How It Works and the Oneness of the Universe – Jessie P.

Hi everybody, I'm Jessie. I'm very grateful that I get to be sober on this day of days. I have a talk that I've written about non-theism and the 12 steps so a lot of my story or not a lot some of my stories that okay I'm honored to be talking today about a topic that is very important to me, which is leading a life with the 12 steps, a sober life and having non-theistic understanding of the world. The first day I stepped into the doors of AA, I was confronted with the issue and now when I'm 26 years sober I'm still living the program so going to meetings and still continuing to work with the issue. I'm going to share some of my story and I want to preface it by the disclaimer that what I share is just my story in my understanding and I don't speak for anybody else. So be patient. A good place to start is definition of theism. I looked it up on dictionary.com. It had two definitions. The first, a belief in one God as the creator and ruler of the universe without rejection of revelation. And the second was the belief in the existence of God or gods as opposed to atheism. And for my purposes, I see theism as the belief where there is a centralized Godhead. And on this day of Christian tradition, from which the Twelve Steps were derived, is, of course, atheistic tradition. A little bit longer? Okay. I think... All right. So in 1981, when I was 21 years old, I went to my first AA meeting. At that meeting, they closed with the Lord's Prayer. It was the first time I had ever heard the Lord'S Prayer. I didn't know the words, and that was pretty humiliating. I had not been brought up with any religious instruction. On the contrary, I was brought up in an environment that was hostile towards religion. My parents come from different traditions. My father was brought-up Episcopalian, and he was devout when he was young, but as a teenager, he rejected the church. And my mother is from a 100% Jewish family who really didn't practice their religion but lived with Judaism as a cultural identity and I believe her family was very affected by the Holocaust and was left really without faith. My parents never taught their children they got existed. It's difficult to say what they thought because they were caught up in their own personal problems and addictions and they didn't really parent. I identify myself as an adult child alcoholics because my parents drank daily and created a home full of anger. As a child I loved a booklet of Christmas carols that found in my house. I remember those lyrics and I felt the awe and beauty behind the faith in the word. My mother was offended by this book of carols. She was okay with Christmas as Santa but wanted Christ out at Christmas. She made fun of me that I must not want to be Jewish because I learned the hymns and I think I became very private about my feelings about the hymn and God. I heard at home that religion was the opiate of a people and that people who needed God were weak minded and couldn't face up to life as it really is. Religion or spirituality was a crush. My mother believed that all organized religions oppressed women. I think there's some degree of truth in these criticisms, which makes them that much more toxic. My father was a Christian, and he was a Catholic. My mother didn't recognize that religion may have helped a lot of women in building community and my parents didn't see that people strive for spiritual understanding because people recognize there's more going on than surface appearances so I had a rough childhood it's difficult to talk about what happened when I was young so here's my qualification I started drugs when I was 12 I tried to kill myself when I 16 after my suicide attempt I switched from drugs to alcohol and I came to AA when I was 21. At 21, I was flunking out of college for the second time directly because of my alcoholism. Before I came for the program, I loved finding people who believed in God. I loved to argue with them and point out where their logic in having faith failed. I was probably pretty hard to bear. The first time I read the Bible was in a college course on the New Testament a few months before I came to AA. And I enjoyed the course. And cultural references that used to baffle me made sense after I read the Bible. And I think I gained some sensitivity towards people who had faith. What led to my coming into the program was a spiritual experience. After a night of excessive drinking with a girl, the girl who I was drinking with that night puked all over herself and almost choked to death on her own, puking in my dorm room. I was so drunk that my roommate had trouble getting me conscious enough to help out with my friend. The next day, I got on my knees and I prayed for help. I had never done that before. I fell asleep and I slept so well, like I was a young child. and when I woke up I felt good and peaceful and loved then after a few minutes of being awake I started to piece together what had happened the night before and very tangibly the dread regret and anguish that I normally lived with came back And within a few days, I had the big book in my hand. I found it in my house, my parents' house. My mom said that she thought it had been my paternal grandfather's. He did not get sober, but he died from an infection when he was in his 30s. My dad was a child. So maybe he tried to get sober. It's like a first edition big book. I read the big book while sipping whiskey out of a coffee mug and then I consciously reamed myself up with booze what was striking about my doing so is that normally I didn't have control over how much I drank but this time I did it took about four or five days of drinking he left each day and then when I was two days away from a drink I went to my first meeting the first meeting I went to was in a church basement and to get to the basement there was a wide indoor staircase where the 12 steps were hanging over the steps I remember looking at the steps and seeing God referred to over and over again and thinking that I was heading into new territory I wondered what was going to happen but I felt that keep on drinking was to die miserably and I didn't want to be miserable. I didn' t want to die miserable. At the end of the meeting they said the Lord's Prayer and I watched. I had no idea who the God was but they seemingly think people were praying too. I felt like I came home when I came to the program. I liked the people. I wanted to have faith and I tried to have face. I spoke to lots of people to try to find out what they believed God was and I tried praying. I felt gratitude for a second chance in life and I began having spiritual experiences as life became real to me again. For me, having spiritual experience is a waking up to new feelings, new attitudes and new understandings of the world. I studied AA literature and I became convinced that self-centeredness was the defining characteristic of alcoholic thinking. Even as I was growing and changing, I couldn't and I didn't have faith in a deity external to me who was listening and making judgments about what should be going on here on earth and in our human lives. It just didn't make sense to me. I couldn'T make it make sense for me. I thought maybe it was something about being brought up without a faith, and I kept on. I had shaky sobriety, and I periodically got drunk for my first few years in AA. And the yes we spoke about in the program began to happen to me. The last day I drank, I went to a meeting and was asked to read how it works. I said I shouldn't because I had alcohol in me. I felt like such a loser, and the expression in the person's eyes I said that to kind of reflected that. But I kept coming back to meetings, and somehow I did eventually stop drinking. My last drink was December 4th, 1983. Greece. I went to meetings every day for that first year, and again, I would talk to almost anybody about what they understood God to be. I continued to pray to a God I didn't know because people in the program told me to pray. I would give thanks for the chance to live a sober day in the morning and give thanks that I had lived another sober day at the end of the day. I developed the discipline of reading something spiritual every morning when I woke up and every evening before going to sleep. I created affirmations I could use where I had no internal resistance to them and the one that I used most or made up was God is here with me now. I don't know how I made this up but it sounds pretty Buddhist to me now One day I was pestering Mary, a wonderful elderly catholic woman about what god was i did this often and this day we were walking on the path that led to the parking lot from the meeting and she was getting tired of me and she said in an aggravated voice jesse god is reality that hit me like a bowling ball and i do think it's true god is not for me a theistic out there separate from me and everything i know but it's everywhere reality for me the trick in getting the third step was to have a God consciousness which turns out just to be awareness as I now put the two together reality and awareness I think I was working with some basic Buddhist elements I just wish I knew back in 1983 that Buddhists were around in living bodies for the first 10 years of my sobriety I pried to be atheist I I worked the steps. I went to a ton of meetings. I read Emmet Fox and William James. I studied the Bible and went to church. I tried a few different churches, but I thought I simply did not have the basic Christian beliefs. I figured maybe it was because of Jewish genes or maybe it's because my parents Or maybe it is because my parent had been lousy parents and I couldn't trust a spiritual parent. But I did have some sort of an understanding of the oneness of reality, and I would call back God. And I did practice the principles of the program which I see as honesty in admission of powerlessness and personal inventory, openness in sharing in the fifth step and being teachable in the sixth and seventh steps, and service in the ninth and twelfth steps. I found spirituality in listening, both inside and outside of meetings, and from sharing when I felt moved to do so. I felt a little like a cheater because I would use the language of God in the program knowing that my belief was different from the people who seemed so certain in their faith. In the meantime, during the first ten years of my sobriety, my life blossomed. I got married, I returned to college, and did very well in college once over. i did some therapy to deal with family of origin issues and to decide if i could parent and when i was five and a half years sober andrew my son was born life was good i loved where i lived in huntington new york i loved being a mom and a wife and a homemaker My somewhat blissful days of having a truce with God ended on December 24, 1992 when my daughter was diagnosed with a condition called Turner Syndrome or TS. My daughter was two days old and it was Christmas Eve. From the description of the condition I could see it would greatly affect what was possible for Sarah. The doctor said that what she had was a lightning strike. It was a chromosome abnormality, but not genetic in that it's not inherited. In my mind, that meant if Sarah was a God, her having CS was something that was in God's hands. Before I got the diagnosis, I was filled with hope that I called spirituality and my spirituality was like a filled crack-up. So when I heard of the diagnosis it was as if the plug was pulled from the tub and all that spirituality or hope drained away. I lost all faith that I had mustered up in my first ten years of sobriety. I could not believe in a God that gives infants huge medical problems intentionally or haphazardly. So to me, either God was unfair in a very cruel way to my daughter, or God was impotent and didn't act when he should have, or choice C, there is no God directing things. The experience of my daughter having such big problems brought me face-to-face with the immaturity of my beliefs about God, about life, and about death. Without knowing it, I was requiring of God that God take care of me and my family in such a way that haphazard tragedies would not happen in our lives. That was immature. I had to take life as it is given just like everybody else in the world now and throughout history. Dealing with Ferris diagnosis was life on rice terms. To me, it felt like everything wasn't all right anymore, I thought I'd talk in meetings about my crisis of faith. And at first I assumed that after a few months I would find greater meaning in what was happening. But what happened was that my challenges increased. I had clearly lost faith. I wondered how I could work the program without faith. I began having more issues with the program literature and the language in the program around God. It seemed to me that God was not there for me. What was there for my family for me was reality and I had a lot to do to take care of my family. I had lots to learn about life and living with chronic health issues and chronic doctors appointments and I got about the task of doing it. As I learned to live while parenting an infant with chronic help issues I began to see emptiness in what people say to each other. I felt I could see through the veils that people create about their lives. To people in the program, I would say I was having an anti-spiritual awakening because instead of gaining God consciousness, I was seeing life without a God overlay. But really, I think I was Having a spiritual awakening that just didn't look like what I was expecting. When Sarah was two, we moved to Minnesota. I was doing my best to keep my family together and to help my kids thrive. At this time, I investigated a Buddhist organization where people chant. I spent a lot of time chanting the Lotus Sutra. In the action of chanting, I was able to summon some feeling of connection and safety. At around this time I read Ploydo Rinpoche's book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I was deeply impressed with what I read and looked up his organization which follows the Stretton tradition but they didn't have any contacts in Minnesota so I figured there were no blues here. In January 1995 I got Tor Jovan Poche's daily meditation book, Limps After Glimpse, which I included in my morning and evening contemplation period for the next ten years I would I would like to read sorry I would love I would also like to read a page from one passage so I think I will you all have the karma to take one spiritual path or another and I would encourage you from the bottom of my heart to follow with complete sincerity the path that inspires you most. If you go on searching all the time, the searching itself becomes an obsession and takes you over. You become a spiritual tourist, bustling about and never getting anywhere. As Poitou Rinpoche says, you leave your elephant at home and look for its footprints in the forest. Following one teaching is not a way of confining you or jealously monopolizing you. It's a compassionate and practical way of keeping you centered and always on your path, despite all the obstacles that you and the world will inevitably present. For many years, I took the 12 steps as my spiritual path. I did a lot of searching outside of AA, but I never stayed from the 12 Steps and participation in AA. After a year of being in that chanting organization, I backed out of it because it started looking like a cult to me. But I continued to do silent chanting on my own, and I feel like I was going to ACA and AA. Then in the beginning of 2007, I read Hema Chodron's book, which I found very inspirational. The Buddhist organization she is associated with does have a Minnesota center and I began practicing meditation there. I felt then and I feel today a great affinity with Buddhist teaching. In the spring of 2008, I took refuge vows. There are many wonderful people in this other sangha. But over time, I became uncomfortable there because of the alcohol use. I felt I could not take in any newcomer to that Sangha. So I started looking at the relationship of sobriety and Buddhism, including the precepts, which one of the prefects is to refrain from getting and taking mind-altering substances. I first came to Klausenwater for the 12-7 Buddhism retreat in 2008, and i found the retreat to be a really powerful experience my next experience here at clouds was the precepts class in the fall of 2008. it was a great class and the prefects were looked at from many different angles after going through the 12th southern bluesman retreat in 2009 i never stopped coming to clouds so i switched stronger i have found here what i've been looking for in a spiritual life a teacher a community teachings which reflect what I see is true and real opportunities to be involved in something positive and a place to heal I've experienced a lot of growth through listening to Dharma talks going to the shins which are intensive Zen meditation retreats and I'm so happy I want to return to the 12 steps in non-theism. My primary 12 step experience has been through AA, so I'm familiar with AA literature. So I'm going to go over some examples of how non-theism is addressed in AA literature. Well first there's the tradition, the third tradition which is also stated in the preamble is the only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking. To me this is a great tradition opening the door of AA to recovery to anybody who wanted it. In the 12 and 12 on the chapter on the third tradition there's a discussion about an atheist named Ed, page 147. The chapter describes how Ed was a real tolerance tester for the group because when he shared, he talked about how he didn't think AA needed all the God stuff. The group found this talk painful and when Ed eventually slipped, no one would go on a 12-step call to help him. The chatter in the 12-12 goes on to say that Ed found back to the clips and returned to the group able to join in with their prayer and meditation the chapter concludes in our quote quote so the hand of providence gave early so they had a providence early gave us a sign that any alcohol is a member of our society if he says so close quote my friends from this story is that as atheism was tolerated in the end because it was a passing phase and he got over it. This is not a helpful message to me. I'm no longer looking to gain a theistic faith. So as a Buddhist, I take in the tradition, I take the tradition at faith value. I belong because I have a desire to stop and stay, stop drinking. I see the example given in the chapter on the third tradition as not very well thought out. Not a good example of the tolerance that is the spirit of the third edition. Moving on to the big book. Dr. Bob's story is great. He is a co-founder and I identify with plenty in his story such as alcohol, smoking in college. I identify with his attitude when he got sober. Quote, I fooled myself to believe that I once had the privilege of being able to drink and had abused it so frightfully that it was withdrawn. I had that same thought. So Dr. Bob goes on to say at the end of the story, quote, if you think you are an atheist, agnostic or skeptic or have some other intellectual pride which keeps you from accepting what is in this book, I feel sorry for you. I am offended by atheism and agnosticism as being classified as forms of intellectual pride. My Buddhist understanding is that, as individuals, we are on the path when we examine our beliefs and assumptions. I think that we all lapse into intellectual pride at times, atheist or not, when we feel too certain about our beliefs. In other words, when we have solidified our understanding of reality, we have possibly slipped into intellectual pride. So I'm not offended by the idea that people suffer from intellectual pride, people do, but it is incorrect to say that somehow the folks who are accepting God with a capital G are not involved in intellectual pride and the people questioning their beliefs do have intellectual pride or take issue with the assumption that a sincere non-belief in God is intellectual pride. So I take what I like out of Dr. Bob's story and read the rest. I think his point was that atheists and the like need to have an open mind about spiritual matters to recover. And my experience, and in my experience recovery does require openness. To gain recovery we need to be willing to change our attitudes, see if we're not. how it works is often read at the beginning of AMU and its theistic language is always something I have to work with quote there is one who has all power that one is God may you find him now as a Buddhist I do like some of the language here Zen Buddhism has Taoist roots so the concept of oneness is part of Zen I translate There is one who has all power, too. There is the oneness of the universe that contains everything, is infinite, and so all power is within this oneness. That oneness God is translated to I am awed by the oneliness. The complete interdependent universe of which I am a part is awe-inspiring. Some people call that oneness god. May you find him now is translated into being here now. In this instant, the universe is unfolding and I can experience it by getting out of my head, looking around and feeling my heart and I feel enthusiasm for studying the Dharma. May you find him now as an imperative telling me to study, to learn and not waste my life in the unexamined state of mind of greed, hate and delusion to feed poisons and Buddhism so I'm okay with how it works although I am uncomfortable thinking that the people around me are speaking of these words differently than I am The Lord's Prayer After being in AA I memorized the Lord's prayer I didn't really like saying it because I thought it was offensive to my Jewish ancestry but I wanted to find the God I was hearing about when I was first in the program So for a time, I did say it in meetings. But in the late 80s, I stopped saying it in meetings. I felt saying a prayer that was specific to the Christian faith at meetings sent a wrong message. It made AA seem Christian. My experience with home groups is that after I am established as a regular and I do not say the Lord's Prayer, I bring up the topic of the Lord'S Prayer at a business meeting saying that I would like to join in a closing prayer, but that I cannot say it's the Lord's Prayer and would the group be willing to end with a Serenity Prayer, the Third Step Prayer or the Seventh Step Prayer. This strategy has been successful most of the time and I will say the Serenite Prayer, the Third step prayer or the seventh step prayer at the end of the meeting. Now I like the Lord'S Prayer. Emmett Fox, the Christian heretic who tried to sort of fuse Christianity and Buddhism in the early 1900s wrote a beautiful interpretation of the LordS Prayer that helped me get comfortable with the prayer. But to me, how I feel about the Lord's Prayer is besides the point. I want the 12-step program to be there for people without confronting them with a specific religion. So I can join in the prayer silently, although I rarely do. Most of the time when others are saying the Lordís Prayer at a meeting, Iím trying to send out loving kindness to the people in the room and the people en general. so I had a slow evolution towards Zen Buddhism and I'm grateful to be where I am now to me there is no inherent conflict between 12 steps and Buddhism it's always the tension of being in the minority I've got to sum up that's two paragraphs left one observation I made when composing this talk is that I feel very defensive about other people's theism. It's as if I assume I'm going to be judged by their gods. I'm glad to see this so I can work with it and not project my fears onto other people. I've also felt very defensive around the idea of karma in the same way, but my ideas around what karma is have changed. I understand the principle of karma is simple cause and effect or call and response but the workings of karma here in our world is mind-bogglingly complex so for my daughter's tf i know that one out of every 4 000 births will be a child with tf to me that is humanity's karma or community karma There are many human conceptions and many births and there are mind-boggling number of variations, no, of variables that affect each conception. I believe it would be impossible to trace an exact cause for Sarah having T.S. Sarah was born into the karmic reality of having TS and she will have to live with all the effects of the birth so that is her karma but there's no simple and moralistic explanation on why it is her Karma or to take my own birth I was born into a family with a long history of alcoholism abusive behaviors and trauma I see community karma when I see the pattern of abuse in my family history. So whoever was going to be born into my parents was going to have some heavy karma. So I live with my karma, the fact of what happened in my life but the causes and conditions that led up to what happened involve everything in the universe. It's not personal to me. I want to end with a line from the Third Step Prayer. Relieve me of the bondage of self. This line which stresses a central idea in AA seems to me a totally Buddhist thought. In Buddhism understanding the fundamental delusion, in Buddhist understanding the fundamental delusions that gets our entire misery and dissatisfaction going is the belief that we have an individualized self that we need to protect. Because of this belief in itself we waste all of our energy on self-preservation and self-centeredness. As a person in recovery and as a person on the Buddhist path, I will be relieved with the bondage of self.