SPIRIT VERSUS SPIRIT
On Bill Wilson, Carl Jung, and God
In June of 1961, about five months before his death, Carl Jung wrote a now-famous letter to Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. In it, Jung equates the insidious craving of alcoholism to “the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness or—expressed in medieval language—the union with God.” This effectively confirms what Wilson and his contemporaries had been saying, that the only remedy for “the alcohol problem” was “the spiritual solution.” At the time, the endorsement of the world’s most famous living psychiatrist was an energizing boon for Wilson and the nascent 12-step movement.
That Wilson and Jung were exchanging letters at all reflects a mutual interest. Both seemingly believed in what the other was selling. And in this case, they were selling the same thing. They both understood that for the alcoholic of the hopeless variety and the human being in general, “Reason alone does not suffice.” At the time, both were concerned with the spiritual degradation of society and the individual. Jung saw a “civilization [whose] spiritual background [had] gone astray” where people “just drift,” their need for meaning going forever “unanswered.” Drifting, of course, is an antonym for walking with purpose. Like the eightfold path or the way of the Tao, Wilson employed the walking metaphor with “the steps.” And in his letter, Jung wholeheartedly agreed that this spiritual fulfillment “can only happen to you when you walk on a path.”
Wilson’s path starts with that first step, admitting powerlessness. The second step, summoning a willingness to believe in something—anything—that might restore the sanity that alcohol savagely rips from the alcoholic. It’s the third step, though, that most resonates on the union-with-God level: “made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” While this God of our understanding reappears in the eleventh step—a step that requests a conscious contact via prayer and meditation—it’s the act of turning over the will to God where the real juice is, where the spiritual thirst gets quenched.
And I wonder…why?
The third step prayer begins: “God, I offer myself to Thee—to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will.” It’s an act of self-sacrifice. And it’s an act of letting go. It’s a letting go of what Jung calls “the downright resistance to the mere possibility of there being a second psychic authority besides the ego.” And it’s an affront, “a positive menace to the ego that its monarchy could be doubted.” It’s an attitude, a posture. This step is not about belief. It’s about relief. And the “re” in relief implies a precursor, a turning back, a return to a previous state.
What exactly is that previous state? And how exactly do we get there?
To answer that question, I looked to Jung’s lectures on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius, a 16th century Spanish priest and one of the OG Jesuits. The Exercises are a kind of Inquisition-era spiritual bootcamp and a precursor to the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Whether Wilson pulled the material from the collective unconscious or by coincidence (Wilson claimed to be unaware of the Exercises at the time of writing down the 12 steps), his “design for living” has inspired many Catholics to rally around the similarities. Namely, Father Edward Dowling, who Bill Wilson called “the greatest spiritual figure who has ever come into my life." Dowling believed the steps and the ascetic Exercises were intrinsically linked, stating “all the teachings of Our Lord boil down to two cardinal ideas: one negative, the denial of self; the other positive, the initiation of and union with Christ."
And there’s that word again. Union. Jung said it. Dowling said it. Not belief. Not adherence to the creed. Not devotion. Instead, it’s about the merging, the offering of self to the other, the return. As Jung wrote of God, “we neither make Him more remote nor eliminate Him, but bring Him closer to the possibility of being experienced.” And union, by definition, is as close as one can get to another.
In the Exercises, this is deemed to be man’s reason for being, to defy “our biological notion that men’s purpose lies within themselves,” to accept a view in which “man is created for a specific purpose and end.” That purpose, essentially, is to hand your will over to God. And to many alcoholics in recovery, that should sound familiar. In his description of the Third Step, Wilson writes, “hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our director. He is the Principal; we are His agents. He is the Father, and we are His children.” Here, I wonder if Wilson is describing the birth of a new man or the birth of a new consciousness. And I also wonder, is there a difference?
The Fundamentum opens with the words, “Creatus Est Homo” or man is created. But this is not the Book of Genesis creation. Nor the evolutionary spark. It’s a psychospiritual realization. As Jung writes. “If we understand this “Creatus est homo” correctly, then we tell ourselves that we are something that has come about, a product, that we are anticipated. We were there and did not know it. It was “known,” only we do not know who knew it.” What Jung seems to be describing here is a kind of coming online, a new awareness that God has been, in effect, waiting for you to return to Him.
This isn’t “the pink cloud” recovering alcoholics talk about. This is the transition from purposelessness to a single-minded purpose. “Thy will, not mine.” It’s the positive and the negative that Father Dowling was talking about. It’s an indifference to anything but that which “helps us more towards the end for which we are created.”
As the Third Step Prayer concludes, “take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of thy Power, Thy love, and Thy way of life.” The stripping away of obstacles that we experience in steps four through nine is initiated in the third step. It’s the deal we make. The quid pro quo. You do this for me, and I’ll do this for you. And this, I believe, fundamentally is what the 12 Steps or the Exercises are designed to do: to help us keep up our end of the bargain.
And while this isn’t a devil’s bargain, it is protection from the Devil himself. As Jung writes in that same letter to Wilson, “an ordinary man, not protected by an action from above and isolated in society cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil.” The Devil? Are we really going there?
Indeed, we are. The devil, according to Jung, is real. He was not a proponent of privatio boni, or the notion that evil is simply the absence of good. In the letter to Wilson, he wrote, “I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world, leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition.” This spiritual need, again, the need for union. Those seeking a spiritual (or spirits) experience with the bottle, find something else—annihilation. As Jung writes, “if the drives exceed those limits, that paves the way to unconsciousness: so into a lower state of culture, a destructive state, and that is the devil—because the devil destroys all.”
The Fundamentum, The Exercises, and The Steps aren’t just a call to God, they are a hedge against the Devil. For me, the devil has always been the purview of televangelism and Mama Boucher. On the other hand, Kendrick Lamar, one of the greatest spiritual teachers of our time (and one who eschews alcohol and drugs), conceptualizes the Devil (or “Lucy”) as an ever present, all-demanding list of temptations. Lucy will “give you no worries,” “fill your pockets,” “want your trust and loyalty,” and won’t “slack a minute.” That lower state of culture Jung references, according to Lamar, is everywhere, all the time. But, Lamar is a devout Christian. I’m not.
I struggle with Christianity. I struggle with the communion cup of it all. But as Ram Dass said, “To say that Christ is the only way is a certainty. We are all the Christ and it’s the only way. I just tell people, focus on Christ, not on Christianity.” This is an invitation into non-dichotomous thinking. And what is that if not an invitation to a spiritual experience?
I had one. On Epiphany, 2015, I was “struck sober.” However, upon further reflection, I remembered it didn’t quite go down like that. Twelve days earlier, I had (so random) found myself at Christmas Eve mass at Mount Carmel Church in Montecito, California. For the first time in my life, I fell to my knees and prayed for God’s help, God’s relief. And, twelve days later, I got it. For many years, I felt that that was God choosing me. But it’s more than that. I could say, “God gave me everything.” But, more accurately, it was me who gave God my all.
We hear about sober people “finding religion.” But what we really find is more intense than that. It’s religiosity. It’s not Christ’s passion that matters. It’s our passion for Christ. Or our own non-denominational version of Him (or it). Jung grasped this from an early age. Reflecting on his childhood, he understood there was a right way and a wrong way to access God, “that this grace was accorded only to one who fulfilled the will of God without reservation.” In Alcoholics Anonymous and the Exercises, it’s less about God than the relationship with God. The power isn’t in God choosing us. The power is in us choosing God, electing to take “spiritus contra spiritum” one day at a time.