Daily Reprieve

Source: c.1939, AAWS, Alcoholics Anonymous, “Bill’s Story”, p. 3

“God is either everything, or He is nothing.”

-Bill Wilson

My paraphrase of Bill’s words; The concept of God is either useful in all of my life’s circumstances, or he is useful in none of them.  That concept is either worthy of my absolute trust, or my absolute disregard.  It has the power to positively interact with me, and intuitively guide me, and responds in a way that I would see as love OR God is a persistent delusion socially re-inforced by some form of mortal fear (death, aging, limits in time, space, and resource).

The concept of Zero and the concept of God have much in common.  The usefulness of zero was debated, but finally acknowledged.  A symbol for absolute nothingness, a vacuum of existence, was useful in holding a place in defining the process of counting.  What if God is the symbol humans came up with to acknowledge universal infinity, the complete union of all things, the connection of all conscience, thus a place holder for super-conscienence.

Zero is the human symbol recognizing the significance of the existence of nothing.  Is there a place where absolutely nothing exists?  This could open all kinds of debates and arguments. But the usefulness of accepting zero is undeniable.

The cells in my body are individual living organisms, connected with one another through interdependence.  What concept does one of the individual cells in my body have of me.  I can see it as a separate and whole being.  But I don’t think it can recognize me in the same way.  As individuals join together, and respond to a need for interdependent connection, is another level of conscienceness created?  If my level of consciousness is ground zero, then the cell’s level of consciences is level -1.  And the human group associations I live in is consciousness level 1.

My recovery groups use the power of conscieness level one to overcome a problem I am powerless over in ground zero.  My alcoholism.  But like all journeys, there is the time I leave a place, and then there is a time for arriving at a destination.  As it says in the 9th step promises, before we are halfway through, we are going to know a new . . . destination.

So the steps of recovery point to levels that exceed that level one, and present the possibility of an infinite being that encompasses all levels of conscieness.  How would I ever conceive of such a being?   Step 11 is the continuation of a process begun in Step 3.  I trust that there is something there, that it seems to give a damn about me, and that my attempts to make conscience contact further expand and empower me.

Albert Einstein once said that we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

This entry was posted on March 7, 2010 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Addiction, Alcoholism, Journal, Life, Personal, Recovery, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.