Through practicing the Steps we learn that our ego-image is not fixed or static
I WILL never forget Karl. A buddy of mine, Mac, and I had received a call through a physician friend of AA. We were put on the trail of this character who, we were told, wanted to sign himself into a big state hospital which had an alcoholic rehabilitation program. We found the man all right, at the home of his ex-wife. He was well dressed and well spoken. And, unknown to us, he was on the outside of a fifth of vodka. He told us he had had one or two. We mentally allowed him six or eight. But not a whole fifth. On our way to the hospital (some eighty miles from where we picked him up) he began to shake and begged us to pull up at an oasis so he could have a double shot. I whispered to Mac, “If we get him in a saloon we may never get him out. Let’s pick up a pint and let him nibble until we get him out there.”
Mac got the pint. Karl got the cap off the pint and up-ended the bottle. When he took it down it was about a quarter reduced. When we got to the hospital we had an inert mass of beef. The pint was empty. Karl passed out so cold we could not wake him! The hospital wouldn’t accept him unless he signed himself in. Mac said, “Let’s leave this body at the nearest hotel and reclaim it tomorrow morning.”
We paid eight bucks for the room and toted Karl upstairs. In the room we pulled off Karl’s jacket and shoes, loosened his tie, covered him with a blanket and left a note telling him to stay put and we would be around for him in the morning.
We got there bright and early but Karl was not in his room. We found him in the dining room. He had just finished breakfast–two eggs, two-and-a-half-minutes each, melba toast and a pot of coffee.
His hair was uncombed, his shirt was filthy. He had not a nickel in his pants. And when we got there he was reading the financial section of the morning paper which he had grandly sent the waiter to get for him at the newsstand in the lobby. When we converged on him he greeted us with condescension and offered us some good advice about his favorite stocks.
Now this man had been in and out of hospitals, on and off skid row, again and again in the past ten years. It had been at least fifteen years since he was in the brokerage business. Yet his image of himself, undiminished and unchanged by reality, was that of a prosperous broker, a pillar of the community, too well-bred to be a snob but very much aware of his social position. He was living in a fifteen-year-old dream. And the tragedy of it was that he never came out of it. The hospital was able only to dry him out, not to reach the real man. And a year or two later we heard of his death.
The tragedy of Karl started me to thinking, more actively than ever, on the mystery of a man’s image of himself. As practicing alcoholics we were great actors, always the heroes, naturally, of melodramas we wrote, costumed, directed and played out in our own minds. We stood at the bar and were G-men trailing a dangerous international spy; we were explorers just returned from the steaming jungles of Boolaboola. We were Casanova, reborn, in slacks and sports jacket, and with every drink, up to a point, we seemed to look more dashing and romantic in the amber-tinted mirror behind the bar. All of it the stuff of dreams.
But what of the waking moments, in the grim, harsh light of the next morning, trying to shave without slicing ourselves to ribbons? Was our view of ourselves any more realistic then? Did we really know who and what we were? I began to wonder.
Years after I finally got dried out in AA I came across a discussion of this question of “Who do you think you are?” in a book “The Way of Zen,” (Pantheon Books, 1959) by the philosopher, Alan Watts. He wrote: “. . .the conventional ‘self’ or ‘person’ is composed mainly of a history consisting of selected memories. . . . According to convention I am not simply what I am doing now. I am also what I have done, and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real ‘me’ than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is!”
Watts goes on to point out that the memories which make up a man’s picture of himself are highly selective. The number of events to choose from is infinite and a man picks to suit his own personality needs, and conventional standards. If we try to pick a new set without guidance we run into difficulties.
The “I” which I have taken for granted for so long, turns out to be not a solid structure at all but a shifting, fluid thing, like a handful of water. The question, “Who am I?” so frightened a friend of mine that he wound up in a mental hospital after a bad breakdown. The psychiatrist who put him together again sternly forbade him to think about who he was and told him to concentrate his mental energies, after working hours, on a hobby. He has been quietly gardening in summer and building fine furniture in winter ever since, dutifully obeying the doctor’s injunction not to wonder just who he is.
For this lad, flight from the tormenting question, “Who am I?” was probably the only safe measure. But we in AA seldom find so drastic a remedy advisable. In taking our “fearless moral inventory” we find out some surprising things about who this individual is who bears our name. And in the Steps dealing with the removal of character defects we come to learn that the ego-image, a mosaic of memories, is not a fixed and static thing. Old virtues appear from the past, blessing us; good actions we had forgotten lighten the picture for us a litle. We recover the memory of times which we had forgotten when we were brave, and when we were unselfish and when we were understanding and tolerant of others’ weaknesses and wickedness.
It seems to me, after a good many sober twenty-four-hour periods, that one of the greatest things AA brings to us is a change in the image of ourselves. And the point of change is the Eternal Now which is the country of God.
I once walked down a famous street with an AA friend, a former confidence man. He pointed out the hangouts of dope peddlers, hotels where he had once “taken off a score” from some larceny-minded “mark,” bars inhabited by pimps and steerers. That stroll through the streets of a familiar city was like a guided tour of evil. Finally he said, musingly, “That guy was really an anti-social character. He just sort of turned into smoke and drifted away my first week in the Fellowship. I don’t know where he went but I’m sure glad he’s dead.” He was speaking of himself-that-used-to-be. He had made the change-over to the New Man so completely that he could talk about his former adventures as if they had happened to someone else. As, in very truth, they had.
Our first jolt of reality, as alcoholics, comes on that awful day when we realize that something is the matter with the booze or at least its effect on us. Just maybe we can’t handle it any more! And from there, the honest look at ourselves, begins the transformation miracle.
Fifteen years ago I did an outstanding piece of work in my profession; people are still talking about it. But it is as if they are concerned with something another man did for I have hardly one single trait in common with that man back there. The things that he loved, or thought he loved, proved false. The things he hated proved objects of compassion. The things he wanted turned into shadows. Many of the things he despised proved to be treasures of the heart. That man is dead. I, thanks to God and AA, am alive.
I do not mean that I have cut off all memory of my past life. But it has been reinterpreted. I appreciate people whom I ignored then. I have compassion for people I admired then but admire no longer. Everything is changed, including my ego-image of myself. It is no longer solid, immovable. It is a light, airy thing, built of the breath of the Creator. The old, proud boast, “I’m going to live my own life!” has become nonsense. I have a definite feeling that instead of living “my own” life, as I would tie “my own” shoelaces, that I am being lived.
The women in AA also need to make a new selection from the memories of the past when they are building, through the program, the New Woman. Alcoholic women can get into such messy situations and are so cruelly exploited and abused, tormented by their own consciences worst of all. I think that the women, even more than the alcoholic men, need to be able to pick a new set of particles from the past to make a strong and confident “self.”
When we have taken the final drink, been to the first meeting, taken the initial inventory, helped with the first Twelfth Step call, when we have learned the beauty of life in the Everlasting Now, each of us must perform the office of coroner for the old self. Casting a steady backward glance we must be able to say to ourselves, “That man is dead.” Standing at the pin-point of Now is a new man, a child of God, constantly reborn.
All right.
Just who do you think you are?