What’s Gotten Into the Alcoholic?

"This is not the person I married."

"He isn't himself anymore."

"I want my wife back."

Then where is he? Who is he? Where did she go, then?

Years ago a voice told me that the solution to the pain in my head was to wrap my lips around the barrel end of a Remington 12 gauge shotgun and squeeze the trigger. That voice was correct. Death works. The pain that I sought to eradicate would have ended then and there.

It should come as no surprise that many alcoholics hear such voices. Even alcoholics who do not drink anymore. Sure, there is the head-chatter that goes on in mostly every individual walking the face of the earth - that condition of sleep-walking with eyes opened – an idea to which every student of Spirituality 101 or even the most hypnotic of pseudo-spiritual meditations has been exposed. 

Although this can sometimes signal the beginning of understanding, becoming aware of this is no great feet of spiritual awareness - even the storefront yoga instructor can teach you how to do that.

What I am talking about is recognizing what happens when almost unintelligible mind-noise coalesces and begins to form into intelligent expression of thought. Thought originating outside of your ‘self’. I am referring to those ideas that can mimic your own voice, impersonating your "self,"  -  that speak to you. Where do you think that is coming from? Did you think it was you? It is not. It comes from beyond.

To understand why so many alcoholics hear voices we have to understand basic truth. The talking from beyond that occurs will never go away permanently until we go back to the scene of the crime – to the place where that ego-self rises to feed on hate and where it exploits our sleeping state in order to do it.

Instead, be awake and see what is going on. That is all we have to do. It cannot operate while being watched through enlightened vision. That vision that is God’s vision and a gift to us from Him. Resentment, negative thoughts and voices inside the head, disintegrate in its presence.

Like a vampire to sunlight. Just being aware of it, and aware enough to remain aware, is sufficient. Ego-self will work overtime to use our own ambition to fight this idea and to put us back to sleep through trying. Impatience will be used. Doubt will be used. People, books, philosophies tempting us to try more, more, and more will be used. But there is no additional information - no encouraging writing, no philosophy, or advice that will do much good.

Studying truth, trying to learn wisdom and ambitiously struggling to learn our way out of feeling bad is a block from happiness and from truth ever reaching us. These things hinder, confuse and complicate as each casts doubt on the simplicity of just being aware – and doing nothing else except that it becomes plain to act without struggle. 

 If you are asleep, even your praying will never get out. God doesn’t obey – not even when we add, “But I will use what You give me for good”. We can actually think that God can be baited in this fashion. Then after He doesn’t bite by performing His miracles for us, we get frustrated, which is (anger at God). Stop asking.

Wake up as often as you can and everything else will be added after that, despite the protestations of ego. A new energy to know and to see will be the new default condition instead of constant questioning and seeking answers ambitiously. The energy of frustration always fails even when it is strong. The spiritual irony is that it always adds even greater frustration.

Go back to the scene of the crime – in the mind – where hate knocked on the door our your psyche, ego rose to answer and to feast -- and you thought “it’ was you and you opened your mouth to swallow it in. Now it can speak and chatter and utter vile things. Silence it by giving in, do as it says – or distract your attentions away from it by judging. Either way it wins. Judgment is playing God. Playing God doesn’t work.

That night, a voice that sounded like mine made Its case to me and could easily have won out -- but something else intervened.

The intervention came in a form of a consciousness and a knowing that there was a better way to be rid of the pain – and that was through the very awareness that was showing it to me. It lead to a new relationship with my Creator and a simple way of living that not only answered my alcohol problem, but answered all my problems. The obvious ones and the ‘secret’ ones.

The form of consciousness comes by separating from the stream of negative thought that hounds all alcoholics, bar none, and speaks and acts through them. The co-authors of the Big Book knew it, if not consciously then at some level. And they were divinely moved to write it into Step Eleven.

"Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out."

Prayer alone won’t' do it. Working with others won't do it. Only practicing conscious contact with God through meditation is the instrument that delivers us back to that place were our minds become linked to its original source and not put to sleep through overreacting to cruelty and pressures in the stream of life.


Peace and Love,

Danny S – RLRA
Real Live Recovered Alcoholic
http://recoveredalcoholic.blogspot.com