Recovery and Enlightenment

OK, it's time to give a shout out to the recovery community. A couple of us are (coughs discreetly) members. 

After you sober up and look around, you realize you are going to NEED a spiritual programme. To stay alive. To stop harming your self and others. 

This adds urgency to the spiritual search, which is, frankly, wonderful. You whip right past New Age marshmallow fluff, heading for meat and bone. 

You begin to sort out available spiritual offerings. Some people are lucky enough to go back to a childhood belief system. Others have no beliefs, and some just have a lot of unquestioned crap.

You look around to see if there is someone less confused, more peaceful, not full of crap. You lurk around a group, seeing if there is evidence for spirituality having any visible effects.
Otherwise, why bother?

You stay sober long enough, see the same people for a while, and you realize some people are not shitting you. This Higher Power thing is working for them. 

Really.
Alcoholics and drug fiends are not lying to you. 

So you keep working at the Higher Power thing-y (described as something larger than your self), while watching how, for at least one of your group, B., the higher power thing has completely subsumed the personal self. She has, entirely, turned her personal will over to God, and is no longer running the show.
In any way.
You blink, because Christian is your least favourite flavour of Higher Power. 

But she speaks with utter honesty about her experience. It is straight up and no frills. You are floored that enlightenment looks so ordinary, and yet has the specific gravity of Earth. No robes, no glow, not a single claim to be special. 

But proximity to B. does not mean that her courage, honesty, or work rubs off on you in some magical fashion. You have more work to do. More looking for a way to get out of self protection, self concern, self-centeredness, and the delusion of personal will. 

There is not an ending to this story. 

I got "enlightened" going through the Ruthless Truth process of extremely pointy pointing to the illusion of self. Search abruptly stopped. Life is ordinary, dear, and not personal. Nothing else stopped, and nothing happened except that the illusion of self was seen to be just that, an illusion.
Talk about obvious. 

So, watch this blog for B.'s story. It won't sound at all Ruthless Truth-y, but this is an enlightened collective, that is the criteria. Welcome, all.
Love, Elizabeth