Guest Blogger and long-time Council friend, Bob W. presents Part 59 of a series dealing with Alcoholism and Addiction from a Mystical, Mythological Perspective, reflecting Bob’s scholarly work as a Ph.D. in mythological studies.
For those of us who have achieved a certain level of committed sobriety, i.e., multiple years of living and working actively in the Fellowships of AA and its sister programs, we begin to find ourselves moving into a realm of peace and serenity that seems other worldly. We still must face the normal struggles of life and we experience crises and trauma with friends and family that challenge our sense of presence, but there is a growing calm in all of it. We have learned that staying in the here and now of today, avoiding the tendency to obsess about outcomes, gives us an inner peace and a power to face the world with grace and resolution.
The journey to this state, for each of us, was as mythic as all the great stories of literature and history. At the depths of our bottoms, we may have felt like Edmund Dantes in the dungeons of Chateau d’If, in The Count of Monte Cristo…alone, cold and dissolute in the deep recesses of that dreaded island prison in the Bay of Marseilles. The feeling of hopelessness, doom and isolation was overwhelming. As in the story, fellows like Abbe Faria, a fellow prisoner for Dantes, may have given us a process to begin the journey of relief. Also like Dantes, the journey may have been long; our own “rocketing into the Fourth Dimension” may have progressed much less like a rocket than a speed akin to the Lexington Avenue Local.
The working of the Steps, the constant renewal of self-examination, a continual reinforcement of the focus on a Higher Power, and an untiring commitment to service elevate our personal psyches to an unusual extent. We begin to feel, slowly and purposefully, a deep need to focus on service, service to all things and to all people, service that is an unflinching, almost unconscious, process attending each and everyone one of our daily waking moments.
I have come to see this evolving state of consciousness to be an unusual spiritual presence, one that speaks to a new and enlightened way of being in the world, for all of us, individually and collectively. To have come from those terribly dark and hopeless places of our disease, to work along a journey of love and commitment, to and from our fellows in the programs, in our journey to sobriety, and then to arrive at a point where uncompromising and selfless service becomes the primary focus of our lives, is truly mythic…and maybe it is so deeply mythic that it begins to defy imagination.
Our alcoholism may have provided us with a “dark portal” to a life that will take generations for all of us to fully understand.
