Grand Illusion

There is a light at the end of the tunnel.
The light is not an illusion.
The tunnel is.
-unknown

I noticed this sign above the door of a meeting I occasionally go to and it just struck me. It seemed profound enough, but it wasn’t till I woke up this morning and read Sweet Pea’s post where she said, “secrets. they thrive in the darkest recesses of my mind and heart,” that I began to see the truth in the idea that the tunnel is an illusion.

I don’t know very many people, even the most spiritual or religious people, who come into the rooms of recovery, that have something resembling a useful and healthy relationship with a power greater than themselves that they understand to be infinite love. That was definitely true for me. I came in with a pretty traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of the Celestial Father, the one I hear some people call the ‘bearded, bean counting, lightning bolt throwing bastard in the sky’. Sure, He was loving and merciful to those who groveled for his forgiveness, but there were things he wouldn’t forgive and I was pretty sure it was me - radical faggot political activist drug addicted rebel that I am. In the difference I perceived between me and everything else I perceived darkness and isolation.

Though it was never said in so many words, I was under the impression that God didn’t like little boys who wanted to grow up to be Mahalia Jackson and to bury their face in Parker Stevenson’s arm pit, which is a shame, really. People like me especially need God. In a world where getting love and acceptance from the closest members of your family is problematic, God can mean the difference between life and death. As a youngster I didn’t understand that my church turning it’s back on me was not the same as God turning His back on me and I responded in kind. I turned my back on God and began to move farther into the illusion of separateness from All that Is.

I realize now that experiencing this separation is part of the human condition; that “our stories align at the core, if not in the sorry details.” The book talks about alcoholics and addicts being extreme examples of living according to this illusion. It talks about self-will run riot, of problems being of our own making and arising in our selves, of a spiritual malady that centers in our minds. It also suggests that people like me reaching out for help need to choose between God being everything or nothing; at a certain point we have to accept spiritual help if we are to recover.

Many forms of spiritual instruction and many forms of religion inform my journey, one of them recently being A Course in Miracles. I am attracted to the course largely because at it’s core it talks about what we talk about in AA and in similar, almost identical, terms. It talks about God being everything. It says that what blocks us from God is a barrier created out of our own mind. It says “a cloud does not put out the sun.”

The tunnel is an illusion.

The light is not.

The tunnel is made out of me. “Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it kill us!”

I found God in AA. I found God when I was finally “beaten into a state of reasonableness”; when I finally got still enough to listen. And that is where I continue to find Him; in the quiet space in between the demands of living a “productive” life in the material world. Demands on my time have increased and finding, or setting aside, enough time to get still has been challenging recently. I experience it as anxiety, frustration, sadness. I experience it as separation; as the tunnel. I wonder what people want from me and I wonder how my needs will be met. I forget that the real question is “what does God expect from me?”

As you already know, I am not particularly Christian. The God I have come to know through AA is described to me most perfectly in Hindu tradition as “the unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent reality which is the Divine Ground of all matter, energy, time, space, being, and everything beyond in this Universe.” But the symbolism of Easter is not lost on me. It really is the sacrifice of self that leads to eternal life, freedom from bondage, salvation and enlightenment.

Happy Easter, friends.