Intuition and Inspiration

Today’s passage comes from “Into Action,” the sixth chapter of the Big Book, in its pages on Step Eleven, where the day begins. Just before it, members ask for their thinking to be kept clear of selfish aims, then plan the day with confidence, “for after all God gave us brains to use.” The passage is for when that runs out. The lines after it say that with practice “the hunch or the occasional inspiration” becomes “a working part of the mind,” and warn against expecting to be inspired every time.

The draft said more. In the loan copy, the version sent out for comment early in 1939, the paragraph also told the reader to “Ask God’s help,” promised the right answers “after you have practiced a few days” and closed with a reassurance: “This is not weird or silly. Most psychologists pronounce these methods sound.” The book printed that April dropped the call for help and the reassurance, and gave no number of days. It dropped a word near the end, too, where the draft spoke of thinking on “the plane of inspiration and guidance.”

Guidance was the Oxford Group’s word for what its members believed God told them, often written down in a morning quiet time. In AA Comes of Age (1957), Bill W. wrote that the alcoholics wouldn’t accept guidance handed to them by a team: it was “too authoritarian for them.” He had learned to doubt his own guidance, too. When Charlie Towns offered him a paid job at his hospital (in 1937, as Bill dated it; Lois W. remembered the fall of 1936), Bill had, on the subway back to Brooklyn, “a flash of seeming divine guidance” that he should take it. That night the sober members meeting in his house talked him out of it. As he told it, “the voice on the subway was not the voice of God.”

He had already told the story once, without his name, in 1953, in the essay on Tradition Two in the Twelve and Twelve, and that book’s essays on the Steps are warier of guidance than the Big Book had been. The one on Step Eleven warns that what feels like an answer from God often turns out to be “well-intentioned unconscious rationalizations,” and that someone who expects God’s orders on everything can do great harm without meaning to. The one on Step Five says that the most spiritually seasoned people “almost always insist on checking with friends or spiritual advisers” before trusting what they feel they’ve been given.

More on Charlie Towns’s offer and the meeting that night: The voice on the subway, in Number One Man. On how the Oxford Group listened for guidance and checked it: Team guidance, in What Not to Do. On the draft sent out for comment: Loan copy, in By the Carload.