contact

CHAPTER ELEVEN – EDUCATION LEADS OUT FROM WITHIN

This post belongs to a wider body of work that is being released in stages. It can be read on its own, or as part of the whole. The Prologue offers a natural point of entry for sequential reading.

What is born is a new attitude which must learn how to help the whole new relationship with the Creator to fly.

Chapter Ten described the birth of conscience. This chapter concerns its education.

Birth alone does not guarantee maturity. A newly born conscience is exquisitely sensitive, morally alive, and often unstable. Without structure, it can collapse into guilt. Without contact, it can inflate into righteousness. Without guidance, it can retreat into silence or dissociation.

What follows birth is not freedom, but learning.

Clinically, this is the phase where many people falter. The presenting problem has been interrupted. Insight has arrived. Contact is active. Yet something feels precarious. Old patterns no longer satisfy, but new ones have not yet consolidated. The person stands upright for the first time — and the world feels sharper, louder, more demanding.

This is not failure. It is proprioception returning.

The metaphor of standing and falling belongs first to the physical body. A baby finds its centre of gravity by falling, rising, and falling again until balance becomes native. But the education of conscience is not only a bodily matter. In the psyche, the governing metaphor is not walking but flying.

A conscience that has just been born does not simply learn to “stand.” It learns to cohere around a Higher Emotional Centre. It learns by ascent and misjudgement, flight and crash. These repetitions are not failures. They are re-petitions — calls back to Life for meaning, returns to the Source for re-orientation, renewed attempts at truthful alignment.

A conscience that has just been born feels everything. It registers misalignment instantly. It cannot yet discriminate between responsibility and omnipotence, between humility and self-erasure, between service and rescue.

The Twelve Step Programme anticipated this phase with remarkable accuracy.

Steps Ten, Eleven, and Twelve are not maintenance tools. They are educational structures. They teach conscience how to live inside time, relationship, error, repair, and uncertainty without reverting to old compensations.

This is why these Steps are lifelong. They do not complete recovery; they prevent conscience from being crushed by reality or intoxicated by insight.

Step Ten teaches proportionality. It restores scale.

A newly awakened conscience initially experiences everything as urgent. Every misstep feels catastrophic. Every failure appears global. Step Ten interrupts this distortion by introducing rhythm. Inventory becomes continuous, not dramatic. Repair becomes ordinary, not existential.

In the language of flight, Step Ten teaches what to do after a wobble, a dip, or a crash. It trains the person to correct course without spiralling into shame, and to admit error without surrendering the entire sky.

Clinically, this marks the movement from episodic shame to relational accountability. The person no longer requires collapse in order to remain honest. Truth can circulate without crisis.

Step Eleven teaches orientation.

Contact, once established, must be stabilised. Without orientation, conscience becomes reactive — pulled by circumstance, opinion, fear, or approval. Step Eleven restores vertical reference. It reminds the person that conscience answers upward before it answers outward.

This is not withdrawal from life. It is calibration.

Psychologically, this corresponds to the maturation of executive function in relationship to affect. Spiritually, it restores the axis between the created vehicle and the One who has all power. Practically, it prevents burnout, moral injury, and compulsive caretaking.

In live clinical and recovery settings, a phenomenological approach to Step Eleven has repeatedly shown the same outcome: when a person returns to orientation before reaction, reactivity softens, inner pressure becomes legible, and conscience regains altitude without inflation. The person does not become “better.” They become located.

Step Twelve teaches circulation.

What is not circulated stagnates. What stagnates corrupts. Conscience that remains private becomes brittle. Step Twelve returns conscience to the world — not as instruction, but as example; not as authority, but as availability.

This is why service stabilises recovery more reliably than insight. It places conscience back into relationship with unpredictability, difference, resistance, and need — without asking it to dominate or disappear.

Here, kind becomes decisive.

Kind is the behavioural expression of individuated conscience. It is not sentiment. It is not indulgence. It is discernment without violence.

In clinical terms, kind allows boundary without aggression, empathy without fusion, truth without humiliation. In recovery terms, it allows relapse to be addressed without moral collapse and success to be held without superiority.

In spiritual terms, kind is the signature of a conscience that has learned how to live — a conscience that can fly without fantasy and land without despair.

This is where the Human emerges — not as abstraction, but as a person capable of bearing contradiction without fragmentation.

Mankind operates through force, defence, and domination. Humankind operates through relation, responsibility, and response-ability. The bridge between them is not ideology. It is lived conscience, educated by error, tempered by humility, and sustained by contact.

This is why recovery does not end with awakening. Awakening that cannot walk becomes dangerous. Walking that forgets awakening becomes mechanical. The body must learn its balance; the psyche must learn its flight.

The work of Chapter Eleven is simple to state and difficult to embody:

to live as a conscience in the world without fleeing, fixing, or hardening.

When this becomes possible, something subtle but decisive shifts. The person no longer asks how to avoid falling. They ask how to re-orient quickly when they do — how to return to the vertical axis, how to re-enter the sky without grandiosity, how to serve without self-erasure.

This prepares the final movement.

Chapter Twelve will not add new material. It will release what has already been built.

Because what has been born, educated, and stabilised now carries its own momentum.

And the work no longer belongs to the book.

For readers unfamiliar with the Twelve Step structure referenced throughout this chapter, the full wording of the Steps (Second Edition, Alcoholics Anonymous) is provided in Appendix A as a stable reference.

Intercourses

The Latin words “inter” meaning “between” and “currere” meaning “run” blend together to give us the word “intercourse”.

The sexual hijacking of this word began in 1788 when the habits of Mary Queen of Scots were immortalised in a biography. Today, most people associate intercourse to mean sexual intercourse.

However the word intercourse is a vitally important word to help people in a recovery from the disease of stuck and broken addiction.

Because the whole of Mankind is now powerlessly broken apart indisputably in a way that hitherto has been “managed” by ridiculously small forces, there is a crack in the prison wall. There is a way to see the course of events more clearly, to see the overall picture with a clearer resolution, to inter-act then more bravely, more creatively.

These small numbers of people that have historically hidden their real powerlessness over actually being able to control the huge numbers of people that they have ruled over, except by scaring the people subjugated to them with the loss of physical liberty or with wars, torture and death, these small numbers of people are exposed currently to be both powerless and unable to manage their political constitutions effectively.

Intercourse involves a toing and froing, a certain wrestling within a container of mutual respect amongst participants or even inner thoughts, that have oppositional positions and/or identities. In Mankind’s physical sexual intercourse, love is the container par-excellence and legal consent is the final arbiter to the sanctity of the act of physical intercourse, without which there is ultimately only the calamitous descent into rape.

In Mankind’s social intercourses, both public and private, truly manners maketh Man, a way of guaranteeing that consent is implicit in the inevitable toing and froing that happens between people privately and publicly. When manners become ill, then this illness opens the way to the rapacious interactions that then erupt between people in their intimate relationships and between systems in their political and financial relationships.

When social and political intercourse turns rapacious, though it seems easier to deny and hide than its physical relation, it’s actual effect is massively more destructive.

I have worked with people to try to help them to heal themselves from the trauma arising from physical abuse. I have heard that the words screamed at them during the physical attack stayed with them in a far more destructive way long after their body’s bruises had faded.

So with the verbal engagements of the participants and recipients within social and political intercourses, these bodies of proposition, argument and potential resolution can only safely wrestle together where there is openness, respect, humour, a willingness to be altered by the appearance of the new birthing of ideas rather than the maniacal defence of old entrenched positions.

Where ill-will, lies, hidden agendas and fear abound, whether in private lives or in public and systemic lives, when love disappears and the bottom line deliberately destroys its own top line, then all hell eventually breaks loose.

Hell simply means separation. When the bottom line is severed from its own top line.

Spiritual intercourse is the ultimate toing and froing that a mere handful of Human beings have been evidenced as having remained on Earth to share their result of actually having achieved a successful consummation of that particular deific Union.

Jacob and Esau (1878) by George Frederick Watts

This being said, even though the possibility of the sanctity of spiritual intercourse is often denied by those insisting upon the supremacy of their particular academic definition of intercourse, the previous progeny of such a spiritual Union rule the actual eras of Mankind’s experience past and present.

So today, as ill-will abounds amongst the global political class, as collapse continues to reverberate across the global financial class, as disease threatens to collapse the academic class, the contraceptive blocks that reduce global political debate to so much entrenched partisan masturbation have to be removed.

These blocks are being potentially removed by the very urgency of the environmental challenges erupting on Earth, the urgency of the political collapses that have so nearly repeated Mankind’s near history of World War, the urgency of the collapse of the Ponzi Scheme that was analogue money.

However, even if the contraceptions are to be removed from Mankind’s social, financial and political intercourses, just how the new wedding of these arrangements are to turn out so that truly new conceptions can be born into existence from the these new conjoinings will be wholly in the hands and hearts of those leaders who can hear this Spiritual diagnosis of their present condition.

BBC News – Attenborough gives stark warning on climate change to UN
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-56175714

The invitation to this diagnosis is clear. If you are not clear, ask, for a definition of intercourse with all and any of the facts of life is not enough, contact has to happen!

Einstein is purported to have said,

“Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler”.
“If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself”.

These two quotes attributed to Einstein if true, speak to the need perhaps, of practice to make difficult matters appear simple – then to practicing communication once having reached a certain level of actual experiential attainment, of being, in that which is to be communicated.

I have conscious contact with God, as I understand God, this fact granted to me in the wording of Step 11 of a 12 Step Programme, a Programme I have practiced since 1995, a practice that actually builds upon a ‘tifl al-maani’ personal experience from 1982.

I can communicate simply now about consciousness, should I choose to answer anyone who might care to ask me a question, especially if the question were to be asked from the guileless place that a six year old can be found in 😉🕯️

Matthew 18:3 says

International Standard Version
Then he said, “I tell all of you with certainty, unless you change and become like little children, you will never get into the kingdom from heaven.

The biblical reference points toward a change of heart, away from the contempt prior to investigation which is mentioned in the book Alcoholics Anonymous as the ultimate bar to progress.

Toward a change of heart where a creative imagination serves Consciousness in our consciences, when minds work to digest life experiences with the peristaltic necessity of joined opposites as depression and expansion are repaired then, without the need of antidepressants.

Then E = mc² can be seen through the eyes of Love.

Salaam.