The cofounder of Alcoholics
Anonymous, Bill Wilson, was inspired by a near-death experience in 1934. While
being treated at a clinic for his addiction, the clinic’s director asked Wilson
“if he would like to dedicate himself to Jesus to see if such an act would rid
him of his alcoholism. “Depressed and filled with despair, Wilson began to
weep. I’ll do anything! Anything at all!
If there be a God, let him show himself! He shouted.
The
effect was instant, electric, Wilson says. Suddenly my room blazed with an incredibly white Light. I was seized
with an ecstasy beyond description. I have no words for this. I was conscious
of nothing else for a time. Then,
seen in the mind’s eye, there was a mountain. I stood upon its summit where a
great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. Then came the blazing
thought, ‘You are a free man.’ I know not at all how long I remained in this
state, but finally the Light and the ecstasy subsided. As I became quieter a
great peace stole over me, and I became acutely conscious of a presence, which
seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the shores of a new
world. ‘This,’ I thought, ‘must be the great reality. The God of the
preachers.’
“Wilson never drank again. He
told Dr. Bob Smith, an alcoholic in Akron, Ohio, about his experience, and the
doctor also quit drinking and began to pursue a ‘spiritual remedy’ for his own
alcoholism. The two men, Bill W. and Dr. Bob, became the founders of Alcoholics
Anonymous.
Their twelve-step program, Raj Parti
notes, was originally based on these affirmations:
1) We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives
had become unmanageable.
2) Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could
restore us to sanity.
3) Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to
the care of God, as we understood Him.
4) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of
ourselves.
5) Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being
the exact nature of our wrongs.
6) Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects
of character.
7) Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8) Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became
willing to make amends to them all.
9) Made direct amends to such
people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10) Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11)
Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God,
as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the
power to carry that out.
12) Having had a spiritual
awakening as the result of these steps, we try to carry this message to
alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
“When I look at the twelve steps,
I can’t help but think that Wilson’s encounter with the Light was similar to my
own with the Being of Light. I also couldn’t help but think that he too was
asked to devise a means of spiritual healing much like the one I was being
asked to devise. Following my surgery, I realized my addiction to painkillers
was abating. Soon I took less than what was prescribed and only as needed for
my pelvic pain."
Raj Parti, Dying to
Wake Up: A Doctor’s Voyage into the Afterlife and the Wisdom He Brought Back
(Atria Books, 2016).