Effing the ineffable

Last night's topic at the men's group meeting that is my home group was "What is your concept of your higher power?" I usually dread this topic because it often results in weird shares, vague platitudes, bizarre barely veiled references to Christianity, bold proclamations of atheism, rambling and nonsense. It can have that aimless and ultimately meaningless feeling to it, similar to people talking about music rather than just listening to it. 

But, as usual, the guys came up with some interesting and useful perspectives last night. And it is simply jaw dropping to see yet again the contrast between physical appearance and general attitude versus deeply held beliefs and intimate experiences that have changed our lives. 

the ordinary and the extraordinary

Anyway, there is no way around the simple fact that the 12 step approach to recovery and healing and wholeness involves the imperative of coming to believe that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity, turning my will and my life over to the care of that power, and seeking through prayer and meditation to improve my conscious contact with that power and attempting to know the will of that higher power. 

This whole enterprise is deeply repellent to a great many people. In his curious and eccentric little book, 12 Steps and 12 Traditions, in the chapter on step 2 (Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity), Bill W outlines some of the categorical types of recovering people and their attitude toward a higher power. His types are:

1. The belligerent one

2. The bewildered one

3. The intellectual

4. The cynic

At one time or another, I have been one or more of these types in regard to the question of a higher power. In particular, having had white light spiritual experiences at age 14, 22 and 23 and 30, and having consciously sought a direct experience of the divine through intoxication and using hallucinogens, and never really having had much of a problem with the idea that there are mysterious, unquantifiable and tangible but highly subjective spiritual forces at work in the universe and in my own life, I have usually just been bewildered. 

Why did my pursuit of the divine go hand in hand with an almost fatal, progressive illness? How can it possibly be true that the mysteries have any particular interest in me, let alone actual positive care for me? How can I develop a concept of a power greater than myself when I am an atheist and do not experience the divine as one entity or a Supreme Being? Can I form and maintain conscious contact with my own conception of a power greater than myself reliably enough to stay sober?

These were some of the reservations I personally had. Many people faced with this core of 12 step recovery have far more serious reservations. I have worked with many men who were empiricists, rationalists and cynics to the core and who simply could not form any kind of connection with even the barest sense of the divine, no matter what they tried. Many of these men do stay sober anyway, either by finding a way to work the 12 step program that works for them or by pursuing sobriety some other way. 

But at the thermonuclear core of the spiritual malady that is alcoholism and addiction, despair reigns. My experience of the darkest side of my delusional addictive state is that it lives in complete despair. A form of pitch black nihilism and rejection of purpose, meaning, love-- leading to a total rejection of life. Not everyone experiences this completely negative emptiness, but it's there in me, and I am often reminded that it is. Maybe it is as much a cause of depression as it is a cause of addiction. At any rate, it too is a totally subjective experience that is almost untellable. 

One of the very tough looking men of our group said a single thing last night that sticks with me: God is not the object of my belief, but the subject of my experience. 

If the divine is the subject of my experience, it doesn't matter what I believe or don't believe. My first sponsor in AA always referred to beliefs as thoughts, and therefore as human products, creations of the mind. Faith, on the other hand, was experience-- transcendent and not only a thought, but an action, a way of acting in the world. It assists me to think of belief and faith as two separate realms-- one can believe in God and not "have faith;" one can "have faith" and not even believe in God. Believing has no relationship whatsoever to reality. I can disbelieve that the sun will rise tomorrow all I want, but rise (probably) it will. 

Fortunately, for me to stay sober, I don't have to believe any damn thing. I do have to live by a daily experience of faith. But this experience is a strange and mysterious one, and includes within itself the spiraling out toward greater and greater faith. It's funny because my mind starts to rattle in the face of that language-- but what do you have faith IN?? How can you "have faith" if you don't BELIEVE anything? How can you have faith that there is a power greater than yourself that gives a fuck about you at all, especially in the face of so much random suffering and horror in the world? Etc. Yes, yes. Good mind. You are doing your job. 

A dozen dead roses looking super fine

Anyway, I am unable to put into words exactly what I mean. The rationalist in me finds this unacceptable if not embarrassing and downright foolish and dangerous. Quieting that skeptical mind and not trying to fight it, simply leaving space and observing, allowing room and allowing experience to be what it is, this kind of mindfulness, is where I get the power to stay sober. For a drunk used to a big old man punishing sky God or a loving friend in Jesus, my form of the experience of the divine would probably not work. It's too "mystical" or gnostic and probably sounds vague, like one wouldn't be able to really have a relationship with it. 

But it's the actual and experienced fabric of my daily existence.