The Good Giant
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| 8/29/2006 |
Ten feet tall and invisible. As in: “It was a bad place for me to be – especially in my condition. But you know how it is. When you’re drunk you feel like you’re ten feet tall and invisible.”
Of all the terms and phrases in recovery that relate to the dynamic between large and small – between the larger, stronger self we felt ourselves to be at the better moments of our drinking, and the wounded, broken sub-midgets we turned into just a few hours later -- this one has always been my favorite.
Imagine a pair of giants – a good one and a not-so-good one. When I drank, I tended to start out as the good giant: a being who was no longer afraid of the world, no longer confused by it, no longer at its mercy. After my first few drinks I’d look around like someone who’d just come out of a long sleep and remembered who they were. I was myself again! And my real self really was bigger and better than the one I’d been just a short time ago, before I’d cracked the bottle. Not just physically, but on some more mysterious level. There was more to me now. It was as if whole sections of myself that had been closed off before were now once again up, running, and open for business.
Then, as the evening progressed, this Good Giant would slowly give way to the Bad Giant: the one that said and did ridiculous things and got into trouble. The one that thought it was ten feet tall and invisible, but that was, sadly, anything but.
The older I got, the shorter a time it took for this transformation to occur. By the end of my drinking life, in fact, the Good Giant would hardly make an appearance at all before the bad one seized the wheel.
Recovery, of course, is all about getting “right sized,” about leaving the endless swings between hugeness and smallness, grandiosity and humiliation, behind. But in the course of doing so, some people seem to feel it’s necessary to deny that the Good Giant ever existed at all. That larger-than-life feeling alcohol gave us, such people suggest, was a lie from start to finish.
I think they’re wrong. One of the reasons I loved alcohol as much as I did was because it pointed me to things that I sensed I could be: a realm of possibilities that stretched out like a vast landscape waiting to be explored. Of course, I typically only caught a glimpse of this landscape before driving into the ditch – before I went from Good Giant to Bad. But that doesn’t necessarily mean those possibilities weren’t there, and weren’t real.
Carl Jung, one of the spiritual fathers of AA, had a lot to say about the Good Giant. He called it, among other things, the Undiscovered Self. Everyone, said Jung, longs – whether they admit it or not -- for completion. Everyone has a Good Giant which they wish, secretly or openly, to get in touch with. Not because we’re arrogant or egotistic, but because we sense, on a deep level, that this larger self is our true identity.
That’s why, in his famous letter to Bill W. in January 1961, Jung called the craving for alcohol “a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness.” We really are bigger than our fears, bigger than our limitations; bigger than all the boundaries and barriers that the world seems to place upon us, and that we place upon ourselves. We are, in fact, our giant selves.
So if alcohol isn’t the true and reliable route to becoming our larger selves, what is? That’s easy (Well, easy to say, if not to do). We need to translate our longing for alcohol into a longing to develop spiritually. Human beings, the economist and philosopher E. F. Schumacher wrote, are like open-roofed buildings still under construction. We have “no discernible limit or ceiling. Self-awareness, which constitutes the difference between animal and man, is a power of unlimited potential, a power which not only makes man human but gives him the possibility, even the need, to become superhuman. As the scholastics used to say: ‘Homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est’ – which means that to be properly human, you must go beyond the merely human.”
Both Jung and Schumacher saw this longing to be more than merely human in disguised form everywhere in the modern world. Jung went so far as to see it at work in the flying saucer craze that gripped America in the middle years of the 20th century (for Jung as for Emerson before him, the higher self – the Good Giant -- is often symbolized by circles of one kind or another, as the circle is the shape that best embodies the condition of wholeness).
Ten feet tall? Actually, it’s way bigger than that.
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