"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