A monthly exploration of addiction and recovery through the lens of Buddhism. Read about Step One and Step Two.
Step Three: Turning It Over
"Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood him."
"Turning our will and our lives over to the care of God" is one of the most challenging, and for some, troubling, of the tasks that the Steps suggest. It sounds as if we are going to give up all control of our lives and throw ourselves at the mercy of some outside power.
That's not exactly what happens.
Certainly the Steps are trying to get us to be less compulsively controlling. The movement from the powerlessness of Step One to the power of Steps Two and Three is asking us to see how certain aspects of our thinking and actions were self-defeating. Here I want to distinguish between the ego-driven, deluded, selfish, unconsciously reactive, desire-self and the more conscious, aware, objective, compassionate and discriminating self. The former is the one that is powerless, that is addicted, that keeps us on the cycle of samsara, the constant birth and death of ego and the search for satisfaction. The latter can be called the "higher self" and is connected to our higher power -- some would say it is our higher power.
If we are to get and stay sober, we need to live less from the lower and more from the higher self. Turning our will and our lives over is the way we do this. This process has two components: will and life. The will in Buddhist teachings is associated with intention, and Right Intention (or Wise Intention) is a key aspect of the Noble Eightfold Path, the Buddha's prescription for freedom. The Buddha said that intention is what informs the results of actions, that is, the reason you do something is actually more important than what you do. If you act kindly out of kindness, the results are positive; if you act kindly out of selfishness, the results are not so positive. So before we even start to worry about changing our behavior, we need to look closely at our motivation, our intention. One way to describe the shift suggested in the Steps is that we have to put the search for truth and meaning before the search for pleasure. We have to ask ourselves what we really want in our lives. What do we think is going to bring us happiness? Is it sex, drugs, alcohol, gambling, eating, etc.? Or is it peace, a sense of connection with others, the joy of generosity, and the sense of a job well done? For most of us, when we seriously ask a question like this, it's obvious what the answer is.
Turning our will over means that we now are clear about how we want to live, that we've committed ourselves to living skillfully and wisely. That doesn't mean we'll always succeed (far from it), but it does mean that we know what direction we want to be aimed, and when we lose our way we know how to get back. In the same way that when we are meditating and get lost in thought, when we realize that's happened, we come back to the breath, to our intention to be present. This shift of intention has a profound effect on the direction of our lives.
Turning our lives over means that once we've changed our intention, we now change our actions. When we realize that karma is a power greater than ourselves, that our actions have real consequences that can't be avoided, we see that we need to align our lives with the laws of karma. One of the fundamental ways of doing that is to follow the Five Lay Precepts. These are the moral foundation of Buddhism, and they are much the same as the morality taught in al major religions: not to kill, not to steal, not to harm others with our sexuality, not to harm others with our speech and not to use intoxicants. This level of morality is essential for recovery because trying to get around the law of karma is just what addiction is. It's trying to get more pleasure and less pain than is actually possible -- it's trying to cheat the law of karma. When we break the essential moral laws, we are putting ourselves above the law, saying we can do whatever we feel like without consequences. When we do this we are breaking the human covenant, what makes us part of the human community, putting ourselves on the outside. This is also a statement about our relationship to life: we won't accept life on life's terms. We want to create our own rules, or lack of them. This is life-denying. When we act on our addiction we are turning away from life, saying that we don't value life, turning toward death.
Turning our will and our lives over is a huge letting go. It means trusting the universe, trusting that if we do the right thing and then let go, things will be okay; trusting that when things aren't going our way, we still need to stay on our path. Suzuki Roshi says "Even if the sun were to rise from the west, the Bodhisattva has only one way." This is the kind of trust and commitment that we need, not just for recovery from addiction, but to find the kind of happiness and peace that makes life truly worth living.
Exercise: Letting Go
This is a practice of surrender. In a sense it is "non-practice," not trying to control your experience so much as allowing it to come and go without grasping or pushing away.
Begin by taking a few mindful breaths, relaxing and settling into the body. Now open your awareness to the full range of senses, hearing sounds, feeling your body, feeling your breath and noticing thoughts. Don't try to guide the mind anywhere, just be aware of whatever is appearing in your mind and body moment to moment. As though letting a waterfall rain on you, let each moment come and go without clinging to anything, thought, feeling, sound or sensation. It's fruitless to try to catch the drops of water as they pass over you, just feel each passing sensation, sound, thought, without following it or holding on. Just keep letting go.
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Thanks,
Kevin
I enjoyed your perspective very much. AA loses many people because of the 3rd step and yet the 3rd step is critical to recovery in my opinion. I've advised people that it's not necessary to believe in a 'Higher Power', what's important is believing in something bigger than one's own ego. That could be the collective knowledge in an AA group or a Buddhist Sangha or the teachings of Buddhism as you illustrated. Your approach could appeal to many addicts who refuse to go to 12 step meetings because of the 'god' approach. Buddhism is a unique religion where there's no contradiction between the practice while holding the beliefs of an atheist or agnostic.
Addiction is kind of the ultimate control issue, and many recovering addicts don't see that their resistance to this step, and to "getting with the program" literally or figuratively, is based in the same psychological errors which facilitated their addiction in the first place.
Combine this with the fact that many recovering addicts have had bad experiences with traditional religion (usually fundamental Christianity), so the whole idea of a "higher power" is something they resist -- only being familiar with the idea of God in the dogmatic, fundamentalist Christian sense of that term.
Having (literally) pathological control issues, addicts and recovering addicts are also pathologically resistant to both loss of control and being controlled against their will.
Which brings us to what is quite possibly the essence of all spiritual traditions, including Buddhism:
Opening past the mistaken view of personal will (aka ego), and its impossible-to-resolve errors and effects (2+2 will never equal 3, no matter how unceasing the demands that it be so).
Jesus said "Thy will, not my will, be done."
Islam means "submission" (to Allah - to Wholeness).
Buddhism, and other practices-centric paths, dissolve the over-attachment to memory and conditioning with various techniques: meditation, directed breathing, inquiry, etc.
http://livingunbound.net/lessons-resources/level-1/resources/12-step-programs/
There is a place of conciousness which we predominently inhabit - the individual egoic mind; thought occurs at this place (Manas - or mind). It has a very difficult time letting go of itself - it has so much invested there. There is a yet higher place (and many above it I hear), called Budhi (hence the term Buddha - or the 'Christ' in our terms), above it Atma. A triad - and the origin of the term 'holy trinity'.
How one's conciousness moves from Manas to Budhi - that is THE question I think. I suspect it has to do with letting go as the author says, an impersonal event, allowing self to not be so involved or invested. It can be practiced in everyday events - walking, talking, eating, whatever. Habit becomes character, which becomes destiny as they say.
Ultimately, that's what all spiritual practices and systems, including twelve step programs, are for:
Releasing the artificial over-focus on mind-forms, and related, erroneous conditioning (provided by those who have that same artificial over-focus -- i.e. very close to 100% of humanity -- and which includes parents, teachers, friends, society overall, and so on).
"Letting go" is simply opening past pathological over-focus on ideas, and opening to the reality of the flowing of life.
Doing so completely puts us in touch with the full range of consciousness. One way of articulating this is what you wrote above -- and every so-called mystical system (i.e. yoga, tantra, advaita, kabbalah, sufism, Christian mysticism and gnosticism, and so on) has its own symbols and description -- but the map from artificial constriction to natural expansion which they posit is the same.
The ultimate effect of letting go isn't transcendence - it's balance.
Transcendence must be experienced, so that we can come to understand how our pure, changeless inner awareness is inherently free from anything it's aware of ... yet to "camp out" there, as some spiritual practitioners do, is to be half-baked, so to speak.
When it all resolves, being in a state of release is simply the natural state -- and all the fears that what "needs to happen" won't happen, are seen to be either false, or, far more often, not to matter at all, being based in old, error-based ideas.
Just let go.
http://livingunbound.net
That's been my experience.
Respectfully, this isn't true.
There is escape.
This has been my experience.
And yes, even meditation can become a tool for ego keeping itself employed (aka "keeping the dream in place").
What I found most helpful was not only to practice meditation, but also, to become clear on how the full range of consciousness works, and what to look for, and what to do, at each step along the way.
I know quite a few people who have "escaped" (all the way back here), most of whom have utilized a combination of daily practices (i.e. meditation, directed breathing, etc.) - which, after some basic benefits of daily meditation are gained, in terms of inner stillness, are combined with (self) inquiry and observation during daily life.
This is the essence of the approach of all mystical (practices-centric) spiritual systems.
Just notice: "there is no escape" is a thought.
If you are aware *of* that thought, you're not that that thought (or, as observation will show you, anything else you can be aware of, no matter how subtle - including even your own sense of self, or anything else that can be experienced).
The "awareness of" that is living every moment, behind all the filters - is ever-free, right here, right now.
Most people have such deep conditioning driving over-focus on form, that they're not aware of this.
However, awareness can't be anywhere "else" -- awareness itself is the very ground of being.
http://livingunbound.net
I thank all those who have made comment to the single pointed journey to enlightenment from the EGO Self to THE SELF from each persons perspective. It is the essence of Buddha I have been taught and come to know.
Wholeness.
"Anything which says 'two', not 'one', is a lie."
~Jed McKenna
This awesome article is one of many sources that have been providing me with some new and very useful direction- and it has NO conflict with any new understanding I have gained. Thank you, Mr. Griffin....
While I believe you're correct here, I think we should examine a little more closely how this would best be accomplished. The way you express it gives (to me at least) the impression that extinguishing the will is itself an act of will; it's as though a person should set out with the objective to actively exterminate the will.
The Vipassana method, as I understand it, counsels not actively opposing or attempting to suppress the will, but dispassionately standing back and mindfully observing the process and structure of each act of willing as it unfolds. The trick is to will but not to be unconsciously caught up in the process of willing.
For instance, I notice that acts of willing I have subjected to this approach have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I observe sensations of dissatisfaction with a certain situation, the anger that arises that something is not as I believe it ought to be. Then comes the act of willing itself, that the situation should be changed. Finally, the resolution: either I resolve to change the situation, or I get tired of obsessing about it and move on to other issues.
Mindfully observing all of this tends to soften, de-fang, and even completely dissolve the will in each particular instance. If I understand correctly, this is the Vipassana method of extinguishing the will.
I like the phrase "opening past the personal will" .... I feel it describes the essence of all effective spiritual paths, fairly well.
We open from the dream of personal will, which comes from artificial over-focus on memory and conditioning and related erroneous desires, thoughts, feelings, etc.
When we do this, we find that, as very-real-world spiritual teacher Adyashanti has said repeatedly: "Life knows what it's doing."
It's true.
The ego is the experience of flowing river water, dreaming it is ice.
The path to liberation is "less like climbing a mountain, more like melting."
And when we melt ...... "Ah, flowing."
"If I choose to let anger come up, then I will be an angry person and plant the seed to react with anger in the future."
Respectfully, I disagree with this. I've never experienced anger as a choice - have you? The initial reaction is something the body-mind does, as a reaction - like the jerking of our knee, reacting to the doctor's hammer-tap.
Anger happens; attachment to anger, and related conditioned thoughts and feelings, causes it to persist.
Animals experience anger -- but always very briefly, then it's gone.
Human thinking evaluates anger as negative, while allowing conditioning to exacerbate it.
In the state of natural release, anger can arise, it's allowed, it passed through - and it's all perfectly fine - and anger becomes very infrequent.
The fat little guy you are referring to is called Potai. That is not The Buddha.Siddhartha was probably quite skinny and is portrayed that way always.
Buddhists to not consider The Buddha to be a god. Just an enlightened being.
Just thought I would correct your 'facts'.
With regard to the third step, I've heard him say, and have read from his writing, that he overcame the "God" aspect of this step by replacing "him" with "it" in the traditional 12-step verbiage. That helped me too.
Some people admit to their addiction but do nothing to about it.
Some individuals will pour all of their might into ending their addiction. They succeed but go no further.
It takes more than self control. It takes penetration (keen observation into the etiology of the addictive behavior as well as tracing its sources.) Only after identifying the root causes for this tendency is the addictive personality able to grow. Many stop upon the wagon and go no further.
Surrendering to a higher power or karma does not cut it. Karma is merely action, the cause and effect of the complex web of existence in which the person's threads are inextricably intertwined. Rather than surrendering it takes an unrelenting effort to observe behaviors and analyze their source. This involves (1) the practice of equanimity (calm abiding of mind) (2) dialectical contemplation by probing questions that are felt as well as mentally articulated to get at the root of the issues at hand.
This cannot be done in a solitary manner. One is obliged to connect with others seeking compatriots (friends) in this quest of self observation.
Peace. :)
Our intellect, reasoning and cognitive abilities are drowsy because we are our passion's slaves. I have found the way to forgive -- or get rid of feelings anger and resentment towards someone for an offense or mistakes -- by getting an insight about myself from the inventory psychoanalysis of the AA path and also, from the Insight meditation, Vipassana, which the Buddha had developed to end suffering.
You can read more about this way of changing human nature in this book of mine: http://www.amazon.com/12-Steps-Day-Lost-Path/dp/1453730168/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1288469502&sr=1-1
and this article on Insight meditation: http://greathumancapital.wordpress.com/2007/04/05/pi-day-reflections-on-einstein-and-vedanta/
And then, I hope you make all attempts at falsifying what I have written. For, it is only when all attempts at falsification fail, that a theory can become a scientific theory.