Had my Self gained full control, suicide might very well have surfaced as a viable escape route. Without reliance on God or spiritual belief system to follow, such an outcome wasn’t beyond my range of choices. Residual hope for a better day had dissipated into a kind of nothingness, leaving my life without meaningful light. Was there any real point to perpetuating such madness?
Of course, that was not Me asking the question. Instead, it was my Self ingeniously steering Me towards the edge of the abyss it had so artfully created. Recognizing this truth forced Me to face-up to an either/or proposition. I must either change the nature of my spiritual search or live the rest of my life in quiet desperation.
Listening to my Self had clearly not worked, no more than had the pursuit of God provided Me with a spiritual awakening. Both had been dead ends. But even in my life’s greatest darkness, I never lost awareness of a transcendent sense of illumination from within which baffled me, given my dismissal of faith in an external Deity. But there it was. No matter how torturous my life had been, an internal light remained illuminated, if only as a faint spark.
That light kept reminding Me I wasn’t dead, not yet. More to the point, I intuitively knew the source of its flickering glow to be my spirit. I cannot explain why such awareness remained present throughout my darkest hour. All I can say for sure is that Grace’s reassurance originated from my gut rather than my head. I would eventually learn I’d been hearing the voice of the real Me, my True Identity.
Why had I not seen this before? Simple answer. I wasn’t looking. But once I was introduced to my internal truth, we became inseparable. Since that introduction, my mission has been to build a bridge between these two component parts of who I am, using Grace’s qualities to work the equation: Me = I.
As I am all too human, it has taken years of trial and error to find my way. Over time, night gradually turned into day and with its light I found deliverance. By becoming a committed friend to my True Identify, I was set free.
Now, I know this precious internal space to be where my spirit resides, the gateway through which the truth of my life remains both present and available. However, unlike my Self, my True Identity has no need to market itself as supreme. Truth requires no volume. My voice from within trusts that when I make the proactive choice to listen, it will be heard.
My failure to receive my internal voice’s earlier calls was primarily due to my Self successfully blocking my spiritual receptors. By learning how to turn down the Self’s volume, my conscience’s softer voice slowly became more audible. Over time, the practice of listening created a vibrant reconnection to my better angels, especially the one sitting on my right shoulder.
These two voices, Self versus conscience, remain pieces on my internal gameboard. Me, My Self & I, will always comprise my internal world’s Three Musketeers. As such, they cannot help but pull out their swords from time to time and duel. But it is no longer a fair fight once I established contact with my conscience. Before, I would have easily dismissed the pursuit of Grace at my Self’s insistence. Merely brandishing its sword in my face was enough.
Fortunately, my attention has become affixed to a new voice speaking inside of Me, one of vibrant truth. Following that quieter voice’s call saved Me from my Self. By establishing a clear line to my conscience, the gate to Grace’s road swung open.
Having fallen in love with my True Identity, I wanted to spend as much time with it as possible. I seized upon this golden opportunity to create genuine intimacy between my inner child and Me. That is the ultimate purpose of this series, to illustrate through personal storytelling how my relationship with Grace was achieved.
Why am I so sure that every person possesses such an internal voice? Because each one of us has a conscience. My conscience is that part of Me which speaks up whenever my Self moves in a direction of abuse, whether to Me or others. The moment I defy its directions, my cowboy conscience will utter that holiest of barnyard commands, “Hold your horses right there, partner!”
I know I’m not the one providing that instruction. Instead, I am that voice’s audience; the one it is telling to “Stop!” What I am articulating here is nothing new. It is the same conversation we were taught to have with ourselves as children. Healthy parenting includes a fundamental instruction, “Listen to your conscience!” Why? Because, based on all I know, it serves as our best internal guide. Prior to doing something wrong, my childlike conscience would intercede to stop the detrimental behavior ahead of time.
I distinctly recall my mother explaining to my six-year old’s mind the reason murder is a sin beyond redemption. She did not waste time describing the act as an evil defiance of law and order. Mom trusted that common sense had already made that truth crystal clear, even to a little boy. She explained the problem with committing murder is that my conscience won’t let Me get away with it. Defying my conscience results in a kind of imprisonment.
I learned early in life that my conscience was there to protect Me from my Self. Failure to do so would deliver Me into a hell of my own making. Adolescence then chased away such parental advice, not to return until forty years later when Grace came knocking. During our teens, the egotistical Self has a funny way of seizing upon the human animal. Those of us even slightly broken become fertile soil for the Self’s lures. Add drugs, alcohol, or similar methods of Self-avoidance and the result is all too common: “Adios, Mr./Ms. Conscience!”
I honestly believe that ignoring my conscience is what drove Me to expressing so many forms of Self-loathing. Over time, I became less and less able to live with the truth of Me. Substance abuse not only numbed Me from my feeling’s guidance but provided an opening to Self-destruct. Until I confronted my Self and all the self-hate it creates, my Twelve Step reprieve would be short-lived.
If I ignore my conscience and commit a bad act, that voice will reliably circle back. Rather than calling Me out, my conscience suggests corrective steps to take in the future. When I choose to ignore such guidance, I have unwittingly chosen peril, sometimes disastrously so. My conscience conveys truth to Me regardless of challenge or difficulty. My responsibility is to listen assiduously then follow.
Utilizing my conscience is simple arithmetic. Listen + Comply = Peace. Yet even with such new clarity, I had no idea how to achieve the internal changes needed. That was why I chose Grace as my new spiritual path. I had to go back to school and Grace was my chosen curriculum.
My goal was clear. I wanted to establish a permanent connection between Me and my spirit within. As a rule, adhesion is unable to occur without direct engagement. So, having met my True Identity, I wanted to learn more about the language my conscience speaks. That way I could better gain its acquaintance.
By rediscovering my conscience, I more clearly understood the usefulness of the Twelve Steps from a housecleaning standpoint. Each of those Steps mentioned at the end Section I were, in my opinion, mandated to achieve a singular purpose: clearing my conscience. Through unblocking its passageways, I could authentically receive the PROGRAM’S offered solutions.
My struggle with gaining an authentic spiritual identity was the result of a fundamental misinterpretation. I had failed to comprehend that spirituality, at least as I now understand it, comes from within. I’d been mistakenly operating under the Calvinist premise that anything originating from Me was out of control, entirely unmanageable...sin. I therefore interpreted conscious contact with a higher power to mean reaching outside of Me for spiritual answers.
My guess is that growing-up within a Christian framework resulted in my wrong-headed conclusion that heaven was some faraway place, a Holy City on a hill. Thus, rather than looking for answers from within, I followed traditional orthodoxy, attempting to reach for a celestial light beyond my human ability to generate. Now I know the source of my spiritual strength lives inside of Me.
Once again, my intelligence had failed to bring me the correct answer. You see, when it comes to life’s more complex questions, I remain a simpleton. When I hear “higher,” I look up. As used in a spiritual context, higher power translates to a place well above a lowly wretch like me.
I continue to shake my head and laugh at so many years of blindness about my spirit’s source. Fortunately, with my True Identity in hand, spiritual sight eventually became mine. Looking back, I have no one but my Self to blame for the many erroneous 2nd Step assumptions I made during my first fifteen years working the Twelve Step program. I thought “coming to believe” required I look out there . It turns out for me, that power is in here .
I now stand happily corrected.