Lash wrote:I've been considering this issue and similar ones over the past year....
People have a lot more power than they realize. For instance, in the Registrar's Office, I notice the same people have problems that require intervention. They show up in some kind of trouble routinely. Several of them have said it's just their luck. Bad things are always happening to them. When I was depressed, I considered myself unlucky. We construct sympathetic and friendly systems to agree with our reality.
The reason the same students don't get the classes they want is because they don't pay attention to their responsibilities--they don't check their e-mails, they aren't engaged in the necessary trivia that makes up their life. They **** up, and the consequences follow. It's easier to blame bad luck than to be responsible for your own failings.
I wasn't unlucky, I was careless in my choices. When I came to junctures in my life, where I knew the smart thing to do--I refused. I went with my heart. Bad choices. Not luck.
There's a lot going on in our subconscious that "makes our luck."
People in AA are trained to grab on to God, because they are conditioned to believe (and affirm) that they are powerless and God is their only source of salvation--literally and figuratively. How can this not set these recovering alcoholics up for a massive fall. They put all their eggs in the God basket, after being forced to take them out of the alcohol basket. Consciously, that's making a human being incredibly vulnerable to the emotions that swirl around religion--but I think the real danger is what that can do to a person subconsciously.
I don't know what it's like to be an alcoholic, but I know what it's like to live with one. I strongly believe there is a powerful reason for each person's alcoholism. Whatever that reason is, it is the strongest thing in the alcoholic's life. Being drunk is the only thing that can give the alcoholic relief. When the drunkeness threatens to destroy their life, they have to let go of one life raft (alcohol), and grab on to another one to make it. That in itself shows the frightening dynamic going on with alcoholics, and how desperately they are forced to cling to God.
That kind of "religion" is almost as dangerous as the ill it seeks to heal.
Ipsofacto, submerging oneself into the AA religion likely opens people up to belief in all manner of things to support their life raft. They NEED God to be true. They can't survive without it.
I'm not sure that's intelligible. Hope someone understood.
I have not posted in this thread, because i have never had a "spiritual awakening." Even my rejection of organized religion proceeded from a series of events which i can recall both "visually" and "emotionally." I don't ascribe any "awakening" because i assert that i was not asleep during the process.
This post is one of the most cogent analyses of human character that i have ever seen posted at this site. Especially, i appreciate the analysis of people's notions of luck--and the subsequent and comcommitant analysis of the so-called "twelve step" method with its imperative to acknowledge a higher power. Whether or not i were ever an alcoholic i would leave to others to determine. I know that i certainly had a problem with binge drinking, and that i seriously f*cked-up in life as a result. I only succeeded in quitting alcohol because i was finally able to step outside my experience and look at it in a more objective (if not an entirely objective) manner.
I had been moved to lose weight several years before i quit taking strong drink. I acheived truly remakable results in a short period of time by completely altering my eating habits--at that time i routinely got so much exercise that it wasn't necessary to increase that. One of my friends pointed out during the process that even though i had adopted a leaner, more sensible diet, i was still soaking up thousands of calories in beer each week, on the day or two when i drank. That made sense, and so i stopped drinking for about five months. To my surprise, i found out that many of my "friends" were not interested in my company if i were not drinking. I also found that quite a few of my previous acquaintance were actively hostile toward me because i was not drinking. But the focus of my behavior at the time was to lose weight, and the object lessons had less of an impression on me than they might have if drinking had been the focus of my efforts.
Within a few years, i went to Florida to stay with a friend while he got chemo-therapy--he needed help with his landscaping business during that time, and wanted someone he knew, upon whom he could rely on a daily basis. In that part of Florida, at least, there was a heavy culture of drinking, and it was not just young men and women, it stretched right across the social spectrum to the retirees. Someone would be described as DNIW--and when i inquired, i was told that meant "drunk, not interested in working." Part of my value to my friend was that the term did not apply to me--i was used to getting up before the sun to go to work.
When i left Florida and went about my own life again, i ended up in Ohio for reasons which are not germane and no one else's business. There, i resolved to rid my life of alcohol. I had once heard a woman (radio or television, i don't recall) saying that she had given up cigarettes by spending time in places where she did not smoke, such as the the bathtub (she mentioned other places, but for the humor, that stuck in my mind). Because i had been raised in a house in which alcohol was not kept, i had never been in the habit of drinking at home, or keeping alcohol there. The most effective, and often the only method i had to avoid drinking was just to stay home. I read a lot, rented movies, took long walks, but mostly, i was alone. I again noticed that many of my acquaintance were actually only "drinking buddies," and was quickly able to distinguish people who were actually my friends by their reaction to the change in me.
The upshot of it all was that i eventually came to have no further interest in alcohol, and more importantly, in the cultural milieu in which is prominent. That meant, though, that i was a good deal more lonely than i had ever been in my life. This is something i have never actually been able to rectify--i guess that it was left to so late in life that i have not learned to create an acquaintance by other means. To that extent, the internet has become a "god-send." Many of my interests were those of much younger people, and they are usually not that comfortable in the company of someone the same age as their parents. The online world contains many people my age, and the diversity is such that i can connect to people who are both my age and who share my interests.
Nevertheless, my life has far fewer people in it than it once did. I am glad, though, that it did not involve any "spiritual awakening," that i was never obliged to appeal to a putative "higher power" to take control of my life. I am glad, to borrow Lash's metaphor, that i learned to swim, however badly, rather than looking for a different life raft to cling to.
