The Search for Ecstasy – Grapevine Article May 1958 By Gerald Heard

A note from Bill W.

The Grapevine is trying out the idea of inviting an occasional article from its friends in the world around us. Gerald Heard, one of our most ardent well wishers, has sent in the “think piece” printed below. The views he here sets forth are sure to be stimulating to many an AA member.

NOBODY, IN OR OUT OF AA, can doubt that this–AA’s most remarkable attack upon a major complaint, alcoholism–has resulted in something much bigger, even, than its success against this most damaging social and individual disability.

Look first at the rise of what some of us call the “ad hoc churches.” These are the many anonymous groupings which, modelled on AA and using its main principles, have helped people to endure ordeals other than alcoholism and at the same time to help their follow sufferers. These other ordeals range from narcotic addiction through epilepsy, cancer, and heart surgery to the trials of bereavement and divorce.

Why has this happened and how may we in society as a whole avail ourselves of this widening applicability of the AA basic principles?

I find that it’s generally taken for granted by experts on the subject that alcoholism is a particular symptom of a very widespread distress, a kind of psycho-physical illness.

This basic notion is today gaining increasing attention among all doctors. With his extensive and convincing studies on “stress” and as a central part of his big theory, Dr. Hans Selye of Canada points out that most of the illnesses we now suffer from are not infective diseases–they are not caused by bacteria or viruses.

The diseases which interest him and which must increasingly interest our “oldstering” society are the big, slow-moving, wearing-down illnesses against which medicine fights decade-long rear actions: arthritis, asthma, alimentary canal ulcerations, loss of intestinal resilience, hardening of the arteries–yes, even, in certain cases, TB.

These diseases he regards as symptoms. . . . The body has been over-strained. In the attempt to release additional energy and to summon exceptional effort, the ductless glands (especially the suprarenals, glands which are readily affected by our aggressive emotions and drives) have been overworked. If you continue to overwork an organ it will begin to break down.

Dr. Selye has gone far to prove that much disease is not a real disease but a symptom. What we see as a sickness, and label with a medical-dictionary name, is really a result of the body’s desperate effort to meet our demands–an indication of the way we are overworking it.

This, of course, is an extension of an idea which has been current in a number of medical schools for the last twenty years. Psycho-somatic therapy believes that though the occasion of a disease may be an attack by bacteria, their power to lay us low depends on our general resistance.

Now what light does all this research throw in particular on alcoholism, in general on addiction (of which alcoholism is one type)–and most, comprehensively on that general susceptibility to breakdown of which addiction is only one form?

First, it would seem to show that none of us is living in a sufficiently tonic way, so as to be able to meet the stresses to which we are now bound to be exposed, without breakdown.

Second, the ways in which we try to bolster our defenses do not go deep enough. Take, for example, the best known “wonder drug,” penicillin. Indeed, all the antibiotics–of which penicillin has become the most relied upon–really deal only with an occasion, not its cause. They so slaughter all the bacteria that bad and good, friends and enemies all perish. The house is “left empty, swept and garnished,” and, as in the parable, far worse guests may enter and occupy.

But how are we to keep up a really deep-down, rock-bottom defense? For if, as the Quakers say, we try to “center down” what do we find? We don’t find a rock. Rather do we find a stream. That doesn’t mean we are just a flux of bubbles whose name is legion. It means that deep down we are a current. Our little surface crust wants to “stay put.” Our deep self wishes to move on, to grow.

There, I believe, lies the cause of our stress. That is why general resistance is itself as vain a dream as is a panacea drug that would keep us well for good. We are meant to grow, we are wired for intensity. Comfort, adjustment, security, adaptation–these are deadly terms for man.

Though alcohol is a narcotic, alcoholism (like all addictions) is not at base a search for utter sedation. It is a desire for that ecstasis, that “standing out” from the land-locked lagoons of conformity, out onto the uncharted high seas where the only map is the star-set heavens.

Alcoholism is, then, itself a master-indicator. For centuries it has been Western man’s standard alternative to a materialism that provides means without meaning and power without purpose. AA has proved that you cannot cure addiction by reason, by regime or by drugs. You must give the protestor-inebriate three things: (1) he must have a personal experience of purposive power; (2) it must be brought to him by one who had also been aghast at the emptiness of our way of living, who had fled to alcohol and then found a power greater than addiction; (3) then the salvaged person must find a group, a model society, whose members have gone through the same ordeal to the same initiation.

This, then, is what I believe to be the comprehensive meaning of AA. First, it has proved itself to be, salvation for those caught by the gravest symptom of our general distress–alcoholism. Next, it has been seen that its twelve-step method can be applied to succor those stricken by other distresses for which our educational training gives no adequate preparation. Third, since it indicates that because man is made for growth in consciousness as well as conduct and character and so must tire of everything but ecstasy–we must all of us learn how to train ourselves with exercises that teach us to meet life’s accidents as ordeals which, when thus taken, lead to initiation.

Only thus can we keep the initiative toward experience. Only thus can all events come to be regarded as opportunities for an embryonic growth, here and now, which prepares us for a maturity yet to come.