Playing God

It's Hard Work

Ego is a hard master . Quite the slave driver, in fact.

In order to preserve its emboldened egocentric existence and maintain the role of “god” – judging the people and conditions it sees in the world – the Ego-self has the un-recovered alcoholic working very hard.

Since the circumstance around him - as evidenced by people’s reactions to his increasingly miscreant behaviors - are constantly reminding him of his true, diminutive place in the world, he must stay ahead of the game by constantly reordering himself, his thinking and his environment in a way that continually resets the stage for the performances of his (really the ego's) life.

It is a restless existence as the alcoholic struggles, jumping through hoops, expending his energies trying to manufacture his own “self’-esteem” fitting an imagined picture of himself; one he reserves in his fantasies.

No wonder he is so tired and worn out much of the time. Even dry, sober alcoholics, yet a prey top their emotions, must "pass out" deeply into the recesses of their thinking by the end of the day. The patience for a "nightly review" of the days spiritual failings and successes is hard to find.

All alcoholics become a slave to the prideful, false-self lurking inside and he often acts without much regard for his fellows or awareness of what he is doing - wondering why he cannot ever seem to acquire and hold onto the “white picket fence” of his dreams.

The answer is for him to get out of his dreams, thereby escaping the grasp that his lower nature, his own ego-self, has on him. The Twelve Steps is a great place to make a beginning. Custom made for alcoholics by alcoholics - it is the longest running, most successful modern day recovery program around, providing a path to the spiritual awakening necessary before anyone can experience enduring sobriety and growth.

Peace & Love,

Danny S – RLRA

Real Live Recovered Alcoholic

http://recoveredalcoholic.blogspot.com

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Reconnection Restores Confidence

Lots of us alkies are frequently on the fragile side - many times secretly - but we put up a good front.

Often we have found that we could not trust our own 'trusting' of others (having been screwed in the past by placing dependency upon others - their opinions of us etc) and we end up resenting them. It leaves us weak and legless, afraid to stand up for ourselves - fearful of confrontation and prone to procrastination and social timidity.

Sometimes it seems we have no voice in the world as we become less and less able to speak up to others and stand up for ourselves without unless first fueled by anger.

When we do that the pain of judgment, god-play and God-separation delivers nothing but pain as we recoil from others - becoming even less trusting. We blame them for our growing discomfort when it is really our own inability to deal with them in a loving manner that is the cause of the internal conflict.

It’s a hell of a way to live. It sucks, actually.

Fearing our fellows and walking on eggshells on this earth is not how we are meant to live, is it?

The truth is while many people cannot be trusted - there are those who can be and should be.

We can know. But how?

One benefit of recovery is that the spiritual awakening required not only removes the obsession to drink or drug, it also sets us onto a life-track where we rediscover natural discernment.

Armed with new intuitive understanding, through trusting God, we are shown who can be trusted, who cannot, without

This ability is a God given instinct that animals do not posses -- that only humans have -- and it is a gift we had squandered and set aside in favor of manufacturing our own “self esteem” to levels entirely undeserving, while we were descending into the drinking life. It was a life marred by selfish, self-centeredness -- stepping on the toes of others as they had stepped on ours and then fearing them for the anger they raise in our being.

We were never more connected to the Creator as the day we were first born and we can now move back into that spiritual direction, returning to childlike innocence, even as time marches on for our corporal existence.

Fortunately, once we recover and heal, our God connection reestablishes and we can shed anger and the inclination to hate others. We become resilient to the psychic attacks of others. From our new awakened state we can effect a still, quiet, meditative state where we remain aware and recover continued intuition, discipline, and instinct. These gifts begin to redevelop within and commence to function once again - like it did at one time when we were younger and more innocent.

Confidence (con fi Deo) implies we are always "with God" and that is a spiritually humbling existence of faithfulness that overrides the animalistic, humanly dependent cockiness that so frequently accompanies piousness, religiosity and faux spirituality.

We can gain back our lost vision and all we have to do is.......... CHANGE COMPLETELY! That only comes through first trusting God. It isn't easy but it is so simple and one way that it happens is through the spiritual awakening afforded through Big Book version of the Twelve Steps. It really does!

Peace and Love,

Danny S – RLRA

Real Live Recovered Alcoholic

http://recoveredalcoholic.blogspot.com

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ALCOHOLIC OBSESSION -- A Piece of Mind

A Quest for Equilibrium

If you have never really understood alcoholic obsession as much as you would like, you will 'get it' now.

It would be great if we could just drink, feel better, then move on with our lives without the need to do it again -- at least not until the next new pain comes along. That might somehow be manageable. Then drinking episodes of drunkenness could be reserved for major traumas like, divorce, job losses, and major disappointments.

Not exactly a healthy way of dealing with problems yet this is exactly what some non-alcoholics do, much to the amazement of the real alcoholic.

The problem for the real alcoholic is that new pains only mount on top of the old, even after alcohol has been applied.

Each new drunk solves nothing as new, current 'problems' mount upon the ever increasing load that is the sum of a growing inventory of resentment, fear and harms.

Not only are un-recovered alcoholics, who have unaddressed grudges and pending amends subject to the painful torment of their past guilt -- but they also suffer from the torrent of bitter emotions running through their current lives, adding fuel to the fire as they continuing to live in an unchanging,  unmanageable state. With the stresses of life still tearing them down, they remain subject to resentment, anger, frustration and fear while still attached to their own ego-self.

Such alcoholics may even glorify in their "un-recovered" status, insisting that recovery is not possible - that "no one ever recovers." They may even hold up their life "in recovery" and always "recovering" lifestyle as if it were some exalted state of human existence. An alcoholics defiant refusal to recover or to even consider its possibility is a simple rebellious denial. It is a dismissal of the experiences of thousands of recovered alcoholics who have come before and a scoffing truth that is of a magnitude that guarantees him misery and a decent into anxiety, depression, physical illness and finally death -- all 'self' induced through a continued basking in their own negative emotions.

Guilt is as inexorable a power as any universal force such as gravity, light, love or hate. As the result of playing God, vis-à-vis resentment fueled judgment; we sense the pursuing pain of it through our conscience.

This unshakably ferocious “hound of heaven” is always nipping at our heels, compelling us to find solutions through the pleasure centers reward circuitry buried in our skulls. When we apply alcohol, it invokes the neurotransmitter anesthetics in the brain that are necessary to blot out the feelings of guilt. This never eliminates them or the source, but removes the consciousness of it. We experience relief because we are now ignorant of the hound chasing us.

The only problem with this is that it is temporary and only a cover-up. The moment we let up on the alcoholic switch, guilt’s tenacity betrays our escape. Continual refreshment is necessary in order to exist without being conscious of guilt.

This repetitive mitigation of guilt keeps pain and pleasure balanced so we can live with some semblance of sanity and helps maintain the appearance that we have “got our shit together”. This continuous cycle of action, beyond our conscious control, is what society terms as addiction.

Maintaining this equilibrium eventually becomes the main object of the alcoholic’s life. Anything that becomes the main object of a life is an obsession. The alcoholic who is dependent upon this in order to live with ease and comfort looses a piece of his mind as he forces a counterfeit peace of mind he knows he does not deserve -- and so he is a slave to whatever processes or substances he can incorporate into his life to grant it. That process is the drinking lifestyle of the common alcoholic.

The coauthors of the magnificent spiritual text, story and how-to book, “Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism” knew that if the resentment problem could be handled than ALL ELSE would correct. We know they knew it when they wrote, " Resentment is the "number one" offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else. From it stems all forms of spiritual disease . . . . ." (64:3)

Resentment does not stem from spiritual illness -- spiritual illness stems from resentment. The illness is the symptom of the cause -- not the cause of our troubles.

Peace and Love

Danny S – RLRA Real Live Recovered Alcoholic

http://recoveredalcoholic.blogspot.com

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Just 'This' Side of Suicide

 How Meditation Prevents Relapse Into Hell

The pain that comes upon the alcoholic out of guilty conscience is relentless. Naturally he seeks relief.

As we drank, and as alcohol 'worked' we eventually learned that our relief-seeking had to be at least as unrelenting and as potent as the pain which pursues us, less we experience the deficit.

We alcoholics find relief through our own private apothecary, located inside the brain – specifically, the Nucleus Accumbens which houses the human apparatus we call the Pleasure Center. Here are the reward pathways that comprise a neuro-circuitry that the alcoholic can access. The potential for abuse is enormous as the neurotransmitter chemicals that provide pleasure can easily be used beyond their naturally intended purpose.

Pleasurable neuro-transmission within the food and sex reward pathways are necessary for the continuation of the species and are most often the first and most abused. Eating is usually more accessible than sex and therefore is the first activity to be abused. 

The foods most often abused are sugar and alcohol. Both are very effective dopamine boosters. (In addition to their drinking problems, most alcoholics also suffer from grave eating disorders.)

The more pain there is the greater the need for pleasure. It does not remove the pain.

During these abusive pursuits, the feeling of pleasure overwhelms feelings of pain.

 In sound masking, undesirable noise can be neutralized by “opposite” sounds where frequencies cover-up but do not eliminate an objectionable sound. Likewise, pain stemming from god-separation can be swept under the rug through the issue of pain’s counterpart: Pleasure.

The concealing of pain through the ‘white noise’ of pleasure generated through neurotransmitter brain processes, most notably dopamine seems to be an antidote, but like this example, guilt is merely being overridden - pain and its source still remain unaffected and as vital as ever.

Imagine a dark room where someone is turning a flashlight on and off. The light is very obvious and distracting. Now imagine that the room lights are suddenly turned on. The flashlight is still being turned on and off, but now is easier to ignore - even invisible - because it has been ‘”masked". The utter simplicity of this process is easy to see.

It is the interminable force of guilt, that pain of conscience, which compels the alcoholic out of his natural consciousness state and into his brain hell where he becomes trapped.

The crack addict who is ‘stuck’ sitting on the floor of a crack house for days at a time, while his family frantically searches for him, until his bank account has been depleted, his jewelry and car gone - parallels what goes on in the alcoholic in just this way. Once he is locked into this behavior he must continue until conscience ceases its pursuit. It does not.

In the absence of alcohol and if left to their own devices, all alcoholics will eventually find some say to avoid conscience from catching up with them. That includes killing themselves.

If death does not come accidentally then they will do it themselves intentionally.

Just short of suicide, the final solution, there are yet other solutions which the alcoholic has not yet exhausted and the next chapter explores the mechanics of how he manages to not kill himself – for a while at least.

Meditation of the kind that awakens us to the things that bring us the pain of guilty conscience saves us from this dying process. Those ‘things’ are all the names we have applied to resentment: Anger, irritation, annoyance, frustration even fear – all of these cause us to play God and trigger the need for relief of the resulting pain.

Peace and Love,

Danny S – RLRA

Real Live Recovered Alcoholic

http://recoveredalcoholic.blogspot.com

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I Love My Personal Trainer

Well. I do now.

Lack of awareness encourages stagnation. Becoming the sum of our past gets to be a painful burden - more and more so as time moves on. An unhappy past amounts to an increasingly unhappy present.

It is awareness of the embarrassingly little and petty things like the incident I am about to depict, that help us grow:

I had a serious problem within my own self this morning. A situation that had the potential to kill me. It happened at the gym.

My trainer had her personal workout time at the same time as mine. She used the elliptical machine right next to mine. A strange thing happened.

As I was working out on my elliptical, I found myself strangely compelled to compete with her. It lasted just a minute but the urge was strong. So there I was comparing my speed with hers then trying to match my stride to hers so she wasn’t going faster than I was going. (Weird beings, we humans.)

It is not so much the secret approval seeking that is so revealing as it is is seeing why this was happening. This is a gift.

I realized I was actually looking for her approval of me (believing she would be noticing my speed at all) The reason I wanted her approval (here is where standard psychology fails us and simple spiritual awareness provides real insight) is because I had a resentment for her going back to last MAY when she didn’t return a phone call to me.

I must have buried the sucker down were all suppressed annoyances and irritations go, instead of handling it properly. Weird stuff eh? It’ll kill us in the end.

She is a sweet little thing (With a tight set of muscles that could put you down in the blink of an eye if necessary) and probably had no idea what was going on and had no idea how her presence affected me this morning. (Do we ever know all of the good or harm we bring to fore just by our presence?)

This is the beauty of mediation. Meditation as an ‘action’ is nothing in itself. It is just an exercise, - a stress rehearsal, for real-life, if you will.

It’s how you ‘get’ and how you can live AFTER you practice the awareness granted through it. This is the gift.

You come to realizations that would never otherwise come:

This is a resentment that I failed to process through the spiritual Step Ten machine – then additionally it somehow fell through a crack in the Step Eleven nightly inventory routine – BUT here it is now caught in the wonderful spiritual net that is the result of meditative awareness.

It is because of awareness of the situation that it is allowed to vanish.

• No effort.
• No ‘trying.
• No “direct amends" due at this time.

Not even a premeditated "plan" to seek forgiveness or relief and have it happened – no seeking of relief or the ambrosia of forgiveness. Not even ambitiously endeavoring to “do the right thing.”

Just a spontaneously “letting go” of the negative emotion (resentment) that sprung as t result of a simple, forgotten “annoyance” that cropped up some nine months ago - (forgiveness I failed to proffer her way back then) Love I did not give her.

These are simple realities of the human dynamics which affect us all. Most of us do not want to be so aware as to see them. Most people want to suppress their resentments and not see them ever surface in order to languish in an imaginary spiritual aloofness and to secretly bask the sweet judgment of others – playing God.

Many of us are interested in achieving spiritual bliss, not effortless, non-egoist, and God aligned neutrality. And there are others who upon reading this article will think,

“Holy crow! If I could only be that aware, then I could finally, at long last learn, to love others."

Had today’s event at the gym not happened – (and events like it which happen all the time in life) - if I did not have an effective meditation the daily effect of which is an increased awareness of these things – that resentment might have collected in the craw of my psyche together with a multitude of others, making me increasingly miserable and guilty and dissatisfied with my Program (Wondering "WTF? I am 12 stepper – I am suppose to be happy, joyous and free. It must not really work" or I am a real hypocritical piece of shit.) until finally I would need to repeat yet another 4^th step inventory – or else drink – or else kill myself. Either of these options would accomplish the same thing -- stop me from feeling the pain.

The cool thing is now I love my trainer and I would have my trainer love me – by forgiving me for my shortcomings.

Very insightful those Big Book co-authors! The SOBS knew – or if they didn’t know then they were surely inspired in their naiveté - moved to include mediation in Step Eleven even though they had not yet mastered a technique themselves.

Peace & Love

Danny S – RLRA

Real Live Recovered Alcoholic

http://recoveredalcoholic.blogspot.com

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