Illustration · A hospital room in Miami on a night in April 1958, with the clear canopy of an oxygen tent over a bed, as in the member’s letter; the Easter lily on the windowsill and the oxygen cylinder are the drawing’s own. Not drawn from a photograph.

Miami and New York · 1958

Beyond the 4th Dimension

A member who nearly died in a Miami hospital wrote to Bill W. about what happened to him that night, and Bill wrote back about why it comes to some all at once.

“…it was lightning fast—I experienced in months what most AAs receive in years.”

Bill W., of his own experience, in a note above the letter · AA Grapevine, December 1958

Break or bend

On Easter Sunday 1958 a member of AA in Miami was taken to the hospital with pneumonia in his right lung and put in an oxygen tent. He was 46 and had been sober almost exactly seventeen years. The drugs did nothing, and by Thursday night, he wrote later, it wasn’t certain he would live till morning.

That night, knowing he was near death, he remembered the Eleventh Step and asked God for the strength to do His will. At once, he wrote, “I was taken out of my body.” He told of warmth and a soft radiance, of things he knew without being told, and of a choice: he could stay with God, but he felt God wanted him to go back. Then he was in his bed again, “rational, calm, and assured of recovery,” and from then on he healed fast.

In June he wrote it all down for Bill W., asking that his name be kept out. Bill answered on July 28. His letter, which Ian McCabe transcribes from AA’s archives, calls it “a classical spiritual experience, and an illumination of the highest order,” and says his own sudden experience had been the same in principle. Then Bill gave his reason why it comes to some all at once. What the two of them had received suddenly, he believed, every member receives. In cases like theirs the ego “seems to break down completely, if only momentarily,” and grace poured in. In most members the ego “bends but does not fully break,” so grace “leaks in more slowly.”

He added a warning from his own case. Sudden experiences brought great assurance, but at first he had thought he was “rather specially ‘anointed’ to save all the drunks in the world.” It took about a year of failure, he wrote then, to cure him of it (other tellings say six months; Stop preaching, in The Little Doctor, tells them).

The Grapevine printed the letter that December, unsigned, as “Beyond the 4th Dimension,” with a note from Bill above it. His own experience, twenty-four years before, had been like it. It had been “lightning fast,” he wrote: he had experienced in months what most members receive in years, and that was “the only and not too important difference.” He asked to hear from every member who had had “sudden experiences,” for the record.

Listen Beyond the 4th Dimension About 1 minute

Side by side

Nearly every element

Bill wrote that the experience took in “nearly every element” reported in books like William James’s. Here are seven of its lines, beside what James wrote in 1902: his four marks of a mystical state, then the account of the Canadian psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke, which James quotes.

The letter is quoted from the Grapevine of December 1958. James and Bucke are quoted from the Project Gutenberg text of James’s book, which is in the public domain. Bill named no elements; lining them up is this site’s reading. Quotations are short excerpts.

Miami · June 16 and 18, 1958Dear Bill,
In James’s book, 1902
1“For much of it there are no words.”

No words
James’s first mark: whoever has such a state says “that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.”
2“This I knew. No one told me but the knowledge was given me, without words.”

Knowing
The second: such states seem to those who have them “to be also states of knowledge.” In James’s words, “They are illuminations, revelations…”
3“Nor do I know how long the experience lasted…”

Not long
The third: “Mystical states cannot be sustained for long.” Of his own, Bucke wrote, “The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone…”
4“…I was taken out of my body.”

Taken
The fourth: the one it comes to feels his own will in abeyance, “and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.”
5“…there is neither matter nor spirit, but only the will and the mind of God…”

No dead matter
Bucke saw that the universe “is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence…”
6“All living things are not only assured of immortality…”

Immortal
Bucke: “I saw that all men are immortal…”
7“The nature of God is true and perfect love.”

Love
Bucke: “…the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love…”

Nearly every element

Read beside James’s book, the letter can be matched to each of his four marks and to three of the things Bucke saw. What Bill drew from it was not that the gift was rare, but that it was the common one, only faster.

For a closer look

Go deeper

The phrase the title echoes, the second book Bill named, and his call for other members’ accounts.

The fourth dimension

The Grapevine’s title echoes a phrase from the Big Book. In its first chapter Bill wrote that he was soon to be “catapulted into what I like to call the fourth dimension of existence.” The second chapter says members have been “rocketed into a fourth dimension of existence” they had never dreamed of.

Writing to another member in April 1958, as McCabe quotes him, Bill wondered whether “an awareness of God and some sense of relation to Him constitutes a fourth dimension.” The man in Miami couldn’t say whether he had been moved in space, in time, or “into another dimension entirely.”

Bucke and Whitman

Bill told the writer he needed no more reading. Besides James, he named a second book, which McCabe’s transcription gives as “Consciousness by Richard Buck”: most likely Cosmic Consciousness, of 1901, by Richard Maurice Bucke. James quotes Bucke’s account of his own night. Riding back to his lodging in a hansom cab after an evening of poetry and philosophy with two friends, Bucke found himself “wrapped in a flame-colored cloud.”

Bill had heard the name before. After his talk to the psychiatrists in Montreal in 1949, he remembered, an old man who had been an early president of their association told him he had once had an awakening much like Bill’s, shared with two close friends: “Bucke and Whitman,” that is, Richard Maurice Bucke and the poet Walt Whitman.

For the historical record

In his reply Bill wrote that the only objection to printing the letter was that “High Church people” might see in it claims “a little bit contrary” to certain of their doctrines. He didn’t think that enough to keep it out, and offered to write a note asking other members for their accounts. How many answered the note, the sources on hand don’t say.

In July 1962 he introduced the Grapevine’s plan to carry accounts of spiritual experiences now and then, and warned against setting the sudden ones apart. A member whose change took six months or a year, he wrote, might show qualities he himself had never matched, “my sudden spiritual experience notwithstanding.”

Sources

Anon., Miami, Florida, “Beyond the 4th Dimension,” AA Grapevine, December 1958, the letters of June 16 and 18, 1958, with a note by Bill W.
Ian McCabe. Carl Jung and Alcoholics Anonymous: The Twelve Steps as a Spiritual Journey of Individuation. Karnac, 2015. Appendix Five: Bill’s letter to a member, April 1958, and his reply to the writer of the Miami letter, July 28, 1958, from AA’s archives in New York. The transcription has slips (Bill retires “in 1965”), so where it overlaps the Grapevine, the Grapevine is quoted.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Longmans, Green, 1902. Lectures XVI and XVII, “Mysticism,” quoting Richard Maurice Bucke’s account of his own experience from a privately printed pamphlet that came before his Cosmic Consciousness (Philadelphia, 1901). Free at Project Gutenberg (the text of a 1917 printing).
Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939: “Bill’s Story” and “There Is a Solution.”
Bill W., “Spiritual Experiences,” AA Grapevine, July 1962, and “In Memory of Harry,” July 1966. Both in The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988.