BIG BOOK
The Big Book: New Insight Into the 12 Steps
Early cultures learned to use certain plants for medicinal purposes without knowing the reason these particular plants were helpful or what active ingredients or compounds made them useful. Similarly, the 12 steps were collected and ordered over time, having been found to sometimes solve the alcohol problem.
Until recently, however, just how or why they work was unknown. Metaphorically speaking, when we rubbed them on the alcoholic wound, we sometimes found relief.
The teachings of Eckhart Tolle, as presented in his books The Power of Now and A New Earth, provide the wisdom to understand the alcoholic mind and why the 12 steps can provide a measure of relief from the alcoholism. With this new understanding, we propose to isolate the "active ingredients" in the 12-step program--and thereby increase its effectiveness.
The authors of the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous had no idea how or why it worked. Their attempts at explanation (see Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions) are largely deistic in nature a reflection of their deep fundamentalists Christian backgrounds. As a result, the program has often proved to be a difficult sell to non-Christians.
Given one additional piece of wisdom, I have no doubt the authors would have written a different--and more effective--book. That wisdom is simply this: that consciousness and thought are not synonymous. Thought, in fact, is a physical attribute and only a small part of our true selves.
At the time the Big Book of AA was written, it was generally held that thought was sacred and comprised our personalities. Most people were certain they were defined by their thoughts. The Big Book refers to the alcoholic as a person whose God-given instincts (thought and emotions) have gotten out of control. The authors believed that the application of the 12 steps corrected this defect.. They also believed that the elimination of the compulsion to take the first drink was miraculous.
We are not our thoughts, and the alcoholic personality (or any false, thought-based identity) cannot be repaired--only weakened by observation, meditation, acceptance, and presence in the moment. Any solution to the alcoholic problem that provides long-term relief from the compulsion to take the first drink is not a miracle, but rather the simple result of a reduction in compulsive thinking.