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Daily Reflections · December 5

A New State of Consciousness

AA’s first book wrote of a new God-consciousness, and two years later added a page saying that for most members it comes slowly.

Today’s reading

The reading for December 5 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 107, in the essay on Step Twelve: one sentence, from Bill W.’s answer to what a spiritual awakening is.

This page doesn’t reprint it. Read it free at aa.org, then come back for the asks.

Read it at aa.org

Themes and asks

  1. In other words

    The reflection opens on a question: what a spiritual awakening is. In the essay around the passage, Bill W. says new members ask it too, and that the whole idea often strikes them as unlikely. Every member who has had one might define it differently, he writes, but every genuine one shares something with the rest.

    • If a newcomer asked you what a spiritual awakening is, how would you answer without using either word?
    • Whose way of putting it has helped you most: a sponsor’s, a speaker’s, a book’s? What made it fit?

  2. Waiting for thunder

    The member who wrote the reflection looked for something dramatic and found a quieter change. This page adds a thought of its own: someone watching for thunder can miss the quiet kind. In 1941 AA’s book had to answer the same expectation in its readers, after its first chapters left many sure that recovery meant a sudden upheaval.

    • Were you waiting for something dramatic, or are you now? What might you be missing while you wait?
    • Who noticed a change in you before you did? What did they see?

  3. Seeing and being

    The passage sets one more word beside the one in today’s title: being. Read together, this page takes them as two halves, a new way of seeing things and a new way of living among them. A few lines on, the essay lists what such a person finds in themselves.

    • What do you see differently now than you did when you were drinking? Name one thing, as plainly as you can.
    • Where does the change show in how you live, and where is it still only in how you think?

  4. Keeping it

    The reflection ends on how the change is kept, and puts that down to the Steps. AA’s first book points the same way. At the end of its pages on Step Ten, it tells members who have followed its directions that they are only partly God-conscious so far, and what it asks for after that is more action: prayer and meditation, in Step Eleven.

    • What do you do, day to day, that keeps the change going? What happens on the days you skip it?
    • When did the old way of thinking last come back? What brought you round again?

Behind the words

God-consciousness

Today’s passage comes from Bill W.’s essay on Step Twelve in the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions. It is part of the answer that December 1’s passage leaves out. New members ask what is meant by a spiritual awakening, Bill writes, and above all it means that a person can now feel, believe and do what was beyond them on their own strength. Today’s sentence comes next. After it he names what such a person finds in themselves, “honesty, tolerance, unselfishness, peace of mind, and love,” and calls it a free gift that the member has usually done something to get ready for.

With God joined to it, the word in today’s title had been in AA’s books from the first. In “Bill’s Story,” written in 1938 for the Big Book, it comes in the list of what Bill was to do once Ebby T. had been to see him in the hospital: he was to test his thinking by it. In “Into Action,” at the end of its pages on Step Ten, members who have followed the book’s directions are told that they have begun to feel God’s Spirit at work in them, and to some degree to be God-conscious. The book calls this a sixth sense they have only begun to develop, and for the rest it sends them on to Step Eleven.

By the book’s second printing, in 1941, AA had found its first chapters misread. A new appendix said their stories of sudden change had led many readers to think recovery required “an immediate and overwhelming ‘God-consciousness’” and, straight after it, a sweeping change in how they felt and saw things. Most members, it said, changed slowly, in what it called, after William James, the “educational variety,” and their friends often saw the difference before they did. It kept the word, in quotation marks, as its more religious members’ name for what it saw as the heart of the matter: the growing sense that something beyond themselves had done what they could not.

The Twelve and Twelve keeps the idea in other words. Step Eleven asks for “conscious contact with God,” as it had since 1939, and Bill’s essay on it comes back to the phrase. On Step Five, he writes that the talk with another person that the Step asks for is where many former agnostics and atheists first felt God near, and where members who already believed often found God nearer than ever. On Step Twelve, in today’s passage, the word stands on its own, with another beside it that the reading’s title leaves off. Thirty-one years later, Pass It On, AA’s biography of Bill, used the title’s own words for what he had found in James’s book at Towns Hospital in December 1934.

More on the appendix of 1941, and the name it credits to James: The educational variety, in The Educational Variety. On the book Bill read at Towns Hospital, and its two ways of change: The book Ebby brought, in The Educational Variety.

The word, book to book

Some of the times the word appears in AA’s books and magazine, and in a book behind them, in the order they were published, with the word marked in each. Today’s passage is framed, with the reading’s title standing in for it. The quotations are theirs; the short lines under them are this page’s.

  1. 1902William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

    “…has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness…”

    What personal religious experience is rooted in, in the book Bill W. read at Towns Hospital in 1934.

  2. 1939“Bill’s Story,” the Big Book’s first chapter

    “I was to test my thinking by the new God-consciousness within.”

    One of the things he was to do, once Ebby T. had been to see him in the hospital.

  3. 1939The Big Book, “How It Works”

    “…to improve our conscious contact with God…”

    Step Eleven, in the list of Steps as the book first printed them.

  4. 1939The Big Book, “Into Action”

    “To some extent we have become God-conscious.”

    At the end of the book’s pages on Step Ten. A few lines on, it asks for more action, in Step Eleven.

  5. 1941The Big Book’s new appendix, second printing

    “Our more religious members call it ‘God-consciousness.’”

    Their name for the heart of spiritual experience, as the appendix saw it. For most members, it said, that comes slowly.

  6. 1948A panel in Washington, in the Grapevine

    “…will lead, step by step, to a consciousness of God…”

    What prayer leads to, in the panel’s answer when someone from the floor asked whether a member who already accepts a Higher Power also needs a religion. Not necessary, it said.

  7. 1953The Twelve and Twelve, Step Five

    “…even those who had faith already often become conscious of God as they never were before.”

    Of members sharing their inventory with another person.

  8. 1953The Twelve and Twelve, Step TwelveToday’s passage

    A New State of Consciousness

    The reading’s title, from today’s passage, which isn’t reprinted here.

  9. 1984Pass It On, AA’s biography of Bill W.

    “…brought the sufferer into a new state of consciousness…”

    What came of each change in James’s book, by thunderbolt or slowly, as Bill read it at Towns Hospital.

Threads

Each one opens the calendar with its days lit up.

Sources
  • Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Grapevine and Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1953. The essays on Step Twelve (the reading cites page 107), Step Eleven and Step Five.
  • Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939: “Bill’s Story” and “Into Action.” Fourth edition, AA World Services, 2001: Appendix II, “Spiritual Experience,” first added, as the book’s only appendix, in the second printing of 1941.
  • Box 4-5-9, August–September 1989, “Big Book Celebrates 50th Birthday As A.A.’s Most Effective ‘Sponsor’” (aa.org), on the second printing.
  • William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Longmans, Green, 1902. Lecture XVI, “Mysticism.” Free at Project Gutenberg (the text of a 1917 printing).
  • “Group Meeting Discussion Pages,” AA Grapevine, April 1948: the Washington seminar-forums, reported by the Washington Newspaper A.A. Group, in the scanned issue at silkworth.net.
  • Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 6 (what Bill took from James’s book at Towns Hospital) and Chapter 11 (“Bill’s Story,” written and copied in 1938).
  • Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. December 5 · aa.org

Something wrong here? A date, a name, a quotation? Let me know

Daily Reflections is AA’s book of readings for every day of the year, each written by a member about a favorite passage from AA’s literature. A Daily Reprieve gives each day questions to sit with and the story behind its words.

Printed from One Drunk to Another, an independent AA history · onedrunktoanother.org/today/december-5/