The Philosophy of Courage - Alcoholics Anonymous. AA, Meeting ...

NOTES ON CHAPTER 2. DEMONSTRATIONBY EXPERIMENTBy surrendering the self (and nailing it to the Cross),fear is released, and desire is turned into passionIn order to act with passion for the absolute instead of acting only out of selfishness,I must take my self and nail it to the Cross. I must practice total surrender andtotal acceptance. “The instinct for self-preservation must be replaced by the passionfor the Cross.” I must let the self be annihilated, in order that I may become aperson.But once I have let go of my fear of God, my fear of change, my fear of creativegrowth, my fear of not being in control, and even my fear of death itself, I will findmy selfish desires undergoing a radical change. And in this new changed life, my oldselfish desire will have been transmuted into a passion for that which is absolute,perfect, and good. [chapter 2, section I]In apparently paradoxical fashion, I have to surrender to win, and let go of allthings in order to receive all things.The Quiet TimeThe place where I can “cross out” and surrender all my selfishness, and overcomemy crippling fear, and become truly open to God, is in the Oxford Grouppractice called the morning Quiet Time. What we do here, Leon says, “is bestsummed up simply by saying, ‘I appeal to God and He answers me and helps me. Ilisten to Him and obey.’” [chapter 2, section II]The practice of this Quiet Time was of course one of the important thingstaken over from the Oxford Group by the early A.A. movement. In the Big Book forexample (on pages 86-87), Bill Wilson describes how this Quiet Time and requestfor divine guidance is placed at the center of our morning meditation. In RichmondWalker’s Twenty-Four Hours a Day, the standard meditational book in earlyA.A. from the time of its first publication in 1948, page after page talks about theprayerful entry into the divine Quiet and the realm of holy Silence. 9This was an ancient concept. One major group of gnostics in the second andthird centuries A.D. taught that the two primordial aeons or divine beings, fromwhom all the other divine beings and godlike and angelic powers had derived theirexistence, were the male aeon Bythos (“Depth,” “the Deep,” that is, the primordialabyss of nothingness which underlies all reality) and the female aeon Sigê (the divine“Silence”). In the gnostic divine hierarchy, the goddess Sigê gave birth to Truth,Mind, the saving Word, and eternal Life.The hesychastic monks of the Eastern Orthodox church preferred to use theterm Hêsychia, which meant “Quiet” or “Peace,” the ultimate stillness and rest of14