Life Sucks - Now What?

PROCESS THE STUFF WE SEE

Short of dropping out of the stream of life to become hermits we have to react or relate to the events we encounter, no matter how pleasant or objectionable – slight or foreboding. Just how we do this will greatly affect the quality of our lives and how we affect others and so none are insignificant. Subsequently each encounter holds either the power to set us up to fail - or else guarantee our success. Whichever is to be depends upon how we meet the events.

Failure is automatic every time any affairs upset us. Being upset through reactionary emotional responses displaces our first line of defense against cruelty which is our natural birthright state of neutrality.

Success is equally automatic whenever we instead maintain balance and neutrality through not being upset by the things we see. This is only possible after we learn to make allowances for those who impose their injustices. We can do so when we realize that perhaps they are not so much deserving of condemnation as they are of forgiveness since they are simply being unthinking and reactionary themselves when they are being cruel. This can happen when we concede to our innermost selves that people are not aware of the harms they do to us and to others.

This kind of discerning vision happens in a moment; in a twinkling of the eye; in ‘the now’, if you prefer. It is the exact moment that we exert our free choice to either properly relating to cruelty and injustice or improperly reacting to it.

There always is a ‘now’ moment. Just like the sun always shines somewhere it is perpetual and never ceases. It is eternal and it never goes away. It is always now.

Here-and-now -- is the place in time and space, in our consciousness, where we review the events we have been observing. It is the place where we process and experience them – at a level that is beyond mere eyesight and human vision. It is the conscious place where we can either feel or not feel them. In the moment when we simply discern – we do not feel. This unattached discernment is our vision and ability to distinguish danger from benefit – to dispassionately tell right from wrong. This discerning moment is entirely unencumbered by emotion and is pure vision without any self-will injected into it.

INJUSTICE

‘Excrement Occurs’

“Life is a carnival, believe it or not”, as the song goes – and we all have ringside seats to the circus that is our lives. Each of us moves through time and space experiencing the continuous stream of events while making observations of these experiences. Those parts of events which touch us and that we actually experience on a personal level we think of as “our lives”. And there shit happens. Not all of it is good. Some of the events that go on around us are unjust. People are unthinking and they step on our toes causing us harms – real or imagined.

They lie. They cheat. They steal. They are rude. They make mistakes even as we make mistakes - unintentionally and sometimes they do it on purpose. We begin to witness such events – cruelties - through our sensory perceptions - sight, sound, smell and yes, even our imaginations -- and we begin to process this information so that we may respond to it. Just how we process what we see, especially cruelty -- actions which may threaten or harm us -- affects our lives profoundly. The next chapter explains just what is beginning to happen to us as we process this cruel ‘data’.

DILEMMA

Twelve Step practitioners believe that their very lives hang in the balance unless they can develop and maintain a very specific modality of living. It is the model of a spiritual lifestyle that includes daily prayer and meditation. In the magnificent story, text and prayer book, “Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism” the coauthors propose these two activities as a way to improve a conscious contact with God. It is the Step Eleven proposal. While not vague at all about the prayer leg of this proposal, the coauthors were outright negligent in presenting readers with any meditation method to use toward the very end they propose. Many practitioners are forced to seek outside sources for a meditation technique.

Nearly all of what they discover “out there” are meditation methods that come bundled with religious and spiritual philosophies that are contrary to basic spiritual principles to which they feel they owe their recovery. This contrariety is cause for great irreconcilable rifts in faith which soon develop.

Many of us discover that some of the most basic tenets of the organizations and movements promoting such meditations shake hard at the foundation of the Twelve Step Principles and this conflict causes great consternation eventually leading to dissatisfaction with our recovery process, the fellowship that delivers its message, as we slip into unmanageability, depression, anxiety, restlessness and finally relapse; back into drinking.