Why an Open Mind Is the Only Requirement for Step 2 – Taco M.

Step 2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. The moment they read step two, most AA newcomers are confronted with a dilemma, sometimes a serious one. How often have we heard them cry out look what you people have done to us. You have convinced us that we are alcoholics and that our lives are unmanageable. Having reduced us to a state of absolute helplessness, you now declare that none but a higher power can remove our obsession. Some of us won't believe in God, others can't, and still others who do believe that God exists have no faith whatever he will perform this miracle. Yes, you've got us over a barrel all right, but where do we go from here? Let's look first at the case of the one who says he won't believe, the belligerent one. He is in a state of mind which can be described only as savage. His whole philosophy of life in which he so gloried is threatened. It's bad enough, he thinks, to admit alcohol has him down for keeps. But now, still smarting from that admission, he is faced with something really impossible. How he does cherish the thought that man, risen so majestically from a single cell in the primordial ooze, is the spearhead of evolution and therefore the only God that his universe knows! Must he renounce all this to save himself? At this juncture his AA sponsor usually laughs. This, the newcomer thinks, is just about the last straw. This is the beginning of the end. And so it is. The beginning of the end of his old life and the beginning of his emergence into a new one. His sponsor probably says, take it easy. The hoop you have to jump through is a lot wider than you think. At least I found it so. So did a friend of mine who was a one-time vice president of the American Atheist Society but he got through with room to spare. Well, says the newcomer, I know you're And telling me the truth, it's no doubt a fact that AA is full of people who once believed as I do. But just how in these circumstances does a fellow take it easy? That's what I want to know." That, agrees the sponsor, is a very good question indeed. I think I can tell you exactly how to relax. You won't have to work at it very hard either. Listen, if you will, to these three statements. First, Alcoholics Anonymous does not demand that you believe anything. All of its 12 steps are but suggestions. Second, to get sober and to stay sober, you don't have to swallow all of Step 2 right now. Looking back, I find that I took it as piecemeal myself. Third, all you really need is a truly open mind. Just resign from the debating society in, quit bothering yourself with such deep questions as whether it was the hen or the egg that came first. Again I say, all you need is the open mind. The sponsor continues, Take for example my own case. I had a scientific schooling. Naturally I respected, venerated, even worshipped science. As a matter of fact, I still do, all except the worship part. Time after time my instructors held up to me the basic principle of all scientific progress. Search and research, again and again, always with an open mind. When I first looked at AA my reaction was just like yours. This AA business, I thought, is totally unscientific. This I can't swallow. I simply won't consider such nonsense. Then I woke up. I had to admit that AA showed results, prodigious results. I saw that my attitude regarding these had been anything but scientific. It wasn't AA that had the closed mind. It was me. The minute I stopped arguing, I could begin to see and feel. Right there, step two gently and very gradually began to infiltrate my life. I can't say upon what occasion or upon what day I came to believe in a power greater than myself, but I certainly have that belief now. To acquire it, I only had to stop fighting and practice the rest of AA's program as enthusiastically as I could. This is only one man's opinion based on his own experience, of course. I must quickly assure you that AA's tread innumerable paths in their quest for faith. If you don't care for the one I've suggested, you'll be sure to discover one that suits if only you look and listen. Many a man like you has begun to solve the problem by the method of substitution. You can, if you wish, make AA itself your higher power. Here's a very large group of people who have solved their alcohol problem. In this respect, they are certainly a power greater than you who have not even come close to a solution. Surely you can have faith in them. Even this minimum of faith will be enough. You will find many members who have crossed the threshold just this way. All of them will tell you that once across, their faith broadened and deepened. Relieved of the alcohol obsession, their lives unaccountably transformed, they came to believe in a higher power and most of them began to talk of God. Consider next the plight of those who once had faith but have lost it. There will be those who have drifted into indifference, those filled with self-sufficiency who have cut themselves off, those who become prejudiced against religion and those who are downright defiant because God has failed to fulfill their demands. Can any experience tell all these they may still find a faith that works? Sometimes AA comes harder to those who have lost or rejected faith than to those who never had any faith at all, for they think they have tried faith and found it wanting. They've tried the way of faith and the way no faith. Since both ways have proved bitterly disappointing, they have concluded there is no place whatever for them to go. The roadblocks of indifference, fancied self-sufficiency, prejudice and defiance often prove more solid and formidable for these people than any erected by the unconvinced agnostic or even the militant atheist. Religion says the existence of God can be proved. The agnostics say it can't be proved, and the atheist claims proof of the non-existence of God. Obviously, the dilemma of the wanderer from faith is that of profound confusion. He thinks himself lost to the comfort of any conviction at all. He cannot attain even in a small degree the assurance of the believer, the agnostic or the atheist. He is the bewildered one. Any number of AAs can say to the drifter, yes, we were diverted from our childhood faith too. The overconfidence of youth was too much for us. Of course, we were glad that good home and religious training had given us certain values. We were still sure that we ought to be fairly honest, tolerant, and just, that we are to be ambitious and hardworking. We became convinced that such simple rules of fair play and decency would be enough. As material success founded upon no more than these ordinary attributes began to come to us, we felt we were winning at the game of life. This was exhilarating and it made us happy. Why should we be bothered with theological abstractions and religious duties or with the state of our souls here or hereafter? The here and now is good enough for us. The will to win would carry us through. But then alcohol began to have its way with us. Finally when all our scorecards read zero, and we saw that one more strike would put us out of the game forever, we had to look for our lost faith. It was in AA that we rediscovered it, and so can you. Now we come to another kind of problem, the intellectually self-sufficient man or woman. To these, many AAs can say, yes, we were like you, far too smart for our own good. We love to have people call us precocious. We use our education to blow ourselves into prideful balloons that we were careful to hide this from others. Secretly, we felt we could float above the rest of the folks on our brain power alone. Scientific progress told us there was nothing man couldn't do. Knowledge was all powerful. Intellect could conquer nature. Since we were brighter than most folks, so we thought, the spoils of victory would be ours for the thinking. The god of intellect displaced the God of our fathers. But again, John Barleycorn had other ideas. We who had won so handsomely in a walk turned into all-time losers. We saw that we had to reconsider or die. We found many in AA who once thought as we did. They helped us to get down to our right size. By their example they showed us that humility and intellect could be compatible, provided we placed humility first. When we began to do that, we received the gift of faith—a faith which works. This faith is for you too." Another crowd of AA says, We were plumb disgusted with religion in all its works. The Bible, we said, was full of nonsense. We could recite a chapter and verse, and we couldn't see the beatitude from the begats. In spots its morality was impossibly good, in others it seemed impossibly bad. But it was the morality of the religionists themselves that really got us down. We gloated over the hypocrisy, bigotry, and crushing self-righteousness that clung to so many believers even in their Sunday best. How we loved to shout the damaging fact that millions of the good men of religion were still killing one another off in the name of God. This all meant, of course, that we had substituted negative for positive thinking. After we came to AA, we had to recognize that this trait had been an ego-feeding proposition. In belaboring the sins of some religious people, we could feel superior to all of them. Moreover, we could avoid looking at some of our own shortcomings. Self-righteousness, the very thing that we had contemptuously condemned in others, was our own besetting evil. This phony form of respectability was our undoing, so as far as faith was concerned. But finally, driven to AA, we learned better. as psychiatrists have often observed defiance is the outstanding characteristic of many an alcoholic so it's not strange that lots of us have had our day at defying god himself sometimes it's because god has not delivered us the good things of life which we specified as a greedy child makes an impossible list for santa claus more often though we had met up with some major calamity and our way of thinking lost out because god deserted us the girl we wanted to marry had other notions we prayed god that she'd change her mind but she didn't we prayed for healthy children and were presented with sick ones or none at all we prayed för promotions at business and none came loved ones upon whom we heartily depended were taken away from us by so-called acts of God. Then we became drunkards and asked God to stop that, but nothing happened. This was the unkindest cut of all. Damn this faith business, we said. When we encountered AA, the fallacy of our defiance was revealed. At no time had we asked what God's will was for us. Instead, we had been telling him what it ought to be. No man, we saw, could believe in God and defy Him too. Belief meant reliance, not defiance. In AA, we see the fruits of this belief. Men and women spared from alcohol's final catastrophe. We saw them meet and transcend their other pains and trials. We saw then calmly accept impossible situations, seeking neither to run nor to recriminate. This was not only faith, it was faith that worked under all conditions. We soon concluded that whatever price and humility we must pay, we would pay. Now let's take the guy full of faith but still reeking of alcohol. He believes he is devout. His religious observers is scrupulous. He's sure he still believes in God but suspects that God doesn't believe in him. He takes pledges and more pledges. Following each, he not only drinks again, but acts worse than the last time. Valiantly, he tries to fight alcohol, imploring God's help, but the help doesn't come. What then can be the matter? To clergymen, doctors, friends, and family, the alcoholic who means well and tries hard is a heartbreaking riddle. To most AA's, he is not. There are too many of us who have been just like him and have found the riddle's answer. This answer has to do with the quality of faith rather than its quantity. This had been our blind spot. We supposed we had humility when really we hadn't. We supposed мы had been serious about religious practices when upon honest appraisal we found we had been only superficial. Or, going to the other extreme, we had wallowed in emotionalism and had mistaken it for true religious feeling. In both cases, we'd been asking something for nothing. The fact was we really hadn't cleaned house so that the grace of God could enter us and expel the obsession. In no deep or meaningful sense had we ever taken stock of ourselves, made amends to those we had harmed, or freely given to any other human being without any demand for reward. We had not even prayed rightly. We had always said, grant my wishes instead of thy will be done. The love of God and man we understood not at all. we remain self-deceived and so incapable of receiving enough grace to restore us to sanity. Few indeed are the practicing alcoholics who have any idea how irrational they are, or seeing their irrationality can bear to face it. Some will be willing to term themselves problem drinkers but cannot endure the suggestion that they are in fact mentally ill. They are abetted in this blindness by a world which does not understand the difference between sane drinking and alcoholism. Sanity is defined as soundness of mind. Yet no alcoholic soberly analyzing his destructive behavior, whether the destruction fell on the dining room furniture or his own moral fiber, can claim soundness of mind for himself. Therefore, step two is the rallying point for all of us. Whether agnostic, atheist, or former believer, we can stand together on this step. True humility and an open mind can lead us to faith, and every AA meeting is an assurance that God will restore us to sanity if we rightly relate ourselves to Him.