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

desirable, or simply as an attempt to make graphic my definition of constructivepower.There is produced by such a gathering an electric atmosphere—an atmospheremagnetised, purified, sensitised to the utmost, dynamic,* charged with the nthpower. It combines the maximum of concentration with the maximum of ease. Init you are always doing something, always giving the whole of yourself to somethingor some person, but always ready for some thing new, always busy, always at leisure,always hastening, always unhurried; you feel as though you were walking on air.In this atmosphere you see far and you see through. Everyone is transparent.All pretences, masks and pomps have been stripped off. All eyes are wide open,seeing what is in front of them and showing what is behind them. Everyone islike a modern building—all window, Everyone is brand new, young, uninhibited,fearless and carefree. All go about like very happy and very wise children, They arelistening to an invisible leader and, in listening, sense and meet each other’s needs.Complexities are simplified, conflicts harmonised, knots untied, tangles unravelled.Without any arguing, persuading or scheming, everything fits into a plan, a planpreconceived by none.Quietness, special insight or wisdom, mutual interpenetration, freedom—theseand other features I would single out in analysing the power. But at one’s first meetingwith it, one does not analyse it at all. It impinges upon one as a unitary atmosphere.One breathes it in as one breathes the air. Once it has entered one it begins to work.It works like a ferment.The operation of that ferment is by no means some thing with which one fallsin love at first sight. It causes in one unease, dissatisfaction, inferiority feeling inshort self-consciousness. Right at the start we have an illustration of the statementmade above. Consciousness of God brings up consciousness of self. One becomesuncomfortably aware of all sorts of things in oneself that one generally tries tocover up—inadequacy and falsity, fear, everything that one has ever had onone’s conscience and has sloughed off. In proportion as one desires to preserveone’s comfort, to rest undisturbed in one’s present condition and to choke downthat resurgent awareness, one rebels more or less violently against the dynamicatmosphere. The people from whom it emanates arouse in one the strangest andrichest variety of suspicions and dislikes with their slightest word or deed. Instead ofacknowledging as one’s own the faults in one which are struggling up to the surfaceof one’s consciousness, one projects them and fixes them or others on these peopleindividually or collectively, while the atmosphere as a whole begins to irritate oneas crude and violent, glaring and overbearing. “It makes me, sick!” is the eloquentphrase, far deeper than he suspects, with which many a man sums up his rebellionagainst that atmosphere and with which he ends, for a time at least, his contact with* Cf. the use of “dynamis,” just alluded to, in the New Testament.38