I I
SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE
The terms “spiritual experience” and “spiritual awakening”
are used many times in this book which, upon careful
reading, shows that the personality change sufficient to
bring about recovery from alcoholism has manifested itself
among us in many different forms.
Yet it is true that our first printing gave many readers the
impression that these personality changes, or religious
experiences, must be in the nature of sudden and
spectacular upheavals. Happily for everyone, this
conclusion is erroneous.
In the first few chapters a number of sudden revolutionary
changes are described. Though it was not our intention to
create such an impression, many alcoholics have
nevertheless concluded that in order to recover they must
acquire an immediate and overwhelming “God-
consciousness” followed at once by a vast change in feeling
and outlook.
(See BB 85:2)
Among our rapidly growing membership of thousands of
alcoholics such transformations, though frequent, are by no
means the rule. Most of our experiences are what the
psychologist William James calls the “educational variety”
because they develop slowly over a period of time.
(See BB 14:2, 57:2)
Quite
often friends of the newcomer are aware of the difference
long before he is himself. He finally realizes that he has
undergone a profound alteration in his reaction to life;
(See BB 25:2, 50:4, 84 Top [9])
that such a change could hardly have been brought about
by himself alone. What often takes place in a few months
could seldom have been accomplished by years of self-
discipline.
When a man or a woman has a
spiritual awakening, the most important meaning of it is
that he has now become able to do, feel, and believe that
which he could not do before on his unaided strength and
resources alone. He has been granted a gift which amounts
to a new state of consciousness and being. He has been set
on a path which tells him he is really going somewhere,
that life is not a dead end, not something to be endured or
mastered. In a very real sense he has been transformed,
because he has laid hold of a source of strength which, in
one way or another, he had hitherto denied himself.
T&T 106-107 Step Twelve
With few exceptions our members find that they
have tapped an unsuspected
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inner resource which they presently identify with their own con-
ception of a Power greater than themselves. (See BB 55:3, 161 Top)
Most of us think this awareness of a Power greater than
ourselves is the essence of spiritual experience. Our more
religious members call it “God-consciousness.”
Most emphatically we wish to say that any alcoholic capable
of honestly facing his problems in the light of our
experience can recover, provided he does not close his
mind to all spiritual concepts. He can only be defeated by
an attitude of intolerance or belligerent denial.
Let's look first at the case of the one who says he won't
believe- the belligerent one. He is in a state of mind which
can be described only as savage. His whole philosophy of
life, in which he so gloried, is threatened. It's bad enough,
he thinks, to admit alcohol has him down for keeps. But
now, still smarting from that admission, he is faced with
something really impossible. How he does cherish the
thought that man, risen so majestically from a single cell in
the primordial ooze, is the spearhead of evolution and
therefore the only god that his universe knows! Must he re-
nounce all this to save himself?
T&T 25 Step Two
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.
(See BB 13 bottom - 14, 163:2)
“There is a principle which is a bar against all information,
which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail
to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-that principle is
contempt prior to investigation.”
-Herbert Spencer