Internal Authority

     Alcoholics and drug addicts lack internal authority.

     That is, they have no authority or control over their emotions, their thoughts, and most unfortunately, their actions. Because we have no internal control, we allow other people, things or events to dictate how we feel. Even more sad, we allow other people or other institutions to make decisions for us and to take care of us.

     This is why we are such a disappointment, because others have to make decisions for us and take care of us financially, physically, emotionally, etc. Having no internal authority over ourselves, we succumb to external authority, and thus, we are slaves. Truly, we active and/or untreated addicts are a waste of precious natural resources, not to mention a waste of a precious life.

     So please do your parents and the already fleeced taxpayers a favor and take care of yourselves. Most of us are plenty talented enough to at least accomplish that. The secret is to become willing and to be a tad more unselfish. Get better and give back, as there is now no other option. We have officially given up the right to drink, use, hurt others, or in any way, shape or form do the wrong thing.

     And yes, I screw up all the time. The trick is not to do so intentionally, but either way, we must see our wrong and then go make it right. That’s why we write inventory – to identify our wrongs. That’s why we pray for willingness, for the power to then go and make them right. If we cannot or if we refuse to correct our wrongs, to become accountable and attempt to relieve those we hurt, we will never recover from anything. Doctors and counselors will tell you that you relapsed because you were triggered.

     Wrong!

     We relapse because we are doing the wrong thing, coupled with our refusal to grow up and act like an adult, to be a good person, and to do the right thing. Moral action and God alone can remove the mental obsession. Science cannot. It has never been able to. Goodness and spiritual fitness cannot be injected – they must be earned through hard work, right action, and Grace.

God, please teach me how to take better care of myself, that I may stop depending on others…

Get Over Ourselves

     Guess what?

     Even when we are sober, sane, honest and living right, life can get pretty dark, heavy, tough and challenging sometimes. But we walk thought it all, just like everybody else. That is how we get better, how we get stronger. It’s how we dissolve character flaws and how we build character.

     Addicts don’t get it. Our experience and pain is no more unique than anybody else’s. Going through tough times is called life on earth. This is key. We can accept that our life experience is both up and down, and push through it all. This is just what it means to be human. 
     We spend so much time while we’re using and even in recovery and especially in meetings talking about our feelings, thoughts, behavior, lives, relationships, what we’ve done, what we’re doing now, and on and on endlessly. Maybe we should consider veering away from the perpetual self-focus. Maybe we should try focusing on others, or even just living our lives without talking about it so much.

     Addicts LOVE to broadcast anything and everything about themselves, like a teenager – entirely clueless that nobody is looking at us, nobody else cares what we’re doing, what we’re saying or how we look. But since we’re not clueless teenagers with a case of developmental narcissism, perhaps we should get over ourselves?

Letting Go

     Letting go is when I no longer care what others think of me. I no longer need the approval of my family. I no longer need approval of who I am, who I’m with, what I believe, what I’m thinking, what I do for work, etc. And I no longer need to preach to others because I am okay with myself.

     When we need to prove or preach something to others, the sad and rather unattractive truth is that we don’t entirely believe it ourselves. But if we are okay, inside and out, we don’t need to prove anything to anyone. We don’t need approval, validation, credit or recognition. 
     The day I let go was the day I stopped caring what other people thought about my life and what I was doing. It was the day I stopped needing for my friends in recovery to see all the stuff I was doing to help others. I didn’t need to show off, or need a pat on the back, or need smoke to be blown up my ass. And this is true peace – when you no longer need something outside of yourself to be okay.

    Letting go is also forgiveness. That’s why the process of writing a thorough inventory can truly save an addict’s life. Clearly understanding our resentments has the power to fix an addict for good. If we can successfully dissolve our anger and resentment then we can forgive, and when we can forgive, we are free. There is no more need to hurt self or others. That is peace. Ridding ourselves of resentment is crucial to the process of restoring ourselves to sanity. And sanity, of course, means no more addiction. Sanity means life. Enjoy it.

     Finally, it is important to understand that letting go is a process. We don’t just read it in a supermarket self-help book and wala, we’ve let go and our life magically gets better. Letting go is the result of hard work. As we continue to take Steps year after year, we step back one day to realize that we have let go. We are completely okay with the way things are. We are okay with life. We are free inside. We have recovered.

God, help me become willing to take actions that help me to let go…

Origins of Addiction

     Addiction/alcoholism is simply a natural extension of a preexisting spiritual condition.

     Trust me, if we turn ourselves into addicts, there is something wrong with us spiritually. You don’t just become an addict because you broke your ankle and some doctor gave you vicodin and now you’re an addict even though you don’t have that type of personality and so it’s pretty much the doctor’s and the vicodin’s fault. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s our fault.

     We became addicts by selfishly avoiding discomfort. So us getting better must entail endless amounts of action, hard work and humility. We must demolish the belief that we can fix ourselves, that we can do anything because we are so amazing and so cool, so gifted and so genius. We must crush our arrogance and get underneath something. Sure we may be able to do all sorts of other things, but when it comes to drugs and alcohol, we are completely powerless. We have no control. So pretending like we can do what we clearly cannot is insane. When we’re ready to stop lying to ourselves, we need to get underneath God.

     Newsflash: Normal people feel all of the things we do (it’s called being human – we’re not special), but they are mature and courageous enough to face their feelings and do what’s right despite what they might be going through. This is also known as growing up. It’s what some refer to as becoming a responsible, accountable adult. Addicts should try it sometime. God knows America is in dire need of help as we spiral down the rabbit hole.

     P.S. Just to be clear, when I write these blogs, I’m simply talking to myself, so please don’t take offense if you’re another knucklehead addict out there reading this. I’m the demented shithead that I refer to when describing addicts. Writing these blogs reminds me of what got me better and what will continue to keep me better… and so they might resonate with other addicts or be somewhat useful for parents, spouses or friends of addicts who’d like some illumination on why we act like deranged idiots.

God, please help us to understand the nature of addiction, that we may better treat those who are afflicted and bring peace to those around us…

God Isn’t a Concept

     God is not a concept. God is/was before any of us.

     I think where we went wrong and where God became so loaded is when He became a concept of our selves – our separate, worldly selves… our false selves. In fact, the concept and belief that we are all separate is killing us. God is not an extension nor a creation of ours. God is not born of self but rather we are born of God. And I’m quite sure that all those who curse God wouldn’t be cursing Him if they died, for they would see that God is beyond human concept. Because those who curse God are not really cursing God but rather cursing someone else’s conception of God, which isn’t God at all.

     I don’t think we can even come close to conceptualizing or intellectualizing God. In fact, look at what happens when we pursue Him as an extension of self. When we define God from the artificiality of our limited, conscious minds, we do nothing but get further away from Him. We become clouded such that real contact isn’t even possible.

     The Power which is God is so beyond the reach of us and of our faculties that it’s a fruitless endeavor to try to define or symbolize Him. This is why we fight. Religious wars are not over God, but just over differing man-made conceptions of God, which have nothing to do with HIM.

     Holy wars are quite different, and that is between good and evil, both of which exist in our world. But as Thomas Merton says, “…instead of hating the people you think are warmakers, hate the appetites and the disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, not in another.” –Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation. 

     Man, I wish I could do that.

     But anyway, I’m quite sure that if we were to die, none of us would have the attitude or certainty we have while living in our individual selves, our separate bodies, our fabricated identity driven by ego. Perhaps we should just act, act right, act based on spiritual principles and leave conception and imagination to drug addicts and crazy people.

     From a previous post, Knowing God vs Having God: Truly there is a difference between knowing God and having God. To know God we simply have to believe, or read some doctrine, or perhaps drop by Sunday service and potluck. But to have God we have to perform. We have to take actions that bring God into us and expand His actual presence.

     And once again, from Merton: “Nothing could be more alien to contemplation than the cogito ergo sum of Descartes. “I think, therefore I am.” This is the declaration of an alienated being, in exile from his own spiritual depths, compelled to seek some comfort in a proof for his own existence(!) based on the observation that he ‘”thinks.” If his thought is necessary as a medium through which he arrives at the concept of his existence, then he is in fact only moving further away from his true being. He is reducing himself to experience, directly and immediately, the mystery of his own being. At the same time, by also reducing God to a concept, he makes it impossible for himself to have any intuition of the divine reality which is inexpressible.” Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation. 

God, please give me the wisdom, strength and courage to have You, not just to know You, that I may rest beyond concept in Your love and power…

If An Addict Says…

If an addict says…
Dad! Mom! I think I might get an honors award for my environmental studies. “Wow, that’s great son.” Actually, the professor wants to put me in this special research group but it’s $500 for supplies and I don’t have it, although I’d love to do it ’cause it’d be a really great opportunity, and like, good for the environment.

…it’s all bullshit.

If an addict says…
Hey Mom, I’ve been sober for 30 days! I’m workin’ again now and everything, but I just need something to get me back on my feet. I just some breathing room, you know? Even, like, one or two hundred would be so helpful, just for my asthma medication and stuff.
…it’s all bullshit.

If an addict says…
Hey Dad, I’m doing so good at work right now! Actually, I just made a huge deal but I won’t get paid for another two weeks because the client is out of town so if I could get an advance from you just to pay my insurance and my Chinese herbal supplements, that’d be great and then I’ll pay you right back as soon as the check comes in!
…it’s all bullshit.

If an addict says…
Honey, I’d so love to hang out today but I promised my old friend from high school who’s only back in town for the weekend that I’d play golf with him today. He’s havin’ some relationship problems with his girlfriend, if you know what I mean (wink), and he really needs a friend to talk to.
…it’s all bullshit.

You get the idea. The list goes on and on and on ad infinitum. Basically, everything out of the mouth of an addict is all bullshit.

P.S. Feel free to leave your own down below…

God, please help addicts to become utterly hopeless, that it may hasten their path back home to You…

Fearing God Isn’t Scary

     A few entries back, I opened with…

     The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. Proverbs 1:7

     A common criticism towards this language and type of relationship with God is that our Creator is some scary, punishing God – one to be ‘feared’. I get quite the opposite from this. Sometimes we addicts must step back and suspend all preconceptions… and also be sure not to robotically press the ‘PLAY’ button in our heads. We must stay open and educable.

     My translation:

     Be humble, and in a healthy way, fear doing the wrong thing for the effect it will have on self and others. To fear wrongdoing is wisdom, for we have been blessed with the knowledge of the certainty of cause and effect, a knowledge which better allows us to love ourselves, love others, and ultimately love God. To fear God is also to be vigilant not to become narrow and closed to new ideas and information. Remain a sponge, yet firm in our resolve that God Is. The boundaries of our knowledge rest in understanding and respecting where we come from.

God, please give me knowledge and wisdom, and instruct me how to better do Thy will and Thy work…

Spiritual Debt

     Just like our economy and supposed ‘recovery’ is fake – driven by the false prosperity of debt, consumption, government intervention, accounting fraud and false data – as opposed to savings and production – and will inevitably come to screeching halt or a slow painful death…

     …so too the drug addict is fake, driven and fueled by the false solution of drugs and the accumulation of spiritual debt – and will also inevitably come to a screeching halt or a slow painful death.

     Spiritual debt, i.e. the accumulation of various forms of poison such as fear, anger, resentment, self-pity, ego, pride, narcissism, dishonesty and immorality, must be eliminated and a replaced with a spiritual surplus of honesty, courage, strength, tolerance, patience, willingness, selflessness and love.

     Special bonus tonight: Please have a look at Aristotle’s criteria of a tyranny (and more specifically a tyrant) in his timeless work, Politics, and tell me if you don’t see a frightening correlation to what we have developing today, especially under the current regime. Just sayin’. Aristotle – Politics (See Book Five – esp pages 127-8, 133-135.)

     But times have indeed changed a bit since the days of Aristotle. The financial system is a complex ticking time bomb filled with trillions and trillions of worthless paper money, trillions in hypothecated and re-hypothecated securities, trillions in leveraged derivatives, and market rigging of the entire world’s interest rates, market rigging of stocks, bonds, commodities, elections, everything.

     So what else do governments and central banks do when they are completely bankrupt, totally corrupt, and have no intention of ever repaying their debts? They find creative ways to confiscate the wealth of their citizens and then hire the media to lie about it. Wait, let’s get this straight – I mean even more money than the trillions they already stole from the American people during the planned financial meltdown of 2008 and subsequent bailouts, which, despite popular belief, was the antithesis of capitalism. We don’t have anything close to free markets.

     ZIRP (our current Zero percent Interest Rate Policy) is nothing but an ongoing bailout for the biggest banks (which are insolvent), allowing them to borrow from the federal reserve at 0% while crushing savers, senior citizens, and creating asset bubbles from a misallocation of capital, of which average Americans are always the victims as they are for the most part clueless about the way our financial and monetary systems work. And now we have stagflation coming to melt away what little savings the middle class has left. Good job, central planners. You have completely and utterly broken the markets and destroyed the American economy.

     QE (Quantitative Easing) is nothing but an ongoing bailout of the federal government as well as the banks, as it simply amounts to the fed printing money to buy our own debt (debt monetization), as well as to buy the worthless mortgages on the banks’ balance sheets. It has nothing to do with creating jobs or helping Americans. Nothing. The federal reserve serves their member banks, as does our government. They couldn’t care less about you except to make sure you are kept blind from the fact that you are a financial serf, to be sheared regularly, but kept alive, numbed and dumbed down such that you can continue being milked without protesting too much.

     But since we are beyond broke and will never grow our way out of this increasingly unstable volcano of national debt, QE and ZIRP are necessary and will never end until we either default or hyperinflate it away. Since there is not enough foreign treasury demand to satisfy the government’s profligate spending, they are just idiotically printing money and lending it to themselves. That’s called counterfeiting, and it robs the purchasing power of the dollars you are working so hard for. Wages flatline but prices go up. Inflation is a hidden tax. It is theft. It is a wealth transfer from the lower and middle classes to the rich. These policies are dramatically increasing wealth inequality, especially since 2009, even though most people have been somehow led to believe the exact opposite.

     As financial slave-master, Amschel Mayer Rothchild, revealed long ago, “Give me control of a nation’s money supply and I care not who makes the laws.” Not only does a private cult of bankers control the money supply, but through QE they have been actively buying our debt – mortgage debt and treasury debt. The fed owns your house and your nation, which they seek to dissolve, and with plenty of help from Washington. It is purposeful. If you want to control or own people, all you have to do is lend them money or buy their pre-existing debt. So, you see, we still have slavery – it’s just carried out through debt and other financial weapons of mass destruction.

     Folks, this is the end game of the current climax of government corruption and our mathematically unsustainable debt-based monetary system. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter who you vote for since the Left/Right paradigm is just a hoax designed to fool you into thinking there are two different sides when, needless to say, there aren’t. Save for a few social issues, when it comes to economic and foreign policy, they’re both the same. They are puppets, owned by the corporate/banking elite and the oligarchs. They do not serve the people, the middle class. So that won’t solve anything.

     This is a moral issue, a moral issue regarding the future of our children, of which there will be none if we remain blind and passive. So please, dear voters, stop voting for these jokers. They have no clue what they’re doing. Is it not time we get these war-mongering, surveillance-obsessed clowns and their collectivist debt state out of government and let some sane adults take over? Debt and war are crippling America and our insolvency will force them to confiscate as much of our wealth, wages, property, privacy and freedom as humanly possible. We don’t want our somewhat free republic devolving into a totalitarian banana republic.

God, please teach me that hard work and honesty is what changes me, builds character, and leads to success…

Phony

     The hardest yet simultaneously most important thing for any addict is to be honest. Not just honest in his word, but honest in his thought, action, and character.

     Addicts are perhaps the biggest phonies on earth, besides your elected officials. That is, the way we act is fake. We are always trying and acting like anything BUT ourselves, which becomes necessary to achieve our selfish ends. Why is it so hard just to be real? Why is it so hard to be ourselves?

     One, because we have no clue who we are. Second, because we have been full of lies and bullshit for so long, honesty and authenticity are unfamiliar territory, to say the least.

     Another reason is a bit more subtle. I remember a story an old teacher of mine told me about how he asked a guy to join him in driving to another state to speak at some meeting. The guy responded that he would only go if he went with joy. That’s an honest guy for you. How often do we do things without really wanting to, but just to please someone or to look some way to others? It’s even more difficult to distinguish what it is we truly feel like doing – a natural problem of not knowing who we are.

     So I’ve been trying to only act with joy, with the exception of needing to help someone, which honestly, I don’t always feel like doing. I’ve been trying to act whole-heartedly, if you will, in an effort to not just be myself, but to become who I am, to become truer to who I am, and accordingly, to become more honest.

    For an addict, fake and phony won’t do. And once sober, being a phony is like a form of torture – it will bring you down until you become depressed… and then ill… and then… boom. It all blows up. Great job.

God, please help me to become more honest, to just be myself and to act whole-heartedly and with joy…