And the man of today? Must not this he hears be strangest to him, exactly because it is closest to his fathomless yearning? He dreams of change, but does not know transformation.

            – Martin Buber, speaking of the prophecy of the kingdom (‘a new heaven and a new earth’, Is. 66:22) [On the Bible, Schocken, 1982, p.12.]

            If I remember the quote correctly, Aldous Huxley described Bill Wilson as ‘perhaps the most important social architect of the 20^th century.’ Bill Wilson, of course, was the founder of AA. But while AA and Bill Wilson have been largely responsible for lifting the image of the alcoholic out of the gutter, AA has taken on some of the image of eccentric societies. And, at first glance, Wilson seems partly responsible. His dramatic mystical awakening translates into a spiritual insistence at the center of the 12 step program clearly at odds with our peculiarly secular society. As a rule, even our religious cultures (including jump and shout churches) do not insist on such a direct and immediate spiritual or religious awakening – since direct spiritual awakenings commonly violate dogma, as well as rigid ethical codes.

            But it is perhaps this which prompts Huxley’s statement. Bill Wilson grew up beneath Mount Aeolus, the ‘mountain of the winds’, and in the moment of his mystical awakening, he said that he stood upon a mountain on which a wind, ‘not of air, but of spirit’, was blowing. Such experiences, while they have specific manifestations, are essentially ineffable. Wilson also speaks of a great light. But as much as Wilson’s intelligence muted the booster language of the stock tout and gave him great versatility of expression, one senses a certain reticence, finally. When he took LSD – much to the chagrin of his AA cohorts – he described it as a ‘minor version’ of his original awakening. And, if one shares that moment on the mountain of the winds, one is inclined to recognize it as the epitome experience of the Great Death.

            Wilson, of course, was essentially unprepared for the experience. One assumes that he had felt the western goad – almost inevitable for anyone of intelligence. And his background suggests that he would have had a passing familiarity with the Bible, perhaps enhanced by his indigenous inquisitiveness. But the immediate prompt was someone – I believe, a doctor – telling him that his only hope at that point, against the compulsion of the addiction and certain death, was a radical religious awakening.

            The peculiar power of Wilson’s awakening is twofold. First, it is precisely spontaneous and unprecedented in terms of the mystical traditions available to him. And, second, it is entirely focused in the pragmatic. It arises out of need alone and effects a radical transformation of consciousness.

            What we have been describing here, in the written pages of this blog, could be considered the universalization of the issues of addiction and recovery. At this point, nowhere else will you hear, see or read them in this form. Because ‘we’ (this writer) had done the preparatory work necessary and experienced the necessary experiences of awakening prior to encountering the issues of addiction and recovery, we had the keys to the grounding philosophy by which to recognize that addiction is the core issue of the self and self-awareness, that is, of our present condition of experience.

            As a consequence, we have had the power to deal with this in the abstract, to recognize that it is the universal set of issues at the center not only of the historical evolution of philosophy, but also at the core of all legitimate religious traditions, from shamanism to the presently named ‘world’ religions.

            At the same time, we must assign the origin of ‘this’ understanding to the western tradition, since only the prophetic brings the focus to time itself, and only the focus on time as such brings forth the paradoxes of cause in the pragmatic and empirical forms we know as science. And only science turns us back, finally, to observe that the nature of the observer is somehow ‘objectively’ written into the nature of the universe. And it is only this turnaround in the practical experience of cause that opens reflective consciousness up and allows us to look into and understand reflection, since reflection itself, by nature, is the essential core of addiction, as well as the potential for ‘liberation’.

            We all experience ‘dis-ease’. We all experience the uneasiness that we are not properly ourselves. Somehow, I am not I. This is what the opening of Genesis is all about – not about some primeval woman’s responsibility for ‘sin’; not about some primeval man’s guilt. The body awakens to power. But ‘power’ takes us outside the body and opens the ‘Eye’ of the mind, the ground not only of ‘self’ but of the formalized nature of experience itself. What we ‘experience’ now is inherently proto-conceptual because it already contains the full cycle of reflective awareness as ‘objectified’ in something that can be named, something ‘located’ in a formalized structure of ‘time’ and ‘space’, all of which are essentially alien to the primal immediacy of infancy.

            But in the act of self-awareness which opens the gates to this understanding and which has served in human history and prehistory to develop this understanding of the world, there is also the unequivocal basis of a pervasive addiction, of which self and the perceived forms of the reflexive world are the tangible keys, cords and anchors.

            Breaking the addiction to self is the great challenge of life, the great adventure.

            Historically, the modern has brought us to this pass where this is the only true opportunity before us. All formal religions are falling because of this historical moment. Do you hear and see their disastrous reactions in consequence?

            Where I have come to ground, obviously, for the present moment, is in Buber’s presentation of Judaism, which – as Harold Bloom points out in his introduction to Buber’s text – like Gershom Scholem’s Judaism, is in fact a modern reinterpretation.

            Like many conservative Christian scholars, Buber points to the modern archaeological, paleological and epigraphical studies that suggest the peculiar validity of the story of Abraham. The named studies have shown that the details in the stories of the ‘patriarchs’ from Abraham to Jacob correspond with the mores of the appropriate era. They do not necessarily involve folkloric material, as once presumed. Nor does the internal and external evidence support the earlier contention that these stories parallel oral traditions in which gods are gradually reduced to human form.

            Therefore, of course, the conservatives have concluded that Abraham must have been a living man, whose story parallels the given text, although the text as it stands is clearly composed of residual fragments from dispersed traditions.

            The only problem here, of course, is that the cave paintings and little ‘virgins’ show us that verisimilitude is as old as art and art is as old as human prehistory. All we can say from the verisimilitude of the Abraham story is that the story was originally based in storytelling from the given era, whatever the validity of the man Abram or Abraham.

            But, that said, what is undeniable is the vision of Abraham, a man who put away the gods of his ancestors in the auditory ‘light’ of a God who had spoken to him, whether from within or from some more or less tangible form. And the story is about an ongoing personal revelation – a multiplicity of the appearances of this God, both in sequence and forms. It is the vision, and not the man that is the imperative here. And the vision is not simply a mystical vision, but a prophetic vision, a statement about promises and fulfillment.

            One of the key problems that the conservatives ignore is that given the non-folkloric motifs of ‘the patriarchs’, how does one explain the relentless and unrelieved folkloric material that constitutes the entire bridging narrative from the beginning of the descent into Egypt to the appearance of Moses in South Palestine?

            The evidence may validate the real existence of Jacob. And it appears some ‘outside’ evidence points to the emergence of the Mosaic traditions and a ‘Mosaic peoples’ from South Palestine, although the ‘conquest’ of Canaan is also cast into doubt. But, in between, one encounters next to nothing that is other than standard folkloric motif.

            The answer, again, has to be the question of prophetic vision.

            In this case, what we are apparently looking at is a function of the Mosaic revelation. Personally, I think I would like to consider it as a narrative constructed more or less directly out of the actuality of his vision, however much detail may have been added in the final redaction, not simply because of my intimate sense of the allegorical force of the presentation, but because I would like to think that the prophetic insight has the power to 'recover' history as well as both project and create, by however indefinite a text, a coming into being.

            What is Egypt, in this instance, if not addiction?

            The betrayal of a brother, the spiritual core of the ‘family’, into unintentional slavery, leads first to the rescue and then the enslavement of the rest of the family. And finally, a renewed vision leads the whole of the family, now a peoples, into a greater liberation, and a return to the land of first promise.

            Here is a structural reverse to the obverse figure of the couple in the garden.

            Until modern times, the image has served the peoples well.

            Self is first of all a liberating force, allowing us to awaken to our nature as conscious beings. But the very nature of the self enslaves us, once we have established the field of the self as a field of personal power.

            Now the vision must open the nature of self, the relatively complex reality not only of consciousness – of whole awareness, focus and volition – but of a world differentiated and rendered formal through cause, so that this and that dance together in endless arrays of apparently linked functions.

            But the new vision is at hand.