My Higher Power is Expressed In:

My 12-step groups
My sponsor
My therapist
My wife
My friends
My fellow musicians
12-step literature
Recovery literature in general
The dharma
Buddhist teachers and literature
Life, just as it is, right in this moment.

Authentic Spirituality

"In my opinion, being in touch with our own spirituality is crucial to recovery in a Twelve-Step program. In the first place each of the Twelve Steps is about either accountability or spirituality. But beyond that, authentic spirituality is about being accepted, loved, and valued in a relationship with Ultimate Reality -- our value and self-acceptance are experientially verified as we relate to the Truth itself."

Pia Mellody, Facing Codependence, p. 99

Confrontation, not Consolation

"An agnostic Buddhist would not regard the dharma as a source of 'answers' to questions of where we came from, where we are going, what happens after death. He would seek such knowledge in the appropriate domains: astrophysics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, etc. An agnostic Buddhist is not a 'believer' with claims to revealed information about supernatural or paranormal phenomena, and in this sense is not 'religious.'

"An agnostic Buddhist looks to the dharma for metaphors of existential confrontation rather than metaphors of existential consolation. . .It confronts the enormity of having been born instead of reaching for the consolation of a belief. It strips away, layer by layer, the views that conceal the mystery of being here -- either by affirming it as something or denying it as nothing."

Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs, pp. 18-19.

The Religious Sedative

"But I say every supposed answer to the Mystery of Being is not a healing balm but rather a sedative, even a blinding dose of spiritual poison. For the minute you fill in that blank, you are exorcizing the chief source of religous awe. What once one gaped at in astonishment and unbearable awe, one now relegates to the file drawer of solved cases."

Robert M. Price, The Reason-Driven Life, p. 82

"Greater," "Higher," or just Bigger?

At the outset of 12-step recovery, we are urged to take whatever view seems to work best for us of a "power greater than ourselves." It could be our group, or the general notion of goodness and order in the universe, or whatever. But you can't get far in the 12-step literature before you get the sense that something far more specific is meant. Here's from the Big Book:

"Next, we decided that hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our Director. He is the Principal; we are His agents. He is the Father, and we are His Children." (p.62)

Screeeeech! Here we've gone from our own notion of a Higher Power to somebody who sounds like good old Yahweh. So I think there's a contradiction within the 12 step literature; sometimes it sounds spiritually all-inclusive and sometimes it sounds covertly Judeo-Christian, if not outright Calvinist.

That's part of the discomfort I have with the adjectives "Greater" and "Higher." Sometimes they are presented as meaning that we need to seek a power outside of our own will, our own notions about ourselves and the world, our own tendency to demand that life live up to our expectations. And to me that makes perfect sense; as an addict my will has been turned against my own well-being. But "Greater" and "Higher" can also mean "better," "holier," "more worthy," and it's hard for someone raised in a Christian culture not to hear them that way. And to that extent, the notion of a "Higher Power" can feed into the sense of shame and worthlessness that got me into addiction in the first place.

So I see "a power greater than myself" as a power bigger than myself, as big as this whole community of recovering people trying to care for themselves and each other, as big as this unthinkably vast universe of which I am a tiny interwoven part, yet which is not other than myself.

Who Needs a Higher Power, Anyway?

Well, I do.

As an addict, my thinking and my habituated responses have been hijacked by my addiction. And even before I became addicted, my personality was based on shame and a lack of self-worth. These aren't just nasty mental habits; they are, in a sense, hard-wired. They take years of recovery work to correct; in the meantime, I can't just think or will my way out of them. I tried that and it didn't work. That's why I'm in recovery.

Also, as an addict, I tend to isolate, distrust and fear others and believe nobody can really help me. To heal, I've got to get over that -- I've got to start to trust in a "power greater than myself."

As a Buddhist, I try to recognize that the Self is an evanescent, constantly shifting thing at best; at worst it is simply an illusion. If there is no power greater than my Self, there is no power at all.