Step Twelve
Next time you walk up a flight of steps, stop and think where it is you’re going. You’ll probably find that you’re climbing to the second floor in your house so you can go to bed, or maybe you’re climbing a ladder to change that burned out light bulb in the ceiling. You take the steps for a reason – there’s a definite end in mind when you begin your climb. Well, the same is true in the program. We take the Steps not because like Mt. Everest they are there – we take them because they lead us to something we need or to a place we need to go. That something or that somewhere is a spiritual awakening.
This might be a good time to flash back to the early 1930’s and review how this whole step business started. You could make a pretty good case that it all began in the waiting room of the famous, Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Carl Jung. The doctor was having a conversation with a patient of his named Roland Hazard. Roland was a chronic alcoholic and he had been Jung’s patient for nearly a year. Obviously this was before the days of managed care! When Roland first left Switzerland he was convinced that with his newly found self-knowledge he could stay sober. But his hopes were soon crushed. He found himself drinking again after only a few short weeks. So in 1932 he returned to Switzerland drunk and defeated and reaching out again to Jung as his one, last hope. Jung's response when he met him in the waiting room shocked Roland. The good doctor refused to counsel any further with his patient. The psychiatrist told Roland that he had done all he could do for him and that he considered Roland's alcoholism to be what he called: the HOPELESS variety. HOPELESS - that was the word he used.
Now that's not a word people like to hear – I think it may even border on being un- American – but it was an honest assessment of Roland’s case and it’s the diagnosis every real alcoholic and addict will one day face. Still in shock and reeling from the harsh verdict, Rowland asked if there was ANYTHING he could do. The best advice Jung could offer his patient was that he return to the States, attach himself to a religious group of some sort and hope to undergo a deep, psychic change, a conversion experience, a spiritual awakening – these were the words he used to describe the only thing that could bring hope to Roland’s hopeless condition.
Jung counseled his patient that although these spiritual awakenings were comparatively rare, there had been instances where such profound experiences had resulted in personality changes sufficiently strong to overcome addictions of his kind. Roland was a good patient and he followed his doctor's advice. God's providence brought Roland to New York City where he came in contact with a group of people practicing a set of principles designed to bring about the spiritual awakening Roland so desperately needed.
Roland found his spiritual awakening. He changed and his mind was healed at a deep enough level that he never drank again. Roland then went on to help other alcoholics get sober including AA’s co-founder Bill Wilson
Now let’s take a closer look at the spiritual awakening that Wilson himself experienced. Laying in Towns Hospital in 1934, Wilson had an encounter with something so powerful that it altered his very consciousness, his psyche, his soul just in the manner that Jung had said was necessary for an alcoholic to find recovery.
Wilson describes his spiritual experience this way: "My depression deepened unbearably and finally it seemed to me as though I were at the very bottom of the pit. I still gagged very badly on the notion of a Power greater than myself, but finally, just for the moment, the last vestige of my proud obstinacy was crushed. All at once I found myself crying out, If there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything, anything!' Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up in an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me, in the mind's eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness. All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence, and I thought to myself, 'So this is the God of the preachers!' A great peace stole over me and I thought, 'No matter how wrong things may seem to be, they are still all right. Things are all right with God and His world.'"
(see AA Comes of Age, p.63.)
Wilson's spiritual experience, while more dramatic than the spiritual awakenings most of us have, contain the same three ingredients common to most alcoholics and addicts who recover. First, Wilson hit a very deep and keenly felt bottom. Notice his depression. Wilson's spirit, he says, had reached "the very bottom of the pit." His ego-consciousness was totally defeated – at least for that moment. He experienced what AA psychiatrist Harry Tiebout would later call, "ego-deflation at depth". All the pain that went along with Wilson’s alcoholism and drove him to the emotional and spiritual gates of hell now became the necessary component of his awakening. Like the proverbial camel passing through the eye of the needle, the shrinkage of his ego was a pre-condition for his psyche
(soul) to break through and enter into what Wilson later called a "fourth dimension of existence."
Second, his experience of defeat removed the barriers that had previously separated his consciousness from an awareness of God as a genuine "Presence" in his life. Now suddenly, he felt that Presence. He awakened – and he saw and he felt a different world – he both saw and felt and entered into conscious contact with the world of spirit. With his ego-mind defeated and at least temporarily suspended from being in control of his consciousness, he entered into this Presence through a much deeper part of his mind – this is the mind Jung might call Wilson’s true self. Prior to this experience, Wilson always felt himself removed or separated from this "Presence." Now he was vitally connected. For the first time in his life he was freed from the bondage of self.
Finally, returning again to his ego-conscious state, Wilson emerged from the experience a changed man. He had acquired faith. Prior to this he had belief (Step 2)– now he had faith (Step 12). He brought back with him the comforting assurance that even though he would continue to live most of his life at a lowered level of conscious awareness, he now knew that there existed a realm of spirit from which he had come, where he was truly at home, and to which he would ultimately return. This was a world where, "No matter how wrong things might seem to be they are still all right. Things are all right with God and His world.”
The purpose of the 12 Steps is nothing less than to provide us with a ladder that will lead us into this new world of consciousness. Bringing about this spiritual awakening is the whole purpose of the Steps. It is what awaits us at the end of our climb. Once we've been there and have seen it, once we've tasted it, whether our awakening is fast like Wilson's or slow and gradual like most of us, it then becomes our sacred duty and our privilege to carry the message of awakening to those who still suffer because they don't yet know about its existence. Keep climbing, there’s a helluva view from the top of these stairs!
Hope this little journey through the 12 Steps has been helpful. Next year we’ll start a twelve-month series exploring the early history of 12 Step recovery and we’ll meet some of the spiritual giants upon whose shoulders we now stand. Have a blessed & sober & awakened Holiday! You deserve it!