Deep Sobriety

Discovering life beyond selfishness and self-centeredness

For the uninitiated, sobriety may appear to be a straightforward relationship of abstaining from drugs and alcohol. For those who have chosen sobriety after going all in, simplicity is rarely the experience encountered. Instead, you run straight into yourself, the you that you've tried to obscure, perfect, enhance, and outrun, and now, there’s nothing to mute the unfolding encounter.

The 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) are one approach for navigating this terrain. Through a connection with a self-defined higher power, rigorous honesty, and reparative actions, the program works to dismantle the selfishness and self-centeredness seen as central to the dilemma of drinking.  Most of that work unfolds across the first ten steps, but the eleventh step invites something further: a deepening of “conscious contact” with that higher power. While this is often interpreted as reaching out to the divine, AA’s literature leaves the door open while offering pointers throughout, including a curious reference: “the Great Reality deep down within us.”

New Perspective: Turning Attention Around

For meditators, that phrasing lands differently. There is something other than thoughts and feelings to discover within. Across spiritual traditions, this space has been called presence, the ground of being, spirit, true nature, awake-awareness, and more. Each name is fitting but never entirely precise, just as our own name is simply a word appended to something far more complex. What matters isn’t the moniker, but the direct discovery of what it points to.

In Zen, this is sometimes called the backward step: a shift away from what’s arising in consciousness toward the field in which such things arise. Mystics, sages, and contemplative teachers across centuries have described this same shift. AA’s appendix literature on Spiritual Experience gestures toward it too: 

“With few exceptions our members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a power greater than themselves.”

The inner resource and its conception are named separately, a reminder that there is something more than a story to discover.  

Sobriety from the Stories of Self

Mindfulness practitioners come to know that thoughts and feelings are transient visitors. Less often emphasized is what remains as those fleeting experiences come and go.  

People in AA are primed to be mindful of expressions of self-will.  The steps guide this self-examination, and through that process, many members have earnestly offered a prayer for relief from “the bondage of self.” But what is this self that we may be freed from, and what remains when we are?  Intellectual answers may abound here. But if we look for our answers not in the narrative but in the silent space between our thoughts, there is a shift. The question “who am I if I am not my thoughts?” reveals itself to be more than rhetorical: it’s a direct inquiry into the depths of being.

What opens there is subtle.  So ordinary, so quietly empty that it’s easy to dismiss as irrelevant.  The old trappings of seeking explosive results can be a barrier to recognizing what’s actually available; the gateway isn’t always adorned with neon lights.  But, with curiosity as our guide, that small gap between thoughts reveals itself as not only stable but vast.

This is the nondual: seeing everything is arising in a greater whole; an oceanic presence. It’s not an elimination of personality or responsibility, but it opens a new relationship with our own being; a sobriety from the narrowness of the self.

Not a Shortcut

None of this bypasses the work necessary in recovery and in life.

Spiritual bypassing, which is using elevated states or frameworks to sidestep unresolved and unappealing aspects of the psyche, is a genuine risk for all.  There are ten steps preceding Step Eleven for good reason.  They help us to see who we've been and how we are in the world.  No depth of meditation insight changes the fact that our actions will always have consequences worth considering.

Living from a Deeper Ground

To know deep sobriety is to discover that what we have sought externally is already within.  That recognition is fleeting at first, often no more than a glimpse before it’s gone. But it becomes increasingly familiar through continued inquiry and meditative explorations. Learning to rest in this open field of presence begins to change the texture of recovery itself. 

The conditioned patterns of the psyche–contractions, reactivity, and everyday internal difficulties–stop being problems to overcome and become things to meet with compassion. We can begin to see the benefits of offering the same love and tolerance given to newcomers to these exiled parts of our experience.  Gradually, seeing beyond the limits of the storied self, we glimpse that nothing is apart from this awake-awareness. Not others. Not the world.  Everything is included, alive and present.  This is the essence of nonduality, the Great Reality not out there, but here.