starts to arrive, and the evidence base for the existence of a personal God is complete.
That was great news to us, for we had assumed we could not make use of spiritual principles unless we accepted many things on faith which seemed difficult to believe. When people presented us with spiritual approaches, how frequently did we all say, “I wish I had what that man has. I’m sure it would work if I could only believe as he believes. But I cannot accept as surely true the many articles of faith which are so plain to him.” So it was comforting to learn that we could commence at a simpler level.
When it comes to the realm of the spiritual and God, the only part that I need to have a handle on—at the beginning—is the ‘business end’, i.e. the mechanics of the operative relationship with God. These are well provided for in Steps Ten and Eleven in the Big Book. Just four pages of specific instructions. All I need is these practical instructions plus the notion that God can provide all the direction and strength I need. No other aspects of theology or philosophy need to be solved at this point.
Besides a seeming inability to accept much on faith, we often found ourselves handicapped by obstinacy, sensitiveness, and unreasoning prejudice. Many of us have been so touchy that even casual reference to spiritual things made us bristle with antagonism. This sort of thinking had to be abandoned. Though some of us resisted, we found no great difficulty in casting aside such feelings. Faced with alcoholic destruction, we soon became as open minded on spiritual matters as we had tried to be on other questions. In this respect alcohol was a great persuader. It finally beat us into a state of reasonableness. Sometimes this was a tedious process; we hope no one else will be prejudiced for as long as some of us were.
Obstinacy: the insistence that whatever I have believed to date is to be defended, regardless of what evidence is produced.
Sensitiveness: the offensive idea I might be wrong, or the offensive idea I, because of my inadequacy, need God.
Unreasoning prejudice: the arriving at judgements on spiritual matters in a position of almost entire ignorance plus the failure to gather anything like sufficient evidence for such a conclusions.
I treated atheism as an antecedent truth, self-evident, not requiring any real thought or demonstration. With this as the starting point, anything religious or spiritual people said was ‘inadmissible in court’; and religious people were guilty by association with worldly systems I found destructive.
This thinking, as the Book says, had to be abandoned: not chipped away at or argued into nothingness but simply set aside. Leave it at the side of the road and drive off. I was very attached to this world view, hence the resistance. But I was able to do precisely this because I realised that, going the way I was going, I was going to drink again, and, if I drank again, maybe even that very day, I might never stop or I might die on a slip, so, to stay sober, I was going to have to think the unthinkable, believe the unbelievable, and walk out into the nothingness above the abyss.
The state of reasonableness I was beaten into by alcohol did not seem reasonable: it seemed folly or insanity, but the folly and insanity of my behaviour dwarfed the lesser folly and insanity of saying a prayer, getting out of the boardroom, going back down to the shop floor, and getting on with the programme.
The reader may still ask why he should believe in a Power greater than himself. We think there are good reasons. Let us have a look at some of them.
Step Two is 99% the application of reasoning to observation and experience and the making of valid inferences on the basis thereof.
The only faith required will ultimately prove to be the adoption of a course of action (the remainder of the Steps) without any cast-iron guarantee of any very particular outcome beyond the general promise that ‘it will work’ in terms of keeping me sober and solving my other problems. Everything up to that point is firmly in the domain of reason. There is no ‘blind faith’ involved. The only ‘blindness’ is the fact that, as one starts to take the Steps, the track ahead is invisible, because one is travelling with one’s back to the engine. But what one see from that position is everything that is and was, and we are enjoined to be rational and reasonable about both.
The practical individual of today is a stickler for facts and results. Nevertheless, the twentieth century readily accepts theories of all kinds, provided they are firmly grounded in fact. We have numerous theories, for example, about electricity. Everybody believes them without a murmur of doubt. Why this ready acceptance? Simply because it is impossible to explain what we see, feel, direct, and use, without a reasonable assumption as a starting point.
The term ‘theory’ causes problems, because ‘theory’, in the modern world, has come to mean ‘unproven supposition’, ‘subjective belief’, or ‘abstract nonsense’. The book itself uses the word in that alternative sense later, when it says the spiritual life is not a theory, suggesting one might wrongly view it as just an abstract set of ideas as opposed to a guide to action.
What it actually means in this context is an explanation for a phenomenon that accords with the scientific method, gets in all the facts (Aristotle’s ‘saving the phenomena’), and does not create more mystery than it set out to resolve (Occam’s razor).
In the case of electricity, the facts are the observable facts of what electricity does. The theories of electricity provide the best explanation per the principles of both Aristotle and Occam. Starting with facts is great, because the facts must be accounted for by something. If one theory is implausible, then there must be a better theory that does explain the facts. Disproving a particular theory leaves one back where one started with the inexplicable facts.
What are the inexplicable facts in this case?
In 1939, it was 100 people or so who had got well from alcoholism, against medical predictions, following a regime that seems to have little or nothing to do with alcoholism.
Today, it’s millions.
Everybody nowadays, believes in scores of assumptions for which there is good evidence, but no perfect visual proof. And does not science demonstrate that visual proof is the weakest proof? It is being constantly revealed, as mankind studies the material world, that outward appearances are not inward reality at all. To illustrate:
It’s well to understand that Bill is using the word ‘assumption’ in a different way than it is currently used. When people say ‘assumption’, they usually mean something taken to be true without any real thought or consideration, as an automatic response to a situation. That’s not at all what he means. A second meaning of assumption is the one used in financial models: one predicts future financial flows by, for instance, assuming sales of X, cost of sales of Y, etc. Such assumptions are not plucked out of the air, but they are speculative, and the usage is almost entirely confined to the future or other phenomena that are necessarily the subject of conjecture.
Bill, here, is using ‘assumption’ where what fits is actually ‘theory’. When he becomes confusing, it is sometimes because he is varying the vocabulary for stylistic reasons (in this case not wanting to use the word ‘theory’ again), but, in doing so, he uses an adjacent word that is not well suited to convey the meaning he has in mind.
So, ‘believes in scores of assumptions’ should be read as ‘believes in scores of theories’ (with theories understood as in the previous paragraph: an explanation whose value lies in its ability to account for all the facts and not involve unnecessary complexity or the generation of greater mysteries).
Where he’s going with this is that almost all of the understanding one has of the world is not based on direct sensory experience. Direct sensory experience is the starting point for everything, even overarching principles of reason (e.g. that no effect is without cause: if the jug of cream fell on the floor, something must have caused it to). On top of direct sensory experience, we have authority (trusting other people), and we have reason, the ability to infer the unseen from the seen, in a systematic and reliable way.
Apart from the fact that seeing is not the only believing, sometimes seeing is not believing at all.
What has this to do with God?
Quite simply, just because God is not visible in Trafalgar Square or downtown Lagos does not mean that God does not exist. The common supposition that, were God to exist, he would be constantly taking physical form, and, because He does not apparently do that, He does not exist, is not a supposition that anyone really applies in any other domain. No one senses the abstracts of familial love or injustice using the physical senses. No one demands that electricity actually be visible as it moves along a wire in order to believe it exists. No one demands that atoms be visible to the naked eye in order to believe they, too, exist.
Brilliantly, he’s suggesting that those who are scientifically minded and taking a view on the existence of God should, as a first move, abandon the notion that that His existence would necessarily be provable by seeing Him sitting in front of you, grinning.
The prosaic steel girder is a mass of electrons whirling around each other at incredible speed. These tiny bodies are governed by precise laws, and these laws hold true throughout the material world. Science tells us so. We have no reason to doubt it.
And here’s Bill’s example: the true nature of steel and the laws that govern it is not revealed by direct observation or the evidence of the senses alone but by observation, inference, hypothesis, and testing. If even physical objects are not what they first seem, how much less should one demand physical evidence and physical evidence alone for a postulated metaphysical entity, namely God?
He’s also implying that, with the metaphysical world, there are precise and universal laws governing that world. Now, the inference is not easily demonstrable, but that should be the starting point: if the material world is governed by precise and universal laws, it is most reasonable to assume that this is the system of worlds generally, namely that governance by precise and universal laws is the rule, until anything else is proven.
When, however, the perfectly logical assumption is suggested that underneath the material world and life as we see it, there is an All Powerful, Guiding, Creative Intelligence, right there our perverse streak comes to the surface and we laboriously set out to convince ourselves it isn’t so. We read wordy books and indulge in windy arguments, thinking we believe this universe needs no God to explain it. Were our contentions true, it would follow that life originated out of nothing, means nothing, and proceeds nowhere.
As indicated earlier, Bill uses ‘assumption’ to mean ‘theory’.
It is therefore a theory, an attempt at explanation, that postulates the existence of God (the All Powerful, Guiding, Creative, Intelligence).
‘Logical’, here, causes a problem, because of its contemporary use to mean ‘self-evidently true’. Bill is not saying that a belief in the existence of God is self-evidently true but that the system is constructed logically. To those who believe, the system gets in the facts and leaves fewer loose ends to tie up than the materialistic belief that the universe simply exists as a single mechanistic mechanism, every single event caused by a set of antecedent events, endlessly extending in both directions in time, with no explanation for what started the ball rolling, why anything exists at all, and why these and not other laws exist to govern matter. The materialist’s explanation explains nothing.
Now, at this point, one does not need to enter the domain of theology and try to work out whether the theists or the materialists are right. His point here is that the theistic view is not plucked out of nowhere; it is indeed constructed rationally and logically. It is certainly not primitive, predicated on ignorance, and leapt to as an idiotic supposition by craven man; it is a whole system that has been thought about deeply, and has had the kinks worked out of it over the millennia.
The second point is that some of us (and I include myself in this) react to this theory with aggression and hostility. Disproving it becomes a project. It appears from the violence of the reaction that it is prompted not merely by some sort of academic rigour (note how few people will get exercised about particular schools of thought in string theory or Anglo-Saxon sound laws) but that the individual so activated has a vested interest under threat. What is the vested interest under threat? Well, we’re going to find out in the next paragraph.
But two more points:
Firstly, Bill’s ‘you can have any Higher Power you want’ is a bit like Ford’s quip, ‘You can have any colour car you want, so long as it’s black’. In Bill’s view, for God to be God (setting aside particular religion and denomination), God must have four characteristics: all-powerful, guiding, creative, and intelligent. The two that are real prerequisites for the programme are guiding and intelligent. These are required for Step Eleven. This rules out any conception of a Higher Power that lacks intelligence and lacks the ability to guide. The Higher Power must be powerful enough to keep us sober, remove defects, supply strength, etc. Strictly, it need not be all-powerful for our purposes, just more powerful than us with a good margin, and, given how puny we are, that need not be at the absolute extreme of all-powerful. The all-powerful notion does come in, subsidiarily, in the Step Three promise of Him providing what we needed provided we meet certain conditions. That’s important in the elimination of fear: God is not merely a good internal source of inspiration and strength but really is governing external affairs in a certain way. Some people do squeeze through without the belief in the absolute all-powerfulness of God, but why deny oneself and live in a presbyterian asceticism with the construction of a cruel, cruel world? The most contentious of the four characteristics is the supposition that God is creative, in other words God created the universe and us. This immediately raises hackles, but the reader can cheerfully step over this particular idea if it causes problems; whilst it is philosophically helpful for some to believe that they are ‘children of a living Creator’, one can work the programme quite well remaining agnostic on the question of where human consciousness originates and whether God’s role, if He has one, is direct or indirect, via nature.
And the second point: he dismisses nihilism thus: “Were our contentions true, it would follow that life originated out of nothing, means nothing, and proceeds nowhere.” This is essentially the materialist view, presented above, of the mechanistic system. This view has some merit, but there is a catch. If we are merely machines and have the capacity to discern that we are just machines, the acceptance of that would reveal any emotional reaction to the notion that life “originated out of nothing, means nothing, and proceeds nowhere” to be merely a biochemical and electrical event and not an emotion at all, of no more value than a burp; it would reveal any inference of truth to be merely a chemical inevitability rather than a consequent of a ground, in other words would reveal inferences not to be inferences at all but to be biochemical and electrical processes with no relation to reality; a burp is neither true nor false; the falling of an apple is neither true nor false. It turns out the materialistic view explains even less than we suspected. It explains neither why anything exists nor why the rules governing matter exist as they do and not others, as explained above; moreover, it does not adequately or plausibly explain reason, morality, love, the numinous, worship, or a score of other inherent human faculties. Furthermore, it is rare for someone who adopts the nihilistic, materialistic view intellectually to really follow that through and reject reason, morality, love, the numinous, worship, or the other faculties in their entirety as fictions emerging from the biochemical soup. They live as though these are real and valuable. It turns out that materialism is a philosophy that cannot be applied in practice. The philosopher (and there are some) who claims we are just machines in a single interlocking system of cause and effect goes home at night to his husband, says, ‘I love you’, and means it. The true nihilist should be entirely emotionally neutral. But the almost nihilist never is, as least not for long. Even their biology has other ideas.
Instead of regarding ourselves as intelligent agents, spearheads of God’s ever advancing Creation, …
This tells me precisely what my role in the world should be: intelligent agent, spearhead of God’s ever-advancing creation.
There’s a theological point here worth noting: creation is not the winding up of a mechanism that, ever since, has been winding down and will wind down until the end of time. Creation is going in the other direction: whilst the material universe is winding down, another process, laid over the top, is winding up, is heading towards God’s ends. Creation is still ongoing, and we’re not spectators or patients but agents in this.
The agent works but not for himself. He is paid, directed, and provided for by the Principal, who is upstream.
He need not necessarily understand why he does what he is enjoined to do, merely what he must do.
He need not have his own objectives or plans beyond the mechanical ordering of tasks in a schedule.
This takes away the responsibility for running my life strategically.
He need not have his own identity: ‘agent’ suffices. No labels. No groups. No categories. No I.
This takes away the questions ‘who am I?’, ‘where do I belong’ by supplying the answers, ‘intelligent agent’ and ‘wherever God sends me’
I’m merely the operative with my ears above and my eyes, hands, and feet below.
I’m to act under direction, and that’s it.
The acting takes place in daily doses, no more.
… we agnostics and atheists chose to believe that our human intelligence was the last word, the alpha and the omega, the beginning and end of all. Rather vain of us, wasn’t it?
If there was a purpose in my life, I thought, it had to come from me.
When I could not find a purpose, I thought, the problem lay in my failure to find it.
The self-willed plotter and strategist, on one hand, and the mope, the pincushion, the nihilist, on the other, are both the same person in different phases. Both believe that the individual must carve their own destiny as a monument to themselves—the latter has merely realised that the effort is futile, the end illusory, and the whole thing, “The great farce in a hundred acts!”, as described by Dr Jeddler in Dickens’ ‘The Battle of Life’.
Both discern themselves as the centre and main objective of their life. Ironically, the latter is closer to the truth and closer to finding an alternative. The former still has to work the system through to find out it offers nothing.
The vanity lies in the assumption that, if one does not generate one’s own purpose, there can be no purpose; that there can be no higher intelligence, no higher force.
One might conclude that humanity houses the highest intelligence that one has discerned or encountered, but this stops well short of a proof of the non-existence of a Higher Intelligence.
It also happens to flatter humanity and, by extension, oneself.
We, who have traveled this dubious path, beg you to lay aside prejudice, even against organized religion.
The dubious path is the path of self-containment. It’s not even a path, really—it’s more a running on the spot. Not going anywhere but tiring oneself out. Rocking-chair.
Laying aside prejudice means putting everything back on the table for discussion.
Laying aside prejudice does not mean immediately buying everything that one had previously dismissed, but it does mean passing everything before one’s eyes for review.
The data are kept—it is merely the judgements that are set aside.
We have learned that whatever the human frailties of various faiths may be, those faiths have given purpose and direction to millions.
Here is a powerful idea: one might think that religious people are numpties, but, if they’re doing better than me, the renegade, the mope, then there’s a lesson there.
In modern society, particularly urban society, it is quite possible to surround oneself only with lookalikes and not encounter anyone with whom one profoundly disagrees or who is living fundamentally differently.
But AA—as long as one goes to regular meetings, not special-interest ones with skewed demographics—will furnish examples of people who have made very different choices, and they give the lie to the assertion that my way, my choices are the only valid ones.
It doesn’t take meeting many religious people in AA to realise there’s a common thread to many of them and that they seem to have a stability and a sturdiness that one might profitably envy.
People of faith have a logical idea of what life is all about. Actually, we used to have no reasonable conception whatever. We used to amuse ourselves by cynically dissecting spiritual beliefs and practices when we might have observed that many spiritually minded persons of all races, colors, and creeds were demonstrating a degree of stability, happiness and usefulness which we should have sought ourselves.
The purpose of examining spiritual beliefs and practices in Step Two is not to mock or debunk but to review the fruits they yield in the believers and practitioners: stability, happiness, and usefulness.
Rather than viewing the picture of the person in the round, the cynic (which I certainly was) disregards the organic whole and picks apart the details. To dissect entails killing it. Dissection of an animal might yield information, but it will not tell you anything about what it is like to experience the animal as such.
Cynicism—the ruiner of all small, good things—is a bias. Caution in accepting ideas or assertions is sensible, but cynicism assumes a priori the untrustworthiness of others’ motives and discourse and, rather than aiming at a balanced view, sets out to prove the emptiness, absurdity, or hypocrisy of the object of its examination.
Cynicism also defeats the cynic. The pastime of torturing flies with a magnifying glass becomes particularly grotesque when you realise someone is holding a far bigger magnifying glass above you and you’re burning up yourself.
Instead, we looked at the human defects of these people, and sometimes used their shortcomings as a basis of wholesale condemnation. We talked of intolerance, while we were intolerant ourselves. We missed the reality and the beauty of the forest because we were diverted by the ugliness of some of its trees. We never gave the spiritual side of life a fair hearing. In our personal stories you will find a wide variation in the way each teller approaches and conceives of the Power which is greater than himself. Whether we agree with a particular approach or conception seems to make little difference. Experience has taught us that these are matters about which, for our purpose, we need not be worried. They are questions for each individual to settle for himself.
The logical approach the prospect takes to Step Two is flawed: finding a detail which—in isolation—is worthy of mockery or calls for debunking, and generalising to produce the whole picture. Generalisation from a large body of data can be valid; generalising from a single detail, from cherry-picked data is not.
The end generates the means; the a priori decision that the religious are wrong is the starting point, and then evidence is gathered and assembled to support the conclusion drawn at the start. This is called begging the question: baking a conclusion into the framing of the question so in order to meet the same conclusion at the end of the process.
Intolerance—the dismissal, condemnation and mockery of anyone or anything that does not mirror my views and outlook.
Not seeing the wood for the trees—looking at the detail not the whole.
To give the spiritual side of life a fair hearing, one must really talk to spiritual people, at depth, and at length or read extensively the writings of genuinely spiritual or religious people. Watching YouTube videos produced by ‘personalities’ who mock the most comical or malevolent examples of the religious or spiritual does not come under the heading of a ‘fair hearing’. Listening to any polemicists at all, on either side, is usually not helpful. Listening or reading to people who quietly and calmly relate their reasoning and experience without any desire to overpower or mock others is far more helpful.
On one proposition, however, these men and women are strikingly agreed. Every one of them has gained access to, and believes in, a Power greater than himself. This Power has in each case accomplished the miraculous, the humanly impossible. As a celebrated American statesman put it, “Let’s look at the record.”
This means that there are many other propositions on which people disagree, and legitimately so. The one thread that runs through real success in AA is this access to God. When the Book talks about the way out we can absolutely agree on, that is what it means. When it asks whether the reader wants what “we have”, that’s what it’s talking about: not Audis and villas.
The miraculous, the humanly impossible, is firstly the blocking of the impulse to drink and secondly the resolution of the problem of how to live peacefully and fruitfully. If a miracle is an intervention in a system from outside the system that diverts the course of events, then pretty much everyone in AA can point to where the billiard ball, as it were, started travelling in a new direction, without the cue that causes the redirection being visible, with its existence being inferable from the change in trajectory.
The Book then reminds us of the basic approach: start with the facts and work back to the theory, in other words, proceed a posteriori rather than a priori and seek for something to explain what facts present themselves. We are working upstream not downstream, from the bottom up not the top down, inductively not deductively.
Here are thousands of men and women, worldly indeed.
The first draft said, “Here are one hundred men and women, worldly and sophisticated indeed.” Apparently ‘sophisticated’ was too much. It’s now, in any case, millions.
Why the reference to worldliness? Because these are people whose testimony is not merely academic, theoretical, or theological.
They flatly declare that since they have come to believe in a Power greater than themselves, to take a certain attitude toward that Power, and to do certain simple things, there has been a revolutionary change in their way of living and thinking. In the face of collapse and despair, in the face of the total failure of their human resources, they found that a new power, peace, happiness, and sense of direction flowed into them. This happened soon after they wholeheartedly met a few simple requirements.
The flat declaration: which brooks no opposition.
The stages:
- Coming to believe (Step Two)
- Taking an attitude (Step Three)
- Doing things (Steps Four through Twelve).
The prerequisites:
- Collapse
- Despair
- Failure of their human resources.
This means that one has failed, and one recognises that one cannot save oneself, and nor can anyone else.
What are my human resources? The ability to live well and fruitfully, but more importantly the ability to judge where I am and where to go next, what to do next.
This last ability must also fail: I must recognise that I do not properly understand my position—beyond the fact that I am in very hot water—and I therefore do not know what to do next.
It’s possible to be in a terrible state but still have a plan for how I am going to get out of it.
Even the programme can be converted into ‘human resources’: the notion of the sane and sound ideal and the notion of corrective measures, which should be spiritual tools, can be turned into material tools, into the instruments of self-reliance. Claiming I am being directed by God, I come up with a complex and systematic sane and sound ideal and panel of corrective measures and decide I will apply my will power to implement the ideal and the measures. It can be tricky to discern that this is self-reliance dressed up as God’s will, because a God-guided person will also think, use their reason, devise the sane and sound ideal by asking God and discerning thoughts entering the mind, ordering these into a coherent whole, and then listing corrective measures, also given by God. The person must then actively use will power to do this. But there’s a difference between deploying one’s human resources as principal and deploying one’s human resources as agent.
One can usually tell whether one is surrendered to God or running on self-will by the flavour of the exercise. If the exercise feels like you’re organising a team of employees, like you’re mapping out your own life or day, like you’re confidently deploying your massed resources, and the corrective measures look like the hackneyed list of familiar failed tools or impossibly ambitious goals, it’s probably self-will. What does God-reliance look like in this situation? A profound sense of bewilderment and uncertainty, a humble asking, and the receipt of a few simple instructions as to what to do today, with the sense that one’s thoughts and actions are only a tiny part of the solution, that a Great Mystery is directing one’s affairs, combined with the trust that, if one does these small things, things will turn out alright, even though one has no idea what that will look like.
To sum up, to conclude that my human resources have failed is not just to recognise I am in a bad way but to realise I have only a shady idea of my situation and I have no idea how to get out of it.
In that position, I am able to receive guidance, and, having received that guidance, I must act on it promptly.
What are the promises? They are four-fold:
- New power,
- [New] peace,
- [New] happiness,
- [New] sense of direction
The conditions are re-presented: “This happened soon after they wholeheartedly met a few simple requirements.”
One does not have to wait long for the benefits to start flowing.
But the meeting must be wholehearted. How can one tell whether one is wholehearted? By whether the action is prompt, diligent, and complete. Half-heartedness or double-mindedness always reveals itself in dithering, sloppiness, and partialness, and in particular in sabotage that appears to arise out of factors beyond one’s control. Don’t fall for that.
Once confused and baffled by the seeming futility of existence, they show the underlying reasons why they were making heavy going of life. Leaving aside the drink question, they tell why living was so unsatisfactory. They show how the change came over them. When many hundreds of people are able to say that the consciousness of the Presence of God is today the most important fact of their lives, they present a powerful reason why one should have faith.
“Seeming” futility establishes that existence is not futile, and that the appearance of futility is erroneous.
Why might existence seem futile? Plans are frustrated; plans, achieved, yield no lasting happiness; and lastly: earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, all temples fall, all civilisations fall, and before that all individuals fall and are forgotten. And amidst all this we have cruelty, negligence, pain, and randomness, each throwing spanners in the already ailing works. Essentially, materialism sucks unless you’re firstly fortunate and secondly very good at it. And even then, happiness is both elusive and persistently jeopardised from many angles.
“Confused”: unsure what is going on.
“Baffled”: unable to solve the riddle.
“Underlying reasons”: this suggests superficial but erroneous reasons for the seeming futility of existence. What might these reasons be? Malign individuals, malign forces, living in a universe apparently not constructed with our comfort in mind, even a malicious god or gods.
Yet the real reasons for all of this are not what they might seem.
Why is living unsatisfactory? Because we are made for more than this. Not for something other than this, but for something more than this. The kitchen’s bustle would seem futile if one did not know that the food prepared and disappearing into the dumb waiters were consumed and enjoyed elsewhere, that, in fact, the work yielded benefits that outweighed the bustle. The attempt to find value in and understand the whole of existence with reference only to the material world and its doings, ignoring the metaphysical, is the attempt to understand a jigsaw puzzle piece without the other pieces, a railway line without a destination, a pen without a language, a quack without a duck, a wag without a tail. The jigsaw puzzle would be incomplete without the piece, the language would be restricted without the pen, so the higher—the metaphysical—requires the lower—the physical, but the physical is nothing without the metaphysical, just as Bill says that without God he is nothing.
How did the change come over them? Collapse. Surrender. Action.
“The consciousness of the presence of God”: it is important not to construe this as a physical sensation, as a hallucination, a feeling of God’s breath on the back of one’s neck or eyes staring out at us from the dark. This is to mistakenly conflate the metaphysical with the physical.
The consciousness is thus metaphysical and cognitive: it is the knowledge, arrived at through a combination of observation, inference, and authority, that God exists, is omnipresent, and is widely interfering, like the maker of the trainset in its miniature world: nothing exists without the maker, and the maker provides not only the power but its purpose and direction, endlessly making adjustments—large and small—in his tiny cosmos.
Why should one have faith? Either others are systematically and comprehensively lying or they are not. People who deny France’s existence but have never taken the trouble to find out for themselves by crossing the channel prove unreliable witnesses. But reporters of France—well, one can tell whether or not people are telling the truth. When believers—with neither proselytising zeal or reforming fervour—calmly report the fact of God and are indifferent as to whether the particular listener believes them, there is a case to answer, at the very least.
This world of ours has made more material progress in the last century than in all the millenniums which went before. Almost everyone knows the reason. Students of ancient history tell us that the intellect of men in those days was equal to the best of today. Yet in ancient times material progress was painfully slow. The spirit of modern scientific inquiry, research and invention was almost unknown. In the realm of the material, men’s minds were fettered by superstition, tradition, and all sorts of fixed ideas. Some of the contemporaries of Columbus thought a round earth preposterous. Others came near putting Galileo to death for his astronomical heresies.
We asked ourselves this: Are not some of us just as biased and unreasonable about the realm of the spirit as were the ancients about the realm of the material? Even in the present century, American newspapers were afraid to print an account of the Wright brothers’ first successful flight at Kitty Hawk. Had not all efforts at flight failed before? Did not Professor Langley’s flying machine go to the bottom of the Potomac River? Was it not true that the best mathematical minds had proved man could never fly? Had not people said God had reserved this privilege to the birds? Only thirty years later the conquest of the air was almost an old story and airplane travel was in full swing.
*But in most fields our generation has witnessed complete liberation of our thinking. Show any longshoreman a Sunday supplement describing a proposal to explore the moon by means of a rocket and he will say, “I bet they do it—maybe not so long either.” Is not our age characterized by the ease with which we discard old ideas for new, by the complete readiness with which we throw away the theory or gadget which does not work for something new which does?
We live in an exceptional society—exceptional not in the sense of being very good, but exceptional in the sense of being statistically unusual. The exception is that few people believe in God. The notion that we do not believe in God because we are cleverer than people in the past is plainly false, as any student of ancient or medieval languages will report. Read Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and you will discover no less genius than today. The fact that miracles are reported in ancient times, far from demonstrating the silly credulousness of the people of those times, demonstrates the precise opposite: people understood quite well what the normal course of affairs was and could therefore determine when something had happened that was out of that normal course of affairs. The virgin birth was considered miraculous precisely because people knew quite well what produced babies and what did not.
Material progress was thus slow not because people were thick but because reasoning processes were hampered.
Broadly, there are two types of reasoning: inductive (inferring principles from evidence) and deductive (combining principles in syllogisms to produce conclusions).
Inductive reasoning starts with systematic—scientific—observation, enquiry, and research and might ultimately proceed to invention, which involves a cycle of attempting to apply the principles determined by making something that employs them, testing whether the thing works as intended, observing the results, and refining the principles inferred. This has always existed (and is always in evidence when people make things or do things and refine processes over time). But deductive reasoning from first principles always ran in parallel and for many centuries had the upper hand. The spirit of modern scientific enquiry is present not just from Bacon but from Aristotle. Bacon championed inductive reasoning (inferring principles from evidence) but did not invent it. Columbus and Galileo were not the first reasoners in history. But it is true that inductive reasoning and the associated processes took longer to get off the ground and dominate human affairs.
Deductive reasoning is great but only as good as the assumptions, the principles fed into the top of the mechanism. Proceeding on the basis only of assumptions without firm foundation will only take you so far; if those assumptions (the input to the syllogism) are false, then the conclusion (the output of the syllogism) will be false. Thus deductive reasoning (from principles to conclusions) takes one only so far. One needs to use not just deductive reasoning but inductive reasoning, and it took the adoption of both systems to produce substantial and rapid material progress.
The pests to material progress were threefold impediments to reasoning: superstition, tradition, and fixed ideas. What are these? Superstition refers to groundless, often magical beliefs; tradition, to beliefs adopted from others without question; fixed ideas, to ideas that refuse to be dislodged by reason or evidence. The reason these get in the way is twofold. Firstly, these three are categories of principle fed into the top of the mechanism. If they’re wrong, the output at the bottom end of the mechanism will be wrong, as well. But adherence to them, for whatever reason, also blocks inductive reasoning, because when inductive reasoning suggests a principle that runs against these (e.g. the principle that the earth rotates around the sun), the adherence resists the change in view, and the inductive reasoning process stalls.
My own, contemporary bias and unreasonable attitude I can illustrate with reference to these three. Superstition: I believed in the material being the sole and ultimate ground of reality, even though I had no evidence for this assertion (I believed that the metaphysical, if it existed, ought to be measurable in the same way as an orange, even though it is by its nature non-physical, so the non-measurability of the metaphysical in the physical realm, to me, erroneously proved its non-existence). Tradition: members of my demographic were largely atheist—how could they be wrong? There were so nice and so amusing! Fixed ideas: theists were stupid; churches, corrupt; religions, atavistic; the metaphysical, moonshine.
Even though inductive reasoning in AA told me that there must be a Higher Power, that inference collided with the ideas I had been adhering to, so the inductive reasoning process stalled.
Open-mindedness was necessary, i.e. the willingness to have those fundamental ideas, the principles, as it were, revised on the basis of evidence and inference.
This is scary, because those fundamental ideas, those principles, apparently constitute the structural elements of one’s universe. They are the reinforced steel struts, beams, girders, and piles that hold the whole building together. Letting go of these or allowing them to be warped, altered, or replaced might look as though it threatens the very reality one lives in. The truth is, however, that the fundamental ideas and the principles are not the basis of reality but the basis of my conception of reality. Change the conception and the reality changes not one bit. Strawberry jam will still be red; red cardinals will still settle on the branch; the branch will still produce buds in spring, whatever I think or believe. This is why open-mindedness is essentially a safe faculty to activate.
Open-mindedness is obviously an admirable modern faculty in the realm of the material. The task is therefore to re-deploy such open-mindedness instead to spiritual matters.
One does not have to devise open-mindedness from scratch—one need only take a well-honed tool and apply it to spiritual matters.
Why might one do this?
As with gadgets, so with theories. If one does not work, get rid of it, and get a new one.
How did my old theories not work?
They failed in two respects: firstly, operatively, secondly, as explanatory systems.
The old theories failed operatively because I was drunk and incompetent at living fruitfully and cheerfully.
The old theories failed as explanatory systems because they explained nothing of any importance other than there are chains of cause and effect in the physical world and that was that; without the metaphysical realm, consciousness can be reduced to neurobiology and electrical signals, and thus, ultimately, to physics. Yet that did not account for one whiff of my subjective experience.
It was on the basis of this dual failure that I was willing to abandon my old theories.
We had to ask ourselves why we shouldn’t apply to our human problems this same readiness to change our point of view. We were having trouble with personal relationships, we couldn’t control our emotional natures, we were a prey to misery and depression, we couldn’t make a living, we had a feeling of uselessness, we were full of fear, we were unhappy, we couldn’t seem to be of real help to other people—was not a basic solution of these bedevilments more important than whether we should see newsreels of lunar flight? Of course it was.
If open-minded is warranted on such a casual matter as lunar flight, then how much more is it warranted on matters of vital importance?
When we saw others solve their problems by a simple reliance upon the Spirit of the Universe, we had to stop doubting the power of God. Our ideas did not work. But the God idea did.
Reliance is the activating force. What is reliance? The turning to something for direction and resources, on the basis of trust. If the problems were solved, then the reliance activated something real. The reality of a power that enabled the solving of problems comes first; the term ‘Spirit of the Universe’ and one’s conception of what this means comes second. The terminology is there for convenience; the conception is there for our edification; but the thing itself, whatever is doing the solving of the problems, is simply a fact.
We are asked to start with the observation of power in operation, and that could be doubted only by saying others had not really solved their problems or that they had done so themselves without any external agent. The former doubt is dispelled by simple observation; the latter doubt is dispelled by asking the rhetorical question, ‘If they could have solved the problem themselves, why did they not, years before?’
Our ideas did not work: I could determine this by asking, ‘I am happy?’ and ‘I am functioning optimally?’ The laughable answers to these questions answered the main question with a resounding ‘no’.
The God idea—trust in and reliance on God—did.
The Wright brothers’ almost childish faith that they could build a machine which would fly was the mainspring of their accomplishment. Without that, nothing could have happened.
If adulthood is taking into account every factor, every objection, every difficulty, mitigating every risk, seeking to see round every corner, childishness is holding onto a single idea and steering by it, as if by the North Star, until the goal is achieved.
Adulthood is fine for certain material things, but in spiritual development an excess of misgiving and caution can keep one stuck forever. Whilst discernment and predictive powers might be reliable in engineering matters, not even in engineering do they always do the engineer favours. The ability to look past the objections and difficulties and keep trying anyway turned out to be the rare insanity that enabled the Wright brothers to make the progress they did.
In spiritual matters, this principle is amplified. When I am in a spiritually parlous state, I am by nature blinded, so the discernments and assessments in that condition are compromised. What appears to be a childish faith in an improbable proposition is in fact the only sensible approach, as the improbable proposition—the care of God—is actually underwritten and vouchsafed by highly successful and competent people in AA.
We agnostics and atheists were sticking to the idea that self-sufficiency would solve our problems. When others showed us that “God-sufficiency” worked with them, we began to feel like those who had insisted the Wrights would never fly.
Translated into AA, this means believing that one, as an intelligent being, can take the Twelve Steps and use them as intellectual and cognitive tools to manage one’s life successfully and learn how to make money, achieve security, progress in one’s career, buy a Cartier watch, and go on holiday to one of the more exclusive Greek islands.
That actually works quite well for a bit, but it does not solve the underlying philosophical questions of value, identity, and purpose, and, whilst those three are still housed in one’s own image and performance in the material world, because those cannot be controlled in a volatile setting, fear will not be eliminated and will therefore continue both to run the show and to spoil the general atmosphere.
There is also the question of lack of power being our dilemma. I do not know of anyone who, without God, has been able to command themselves not to fear or hate and maintain the new position durably. The same applies to impulsive and compulsive behaviours and to the elimination of other defects of character. Self-improvement is a nice idea but it’s only people who are not to some extent ill, spiritually, who can pull it off consistently, and rare are those without a spiritual malady. Those in recovery were to some extent ill, spiritually, before they became alcoholics or addicts and, even if they were not, are rendered spiritually ill by active addiction, which hives off the individual into their own pod of self-reliance.
The improbability of God-reliance is proved illusory in the light of others’ success with this approach and later one’s own success.
The phrase ‘God-sufficiency’ is splendid. God’s direction and strength are enough, and nothing else is necessary. God may choose human beings, books, transcendental experiences, AA groups as His channels, but one must not mistake the channel for the source.
Logic is great stuff. We liked it. We still like it. It is not by chance we were given the power to reason, to examine the evidence of our senses, and to draw conclusions. That is one of man’s magnificent attributes. We agnostically inclined would not feel satisfied with a proposal which does not lend itself to reasonable approach and interpretation. Hence we are at pains to tell why we think our present faith is reasonable, why we think it more sane and logical to believe than not to believe, why we say our former thinking was soft and mushy when we threw up our hands in doubt and said, “We don’t know.”
The existence of God and the supreme validity of trusting and relying on God as the best way to live, because they are real and true, are amenable to logic and reason. The notion of blind faith has no place at all. What is required is open-eyed faith.
A footnote: one does meet people who are atheist or agnostic who have equanimity and are perfectly successful in a spiritual sense as well as a material sense. What one invariably discovers is that they believe in and live by higher values, in particular universal love, but they merely construe this differently, without an intelligent being at the core of things. The substance is the same as in the case of someone living a consciously spiritual life; the construal is merely different.
Now, the faith that is going to be required is this:
Reason tells one that God-reliance works and works universally for those who invoke it.
Someone at the start of this process is then faced with the option of taking up this God-reliance as a way of life.
Reason is applied to the past, in particular what has worked in others’ lives.
The inference that what worked for others will work for me is by nature speculative: it involves a leap into the future and a conditional sense. Since this has worked for others (past tense), this ought to work for me (speculative future, modal).
This, too, is reason, but it is predicated on an assumption that has not been stated. The assumption is that God is available to everyone and not just some people and that the method is operable by anyone willing to give the method a try.
The syllogism is this:
- Major premise: The programme works for others.
- Minor premise: The programme is universally accessible.
- Conclusion: The programme will work for me.
The major premise has incontrovertible evidence behind it: one need see it working only in some to be convinced.
The minor premise has reasonable evidence behind.
The premises must, however, hold for the conclusion to be valid.
If there are exceptions and the programme will not work for everyone, I might be the exception, and then the conclusion fails.
Whilst the evidence for the universality of the programme—and thus the universal availability of God—is strong, no evidence can be complete. If one asserts that all spiders have eight legs, this assertion becomes only absolute once one has tested all spiders. All it would take is one exception for the assertion to have to be modified to, ‘Most spiders have eight legs’. Similarly, one could not say that the programme is universally accessible until it has been tested on everyone, and that cannot be done.
Thus, reason takes us almost all of the way there, but not quite all of the way there.
The prospect has three options:
- Take the reasonable assurance for a full assurance and proceed.
- Observe the tiny risk it might fail and not even try.
- Insist on remaining agnostic on the question.
Since one is going to die of alcoholism anyway, 2. is folly: one loses nothing by trying.
The two options are therefore 1., proceed, or 3., wait.
The last element of this paragraph, about the mushy thinking, is really an attack on the position of someone who has eaten a thousand apples and has found that they all contain pips but is withholding judgement on the basis that there might be an apple without pips. Once one has seen a thousand quite disparate people use the programme successfully, the agnostic position—the mushy ‘I don’t know’—ceases to be tenable.
We have to come down off the fence. There is no reasonable option but to accept the premises of the syllogism and conclude that this ought to work for one.
In addition to this elimination of the heeltap of doubt, there will be the practical question of actually launching out onto the course of action.
One might know in principle that it is perfectly possible to merge in traffic safely, that’s quite different than actually pulling out to merge on a freeway the first time one tries it.
The question of faith covers both: the elimination of residual doubt and steeling oneself to take action.
When we became alcoholics, crushed by a self-imposed crisis we could not postpone or evade, we had to fearlessly face the proposition that either God is everything or else He is nothing. God either is, or He isn’t. What was our choice to be?
A crisis is also a turning point in the disease. In this context, it is a situation that commands action—or else. ‘Opportunity is not a lengthy visitor’: if one is posing oneself the question of whether to proceed with the programme or throw in the towel and surrender to alcohol, the clock is ticking, because, if one sits on the fence for too long, one will likely fall off the fence in the direction of continued drinking. Alcoholism might have washed one up on the shore, but, if one does not stand up and proceed briskly inland, it is likely that another wave will come and wash one back out again.
Thus, I cannot get off the lift at any floor. I have to wait until the lift stops and the doors opened. The option to work the programme is what is on the other side of the lift doors that are about to close. This is why this is a crisis. The question can be neither postponed nor evaded. If I do not decide, alcoholism will decide for me, and this could happen at any point. Like a man standing on thin ice, the ice could crack at any time, and, by the time he knows it’s cracking, it’s too late—there’s nowhere to run to and nothing to hold on to.
“Self-imposed”: Firstly, I drank the alcohol myself; no one drank me the alcohol; I am the subject not the indirect object. Secondly, once I realise I have a problem, it is self that is blocking me from the divine defence. The ego is the thick glass behind which the big, red emergency lever is sitting, waiting for me to pull it down.
When we “become alcoholics”: bang goes the idea of ‘always having been an alcoholic’. I was not an alcoholic until the two mechanisms of the physical craving and the mental obsession were operative. These might have arisen pretty soon after me starting to drink, but drink was required. Alcoholism is not an attitude to the world, an emotional maladjustment, a psychological condition, or even a spiritual misalignment: it is a specific relationship with alcohol, wherein the will is overpowered by physical mechanisms.
“God is everything or … He is nothing”: This is not Bill W sliding in a pantheistic theology on the flank. He is not saying that God is literally everything, in other words God is not you or me, God is not avocados, and trees, and Peru, and concentration camps, and botulism, and Newt Gingrich’s memoirs or collection of stuffed possums. If God really is everything, there are no avocados, or trees, or Newt Gingrich: everything is God in disguise. This would be a theology, a very particular one, and one that is especially hard to swallow. As soon as God is everything, I am saying that I am God. This is all very implausible. Everything in the book must be read in the context of the whole book. One cannot rip out a line and treat it distinctly as though it lacks context. Each line is part of a chain, a communicative act, an argument, a discourse.
What is Bill saying here, then? Well, we’ve already demonstrated pretty reliably that God exists and is capable of miracles on a very large scale. The remaining question is whether God will be able to perform that miracle for the individual proceeding through this chapter, whether, if that person takes the Steps and meets the requirements, the God idea will work for them, as well. God being everything would therefore mean the God idea being universally accessible and applicable; if the God idea works only fitfully, for some people, or God merely strikes people sober and keeps them that way with no activation, cooperation, will, and gumption on the part of the individual, then the project of recovery is off the table altogether; the individual might be struck and kept sober, but that would merely be terribly good fortune, and there is really nothing more to discuss. God is either everything in the sense of a universally available power who can solve all problems, or He’s an occasional boon to a select few, in which case, for practical purposes, He’s nothing.
In short, God can help not just others but also me. Or God cannot. Either I can stay sober for ever or I cannot. There is nothing in between. One slip could produce a debacle lasting decades, so the two options are sobriety or its opposite.
We have to face this question and draw a conclusion based on the evidence accrued so far. The choice is really a choice as to what to believe: (a) God exists and can help me or (b) God—through non-existence or select goodness—cannot help me. The choice is really a conclusion to be drawn. What am I to conclude?
If my Step One is solid, then I’m going to die of alcoholism anyway, so there’s no risk in asking the question. If I conclude God cannot help me, I am no further back than where I started. If I conclude God can help me, then I’m going to have a marvellous life.
Arrived at this point, we were squarely confronted with the question of faith. We couldn’t duck the issue. Some of us had already walked far over the Bridge of Reason toward the desired shore of faith. The outlines and the promise of the New Land had brought luster to tired eyes and fresh courage to flagging spirits. Friendly hands had stretched out in welcome. We were grateful that Reason had brought us so far. But somehow, we couldn’t quite step ashore. Perhaps we had been leaning too heavily on Reason that last mile and we did not like to lose our support.
Reason can allow me to conclude that God exists, God is good, God helps people to stay sober in very large numbers, whether or not people stay sober seems largely down to their own activation of the programme and the wholehearted meeting of a few requirements rather than a cosmic lottery. Reason can take me almost all the way.
Reason can even allow me to speculate that God ought to be able to help me as He has helped others, and it can even allow me conjure a notion of what life might be like with permanent sobriety, by the analogy of what others’ sober life looks like.
What reason cannot do is provide a guarantee about the future, firstly whether God will indeed enable me to stay sober should I surrender to Him and secondly what my life will look like. The future is necessarily in the realm of speculation, and, whilst speculation can be reasonably secure, it can never be absolutely secure. Faith bridges the gap left by reason’s limitations. Reason cannot extend into the future with the same certainty with which it overlays the present and the past.
Faith has two components: firstly it is the choice to believe something on a balance of probabilities without demanding absolute certainty, in the way one has faith in a lawyer who says they can win your case the way they have one a thousand others; secondly it is the activation of that belief by the decision to proceed along a particular path.
All action potentially entails effort, pain, sacrifice—of the other actions foregone, and uncertainty. Faith activates the strength required to push through those mental impediments.
Faith is thus required both at the intellectual level and as a powerful faculty enabling the inertia created by these four prices to be overcome.
That was natural, but let us think a little more closely. Without knowing it, had we not been brought to where we stood by a certain kind of faith? For did we not believe in our own reasoning? Did we not have confidence in our ability to think? What was that but a sort of faith? Yes, we had been faithful, abjectly faithful to the God of Reason. So, in one way or another, we discovered that faith had been involved all the time!
The reader might say, “I’m scientific. I proceed based on fact only. The proposition of the programme is speculative, and I cannot proceed based on speculation.”
This passage seeks to overcome this by demonstrating that faith—which we will define as belief based on a balance of probabilities plus the adoption of a course of action based on that belief—is an inherent faculty that everyone has been practising the whole time.
Throughout one’s life up to the point of facing the self-imposed crisis referred to above, no one ever proceeds based on absolute certainty. Every individual, in adopting every course of action they adopt, does so with no guarantee of outcome. In particular, one has trusted one’s own perceptions and interpretations of reality and one’s own decision-making. Is this because experience has shown me that every perception and interpretation was correct? That every course of action I have ever taken turned out precisely as I expected? That I have always been right?
Of course, this is nonsense. Worse than that: most of us have spent most of the time proceeding on the basis of our own assessment, our own reason, even though experience should have told us that we are less reliable as sources of wisdom than the collective experience of humankind.
It’s nonsense to say that one has no capacity for faith: the question here is not one of switching from reason to faith but switching from an unreliable form of faith (in self) to a reliable form of faith (in God).
We found, too, that we had been worshippers. What a state of mental gooseflesh that used to bring on! Had we not variously worshipped people, sentiment, things, money, and ourselves? And then, with a better motive, had we not worshipfully beheld the sunset, the sea, or a flower? Who of us had not loved something or somebody? How much did these feelings, these loves, these worships, have to do with pure reason? Little or nothing, we saw at last. Were not these things the tissue out of which our lives were constructed? Did not these feelings, after all, determine the course of our existence? It was impossible to say we had no capacity for faith, or love, or worship. In one form or another we had been living by faith and little else.
The programme does not require worship but may result in the adoption of a religion, and religions tend to involve worship, although this is not at all obligatory.
If to worship means to honour and revere as divine, and the divine is the source of goodness, to worship something other than God is to believe in that thing as the source of goodness or the ultimate goal.
Whilst my attitude towards certain things might not have felt like worship, that is what it what: thinking that the good originated in other individuals, in performing impressively, in having things under control, in doing things of value.
These turned out to be hollow, tin gods. Either a bad, or a good, but not an ultimate source of anything.
Staking my whole life on such things was insane but was pursued with a dogged reason.
The basis of life, in reality, is not physical but metaphysical: reaching for something beyond. That something lies beyond the material and can be reached only with the faculties of the metaphysical, the intuition that there is something beyond physical sight and the striving towards it. All material loves are intermediate staging posts and deceive and embitter unless the goal behind them—God—is discerned.
Even the dyed-in-the-wool materialist is striving for something metaphysical but merely mislocating the destination.
Imagine life without faith! Were nothing left but pure reason, it wouldn’t be life. But we believed in life—of course we did. We could not prove life in the sense that you can prove a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, yet, there it was.
I cannot live without value, identity, and purpose, and the material cosmos is too small a theatre for these, the aeons of the physical universe, too short a span, and the planet, too small a stage.
The physical universe goes on almost forever but cannot contain a single soul.
What matters cannot be enumerated, worded, or pinned like a butterfly and labelled.
Life—the electrical signals and neurotransmitters—without reason, sense, appreciation, love, existential value is not life at all but chemistry.
Even reason would not be reason, because reason is not just putting two and two together and making four but seeing that they must make four. A computer can make an inference, but the computer cannot know that the inference is true. It can only produce outputs based on inputs. It is subject only to the laws of cause and effect causing it to produce specific outputs as effects of specific inputs as causes. Reason is the seeing of a consequent based on a ground, spontaneously, outside the physical laws of cause and effect. I believe to be true what I believe to be true because my inferences are true (when they are true), and the truth of those inferences is based on the thing to which the truth pertains, which is not causally linked to the atoms in my mind, causing me to think the true thought. Seeing truth circumvents the laws of cause and effect. You can prove a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, with calculus or geometry, but even the sense that such proofs are correct requires more than reason; it requires the validity of inference, of insight. Reason thus requires more than reason to be reasonable. Reason alone is never reasonable. Artificial systems without human insight and intuition can be entirely rational yet wholly insane in their conclusions—and know nothing of it. It requires the not entirely rational human being to produce reasonableness, in fact sanity.
In fact, a state of affairs constitutes a ground. I see this, and infer a consequent, not necessarily, but by choice. This thought produces correlated activity in the brain. The mind animates the brain; the brain does not produce the mind as a hallucination. The real cause and effect is this: the inference is the cause, and the brain activity is the effect. All mental operations are therefore operations by the supernatural on the natural.
It turns out that there is more to reality than calculations in a computer or thoughtless, mechanical systems of cause and effect, and that reality comprises the natural and the supernatural, with the latter tinkering constantly with the natural. Is the Taj Mahal naturally occurring? Is Brothers Karamazov simply a result of cause and effect, a naturally occurring phenomenon like the burp of a chimpanzee? No: nature, the ever-accommodating host, welcomes the supernatural constantly, as, through human reason, the latter moulds the world.
It turns out that reason is but a fragment of the whole in all other matters than faith in God.
So why not this question too? Why cannot the question of God be subject not just to reason but to other faculties?
Why would a question that encompasses both the natural and the supernatural be answerable with reference only to the natural?
Could we still say the whole thing was nothing but a mass of electrons, created out of nothing, meaning nothing, whirling on to a destiny of nothingness? Of course we couldn’t. The electrons themselves seemed more intelligent than that. At least, so the chemist said.
To believe that the material world is a single interlocking mechanism of cause and effect, with metaphysical phenomena simply illusions of consciousness all reducible to mechanical causes and thus of no significance, is a perfectly respectable philosophy. The argument largely holds.
Except for this: Why would a being whose consciousness is reducible to mechanical causes and who has this pointed out continue to be bothered by anything? If everything is reducible to mechanical causes, there is no personhood, there is no meaning, there is no purpose, there is no morality, there is not even any reason. There is simply no one to be upset. If the world were merely an interlocking mechanism and thus were perceived at such—which is not hard to do—bang goes all upset, because bang goes the person who might be upset.
Yet the argument, apparently flawless, fails to convince. The unhappiness remains; the disquiet remains; the certainty remains in the truth of truth, love, and beauty, even if they are so thoroughly thwarted that they can barely be experienced in a universe that contrives to mask, conceal, or place out of reach those three interlocking aspects of the metaphysical.
A machine that cannot be convinced it is a machine is not a machine at all, or, rather, the machine is the vessel not the substance.
It is hard for a nihilist to hold on to the nihilism for more than a few moments before personhood and all that goes with it bleeds through the bandages: even blood knows better.
Hence, we saw that reason isn’t everything. Neither is reason, as most of us use it, entirely dependable, though it emanate from our best minds. What about people who proved that man could never fly? Yet we had been seeing another kind of flight, a spiritual liberation from this world, people who rose above their problems. They said God made these things possible, and we only smiled. We had seen spiritual release, but liked to tell ourselves it wasn’t true.
There is more to the mechanism than the mechanism itself.
And the mechanism, itself, falters.
The human riddle cannot be solved with a slide rule, and the slide rule is itself mis-calibrated.
I cannot think my way out of the trap.
But I can observe my way out of the trap.
I observe those who have been sprung from the trap.
I mimic them.
And I too am sprung.
Actually we were fooling ourselves, for deep down in every man, woman, and child, is the fundamental idea of God. It may be obscured by calamity, by pomp, by worship of other things, but in some form or other it is there. For faith in a Power greater than ourselves, and miraculous demonstrations of that power in human lives, are facts as old as man himself.
God is not within me like an egg is in the larder. But the idea of God is within me.
Within me is baked the idea of an origin to which I must return.
Within me is baked the idea that there is an ideal way to live.
Within me is baked the idea that the riddle can be solved.
The blocks:
Bad things happening (calamity).
Personal vanity (pomp).
Mislocating the source of all goodness in the material (worship of other things).
Those can keep a person blinded and distracted indefinitely.
The stories of those who have been ‘one with God all along’, as it were, prove nothing. They might just be built like that, designed by nature.
The stories of whose who never find God prove nothing. For them, everything proceeds along its preordained course.
A miracle is found at the kink in the line: where the natural course of affairs is diverted.
This is the case to answer when observed in others.
This spiritual experience occurs both spontaneously, by contagion, and by systematic application.
AA started with the first two and developed the third: the miracle, the intervention in human affairs by a force external to the natural but employing the natural, is now wholesale.
The fact that the means God uses are natural—reason, emotion, human interaction, mental activity, physical acts—should not obscure the divine source.
I repeat: if the billiard ball suddenly goes in a new direction, someone has taken up a cue and struck it.
We finally saw that faith in some kind of God was a part of our make-up, just as much as the feeling we have for a friend. Sometimes we had to search fearlessly, but He was there. He was as much a fact as we were. We found the Great Reality deep down within us. In the last analysis it is only there that He may be found. It was so with us.
What is located ‘deep-down-within’ is not God Himself but the channel, the port, the portal, the access point to God.
When sitting, quietly, deep down within, the metaphysical realm becomes apparent, 360 degrees in all planes, and there are infinite planes, geometrically.
From that single point of stillness—Eliot’s still point of the turning world—the other world heaves into view.
To find God, talk to God: narrate, thank, ask, then shut up and listen..
He’ll inevitably show up.
We can only clear the ground a bit. If our testimony helps sweep away prejudice, enables you to think honestly, encourages you to search diligently within yourself, then, if you wish, you can join us on the Broad Highway. With this attitude you cannot fail. The consciousness of your belief is sure to come to you.
One cannot sit with one’s arms crossed hoping that the Chapter will convince one against one’s will.
The chapter can get rid of nonsense, provide a clear path of reason to follow, and point the way to the actions required to activate the relationship with God, to, as it were, turn the light on.
The diligent search will require not just the searching itself but the removal of the clutter that impairs the signal: self-will, attack thoughts, secrets, unmade amends.
The path always leads to God.
The only way to fail is not to embark on the course or to give up half-way.
Failure is therefore down to the individual.
In this book you will read the experience of a man who thought he was an atheist. His story is so interesting that some of it should be told now. His change of heart was dramatic, convincing, and moving.
This might seem patronising: ‘thought he was an atheist’. If an atheist is someone who believes they have proof of the non-existence of God, the belief can be quite sincere, yet it is the evidence that proves false.
It is almost impossible to prove conclusively that there is no mouse in the attic.
But a single whisker is proves that there is one.
The whole structure collapses in an instant.
With the first, even slight conscious contact, atheism is dead.
Our friend was a minister’s son. He attended church school, where he became rebellious at what he thought an overdose of religious education. For years thereafter he was dogged by trouble and frustration. Business failure, insanity, fatal illness, suicide—these calamities in his immediate family embittered and depressed him. Post-war disillusionment, ever more serious alcoholism, impending mental and physical collapse, brought him to the point of self-destruction.
If God’s will is to have a relationship with me, self-will is my rebellion against that: the desire to go it alone, to have no relationship with God.
Once the decision is made in favour of self-will, that’s where the rot sets in.
That’s what creates the shell of separation.
And within the shell of separation, the self is made.
The self needs to be destroyed to return to the fork in the road where the decision was made.
Self needs to be unwound back to its origin.
Self needs to be undone.
From that point, a difference choice can be made.
The way forward is really the way back first.
Self-destruction. Obviously what is meant is death. But one can read this as the destruction of the self.
When the scorecards read zero—and not before—I recognise which side of my bread is buttered and side with buttery God against the unbuttered self.
I let go and fall, onto the buttered side, of course.
That’s where recovery starts.
One night, when confined in a hospital, he was approached by an alcoholic who had known a spiritual experience. Our friend’s gorge rose as he bitterly cried out: “If there is a God, He certainly hasn’t done anything for me!” But later, alone in his room, he asked himself this question: “Is it possible that all the religious people I have known are wrong?” While pondering the answer he felt as though he lived in hell. Then, like a thunderbolt, a great thought came. It crowded out all else: “Who are you to say there is no God?”
Our candidate reasons that God does not exist because God has not descended like a fairy godmother granting wishes or the cavalry coming to the rescue. The failure of God to show up spontaneously might seem to constitute evidence that He does not exist.
This short episode reveals that just a small degree of investigation and willingness to reopen the closed topic is sufficient to effect the first relation with God.
Even if the individual does not initiate the process, God seems, on this occasion, to have initiated the process for him. God, working through the ‘alcoholic who had known a spiritual experience’, reaches all the way down to the individual, and the individual engages in the subject, actively wrestling with the question of God. He does not need to even ask God for help: God seems to recognise the fact he is searching and ‘throws him a bone’: the thought that came like a thunderbolt.
For atheism to be true, all asserted experiences of God have to be lies or delusions.
The trilemma: lie, delusion, or truth.
If even one person is not lying or deluded, the existence of God is certain.
On the other hand, the failure of a particular person to have an experience of God proves nothing.
I cannot infer from the absence of golden syrup from my pantry that no golden syrup exists in any pantry.
Not switching the light on is no evidence that the light does not work.
One flick of the switch on one occasion is sufficient to prove that it does, years of sitting in the dark notwithstanding.
For our candidate, the single example of a friend who had had a spiritual experience is sufficient.
Jim and Fred, earlier on, have thoughts come to them, and these thoughts crowd out all else.
In active alcoholism, a thought comes and overwhelms the individual.
Our candidate also has a thought that comes to him that crowds out all else.
In the solution to alcoholism, a thought comes and overwhelms the individual.
What is the nature of this thought? The observation that the individual is not really in a position to assert that there is no God. The individual cannot possibly gather enough information to conclusively prove that every single assertion of a genuine spiritual experience is a fraud or a hallucination.
This cracks the door open.
He has not even proved that God exists: he has merely set aside the idea that the non-existence of God can be proved.
This tiny step forward is sufficient. The wall is breached. The enemy has penetrated the city. The Trojan Horse discharges its hidden crew, the gates can be unlocked from the inside, and the city falls.
This man recounts that he tumbled out of bed to his knees. In a few seconds he was overwhelmed by a conviction of the Presence of God. It poured over and through him with the certainty and majesty of a great tide at flood. The barriers he had built through the years were swept away. He stood in the Presence of Infinite Power and Love. He had stepped from bridge to shore. For the first time, he lived in conscious companionship with his Creator.
Knees: humility. The natural position of someone who knows that he does not know, which is one step above knowing that one knows.
Knowing one knows is a closed system: the individual is their whole universe.
Knowing one does not know establishes two things: a vessel to hold the emptiness, and the emptiness, and the emptiness can then draw something into it.
One break in the dyke and the whole hinterland is flooded.
The influx of water restores the natural state of affairs, and the unnatural dry kingdom of man falls, to be replaced by a floating kingdom.
Reason takes the individual so far. Reason has built the kingdom without the King. Reason is employed one last time to jemmy a single brick from the wall holding back the entire ocean, and the rest of mortal reason is swept away and replaced with an immortal reason.
Thus was our friend’s cornerstone fixed in place. No later vicissitude has shaken it. His alcoholic problem was taken away. That very night, years ago, it disappeared. Save for a few brief moments of temptation the thought of drink has never returned; and at such times a great revulsion has risen up in him. Seemingly he could not drink even if he would. God had restored his sanity.
The problem is the impulse to drink plus the automatic obedience of that. That problem is no longer there. Firstly, because the impulse mostly does not return. And when it returns, the conversion to action is blocked.
The sanity is sanity of action—even if the individual wants to drink in that moment; they are prevented by God.
The insanity implied in Step One is not so much insanity of thought as insanity of behaviour: one can be stone-cold sane and still compelled to drink. The problem then is not an ability to see things clearly but an inability to act sanely.
The blocking action of God seems to come via a visceral reaction, deeper and more powerful even than the impulse to drink.
Vicissitudes are setbacks. Setbacks are irrelevant, because the defence from God stems from obedience to God’s will and the suppression of one’s own self-direction that this requires. The defence does not depend on circumstances or even emotional condition.
What is this but a miracle of healing? Yet its elements are simple. Circumstances made him willing to believe. He humbly offered himself to his Maker—then he knew.
The mind is part of the entire system. The mind remains cracked to an extent, but the system is restored, so the system is sane, in its actions.
Although the mind is healed, it is not healed completely or permanently. Defects are removed, but they are not removed far and can be retrieved. Alcoholism not alcohol-was-m.
Yet the system is patched up and so can operate even though the mind is not entirely healed.
The healing is conditional forever, contingent on the maintenance of the relationship of subservience to God.
It is circumstances that made him willing to believe, to undertake the process of going through the theoretical recognition that God ought to be able to help to a real belief that God can help plus the placing of trust in God. Circumstances, not argument or reasoning, primarily. The fire behind and underneath the alcoholic is more persuasive than the fellowship, the literature, a sponsor, meetings, and all other resources.
You can have any Higher Power you want as long as it’s your Maker, apparently. Of course, let’s take the phrase ‘as we understood Him’ at its word, although even that phrasing implies personhood (though it does not imply sex or gender: in the Roman catechism, it is clearly stated that God is without sex or gender, since God is spirit, though the male gender is used grammatically by convention and was historically used as a genderless pronoun as well as to denote a male person when referring to an individual human as opposed to a category or a non-physical entity). That means we need not take God to be our Maker. The notion of Maker does, however, establish a couple of points. Firstly, the Maker is higher in the power hierarchy than the made. The Maker can exist without the made. The made cannot exist without the Maker. The made does not have its own, independent purpose. The purpose of the made lies in the mind of the Maker and need not ever even be discernible to the made. The pot does not know for what it is fashioned. And the made can be done with in accordance with the Maker’s will. The only difference between a pot and a human is that a human must make the choice to submit to his role as the made. This role is inherent but not forced upon him in reality. This is where the ‘offering oneself’ comes in: we’re given separation and offered reunion. And if we reject reunion, no one is going to stop us.
To quote Yogi Berra: “If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them.”
Proceeding on the basis of a willingness to believe, we arrive not at belief but at knowledge, and knowledge eliminates the need for belief.
Belief is a candle in a dark room.
Knowledge is a room flooded with natural light.
Even so has God restored us all to our right minds. To this man, the revelation was sudden. Some of us grow into it more slowly. But He has come to all who have honestly sought Him.
‘Even so’ is to be read as ‘just in such a way’ not ‘nonetheless’.
The right mind is the mind that in effect does the right thing, even though some of its thoughts are crooked.
‘Revelation’ comes from ‘vēlō’, meaning ‘to cover’, and the ‘re’ denotes not repetition but a restoration to the original state (note that the prefix ‘re’ has seven meanings in English, adopted from Latin, only one of which suggests ‘again’, and that the ‘re’ of ‘resentment’ means not ‘again’ as in the oft-posited but quite incorrect misinterpretation of ‘resentment’ as ‘re-feeling’ but ‘in response to a stimulus, with intensive force’, so a resentment is really an excessive emotional reaction to something).
‘Revelation’ is thus the uncovering of something that was covered. God was never not there. He was merely covered with a blanket of nonsense.
Some of us ‘grow into it’. In other words, atheism is childishness, immaturity. We grow up and out of it into reality.
God appears to ‘come’ to us, but that is only appearance: if revelation is the uncovering of what was covered, He was never more distant when one was unaware of His presence; he was merely not visible to us. When we become aware, it appears to be a coming-towards. But that is an optical illusion.
The condition is that we seek Him.
Clearly this is metaphysical not physical, internal not external. One is technically permitted to have a doorknob or nature as one’s Higher Power, but will one make internal contact by trying to physical touch a doorknob or a tree (after all, what is nature but the aggregate of physical things?) If you want to make contact with something metaphysical, best to look metaphysically. If the linen is stated to be in the airing cupboard, best not look in the larder.
So one has to seek internally, and one has to look alone. No one can look with one.
The internal looking is really meditation, which takes place in the conscious mind.
Forms of meditation that seek to abstract the person from the conscious mind, from thought, and concentrate on the body, the breath, posture, are very effective at what they seek to do, but it’s rare that the stated object is conscious contact with God and knowledge of God’s will for us in the material world. Wonderful but not our purpose here.
If one wants that, one must get out of the body into the mind.
How does one approach God?
Talk to God. Ask God questions. Make requests of God (the resolution of problems, the welfare of others, knowledge of what He wants one to do). Thank God. That will do the trick. Thank God!
But don’t dawdle until He replies. Sometimes He takes a while to get back to one. In the meantime, if one hangs around for too long, something might reply, and it might not be God. God won’t be insisted upon; God won’t be hustled.
‘Honestly’ sought. I’m not sure what ‘honestly’ means. If one is seeking, one must have a motivation to seek Him, or one would not be seeking. A motivation cannot be honest or dishonest in the sense of truthful or untruthful, because motivations are phenomena not propositions. Motivations can be honest, however, in terms of being pure rather than composite, comprising a surface, pretended motivation plus a real motivation.
If one seeks God really driven by the secondary motivations of personal happiness, sorting one’s life out, getting ahead in one’s job, and one does find God, God will blow everything out of the water anyway.
If you open floodgates, the floodgates do their job regardless of your motivation.
‘Honestly’ thus has no real meaning here, unless one takes it to be a solecism, assuming that Bill means ‘sincerely’ in the sense of ‘diligently’ and ‘above all else’.
See what else Bill says in terms of how ‘seeking’ is to take place:
- with all the desperation of drowning men (page 28)
- earnestly (page 46)
Note also that Step Eleven (page 59) and (c) (page 60) refer merely to ‘sought’ and do not stimulate the necessity of particular intensity or manner.
Thus, we need merely seek.
When we drew near to Him He disclosed Himself to us!
We only have to go a little of the way towards God, and He will come all of the way in the other direction, towards us.
This echoes the idea of God not making too hard terms with those who earnestly seek.