"What We Are Like Now"

Getting a Handle on Truth is Not Complicated. It's just a little shocking.

The machinery of the Fourth Step inventory process, a fact finding and facing method, shocks us as it displays before our eyes the natures of our badly flawed psyche.

Doing so sets us up for the truth- about ourselves. It reveals the truth about our past ("What we were like") and in doing so we are prepared to see the truth about how are. Still.

Sometimes the truth revealed is that other than the removal of the desire to drink, nothing much more than that has really changed. The "What happened" part of our story is "not enough ". Even is what happened was a spiritual awakening, then something is causing us to lose that wakefulness and to return to spiritual slumber.

These truths are revealed through meditation and constitute the spiritual growth of our journey. Without this continuing education we experience spiritual atrophy.

The first thing we learn is just how pissed off we usually are so much of the time – how affected we are by outside forces that are delivered to us through unthinking and equally unaware people.

Many of us have thought we had been ‘managing’ things, keeping life in order - by repressing our little irritations and annoyances grateful for having been sown them through review. We were not. We were setting ourselves up for failure.

When we stop short of the whole Twelve Step Process, in other words – balk, on meditation, we will have to revisited the original process and repeat a forth step inventory over and over, even reinventing the process, attempting to make it more and more effective as our inner turmoils gain more and more power over us. Like a spiritual virus, becoming more and more resistant to our crude prayer, behavioral analysis and “talking cures”.

It is so sad to see folks rotating among sponsors and gurus and groups and introducing new self-help manuals and pseudo-spiritual movements and theories into such a simple and effective thing as being awake and God conscious - as if 'the search' itself were 'the all. All the while sinking deeper and deeper into depression anxiety and fear of life itself - until finally they die. Sober.

The Ego Self is so cunning.

Soon what was once presented as a simple process toward spiritual awakening - The Twelve Steps - has been distorted into something that bears more resemblance to classic psychoanalysis than it does the simple spiritual tool for inner enlightenment.

Then that evolves, even further becoming more and more complicated as we fine-tune the simple inventory process to dig deeper and deeper into our psyches. This is like never graduating from kindergarten.

So what are you like now? How far off of page 52 are you today? Anyone of us caught in the trap of worshiping this 12 step 'process' more than God has got a serious problem. And it will show.

What we are like now - if it's not at peace, in don't, mind an spiritual then although we may be on a path, we are not on the path we think we are on.

Peace & Love,

Danny S – RLRA

Real Live Recovered Alcoholic

http://recoveredalcoholic.blogspot.com

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Freedom From the Bondage of Self

Has it ever bothered you that it is so easy for others to "piss" you off?
Your secret, embarrassing sensitivity to others will eventually kill you.

Once we respond to any cruelty and allow ego to feast on resentment we automatically lose our footing, becoming sensitized and subject to our surroundings.

Now we can no longer make right choices. Someone or something is in control. It could be a boss, a spouse, a parent even someone we call "friend" who we think of as confidant. Each and every one of these are sources of stress and offer temptations to permit anger into our psyche.

The moment we accept the charge of anger the ego gorges on the bitter energy of resentment and enlarges. It becomes gross and unwieldy. Unmanageable. This is a form of preconditioning and no matter how hard we try to break ourselves free of this increasing sensitivity we remain bound. We become attached to the forces of our own bitterness, exhibiting impatience onto others - including those we purport to 'love'.

Eventually even innocents become a threat and we respond with anger to those who mean us no harm at all; who do not deserve our inner wrath and secret judging. It makes us depressed and even physically ill. *

Breaking free from self-will through the sheer force of will is a spiritual oxymoron.

Instead of relying upon intuition and inspiration, moving out of spiritual power instead of selfishness, we become less human and rely more and more upon sensual instincts and nervous energy - like animals in the wild. 

If we could develop a loyalty to our God vision, experienced in the dispassionate, quiet place where grace is, we would truly know what it means to be freed from the bondage of 'self'. We might unhitch from the wagon of the inferior ‘self' and onto a superior star – a divine source of power.

We have been given a way to do just that. It comes through separating from the alien, false self (ego) and seeing "It" for what it is.

When we do that simple thing and nothing more, "It" flees and we are free.

That you do not enjoy the unstable, excited state of unsettled discontent and anxiety that accompanies your own response to your tormentors is your personal proof that a loving God calls you 'back'.

What you have always thought of as your ‘self’ has not been you at all and you can now begin to see that by being free from this impostor “self” you will also be finally be free of your slavery to the people, places and things; even alcohol.

You can do so without struggle - finding true peace with the world and with your Creator.

Meditation, using the very special technique helps us to separate from the self - without inserting anything else back in; no doctrine, no suggestions, no affirmations - just objective awareness - allows us to develop strength. This strength is the 'daily bread' that supplies us with an otherwise elusive energy to sit still long enough and to live still enough for that 'call' to catch up and save us from our 'self'. 

We experience spiritual, emotional, mental and physical health. Free at least!

Peace and Love,
 

Danny S – RLRA

Real Live Recovered Alcoholic

http://recoveredalcoholic.blogspot.com

* Suppressed, secret anger causes more heart disease and cancer than any of the environmental causes to which society wants to redirect our attentions.

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Why Bother?

Are You Psychotic?

There are only two ways that we exist in this world. Either we are awake and aware or else we are asleep and unaware.

To be asleep is to exist in a state of unconsciousness running the “matrix” program that presents only an illusion of wakefulness.

Rene Descartes’ famous quote, “I think therefore I am” shows great introspection. Unfortunately it also reveals poor Descartes’ great intellectual delusion. It is both true and it is false – depending on our state of being in any given moment - which is why Descartes' observation make such excellent fodder for college debates and forensic society who like to argue the chicken and egg. (Which came first?)

But there is another perspective to be seen in poor Descartes' observation. When it is true – then we are truly screwed.

There is also a spiritual axiom, probably Hindi in origin, which recognizes that most of us are asleep – dreaming that we are awake. This is an accurate description of our human condition even though it falls very short of conveying the depth and breadth of the dream state. Still it as at least fair and correct. But seeing it not enough.

There must be something more. There must be some way to correct this hypnotic condition and to reclaim our original birthright state of God-centeredness. There is. It is found in a certain form of meditation.

We humans exist, living our lives in a constant state of unawareness and we are not aware that we are, in a very real sense, psychotic; unaware that we are unconscious.

To become aware of our present lack of consciousness is to no longer remain unconscious.

Read that last sentence again because it is the basis for effective meditation and the secret weapon that will free from all delusion. It never need become any more complicated than that. It is the mediation practice that allows us to break out of the pit of dreams we call thinking by separating us from thoughts and allowing the delusions they bring to float on by.

So, why bother? Because when we make decisions from this place, this fool’s paradise, such choices can never be right. We become entirely subject to fate, chance or luck. Life becomes an endless series of coin-tossing. We live and react to conditions as if our lives are nothing more than an algorithm and not one comprised of intuitive action aligned with the will of the Creator.

Most people who practice a Twelve Step lifestyle have been well counseled in the importance of aligning thought and behaviors - life and will, if you prefer – with God's will. We yearn to turn these over to God’s care and to receive knowledge of His will and the power to carry His will out.

The knowledge and power for which the Twelve Stepper prays cannot be wrested out of a life that is really just and ambitious career of self-willed decision-making.

Receiving knowledge of God’s will means a reversal of agnosticism – after all agnostic means without knowledge of God. When we exist in an unconscious state – this waking sleep - we can have neither the knowledge nor the power because our very ground of being from which we are operating is disconnected from the present truth.

It is only during our Godfull moments (the opposite of our agnostic moments) that we are aware. Only then are we truly not operating from an agnostic, Godless platform. From there we can see from a place where we are able to make decisions and life choices that can never be wrong. Never.

Staying there, in that place of wakefulness from where Godly direction comes is the secret of living happily. From there we can have “knowledge of (His) will” and the “power to carry it out” no matter what we do. This is, literally, the secret to answering every single problem you have ever had or will have in your life - and you found it here just happening by some blog on the Internet. Go figure, eh?

Ahh. . . . but there is a hitch. We cannot remain there for long. Thoughts, thinking, mental distractions of the intellect rush in to pull us away. And so . . . this is why the need for meditation.

Practicing allows us to experience the present state of awareness so that the stresses that come to steal our awareness away can be observed straight out of existence, lose their power over us – their power to make us struggle with them through worry and ambition.

Peace & Love,

Danny S – RLRA

Real Live Recovered Alcoholic

http://recoveredalcoholic.blogspot.com

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