TWELVE STEPS
AND
TWELVE TRADITIONS
STEP FOUR
“Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of
ourselves”
(from p. 42)
Creation gave us
instincts for a purpose. Without them we wouldn’t be complete human beings… So
these desires --- for the sex relation, for material and emotional security,
and for companionship --- are perfectly necessary and right, and surely
God-given.
Yet these instincts, so necessary
for our existence, often far exceed their proper functions. Powerfully, blindly,
many times subtly, they drive us, dominate us, and insist upon ruling our
lives… Nearly every serious emotional problem can be seen as a case of
misdirected instinct. When this happens, our great natural assets, the
instincts, have turned into physical and mental liabilities.
Step Four is our vigorous and
painstaking effort to discover what these liabilities in each of us has been,
and are…
~
It
took some effort... even painstaking effort to dig into this suggestion. That moral
part bothered me. I felt that three million years of human evolution had given
us instincts that we suppress. Like many artists, I thought of myself as a free
spirit that had shed the conventions of society and strove against bourgeois
morality: from table manners, drug/alcohol to sexual conduct. I embraced the great Taoist
poets who came down from their mountain caves to sate themselves with wine and
hit the skivvy houses in town. Thankfully, these social conventions still
restrained my dissipation to some degree… enough that murder, rape and outright
thievery weren’t part of my M.O., but there are several other more subtle ways
to cause almost irreparable harm to those who loved me and those I loved.
Once it was
revealed to me that my excesses were misguided expressions of the very
instincts I had touted. The one I neglected the most was the drive to survive
and when I saw that my drinking, for instance, was so self-destructive that it,
in itself, was enough to convince me of the futility of my thinking. Could it have
been that I was wrong about this whole libertine philosophy?
geo 4,786
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