Humanity as a group seems to be fixated with origins and the nature of god. There always seems to be many quests going on at many levels of society seeking out the nature of various gods and theories of origins. I myself was raised in two households with very loose religious requirements (if indeed you could even call it that). At my dad’s house we didn’t attend church at all except for weddings and the odd carnival here and there (which I find sort of odd as today churches seem to shy away from carnivals, but that’s an entirely different conversation all of its own.) Dad believed in God but wasn’t super clear on the details. When I was younger I recall little proselytizing and a general opinion that the nature of god was perhaps beyond the farthest reaches of the contemporary human mind.
At mom’s house the whole subject of god became even more cryptic as we attended a Unitarian church that had bibles and a Sunday service but mostly what I remember was a lot of socializing and very little bible study. One time I came across a religious station on the radio and called and asked for a free bible they were offering to send out, and mom seemed a little surprised and acted a little weird when I received it in the mail. I don’t recall ever reading it and in fact didn’t really try to read the bible until I was 26 or so.
So as I grew older my god was an entity of my own creation, a vague deity who is everywhere and sees and hears everything, and keeps a tally of your acts here on earth for a later yet undefined reckoning that could possibly have clouds on one end and flames on the other, though I never wholeheartedly bought that one.
When I was 18 or so I became interested in martial arts and things farther east than I’d ever experienced and I read the buddoshinishu (a Japanese text that was at one time considered the Samurai warrior’s primer) and then later the Tao Te Ching, then the Chuang Tzu and Poetry by Ryokan and Li Po and Tu Fu and Cold Mountain by Han Shan and the list goes on. All of it made about as much sense to me as the bible did- they all seemed about equal in believability and all of it was tough to understand due to the wording of the scripture. But I got through it, and have continued to read and study and think about all of it throughout my life.
Anyhow- I had a point when I started this. A while back a friend of mine asked me what I knew about the drug DMT. He’s a psycholgist and I’d mentioned that I’d heard about a friend using it under some supervision in a not legal setting. The guy had talked about near death-like experience and the feeling of someone watching him, observing, and the feeling that they were there to show him something and then the feeling that they lost interest and decided not to. Weird disjointed stuff. When I first heard the story I wasn’t really that interested and sort of said “yeah-yeah” and then pretty much forgot it. Then my other friend who is an Aaer and a licensed psychologist asked me about it, it prompted me to look iknto it a little more and read up a little, and I learned a little about it. Basically the drug DMT is a synthetic made from refining some byproduct of photosynthesis in some grass in the amazon (I’m not going to look it all up again because it’s not really important- the stuff is scary and not really OK in my opinion) that allows you to feel something similar to death, and the experiences people have while under the influence of this drug sounds awfully similar to people’s near death experiences and to experiences some people have had while meditating for lengthy periods of time.
The point is (and yeah- I know I ramble)- I think when people meditate they are searching for something, and this DMT thing seems a lot like people (perhaps) want a shortcut to something similar. Always the searching comes back. And in my experience people aren’t really that unique. I mean- sure- there are no two people alike. But given any particular stimulus you’re pretty much bound to get a finite number of responses from any ten thousand subjects. People tend to do the same stuff over and over- that’s why we’re in the same old political mires we always have been making the same avoidable mistakes we always have, that kind of stuff. And I think when stymied in their search for meaning, a LOT of people turn to substances. I’ll get back to this.
I think about my own search- conscious or not, and in hindsight I think my searches have been more subconscious and realized after the fact than anything else- and my youthful foray into the bottles and I have to wonder at a few things.
First off- I think I was poorly equipped to deal with problems as a youth. My sisters and I were allowed to make our own decisions concerning ourselves at a very young age, and subsequently I made up a lot of rules that kept me safe- more so when I left home at 15 and lived on the streets and here and there for a couple years. While these rules kept me safe as a kid, they haven’t really enriched my life as an adult, and I am having to shed them as part of the twelve step program. I think the big one is where I was very careful who I let into my life. I used to say: The people I like, I love- and the rest I really have no use for. I also have been guilty of judging people at face value a lot. This kept me safe as a kid, with hustlers trying to take me in and people trying to harm me in one way or another. Those were some meanstreets in a crazy time, and so it was what it was. But now maybe it isn’t so useful. I’m not 15, and actually it’s not even realistic. One thing I really like about AA doesn’t come from the stories so much but from the people- the way they bare their souls and are so brutally honest about themselves and their actions and their pasts. This is a huge key that allows me to do the same, and in the process I have to let go of that old “rule” that kept me safe for so many years, but eventually kept me insulated from a lot of truths and kept me out of circulation from a lot of cool people and neat ideas. That’s one thing.
I think being ill equipped to deal with stuff I quickly found alcohol to make the pain and seeming futility of life at bay. Life has always been daunting, and the alcohol made me forget about the suffering around me and turned the party on. To me, alcohol was always about the party- when the drinks were being served, it was a festive time. So when the gloom and doom of my harsh reality got too heavy I could always get a twelve pack and start a party- even if it was just me- a party of one.
A couple things I heard again and again growing up and reading a lot of different texts by a lot of different people: “Live in the now” and “This too shall pass”. These are really common thoughts in subjects related to Buddhism, but they take on a larger relevance for me in AA. “One day at a time”. Jesus- I’ve read that thing all my life- on bumper stickers and shirts and wherever. Sounds an awful lot like “live in the now”.
“Live in the now.” I never was one to worry too much. I always had the attitude that if I could do something about a problem, then I should get to it- and if I couldn’t do anything about a problem, then what was the use worrying about it? So I managed to get through a lot of lifes mundane, day to day pitfalls with little collateral damage. I tended to worry about the big things. At 25 I was scouring the internet trying to figure out how long we would have enough tillable land and food and water to sustain the world’s population. Huge stuff. I still haven’t really figured out the answer to that one. As far as I can tell it’s either “soon” or “never” or somewhere in between. But over the years I’ve learned that it really isn’t helping to figure it out. Dwelling on it isn’t changing it- it’s just going on about it a lot.
John Kabat Zinn talks about people who are new to meditation, and how they like to talk about meditation, seeking out any opportunity to tell someone new about it. His advice is that for the first ten years of practice, whenever you get the urge to talk about it, go DO it. You get so caught up in the PR of it that you end up not having any time to actually DO it. That might be an exaggerated line of thinking but I got his point completely, and all of the time try to be DOING whatever I do, rather than just emulating the air of someone who does that. With the 12 steps I’m finding that’s an important concept. I get the feeling that I’ll end up going through the steps the rest of my life, each time elaborating on them and taking them a little further. It seems like such an adventure of self discovery and I personally know that no matter how honest I THINK I’m being the first time around, eventually I’ll realize just how much I missed.
Anyhow- I truly am beginning to believe that the whole substance abuse trap is a pitfall that people run through in the same manner again and again. Despite what we all want to think, in our alcoholism we aren’t unique. We’re drunks- just like the next guy. The banker and the politician that are drunks are drunks just like the guy that lives under the freeway overpass. The fashion that they live in may be different, but the alcoholism is just the same.
Just a random idea that occurred to me at some point this week: perhaps if our parents and schools focused more on the origins of man and his spirituality and the various spiritual beliefs themselves- rather than banning them completely under the guise of seperation of church and state (of which I believe there is little or none. Politics just brings out the worst in everything.) our society might be different in a good way. I never thought I’d be the one to say THAT. It’s just a thought of mine, but with a broader knowledge of theology and it’s history and an understanding of abroader base of accepted moral norms to work with….who knows, right?
But instead we do it this backwards way and go through all kinds of pain and end up learning it in AA, interestingly enough.
I’m very much enjoying the whole process of AA and the steps and have ended up re-opening subjects that I laid down years ago to further explore the nature of my own identity and what is real and what is just fluff. It’s strange to (assumably) get to the root of why I do some of the things I do, and I don’t think a psychologist could do it “externally” as quickly as going through the steps and being “brutally honest”, for lack of a less scary term. Exciting stuff. Honestly I look forward more and more to getting further and further along. I never would have predicted that.
Just one other item I borrowed from Mr Kabat-Zinn. He was originally using the term to explain how meditating is like “tuning up the mind, calibrating it and getting yourself a firm base to work from”- but I liked the analogy so much that I couldn’t help myself.
Trying to make responsible decisions with an alcohol soaked mind is akin to trying to operate a telescope on a waterbed. You can get the thing set up right and look through it but you never know what you’re going to see.
Today I feel like I have my telescope set up on something more firm than a waterbed. Maybe spongecake. Give me time.
