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Post Info TOPIC: God and AA
LinBaba


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God and AA
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Have something in common

They help those that help themselves

Sobriety, like anything, takes work

Faith without works is dead

half measures availed us nothing

The result was nil until we let go of our old ideas

dead
nothing
nil

Think they were trying to say something there?

We have to do actual work, actually putting pen to paper, actually helping newcomers, actually doing uncomfortable things with people that WILL piss me off, it starts with me pulling my head out of my ass (step 1), believing that something outside of all powerful, all knowing me can help me (step 2) and making a decision to actually DO that work (step 3) then putting pen to paper immediately following that decision

If I sit in the gym all day eating Chunky Munky, I'm not going to lose weight, If I sit on the couch watching TV all day I'm not going to find a job, The hand of God isn't going to come down and make me as rich as Donald Trump or give me a body like Brad Pitt or get me sober  unless I put the effort into it that they did, unless I do what they have done

It absolutely boggles my mind they folks come into AA and even after hundreds of people say hundreds of times, do 90 in 90, get a sponsor WORK THE STEPS they keep relapsing and say "I've tried everything, help me!!!"

Get a sponsor and follow their instructions?

ummm....no

Work the steps?

ummm...no

90 in 90?

ummmm....no

thoroughly followed our path?

ummm ...no

So by your own admission you have done exactly fuckall, literally, zero, gone to a few meetings, maybe shared some uncomfortable feelings, told on yourself about how you were sometimes a bad actor....but when it comes down to actual -work- you have done .....nothing, zero, nada, zilch

....long pause.........

"but I've tried everything you HAVE to help me!!!"

AA doesn't actually work until you actually work it, there's like this crazy mathematical concept, if you do no work, you get no results, mind boggling I know, and AA doesn't come in a pill or in a TV show or on the internet, to get the results one has to chop wood and carry water to paraphrase

The famous story in AA is that Carl Jung is the one who discovered the spiritual experience is what can bring an alcoholic back from the brink, he passed that on to Roland Hazzard, who passed that on to Ebby Thatcher, who passed that on to Bill Wilson, who mixed in what he learned from The Oxford Group, Dr Silkworth, and Carl Jung, because it took all 3 ingredients

Carl Jung on the Oxford Group

Carl Jung became aware of the Oxford Group in the 1920s when Alphonse Maeder, his colleague and former assistant, became involved with the movement. Although Jung recognized that troubled patients sometimes gained a sense of security, purpose and belonging from Group involvement, in his view there was a sacrifice in personal individuation. He therefore did not understand what attraction the group could have for someone with the psychoanalytic sophistication of Maeder. For a time Jung was respectful of Maeder's convictions, but when his relationship with Maeder deteriorated in the 1930s his attitude toward the Oxford Group also became more negative.[71]

Jung expressed this ambivalence toward the Group in a talk about the relationship of religion to mental health around 1941. "A hysterical alcoholic was cured by this Group movement, and they used him as a sort of model and sent him all round Europe, where he confessed so nicely and said that he had done wrong and how he had got cured through the Group movement. And when he had repeated his story twenty, or it may have been fifty, times, he got sick of it and took to drink again. The spiritual sensation had simply faded away. Now what are they going to do with him? They say, now he is pathological, he must go to a doctor. See, in the first stage he has been cured by Jesus, in the second by a doctor! I should and did refuse such a case. I sent the man back to these people and said, 'If you believe that Jesus has cured this man, he will do it a second time. And if he can't do it, you don't suppose that I can do it better than Jesus?' But that is just exactly what they do expect; when a man is pathological, Jesus won't help him but the doctor will."

Carl Jung knew it took work to get and stay sober, and he tolerated no bullshit that boy



-- Edited by LinBaba on Sunday 16th of January 2011 11:52:51 PM

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it's not the change that's painful, it's the resistance to change that is painful
Larry_H


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So true LinBaba

The sad part is that many will read this and thier alcoholic mind will convince them that this does not apply to them.

Larry,
----------------------
"Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open. "

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Klaatu


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Does this apply to me? LOL I really like this LB. For a second after seeing the title of this thread my guard went up, but only for a second. I still struggle with the difference between the God of my (very limited) understanding and the God of religion and the Bible. My God has made it possible for me to stay sober for almost 2 years now, whereas I'm not convinced that the God of religion even exists. Glad I found the one I did...he saved my life.

Brian

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pinkchip


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Good post. It's sad that people just don't know what they don't know. It is all part of "the illusion" and the persistence of it is astonishing. I think people want to write themselves off as hopeless so they can then say "AA doesn't work! I tried! I'm special and unique! I have a worse kind of alcoholism than everyone else!"

I knew when I came into AA that it was going to involve some painful growth. I knew it was time to grow the hell up. Other people seem to think its just gonna get them to stop drinking. I guess it's too scary a proposition for them to really surrender and do whatever it takes.

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happycamper


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Yep ... If you want what we got, you'll do what we do.

What did I do ?

I got a God, and then I got into AA .. working it, living it, breathing it, trusting it.
Eventually it all simply became a way of life.

Like our book says: What use to be the occasional hunch or inspiration gradually becomes a working part of the mind.

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Rob84


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Funny thing is Rowland, 1st called Sigmund Freud for help, but he was either too busy or didn't want to take alcoholic cases.

Frued was strongly opposed to any type of spiritual therapy and would have never refered him to the Oxford Group.

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barisax


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Having experienced the cold science of psychiatry at a young age, I didn't even consider it when I sought to stop drinking.  I knew of AA, but really didn't know much about it.  I didn't even remember the steps (my dad had been in AA briefly when I was a kid), and nothing spiritual other than the serenity prayer.

I didn't go back to any kind of professional therapist until I was 5 years sober.  Even though I was in a lot of pain going through divorce, I had a few ground rules.  First, I sought a therapist who would work with me on a spiritual basis.  I ended up with a psychologist (masters, not phd) and that worked out well.  I was not under pressure to overthink things, nor under pressure to go on medication.  I later got involved in a therapy group that was run by two therapists, one a psychiatrist.  While the guy was benign as their ilk go, he was pretty much ix-nay on any spiritual talk, which I found rather confining.  That was ok - unlike some of the others in the group, it was not my only outlet so I chose to use the group for what it was good for - in other words take what I like and leave the rest.  I still found it confining at times - the sharing in the group was a lot less free-form than in an AA meeting, I'd get interrupted, cut off, people would be jumping to conclusions before I finished a sentence, etc.  I got a lot out of it, but it ran its course and I walked away, with no regrets.

I think a lot of very educated people harbor an underlying belief that 12 step programs are really just self-help programs, that our "higher power" is really just ourselves.  I don't really want to go there - because I don't have faith in any part of myself to make it my higher power.  That is exactly how I lived my life until I got sober.  I much prefer to let go of that illusion of self power.  My life has gotten nothing but better since I did so.  Why would I resume the behavior that led me to years of drinking and misery?

"Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to power"

That's the secular view, from what I've seen.  If it works for you, great... but it never worked for me.  I'll take sanity over the illusion of power any day.

Barisax

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LinBaba


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barisax wrote:
I much prefer to let go of that illusion of self power.  My life has gotten nothing but better since I did so.  Why would I resume the behavior that led me to years of drinking and misery?


"Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to power"

That's the secular view, from what I've seen.  If it works for you, great... but it never worked for me.  I'll take sanity over the illusion of power any day.

Barisax



I don't suscribe to the "self will" or the "self power" secular vision that I have seen online or at meetings from people who can't get sober, and those are the only people I have seen cling to that model, but I don't have a need to have a Christian Deity or to anthropomorphize my Higher Power, or God if you will in any way shape or form, frankly I view those views as just more superstitious twaddle, however, one thing I have noticed, is no matter what "road" we take up the mountain we all end up in the same place, so it's all good, Buddhism, Christianity, Taoism, Paganism, Shamanism, Shintoism all leads to the selfless self and the timeless time and the freedom from the bondage of self, so I judge no one's path, because it all leads to the same place

It doesn't matter WHAT your conception of "God" is, but the one thing upon which we all absolutely agree is that God is found within

That's what Chuck C talks about when he asks "Do you know why we have so much problem finding God? Because he hid in the last place we ever thought to look....inside us

I found three ideas in the book which let me find my own spirituality.

With few exceptions our members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power greater than themselves.

We found the Great Reality deep down within us. In the last analysis it is only there that He may be found. It was so with us.

Much to our relief, we discovered we did not need to consider another's conception of God.



The first of these ideas, I had been using all along, but it hadn't quite been enough. That idea is found in Appendix II of The Big Book, titled "Spiritual Experience:"

With few exceptions our members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power greater than themselves. (italics mine)

That "unsuspected inner resource" was the line that had first pointed my thinking to the idea of a God within.

The second inspirational idea is in Chapter 4, "We Agnostics." I had certainly read it before, but its importance hadn't struck me. The passage is:

We found the Great Reality deep down within us. In the last analysis it is only there that He may be found. It was so with us.

These words were even more powerful for me than the "unsuspected inner resource" idea. The notion that Higher Power is a Great Reality, and that it is to be found deep within us fit well with certain ideas I'd discovered in Eastern philosophies. The word, "found" is critical. Higher Power doesn't have to reside within meIt might, or might notbut I must look within to find Higher Power. These early AA members seemed to have found that to be a nearly universal idea; they say, "it is only there that He may be found," and "It was so with us."

Still, I struggled. Bill Wilson's chapter to agnostics is disturbing to me. In places, his discussion of Higher Power is open and inclusive, but he seems not to have really understood what the word agnostic means. And he incessantly attaches the concept of a creator to his idea of God. Bill's Higher Power seems very close to the ideas I'd heard in church as a childthe ideas I had again and again found unworkable.

And then, I found my third inspiration. It is also in the fourth chapter, actually a few pages earlier than the "Great Reality" passage:

Much to our relief, we discovered we did not need to consider another's conception of God.

And finally, I got it. That means I don't even have to consider Bill Wilson's conception of God. Higher Power doesn't have to be a capital G God. It doesn't have to be the God of Bill Wilson's fathers. It doesn't have to be the magician-like cross between the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus that I'd rejected as a young man.

I was back to my spiritual roots. God gets to be what God wants to be. If He wants to be Jesus Christ, so it is. If She wants to be the Earth Mother, so it is. If Higher Power resides in you and in meand if each of us resides just as surely within Higher Power, so it is. I may or may not be made in the image of Higher Power. But I don't have toand I don't get tocreate God to fit my feebly finite image of Him.

I don't need to even consider your concept of a power greater then yourself, as a matter of fact it's none of my business and in the worst taste possible to go snooping around what anyone else's concept is, to actually question someone else's concept of a power greater then themselves is akin to breaking in their house and searching through their most secret papers, poking my nose in their closets, in short, the worst sort of violation of personal space there is

We help each other find our own concept of God, not knock holes or question each others concepts, that is probably the most important facet of AA to me, and tied into "Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our Traditions", because not only are we anonymous in that we don't seek credit, we allow our higher power to be anonymous as well, only helping the newcomer find his own concept of a power greater then themself, no matter what that concept is.


 



-- Edited by LinBaba on Wednesday 19th of January 2011 01:20:05 PM

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it's not the change that's painful, it's the resistance to change that is painful
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