The Moon And The Water
The Moon And The Water
Step Twelve and Spiritual Awakening
The end of a series is one step closer. After six months of consistent writing, we arrive at Step Twelve. The step reads:
Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
From one point of view, Step Twelve is a response to the question: So … now what?
We admitted that a particular way of living was unmanageable and sought the support of others to change our lives. For some, that support is found primarily through an intimate relationship with a Higher Power, often (though not exclusively) referred to as “God.” For others, it is informed by the decision to seek refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. For still others, its shape emerges in another way; the possibilities for how Steps One through Three appear in a person’s life are too many to list, too many to count.
We undertook deep house cleaning and shared what we found with a trusted person, perhaps even several people. A significant internal shift followed, encouraged by a new commitment to honesty, open-mindedness, and a willingness to move with the world rather than fight against, shut out, or run from it. Part of that “moving with” required accepting responsibility for the harm we caused during active abuse and making amends where and when appropriate.
With some wind at our backs, we committed to “keeping our side of the street clean” through regular check-ins and continuing contact with our Higher Power, God as we understand God, seeking refuge in the Three Treasures, or any one or more of the many ways in which we find support through something other than ourselves.
I cannot stress enough that how the process happens is entirely up to you. Others will share their experience, strength, and hope—when you ask for it and when you do not, by the way—but you are the one who decides what will be done. For so many of us, me included, we felt helpless and powerless when caught in the throws of active abuse. Recovery, in its many forms, ends the cycle of suffering by empowering us to choose, and thereby live, differently. It is up to you—though you are not required and, I dare say, cannot do it alone.
Of course, you will meet some A.A.s who insist that there is only one way—usually, their way or their sponsor’s way, passed to them as they sought to reorient their life. And that sort of approach has its place and is appropriate for some people. Yet, it is not the only way.
The Twelve Steps offers a framework with some built-in must-dos. But much of the framework is flexible enough to fit a specific person’s particular circumstances and (some of) their preferences. As far as I can tell, that was the founders’ guiding intention when formulating the Steps—and the Traditions, too—and it manifested in the now-familiar list that appears in many meeting spaces.
The process of “working the Steps” culminates in a “spiritual awakening” and a further commitment (we might even use the word “vow”) to carry the message and continue embodying the principles of recovery in daily life.
When we read Step Twelve, we understandably ask: What is a “spiritual awakening”? How can you tell when it happens?
For this offering, I want to explore these questions using a section of Dōgen Zenji’s Shōbōgenzō Genjōkōan (Expressing What Is Most Essential).
Dōgen offers several different descriptions of awakening or enlightenment—I will use the two words interchangeably—in Shōbōgenzō Genjōkōan. I want to spend time with the following description:
Enlightenment is received like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet. The water is not broken. For all the immensity of the moon’s height, it rests upon a small patch of water. The moon and the sky in their entirety settle on a single dewdrop in the grass, on a mere drop of water.
Enlightenment presents no harm to a person just as the moon would not harm the water, and the person does not obstruct enlightenment, any more than a dewdrop would obstruct the moon or sky. In the depths of that dewdrop resides the full measure of the moon’s greatness. With this, consider also the duration of light, the water’s greatness or smallness, the aspect of the moon, and the vastness of the sky.
Old-timers and those who complete the Steps for the first time will tell you that, in a sense, their lives are no different from how they were a year, two, or thirty ago. Frustration and disappointment still arise. Bills still need payment; sometimes, there is uncertainty about whether on-time payment is possible and practical. New situations still arrive with anxious feelings and opportunities for questioning our self-confidence. And the fear of the unknown, too, has a particular, fixed presence, somewhere on the periphery.
Sobriety and the spiritual awakening that comes with it do not transform your life by once and forever removing all potential obstructions—and I hesitate to use that final word. They will not immerse themselves in the muck and proceed to abolish its presence.
This is the sense in which, though enlightenment is received like the moon reflected on the water, the moon does not become wet, nor is the water broken. Enlightenment is the moon; your life is the water. Once the fog of substance abuse clears, you can see the moon with fresh eyes and a whole heart. It has always been there, shining bright, a testament to the statement that recovery is possible. Yet the water is still the water, and your life is still your life, with much of what was previously mixed in still present.
What is still mixed in? Just above, I called them “obstructions,” and as I wrote that word, I felt discomfort. Why? As best I can tell, the feeling arises in part because the word “obstructions” does not adequately represent what was described: feelings of frustration, disappointment, anxiety and fear, bills, occasionally shaken self-confidence, and more. Nor do the words “challenges” or “difficulties” or the more elaborate “opportunities for personal and spiritual growth.” The last prompts a thunderous eye-roll on my part; I find all of them almost objectionably reductive.
Rilke writes in the collection In Celebration of Myself:
I am so afraid of people’s words.
Everything they pronounce is so clear:
this is a hand, and that is a house,
and beginning is here, and the end over there.
Their meaning frightens, their mockery-play
and their claims to know what’s coming, what was;
no mountain thrills them now; their estates
and their gardens abut directly on God.
I warn; I ward them off. Stay back.
It’s a wonder to me to hear things sing.
You touch them, and they stultify.
You are the very destroyers of things.It pays to be a great poet—and dead—for then you can label others the “very destroyers of things” with little consequence. I will not join Rilke there—yet, anyway. I will, however, stay with the observation that “everything they pronounce is so clear […] their claims to know what’s coming, what was.”
What we call “obstructions” are not obstructions just because we call them “obstructions.” Consider a pathway of good width and clear as far as the eye can see. Now, consider the same pathway where, at a quarter-length in, there is a large boulder on its left side.
Is the boulder’s presence an obstruction? It is an interesting question.
The boulder is an obstruction, only given certain assumptions. Namely, those concerning what a pathway is, how its boundaries are determined, whether it should be of a certain width and what that width is, and so on. Absent those assumptions, nothing suggests that the boulder’s presence needs to be classified as an obstruction; it is part of the landscape to be worked with appropriately when necessary. If anything is an obstruction here, it is the assumptions lingering in the background—though it is not clear to me that these are obstructions, either.
I suggest that the same is true for frustration and disappointment, anxiety, uncertainty, the unknown, cover pages for TPS reports, and anything else you care to include on the list. These things are not obstructions; they do not get in the way of our lives. Quite the opposite, they are essential parts of our lives’s landscape. Yet we assume they should not appear where they do, arise when they must, and occupy the places they are all too well-suited to occupy. And for that reason, we suffer, and to address that suffering, we may turn to generally unwholesome substances or behaviors.
However, we do not have to suffer; if we are suffering, it does not need to continue forever. As I wrote above, recovery is possible. Small though we are, comparable to a patch of water or a single dewdrop in the grass, the moon’s greatness and the vastness of the sky can settle in us, too. And we can, with Rilke, warn and ward off the assumptions we carry out of habit from place to place. We can encourage them to “stay back” for a while and meet what appears with childlike innocence.
Speaking of obstructions:
Enlightenment presents no harm to a person just as the moon would not harm the water, and the person does not obstruct enlightenment, any more than a dewdrop would obstruct the moon or sky.
I felt a lot of what I will call “fear” during the first year of sobriety, and it often manifested in the endless appearance of questions following a different version of the now-familiar: So … now what?
How will I handle frustrations in the workplace if I cannot escape to a barstool and rocks glass afterward? How will I meet people—friends, a future partner—without a little “social lubricant” to calm my nerves? What will I do if I am the only person not drinking in a social situation? Do I share that I am in recovery? Am I willing to “open that can of worms”? Do I lie, and how does a “white lie” or a mere omission square with the Twelve Steps requirement of “rigorous honesty”?
These are just a few of the questions I wrestled with; anyone newly sober meets with them and many others. And somewhere in the whirl is the dramatic: Will my life be any fun without booze?! I did not choose sobriety for sobriety’s sake. As the familiar saying goes, I chose to give up one thing and, in turn, receive everything else. And I was clear about this from the very beginning.
The counselor I met with during in-patient treatment had me write a letter to myself six months after my day of discharge. The letter could take any form, but she encouraged presenting how you wished things would be for your future self. Did you do this? Are you still doing that? I hope that you are—and so on. I ended that letter with: Remember, you are pursuing a multi-dimensional life. At the end of active abuse, it was painful and clear how much I had lost and how the only remaining dimension of my life centered on a bottle. I lost relationships with friends, family, and past partners; I lost the joy found in hobbies, whether active, creative, or contemplative; I lost my physical health and mental well-being; and I nearly lost a religious way of being with the world that, when given room to grow, would flourish in unimaginable ways.
Still, I was afraid. I was afraid that sobriety and the spiritual awakening promised would “harm me,” meaning that it would sever from my life its potential for rich and varied flavors.
Only it did not, not one bit.
And a reason is that this is not the nature of awakening, the nature of enlightenment. Enlightenment is not some thing, nor is it somewhere “out there,” nor are its arrival and presence predicated on logging a specific range of hours in meditation or practicing the principles of recovery in daily life. It is right here, present and inseparable from the practice of meditation or honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness, even when confronting adversity. It is present from the beginning, even if you cannot see, hear, or feel it.
Dōgen writes in Shōbōgenzō Uji (Living Time):
No thing interferes with any other thing, in the same way that no two times clash with one another. Therefore, all living things aspire at the same time and, simultaneously, all life is aspiring time. The same holds true for practice and attainment of the Way.
Sometimes, we are more in tune with how all things are in concert with all things. These are the times that we tend to notice, and often, we try to hold onto them or analyze their parts in an attempt to define what a “spiritual awakening” is. That is fine to do, but it is also unnecessary.
Trust in yourself, trust that no matter how things are at any particular time, you cannot obstruct the full measure of the moon’s greatness or the vastness of the sky, and take good care of what is right in front of you.
That alone is enough.
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