What Color Is Your Blood?
By
Harold Arbuthnot
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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Published By:
Harold Arbuthnot at Smashwords
What Color Is Your Blood?
Copyright © Harold Arbuthnot
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What Color Is Your Blood?
Introduction
Active addiction for me started in childhood and lasted until after my fortieth birthday. The number of times that I hit bottom and didn’t know it but, bloodied and clueless as to why it kept happening, struggled back to some semblance of a normal life is a clear demonstration of true spiritual blindness. A friend and mentor likened me to crawling in on my lips when I began to show up at recovery meetings. In truth, this is by no means unique within the fellowship. Such a state of affairs doesn't happen all at once. It takes years of back and forth with addiction to build up a tolerance for such a low functioning bottom dwelling existence. Even had I become clean, I would have remained far from a sober mental life in my blindness. However, sight may be regained through the miracle of spiritual progress, which is available to all who enter recovery with an open heart.
During my first twelve months attending recovery meetings I heard soul wrenching accounts by others of living a spiritually attuned life on life’s own terms. It was soul wrenching to me only because I was a spiritual maladroit, but for those whose spiritual muscles had had time to develop it was a normal part of daily experience. Yet it was as though I had sat in the rooms of recovery before, for the material has a universal applicability and is in fact being acted upon all the time in society by those with a penchant for such matters. Having my soul wrenched out of the unnatural socket it was screwed into was exactly what was needed for me to discover life had always been waiting for me to come to the table. Those twelve months were ones of shocking realizations and painful admissions, and the overall effect was much needed if a life of spiritual progress was to take root.
Equal to the misery of hitting bottom and entering recovery, I followed the guidelines I was given, worked diligently at the pace I was capable of going, and learned to forgive myself on a daily basis. I also kept a journal. This was the spring of 2002. Since that year I have remained in recovery and continued to make headway, not looking back to those dark miserable days until recently. In re-reading the journal of those first twelve months I discovered amazingly that the clarity and power of the thoughts I heard from sponsors and others in meetings had sometimes been captured in the writing. In former years many of the items I would have quickly dismissed as hopelessly cynical or pointlessly sentimental, but in hearing them shared with an open heart in a meeting, backed up by some individual’s hard won sobriety, I had to accept my true size as merely one among many,and each one with their own unique way of seeing things and their own stories to tell. Many of them quoted or referenced certain authors and this is reflected in the following statements. Sometimes I remembered the names referred to and these are retained in the transcription from my journal to this book, but often my memory did not serve well enough. The important thing is that someone at a meeting said a thing that worked as a kind of antidote to the dull and demoralized character grown up in me over the years, and it was these little restorative slaps in the face which began to work the promises of recovery on me.
Some of the things I tried to capture in my journal I only know struck me as odd and made me want to keep on the journey, but I couldn't say what real importance they have other than that they served to resuscitate a brain that had gone batty on its own will to dissipation. Even though the journal entries were made over time as I attended many different meetings, there appears a building of spiritual intention as though some Greater Power had a plan even for the likes of me. Thus, the statements here contained are like stepping stones critical for my path in developing spiritual muscles. They represent a rough path of psychological discovery in chronological fashion taken through some of the hardest months of my life.
Each entry represents a particular attitude or perspective which for some reason I had to deal with. The stimulus for these came from the open environment of people sharing their truth, but the phrasing reflects my particular education and background. Underlying all the statements are insights about the terms of life through different lenses which I could no longer avoid considering. The fellowship of recovery made it possible for me to accept the possibility of so many more outlooks on life than I ever had before, and without it I would not be able to share this struggle of the first months of overcoming addiction. If anyone new to spiritual progress can find here encouragement for their own journey then the purpose of this book is fulfilled.
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Humble Power By The Hour
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1
On the face of many in childhood and adolescence as well as large numbers of adult addicts is the red flag of emotion, of passion, which our environments do not allow us to process in a way simply equal to the experiencing of it. Either our passion is too frequent or too fast, or those around us refuse to admit that it is appropriate to the social context and significant in life. This is an unfortunate fact which can be corrected by the technology of spirituality.
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2
A final solution is to reserve your own fate; what are you going to do unto the day of your expiration?
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3
To think in ignorance of the color of your blood, of your true calling in life, is to think in terms of what new crime you will commit against yourself and others.
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4
The stench of death, destruction and deceit is everywhere a part of human and material life. In human form the term mediocrity applies well to the uneasy edge of the wave which is always rolling out against our best made plans, and beyond the lip of this wave is the unfettered accomplishments and destruction of our desires. In Christian literature this realm is likened euphemistically to sin, hellfire and brimstone.
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5
Good intentions mean nothing except to children and the dead. It is out of our spiritual death that we must grow. We find that by replacing intentions with prayers our spiritual regeneration begins in earnest.
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If for no other reason than negative reinforcement, human spirituality is evident in every day of our lives.
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7
Parents who merely shelter their offspring from negative reinforcement are poor parents indeed. Consider C. S. Lewis’ description of kindness in “The Problem Of Pain.” We do not condemn our parents for having failed to provide us with a set of spiritual principles to live by successfully. We do, however, choose now to face life on life’s terms.
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8
We choose abstinence from a thing because that thing contributes to our spiritual corruption. We become celibate toward a thing in our life when we accept that it is ourselves who are corrupt and will not be able to use the thing wisely. By accepting our real limitations we improve our relationship to the Greater Power of our understanding.
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9
A good mentor will cultivate a particular lifestyle in one who is capable of maintaining it in a healthy way, though backsliding and mistakes may be common, especially early in the relationship. The mentor thus allows his protégé to experience the real gravity of life and benefit from it, without moralizing or forcing a point of view that to the protégé may not be important for what his Greater Power holds in store for him. With skillful encouragement each of us can feel safe and grow into spiritual maturity. Capable parents too will at least do this. Surprisingly, even hard times and dreadful mistakes by which we suffer in growing up become the sources of spiritual strength once we discover what our Greater Power has in store for us.
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It’s a highly conditional world at every level. So what is the color of your blood, your true identity? What is your embodiment of truth in your place as a member of your own society?
The true color of one's own blood is for many an area of confusion. Some bloods mix fine with others and seem to require a constant thinning through social contact, while others are already so thin or reactive that any mixing seems to be a volatile experiment indeed. In our spiritual torpor, many of us became crazy chemists, seizing every opportunity to thin or thicken our blood with any substance or action at hand. Failing to appreciate the subtle and inalterable hues of our lifeblood, we wrought havoc in the spiritual world where in fact, the colors of every blood type can only mix if there is a progressive tolerance and understanding that surpasses the mere and tawdry assumptions of single human beings. Our role as a crazy chemist of self righteous knowing led us to become an unknowing pawn of others, a usurper of peace, a blind denizen of a world without spiritual light. Forever in shadow, we had no clue what our blood did or what hues it took on when mixed with that of others whom we seldom understood.
To survive spiritually means to accept the real color of our blood, not try to force a combination that yields an unwholesome spiritual tone. Yet, it seems life demands of us that we adapt our true color to many situations in which its tone reflects badly.
The spiritual progress that comes in recovery makes clear, the color of each and everyone's blood is exactly what it should be, and each of us must learn to respect that, and perhaps, to find the grace to love this fact in every instance. Only in the spiritual world of a Power much greater than the shadows cast by any particular blood can the promised progress take place. In such a world, every color begins to reflect with every other and light is born. This is the spiritual dawn.
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Nostalgia is born at the same age as Thanatos, the will to death, for suicide is a final solution to mediocrity, we think. When we realize it is not, and we choose to embrace instead the love of leviathan, of mediocrity, we advance on spiritual maturity. The mature mind loves leviathan, rejoices in nostalgia in as much as it serves survival, and knows how to survive.
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12
Some of us remember moments even in childhood when we were besotted on drugs or through willful delusion. Poisoning our senses with bad habits, we were callous to some level within that was experiencing panic. It was here that our fates with the streets, our discomforts in society, first took root. By siding only with peers who enabled the denial of our social panic, we laid foundations of fear. It can take years to uncover the nature of these foundations. And what to do with the related emotions once we have uncovered them? It is only now that we come to realize the truth of our vulnerability, but if we can stomach getting down to our real size the healing and healthy growth may begin.
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We may at times give way to working on new foundations of willful resistance to the terms of life. Therefore, we must pray for freedom from our black and white feelings which don’t have anything to do with now, and learn how to meditate during times of thinking deathward. We discover how to meditate in some way in every situation where we are prone to enabling the willful resistance of our dis-ease.
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14
The difference between a saint and a sinner is that the saint knows and does not back talk what he knows, for he is sure of the outcome. We may not be saints, but we learn how to give up and win.
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15
Some of us fell under the trance of physicality. It was so persistent, this sensual delight of a particular embodied moment we seemed to be able to create at will, that we began comparing one moment with another and so lost love for the simple wholesomeness of mediocre physicality.
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16
Mediocrity is love. It is heaven, for to set and maintain the standards of mediocrity in the population at large is to set the discipline of love between adversaries. None of us really wants to keep up standards in all areas of life. Mediocrity is leviathan, a mistress who holds forth love even to the blood thirsty heads of state and the unadorned masses.
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We must take care in seeking to learn what has really happened, for once learning a thing we can never really back talk it without inviting self demoralization.
Spiritually, we can't safely back talk what is known to be true, for the knower respects what he's come to know, or else he doesn’t know a thing. Therefore we do not casually ask the Darkness to speak the truth to us. In fact, in recovery we have already come to learn certain truths from when in the back ways of life we reveled in the knowledge of being alive. Now we do not shut the door on this knowledge, but begin to live in peace with it.
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18
The images of despair which our minds provide have finally yielded a meaning that for far too long was hidden from us. This meaning at times was cloaked by our imaginations, which sought to dramatize the spiritual facts. Some of us report that a sense of impending doom hounded us. For example, we imagined ourselves eternally lost while climbing a steep mountain, or becoming a crashing meteorite, being a burned out building, having no more than a shadow presence, living on a war torn beachhead, existing in a sunless cave.
The cave image may be taken as the classical Cave of Plato, though in our own experience perhaps we neither saw shadows cast by a fire nor ever hoped to rise to the sunlight on the outside. Instead, bloodied and blind in our spiritual malady, we clawed the unseen stone in the dark, trying ever harder to insert ourselves further into nooks and crannies of oblivion, away from the source of shadows and the truth of the outside. Only in finding the spiritual path do we grow to accept who it is casting the shadows and what our place is outside in the full light of spiritual truth.
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19
As recovery literature discusses, our addictions are brain allergies. We have obsessive cravings for more because our brains think more will snuff out the allergic reaction. We then ply ourselves with our chosen intoxicant, ever hoping to be ultimately satisfied, but we are really extending our withdrawal date, for the abuse of chemicals, ideas and life itself is never a final spiritual solution.
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20
The spiritual malaise that some of us suffer has formed in us an addiction to impertinent looking, a condition which, in our highly conditioning image driven market place, has taken on epidemic proportions.
The flush of eyes too close— a sensitive soul balks at their fleshy presence. They touch the soul in places where honesty would take offense— never mind intellectual premises, we know prying eyes are the love that will bury us in the end. Eyes too close are ones which do not respect our embodiment. Like an allergic mind seeking in the substance that triggers it a method to stop the triggering, eyes that lock on their target are impelled to control it, own it, use it till all is said and done.
It is not prudish to admit that a spiritual discourse exists in which prying eyes become impertinent and lacking in grace of compassion. If we are to allow spiritual progress to characterize our own journeys, we must learn to accept and respect that grace does exist.
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Some of us are horrified by the progress of modern civilization, for it seems to establish which species is without doubt the most destructive and the least responsible. With a small trick of thought we can choose nostalgia over suicide and accept the love offered in the moment, though it may appear mediocre, power lusting, or even deadly. Thus, one stops running and ends the time of inverted soul searching, understanding now such exercise as wasting time. We can do only a few things each day and be happy. Many who are “normal” have learned this lesson early, it seems.
For these normies it is often true then, nostalgia can be bathetic, because in their consistent manner of coping they discern the whole meaning of their enterprise in an instant. Bathos implies an excessive sentiment, an overweening manner, and if we can accommodate it in others, accepting what seems to be a natural part of being human, then we can become detached. A certain nostalgia for this way that things have always been is a healthy response sometimes.
It is we addicts who have resisted unreasonably the mediocrity of our environments, so that we feel we must seek satisfaction in the more pure, elegant, elaborated. In truth, this is not very much a moral position. It is the action of our troubled lives on the singular path to success, and merely the tool of the Greater Power as we understand it. A certain nostalgia with regards what happens in life is a positive way to accept the moment and let it pass peacefully, rather than getting our hackles up.
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22
Directionless and fear driven, lacking a strong mentor with even mediocre skills (parent, educator, sibling, spiritual advisor…), the legions of the road remain in search of the true blood color of their identities to carry them to the grave.
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23
Someone with a triggered, allergic mind is always in shock. Because of immaturity, denial and addiction, there is shock from those things which normies are not in shock about. It is normies who happily pay good money so as to experience a little bit of this kind of shock. In recovery we no longer run from certain things which used to shock us. We choose to never ingest substances that radically alter the memory, and we do not easily submit to any process that weakens our ability to move willingly toward destiny.
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24
Regardless of the way one might earn one’s keep in the alleys of human chaos, one will have a personality which functions as nothing more than an engaging mechanism of idle social moments, those which fill the majority of our time shared in each other’s company. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. referred to this as hello—goodbye—hello—goodbye.
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25
Some describe the experience of life as a sine wave, up and down through the events which compose it, fast or slow, strong or weak, but always crossing back over a middle point where we can recognize what phase of life we're in. Many of us find we have many sine waves going in our lives at once, and which vary a great deal based on so many collateral yet small happenings. We have lost sight of the big sine wave of our life. It is the spiritual path that proves the remedy for our lack of a more sanguine awareness. Without doubt, consistent daily prayer to the Greater Power of our understanding during the events that happen lets us know where we are in life.
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Our only job is to manage our wayward selves. To put it this way is back talk in many circles, for it is unfashionable to embrace the fact. Only those who have been truly wayward can admit at any moment, “I sin even now,” without further loss of self esteem. Only those who wake up to how they are dis-abled by a spiritual malady have nothing else to lose, and yet as we live along into the answers we too shall cease such back talk.
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27
Fixation on the past is distraction. Once we’ve an opportunity to be honest with ourselves we acknowledge who, what and where we are now. Grief comes, for in the now is the telling of the past and we see the damage. We do go on, and at a new pace but without the fear like before.
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Sudden different perspectives or embodiments come on us. With ever greater clarity we become who we are, but the process we’ve denied for so long often still goes on outside of our consciousness and until we recognize a feeling as our own embodiment of now, we are at the mercy of unclear associations and baffling reactions. Early on this new path we are always wondering, “What next?”
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The knowing way is the sowing way.
There is cant in everyday speech. That is, the jargon we use in our particular locale on the globe for our specific lifestyle carries in it many assumptions and attitudes which are not particularly in a state of grace when it comes to the terms of life, yet they are the seeds from which can grow our whole understanding of a situation, and we need to be more attuned to the process if we are to have spiritual progress, and not be impertinent in the presence of enlightenment. Roam further and sow for the next meal you take, you have now to take a naked lunch, but it need not be immoral or dissipating. Never mind you that lusty heedless pride.
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Humility comes in simple ways now. For example, too much coffee may for some of us set back our withdrawal. It’s not just a matter of nerves. Cigarettes, masturbation, day dreams… these may now be threats to our very happiness. If we are not very well balanced, these things can threaten us even with insanity. Humbly staying within the pale of normalcy may require a simple relativism which a “normal person” would not like, but by it we may be as happy as any of them.
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31
Our diseased state makes us think we don’t have a disease, but it is like a newly healing wound. It is inside us and when it gets bumped or chafed it often doesn’t hurt. It strangely attracts us; a sweetness calls to us to bruise the wound some more. The weaker we are in recovery the more likely we are to tear it open anew. Only by working the process of spiritual sanity can we arrest the process of our spiritual malady and begin recovery. Honest, open and willing, that is how it’s done.
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Entering recovery after years and years of being in a habit of dis-ease, we find that it is a realm of simple statements which have far implications. There’s no sense in walking about with your head in the clouds. There’s no reason to doubt the nature of life.
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33
Some of us have a diseased condition of self resentment, but self is not what we think it is. Self is a higher power that steers our corporeal state and indicates to it ways of being and doing. This higher self power has already made all decisions based on a criteria it understands in the higher order that it serves. We can’t easily understand in real time the world of our Greater Power, but we can get out of the way of our Greater Power’s decisions by accepting them. When our diseased state makes us resent our GP’s decisions we often can only acknowledge our disability, and take time out to reflect on the true nature of our lives.
If we do so following the principles of recovery with an open heart, we will discover that each person we meet is in fact on a journey of universal importance to the Greater Power.
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First pray to surrender everything, then pray to accept what is left. The important thing is to accept what you have, where you are, when you’ll die.
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Beware, resentment rules in unseen glances and foolish pastimes.
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36
The problem with indulging in even the simplest forms of avoidance is that before returning to the real concerns of life, the addictive mind already has a plan for further avoidance. Rest is important, avoidance is not. Rest refreshes, avoidance frustrates.
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“Remember the lilies in the mountains,” a man said, and I realized nostalgia started for me at ten. It was then that the love of friends led me to cherish certain situations. It was then that I began longing for death rather than accepting the working nature of life. After all, indulging in fruitless past times seems so much more fun, doesn't it? Ah, but it turns out, in recovery, that an ounce of reality is worth more than a pound of memories.
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What you’ll learn is that you’d rather be working at your healthy life than any other job.
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Wait! We have a place in a community of old friends that is worth the effort to maintain.
Don’t presume to always know the true import of what is habit between friends, and prepare to build on old habit for the future by choosing the direction to turn when those of long acquaintance ask you to acknowledge tradition. It is impossible to change others, what are you going to do to help yourself? The tradition of old acquaintance is not something worth poisoning ourselves for.
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We are variously challenged. It is easier to say dis-abled or handicapped. This makes us into something of a black sheep, as long as we’re keeping score. However, there are certain advantages to our darkness. We learn to stick to the shadows when the wolves are out. We know the necessity of social ingratiation, and how to observe from the edge of the flock. If we can be astute, the variance with society in which our affliction has placed us at different times will seem little more than a classroom exercise in understanding the vast differences in perception between persons in even a small group, and with strength gained in our recovery we will become aware of the universal need of loving tolerance in finding solutions to today’s problems.
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41
We finally have learned that the standards we have lived by are those of a besotted child.
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42
The color of our blood has a harsh quality, one which requires we forewarn others lest their enthusiasm cause them to mix too readily their own hue with ours. We set boundaries in our own best time; boundaries we learned at such great expense.
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43
We may panic at being defined. We panic that the embodiment devised for us by life is so precise, integral and reliant. It is both derivative from and defining of others, as the embodiment of others derives from and defines ourselves. We do not want to be defined. We are defined.
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The Grace Of Normal
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” There are those who in their natural temperament pursue their desires in the pragmatic styles most obliquely trained by society. They are not narcissists despite egos greater than their memories. They are citizens who help to make up the legions of so called normies and seem too unimaginative to be addicts, too stolid to give way to impulse, too disinterested to remember certain things with any regularity, and, display an easy habit of rationalization that somehow always enables them to save face. They are oblivious to the extremes of suffering which drives an addict into a strong and healthy relationship with his or her Greater Power.
It’s a fact, the narcissistic and arrogant addict, whether allowed another fix or not, often will scoff at the pastimes of the poor in spirit, and is marked for education.
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45
Spirituality can be like the weather. The Greater Power of your understanding is always present, always changing. Our relationship to it is often the reason for the day being experienced as good or bad. To ignore it can lead to sudden catastrophe or slow demise.
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46
In recovery we learn why we survived all those years without being completely destroyed. It may be, for example, that equal to the characteristics of an addict, we also had a need to safeguard the well being of others, so we isolated.
Now, instead of isolating so as to save others and ourselves from our triggered state, we learn to place principles before personalities. If we keep at it, in time we learn to really give up and win.
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47
It seems we are surrounded by armies of the normal and it seems like we do not belong. However, we do not accept the diagnosis of being terminally unique and so we will join and serve. We suffer from an extreme allergy or sensitivity, some might say narcissism, that is addicted to the drama that wrecked our lives. It disabled our capacity to serve and we remained among those who cannot honestly earn their keep, but now we have become aware of this condition. We are unable to kill or cure this condition within us, but we discover that it cannot kill us if we do not choose so. We suffer until we earn a living honestly. A blessing of being in recovery is that we see ample evidence in the lives of fellow addicts in recovery that it is not as hard as we thought. Today we succeed, no matter how small our effort, in becoming more honest so long as we remain committed to our recovery.
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48
Time and again we are reminded by the sheer incorrigibility of the human condition of the following sociological precepts. We are human primates. We group ourselves into armies. We are loyal to those closest to us and each of us has several groups we are part of. This simple awareness is a first step up toward understanding what civilization is all about. As we gain spiritual buoyancy we begin to better discern our relationship to our neighbors and an army of doers.
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49
The reason there is little back talk in the armies that form civilization is that loyalty to those immediately to the fore and behind cannot tolerate too much of it. It seems each of us has a Greater Power devoted to a continuous fabric of human kind toiling at a singular goodness.
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50
Actively self harming addicts are persons failing to respect their given place in a primate grouping, but if long experience holds true, their Greater Power has a plan for them. All must be introduced to ever greater spiritual hazing, even to the point of death—the accommodation of some poisonous treatment that they compulsively desire which will see them to an early grave—so that they have the opportunity of caving in and realizing where they come from and why they are here, so that they will accept their given place and work diligently to support it and the places of others in their tribe of animaline foragers. The situation of such unfortunates is that they have not reached the point of understanding, the point of total abject surrender to life’s terms of survival during the years of childhood and after. If they are to achieve total surrender as an adult to the will of their Greater Power, then they must understand with their adult mind, or split their mind adequately to insulate consciousness from those memories that, taken together, spell out nothing but total surrender. It is far easier as a child to relate everything one knows to the event of surrender to life’s terms than it is as an adult, but the total psychic change of recovery does not come without it.
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51
The armies of consumers drape mother Earth. Consuming is a job in itself for the human spirit. The armies of spiritual production are far more exclusive. Till we learn and earn a specific vocation while spiritually aware, we do not truly produce anything significant.
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52
We stand each day with true human morality and, socially approved intercourse. The one is an outgrowth of the other. At our feet, perhaps yet still below our line of sight, stands the slowest among us. It is our relationship with this one which always makes clear what is principal to humans and what must follow. We prefer to look eye to eye with the fastest among us who remain busy with development, expansion, success. How we resolve our relationship to the slowest while we strive with the fastest encompasses the whole of our physical spirituality.
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53
The corpus of humanity is. It exists beyond rationality. It is the spiritual physicality of the human now.
Spirituality is good feeling honest cooperation for real time and long term good feeling health. Good feeling means each one’s whole embodiment, the mind as well as the heart, the joints of the limbs as well as our capacity to rationalize and psychologize. Honest means just that, and as strictly so as we are able in real time, with our own goals and well being always in the front. Cooperation means acting in concert with others and being congruent with them in genuine expression. Good feeling health means here and now embodiment of health in such a way as to support long term and terminal satisfying embodiment. Good feeling goals must be founded on our beliefs and concepts of well being.
The peculiar gravity of each person's life is his or her survival in the spiritual and physical corpus of humanity.
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54
There is no longer any need to take other people’s inventories. We have long history of doing so. One of the hoped for outcomes of formal education is to rid us of this compulsion by forcing us to do so in a methodical manner. The outcome of all personal inventories equates to the same thing, territoriality. When we do not accept our sense of territoriality as primates, we become resentful, fearful, unstable. When we accept it and strive to adhere to the principles of recovery, it becomes a prerequisite of good self care for us to be honest, open and willing. In this way we begin to realize that the best use of inventory taking is to effect a change in our self toward greater acceptance of life.
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55
Let’s be oblique here, the social contract is this:
You work and you take what you can.
This explains it—morality, justice, purpose, government, religion. When the particulars of the self are allowed to be forgotten, and the oblique forces of existence are assessed, there is no more that is needed to explain your secular, even spiritual purpose.
Let’s take a different tack now, that of the personally spiritual: The Greater Power does for me what I cannot do for myself, and it does a whole lot more.
The relationship that I have with the Greater Power of my understanding today is the most satisfying when I am not too oblique about life’s terms, and I live by principles before personalities. Especially before my personality.
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56
When we come of age, when we mature, if we do not suffer from serious mental handicaps, then we come to see a bigger picture, and can accept the territoriality of human primates organized into armies of function and feeding. Because for most of us this happens when we are older, we are aware that acceptance, tolerance and routine are an easier solution than change and heartfelt striving.
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57
The secret of my existence: the source of all cravings is the inner animal self. This might be called the sense of lack. An inner sense of animal self, the so called lizard brain, is one of lacking because the perception of the social self is neocortical, rational, enchanted by the absolutism of logic, which is an artifice, but nevertheless keeps reassuring the lizard brain that it can fulfill all nature’s prerogatives. Be that as it may, all my rational behavior will always be confronted by society’s General Secret.
The General Secret is the reason for much of the obtuse denial and forced focus on the “socially appropriate.” The secret simply is that we are armies of human primates— we are loyal to the next in line by nature, we are committed to supplying food and shelter to ourselves and the next in line whom we class ourselves with. A linchpin of all army loyalty is that there is no back talk. One can say anything, but one can never lip back talk without risk of upsetting someone’s lizard brain, and that brings recrimination.
The principles of recovery allow me in good conscience today to stop trying to fool my animal self that the world is anything other than what it is.
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58
Everybody works a program. It seems that many who are stable have learned to embody respect of their Greater Power in the most saccharin, sentimental, stereotypical channels. In short, a respect for popular media that has boundaries of normalcy. It is the trunk of normalcy in society, and people are inspired to struggle and strive and die by the popular franchise, the fast food purveyor, the morning show, the cults of a known scripture, sports and Hollywood. The way of normalcy is wide, as deep as any internecine affairs of humans can be. Do not fear for your contribution to the way of normal. You are a consumer.
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59
Look at the territoriality of your neighborhood. There is pleasure in territoriality.
All personal inventories equate to the same thing; marked territory. As primates we want to hold as much territory as possible. The foundation of society is little more than armies of primates holding out our claims to territory in relation to those next to us, and being in thrall to one another in this endeavor. We are loyal to those of us immediately proximal, for it is our neighbors in the armies of our identity that we have struggled with to establish a relationship of power.
Because we are territorial primates still, we feel righteous in making and ultimately accepting our space. This is true morality, we feel. Because a Greater Power has led us into addiction, and now leads us out of it, the right thinking that used to make so much sense looks suddenly a little shallow. Insights come to us of a spiritual nature. We can’t get so self righteous anymore when we take someone else’s personal inventory. We get introduced to our real size by the Greater Power of our understanding. If we are not to be disheartened, we need to pursue life based on principles which make plain our truly powerless state. History has recorded the impact of many spiritually advanced persons who fully accepted their powerlessness.
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60
In our early learning experiences and subsequent entrancement by addictive payoffs we characteristically adopted particular patterns relating to our environments and for our own embodiment of life. Psychologists such as Adler and Dreikurs have said much.
Liminal reality, the sensory moment threshold of our environment unfolding now is an embodiment reality that is in real time and is truth, but only one real time reality alongside other realities such as our habituated routines and the entrancement by addictive payoffs that contribute nothing to our spiritual progress in recovery. If we are to have an addictive entrancement broken, we must become early learners again, coping with the real stimulus of our environment and receiving guidance from others on what is healthy, for in truth, we don't yet know how to love ourselves in a good way. In spiritual fellowship, we learn to believe in principles and also to place trust in other human beings.
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61
It is the capacity to invent that makes for the assumption that one can control one’s own destiny and handle any situation. The very nature of the simple spiritual path makes it impossible to invent with premeditation a complex and preformed version of it. The spiritual path in relationships and associations to people, places and things, has come about only because you are willing to turn the moment over to your Greater Power based on principles, and so you have chosen a human guide in the fellowship based on your turning things over, a guide to put faith in even if you define such faith using scientific reasoning or mathematical terms. Somehow, for some of us logical types who are addicts, turning things over to a guide never seemed like a good idea, not with colleagues, family or friends. We always felt control was possible and understanding complete, therefore, we expected to do it on our own, like everybody else, right?
We must now befriend the memories of our failed relationships. We on our path must accept in selfless friendship relations as they are, faithfully leaving them to create their own destiny through time. We give up our sense of power to make and control.
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62
In a mind in which cloudiness is common place, the most simple of next indicated things, such as mere daily ablutions, can be confounded and distant. Ask yourself, “What is the next most simple goal?” Mindfulness here may be an outland proposition, though we say the words with easy familiarity.
What is the most simple next indicated thing you may do? Sweetly accept this course of action as the focal goal of your prayer in life, and have faith that the program you are committed to will bring you to the best of final places. Remember; you are better off today by far than you ever were being active in addiction.
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63
Having come to believe that we can be improved by real spiritual recovery, many of us find the stress and pain to be enormous.
In one sense, the love we have for ourselves is the pain. During our frequent failures early on in our recoveries at communication, cooperation and adult sharing, we experience mortification. For many of us, these moments so often in the day are clear examples of both character defects and the consequences of being in relationship and employed when so tenderly new to the program of spiritual progress. We must be steadfast during such moments. It is wise to have recourse to support from the experience, strength and hope of others who have gone this way before. It is those moments when all that we want as healthy adults seems to be eternally beyond reach. We must then recognize that our job as an adult is to accept our naturally limited reach, and to know that any pain we feel is, at that moment, converted into love, if we desire it. Accepting that the love is the pain, we take each day as it comes, and we reach for opportunities as they come through the songs of our prayers.
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64
For us, to be alive at all is to live in recovery, for we have survived a drastic fall. As we choose to live in recovery, we come into acceptance of life on life’s terms and it is here that we will find the strength on which we can live.
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65
We must now choose to attain economic survival very carefully.
Most people have a drive to be with others. We express this by displaying our social competence and avoiding situations that require us to do things at which we are poor. Our habitual displays of competence are statements of association and employment. “This is how I am human, let’s parlay here,” and, “This is my group loyalty, let’s beat the bounds here.” Because human primates are territorial, these displays structure social demeanor, social classes, into layers of complexity. Such layers have a gravamen that influences the community as a whole. One who is employed merely at a task to make himself look good is likely to grow bored and seek consolation, which for us is a time bomb waiting to go off. It is a spiritual necessity that we find work which will keep our conscience clear. Failure to do so may lead us to imbalance others and encourage a deterioration in the standards of where we are employed, the morale of our community.
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66
It is the Greater Power’s deliberate will that we are the way we are. If we can be who we are gracefully, and be of service to others, then we have accepted fully the love of our Greater Power and returned it in kind to the best of our ability.
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67
We will see the addict within us buried. Our addict self is worth our every effort to guide and protect around both the weak and the strong. This is because we will see our addict buried.
Being an addict is for us the process of the Greater Power as each of us understands it. Life’s terms, warts and all, are the process of the Greater Power. Being an addict is a gift.
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68
Turning the inadequacies, deficiencies and disabilities of a life into addiction masks reality from the ego, the reality of being vulnerable and having defects. Instead of fearing the manipulation and harsh treatment of others consequent to the animal aspect of being human, we put everything we had into the pleasure of playing, working, reading, writing, music, alcohol, sex, drugs, food, etcetera... anything so long as we thought to give harsh reality a miss.
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69
Many of us always longed for a good parental authority. A good parent would, in one form or another, say this, “This is your life, the only one you have, so go at your own speed and feed your soul with complete honesty, for at some point in youth or later years the day will come when you must fully understand the gravity of your life time.”
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70
For some of us, having entered recovery, we begin to get the notion that the life we had built is intrinsically out of balance. It feels like family and friends treat the issues of our career and recovery as though they were toxic waste, to be shunted aside. If so, we must start off very slow. There’s no other way to do it. We go slow enough to recognize that we are dealing with toxic waste. We are submerged in it. We are not like others. If we were, we would already know the true color of our blood. We can go slower still than we know is possible, and we do not entertain any of our old thoughts, for they will be outside the pale of all good brethren. There is one way only to plan our trajectory, and that is through toxic waste. Sorry for this state of circumstances, but we must go slower still.
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71
The larval pupus transforms. It seems that at some age a person sheds much mental incoherency. What steps into their mind is a clear vision, that the armies of social order do not organize along lines of promoted thinking, but are founded upon life’s terms for survival. At such a transition of mind the person may perceive that their opportunities for change are over, but they are just beginning on life’s true terms.
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72
If most of us had been introduced to a safe sane method of prayer in childhood, many of our troubles would have been avoided. Instead, childish sentiment and dishonesty in the face of disinterest and dullness encouraged us to move progressively into compulsive self gratification, which soon deranged our personalities. The method of a safe sane practice, instead of our childish, isolating and regressive ones, need must come on strong from guides at each person’s special time.
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73
In the real world we befriend those who befriend us, but not those who merely tolerate our presence or even resent it. There is a spirit of association, a third person if you will, that enters in sudden judgment on the viability of any companionable endeavor, and it doesn’t give a hang about what we wish our friends were like. For those of us who have thought too long and too hard on the particulars of life, the nature of friends will be yet another aspect of deliverance into the terms of reality.
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74
One point that makes hitting bottom so important to some of us is that it clarifies the vision. In the clarity of its extreme, we understand only the goal of reducing or stopping the pain, and this then defines over a period of days, weeks, months, years, every relationship we have, be it to God, people, or environment. In recovery we can never truly forget this simple vision if we have not lost too much neural capacity. Therefore we come to recognize the killer of all good conscience. We know now as never before what things are likely to disrupt our peace. We have at least the beginning of subtle knowledge about our true nature and the world.
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75
A selfless acceptance of life’s terms is difficult when it seems that culture keeps altering those terms. Terms of community can be difficult to adhere to in a healthy manner in truth. The religion of media blitz provides a shotgun effect of reason for people to do what they want and what they are told.
Consciousness is an I-Thou narrative. Awareness is an openness to stimulus. Conscious-awareness is a source of much pain. It is easiest to keep the two separated. In this way exploitation of biodiversity for gain continues, rewards can be pleasurable, and ownership of behavior can adhere to standards of territorial aggression in every single position we find ourselves. In this we find the roots of self righteousness.
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76
The Black And White Stiletto
The central pain is that no one will speak plainly of The Truth.
The Truth is that all signifying about meaning of life falls either into abject lies, or expressions of faith by madmen. A sharp distinction indeed. This the one side of the coin of our civilization. The opposite side is that through social convention and mediocrity, the world is shared among many who, for love of life, relinquish The Truth in order to be happy. Life goes on.
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77
Addiction choices can be seen as the intention, deluded at its core, to impose the ego in a situation as though the ego has been significantly negated and must make up for this offense. In addiction, the choice is usually to transfer the pain experienced into some act construed at least superficially by the ego as one of playful joy which the inner self has learned will assert the sense value of itself— I am me, and this is joyous. This act of self is perverted by the layers of defense which our distorted thinking pulls us through; we convert one thing into another, paint the world in hues given to us by family, friends and culture, at an age when we have little capacity to resist the exotic colors of another person’s convictions, which themselves are often expressed as two dimensional sign posts rather than disparate or scheming philosophies of survival. When we come into some awareness of what is good feeling health for us, if we are to make spiritual progress, then we must start to see what is not good feeling health for others, and to register their continued pursuit of it if such is the case. Making progress, we at last become aware how our choices tend to be made based on two dimensions in society, and not the three that we inhabit, and if progress continues, we find ourselves free to know the true nature of humility, acceptance, and prayer.
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Spiritual Progress, Not Impertinence
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