Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point. We asked His protection and care with complete abandon. Here are the steps we took, which are suggested as a program of recovery:
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol —that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than our-selves could restore us to sanity.
3 Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. 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.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Many of us exclaimed, “What an order! I can’t go through with it.” Do not be discouraged. No one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints. The point is, that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. The principles we have set down are guides to progress. We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection.
(AA Basic Text 1937)
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These Spiritual principles of the Spiritual Kindergarten are timeless and remedy the devilry that is manifested by envy and resentment.
Many people these days are looking for a New Age asset stripped version of the blood and thunder religions of past centuries. In recovery dynamics this is called looking for the easier softer way.
Unless a person can lay down the foundation protection that these divinely simple Steps provide, any attempt at a 21st century exploration of inner space is as doomed to failure as would the prospect of going into outer space without a space-ship.
In fact the global religious trigger points that fill the news channels 24/7 offer ample evidence of an encroaching insanity of which #Brexit is but a local symptom, that stubbornly refuses to respond to the partisan systems purportedly of the same Holy Spirit.
If the religions did a 12 Step audit of their actual state and made amends, then their individual adherents might have some chance of enjoying a Step 11 that was actually connected to Consciousness.
The challenge to face the destructive force of envy and resentment is not just a personal matter, whole systems now face collapse unless the systemic leaders can see the illness that threatens our whole global system.
Whatever side of the #Brexit argument a person find themselves on, when alcohol is replaced by whatever is the person, place or thing that is clearly causal, then Step 1 chillingly describes the actual state of the UK political Executive function over the last three years. The recent change of UK leadership when placed into an illness paradigm is almost certain to be a deepening of the calamity.
A well known search engine gives the etymology of the word expert as follows:
“Middle English (as an adjective): from French, from Latin expertus, past participle of experiri ‘try’. The noun use dates from the early 19th century Compare with experience and experiment.”
So the word expert is an adjective that can be used as a noun, but in its root it is all about experience.
Then the difficulty around the hostility toward the self-proclaimed expert becomes clearer in the difference between theory and practice.
This is no more clear than when a man becomes a politician who is rich and who has been rich all of his life saying that they are experts in knowing what poor people need.
(Postscript added 30/11/19 https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10218768279451646&id=1039915465)
In my professional work, the expertise that I bring to Diction Resolution Therapy is based primarily on the fact that I haven’t had a drink of alcohol since May 1995 and that my professional work roots from that personal experience.
In my spiritual work, I speak from my experience not from a theory.
This experience is clarified in the Sufi Way here.
Without prejudice, the reference to Jared Diamond’s book is a signpost that the illness paradigm is at least being talked about at the Davos level of global cultures as Bill Gates has recommended that all leaders read this book asap.
2 thoughts on “12 Steps to sanity.”