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

or uncaring forces which I cannot control, and the horror I feel when I contemplatemy own death. There is the anxiety of guilt and condemnation: the awareness thatI can never be perfect (at an absolute level) in meeting all of the demands which lifewill place on me, and that I will always be guilty of not having been good enough,along with the closely associated anxiety of rejection and abandonment. Each periodof human history tends to have its own dominant form of existential anxiety,which overshadows the others in importance for a century or so. Images of theanxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness filled many of the artistic, literary, anddramatic expressions of the twentieth century: one can see it appearing in the apparentlymeaningless drips of color which made up the paintings of Jackson Pollockduring the 1940’s, in Albert Camus’ formative novel The Myth of Sisyphus, and in theworks of the playwrights who were associated (in the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s) withthe theater of the absurd—Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, HaroldPinter, Tom Stoppard, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Edward Albee, and so on.Being sickened by my own inner rottennessWhen he attended the Oxford Group house party, and felt God powerfully atwork in that gathering (what the twelve step program calls the spirit of the tables),Leon discovered that there was no way of becoming conscious of God without alsobecoming conscious of self. And the rottenness he discovered within himself madehim sick to his stomach and nauseated. He started to become aware of all the falsityand phoniness which had made up his life. He found that all of the things he hadhad preying on his conscience (things which he had spent years trying to suppressand forget and alibi and explain away) were coming up to the surface of his mindonce again: acts of selfishness, cowardice, and dishonesty. He found himself tryingto project these feelings of self-loathing over onto the Oxford Group people whowere so disturbing him: they were the ones who were phonies, they were the ones whowere bossy and opinionated know-it-all’s, they were the ones who were out to trickhim out of something or other. [chapter 1, section I]Recovering alcoholics who can remember things like driving an automobiledrunk and running into other people and hideously injuring those other peopleand having to stand there uninjured (with police handcuffs on) and listen to thoseinjured people scream with pain can understand exactly why Leon said that it wasa feeling of nausea which we felt when we confronted our true selves. Drug addictsand gambling addicts who think too hard about how their addiction caused them tocast away their spouses and children, find their insides cramping up within them, inthe same kind of total visceral disgust with themselves.8