MATURATION VERSUS MATURITY
I define addiction as a state of mind committed to maintaining the illusion of control. In addition, I define spirituality as the practice of spiritual maturation, designed to continually cut through the illusion of control and return you over and over again to reality and your powerlessness over it. And I understand spiritual maturation as living life with the ever-deepening qualities of justice, compassion, curiosity, awe, wonder, serenity, and humility.
Notice the phrase over and over again, rather than the idea of “once and for all.” Maturation is a process with no end point. We mature continually without ever achieving maturity, as if maturity were a fixed state one arrives at once and for all. Nothing is once and for all. The hunger for control is so strong that few of us can simply let it go, and even fewer can let it go once and for all. Most of us never voluntarily divest ourselves of the illusion of control or the delusion that control is possible. Rather, reality painfully rips both from our grasp, and even when this happens most of us still try to get them back. Living without even the possibility of control is so frightening to most of us that we would rather live in an addiction-induced fantasy than face the tough truth of reality. This is why, as addicts, we most often refer to ourselves as “recovering” rather than “recovered.” Recovery is a process we work every day, not a destination at which we arrive.
Because recovery in this sense is a verb, rather than a noun, you will want to work the Twelve Steps over and over again… Don’t expect anything like perfection when working the Steps and experimenting with these practices. You will get better at both over time, but they are too rich to be mastered. You grow into rather than out of the Steps and the spiritual practices. The more you do them, the more you learn how to do them more profoundly.
UNCOVERY VERSUS RECOVERY
If it were up to me, I would rather speak of uncovery than recovery. Of course, I understand that recovery is used in the sense of regaining the sanity we once had but lost to the delusion of playing God; recovery can also mean to cover over once again. You can recover a lost treasure by both finding what was lost and by reburying it once it is found.
People addicted to control—which means almost all of us—use drink, drugs, food, work, and other substances and actions to cover over and hide the fact that control is a delusion. Workaholics are driven by the delusion that control is possible, and the illusion that working 24/ 7 can ensure them that control. Their compulsivity covers over the reality of life’s fundamental uncontrollability. This is true of all addicts, regardless of the substance or behavior to which they are addicted. A “recovering” addict is a person who is, given my quirky use of the term, trying to re-cover reality. Thus a “recovered” addict would be one who has successfully returned to the illusion of control. This is truer that many would like to think. I have met dozens and dozens of addicts who imagine that practicing the Twelve Steps of recovery will put them back in control of their lives.
The genius of the Twelve Steps is not that it re-covers reality with the blanket of delusion but that it continually uncovers reality and forces the practitioner to face reality and her inability to control reality time after time. It is only by facing the truth of life’s uncontrollable nature, and hence our powerlessness over it, that we can shift our lives from the futile quest for control to the potentially rich quest for learning to live without control.
SPIRITUAL NOT RELIGIOUS
For some, the use of the word God suggests that Twelve Step recovery is a religion. Nothing could be further from the truth. Twelve Step recovery offers no defined theology; relies on no professional clergy; collects no dues; and builds no buildings. It is simply a series of practices that can free us from the addictive behaviors that ruin our lives and the lives of those who love us.
Twelve Step recovery offers no image of God other than God as a force capable of helping you recover your sanity by freeing you from the insanity of your addiction and the delusional thinking that feeds it. And the Big Book defines spiritual experience and spiritual awakening in nontheistic terms, saying only that these phrases refer to a “personality change sufficient to bring about recovery.”
The Twelve Step program is not a religion, and the Big Book is not a bible. Yet the Twelve Steps are a spiritual discipline, and the Big Book is a story of revelation. The revelation comes not from God but from recovering addicts who have quit playing God—at least for today. The revelation is the stories of people who have experienced rock bottom, have had the illusion of control stripped from them, and then have taken the heroic step of daring to live without it. To paraphrase Albert Einstein: We cannot solve problems with the same mind that created them. The Twelve Steps take us to a different level of mind, a mind no longer seeking control, and learning instead how to live with justice, compassion, curiosity, awe, wonder, serenity, and humility in a world beyond our control.