Right View

I’m not one for meetings. I spent some time in Al-Anon in my younger days and I just never felt like my presence was appropriate. There was one woman I still think about to this day, sitting in our group, shaking and pale, clearly terrified of whoever waited for her back home.

Her story wasn’t a story, it was her life and she was living it in front of us with nothing to do but find some solace in our weekly meetings that, at least, she was not alone in her fear… It was a fear that I shared, but never had so intimately… This woman was afraid for her life.

 Living with an addict isn’t a question of if, but when: when is this person going to explode, when is this person going to lose it, when will I not be enough, when are they going to… 

Your heart spikes when you hear their car pull up the drive. 

You find reasons to hide very quickly. 

I think about her all the time. She was so small when I met her, sinking in on herself with each passing week, her physical presence mirroring her inner world. 

I stopped going to meetings because of her. I could not bear to look at her becoming her pain and the demonic thief attached by the ring on her finger continue to steal her life away. I couldn’t sit in a circle with whatever excuses I had for being there that could match this person’s reality. 

I hope she and her daughter are OK now. 

I pray that they’re safe. 

She comes up occasionally, flashing in my mind like an old sun kissed polaroid. I think of her sunken, sleepless eyes and her cigarette white skin. My problems seemed like such ash compared to hers, and while I knew what it was like to live with nitroglycerin when I met her, I was not so intimately acquainted with someone who made me afraid for my life until one September morning in Brooklyn, waking up on a Saturday—almost five years since seeing that woman—on an air mattress in my basement apartment. A flood of the night before washed over me and mixed with my body sweating out seltzer and whiskey. 

Oh, no! 

Everything that felt like a nightmare was true… It happened exactly the way you’re piecing it back together with some pieces missing, like the tooth that was left on the subway platform amidst the pool of blood that spilled out of your face. 

The night before I stared in a mirror in a stranger’s apartment happily and confused, breaking yet another attempt at sobriety only two weeks into Sober September. 

A personal best. 

This morning the mirror looks back at you, crying, in so much pain that it’s numb. The tears dry over dried blood, the clothes I had worn the day before were covered in so much blood it was as if I had killed someone. I looked in the mirror and considered that maybe I had tried. I looked in my eyes and saw nothing at all.  

Whose life am I living? 

Who am I living? 

How did I get here? 

I celebrated two weeks of sobriety with two missing teeth, scar tissue, and a call to my dad explaining, from the hospital, that “it was really rainy last night and I was just being dumb, running down the stairs, and…” 

I walked around for two months with a stitch in my lip, scabs on my face, and I refused to quit drinking… Sure, I took a couple days off, but my explanation was, ‘Well, that wouldn’t have happened had I been drinking for those two weeks because my tolerance reset and…’

Who thinks like that? 

Who am I living? 

I was living a self-important, self-reliant life built around consumption and bitterness. Even by declaring someone else’s problems bigger than mine I was giving in to a self-reliant, ergo self-important, lens. As if I could handle my own problems, as if I didn’t need help… that is arrogance. I was ignorant of who I was, because I refused to look at who that was—I was not aware of my weaknesses nor was I aware of my own want to sink in on myself through booze, laziness, and dishonesty. I was living an excuse. An excuse to drink, an excuse to live in a sulfuric state of scarcity and fear. This sulfuric state, by design, kept me from becoming… becoming anything.

In this state there is nothing to become, because becoming means that we quit satisfying our own impermanent passions and desires to strive for something greater than our meaningless appetites. God is greater than all things and is much greater than any of us, no matter how much the world values us, no matter how much we value ourselves, “Realise your nothingness and constantly keep in your mind the fact that by yourself you can do nothing which is worthy of the kingdom of heaven” (Unseen Warfare 82-83).

If there is only One Who is good, and He is God, then all good things that occur or happen through us come from Him and to produce good is to humble ourselves enough to know that apart from God we can do nothing. It takes humility to accept this and in my days of being a dry drunk it was a hard saying for me to understand, or maybe it was my heart that was too hard to understand.  

In myself I can do nothing. 

Without God I am nothing. 

It took a lot of dark days for me to realize that and even darker days for me to accept it.  I would not still be sober and in recovery without God and the knowledge of Him was only attained through a humble, submitting, ‘I tap…’ when things were getting too heavy to carry. I turned away from my self-reliant comprehension of the world.

The act of surrender is the practice of becoming.

Christianity is a religion of personhood,  

“It is the glory of God to conceal things,

    but the glory of kings is to search things out” (Proverbs 25:2) 

And because of the nature of the persons of the Trinity and our own personhood Christianity is a tradition of becoming. 

Man’s spiritual nature is conditioned and relative to the world around it therefore it is correlatively becoming through contemplative practices. The spiritual essence inherent in Man, which is the breath of God, is revealed through this process of becoming spiritually conscious of the self “which is essentially consciousness of God” (Bulgakov 93). By extension, to be ignorant of the spiritual realities of self is to be not only ignorant of God, but also ourselves. Ultimately, the only real way to know the self is to know God. 

Because we are imbued with the Spirit of God we seek to be known just as God knows Himself. 

We seek self-revelation. 

Addiction and codependency act in tandem to produce egotistical, controlling mentalities from within where these unwelcome and prideful states of consciousness tear us from humility which is wisdom, and Wisdom herself says, 

“For whoever finds me finds life

    and obtains favor from the Lord,

 but those who miss me injure themselves;

    all who hate me love death” (Proverbs 8:35-36).

Suffering is generally understood as a product of sin; however, it is also associated with struggling to be free of sin. The latter can be seen in the piercing of our hearts as a part of catharsis, the compunction leading to a practice of νῆψις in relation to unwelcome forms of consciousness, i.e., wanting to drink and wishing we could be like everyone else, because then we are feeding resentment and isolation. Suffering is cyclical and does not start and end with our addiction, but our addiction is suffering. 

The path out of suffering is Wisdom. 

“The Buddha taught that by living ethically, practicing meditation, and developing wisdom and compassion, we can end the suffering we create by resisting, running from, and misunderstanding reality” (Recovery Dharma 19). The first step of Recovery Dharma is acknowledging the Four Noble Truths: dukkha, samudaya, nirodha, and marga. Dukkha is accepting that life is suffering, accepting the unsatisfactory nature of temporal things, and the understanding of the impermanence of conditional phenomena. Dukkha is pain. Samudaya is the cause of suffering, nirodha is cessation of suffering while marga, the Fourth Noble Truth, is the gateway leading to the path: the Eightfold Path. 

The Four Noble Truths are like a lotus leaf unfolding to reveal this path to the cessation of dukkha, a set of practices that aid one in their journey to liberate themselves from the wheel of Samsara, the cyclical nature of death and rebirth. 

The first two steps taken on the Eightfold Path are known as the wisdom group: right view and right intention. 

Right view is associated with the consequences of our actions, it teaches that death is not the end, and our beliefs and actions have consequences even after death. Right view as practice focuses on the confusion, misunderstanding, and self-delusion that blocks one from liberation from dukkha and right understanding of reality. The idea of view in Buddhism pertains to an energetic interpretation of experience which shapes thought and thus action, otherwise known as judgment.

The interpretations of experience and stimuli is a conditioned response to such events as they transpire with the becoming correlated to the deconditioning of these reactions of thought and action. The deconditioning of one’s energetic interpretation of the phenomenal world relates to a practice of substituting our conditioned response with a right view and action in accordance with such proper mental attitude.

“Watchfulness is a spiritual method which, if sedulously practiced over a long period, completely frees us with God’s help from impassioned thoughts, impassioned words and evil actions” (The Philokalia 162).

The Mahā­cat­tārīsa­ka Sutta explains that there are two right views: mundane and supramundane. The mundane right view, interestingly, involves a matter of conviction on behalf of the practitioner where one accepts the Buddha’s awakening as a matter of fact as well as accepts that the validity of this awakening opens the door to others doing the same. A similar conviction can be found in the Christian’s confession of Christ’s resurrection, His harrowing of Hades, and His return. Living in affirmation that “He is God not of the dead but of the living” (Matthew 22:32) where our conviction leads us to follow the Way, embodying the teachings of Christ, and His life, so that we might live in the next life close to the Father.

Much like Christians, the acceptance of Buddha’s awakening means putting this workable theory into practice.

Mundane right view posits, in a sense, wisdom practices such as there is virtue in respect for our elders, there is virtue in the veneration of our ancestors and devas, gratitude is a virtue, and these things matter. As such, the mundane right view is a practice of living a life with quality intentions, because intentionality leads to actions and if we have a defiled intention then the fruits we bear will correspond accordingly. 

This is foundational to the practice, but it will not help us escape the wheel of Samsara. It has a danger of producing more attachment if not approached correctly in the same way that when we hold our sobriety/recovery too close it becomes another way to define ourselves. In this way sobriety/recovery becomes a means of comparison, to ourselves and to others; when sobriety/recovery strengthens attachment then it makes the line between our addictions, cravings, and suffering thin. “[Some] think themselves virtuous and spiritual, when they fall into transgression, they are overcome with anguish and torment […] caused by pride and a high opinion of themselves” (Unseen Warfare 87-88).

This attachment to our sobriety/recovery is still promoting a self-important, self-reliant thinking, emboldening our suffering where even recovery becomes performative, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this [alcoholic]” (Luke 18:11). It’s like feeling too big to go to meetings or some sort of recovery group because one feels like they do not belong, or that they can figure this out themselves—this is rejecting personhood, because we need community to become conscious of our personage.

God’s nature exists for the consciousness of Himself through the persons of the trinity, it is a self-revealing nature that is the source of life and life itself. This nature is Hagia Sophia, the self-revelation of God to Himself, and to us as the Divine world is the source of life and life itself. Community is a reflection of the Divine Trinity, being revealed by Sophia through our embodiment of the self-surrendering love the Father has for the Son and for us, through the Son.

The supramundane right view is world-transcending, understanding the Four Noble Truths with this type of view leads to liberation from dukkha and ultimately Samsara. This right view is a faculty of wisdom. That being said, this type of view comes at the end of the path, not at the beginning. It illustrates our own understanding of θέωσις as a practice that goes on ad infinitum. The Twelve Steps being a perfect, mundane, example of how this process builds on itself with each step and each step referring back to the previous one in the never-ending path of recovery.

Spiritual perfection is not something that is granted us by a visitation by an angelic creature; we don’t trip in the street and fall into our Buddha Nature; Christ is not born within us by our want that it should be so… Spiritual perfection is warfare, “The kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force” (Matthew 11:12). This is the first step on the Eightfold Path, this is the first step of recovery: the acceptance that all of this will require work beginning with the painstaking labor of humility. 

It will require everything you have, because the demons (Christianity and Buddhism both have an understanding of these creatures) are relentless and they’re existence is based around obstructing us on our Path—on the Way. 

Prayer is, of course, a natural enemy to the demonic forces as well as the remedy for our energetic interpretations of experience and the Dharma teaches, prayer is not something we do once and never have to again and neither is it something we will be good at it our first or second or hundredth time practicing. The lotus leaf grows in the mud, amidst the heavy wetlands of dirty water where to look for a reflection one would find none, but in this dark glass lies the potential for beauty which arises from patience, humility, bringing our weaknesses into awareness, “accustom yourself to be wary and to fear your innumerable enemies who you cannot resist even for a short time” (Unseen Warfare 83).

By letting go of our self-reliance, self-importance, and self-delusion; by surrendering to God as a practice; by approaching life without judgment and with quality intentions then we have taken the next step of the wisdom group on the Path: right intention.

Si comprehendis, non est Deus