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

I AM THE LIMITGod is not Myself in another very important sense—in the sense that I am apower over against Him, the power to resist and exclude Him. It is in that capacitythat the self has so far emerged as the term correlative to God. It is the limit toabsolute and infinite power, love, wisdom, etc.SELF CONSCIOUSNESSWe may arrive at the same conclusion if we merely consider the ordinarymeaning of “self-consciousness,” once more drawing deep philosophy from commonspeech. The self of which I am conscious, when I am what is commonly called “selfconscious,”is not absolutely efficient or loving or wise. In so far as I am any of thesethings I am not conscious of myself at all, being wholly taken up with whateverI am doing or with the person I am attending to. When I am self-conscious I amconscious of something wrong; or, at any rate, there is something wrong when I amself-conscious.Self-consciousness has, in fact, been called a disease of consciousness. Thatis why so many counsel us to avoid it, urging us not to be morbid, not to dwellon our own emotions, motives, faults, but to turn our gaze upon the world aboutus and become extravert. An admirable counsel this would be if the people whoare “extraverts” in this sense were not the most easily wrecked by some of themost elementary motives or emotions, of which they are as ignorant as they arepowerless to deal with them when at last they become aware of these unfamiliarphenomena, and which finally bring them to the extreme of morbidity, namelydisastrous “nervous breakdowns.” The truth is that self-consciousness is not a diseaseof consciousness but the symptom of such a disease (hence it is also self-sickness);and the thing to do with a symptom is, neither to ignore it nor vainly try to cureit, but to study it so that we may find out and cure the disease. Therefore, insteadof running away from self-consciousness, so long as we have anything left to causeit—that is to say, so long as we are not yet perfect—we should rather seek to deepenit so that it may become self-knowledge and acuter self-sickness. It is, however, trueenough that self-consciousness and self-knowledge are useless by themselves, justas the knowledge of physical symptoms and diseases is useless by itself. Just as thelatter knowledge requires to be supplemented by the knowledge of health so theformer consciousness and knowledge need to be made correlative always to theconsciousness and knowledge of God—that is, of absolute health. This is what weare trying to do in these pages.** Self-consciousness is, of course, the same as the consciousness of sin. But I prefer the former tothe latter term, partly because my thought came to me in the former, but largely because, whereasno one can deny his own acquaintance with self-consciousness, the consciousness of sin, on the onehand, is something which most men regard as the concern of “religious people,” while, on the otherhand, the sin of which most “religious people” are conscious is that of the irreligious.48