Inquiry

 A Facebook friend of mine wrote The 12 Step Buddhist about just this stuff. 

http://the12stepbuddhist.com/

Good morning,

Briefly, my story with alcoholism begins in October 1973, when I was 33.  My wife and four-year-old daughter died in an automobile accident.  Consequently, I had all the feelings of grief that you might imagine.  However, in childhood I had never been taught about feeling--in fact, having (or displaying) some feelings was simply not acceptable.  So, after the accident I discovered alcohol:  It took all those feelings away and I mellowed out.  It worked for about twelve years, but the drinking subtly progressed.

When I was 45, about the first of September 1985, I had a very synchronistic sequence of experiences that led to a moment of clarity:  I suddenly saw where alcoholism would take me, and I did NOT want to go there.  So I stopped cold turkey.  And then all those feelings came up.  The next six weeks were the most miserable of my life.  It's called a dry drunk, when you've stopped drinking, but nothing else has changed.  In mid-October 1985, I was introduced to Alcoholics Anonymous and its twelve steps of recovery.

I had a really hard problem with the concept of god, because of being raised Fundamentalist Christian.  In my middle twenties I had turned my back on organized religion, mostly because of the hypocrisy of its members.  (They were all wonderful, good Christians--until they got in their cars after the service and drove out of the parking lot.)  The concept of God delivered by the churches of my youth was that of an angry, jealous, vindictive God, who would send you off to slavery if you weren't "good."  Or He would consign you to hell fire and brimstone for all eternity if you weren't "saved."  The Third Step of AA reads, "Made a decision to turn our will and our life over to God, as we understand him."  Early in my sobriety, I simply could not do that.  I could not turn my will and my life over to an angry, jealous, vindictive God.

So I fired that God.  Understand!  It took many months to accomplish that firing.  Indeed, it took five months of going to one AA meeting a week for me to grasp and accept the idea that there is a power in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous that is higher than I am.  In AA the acronym GOD stand for Good Orderly Direction, or Group Of Drunks.  So I used the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous for my Higher Power, and that worked for many years.  AA has many sayings, all of which encapsulate in just a few words a whole chapter of a textbook.  One of those sayings is A & B:  A, there is a God, and B, I'm not it (nor Him, nor Her--whatever pronoun works for you).

Now to your questions.  First, Alcoholics Anonymous worked for me.  It doesn't work for everyone, but it works if you will allow it to.  The book Alcoholics Anonymous has been asserted to be the most spiritual book ever written.  As a practical primer on the spiritual life, I would have to agree.  Most other books about spirituality are too "in the head" theoretical.  A case in point is Integral Spirituality--it is entirely "in the head" and theoretical, and that's okay.  It is a tough read, but I got through it and grasped the message.  (My personal evaluations, trying to be as objective as I can, put me somewhere around teal.)  For the advanced student, Integral Spirituality is invaluable, in that it tells you where you are and provides a roadmap about what to do next.  For the beginner, newly sober with his life in shambles, Integral Spirituality is beyond his/her grasp and worthless.

Second question:  Organized religion didn't work for me.  Specifically, I renounced Christianity half a dozen years ago.  A couple of years after I retired in June 1998, I began a study of the religion of my youth.  The more I learned, the more appalled I became.  I had many nightmares about the Inquistions.  (I mean bad nightmares with torture.)  I found that many key words in the Bible have been mistranslated from the Hebrew and the Greek into English--apparently deliberately mistranslated, because the correct translations are given in the footnotes of study editions.  Many idioms are ignored.  Social customs are neglected.  Linguistic conventions are ignored.  One day, several years ago, my wife asked, "Why are you so angry all the time?"  I replied, "Because I have been deceived."  So I renounced Christianity, because as a class of people Christians and Christian theologians are not truth seekers.  (There may be exceptions to this statement, but they are exceptions that prove the rule.)  As a case in point, I once asked a Christian theologian about Mithra, but he had never heard of the man.  I told him to look it up on Google and then call up his seminary and demand a refund on his tuition, because the Jesus myth is a retelling to a different audience of the Mithra myth, with no essential differences.

On the other hand, I have talked to many people for whom Fundamentalist Christianity provides the rigid structure that a person at red probably needs.  I have encouraged them to attend the church of their choice, provided it helps them stay sober.  The Twin Cities Church in Grass Valley, CA, is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, and in order to compete with Alcoholics Anonymous they have their own twelve step program.  All I can say, is that it works for some people, and that's better than active alcoholism which is lawlessness somewhere below red.

Buddhism, on the other hand, has much to recommend it.  Specifically, meditation has proven to be a godsend--pardon the pun.  The Eight-fold Path is probably the best path to enlightenment there is.  On the other hand, I reject the First Noble Truth, because it doesn't fit with my experience.  I don't see life as a struggle.  Sometimes life can be very difficult, but that is not the same as struggle.

There's too much to say at this point, and not time to say it.  I have made a study of synchronicity, gathering stories of vastly improbable events (both mine and others'), and "coincidence" as an explanation no longer works.  I have studied reincarnation--there is a veritable mountain of information that reincarnation is a fact of our existence.  Theoreticians ignore these two subjects, because the evidence is anecdotal and not reproducible and so on and so forth.  But mostly the evidence is ignored, because it is inconvenient and would require them to change their wonderful (wrong) theories about how the universe works.  That is to say, many academic theoreticians are not intellectually honest.  I'm currently halfway through Beyond the Hoax by Alan Sokol, and postmodernism is crap.  I repeat myself for emphasis:  Postmodernism is more than simply wrong--it is crap.  (Seriously!  Everyone at the Integral Institute should take a week off from their business and read Beyond the Hoax.)  In the United States, people in the humanities have lost their way and have dragged much of our society into an intellectual swamp with them.

Sorry for the tirade.  Sometimes, when I look around at the mess the United States has gotten itself into, I want to go hide out in a shack on the Oregon coast and be a hermit.  I honestly do not see a way out.  A better education of our youth is the only answer, but who trains the teachers that teach our youth?  Answer:  The very people that have gotten us into the intellectual swamp.  But retreating to a monastery isn't the answer, so I keep on keeping on, following the synchronicities as they lead me.

Next question:  I have just in the last few months started to use the Integral approach.  I have also started reading the Spring 2009 issue of Journal of Integral Theory and Practice.  In particular, I am experimenting with the 5-by-5-by-5 technique, and (to my pleasant surprise) it is working!  More than that, I can't say at this time.

Fourth question:  Honestly, I haven't listened to the videos by John Dupuy, nor do I plan to.  I get the vast majority of my information by reading, where an author can spend some time formulating his words, and I can spend some time with them, too.  (As I have formulated these!)

Final question:  As part of my service work, to give back so to speak, I help take AA meetings into our county jail once a week.  Most of the inmates therein are struggling with beginning sobriety.  Some of their stories are heart wrenching, and I have to work my Al-Anon program--and I mean seriously work my Al-Anon program--in order to avoid being caught up in their chaos.  So, I tell my story in a few sentences (the first two paragraphs above), and then basically listen.  If a subject arises that I have some experience with, then I relate my experience.  If I can't relate, I simply thank them for having the courage to express themselves.  When everyone who wants to has said something, then I close the meeting with the Serenity Prayer.  Somehow, it works.  I've met several people on the outside whom I first met in those jail meetings, and a few of them are getting it and leading constructive lives.

Further with the final question, I have met two or maybe three people among the several hundred who might be interested in the Integral approach.  Perhaps one of them might be also try it.  Let me call him Michael, because that's his first name.  We have both read Jed McKenna's Spiritual Enlightenment, the Damnedist Thing, and are both seeking this elusive "abiding nondual awareness" of which McKenna speaks.  Michael is ahead of me in this seeking, but I haven't spoken to him in a couple of months, so I don't know how he's doing.  The others are busy living their lives, trying to earn a living, and raising their children.

One last thing:  Alcoholics Anonymous is an experience-based program, in that its members share their experience, strength, and hope, so that we can recover from alcoholism.  This is an important distinction, because if a theory, no matter how wonderful, doesn't fit with our experience, then the theory is rejected.  As it should be.  I have heard many such pronouncements by beginners in AA.  I no longer attempt to convince them one way or another.  Rather, I simply say, "That doesn't fit with my experience."  And then I let it go.  Furthermore, I do the same thing with theologians of every stripe.  Yes, they have freedom of speach, to stand on their soap box and preach the word, and also I have the freedom to walk away and not listen.  And finally, I also do the same thing with writings from the humanities.  When the authors stop making sense, I close the book and go on to something else.  There are no end of fascinating things happening around me.  That's probably why I rejected he hermit solution.

Jerry Jacoby, Grass Valley, CA, June 15, 2009