When I first got sober, I heard a lot about the importance of living spiritually -- of seeing my life from a new perspective.
My only problem with that was that I ALREADY lived spiritually.
That’s why drugs and alcohol were so important to me in the first place. They made it possible for me to do all kinds of things that spiritual people were supposed to be able to do, but that un-spiritual people couldn’t have done if their lives depended on it.
Live in the moment? No problem. Nothing puts you in touch with the Now like a bag of heroin or a hit of cocaine. Get in contact with a Higher Power? Once again, easily done. Drugs and alcohol allowed me to plug into that giant, invisible circuit board that secretly feeds life into the universe – that makes it, at least partially, a heavenly place. Without them, I felt like the actor who played the Creature from the Black Lagoon must have, crammed into that claustrophobic rubber monster suit of his. Un-spiritual people, I well knew, lived their whole lives like that. Crammed into tight, constricted, limited identities, they labored under the illusion that they were their bodies and nothing more, and that the gray and gruesome world of everyday toil, competition, and misery was all there was to existence.
What a fate! And thank God I had substances to rescue me from it.
Drugs and alcohol also promoted honesty – a key spiritual quality, as everyone knows. How so? By forcing one to acknowledge what really mattered in life. Not that people who drank and took drugs were honest all the time. In fact, as I was well aware, they spent most of the day being dishonest in one way or another. But… when it came down to what really mattered – getting more drugs – they were honest in the extreme. I’d often noticed that there was a highly visible change in tone that occurred when I, or a fellow drug user, shifted gears from talking about something that didn’t matter to talking about drugs. Many people lived day after day without ever saying anything absolutely honest – something they really and truly meant. Not so the drug user – or the drinker too, for that matter. Though most of what came out of his or her mouth was BS, there were always those special moments when they said EXACTLY what they really meant. (Anyone who doesn’t believe this should watch the interview with rock musician Chris Holmes in the 1988 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. In the interview, Holmes floats about in his swimming pool surrounded by half a dozen or so bottles of Smirnoff. Holmes is SO drunk in this interview that he has reached that strange and fascinating state where total BS statements (“I’m a happy camper.”) alternate with completely honest ones (“I don’t dig being the person I am.”) You can actually see the shifts, as Holmes, his psyche completely un-tethered by all the vodka he’s drunk, drifts second-by-second from one state of mind to the next.)
None of this is to say that I thought a person NEEDED drugs or alcohol in order to be spiritual. But to my mind drinking and drug-taking were what a certain kind of person – a person who wanted to live spiritually but didn’t know how – did instead. And I was clearly that kind of person.
Some people, I know, see no connection between their pre- and post-sobriety selves. I’m not one of those people myself. Though they stopped working for me – just as they stop working for everybody eventually – drugs and alcohol served, for the majority of my adult years, as my most powerful tool for remembering my true situation in life. I was a spiritual being who lived – at least for the moment – in a material world. A world that thwarted my desires more often than it satisfied them. A world that was constantly trying to make me believe that I was nothing more than my body, and that the invisible domain of spirit which I intuited to be out there somewhere didn’t really exist: A world where cultivating a relationship with that hidden dimension was a constant struggle.
As it happens, I still live in that world. The only thing that has really changed is the nature of my struggle. While in the past I struggled to stay high so that I could stay in touch with the spiritual dimension, I now struggle to realize that those same feelings of wholeness and connection are available right here and now, WITHOUT the booze or the drugs.
Sobriety, for me, shouldn’t be a denial of the feelings of wholeness and completion that I got – momentarily -- from drugs and alcohol. It should be, instead, a realization that as a means to achieve those feelings, drugs and alcohol were ultimately unworkable. If I want to have those feelings in a truly real and permanent way, new and entirely different means are necessary.