A Toke of This or That

I read of the great saints of Tibet… the masters who sat in a cave in solitary retreat… for months into years… years in a cave! Who would commit to that? I once imagined it when I was still drinking. I thought of myself in a cave but I would have had to have a substance of some sort… maybe a shot of Jack in the morning... a toke of this or that so I could sleep at night? In other words, even a week or two would have been too much. That was what I imagined it would take for me to reach that state referred to by those monks as the “exhaustion of phenomenal reality.” I don’t pretend that I have opened up so much that I have experienced this but I do know that I would have never… never have ventured on the spiritual path I am on without hitting such a bottom that I had exhausted the reality I was in. Having exhausted that reality I was driven to either: “go on to the bitter end, blotting out the consciousness of our intolerable situation as best we could; and the other, to except spiritual help. This we did because we honestly wanted to, and were willing to make the effort.” (Alcoholics Anonymous, pp. 25-26).

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