Integral Diary: Wilber’s Conveyor Belt and the Recovery Community

 In Chapter 9 of Integral Spirituality, “The Conveyor Belt”, Ken Wilber ascribes the central dilemma facing our planet today--the ongoing brawl between amber-meme traditionalism and orange-meme modernism (and, by extension, green-meme postmodernism)--to a Level-Line Fallacy whose roots can be found in the Enlightenment. During that time, he says that the “mythic God was identified with the horrors of the Inquisition and the liquidation of millions . . . and in a leading-edge cultural convulsion and revulsion . . .,  [all things religious were] angrily suppressed” and “spirituality was infantilized, ridiculed, denied, repressed, and kept out of modernity altogether.”

Because of this, “all of science was identified with the orange level (rationality) and all of spirituality was identified with the amber level (mythology).” And thus was introduced into the evolution of culture “a crippling error: in correctly spotting the immaturity of the notion of a mythic God--or the mythic level of the spiritual line--they threw out not just the mythic level of spiritual intelligence but the entire line of spiritual intelligence . . . They jettisoned the amber God, and instead of finding orange God, [and green, turquoise and indigo God], they ditched God altogether, they began the repression of the sublime, the repression of their own higher levels of spiritual intelligence.”

At the same time that the nascent orange level was making this crucial error, there was another--equally grave--error being made at the amber level. While orange was throwing out the whole line of spiritual development, the amber traditionalists, because they were so fixated on whatever brand of mythic god their religion allowed, could not imagine--or allow--any other conception of God, “compulsively pursuing it and obsessively thinking of it”,  thus freezing the line of spiritual intelligence at that level. 

The upshot of this is that people who have successfully integrated the amber level of spiritual intelligence and are ready to move on to the next level “are therefore faced with a brutal choice: continue to believe in the amber stage of development, OR renounce their faith . . . . In the development of their spiritual intelligence, they are frozen at the amber stage . . . and have no avenues where they can explore the orange or higher levels in the development of spiritual intelligence . . . . They are in effect infantilized in their approach to Spirit.”

Wilber characterizes the effect of this Level/Line Fallacy as a “massive orange pressure-cooker lid clamping down on amber” and says it is a “prescription for cultural catastrophe”. And certainly, we celebrated the tenth anniversary of one such catastrophe on September 11 of this year.

So what does Wilber propose as a way to get out of this dilemma? There seems to be only one: the world’s great religions, as they are the only repositories of the myths that speak deeply to the absolutely necessary stages of human development. Because they came out of the magenta, red and amber stages of our cultural development, they

“ . . . are the only sources of authority that can sanction the orange and higher stages of spiritual intelligence in their own traditions. They are the only systems in the world today that can act as a great conveyor belt, helping people move from red to amber to orange to green to turquoise and higher, because they alone can pronounce all of those stages kosher, legitimate, sacred, acceptable--and give the  imprimatur within their own lineages.”

He points out that no other line of development--architecture, art, literature--has the capacity to do this, and he goes on to suggest that religion can help facilitate this evolution through the stages even more by making contemplative states a core of their training. 

So, the human population of this planet is facing a terrible problem. Since the only way out is for the great mythic religions to ease up on their insistence of the absolute authority of their own perceived-to-be sacred truth, and since that authority is almost hard-wired into their basic view of the world, the chances that this conveyor belt can be made to work like it’s supposed to are not very good right now. 

But if there are any rays of hope out there, one of them might be found in the recovery community--in particular in the loose aggregation of organizations patterned after  the model of the 12-step recovery group. Wikipedia lists 34 (!!!) such groups, from AA to Narcotics Anonymous to Nicotine Anonymous to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous to Clutterers Anonymous and on and on. 

It is easy for non-addictive people to make fun of such a list, to say such off-hand things as, “Yeah, they’ve got a group for everything now” and “Next thing you know there’ll be a disease for people who eat too many Krispy Kremes”, but for people afflicted with a serious, life-debilitating addiction to anything, it is not a joke. You don’t take time out of your week to go to AA or Whatever-A meetings because you’ve got nothing better to do with your time. You go because your life has gone seriously off the rails. You go because you are dying, or possibly headed to jail, or you are in danger of losing all of your money, your job, your family and/or your friends. All due to the fact that you have lost all semblance of control of your life. .

People who go to the meetings of these groups and who take seriously the program of action offered to them soon discover that in order for them to overcome their addictions, they must have a true spiritual experience. They must go from having a self-centered outlook in life to having a God-centered, or at least an other-centered, outlook. Even people who have never stopped believing in God or going to Church have to take a good, hard look at their relationship with God. 

But the big problem for most people who want to come in from the cold is this: Many people whose lives are ruled by addiction are rebels, misfits who long ago had their relationship with the God they grew up with severely damaged. Or maybe they were brought up in a family with no room for God to begin with. Or maybe they have always resented the image of God foisted upon them by their families or by the predominate culture. These people not only have to find some Higher Power that is acceptable to them, they must deal with their own resentments toward and about a Higher Power engendered by the destructive path cut through their lives by the tornado of their disease.

So what to do? Fortunately, it all comes down to what might one day be seen as one of the most important conversations in the history of the twentieth century. It can be found in “Bill’s Story”, Chapter 1 of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. The narrator, Bill Wilson, a once-successful Wall-Street innovator who has lost everything but his marriage to alcohol, and who is now facing the inevitability of liver dysfunction and wet-brain dementia, is visited in his apartment by an old drinking buddy, Ebby Thacher. The first thing Bill notices is that, even though Ebby had once been committed for alcoholic insanity himself, he was now “fresh-skinned and glowing. There was something about his eyes. He was inexplicably different. What had happened?” Bill pushes a drink across the table, but Ebby politely refuses. Bill is, of course, curious and wonders “what had got into the fella.” So he asks him, and Ebby tells him. “I’ve got religion.”

Now Bill, we know from what has come before, is a stone orange-meme modernist, and he reacts like any self-respecting modernist would react: “So that was it--last summer an alcoholic crackpot; now, I suspected, a little cracked about religion.” And, like any other modernist suddenly confronted by an old now-Jesus-freak friend, he expects to be ranted at and preached to.

But that’s not what happens. Ebby is moderate, friendly and accommodating, and they talk for hours, about old times, about childhood, about Ebby’s experience in front of the judge at his commitment hearing. He was rescued by two gentlemen from (we now know) the Washingtonian group. They offered him a simple religious idea and a program of action that allowed Ebby to get sober and restore some semblance of order in his life. 

This awakens in Bill memories of growing up and of hearing the preachers speaking in Church while he sat on the hillside on Sunday mornings. And he remembers his grandfather, a spiritual but not religious man, who insisted that “the spheres really had their music” but also denied the preachers’ “right to tell him how he must listen.” And although Bill says that he was never really an atheist and that he had “always believed in a Power greater than myself,” he also adds that “With ministers and the world’s religions, I parted right there.” 

He goes on to list his problems with the religions of the world, rounding up the usual suspects. To begin, his words suggest that he suffers from the same orange Level/Line Fallacy documented above, and then he goes on to say that, from what he had seen in Europe during World War I, “the power of God in human affairs was negligible, the Brotherhood of Man a grim jest. If there was a Devil, he seemed the Boss Universal, and he certainly had me.”

But Bill looks at his old friend and sees a man whom society was about ready to lock up, who had been declared incurable, who had admitted complete defeat, but who now had been “raised from the dead, suddenly taken from the scrap heap to a level of life better than the best he had ever known!” And he had done it due to his belief in God.

And Bill naturally has trouble reconciling Ebby’s experience with his own beliefs about God and the world. Bill himself believed in some kind of Emersonian God, a Spirit of the Universe, SOMETHING that was out there, but certainly not the same God that Ebby seemed to believe in. Yet there he stood, a man redeemed, due to his belief, from the torments of an alcoholic life.  And Bill is stuck. For the first time in his 39 years on the planet, he doesn’t know what to say. And then Ebby speaks. It is a quiet little sentence in a quiet little book written 70 years ago by a failed business-man, of all people, a ruined Wall Street Whiz-kid, but it has saved hundreds--maybe thousands--of thousands of people from insanity and early, utterly dishonorable, death: “‘Why don’t you choose your own conception of God’,” Ebby says. 

And Bill: 

“That statement hit me hard. It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and shivered many years. I stood in the sunlight at last.

It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning.”

And somewhere, deep down in the gears of our little version of the universe, something clicked into place with a barely audible little chucking sound, a wheel started to turn that had perhaps never turned before, and maybe, at least on that tiny little level at first, something was made to work correctly again.

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Recovery meetings are sometimes raucous affairs, normally up-beat at least, seldom glum or boring. Not if you’re there because you want to be there are they glum or boring anyway. They are often more like celebrations. Pet peeve: Almost every recovery meeting you see in movies or on tv is a very sad-looking affair. A bunch of down-scale people direct from central-casting, depressed, sitting in folding chairs, watching a lectern where a man or woman glumly relates how he or she finally lost everything (“ . . . and then, I lost my car, and then my wife left me . . .”), but now he or she has been sober for maybe a year and gets a chip and everyone claps politely. Maybe meetings are like that in Los Angeles, but in Omaha, it’s a bunch of people who have been saved from the fires of purgatory and maybe hell and are happy and willing to share with everyone else how they did it and why they are happy. They maybe don’t have a lot of money or fashionable clothes, but they are happy. That’s not to say there aren’t quiet moments and sometimes people who ARE very sad, and maybe sometimes people who are a little pushy with the happy business. But the prevailing mood is almost always one of joy, spiced with an occasionally sardonic, knowing humor.

I should say here that the word “Anonymous” appears in the title of most recovery meetings for good reason. It used to be a mark of shame in the society at large to have to come to these meetings (although, fortunately, not so much anymore), so it was important for people at the meetings to hold on to their anonymity. In addition, recovery communities are self-organizing, democratic affairs with no official leaders. So if I step out in public and suggest in any way that I speak for the Loofa-Users Anonymous recovery group, that I am an authority on recovering from Loofa-Using, I will soon be hearing about it from every recovering Loofa-User in town, and not in a complimentary way. And thirdly, as soon as I do come out in public as a member of Loofa-Users Anonymous, I will assuredly get caught on some You Tube video using a loofa, and it won't be good, and it will be all over town, and some poor newly-recovering loofa-user looking for a place to get help will have one more good reason NOT to come to the nearest Loofa-Users Anonymous group. So I will uphold this tradition throughout this piece, deny that I have ever been to a meeting of Whatever Anonymous, and refer only to “recovery meetings”. And you can think what you may.

Anyway . . . you are wondering now, if you are wondering anything, how are we going to get back to that Conveyor Belt. So I will here verbalize the first basic contention of this piece: People who successfully recover from any addictive behaviors using the 12-Step Recovery Model do so knowing that the Higher Power, or God (or whatever)--that helped them recover from their addiction IS VERY LIKELY DIFFERENT FROM the Higher Power (or etc.) of their best friend, who they met at this meeting 10 years ago, and is very likely sitting down the table from them right now, and with whom they will probably go out for coffee after the meeting, and with whom they might share no other similarity (in job, ethnicity, history, dress, fandom of football team), except the fact that they are both recovered from their addiction, hopefully happily, most often successfully. 

Again: Each has a different higher power, and they have been friends for years, on the same journey, helping each other learn how to live. Now this might not seem at first like too big a deal. You probably know and maybe work with plenty of people who have  a different religion and level of spiritual development from your own, and you probably get along fine. But in this case, you are aware that you and your friend are co-travelers on the most important journey of your life and that your friend’s relationship with the absolute is absolutely central to his success in restoring order to his life. And  your friend might be a Buddhist or a Baptist or a Catholic or a Hindu or an Atheist or a Moslem. The core of his religious belief might be antithetical to the basic tenets of your own belief, but still you are aware that by tapping into his own core, your friend has had a deep spiritual experience and has been made whole again. IT WORKED. And you made yours work by tapping into the core of your own spiritual experience, which is different from his. And every week you see that friend and together you share your experience and your strength and your hope.

And if you are at all active in your meetings and go to at least a couple a week, you probably know and are close to a LOT of other people in recovery, with whom you share a relationship similar to the one you share with your friend. Thus, in the recovery community, the artificial boundaries that separate people of different world views--and the views themselves!--are softened, made in many cases completely irrelevant. And so the barriers between your amber spiritual experience, let's say, and her orange spiritual experience dissolve. And so there is maybe a little outlet valve in the pressure cooker, a little grease in the bearings of the conveyor belt, and maybe a recovering amber-meme traditionalist can actually find some safe little space to grow in, to hang out and drink coffee with her modern or traditional or post-modern or maybe even integral or warrior or tribal fellow recovery friends. 

And there’s more. The original Eleventh Step from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is repeated almost verbatim in most if not all of the other Twelve-Step meetings, is as follows: “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.” The word I would like to focus on here is, of course, “meditation”.

No one has any idea exactly what the number is, but it is safe to say that there are millions of members of recovery programs in the world right now. And each one of those people, every time they go to a meeting, hears that step recited along with the other steps at the beginning of every meeting. And probably most of those people have been to meetings where meditation is occasionally the primary topic of discussion. 

Now the people who speak at those meetings often say things like “You know, I’ve tried meditating, but I’m not very good at it. I usually end up thinking about my motorcycle or something else I shouldn’t be thinking about.” And that is probably what a lot of recoverers would say when asked. So I’m not trying to suggest that everyone who goes to meetings meditates. But I am suggesting that everyone who goes to meetings is at least exposed to the idea of meditating, and that their experience of the word is a positive one, and they see it as something they would maybe like to do someday. And some actually do. 

My friend Steve is someone I have known since I first tried to get sober, about twelve years ago. He is a proud member of the same recovery program I attend and he is not at all hesitant to talk about it. In fact, he is eager to share his story with people, and he believes that in so doing he will increase the chance that some fellow sufferer of our disease will find his or her way into the rooms. 

Steve and I and a third friend--whose name I will not print here out of respect for his anonymity, as I have not asked his permission, even though I’m sure he would be fine with it--have been having breakfast together for a good number of years every Wednesday morning at the local Hy Vee Grocery Store. Even though we do not often talk about religion, I know that for many years, Steve has attended a local Christian Church, along with his wife has raised a family in that Church, and has over the years been active in the Church and attended Bible Study classes through the Church.

A number of months ago, Steve’s sponsor died, after a fairly short period of illness. It was a surprise to Steve that his sponsor had been sick, as it was a surprise to a lot of people who knew him, so quiet and unassuming he was. And it was even more of a surprise when everyone found out that the memorial to celebrate his life and mark his passing was going to be held at the Nebraska Zen Center here in Omaha. No one had any idea that all this time, through his twenty years or whatever of sobriety (I don’t know the exact number), that this man had considered himself to be a Zen Buddhist, and that he meditated regularly.

Steve was so impressed by the compassion, wisdom, and humility that this man embodied in their sponsor-sponsee relationship that he started to look into the idea of meditation himself. Of course, he was familiar with it from his membership in the recovery community, and from reading what Bill Wilson himself had said about it in the Big Book and in his other writings. But now he bought some CD’s about meditation by Jack Kornfield, downloaded some pod-casts from iTunes, and consulted some other people in the program. He is now a daily meditator. We are talking very seriously about starting our own meditation meeting, of which there are already a couple in town. 

And I haven’t asked Steve about this, but I am pretty sure that he is NOT planning on abandoning his religion for Buddhism. I believe that he sees the value in meditation and believes that it will only enhance his life and his relationship with his higher power. He’s kind of found his own little conveyor belt here in the 12-Step program, I think maybe . . . And the point is, although the Eleventh Step does not deal with contemplative states as deeply as Wilber recommended at the end of the Conveyor Belt Chapter, at least it introduces the concept of meditation (and remember, to a 1930's, 1940's crowd) and maybe sets the stage for the future.

So . . . there’s more to talk about here, but it’s getting late. My self-imposed little rule, as I mentioned last week, is “Blog Post in by 2359 Wednesday night”. So in a few minutes, my computer is going to turn into a pumpkin and I won’t be able to write anymore. What a great metaphor and excuse for putting an end to anything, by the way. Thank you, Cinderella.

But just a couple more things: 1. This is a huge deal for recovering addicted people, not so much maybe for the rest of humanity. I by no means think that what I have talked about is a complete solution to the Conveyor Belt problem. People like us make up, I believe, about 10% of the population, and those of us who recover are even fewer. So there’s a lot more work to be done. But it’s a start. Or it’s a little piece anyway, and better than nothing.

Second, there is probably more to say on this. For one thing, the 12-Step Model in some--and maybe many--ways resembles the Integral Life Practice Model, ESPECIALLY in that one of its primary focuses is dealing with the Shadow, something that is soooooooo easy to put off or ignore.

And third, I think I’m done talking about recovery for awhile in my Posts. 

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Addendum in Correction Mode: Dammit! I was a minute late! Pumpkin pie, anybody?