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Twelve step critique - original 1999 version
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A Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity discussion topic | |
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Copyright 2006 by K. Ferlic, All Rights Reserved | |
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Twelve step critique - original
1999 version The follow is the original critique of the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous based on the understand listed in the topic “Understanding giving rise to the fifteen creative steps/guidelines” This critique provides the primary starting point for developing the fifteen creative steps/guidelines. The Twelve Steps are copyrighted and reproduced here for educational purposes and critique from the creativity perspective. The original thrust of this critique was not to criticize the Twelve Steps in any way but to understand why it was said one is always recovering from their addiction as opposed to finding a cure or obtaining a healing for their addiction. 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives has become unmanageable. (Top) From a creativity viewpoint, it is
important to realize that we have given away our power and ability
to manage and create our reality to something, or someone, external
to us and, as a result of giving our power away our lives have
become unmanageable no matter how much control we try and exert over
our lives. However, we are not powerless. To say or believe we are
powerless is the most damaging and self defeating statement one can
make relative to their creativity and ability to create their
reality. It is most important we realize we have only chosen to
become powerless and we have choose to give away our power. The
important point that needs to be understood is that in choosing to
give away our power we have to choose to take it back. It is only
after you have taken your power back do you regain the ability to
manage your life. Relative to creativity, one has to choose to break
the habit that keeps them from being present in the moment and the
anxiety of the unknown and one needs to form a new habit learning to
be happy with what is as it is no matter what it is. Then being
fully present to what is as it is, in that moment and that presence
of being with what is, one is fully open to the infinite
possibilities of the moment. That moment of being in the moment is
the point of power. 2. Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. (Top) To believe that there is a power
greater than ourselves that is needed to restore our sanity makes
one dependent on the reality external to them and denies the power
and the creative life energy that is currently flowing in and
sustaining ones’ being. The creative life energy that created and
stains the reality that you see and experience before you is the
same creative life energy that is flowing thought you and sustaining
you. You are after all part of reality and all that is whether you
like it or not and whether you believe it or not. All the power that
one needs is already within one’s being which takes us back to the
first point that we have chosen to give our power away. That fact
that one may not know how to access their power or how to get it
back and they may need some assistance from some external being, God
or otherwise, does not negate the fact that healing comes from
within the individual. Look at any wound that you have. The healing
occurs for within the body and with the body wisdom that is inherent
to the body. You may have a physician that sets a broken bone or
cleans your wound and provides a stitch or two, but it is your body
wisdom is what heals your wound. That same body wisdom will heal any
wound at any level of your being if you allow that wisdom to operate
and follow its lead, not the lead of some external source. 3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. (Top) This statement is about
surrendering to the power that created reality for that is who and
what the concept of God represents. Two points need to be made here.
One is the choice to surrender. As was said above, you must chose to
take your power back. You must choose for your experience of
Creation is based on the choices that you make, have made and will
make. Free will you know. Why surrender? We will return to that, but
first the second point. The second point is potentially a very real
problem. This is the fact that to surrender to God as you understand
Him could actually be very damaging to you in that if you have a
poor understanding of God or what God really is. You will be limited
by your limited understanding of God and you will be limited by how
you believe God communicates His will to you. How do you know when
God is talking to you and how do you know that you are listening and
hearing what He, She or It, has to say. And how do you know what God
says to you is applicable to me and what He says to me is applicable
to you? How do you know what to surrender to? But it is vitally
important to surrender but to what and how? Our recommendation is
you surrender to the only truth that you really know and that is
what is true for your within your being and is effective in your
life. Our recommendation is that you surrender to that power and
wisdom that is already inherent in your being and sustaining your
being. This does mean however to step out of your mind and who you
think you are and how you think the universe works. It means to be
open to the wisdom inherent in being in the moment and open to that
anxiety of the unknown for it is there you can create from infinite
possibilities. You sit in the anxiety of the moment not knowing what
will happen is uncomfortable. To do this, courage is required.
Whether you believe in God and project your power outside of
yourself and to this God, or you access the power within your being
and within your body that created you and sustains you, you have to
be willing to surrender to that power. The end is the same, you have
to sit and wait. To sit in the anxiety of the moment not knowing
where you will be lead and how you will be lead but be willing to go
where ever you are lead is very difficult. But this anxiety is the
root of the addiction we are trying to correct. That anxiety
produces some of the greatest fears and uncomfortableness that you
will ever experience and you have a choice. That choice is to sit in
that anxiety or run away from it by running to a habit of the mind
or taking some external substance to numb the anxiety. Hence
ultimately there is the need to have courage. Raw courage to sit and
wait, to listen and to be lead. And by the way, you already have
that courage. You only need to chose to make it manifest. 4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. (Top) A searching and fearless moral
inventory is no more that looking into one’s being and seeing why
you are making the choices in life that you are make. And that may
mean you need to become mindful of every choice that you make and
look at every choice. There is a reason why you choose the way you
do. The question is, “Why do you choose the way you do over any
other way?” You always have a choice. For every action you take,
there is the choice not to act. Every time you embrace a belief,
there is the choice not to embrace the belief. Every time some
authority such a mommy, daddy, or your teacher says to act you have
the choice not to act. You will need to “pull the string” as you
would pull the string on a sweater and to unravel that sweater for
each choice you make. For every “because” that you give yourself,
you can ask “why?” again and again until you get at the real reason
why you are chooses the way you do. Often you will find it is
because you are afraid to choose otherwise and/or you don’t like the
anxiety of not knowing what you may get. This then bring us two
question. One is, “Do you face your fears and deal with the real
potential hazard in your fear or do you let the fear control your
life?” The second question is “What are you using as your criterial
to make your choices?” Do you choose because some authority outside
yourself says something is right or wrong or do choose because your
body and its wisdom gives you the feeling that it is the correct
thing to do? If one pays attention to their body and body wisdom
asking their body wisdom to reveal itself you will begin to feel
when a decision is in alignment with your body wisdom or not, and
you will have what are called “knowings” about a topic or subject.
That is you just know. You don’t know how you know but you know.
However your mind may quickly judge what you feel and what you know
before you even realize you have denied or suppressed the body’s
wisdom. You will have to learn to watch your mind and how it is
working to catch it at its games and one of the more interesting
games to catch it playing is how it will mask itself as feeling or
an internal knowing from a body wisdom. However, if you ask your
body to let its wisdom be known, the body will give you some type or
kind of feeling unique to your own being that will be of such
strength that you mind cannot deny its presence. One of the most
common ways the body does it is by manifesting pain. If you feel any
pain what so ever, you can probably be assured you are denying your
truth and the truth of your body wisdom somewhere in your life,
somewhere within your being. Illness and disease are ultimately only
a result of you denying the truth of your body wisdom somewhere. 5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. (Top) What is right? What is wrong? What
is one going to use as a criterial as right or wrong? From a
perspective of accessing one’s unlimited creativity the only wrong
is when the creative life energy within one’s being is denied,
suppressed or somehow not acted upon. No one can judge what another
feels, knows and/or perceives. Each will have to judge according to
their own heart when they are, or are not, following the wisdom of
their body. If one has so denied their body wisdom to no longer know
how to perceive it, then that in itself will be the wrong that needs
to be corrected. Each of us will need to become aware of how our
body wisdom speaks to us. Additionally each will have to explore if
the mind so controls our being that it masquerades as the feeling
and perceptions of the body. What needs to be understood is the root
of any addiction whether it be an addiction to an external substance
or whether it is an addiction to an internal habit, is the mind
suppressing what one is feeling or what knows. When ever you try and
run away from what you are feeling you need to ask yourself, “What
am I running away from and what don’t I like what I am feeling?” And
it does need to be noted that many judgements we make on thing being
right or wrong is only an addiction of the mind that mind uses to
suppress what we feel. By judging something a wrong because we do
not like what we feel about what we are experiencing inside
ourselves is one way of producing a warm and fully feelings. We get
a “high” on the feeling of being right and mind use this “high” of
being right to suppress the truth that needs to be faced. The
ultimate game is that we so dislike what we are feeling that we
judge the cause or occasion of what we feel as wrong and in the
righteousness of our judgement we destroy what we perceive as
causing the feelings we don’t like so we don’t have to face the
feelings. We need to understand why we feel what we feel. 6. We’re entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character (Top) There is an old Arab proverb”
“Trust in God but tether you camel” referring to the fact that
although God is going to take care of you, you have to work within
the way things are and the nature of a camel is to wander off if it
is not tethered. Yu need to attend to the things that you need to
attend to doing and God is not going to deny the nature of something
else to meet your desires. Two comments need to be made. First, God
is not going to fix what you yourself need to fix. You have a free
will and that is what it means to have a free will. There are things
that only you can fix for you are free to choose as you wish. God is
going to work within your nature and the nature of the world around
you allowing each to live and be according to their own nature. God
does not deny the nature of an other to meet your desires. If you
don’t like the way you have created yourself and your life because
of your choices that you made in the past and you no longer like the
consequences, then fix those choices. You are not powerless. You
only gave away the power that you had. So take it back. Second, what
makes you think you have any defects in your character? Who told you
that you are defective? What criterial and whose criteria are you
going to use to determine if you are defective? If you were born
with your defect, did you ever think that you needed that defect to
have the experience in life that you are having and there is a
purpose for that defect? And if you where not born with it, who
created that defect? Where did the judgement of defectiveness come
from? 7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. (Top) This statement is very similar to
the last statement except that it added two things. One is “humbly”
and the other is “the need to ask.” The discussion on shortcoming is
the same discussion on defects, “Who told you that you had
shortcoming?” What criteria are you using for such judgements? 8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. (Top) One can make a list of all the
persons they have harmed and make amends is a nice idea but doesn’t
address the real issue. Most of us harm another only out of
ignorance of our actions, in response to our own pain, in response
to our fears and in the general, we harm others because of our own
pain. But if we were to create such a list, it also needs to address
than number of people we harm that we never know about because we
are just unaware of how far reaching the repercussion of our actions
are. There is a ripple effect to everything we do. We treat one
person badly and they in turn, treat a second person badly because
we caused them to be in a bad mood and so on. In one way, we are in
fact responsible for that whole chain of people being injured so you
need to ask, were do I being and where do I stop listing the people
that I have harmed and where does the individual I have harmed
become responsible for not allowing themselves to be disturbed or
upset by another to in turn ripple the harm to another. It is really
rather naive to think you can compose a list of the individuals you
harmed because many of the injuries you caused you did so in
complete unawareness. Also there is a deep subtly that is not
considered here. What fails to be considered here is the fact that
you may have done something that you feel harmed the person when in
fact it was something the person needed to experience. If your
intention was to harm the individual, that is definitely a problem.
However if you harmed someone but your intention was not to harm but
harm resulted, how do you know that you were only a vehicle to
allows something else to happen? A simple example. You swerve to
avoid hitting a child and cause another car to wreck and cripple an
individual. You did harm them. Similarly compare the situation to if
drove your car while knowingly under a prescriptive medication that
impairs judgement and causes and individual to wreck and become
crippled. Again you have harmed the individual. Of course there is
no need to consider the case where you intentionally ran into the
individual with the intent of harming them. So where do you being
determine where you are, or are not, responsible for causing harm?
Then there is the individual who is harmed. How do you know what
they need to face in life. They may have needed to be harmed by
someone acting in the innocence of the moment to break the belief
that everyone is out to intentionally harm them. 9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. (Top) I found the second half of this
statement puzzling and my feeling there is something very wrong in
the logic that is being proposed here. Why would one think of doing
anything in the way of amends that would intentionally injure
someone. The whole concept is self defeating. To amend something is
to change it for the better or improve it. It is to free from
faults, correct or reform. I can see a surgeon cutting a person
technically injuring them to correct an unhealthy condition but that
is not action taken to injure the person, it is action take to heal.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. (Top) This is a continuation of what has
already been done and if you wish to sustain your new creation, you
will have to create a word in which the creation can be sustained.
If you create a world where you can live without denying your truth,
then you will have to continue to live your truth to sustain that
world. If you wish to live in the world of infinite possibilities,
you must not fall back into the habits of the mind that take you way
from the anxiety of the unknown. You have to become aware and awake
as to how you are making your choices in life and recognize when you
escape to a habit of the mind rather than deal with reality. 11. Sought though prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. (Top) Two comments. The first is a
repeat of the proverb, “Trust in God but tether your camel.” We
cannot expect God to do for us what we ourselves must do. We must,
as a minimum, become clear on what it is we desire to create and
hold the desire with complete trust that it will manifest giving up
what needs to be given up to make room for what we desire to
manifest. We must remember, all that is, was and ever will be,
already is. Everything is already in an existing form or moving to
some new form. If we wish to create something new, we must be
willing to give up that which needs to be given up to form the new
creation. Our past will create the future in the image of that past
unless we give up and let go of the past we no longer wish to
experience. However everything can be a two edge sword if we allow
it to become one. To judge something a “bad” and desire to have the
bad removed from our life, we also have to give up that which we
judge as good that is tied to that bad other wise the bad cannot
leave our life. A simple example. Your enemy, who you judge as bad
allows you to hold all that you perceive as good in contrast to that
enemy. If your enemy is going to leave your life, then all that you
hold as good in opposition to the bad no loner has the contrast that
you need to hold to the good. 12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practices these principles in our affairs. (Top) It appears a very common aspect of
humanity is to share what it has found. It too is a dual edge sword.
Some of the desire to share is out of altruism and the wonderment of
childlike discovery and some of it is out of the need not to be
alone in one’s new found world. But neither is good not bad. In some
traditions, it has been said that Creation Itself was formed out of
the All That Is wishing to share and have a playmate. Christ has
said, to love another as you love yourself. To love oneself
sufficiently to want to give oneself a playmate is to love another
enough to give them a playmate too. To share from the mind and say,
“Look what I have found!” with the emphasis on the “I” is an ego
trip. To share from the heart and to say, “Look what I have found”
with the emphasis on sharing in a childlike fashion is to love
another as oneself. I think what is needed here is only a shift in
emphasis and that shift is on the being true to oneself and share
that truth allowing the other to be true to themselves and share
their truth. So after all of this discussion, it appears the end result is as it always was. We need to live and be the truth of the creative life energy that is sustaining our being, not denying in any why who and what we are with the realization we are where we need to be. And in loving ourselves enough to be true to who we are, loving another so as to create the space that they can freely live the truth of their being. So if we are addicted to the mind and unwilling to face the anxiety of the unknown to live a world of unlimited creativity and infinite possibilities, it doesn’t really matter. We are exactly where we need to be and perfect as we are. Nothing needs to be fixed. We only need to decide what we wish to experience and have the courage to create reality as we wish to experience it. And maybe even some say we will choose to claim our birthright to be the creative being that we are and to be the embodiment of unlimited creativity. It is our choice. Always has and always will be. We can choose to do nothing and have more of the same or we can choose to create something new and that is where the fun and play of creation really happens.
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