An Experience of the Desert of Aloneness

          I will once again make reference to "The Twelve Steps" of spiritual recovery because it was a powerful experience for me at a time when I was trying to deal with the effects of living with another person's alcoholism. It could have been any trauma I suspect, but mine was my obsession with another person's debilitating addiction. Although, in the beginning, my practical work followed the prescribed order of the "Twelve Steps", I see in hindsight that the process was far more complicated than it first appeared. Thus it was only through a thorough, in depth, working of the 4th. and 5th. Steps, (quoted in my previous post, "An Experience of Inner Baptism") that I began to understand the significance of the Steps 2 and 3. Let me quote them here:

Step 2: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 

Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

          Immediately, the focus of my life, my sense of spirituality, was moved from my ego-self to what has been called my Higher Self. I had no real understanding of what this Power was, except that some people called it God, as they understood that word. I never did understand the word in any way that I could bring to consciousness. I only knew that I had experienced something, some persuasive force, that remains present today. That has always been enough for me because under its influence I have successfully reached the stage I am at today. Without it, I seemed to be sliding into an abyss of irrationality, illogic and a total loss of reason.
          To recognise an experience of something more worthy than my controlling ego was not enough. These Steps are part of a very practical programme of inner work, and I needed to make some kind of commitment. Let me put it another way if you will: I felt that I needed to respond to something occurring inside me, and that response, call it enlightened self-interest if you wish, was to "let go" of my desire and practice of trying to control both my inner world and my outer environment. I must say that at the time, my motives for making such a choice were perhaps less noble or "spiritual" than they might have appeared to be. In reality, I just wanted something/someone else to carry my burden for a while, until I could gather enough strength and will to carry on as before. Somewhere along the way I learned the futility of that goal; that I had discovered something, some purpose, to which I could offer my allegiance.
          Yet it was after the experience of the later Steps 4 and 5, that I began to experience something arising from the depths of the earlier two Steps. From being buoyed up by the joy of self-discovery, I was plunged into the depths of doubt and uncertainty. Had I really made the right choice? Was I being 'conned' by force of circumstances? I needed to get my intellect working on a problem that in reality didn't exist.
          There began a period of investigation, with all its doubts and second thoughts, not to mention the attendant temptations to let my ego once more take control. In the silence of my rooms, I came face to face with my doubts, my decisions, and even my honesty or perhaps lack of. I was alone, seemingly far away from others who might have boosted my strength and given me support (but not necessarily so). Such help was available, but not twenty-four hours a day, not seven days a week. That was in part my choice. That companionship of others was not what I needed. I needed to be alone, for it was in that desert of lost-ness, of total aloneness that I needed to take my stand. It was not too difficult a stand to make, but neither was it easy. I stood at the brink and became intensely aware of the reality of my own lacking of significant control, lacking of absolute certainty.
          I needed to understand in a new way the significance of the earlier steps I had taken, that I was required to find a point of balance where I did not veer towards ego-negativity, nor fix my eyes so exclusively on the positives of a Higher Self that I forgot the presence of the negatives. Balance was the key, a balance that also refused identification with either extreme. The paradox was that in taking that line I became closer to my positives, my Higher Self anyway. A deep change of my inner life was under way, that kind of change that was out of my control, that was the consequence of right choices being made. That is not to say that I always enjoyed and practised total detachment about my state. There were times when I was very far from that I fear. It was only that by struggling with my self/ego was I able eventually to see that a profound process was inevitably unfolding. Inevitable? Yes, because it happened without my conscious decision to effect that process. It happened, and continues to do so - when I remember to stop interfering - under the aegis of something much wiser than me.