Spirituality

Since even before I got sick I felt like I was suffering from a poor connection with HP.  Looking back, it appears that I’ve been running on self will for some time, but I’ve been sober so something must be going OK.  I think.  Anyway, illness has left “that which is lacking” in in even worse shape than it was before, leading me to feel like God is unconscious; that God NEEDS us in order to have conscious experience.  Making God unconscious is easier to accept than the idea that I’m “right where I need to be.”  And if I’m right where I need to be does that include questioning the spiritual stuff from scratch?

I talked to a couple of other people about it, people who had profound spiritual awakening and then lost it, and they’ve told me things like “you can’t be enlightened all the time” or “I got my connection back, but it was never the same again.  It never had the same kind of power.”  That frightens me.  I want so much to have that great fire kind of experience return and I fear that it won’t.  I feel disconnected.  I feel apart from God.

When I got to the program I was agnostic.  Today I feel atheistic, and I don’t like it.  Wishing for the end is easy when there isn’t a greater purpose.  I’m not at that place, emotionally, the place of “wishing for the end”, but I can still see it from where I am, and I don’t like that either.

I haven’t been able to persuade myself to pray to a God I don’t know if I believe in, and I still don’t have enough of an attention span to meditate (or write) effectively.  Perhaps the “effectively” part doesn’t matter so much as making the effort matters.  I should be open-minded enough to try, but I don’t, or haven’t yet.

Is this just part and parcel of being ill or did I break something that I’ll never get back?

I find it hard to adequately describe what 12 step recovery means to me.  My vocabulary lacks words for the sense of belonging that I feel inside the steps, inside the fellowship, in communion with my Creator, and in the company of others who have traveled a similar path.  By tradition, we who adhere to the 12 step path place “our common welfare” ahead of our own, understanding that our own recovery is dependent on preserving and continuing the practices and the movement by which we recovered.

I recently learned that there is all kinds of empirical data on the kind of phenomena that occurs in groups like AA – groups with “high context” relationships – which is fine.  I am an intellectual creature given to fascination with science.  I occasionally skim the current work of the Santa Fe Institute.  I love getting my hands on a copy of the MIT Technology Review. I have long had more head knowledge of the biology of addiction than most 2nd year medical students.  I had familiarity with research that illuminates why programs like AA and CMA work.  I even had some pretty sophisticated ideas about the origin of the universe and what G*d is to me – and none of that knowledge had any affect of my ability to get sober. Read the rest of this entry »