Sin Consciousness is not God Consciousness
Some borrowings from the Christian Imaginary
12 step recovery begins with a deep piece of metaphysical wisdom: whatever your beliefs about God, including whether or not God exists, you are not it. You and I are finite, limited in our existence, limited in our power, limited in our virtue. To be finite means that failure, suffering, and death are inescapable things, and many humans find this state of existence to be intolerable. We cannot escape failure and suffering and death outright, but a lot of us do try to escape our awareness of failure and suffering and death - through drinking and drugging and impulsive behavior and abuse of other people. Alcoholics like me come in to recovery because our experience of these terrible things overwhelmed our attempts to escape being aware of them. I drank to feel better because alcohol made me feel better like nothing else could, until the very end - I quit drinking because no amount of drinking could actually make me feel free of my own agony.
This overwhelming awareness of our own finitude comes with a parallel awareness of something beyond our finitude - this could be God, or it could be a wide world of human beings living very different lives than any we could individually imagine, or it could be both. For many like me, our salvation from the intolerable awareness of our finitude comes from this new awareness of what is beyond ourselves - we have hit our all-too-human limits and are in desperate need some outside help.
We are then saved, rescued from the pit of self we had fallen into. Certainly not perfect and certainly a hell of a lot better than we were. We are deeply grateful to have been saved and consider this salvation to be the most important experience of our lives, one we cherish and seek to hold on to as tightly as possible forever.
It’s a blessing and a curse that this connection to something beyond us was founded at our lowest moments, when we were most aware of all of the suffering we felt and all of the suffering we caused. It’s a blessing that it happened at all and a blessing that it brought us direction and relief when we were most desperate for those two things. It’s also a curse to have that consciousness of a saving power beyond ourselves be forever associated with a parallel consciousness of our failure.
It can be an easy trap to fall into, then, to think that the only way to cultivate that saving awareness is to first cultivate an awareness of your failure. It makes sense, given that the origin of that saving awareness was in one’s failure, but that’s not where that awareness needs to stay. Turning towards your higher self doesn’t mean rejecting your lower self with as much intense disgust as possible - it just means turning towards your higher self. Just because we spent so much of our life running away from our suffering doesn’t mean that we now have to reactively drown ourselves in our suffering.
Ruminating on my faults and failures puts me in a very similar headspace as the one I was in when I was drinking, namely one that leaves me feeling desperate for relief. This headspace leaves me vulnerable to behaving reactively and even self-destructively, much like I did when I was drunk!
The whole point of seeking and accepting help is to build a life that I don’t want to drink my way away from. Seeking connections with that beyond myself is a key part of that - thinking about my finitude is necessary only as a means to get me beyond it, not as an end in itself. To get them confused is to fall back into the suffering that made me drink in the first place.