Five Years Abstinent: No Blow Up Dolls and No Goat fucking

In my work as an addiction psychiatrist I commonly advise people of the prognosis of their disease and the successful scientific treatments that have been beneficial.
I like to point to the studies, epidemiological and  anecdotal data which showed that those who attained 5 years of abstinence from drugs and alcohol  routinely had only  a few key points in common.
Number 1.  Persons with 5 years abstinence from drugs and alcohol had a HIGHER POWER.  Higher power in this case didn’t represent a white bearded god on a cloud or a big breasted woman deep in the sea.  What higher power referred to was simply something more important than drugs and alcohol.  Something that the person gave more power over their lives to.  It’s long been recognized that addiction is a religion. The drugs and or alcohol were the addict’s God, their direct dealer the deacon and the supplier the high priest of the cult church with all it’s rituals, paraphernalia and jargon. A higher power represented anything that was more important to the person than belonging to this church and religion.  Over the years patients had told me that their higher power was their children,  their family, their job, anything really.  Others had said that life it self was their higher power.  Addiction was killing them.  Some simply described their higher power as God.
C.S. Lewis the great Christian theologian said simply, “Why look in the wall for the architect?”.  Addicts and alcoholics are the most materialist hedonists.  Addiction is idolatry. They worship their addictive substance.  They commonly say their are atheists or agnostics when its obvious that they are stalwart members of their church of addiction.  They commonly say they don't want 'any religion' simply because their addiction is their religion. Translated they are really saying they're not ready to give up their addiction. Their brain is tricked into believing they are getting ‘high’ or even that what they are doing is a ‘party’.  Spirituality refers to an invisible God or power or force that people have in their lives and experience in their world especially after they’ve known the soul empty experience of addiction.  It is the interconnectedness and relationship of life.  It's there strongest in the prayer of the indigenous for 'all of my relations.'
For people to stay clean and sober there simply must be something else, something with greater meaning that gives more purpose and power to their lives than the slavery of the addiction. Their  dependency is making their dealer high priests rich in ferarri’s and yachts.
Scientifically today we measure a person's 'motivation to change' because it's obvious that it's hard for the addict to admit that they have been suckered or duped by the ultimate con artist. The emperor has no clothes and often giving up addiction and entering recovery means admitting to oneself at least that for years and thousands of dollars one has been going backwards.
The Motivation to change assessment describes a person as 'pre contemplation', a true zealot for the church of addiction, a person in 'contemplation' recognizing that addiction was "fun", now it's "fun and trouble" and actually they might be ready to get off the slow to quicking descent before it was just plain 'trouble'.  Determination phase is when one is there.  They've made the determination that they don't want the lie and want the truth of life instead. In 'Action" phase they're 'walking the walk and not just talking the talk' , they're changing their behaviour and making themselves accountable to a plan of recovery.
Number 2.  Persons with 5 years of abstinence belonged to a group that supported their abstinence. When they look for people at 20 years abstinence or more the majority of people they find abstinent belong to AA, NA or some religious organization such as church, temple or synagogue.  Dr. Carl Jung recognized that people who developed addiction were spiritual people but that they were tricked into seeking the holy spirit in the "spirits" bottle. His famous Latin phrase for this was "Spiritus contra Spiritum".  Dr. Carl Jung said in a letter to Bill Wilson, co founder of AA ,that  the ‘craving for alcohol, was the equivalent on a low level, of the thirst for spiritual wholeness.”  He went on to say, “‘alcohol' in latin is ‘spiritus’ and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is , “spiritus contra spiritum”. Addiction leads to alienation whereas recovery leads to participation.   At 5 years abstinent people found they were part of a better group. "We are not alone.” is the message that comes with recovery.  Though AA, NA and spiritual organizations were the most common groups there were many others that served as well such as community organizations like Kiwanis, Odd Fellows, Masons, Toast Masters.  These were not work associations as addicts and alcoholics commonly maintained work to the very last as work and work associations, professionals , unions and faculties gave them the finances to advance their addictions as well as the respectability to maintain the denial of the increasing desperation and the dehumanization.  With addiction people would rather be alone with their substance or drink or with others who shared their substances or drink than in any other recreational activity.
With respect to relationships and the damage to relationshionships, the delusion of addiction was best described by one recovered addict, “fucking a blow up doll and thinking it was love.”  Another said, “it got me high but it took away the sky”.  
Finally, Number 3.  The person was noted to have had a change in attitude.  The more one does drugs or alcohol, the more one minimizes the abnormality of the behaviour and the associations.  People who once loved to be outdoors will instead sit in a dingy bar all day or find themselves living behind closed curtains all the while thinking they’re ‘not that abnormal’.  Everything related to their addiction is justified and yet in recovery they have an awakening and increasingly see what they had become and want never to go there again.
My favourite description of this phenomena was a from fellow who said, “when I got off drugs my life got better immediately. I had money again. I had friends that weren’t trying to steal from me.  I had time and energy to focus on myself and my work and my family. Being an addict takes up all your time.  I had time and I put it to good use. At five years abstinent I was living in a beautiful condo in the west end, had a job I loved, friends I cared about. Nobody used drugs. No one knew that part of my life in detail, not that I hid it but I didn’t get into the sordid details and they just didn’t know.  I mean they knew but they didn’t know. It’s one thing to know that women and men exchange sex for drugs with the lowest scum of the earth and that we’d steal or lie and cheat. It's another thing knowing it. I ripped off my family. I’m not proud of that. Not the lying, betraying, not the person who  didn't care about anything or anyone.  But I’d changed.  It was a bad time in my life and now I was on the other side of it.
That’s when this guyI knew, I’d thought he had got clean and sober, showed up at my door one night.  I buzzed him in. Immediately he’s pulling out this powder,  showing me it and saying it was the best stuff ever.  He's wanting me to do it with him.  He's saying how he could even sell me some if I liked it.
Well, right there and then I kicked him out. I would have physically thrown him out if he didn’t go. I was really furious.   I shouted at him, “get the fuck out of here. I don’t do that shit any more” . When he was leaving I almost whispered, I was so angry, and embarrassed, I was embarrassed too.  I said ;don’t ever come round here again or don't even talk to me if  you’re not clean and sober. "
He went on to say, “I don’t think people get it.  What he’d done was an every day thing in my old life. But now, it may as well been having this guy show up at your westend downtown apartment. Right there at your condo where people know you as a regular guy.  Then there's this guy standing there with a goat and he's saying,
 ‘hey man I got a new goat.  You're really going to like it.  I brought it over so we both could fuck it. If you like it like before I know where we can get more goats to fuck."
That’s how weird it was for me having this guy I’d known in the past,  show up at my place with powder. "
"I realized my attitude had changed.   I was seeing drugs and addiction the way healthy people see it. I just say now.   If some one wants to do it, just leave me out of it.   Live and let live.  I don't fuck goats. so don’t bring any goats around my place.  I don’t want even to be  seen with guys who fuck goats. "
Dr. Vaillant, former head of psychiatry at Harvard studied addiction extensively throughout his career and noted that at 5 years abstinent the risk of a person relapsing to their previous level of abuse was no greater than the risk of an unidentified user becoming an alcoholic or addict to that extent.
Higher power, a supportive group and a change of attitude were the key features noted in those who remained abstinent 5 years.

My God

My God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipotential. My God is OM.  One Mind. Sounds like HOME.  Also AMEN or ALM.  We are created in the ‘image of God’.  This is the imagination as it were. I was surprised by a friend still dichotomizing reality.  He actually believed there was God and something else.  But Phillips addressed this best in “Your God is too small.”
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth etc.  In the beginning there was God and not ‘God and building blocks”.  God the Creator.  The creator created creation of the creator.  No of nothing else there’d be God and nothing.  The essence of the message of the great mystic, St. John of the Cross, who wrote Dark Night of the Soul was NADA.  Not God. There is nothing in this creation that is NOT GOD and to think of some thing like money, or an individual person, or substance, or a book as God is to make that thing an IDOL.  NADA means that’s ‘not god’.  CS Lewis the great Christian theologian and Jew lover said, “Don’t look for the architect in the wall.”
So this computer, my fingers, the seen and unseen, the indivisible divisibleness, the alpha and omega, are all God.  God is one.  God is love. These are statements of God or the nature of God or attributes.  Medieval theologians seriously asked how many angels could fit on the tip of a needle.  That was even before electron microscopes and that was before the Haldron collider particle accelerator.  Looking as deeply inward there is as much expanding mystery asthere is looking outward into the galaxy with the Hubble Space Telescope. The sacred is in the ‘aha’ moments.
Dr. Carl Jung talked about the 4th dimension, that world of synchronicity, where the 12 steppers are spiritually ‘rocketed’ , and what to the genius is commonly known as the “flow.” Right now my friends are asking if they write the poem or the poem writes them but that’s because in moments of insight the separation ceases to exist.
I like words.  My schizophrenic patients were as much an influence on this as the Oxford Dictionary.  But a world like “I-DEAS” holds in it the NADA truth of ’thoughts’ as ‘creatures’ the term C.S. Lewis used for them, not to be ‘idolized’, not to be given God like power, not to be worshipped.  Sensations are like this.  The drug addict, a true materialist hedonist, seeks that sense of ‘pleasure’ and worships it.
The idea of Jesus is profoundly different from the notion of Krisha.  In the eastern religion man evolves upward, much of his own doing, reaching higher and higher to greater and greater complexity until eventually he becomes God, experiencing Nirvana and passing beyond this dimensional world, beyond time and space into the One Mind.  This is contrasted by the western idea of enlightenment inherent in Jesus.  For Jesus is God come to meet and lift man up as on eagles wings to be with God.
The Christ Conscious yogi or mystic chants, “I am he I am he, make me the sea”.  By contrast the western Jesus aware saint says.  “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me.”
Prayer is speaking to God. Meditation is listening to God.  And the Sufi's twirl. In the experiences of dissociation there is a crack in the consciousness which lets The sacred in.  Carmelite Nuns meditating under PET Scans showed orgasmic brain waves enlightening all regions and special parts of the brain brightening and glowing for days after.  With cocaine, like other drugs, the functional MRI shows the blast  followed by the lights of the frontal lobe, or last developed, most human aspect of brain, shut off for weeks and months.  Devolution as opposed to evolution. The language of the left, getting high is really getting low whereas the language of the right in going slow is really going fast but neither matters because all roads lead to Rome where there is but one God and God is both heaven and hell. The concept of eternity or infinity wasn't the true translation of the Biblical and ancient texts because that waited the mathematic abstracts of Cartesian thought, the contribution of "Zero" of the east , (the story of Zero by Given a must read for the scientifically mystically minded). To the agrarian mind , 'a long time' is all that they measured time in, more truthful in reality than the abstraction of the mathematical without all the false prophecies of computer projections and numerological worship. One goes to hell for instance 'for a long time'.
Martin Buber the great Jewish theologian and mystic described the relationship of God and human as Person and God.  I and Thou.  HE said the primitive experience, or paranoid experience as psychiatrists would experientially describe it would be as fear based, I and It, whereas I and Thou is love based.  The immense beauty of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling and the mystical genius of Michelangelo was in showing an awakening languishing Adam reaching up with his finger as God is reaching down.
I am not Alone.
God is love.
God is chasing me as I am chasing him.
Jesus is dancing with me.
Jacob fought with  the Angel.
In the dance, in the struggle, in the crisis and calamity, it is all still God but I in fear retract into my own alienation and refuse to open up to the feeling of the sunshine on my face or the breeze in my hair.
When Alexander the Great met Diogenes, the cynic he asked him what he wanted and Diogenes answered that he wanted him to stand a little out of the sun.
The Wisdom literature is great.  The teaching stories are a delight. The path of virtue is the challenge.  We crawl as children and walk as men and women.  We have but this day that begins with a program of the past which we can not ascertain except with circumstantial evidence.  The past is a linear hypothesis that science says may indeed not exist except in the changing imagination of the collective unconscious.  Similarly we are part of God’s imagining of the future and can be in the here and now where the omnipotential is the greatest and we can embrace “Thy Will Be Done” or insist on ‘my will being done’.  Indeed the two are inseparable because separation is an illusion. The fish in the water don’t know the water any more than we listening to a gesticulating lady are rarely aware of her using the movement of the air to massage the relationship as she might be adding perfume to the conversation.  The subtlety upon subtlety is mostly beyond us unless we meditate and pray. Still the cacophony of the world. Still the senses
Be Still and Know That I am GOD.
Time to shower, another day of work, an experience with soap and water, then a rush to dress in fine clothing, the product of 80,000 years of industry and tailoring talent, then the immeasurable joy of climbing into a vehicle and experiencing the wonders of the scientific age, combustion and electricity and the pavement and city planning and law and order and a true genius of potential.
My little dog is patiently waiting for another walk that he might sniff the air and go with me to wherever I might take him today.  And I am to God as he to me.  I love that Dog spelt backwards, the words again, with their curious insights, spells God and the nature of the relationships.  I walk with Jesus as the footprints in the sand have taught me.  There is Grace, thank God.
I am not alone.