OTHER CONCERNS RELATED TO SPIRITUALITY
In each of the last two chapters I made a brief mention of creativity. I pointed out that human formation is essentially a creative activity, and included Karen Armstrong's statement concerning the essential creativity of the alleged revelation of the Qur'an. While van Kaam does not specifically mention the word "creativity" he does write at some length about the role of imagination, especially as it applies to memory and anticipation of the future. Creativity implies imagination and any use of imagination necessarily implies the presence of at least some degree of creativity, however slight. The dynamism of formation as creative is an entire study in its own right, so I shall only briefly sketch the direction in which this further theorizing would go, in my opinion. The topic is of clinical interest in that it is a realm of spiritual change that could be quantified, that is, the clinician can utilize tests of creativity and encourage the client to develop skills of creative problem solving.
Van Kaam identifies imagination as one of the means by which form directives become embodied within the human-as-field. His discussion of imagination is an area where van Kaam sounds more clinically field-based then usual. He goes into a detailed exposition of the use of imagination for pain management, such as is often used with cancer patients, and of how imagination can induce the flow of saliva. One of the proposed truth statements about the human-as-field is that change in any one pole of the field will necessarily show as change in the other poles. Van Kaam moves in this direction when he writes that "...the imagination can be used to enable us to give form to our involuntary nervous system."
Another member of the Duquesne community, Edward L. Murray, has written on the role of imagination in a way relevant to our goals. His work is a synthetic exposition of the thought of people such as Gadamer, Ricoeur, James, and especially Martin Heidegger and his concept of Dasein. (In addition, Murray refers to Gurwitsch, who I discussed in Chapter 2.) Murray, following Heidegger, sees imagination as absolutely central to the human form:
Heidegger sees the transcendental imagination as dealing with more than the unreal or the absent. It is not to be understood as dealing with the "merely imaginary," as the term is often used. Far from it. He sees the imagination much as a farmer sowing seeds in the field, sketching a horizon in which objectivity is to be encountered. Things will come into being. Thus it is that the comprehension of Being takes place, for the comprehension of Being as the comprehension of anything must take place within a horizon, and imagination provides that horizon. And it is within that horizon, then, that the experience of an essent takes place. A kind of envisioning thinking occurs that enables being to rise up before us, as it were. That thinking is both forming and projective thinking.
If we take Murray's terms such as "horizon" and "Being" and translate them into "field" and "form" we begin to see the outlines of the importance of imagination for distinctively human, that is, spiritual, formation. The horizon of Being is "where" phenomena cross over into mystery, and "where" phenomena emerge as phenomenal. It is the arena of essential interpretation of both the empirical qua empirical and mystery qua mystery-- the arena of the "meaning of life" which is intimately related to the primordial option of abandonment to the mystery-as-benevolent that signifies, for van Kaam, the foundations of spiritual health. Referring to a hermeneutic of the mystery as hostile Murray continues:
The imaginative horizon projected by the human sets the stage, as it were, for what it will effect... Even the highly depressed person-- contrary to common opinion-- who seemingly has written life off and is caught in paralyzing depths is one who has effected a tremendous imaginative achievement [an interpretation of the mystery as hostile]... Just consider for a moment: to imagine that everything is meaningless, that nothing good is to be found anywhere, that no purpose resides in anything, that every person in one's life has walked away and left one abandoned, that even the seeming good of life is really a sham-- this is a huge imaginative accomplishment. ...Knowledge, logic, truth, facts, figures are now devoid of meaning-- not because they cannot be meaningful, to be sure, but simply because the person has imagined them so.
In that the mystery is mystery it is only by means of imagination that we say anything about it at all such as what it is or what its significance is for the other poles of the field. One may have "evidence" that the mystery is this or that, but at heart all such "evidence" or "reason" is empty and unconvincing. All that remains is an act of imagination, a choice of image, a faith, and as Murray shows, even "knowledge, logic, truth, facts, figures" may be meaningful only in so far as they are imagined to be meaningful in light of the images pertaining to the horizon of Being. Imagination is part of the foundation upon which we construct our understanding of ourselves-as-field. It is what produces the faith statements concerning the mystery, and thus the form traditions that arise out of this foundational and imaginative interpretation.
"Because the imagination is susceptible to dissonance, we must appraise, when desirable, the consonance of the images that give form to the formation field..." Dissonance, when applied to imagination, shows forth as fantasy. We have repeatedly stressed that mystery appears only by means of phenomena. There is no such "thing" as "the mystery". As imagination is part of the means by which a hermeneutic of the mystery first becomes phenomenal there may be an inclination to develop images without reference to the phenomena by which mystery appears to us. This is the meaning of imaginative fantasy: the imagination operates without reference to, or without inclusion of, all phenomena-present-to-consciousness. It thus fosters dissonance as those phenomena that are not incorporated into the hermeneutic image cannot be "fit in" with the whole. "Dissonant imagination fabricates an unreal formation field..." That is, a field that is not grounded in actual phenomena. We can thus say that the clinician focusing upon spiritual health shall assess and foster the client's skills of creative imagination. The degree to which the client is able to generate a variety of imaginative hermeneutical schemes, and the extent to which the fullness of co-present data are integrated into those schemes, may provide a scale for measuring the client's degree of spiritual growth.
It would be an error to revert to some type of autarchism at this point. For the individual prone towards a Cartesian autarchy, talk of imagination may seem profoundly subjective. We have seen though, that imagination can be profoundly formative, that is, it aids in the actual embodiment, the full phenomenalization of directives to formation, and thus shows socially as well. We said previously that all formation takes place in tradition. Murray writes:
Traditions among a people... are a people's way of imagining their lives, bringing imaginative thinking to bear upon their lives. ...One imagines his life as it has been imagined for him by his elders.
The spiritual activity that is creative imagination shows forth as the milieu of faith and form traditions in which we may find ourselves. I mean this quite literally. We always "find ourselves" as already present-to and engaged-with such a milieu of others' imaginings of reality which may or may not be consonant, may or may not include the fullness of phenomena, may or may not foster a balance among the poles of the field. The strength of these socially received hermeneutic schemes or traditions can strangle the individual's creative engagement with reality:
The culture is filled with dimensions that are never articulated and in all probability will never be articulated. The people just live them and the common mentality is simply formed and embodied. Unless somewhere someone rises up to question it, as did Socrates in ancient Greece, the vast majority of people just assume that theirs is a way meant by nature, that theirs is a style beyond challenge, that any significant alternative is unthinkable. In brief, a culture is a people's imaginative creation, which here and there may be rethought for needful reasons, but which for the most part constitutes the "way it is done." Handed down from generation to generation, the authority of tradition is brought to bear and render it all even more unchallengeable. By this time the people's way of imagining life is conceived as the only way to do so.
A faith and form tradition can thus act in a tyrannical manner; stifling the small degree of hermeneutic freedom possessed by the human form, and thus its potential creativity which we call the spirit. The development of this freedom-- transcendence-- is the substance of the skills that make up one's spirituality. With this, we see the possibility of a schema of the human spirit as developmental in a manner that can be clinically meaningful. That is, as we always find ourselves present to others and so social, so too we always find ourselves as spiritual in that we are present to mystery. Just as we go through life and develop socially, and may or may not acquire social skills, so too we develop spiritually and may or may not acquire spiritual, that is, hermeneutic skills which could be assessed and developed in a clinical setting or relationship.
MORE ON SUBJECTIVE PREJUDICE
With talk of "finding ourselves" in a social milieu of tradition(s) we return to the realm of the existential-- the idea of the human as "being-in-the-world" (Ricoeur's "belonging" our "human-as-field")-- and the jumping-off point for the establishment of Formative Spirituality.
In that this being-in-the-world is a social phenomenon, and remembering that the human "is a dialogue", we are led into talk of discourse and the linguistic basis of human formation. The fact that we already "find ourselves" in this socially constructed milieu can correct our Cartesian-style autarchy, our subjective prejudice, and help move us more fully into a field-based approach to, and conceptualization of, the human form. Ricoeur writes that:
...hermeneutics proposes to make subjectivity the final, and not the first, category of a theory of understanding. Subjectivity must be lost as radical origin, if it is to be recovered in a more modest role.
In contrast to the tradition of the [Cartesian] cogito and to the pretension of the subject to know itself by immediate intuition, it must be said that we understand ourselves only by the long detour of the signs of humanity deposited in cultural works.
At this we must stop a moment, for here is where we discover the revolutionary potential for clinical practice offered by formation theory (in addition to that of the simple reappropriation of spirituality as clinically significant). Ricoeur provides us here with what to my mind is not so strongly stressed in van Kaam: the proper "placement" of subjectivity within the human field of formation in light of spirituality. Ricoeur is quite clear that he is presenting "A new theory of subjectivity...".
[The Cartesian notion of the subject] is the same philosophical error which must be taken by its two extremities: objectivity as confronting the subject, the subject as reigning over objectivity.
If we follow through with the implications of a field model, developed in response to the idealist/positivist models-- a strict subject-object dichotomy-- we make subjective experience but one quarter of the human-as-field. And it is a part. It is not "that which confronts" the social, physical or spiritual. As we mentioned then, many theorists confuse "psychology" and "spirituality". This may well be because they begin their explorations assuming that subjectivity is "that which confronts" an object and is thus somehow the origin of experience.
This "de-centering" of the subjective is a profoundly counter-intuitive move for those raised in the Cartesian milieu which provides a sense of "positional identity" that "I" am "inside" or perhaps "behind" my head. A full and complete comprehension of the field model, including the primacy of spirit (in that mystery appears through all phenomena), shows this experience to be a false understanding of the reality. It is in the mystery that the origins of all phenomenal experience are to be found, thus making the human spirit the foundation of the human form, not our subjectivity. Just as the sun still looks like it moves, though we know it does not, so too it seems like subjectivity is "what I am" and is thus the first order of experience and interpretation. A field model could thus be compared to a new Copernican Revolution. This is grasped by Ricoeur who, through his post-Cartesian perspective, then looks at the issue of hermeneutics itself and concludes that discourse is prior to the subjective experience of interpretation. In other words, we "find ourselves" already present to a hermeneutic of reality provided by others. Subjective mood therefore, may be symptomatic of formative events that should be primarily articulated in terms of other pole(s) of the field. Subjective mood is a result of, not an original-to-itself in an autarchic fashion.
SPEECH AND TEXT
For Ricoeur, "discourse" is both speech and text. As speech, discourse includes not only verbalizations, but gestures, body language and a specific contextual situation to which its meaning is tied. "...it is in discourse that all messages are exchanged." So, for instance, the form and faith tradition(s) in which we find ourselves already present are communicated by discourse-as-speech between parent and child, and as we grow, with others as well. However, discourse becomes text when written and read. Text is essentially different from speech in that it transcends the psycho-social situatedness of a speech event. It thus transcends the subjective situation of speech and presents a world, a field-configuration, a possible hermeneutic, the possibility of a variety of hermeneutic schemes, to the reader. Speech is here and now, face-to-face with another human form. Text is not. Speech shows forth the other's unique field of formation while text shows forth possible fields of formation. When we move from formation by means of speech to formation by means of engagement with text we open up hermeneutic possibilities that transcend the "givenness" of our being-in-the-world-- an essentially spiritual act of transcendence. Note in the following passage how this transcendence is a quality of any work of art:
...the text may escape from the finite intentional horizon of its author... An essential characteristic of a literary work, and of a work of art in general, is that it transcends its own psycho-sociological conditions of production and thereby opens itself to an unlimited series of readings, themselves situated in different socio-cultural conditions. In short, the text must be able, from the sociological as well as the psychological point of view, to 'decontextualise' itself in such a way that it can be 'recontextualised' in a new situation-- as accomplished, precisely, by the act of reading.
This "decontextualisation" and "recontexualisation"-- a reconfiguration of the dialogue the human is-- is possible because of what Ricoeur calls "distanciation". Distanciation is a componant of the actual structure of discourse as both text and speech (i.e. it is not an essentially subjective activity) and is similar to what we call "transcendence" (which can serve both consonance and dissonance). It entails, as part of the structure of human lingual reality, an element of the very possibility of reflection. Van Kaam writes that reflective awareness and attention is a necessary condition for reformation. Writes Ricoeur: "Reality is, in this way, metamorphosed by means of what I shall call the 'imaginative variations' which literature carries out on the real." It is in these imaginative variations that we discover hermeneutics, human freedom-- our spirituality. And it is through metaphor that we are able to construct new imaginative variations.
METAPHOR AND ANALOGY AS FORMATION
From with a field approach to the human form metaphor and analogy is necessary to continuously integrate the fullness of reality into discourse. In other words, the fullness of reality, which in the abundance of the co-presence of data appears to us as mystery, first phenomenalizes through metaphor (or analogy) into discourse and is thus initially embodied. Murray writes:
...the individuals in [a] culture.. go on uninterruptedly employing language that resonates with connotations and implications that far transcend the pure denoticity of their discourse. They are capturing far more in their words than their sheer denotations, far more than their connotations, far more than their univocal meanings, far more than the retentions that hearken to the past or the protensions that hint towards the future. Thus they go beyond... simple wording and enter into the subtleties, the insinuations, the mysterious, invisible, imaginative possibilities inherent in their attempts to deal adequately with the interrelatedness of the real. Pure words are not enough. Leaps beyond are necessary, for life is so demanding on all sides in every person's struggles. ...The realities of life are all intermeshed-- a truth that the seeming autonomy of words might lead one to neglect or at least misread. New and more comprehensive formulations are constantly necessary for us to stay atop the intricacies of life demands. ...the person cannot settle for staid, staticized, stenotypic language. Nor does he. He moves beyond it; that is to say, he will of necessity metaphoricize it with a new synthesis, minor though it be, an integration that enables him to make larger sense of more of his life.
Metaphors for a person's life are not mere aesthetic indulgences. ...when a person in life, like the client in therapy, is able to metaphorize his situation genuinely and imaginatively, or remetaphorize it anew, it does in fact open up an understanding, a semantic expansion...
...it is the imaginative genius of metaphorical thinking that enables a thinker to perceive in differences an element of sameness that allows a deeper appreciation of the unity of beings and the Oneness of Being, fostering greater intelligibility on all sides and unbelievable fecundity in the presumably barren.
...our metaphorizations take root in our life, and the powerful effect of one's life permeates his or her metaphorical creations... We metaphorize as we live. Conversely, we live as we metaphorize. This is another way of saying that our life shows the powerful influence of our imaginative living
The literal dimensions in metaphors bring a person into close contact with the realities of the everyday world. And the imaginative thinking of the person plays a central role in the creation of new metaphors and the co-constitution of new realities.
Turning as we do to the metaphor in an effort to effect and to communicate experiences is as natural to us as our breathing. And turning as we do to the metaphor in an effort to understand our experience is likewise natural. But turning to the metaphor in an effort to open up, to allow, to experience in anticipation by unique unifications and integrations-- this is our genius.
It must be kept in mind that the relation between clinician and client is lingual. The client's discourse communicates his or her spirituality. In addition, and more importantly for this project, is Ricoeur's continued discussion of the issues that leads him to see a similarity between the hermeneutics of discourse and a scientific approach to meaningful human action itself. Thus he writes that "Meaningful action is an object for science only under the condition of a kind of objectification which is equivalent to the fixation of a discourse by writing." Meaningful human action is like text in that it has not just a situated event, such as during speech, but a world (possibility of fields) in that others, not present to the situated event, may know of the meaningful action. As a world, or possibility of fields, it presents the one who knows of the meaningful action with possibilities for formation-- apprehensions of possible form directives that may then be appreciated and embodied. As a text transcends the psychological and sociological conditions of its production-- it escapes the author's intention-- so too does meaningful human action, that is, human formation as spiritual, transcend the intention of the individual actor to become a "document" within form traditions. These traditions, such as the Christian, Muslim, or that of AA, then offer possibilities of formation to the human.
As we read a text and generate various interpretive understandings of the text, so too we generate interpretive understandings out of traditions as they recount actual human formation experience-- the "hows" and the "whats" of practical formation. In that all interpretive possibilities must eventually refer to mystery we are talking about a spiritual activity. The clinician will assist the client to appropriate faith and form traditions NOT as a simple acquiescence to "others' imaginings" but as a source of formative possibility. This is done by seeing the accounts of human action (history and tradition) as hermeneutically "open".
That means that, like a text, human action is an open work, the meaning of which is 'in suspense'. It is because it 'opens up' new references and receives fresh relevance from them, that human deeds are also waiting for fresh interpretations which decide their meaning. All significant events and deeds are, in this way, opened to this kind of practical interpretation through present praxis.
It should be clear to the reader that spirituality, in its awareness of and response to the mystery, and the centrality of discourse-traditions to this awareness and response, presents us with an image of a homo hermeneuticus or a homo spiritus, the human understood as being the creature-that-interprets. In so far as the human gives form to, and can be a ground out of which new forms emerge, it is a creative form. Mystery qua mystery, as an "overabundance of" the possibility of meaning, or the complete and infinite fullness of the empirical, of discourse, of phenomena, provides the hermeneutic "space" needed for the reinterpretation of phenomena by means of metaphor and thus the alteration of discourse and of that which is empirical. This reinterpretation is called "transcendence". The human spirit shows forth as the essence and possibility of the hermeneutic quality and nature of the human form.
In that all this is similar to any artistic creation we can say that deliberate human formation-- one actively gaining and using skills of spirituality-- is a treating of the human form as an objet d'art the production of which is an on-going activity. To utilize a metaphor; the mystery is the "canvas", the space wherein we create ourselves by means of the "paints" of physical, social and subjective phenomena as grounded in mystery. The "studio" in which we engage in this activity is the faith and form tradition(s) to which we are present.
DISPOSITIONS
The clinically relevant dynamic structure of these types of hermeneutical changes is labeled by van Kaam "formative dispositions". It is in the dynamics of formative dispositions that spirituality displays its efficacy-- its actual effect on behaviors. Van Kaam devotes two volumes of his series to explicating his understanding of dispositions as well as dispositions he considers necessary for healthy human spirituality. It would appear that by this construct he means to indicate general propensities underlying a variety of behaviors. A more common way to think about this might be talk of "character traits".
What creates continuity in life is not particular acts as such. The secret of life's cohesion seems to reside in a flexible constellation of lasting dispositions that form the foundation of these acts.
...to choose a new way of life means to choose a new set of dispositions.
We always give form to life by means of dispositions.
While van Kaam accepts the findings of operant conditioning, he is neither a behaviorist nor a psychoanalyst when it comes to human formation. The reformation of dispositions is not the same, nor similar to, the reformation of behavioral habits, though dispositional change would show as behavioral. Van Kaam specifically distinguishes his sense of dispositions from the idea of habits-- which is the word commonly associated with inordinate mood-altering behaviors (i.e. "drug habit"). For van Kaam, the word "habit" possesses connotations that are mechanistic and divorced from the hermeneutic flexibility of the human spirit.
Because of the functional bent of our society, the word habit has acquired static connotations. Hence, formation science prefers the term form disposition. Form disposition connotes both the humanly directive and the incarnational-learning aspects of this propensity to specific action. These two elements complement one another and constitute together a form disposition.
A formative disposition connotes pliability, that is, the absence of rigidity or fixation.
I would add to van Kaam's distancing from the idea of habits by pointing out the denotation that habit is possessed of a behavioral specificity such that it detaches the one behavior from the rest of the individual's behavioral repertoire. To approach the human quest for consonance in terms of specific, albeit habitual, behaviors could be seen as a symptom of autarchy. Dispositions effect the entire field, and thus underlie all behaviors-- including habitual ones such as inordinate mood-altering.
For van Kaam the key to the reformation of dispositions, and thus behavioral change, lies in the faith response to the mystery-as-benevolent which results in the appreciative abandonment to the mystery. An appreciative abandonment to the possibility of meaning leads to the specifically transcendent disposition of awe. "The disposition of awe is primordial, meaning that it should be first in our hierarchy of dispositions..." "The disposition of awe is a mysterious force in the core of our being; it is a principle of consonance and unity... It is the secret source of our consonance..." "Consonant acts and dispositions are ultimately rooted in awe." The object of the disposition to awe is the mystery of formation-- which is precisely the object of human spirituality.
Van Kaam identifies other dispositions that he proposes as foundational, that is, transcultural. This seems to me, however, to be a dangerous game without extensive validity testing across faith and form traditions and so I shall not delve into these statements in this project. We shall see though, that central to the possibility of formation by means of the Twelve Steps is the disposition of "open-mindedness". And with this brief sketch of a deeper theoretical direction we are now prepared to view AA and the Twelve Steps as taught by Bill Wilson.
THE BEGINNINGS OF AA
Alcoholics Anonymous, and thus the Twelve Steps, originated out of the experiences of Bill Wilson and other early members of AA. This is a key point-- that the Twelve Steps developed out of experience. They did not originate out of speculative thought or out of some attempt to devise a treatment for alcoholics, but out of actual lived formation experience. In his writing, Wilson continuously points to AA members' lived experience as justification for his statements concerning recovery from active alcoholic drinking.
As a celebrated American statesman put it, "Let's look at the record." Here are thousands of men and women, worldly indeed. They flatly declare that since they have come to believe in a Power greater than themselves, to take a certain attitude toward that Power, and do certain simple things, there has been a revolutionary change in their way of living and thinking.
AA thus echoes the phenomenology that has been a recurrent theme throughout this project. The Twelve Steps originated out of the experiences of late-stage alcoholics finding and, what was new, maintaining sobriety.
Bill Wilson was a successful stockbroker whose life was destroyed by his alcohol dependency. He was unable to hold down a job, was in and out of hospitals, and was unable to maintain sobriety for more than a few months. He often told what came to be known as "the bedtime story" of how he finally got sober. It is the story of a non-ordinary experience that Bill, in his humorous way, described as a "hot flash". It marks the beginning of his permanent sobriety.
Following this rather dramatic experience Bill began to attend meetings of the Oxford group, an evangelical movement very popular at the time. This seemed to provide him with the guidance he needed and the means to interpret his experience. (As did William James' Varieties of Religious Experience and the work of Carl Jung, both of which found their way into "The Big Book".) It was the principles of this movement as well as his "bedtime story" that he first brought to drunks. His efforts were largely unsuccessful. This lack of success could well be partly because of the hermeneutic limitations of discourse as speech.
AA proper was born one day when Bill was in Akron, Ohio attempting to rebuild his shattered career. He really wanted a drink. It struck him that if he could talk to another alcoholic he would avoid taking a drink. He met the second founder of AA, Dr. Bob Smith, who was soon sober. Together, Bill and Dr. Bob began the work of approaching other alcoholics and sharing how they were able to maintain sobriety through spiritual principles. Slowly, the small group of sober alcoholics grew.
For a while, these people continued to follow the principles of the Oxford groups. Trouble developed on two fronts. Non-alcoholic Groupers began to resent the separate meetings for the alcoholics and Bill himself began to realize that certain principles and structures of the Oxford Groups were inadequate when applied to alcoholics. The form directives supplied by the Oxford Groups were not foundational.
In 1937-38 it was decided to write a book in order to broadcast more effectively the possibility of recovery for alcoholics: the speech would now be incripted as text. It could thus transcend the psycho-social situatedness, the context, of the actual AA members and open up formative possibilities for anyone who read it. Bill Wilson wrote what was to become "The Big Book", but the process was one of copious amounts of input and discussion from and among the other members of AA-- some of it quite heated. Originally, Bill came up with six steps. These were derived from Oxford Group principles (though they did not have a similar program of "steps"). Out of concern that active alcoholics would not be able to comprehend such large chunks of information they were broken down into twelve. After a few refinements the final form of the Twelve Steps was obtained. The "principles and attitudes" contained in the Twelve Steps are attributed largely to Dr. Samuel Shoemaker.
1. We admitted we were powerless over (alcohol)-- that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves 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.
What are the results promised by the working of the Twelve Steps? Well, it is much, much more than the mere ability of a chronic alcoholic to abstain from drink, amazing as that alone may be. Indeed, the sobriety AA seeks to provide the alcoholic by means of the Twelve Steps is not mere abstinence from alcohol at all. AA devised the term "dry drunk". This is someone who wasn't using alcohol, but still had the behaviors and moods of the active alcoholic. Though the alcohol is not being ingested physically, the individual's social, subjective and spiritual formation is still as if he or she was drinking.
Pre-AA, we alkies could sometimes achieve that dubious state called "sobriety, period." How bleak and empty this alleged virtue is, only God or a dried-up drunk can fully testify. The reason? Of course every AA knows it: nothing has taken the place of the victim's grog; he's still a man of conflict and disunity. Come then the Twelve Steps of recovery, bringing to him a personality change.
If you'll notice, alcohol is only mentioned twice in the Twelve Steps, and nowhere do they suggest that the alcoholic actually stop drinking. "We feel that elimination of our drinking is but a beginning." "Our liquor was but a symptom. So we had to get down to causes and conditions." "Bottles were only a symbol." "...sobriety [meaning here "dry"] is only a bare beginning..."
BILL'S "HOT FLASH": A TRANSHUMAN EPIPHANY?
In his helplessness and desperation, Bill cried out, "I'll do anything, anything at all!" He had reached a point of total, utter deflation-- a state of complete, absolute surrender. With neither faith nor hope, he cried, "If there be a God, let Him show Himself!"
What happened next was electric. "Suddenly, my room blazed with an indescribably white light. I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. Every joy I had known was pale by comparison. The light, the ecstasy-- I was conscious of nothing else for a time.
"Then, seen in the mind's eye, there was a mountain. I stood upon its summit, where a great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. In great, clean strength, it blew right through me. Then came the blazing thought 'You are a free man.' I know not at all how long I remained in this state, but finally the light and the ecstasy subsided. I again saw the wall of my room. As I became more quiet, a great peace stole over me, and this was accompanied by a sensation difficult to describe. I became acutely conscious of a Presence which seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the shores of a new world. 'This,' I thought, 'must be the great reality. The God of the preachers.'"
What is one to make of this story? As we saw in the first chapter many theorists simply ignore it in spite of its place of importance in AA lore. There are distinct similarities between Bill's extraordinary experience and Muhammad's, but they are not at all the same. Muhammad's was terrifying, Bill's was not. Muhammad brought a specific textual discourse-- the first verses of the Qur'an. Bill did not. In my opinion both of these accounts can be seen as a transhuman epiphany, but Bill's was essentially subjective and individual in its formative impact while Muhammad's had a greater degree of specifically social form directedness. Muhammad's experience produced both speech and text. Bill's only speech. As we saw, speech remains bound to psycho-social situatedness, text transcends this and presents to the reader a world-- possible formation fields.
And yet, a faithful working of the Steps promises, not the same "hot flash" experienced by Bill, but the same results. One can hear the echoes of William James as Wilson discusses his "hot flash" which functions as a paradigmatic experience for the AA member:
But as I now look back upon this tremendous event, I can only feel very specially grateful. It now seems clear that the only special feature of my experience was its electric suddenness and the overwhelming and immediate conviction that it carried to me.
In all other respects, however, I am sure that my own experience was not in the least different from that received by every AA member who has strenuously practiced our recovery program. ...if their transformation in AA extending over six months had been condensed into six minutes-- well, they then might have seen the stars, too!
In consequence of these observations I fail to see any great difference between the sudden experiences and the more gradual ones-- they are certainly all of the same piece. And there is one sure test of them all: "By their fruits, ye shall know them."
Through its inscription as text, the Twelve Steps become something similar to the Qur'an. Both provide a hermeneutic of the mystery and directives to formation based upon that hermeneutic. The Twelve Steps though, do not claim to be revelation. Not only are they not from God, they are only suggestions to the alcoholic from those who have already "worked the Steps". "Nobody invented Alcoholics Anonymous. It grew. Trial and error has produced a rich experience. Little by little we have been adopting the lessons of that experience..." And yet, they contain an implicit reference to Wilson's unique experience and could be said to originate from that experience and point back to it as the exemplar of the type of human form that will emerge from the embodiment of the Steps as directive.
There is a significant difference between contemporary Muslim and AA practice that suggests to me directions for further inquiry. AA maintains both forms of discourse: speech and text. Members refer to Wilson's writings, especially "The Big Book", but also attend meetings where they hear "drunkalogues"-- members' stories of their alcoholic downfall and recovery-- as well as discussion and comment on day-to-day experiences. AA is a fellowship, a community. The Twelve Steps are always embodied socially; what is called the "we" of the program. Note that the First Step does not require that I make an admission, but we make an admission of powerlessness together. Through speech, members share their "experience, strength and hope" and are exposed to extra-textual sayings such as "let go and let God", "keep it simple, stupid", "this too will pass", "easy does it", etc. Contemporary Muslim practice, especially in light of what I have identified as Muslim autarchy, is textually based, referring to the Qur'an, the hadith literature and classical scholars (the time ijtihad became suspect).
Wilson identifies the Twelve Steps as spiritual principles. They are thus (and by virtue of our definition of spiritual) text in that they are both written and are a text-like inscription of meaningful human action. They are decontextualized and hermeneutically open within their linguistic restraints. They communicate matters pertaining to but one pole of the field: the spiritual.
When such general formative principles are communicated primarily by means of text the hermeneutic openness, and the (necessary-for-discourse) intellectual autarchism, can result in a failure to actually direct formation according to those principles. AA's emphasis on meetings maintains the communication of these principles by means of speech thereby re-contextualizing them within each member's psycho-social milieu, or formation field. This is one means by which AA maintains its connection with phenomena and, as we shall see below, expresses an incipient field-like approach. Thus, there is less of a danger of an autarchism that would separate mystery from the phenomena by which it appears which could occur when focusing on spiritual principles. Wilson recognizes that "Going it alone in spiritual matters is dangerous" and thus encourages speech as a protection against delusion. Notice the field-like articulation of Wilson here:
Often, I sense the deep meaning of the phenomenon of Alcoholics Anonymous, but I cannot begin to fathom it. ...It occurs to me that [it] can be related to a single crucial word. The word is communication. There has been a lifesaving communication among ourselves, with the world around us and with God.
From the beginning, communication in AA has been no ordinary transmission of helpful ideas and attitudes. It has been unusual and sometimes unique.
Alcohol itself also functions as the minimal means to keep the AA member in reference to actual phenomena. The initial members of AA were chronic, late-stage alcoholics who were considered to be hopeless. For these individuals to continue drinking was to court ending up institutionalized, dead or insane. Though the Twelve Steps do not mention drinking itself, it is hammered home that the individual is faced with the choice of either following the Steps or dying.
If you are as seriously alcoholic as we were, we believe there is no middle-of-the-road solution. We were in a position where life was becoming impossible, and if we had passed into the region from which there is no return through human aid, we had but two alternatives: One was to go on to the bitter end, blotting out the consciousness of our intolerable situation as best we could; and the other, to accept spiritual help.
...after a while we had to face the fact that we must find a spiritual basis of life-- or else.
Nothing else works. Not controlled drinking, not self-knowledge;
neither a code of morals, nor a better philosophy will cure the
alcoholics' destructive drinking. Thus, the spirituality presented
by the Twelve Steps is a serious matter indeed and alcohol keeps
that seriousness, and the phenomenological basis of that seriousness,
in mind. "...we would go to any lengths for victory over
alcohol." These first AA members were addicts in the
physiological sense of the term we discussed at the beginning
of this chapter. This shall be significant when we consider the
use of the Twelve Steps outside of AA.
HERMENEUTIC OF, AND RESPONSE TO, THE MYSTERY
Obviously, the Twelve Steps present an interpretation of the mystery as personal and benevolent, that is, as God. As we saw in the Qur'an, Wilson too sees the mystery as having certain qualities and as engaging in certain activities, though with much less complexity than is offered by the Qur'an. The mystery is a "loving" God who can and will remove the alcoholic's self-destructive compulsion to drink alcohol as well as the mental obsession with alcohol. God will also repair other areas of dissonance. For example, God is the "best possible source of emotional stability". However, there is also the use of the phrases "Higher Power" and "Power greater than ourselves". These are much vaguer in terms of their hermeneutic import than "God" and yet also seem to refer to the mystery. In the Steps themselves "God" is used or referred to five times. "Power greater than ourselves" is used but once, in Step Two-- prior to the use of the more hermeneutically specific "God". It would seem that the function of "Power greater than ourselves" in relation to "God" is to provide a hermeneutic space for the atheist or agnostic such that he or she would then be enabled to move into a hermeneutic of the mystery as God. The hermeneutic indeterminacy of "Power greater than ourselves" bespeaks of mystery in and of itself, thus providing the hermeneutic "space" needed for a reinterpretation.
Wilson is quite certain that AA members will inevitably come to a belief in God, indeed that such a belief is a part of the ontology of the human "...for deep down in every man, woman, and child, is the fundamental idea of God. ...[it is] a part of our make-up..." And yet, he also recognizes that many are not amenable to what we might call "God-talk" due to a number of reasons. The question of the mystery actually being personal and benevolent is sometimes "neatly evaded or entirely ignored". Sometimes a reliance upon God is seen as "somewhat weak, even cowardly". For others there is a prejudice against organized religions due to the hypocrisy of some religious adherents. Wilson himself had had a "will to disbelieve".
...we often found ourselves handicapped by obstinacy, sensitiveness, and unreasoning prejudice. Many of us have been so touchy that even casual reference to spiritual things made us bristle with antagonism.
Wilson uses "Power greater than ourselves" as an interpretative bridge, so to speak, to not only break through prejudice against "God" as a hermeneutic of the mystery, but to break up whatever hermeneutic is operative in the alcoholic's life. Interestingly, just as the establishment of Formative Spirituality refers to both contemporary physics as well as the scientific assumptions underlying our hermeneutic of the physical, social and subjective, so too does Wilson as he attempts to induce a hermeneutical change in the reader to accept the "Power greater than ourselves" and then to accept "God". He discusses how we accept many unverifiable statements about reality simply because they are statements by physics or by science, but we then make unreasonable demands on verifiability when it comes to other types of statements about reality.
When, however, the perfectly logical assumption is suggested that underneath the material world and life as we see it, there is an All Powerful, Guiding, Creative Intelligence, right there our perverse streak comes to the surface...
Again, Wilson would point to AA members' experience as phenomenological evidence that validates his proposals concerning reality. He encourages the atheist and agnostic to "...strenuously try meditation, prayer, and guidance, just as an experiment." The results of such an experiment would be more serenity and tolerance, as well as less fear and anger, among other qualities.
The introduction of the importance of a "Power greater than ourselves" is in direct response to the admission of powerlessness called for in Step One. The potential AA member and adherent to the Twelve Steps is powerless in that none of his or her efforts have worked to alleviate the dissonance-that-is-alcoholism.
Our human resources, as marshaled by the will, were not sufficient; they failed utterly. Lack of power, that was our dilemma, We had to find a power by which we could live, and it had to be a Power greater than ourselves.
This acknowledgment of powerlessness and turning to a power outside of the self is the means by which AA addresses, and Wilson recognizes the problem of, autarchy. Wilson specifically utilizes the term "self-sufficiency" and seems to address the same topic under "self-reliance". Quoting a psychiatrist, Dr. Harry Tiebout, Wilson writes that "A religious, or spiritual experience, is the act of giving up reliance on one's own omnipotence." The proper response to life, the way to minimize dissonance and maximize consonance, the way to get sober, is not through the "self-will run riot" that marks the alcoholic. Rather, Wilson maintains, in words similar to what we have seen in van Kaam and in Islam: "We thought well before taking this step making sure we were ready; that we could at last abandon ourselves utterly to Him." This is Step Three.
The use of the phrase God as we understood him, "is perhaps the most important expression to be found in our whole AA vocabulary." It not only seeks to pry open a hermeneutical "space", but also seems to contain within it Wilson's understanding of the relation between religion and spirituality, or in our parlance, between faith and form traditions. The Twelve Steps provide what we might call a "minimal" faith and form tradition in that though they present an awareness and hermeneutic of the mystery, they do not produce a theological system, which is left up to the individual. Though they present directives to formation their formative concern has to do only with alcohol. The Twelve Steps do not so much spur movement along the "hermeneutic spiral" as they provide the foundational beginning for the interpretive venture.
...we had assumed we could not make use of spiritual principles unless we accepted many things on faith which seemed difficult to believe.
There is thus a "setting aside" of traditions, of how "our elders have imagined things for us" so that the individual may imagine the hermeneutic foundation of reality, that is the mystery, anew. Sort of a course in "Spirituality 101".
Wilson identifies necessary and sufficient conditions for spirituality. One of these conditions is that the individual simply have some conception of God, "however inadequate" that conception might be. The key to beginning the spirituality offered by the Twelve Steps is simple open-mindedness combined with a naked idea of God-- no matter how theologically unsophisticated that idea may be. "We find that no one need have difficulty with the spirituality of the program. Willingness, honesty and open mindedness are the essentials of recovery. But these are indispensable."
This is not to imply that Wilson rejects familiar faith and form traditions, rather he is saying they are not strictly necessary to commence spiritual growth or repair spiritual disorder. The individual moves from the simple idea of the possibility of a "Power greater than ourselves" to a greater interpretive specificity with "God as we understand him" to a fuller hermeneutic of just "God".
Those expressions [Higher Power, God as we understood him] as we so well know today, have proved lifesavers for many an alcoholic. They have enabled thousands of us to make a beginning where none could have been made..."
This is not a wholesale rejection of traditional systems of spirituality. It is a rejection merely to rebuild on a firmer, more reality-based foundation. It is quite possible to intellectually know and understand religio-spiritual matters-- to know a theology or one's own faith and form tradition-- but not embody the tradition as spiritual. For instance, people may mistake emotionalism for authentic religiosity. The Steps allow one to reappropriate what such a person may already know. Wilson himself stated that eventually even he "needed more" than the discourse provided by AA.
Though still rather gun-shy about clergymen and their theology I finally went back to them-- the place where AA came from. ...perhaps they might now be able to tell me more about growth in understanding, and in belief. ...The clergy, I reflected, must represent the accumulated wisdom of the ages in matters moral and theological. So I began to make friends with them-- this time to listen, and not to argue.
So, the Twelve Steps represent the beginning, the possibility of spirituality, that can be built on a mere open-mindedness to the idea. According to Wilson there is only one type of person for whom the Steps will not work. In words read at the beginning of every AA meeting this type is identified:
Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest.
One of the extra-textual phrases used by AA is that of "cash-register honesty". By this is meant, it seems to me, a distinction between a day-to-day form of honesty where, say, one would give the correct change in a transaction and would not tell obvious lies, and what might be termed existential authenticity and a deep knowledge of one's true motives, intentions and dynamics. For Wilson, "honesty" indicates a minimal use of common psychological defense mechanisms such as suppression or projection. It is a state of true humility in the sense of "knowing who you are". The type of person identified in the passage above, for whom the Twelve Steps will not work, would seem to be a sociopath.
AN INCIPIENT FIELD APPROACH AND CONCEPTUALIZATION
If we were to place each of the Steps under the aegis of one pole of the field we might end up with something like this:
FIG. 4.1
The other point to notice is that none of the Steps is physical, except perhaps for the "making a list" of Step Eight. However, we have already discussed how alcohol itself can function as a phenomenological grounding for the AA member. It also functions as the physical grounding for a working of the Steps. For AA members, discourse about alcohol itself, in its clear behavioral specificity, largely remains as speech and so is contextualized to the individual psycho-social milieu, even as it remains a text-like (transcending context) reference point for the proper working of the Steps. Note also, that in spite of clearly identifying itself as a spiritual program, few of the Steps actually deal with spirituality. The Twelve Steps, the aim of which is to effect one's awareness of and response to the mystery, are firm in their phenomenological grounding of spirituality. Though Step Three names "God", the key to the Step is in making a decision. Step One requires only an admission that something is the case. Steps Six and Seven require that one be "ready" and that one "ask". They really don't talk about God, in a theological sense, at all. They say nothing at all about what God wants, commands, requires, etc. They are preliminary to even knowing such things. Rather, they say what God will do. (i.e. He can and will remove defects.) It is Step Eleven that finally talks about God's will and the "conscious contact" that would seem to be a phenomenological necessity in order to validate AA members' claims concerning the truth of their hermeneutic of mystery. The Steps don't even address the behavioral problem! Rather, the behaviors they require are to make lists, apologize to people, admit things, etc. Not to "stop drinking". (However, there is an assumption of a desire to stop drinking before one even begins the Steps.)
It is my opinion that the "confusion of placement" combined with the phenomenological grounding of spirituality, indicates that the Twelve Steps contain within their structure the seeds for, and could make good use of, a field-type approach to and conceptualization of the human form. From the very beginning Wilson acknowledged a debt not only to religion, but to medicine as well. Usually in an adversarial relation, these two arenas of human formation, physical and spiritual, sit calmly side by side throughout his writing. The Big Book itself opens with "The Doctor's Opinion" and closes with "The Medical View on A.A." and with "The Religious View on A.A." In between are chapters directed towards spouses, employers and families. His reference to emotional and psychological concerns, that is, the subjective, is as constant as his reference to social and spiritual concerns as they relate to the alcoholic. At times he even chastises those who would reject out of hand any explanation for, or knowledge about alcoholism other than the spiritual. And of course, he always returns to the physical grounding of alcohol.
As we said that a field model is a useful corrective to contemporary Islam as well as those in a Cartesian milieu, so too such a model could be of great use to those who would work the Twelve Steps.
THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE TWELVE STEPS AS FORMATIVE
The potential AA member, must, of necessity, re-image, that is, reinterpret, alcohol itself such that one's own interpretations of the alcohol problem (other's imaginings about alcoholism) are "cast out... in favor of those suggested by A.A." This begins the process of recovery. One could perhaps form an analogy between an individual beginning to work the Steps, which will focus on the spiritual pole, and another just learning to apply a new diet and exercise program, focusing on the physical. There is an acquisition of new hermeneutical schemes, new appreciatively apprehended directives to formation, but there also needs to be embodiment-- the move to shape phenomena, the field, according to the directives derived from, or related to the foundational hermeneutical scheme.
The Steps allow one to re-imagine the field anew, and it should be clear by now that this is what spirituality does for the person: allows the re-interpretation of one's experience of reality which is always built upon a foundational hermeneutic of the mystery. To reinterpret on such a basic level as the mystery is also to engage in a re-formation of the field as phenomenal, at least to some degree. So, Wilson writes that "when the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically". The Twelve Steps are not just theoretical-- a way of understanding phenomena-- but are formative in that they require active, deliberate acts of formation. Chapter Six of The Big Book is called "Into Action". Step Four is described as the "first tangible evidence" of one's honest willingness to give and receive form according to spiritual principles. Actual formation provides a consistent reference to phenomena and keeps us from "floating off into space" or, quite literally, living in a fantasy world. (AA members could "...recall, a little ruefully, how much store we used to set by imagination as it tried to create reality out of bottles," i.e., rather than out of actual phenomena.)
Healthy spirituality aims towards consonance. The Twelve Steps act in a manner such that already-present dissonance is identified as phenomena and rooted out or cleaned up. That is, there is in addition to the hermeneutical angle of spirituality we have been discussing, a clearly behavioral approach to actively and deliberately work to make the parts of experience (the poles of the field) "fit together". Wilson likens this already-present dissonance to a "hangover which we all experience whether we are drinking or not. That is the emotional hangover, the direct result of yesterday's and sometimes today's excesses of negative emotion-- anger, fear, jealousy, and the like."
In keeping with the call for "rigorous honesty" Wilson broaches no excuses for not working the Steps completely, thoroughly and literally. Reflect upon Steps Five and Nine. Imagine, if you will, actually telling another person the "exact nature" of all your wrongs, with no excuses, no rationalizations, no efforts to blame others, and holding nothing back. For most of us, this would not be a very pleasant activity. "But scarcely any Step is more necessary to longtime sobriety and peace of mind than this one." (Notice the result, "peace of mind".) The Steps actively work, in a functional manner, to diminish dissonance both within our own subjective experience, and in our social relations-- even ones in the past-- and such actions are considered to be the bare beginnings of a life based upon spiritual principles and are indispensable to it. The results of actually working the Steps would seem to be desirable to most people. For instance:
[Concerning Step Four] Once we have a complete willingness to take inventory, and exert ourselves to do the job thoroughly, a wonderful light falls... a brand-new kind of confidence is born, and the sense of relief at finally facing ourselves is indescribable.
[Having completed Step Five] Provided you hold back nothing, your sense of relief will mount from minute to minute. The dammed-up emotions of years break out of their confinement, and miraculously vanish as soon as they are exposed.
[Concerning fear of Step Eight] ...we can fortify and cheer ourselves by remembering what A.A. experience in this Step has meant to others. It is the beginning of the end of isolation from our fellows and from God.
TOWARDS A SPIRITUALITY OF MOOD
Even though early AA was made up of actual alcohol addicts (in the physiological sense of the term), they were obviously not always active alcoholics. Early on, they drank to alter mood, to give form to subjective experience. And it is in this that we begin to make some moves. We begin to move our understanding of the Twelve Steps out of Alcoholics Anonymous to a broader audience. We begin to move from the idea of "addict" back to the less severe "mood-altering". (Or we could say that we move from the strict towards the broad understanding of "addiction".) We also begin to move our understanding of the alleged efficacy of the Twelve Steps back towards the possibility of their use for the prevention of addictions, rather than as being only for recovery from addictions.
One need not be an alcohol addict, or any kind of addict, to express the following sentiments along with those first AA members who: "were prey to misery and depression; had a feeling of uselessness; were full of fear; were unhappy"; who were "tortured by loneliness"; who experience fear in just about every area of their lives. Like many of us, they responded with what at the beginning was simple mood-altering behavior.
We have drunk to drown feelings of fear, frustration, and depression. We have drunk to escape the guilt of passions, and then have drunk again to make more passions possible. We have drunk for vainglory-- that we might the more enjoy foolish dreams of pomp and power.
Until now, our lives have been largely devoted to running from pain and problems. ...We never wanted to deal with the fact of suffering. Escape via the bottle was always our solution.
Even then, upon getting "dry" (as distinguished from the total field changes marking "sobriety") negative moods were even more acute because the alcoholic "cannot use alcohol to kill the pain". In light of this we can now understand the quotes concerning drinking as symbol or symptom. The drinking is a symptom of this pain. The challenge is then to get at the "causes and conditions" of the pain. With this we move out of the contextual specificity of alcoholism and into the generally human. That is, alcoholic drinking is not necessarily the only possible symptom of this pain. According to Wilson, the cause of this pain is a misperception shared with many non-alcoholics that the purpose of life is material satisfaction. No, says Wilson, character-building and spiritual values are the purpose of life. This is proven by the fact of the "profound change" shown by late-stage alcoholics when they have commenced living on a spiritual basis. They display "a new state of consciousness and being" which is the phenomenological evidence for the truth of such a statement concerning so weighty a topic as the purpose of human life.
This foundational materialist misinterpretation (and implied denial of the primacy of spirituality) is discussed by Wilson in terms of a dependence upon "power, fame, and applause" for our consonance which are instinctually desirable. However, the reliance upon them for consonance is doomed to failure. These instincts, when taken to extremes, such as making them the foundational purpose of life, result in the development of character defects that Wilson equates with the traditional Christian rendering of the Seven Deadly Sins. These defects are activated by our "self-centered fear" that we won't get these needs satisfied when we want, as much as we want, and how we want. These character traits are defective in that they are attempts to control phenomena without reference to or recognition of the limits of one's actual form potency. It is in this attempt that we discover the whole "control-powerlessness" dichotomy at the heart of the Steps. Such an attempt at control is like flapping one's arms in order to fly-- one's ability to give and receive form simply comes up against limits imposed by certain phenomena such as gravity. The clinician would assess to what degree the client's sense of potency to give and receive form is effected by the underlying hermeneutic.
Within such a materialist hermeneutic the individual is always in a state of self-centered fear which is always activating the character defects underlying specific formative events of reception and donation. The individual is thus in a state of profound dissonance. Phenomena don't fit in together because of the essential misinterpretation of the nature of phenomena. This includes the self as phenomenon which now has defects in character, which in a vicious circle, now only adds to the dissonance. Eventually, this opens the possibility that there is simply no hope for consonance from phenomena-- it just isn't possible. Here then we arrive at an essential hermeneutic of the universe as hostile to the quest for consonance. The opposite of what we have described as healthy spirituality. This disorder can only be repaired by a re-imagining of the mystery as benevolent which includes an understanding that there is an intimate connection between the mystery qua mystery and our search for consonance. Consonance lies in the mystery, not phenomena, but mystery is always by means of phenomena. As Wilson indicated, it is only in a primal faith in the benevolence of mystery that allows for a world that "makes sense" and is not a "hostile, cruel cosmos."
INORDINATE MOOD-ALTERING BEHAVIOR
The alcoholic seeks to control persons, places and things in a misplaced attempt at consonant formation which seeks to extend human form potency beyond the range of its field of formation. Such an attempt is based upon an essentially idealist error. There is an implication, in the alcoholic's desire for control, of the denial of the reality of phenomena as having an independent existence. But they do, so he or she is thus "not in touch with reality" and so does not "fit in" with the fact that phenomena have existence outside of the self and cannot be totally controlled by the self. This dissonance is then subjectively experienced as non-existent while drinking, which then feeds the illusion of an idealist control of reality.
It is often heard in various Twelve Step meetings that "we are powerless over people, places, and things", not just alcohol, which is used in AA an archetype or paradigm for the relation between the human-as-spiritual and the human-as-phenomenal. The alcoholic in recovery learns to simply accept "that which cannot be changed", to accept that which is beyond the potency of the human form in general, and the individual in particular. This acceptance is learned by means of his or her experience of powerlessness over alcohol. "As I learned acceptance my pain subsided." wrote Wilson.
This acceptance, which is so similar to van Kaam's "abandonment" and Islam's "submission", itself produces moods such as serenity. As the alcoholic begins to "practice these principles in all our affairs" he or she is enabled to face crises and life's ups and downs, the reality of phenomena, with "courage and serenity". If you remember, we discussed the "Muslim mood" of taqwa. Both AA and Islam would seem to indicate that with spiritual health there is no longer any need to alter mood. In light of this I am forced to conclude something that was not a part of my original hypothesis. That is, not only is inordinate mood-altering behavior symptomatic of spiritual disorder, but the very need or desire to engage in mood-altering may itself be symptomatic of spiritual disorder. Perfect spiritual health is evidenced by its own mood and type or style of subjective experience that holds true across all encounters with phenomena.
People may "find themselves" already present to a false hermeneutic of mystery-- one that is not grounded in phenomena-- an imaginative fantasy, a spiritual disorder, such as the materialism discussed above. This necessarily leads to sensations of dissonance and loss of form potency. The use of mood-altering behavior not only leads to a subjective experience of fancied consonance, but also supports a fantasy of creative form potency. Mood-altering thus interacts at such an intimate, primal and foundational level that it becomes the purpose in life. As a phenomenon in its own right it is interpreted as "that which gives feelings of consonance". It functions in a way similar to actual transcendence in that it provides an experience of having a deep and field-based experience of interpretative change from dissonance to consonance. It is thus a pseudo-spirituality.
Because the subjective experience is one of consonance, the actual dissonant, negative formative effects of the individual's mood-altering are not likely to be interpreted as such. A decline in physical, social, spiritual and subjective health due to the mood-altering behavior is covered over by the imagined consonance provided by the mood altering behavior itself. Thus, the mood-altering behavior can be inordinate-- having negative consequences in the various poles of the field-- and can lead to an "addiction" in the broad sense of the term as well as the strict sense of the term, depending on what is used to alter the mood.
At its root, the mood-altering behavior is symptomatic of a spiritual disorder. It phenomenalizes a deficiency in awareness of the mystery, and/or an unhealthy response to mystery.
THE TWELVE STEPS BEYOND AA.
Wilson was quite clear that non-alcoholics should not be allowed in AA. "There is no possible way to make nonalcoholics into AA members." There were two main reasons for this. One was the danger of diverting AA away from its primary purpose. "Freedom from alcohol... is the sole purpose of an AA group." As we saw, alcohol is the phenomenological ground of AA. To dilute that ground would be to dilute AA's effectiveness. But the Twelve Steps did expand out, first to the spouses of alcoholics, and soon to other cultures. And as we know, today there are many, many groups all claiming to utilize the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
The other reason, more significant for us, is Wilson's sense that there must be a "bottom", a point of absolute dejection and hopelessness for the individual to be so desperate that he or she would actually work the Steps fully and completely-- as if his or her life depended on it, as it did for those first AA members. He wrote that "few people will sincerely try to practice the A.A. program unless they have hit bottom. And while this was later tempered by the idea of a "high bottom" I think the issue is significant for anyone who desires to work the Steps. The Steps are simple, and yet so difficult. Most people would "balk" and hope they could find an "easier, softer way".
It was soon realized that AA and the Twelve Steps discussed issues shared by many, if not most people. The fact that it would grow beyond itself was recognized early on. Wilson himself saw the analogy between individual alcoholic behavior, and non-alcoholics, and even between alcoholics and all of society as well. He compared "modern society" to a dry drunk, that is, an individual with all the alcoholics' character defects, but without the drinking-- an alcoholic field configuration. He saw the possibilities for all people contained in this new form that emerged from his life: "It may be" he wrote, "that Alcoholics Anonymous is a new form of human society."