October 22, 2004

• The Promises –
  
  –wherein
  Susitna Sue, your sourdough cornball philosopher, dissects a key facet
  of AA dogma and distorts it into the keystone of her own New Age
  paradigm.

  Disclaimer:  Although I am currently an active member of both
  Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, and have received
  substantial help from an online version of Food Addicts Anonymous, I am
  not a True Believer.  The Twelve Steps were introduced to me in
  prison over thirty years ago in a generic version and I used them then
  to achieve a tenuous abstinence from my addiction to
  amphetamines.  However, it was not until I experienced Reality
  Attack Therapy a few years later that I transcended my addiction.  

  I am a twelve-step heretic.  Don’t read my writings if you depend
  on a belief in the steps and the program and they are working for
  you.  I go to meetings to do twelfth step work and to be among
  fellow dope fiends, but I work a program with some radical
  differences.  One area where I diverge from the 12-step party line
  is at their belief that addiction is an incurable disease.  I have
  known too many people (including myself) who have transcended
  addictions to swallow that line.

  The AA Promises

  If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through.

  We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.

  We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.

  We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace.

  No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.

  That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.

  We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.

  Self-seeking will slip away.

  Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change.

  Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us.

  We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.

  We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

   

  Are these extravagant promises? We think not.

  They are being fulfilled among us – sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.

  They will always materialize if we work for them.

  Alcoholics Anonymous p83-84

  The, “phase of our development,” about which this passage from the Big
  Book speaks is Step Nine, making amends to those we have harmed. 
  This presupposes that one has already worked steps one through eight,
  as well.

  Please note that nowhere in those promises does it say we will stop
  using alcohol.  That’s the part of the program that is left
  entirely up to the individual alcoholic.  Many times I’ve heard it
  said that the program (whether AA, NA, FAA, SLAA, GA, whatever) won’t
  stop you from indulging the addiction, but will certainly take all the
  fun out of it.

  The Promises comprise one of my favorite parts of the AA program. 
  Occasionally at a meeting I will pick up the laminated sheet and read
  them aloud to the group.  Once when no one had a topic to suggest
  for the meeting, I suggested The Promises.  I’ve been at a few
  meetings when others suggested The Promises as a topic.  They are
  always good meetings.

  Once, at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, Greyfox brought up The Promises
  and after he’d talked a bit about how he was transcending his
  insecurities, someone “reminded” him (of a fact he never knew because
  although he holds the position of Literature Person in our group, keeps
  the inventory of books and pamphlets current and sells the program books, he has
  never bothered to read them) that NA does not subscribe to the AA
  Promises.

  
  The Promise

  Narcotics Anonymous offers only one promise… Freedom from active addiction.

  I find this interesting, that the old original 12-step program promises
  just about every spiritual benefit but doesn’t pledge freedom from
  drinking, while its daughter program promises only the freedom from
  using.  Go figure.  Still, despite that promise, many in NA
  use the old, “won’t keep you from using, but will spoil it for you,”
  line.

  But I digress.  I was going to dissect and distort here, so here goes –

  Thank God that the Steps use the phrase, “God as we understood Him,” or
  I’d be out of there in a flash.  The God of my understanding is
  not a Him, for starters.  My diety is genderless, incorporeal,
  omnipresent.  It resides not OUT THERE somewhere but within my
  essence.  A huge leap upward in my spiritual development occurred
  when I grokked the concept, “Thou art God!”

  I reconcile the promises with my BS (belief system) by altering the
  phrasing of that bit about how we, “will suddenly realize that God is
  doing for us what we could not do for ourselves,” and inferring that
  the “self” involved there is the lower self, the “Human Biological
  Machine,” as E. J. Gold terms it, and the God is the Higher Self, the
  essential self, the “Thought Adjuster” to use Urantian terminology.

  That is truly the only “distortion” or correction I need to make to
  those promises, except for a minor quibble over whether it is truly the
  amends that make the difference and not the gestalt of the entire
  spiritual process.  The reason I took to the promises so quickly
  and wholeheartedly a year and a half ago when I first heard them is
  that they are so eloquently true for me.  They resound with truth
  within my soul.  I recognize them as some of the beneifts that
  came to me as I grew on my own metaphysical path.

  The, “amazed before we are halfway through,” is particularly
  fitting.  I’ve not managed to make all the amends I have to
  make.  I’ve completed the eighth step, know who I hurt and how and
  have become willing to make amends.  I have made my indirect
  amends and continue to do so.  There are just some cases where I
  have been prevented from making direct amends, but still have the
  intention to try.

  Otherwise, I’ve realized everything promised there:

  We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.

  Yes to the “freedom and… happiness.”  That did not occur for me
  in the “spiritual kindergarten” (the Founder’s words) of AA or it’s offshoot NA, however,
  but a quarter century earlier, through a combination of radical
  psychotherapy and the New Age metaphysics of the Urantia Book.

  We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.

  I do not regret the past and rather than seeking to shut the door on
  it, I seek to recall as much as I can and write it all down in my
  memoirs.

  We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace.

  I do comprehend “serenity” and though turmoil comes and goes my natural
  state is peace.  That deep understanding of serenity came to me in
  prison as I read Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. 
  His thoughts on “serene acceptance” merged with the serenity prayer I
  found in that generic 12-step article in a magazine I read around the
  same time.

  Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;

  the courage to change the things I can;

  and the wisdom to know the difference.

   Ever since then, there has been no way for me to separate the
  ideas of serenity, courage and wisdom.  Each one is nothing
  without the others.

  No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.

  I did go fairly “far down the scale,” in fact I hit bottom several
  times — one for each of several drugs, and for each of a number of
  non-substance addictions.  
  If I did not see that my experience can benefit others, you Xangans
  would set me straight.  I don’t even need to write new memoir
  segments to get comments and guestbook entries with testimonials of how
  my autobiography is reaching and inspiring some of you through those
  links in my sidebar.  

  I didn’t do it for you originally, really.  I devised that way of
  organizing my memoirs so that I could find all the entries for editing
  into a finished version, and to forestall questions about things I’d
  already written.  It’s great knowing that others get something out
  of it, too.

  That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.

  The old, “uselessness and self-pity…”  Yes, I remember
  that.  “Why me?” I used to ask, and “Why bother?”  I no
  longer ask.  It’s not that I got the answers, it’s just that I
  stopped asking.  That bullshit fell away with Dick Sutphen’s New
  Age Bushido training… that, and the Bene Gesserit Litany against
  Fear.  In Dick’s BS, the Warrior doesn’t ask “unevolved ‘why’
  questions.”  If you never read Frank Herbert’s Dune series or don’t remember, the Litany goes like this:

  I must not fear.

  Fear is the mind-killer.

  Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

  I will face my fear.

  I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

  And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

  Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

  Only I will remain.

  We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.
  Self-seeking will slip away.

  To my way of thinking, selfishness is a manifestation of fear and as
  fear falls away so does self-seeking.  When one realizes one’s
  Oneness with All, then Self takes on a new meaning.

  Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change.

  My “attitude and outlook upon life” have changed radically since the
  first half of this lifetime.  I have nothing to fear from any
  person.  Economic insecurity — what a waste of energy that would
  be!  Given the state of my finances and my frequent inability to
  work, if I were inclined toward that attitude I’d worry myself to death.

  If I were ever to need a reminder of that, I wouldn’t have to look very
  far to find one.  My Old Fart, Greyfox bobs up from his insecurity
  from time to time, then sinks back into that morass.  More than
  one of my friends here at Xanga, other family members, neighbors and
  associates in 12-step groups… examples of the painful futility of
  economic insecurity abound.  Not the least of all of its
  consequences is the way it tends to make us look foolish as we pursue
  the almighty dollar.  Oh, the schemes and daydreams!

  We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.

  I do “intuitively know how to handle situations that used to baffle”
  me.  Chalk some of that up to experience, and the rest of the
  credit goes to Spirit.  In the days and years of my bafflement,
  first I found oracles:  the Tarot, Runes, crystals and the
  like.  I used them to answer my own questions a lot, then started
  using them in service to others.  One greatly enlightening
  unanticipated consequence of that was that I found a set of “stock
  answers” to common questions.  

  I have come to think of them as pillars of reality, laws of the
  universe or rules of conduct.  Most are as simple as these:  

  Don’t move away from something you fear.  Look instead for the positive outcome you desire and move toward it.

  Any thought that makes you uncomfortable, that you tend to shy away from, needs to be examined closely.  Face your fears.

  I’m pretty good at pattern recognition, and once I began to see how
  such bits of wisdom were being channeled through me for my clients over
  and over again, I made them part of my lifeway, and now apply them
  “intuitively”.  One of the things I’ve done with the KaiOaty site
  was to incorporate as many of them as I can think of into the FAQs, for
  the benefit of all.

  When any situation arises that’s not covered in my “rules of reality,”
  then I just ask Spirit how to handle it.  That’s the “conscious
  contact with God.” which features prominently in the 12 Steps. 
  For me, the Serenity Prayer is the HEART of those programs, and the
  conscious contact with Spirit is the SOUL.  In the program I work
  there isn’t and never has been a “sponsor” for me, except for
  Spirit.  This, to some, is heresy.

  It tends to piss off some of the True Believers and party-line
  followers at 12-step meetings when I talk about HOW I came around to
  the realizations of the promises, and how I relate on a
  moment-to-moment basis with Spirit instead of having a routine of
  getting down on my knees as soon as I’m out of bed in the morning as
  some of them recommend.  To them the fact that I reached
  all that outside the Program somehow invalidates the program.

  I don’t see it that way.  I see it as independent corroboration of
  the validity of the spiritual principles the founders incorporated into
  the program.  Knowing that those men in the Oxford Group
  eighty-some years ago came up with some of the same New Age
  metaphysical principles that I picked up on my own path half a century
  after they did, makes the Steps and the Promises they codified all the
  more valid to me.
   
  Unfortunately, many who have followed them have lost sight of the
  spiritual principles and have sought to find some magic in the
  code.  Theirs (those benighted True Believers) is a program of
  fear and denial, and my voice of dissent to which they shut their minds
  at their meetings can just piss them off for all I care.  That old
  revolving door is there for their use.  Maybe on one of their
  trips back around they’ll get it and get with the program.

  

   

  • 5:37 pm
  • 11 Comments