Free Man

“My depression deepened unbearably and finally it seemed to me as though I were at the bottom of the pit.  I still gagged badly on the notion of a Power greater than myself, but finally, just for the moment, the last vestige of my proud obstinacy was crushed.  All at once I found myself crying out, ‘If there is a God, let Him show Himself!  I am ready to do anything, anything!’

Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light.  I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe.  It seemed to me, in my mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing.  And then it burst upon me that I was a free man.  Slowly the ecstasy subsided.  I lay on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness.  All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence, and I thought to myself, ‘So this is the God of the preachers!’  A great peace stole over me and I thought, ‘No matter how wrong things seem to be, they are still all right.  Things are all right with God and His world.’”

"Bill had been raised in the Vermont village of East Dorset in a Calvinistic tradition that his grandfather who he admired, had rejected. As an adult Bill had a long and agonizing history of heavy drinking seemingly coupled with unbearable depression.  Dr. William Silkworth, the Medical Director at Towns, who was Bill Wilson’s physician, friend, and mentor, had told him that he was an alcoholic and that alcoholism was a hopeless disease, without a known cure.

In the weeks prior to the spiritual experience described above, Bill had been going to Oxford Group meetings and to some mission meetings in the Bowery with his old school friend, Ebby Thatcher.  Ebby had stopped drinking as a result of his experiences with the Oxford Groups. Ebby’s neat little summary of the Oxford Group’s spiritual program -which he repeated before leaving Bill’s hospital room just prior to Bill’s dramatic spiritual awakening - was:  “You admit you are licked; you get honest with yourself; you talk it out with somebody else; you make restitution to the people you have harmed; you try to give of yourself without stint, with no demand for reward; and you pray to whatever God you think there is, even as an experiment.” This is the beginning of the impact of one alcoholic talking to another. Bill was aware that another Oxford Group friend of Ebby’s, also an alcoholic, had been told by no lesser an expert than C.J. Jung that he was a hopeless alcoholic and only a vital spiritual experience would alleviate his disorder. 

After Bill Wilson’s spiritual experience, Dr. Silkworth confirmed that he was not “crazy” but that he had had just the sort of spiritual experience that sometimes cures alcoholics.  The next day Ebby brought Bill a copy of William James’ book The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (VRE)… Bill “…devoured from cover to cover.” This remarkable book is still in use today in the fields of psychology, religion, and philosophy (see for example, Charles Taylor’s (2002) Varieties of Religious Today: William James Re-Visited or Bridgers, L. (2005) Contemporary Varieties of Religious Experience. Lanham MD: Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield).  VRE provides detailed examples of spiritual experiences similar to Bill’s and describes their causes, meanings and consequences. 

Bill would have to wait until late spring 1935, when chance took him to Akron, Ohio.  There he met Dr. Robert Smith and re-learned the essential lesson that infuses A.A.: it is the power of one alcoholic talking to another alcoholic about the consequences, but particularly the feelings, engendered by this hopeless illness that can lead to lifelong sobriety. 

From that day forward, several facts about alcoholism became manifest.  Alcoholism was an illness.  Alcoholism crushed its victims by making them feel hopeless. There was no “cure” but there was a “spiritual solution,” centered on alcoholics helping each other to refrain from drinking.  These positive experiences led to the publication in 1939 of Alcoholics Anonymous, containing A.A.’s program of recovery, the Twelve Steps, a version of Ebby’s “neat little formula,” and the shared experiences described in the stories of recovering alcoholics that make up the majority of the book.

Much of the material identified above has been discussed and written about in some detail and is familiar to many recovering people.  What often surprises otherwise knowledgeable individuals, however, is Bill Wilson’s claim that he regarded William James (WJ) as a “founder” of A.A. (1957) and that the VRE was one of a small number of books consulted early and often by the people who founded A.A.  William James is cited in the text of Alcoholics Anonymous, one of only two outside sources cited, Carl Jung is the other, and in the second edition (1955) several footnotes reference the then new Appendix II: “Spiritual Experience,” which discusses William James’ view of spiritual experience, particularly the distinction between the sudden experience of Bill, described above, and the more common, gradual, or educational variety, experienced by the majority of A.A. members.  According to Robertson (1988) “He (Wilson) studied Varieties for months, was completely gripped by it, and urged everyone in sight to read it and learn from it.” ~ John D. McPeake

“Maybe there are as many definitions of spiritual awakening as there are people who have had them. But certainly each genuine one has something in common with all the others. And these things which they have in common are not too hard to understand. When a man or a woman has a spiritual awakening, the most important meaning of it is that he has now become able to do, to feel, and believe that which he could not do before on his unaided strength and resources alone. He has been granted a gift which amounts to a new state of consciousness and being. He has been set on a path which tells him he is really going somewhere, that life is not a dead end, not something to be endured or mastered. In a very real sense he has been transformed, because he has laid hold of a source of strength which, in one way or another, he has hitherto denied himself. He finds himself in possession of a degree of honesty, tolerance, unselfishness, peace of mind, and love of which he had thought himself quite incapable. What he has received is a free gift, and yet usually, at least in some small part, he has made himself ready to achieve it." ~ Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, 1952

(Regarding LSD) "... we can be grateful for every agency or method that tries to solve the problem of alcoholism — whether of medicine, religion, education, or research. We can be open-minded toward all such efforts, and we can be sympathetic when the ill-advised ones fail. We can remember that A.A. itself ran for years on trial-and-error. As individual A.A.’s, we can and should work with those that promise success — even a little success." ~ Let’s Be Friendly With Our Friends on the Alcoholism Front by Bill W.