(01:01) Statistics on Drug and Alcohol Addiction

A 2006 study by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services estimated that 22.6 million Americans over the age of 12 were dependent on either alcohol or drugs: 15.6 million were classified as dependent solely on alcohol; 3.8 million were classified as dependent solely on illicit drugs; 3.2 million were classified as dependent on both alcohol and illicit drugs.

(02:12) Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, and the Twelve Steps

Bill Wilson (1875–1971) spent years looking for a way to overcome his addiction to alcohol. Throughout the early 1930s, his addiction was a destructive force in his life — personally, professionally, and academically. Few options existed at the time to treat alcoholism, which was considered by many to indicate either a lapse in personal morality or a clinical, fatal disease. Throughout his search, Wilson investigated various recovery approaches. None worked for him, but all gave him insights into the program he later helped develop: Alcoholics Anonymous.

From an evangelical Christian recovery group and from correspondences with Austrian psychiatrist Carl Jung, he came to appreciate the role of spirituality as an aid to overcoming addiction. In 1934, while seeking treatment at New York's Towns Hospital, he was overwhelmed by an ecstatic spiritual experience that became the basis of his sobriety. From there, Bill Wilson sought to help others confront their alcoholism, if only as a means of maintaining his own sobriety. Because of his own history, he could talk about alcoholism with credibility and compassion. He knew the kinds of obstacles an alcoholic faced and could talk about his own way of filling the void that was at the root of his addiction. In encountering other alcoholics, he was able to continually remind himself of the addiction he was trying to relegate to the past.

The first alcoholic Bill Wilson helped was Dr. Bob Smith, who quit drinking in 1935. This was the beginning of Alcoholics Anonymous. Slowly, Bill Wilson and Bob Smith gathered other alcoholics and began treating them using a program of twelve distinct steps later outlined in The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous:

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 tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Another set of recovery guidelines, known as the Twelve Traditions , also introduced the teaching of anonymity, from which the organization derives its name. In group meetings, members refer to each other by first name only. This relative anonymity allows group members to share each other's struggles without fear of stigma. To this day, Alcoholics Anonymous identifies Bill Wilson as "Bill W."

(04:10) Story of John Cheever

John Cheever, Susan Cheever's father, was an acclaimed American short story writer and novelist, who was nicknamed "the Chekhov of the suburbs." Born in Massachusetts in 1912, he received the National Book Award for The Wapshot Chronicle in 1958 and the Pulitzer Prize for The Stories of John Cheever in 1979. Cheever died in 1982.

In the late 1940s, John Cheever began documenting his thoughts and his creative process in journals. An edited collection of these writings was later published as The Journals of John Cheever. In the following excerpts from his journals, John Cheever writes with stark honesty about his own experiences with addiction and Alcoholics Anonymous, starting with an entry from 1975:

At the A.A. meeting, I try to work myself into a conversation, but with no success. I sit alone, not uncomfortably. The first speaker is an alert, vigorous woman, whose legs have gone. The second is a very fat woman with a long history of arrests, jails, nut wards, suicide attempts. "I used to weigh two hundred and fifty pounds," she says. It looks to me as if she still weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. The next is an elderly runt, the kind of social steerage whose enlistment the Navy used to encourage. One also saw them in the infantry. Great at doing their own washing and ironing; reliable and punctual when sober; and, with or without a record, moving with the dancey, back-to-the-wall airs of a convict. His voice is close to inaudible. He repeats himself. He describes contracting to gold-leaf the dome of the Baptist church. He sold the gold leaf and gilded the dome with paint he bought at the five-and-ten-cent store. After fifteen years the dome, he says, is still shining; but we all know the Baptist church well, and we know it has no dome. The next is a large, young man, not fat but close to it. He wears a cotton pullover that shows his voluminous breasts and belly. His dark hair is long, and a thin lock hangs directly in front of his right eye. He removes this from time to time with a toss of his head. For me this is painful. My own right eye grows lame. Lying on a sidewalk outside a bar, he shouted that all he wanted was a little piece of mind, a minute—or maybe two—of being at peace with himself. All he wanted, after sixteen years of drugs and dope, was a minute of this and he never got it. My eyes are wet. The aggressive woman speaks again. She gave away her washing machine (while drunk) and had to take her washing to the public laundry, where she drank from a pint in the toilet. Shopping at the supermarket, she suddenly abandoned her groceries, drove home, and drank a half-pint of bourbon in the coat closet, exclaiming wow, wow, wow. The confessions are too lengthy, I guess, but in spite of my recognition of these cruelties, and my wet eyes for the fat man, the confessions seem to me to go on for too long, and I entertain the thought of a drink. There is no subject and no predicate for what I feel. This I don’t know, but I do know, moving blindly, that the answer is, "Nix."

From a 1977 journal entry:

This is a splendid sea. I play backgammon with a young man for most of the afternoon and come out two games behind. Into the village I drive to A.A., which helps immensely, and where I think I see two gays sitting in the corner. I think I am completely mistaken and that the fault is mine. A woman confesses to her sins. She weighed 280 pounds; she couldn’t climb a flight of stairs; she couldn’t drive; she couldn’t do anything but drink, and even that was difficult because she would vomit most of the first bottle. I think of my mother at Christian Science Testimonial meetings, confessing to have been so enchained by the flesh that a cancer was destroying her. And so we say the same; our confessions all deal with self-destruction and love. Look away from the body into truth and light! We find, in these church basements, a universality that cuts like the blade of a guillotine through the customs we have created in order to live peaceably. Here, on our folding chairs, we talk quite nakedly about endings and beginnings. When I leave the church the village has the charm, eclipsed for me, of a restoration or a state set. The nostalgia is openly false. The beauty of the architecture is striking and splendidly preserved, but the clash of a whale-oil port is nowhere; and how absurd to look for it. This is a place for vacationers, mildly in search of a quaint past and a nice answer.

From a 1980 journal entry:

I miss drinking. That’s the simplest way of putting it. When it grows dark I would like a drink. The Hemingway story, or stories, about Nada—the utter nothingness that is revealed to an old man—seem to correspond to what I’ve experienced these last months. I do believe in God’s will and the ordination of events, and it is perhaps stupid of me to question the ordination of my lying unconscious on the floor, convulsed and senseless. It did bring my wife back to me, and have I ever asked for anything more? I feel that perhaps the sorrow of these days will be revealed to me as having had their usefulness. The nature of this sorrow is bewildering. I seek some familiarity that eludes me; I want to go home and I have no home. I think that I have been ill, and one problem is that I lack vitality.

(04:33) The Temperance Movement

A social movement beginning in the early 19th century, the temperance movement gained a good deal of momentum by the 1850s and 1860s — before the beginning of the Civil War — and lasted into the early 20th century. Although the movement advocated moderation when imbibing alcohol, more often its aim was to achieve complete abstinence from liquor.

Speaking to the Springfield Washington Temperance Society in the Second Presbyterian Church, Abraham Lincoln criticized harsh temperance efforts and endorsed a kinder approach to drinking and alcoholism. Read the text of Lincoln's speech on the next page.

The Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution proscribed the use of alcohol from 1920 to 1933. In 1919, the National Prohibition Act (see photo of the document from the National Archives), commonly referred to as the Volstead Act, was passed by the United States Congress despite President Woodrow Wilson's veto. In so doing, the Act enforced the Eighteenth Amendment through its definition of intoxicating liquors. Both went into effect on January 16, 1920, and the Prohibition era began.

In 1933 during Franklin D. Roosevelt's inaugural term, the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed with the signing of the Twenty-first Amendment.

(04:49) Thoreau and Emerson

Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson were part of a literary and philosophical movement known as "transcendentalism" that flourished in New England during the latter half of the nineteenth century. It asserted that the intuitive depth of a person's spirituality exists within each individual and transcends the empirical and measurable. Moreover, the divine could exist in other human beings and not only an imposing, untouchable God.

(06:26) Letter to Jung

On January 23, 1961, the co-founder of AA, Bill Wilson, wrote a letter to Dr. Carl Jung thanking him for treating one of his friends in the 1930s. In his reply dated January 30, 1961, the famous Swiss psychologist wrote:

His craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, the union with God.

In Jung's letter, he recounts the difficulties he had treating Wilson's friend and other alcoholics. It's also here that Jung introduces the phrase spiritus contra spiritum — spirits against spirit. On the next page, view a photocopy while reading Jung's letter.

(09:47) Dr. Silkworth

Dr. William Duncan Silkworth (1873-1951) was a medical doctor and specialist in the treatment of alcoholism. He was director of the Towns Hospital in New York City in the 1930s, during which time Bill Wilson, a future co-founder of the self-help movement Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.), was admitted on three separate occasions for alcoholism. Silkworth had a profound influence on Wilson and encouraged him to realize that alcoholism was more than just an issue of moral weakness. He introduced Wilson to the idea that alcoholism had a pathological disease-like basis.

To help other alcoholics achieve sobriety, Bill W. borrowed and embraced many of the Oxford Group's principles, of which there were four requiring members to:

• Make restitution to any people they'd harmed;
• Take a moral inventory by listing "personal defects;"
• Confess these defects to another person; and
• Receive direction from God through prayer and meditation.

After parting ways because Bill W. thought the Oxford Group was becoming too political and too black-and-white, he wanted a program of tolerance and not specific requirements. It was then that he talked about a "higher power" as the source of conversion experience. This could be a Christian God or any other power greater than him- or herself that an alcoholic would accept.

(10:36) Paul on the Road to Damascus

In 36 CE, Saul, a Roman citizen and rabbi who persecuted the early Christian community, was traveling to Damascus to arrest Christians there. During his journey, Paul experienced an overwhelming divine presence, which is recounted in the ninth chapter of the New Testament's Book of Acts:

Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ He asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ The reply came, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.’ The men who were travelling with him stood speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one. Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. For three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.

Now there was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, ‘Ananias.’ He answered, ‘Here I am, Lord.’ The Lord said to him, ‘Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is praying, and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight.’ But Ananias answered, ‘Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem; and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name.’ But the Lord said to him, ‘Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel; I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.’ So Ananias went and entered the house. He laid his hands on Saul and said, ‘Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.’ And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, he regained his strength.

Accepting the new religion, Saul was renamed "Paul." Paul's writings feature prominently in the New Testament. And where Christianity had thus far been a predominantly Jewish movement, Paul’s evangelism introduced it to non-Jews.

(16:09) Julian of Norwich

An English contemplative and mystic, Julian of Norwich (circa 1342– circa 1416) wrote Revelations of Divine Love describing a series of 16 visions of Jesus. Her writings display a view of a generous and compassionate God who cares for men, as can be seen in a passage from Showing of Love:

For the tender love that our good Lord has to all who shall be saved, he comforts readily and sweetly, meaning thus, "It is true that sin is the cause of all this pain," by his words and says, "But all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner thing shall be well." These words were said showed full tenderly, showing no manner of blame to me nor to none who shall be saved. Then were it a great unnaturalness of me to blame or wonder on God for my sin, since he blames not me for sin. And in these same words I saw a marvelous high secret hid in God, which privity he shall openly and shall be known to us in heaven. In which knowing we shall truly see the cause why he suffered sin to come. In which sight we shall endlessly joy in our Lord God.

Julian of Norwich's name has been invoked a number of times on SOF. In the program "A Program for Passover and Easter", Rev. Linda Loving discusses the one-act play about Julian of Norwich by J. Janda, and what it means to her.

(27:03) "Strawberry Fields Forever"

"Strawberry Fields Forever" is a psychedelic rock song by The Beatles, released in 1967. It is famous for its allusive lyrics and experimental production techniques. The songwriter, John Lennon, was also known to have experimented with hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD at the time.

Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.
Strawberry Fields forever.

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out.
It doesn't matter much to me.

Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.
Strawberry Fields forever.

No one I think is in my tree, I mean it must be high or low.
That is you can't you know tune in but it's all right.
That is I think it's not too bad.

Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.
Strawberry Fields forever.

Always no sometimes think it's me, but you know I know when it's a dream.
I think I know I mean "Yes," but it's all wrong.
That is I think I disagree.

Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.
Strawberry Fields forever.
Strawberry Fields forever.
Strawberry Fields forever.

(27:04) Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix was a rock musician from Seattle who gained notoriety in the 1960s for his guitar playing and experimental style. In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine named him the greatest guitarist of all time. In 1969 at the Woodstock Festival, Hendrix played an instrumental version of the U.S. national anthem with an electric guitar that has been described as "pyschadelic," "politically tinted," and "distorted." Hendrix used hallucinogenic drugs and marijuana, and died after overdosing on sleeping pills in 1970.

(29:42) The Four Noble Truths

In Buddhism, there are four central concepts which encompass the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama Buddha:

• Existence is filled with suffering (dukkha), and is part of the painful cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth known as samsara;
• Suffering is caused by longing and attachment to worldly objects, places, people and states of being;
• Suffering, like a flame, can be extinguished, and samsara can be escaped;
• The way to the end of suffering is through the Noble Eightfold Path, a series of ethical practices outlined by the Buddha. The escape from suffering and from samsara leads to a state of sublime perfection known as nirvana.

Focused meditation aids in the intuitive understanding of these four concepts.

(34:27) Buddhist Teaching of Sickness, Old Age, and Death

Siddhartha Gautama's father was an Indian king who received a prophecy at the time of his son’s birth: Siddhartha would become either a great ruler or a great teacher. Fearing that his son would choose the latter path, Siddhartha’s father surrounded him with the trappings of wealth and luxury throughout his life, sheltering him from the realities of human suffering, habituating him to the life of a ruler. However, as the canonical Buddhist texts relate, the gods of the ancient Vedic faith intervened, sending one of their number into Siddhartha’s court disguised as an old man. The sight of this feeble being shocked Siddhartha. In further encounters, Siddhartha saw a sick man and a corpse. He also saw a hermit.

Increasingly disenchanted with his sheltered life and witnessing the asceticism of the hermit, Siddhartha imagined that for every negative human condition there must be an opposite, a state in which one was free from suffering, age, illness, and death. He resolved to find a solution to his disenchantment. He wore the robes of a monk and left his cushy palace life in search of a worthy teacher — and Enlightenment. Siddartha Gautama did find the Enlightenment he sought, thus becoming the Buddha, the Awakened One. He spread his teachings throughout ancient India, and attracted followers.

On the subject of illness, the Buddha related a teaching to his disciple Ananda. In the following passage, we find that Ananda was reluctant to visit a sick man, one who was also a tathagata, an enlightened man:

The Tathagatas have the body of the Dharma — not a body that is sustained by material food. The Tathagatas have a transcendental body that has transcended all mundane qualities. There is no injury to the body of a Tathagata, as it is rid of all defilements. The body of a Tathagata is uncompounded and free of all formative activity. Reverend Ananda, to believe there can be illness in such a body is irrational and unseemly!

Although the Buddha himself had entered into the state of nirvana, which he described as "deathless," his mortal body was as susceptible as ever to mortal suffering. At the age of 80, as he prepared for his death, the Buddha was surrounded by his disciples. The Buddha uttered his last words: "All conditioned things are subject to decay &#$151; strive on untiringly."

(35:25) Super Bowl and Disney World

Throughout the years, Walt Disney World has released a series of post-Super Bowl commercials, all with the same basic premise: over a montage of shots featuring the winning Super Bowl team in action, a narrator asks the star player, "You just won the Super Bowl. What are you going to do next?" The response: "I’m going to Disney World!"

(36:54) Mindfulness

Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the masters of the practice of mindfulness. In The Miracle of Mindfulness, the Vietnamese monk defines mindfulness (sati in the original Pali of the Buddha) as "keeping one's consciousness alive to the present reality." The following passage describes mindfulness as a miracle by which we master and restore ourselves:

Consider, for example: a magician who cuts his body into many parts and places each part in a different region—hands in the south, arms in the east, legs in the north, and then by some miraculous power lets forth a cry which reassembles whole every part of his body. Mindfulness is like that—it is the miracle which can call back in a flash our dispersed mind and restore it to wholeness so that we can live each minute of life.

(38:10) The Meaning of Karma and Dharma

The concept of karma, from the Sanskrit meaning action or deed, is the driving force behind the cycles of reincarnation and rebirth in Hinduism and many other Asian religions. Karma is a law of consequences for one's actions, which will come to bear upon the individual in this life or a future life. In essence, morally good actions will produce positive consequences while morally reprehensible deeds will produce negative results. Raman sees karma as Hinduism's answer to the metaphysical concept of the problem of evil.

Dharma is commonly translated as "religious duty" or one's ethical framework in the mundane world. Dharma can be categorized in two forms: sanatana-dharma and varnashrama-dharma. They are not mutually exclusive but serve as complementary approaches to gaining deeper understanding. Sanatana-dharma alludes to the need for each individual soul to serve a greater force, namely God. It serves as the driving force on issues of equality and inclusiveness at the personal level. Whereas, varnashrama-dharma takes into account an individual's daily tasks and social matters. These are classified according to four divisions of labor and four stages in life, which change as one passes through different stages. A third form is sadharana-dharma, general codes of moral conduct. They are often defined as yama (prohibitions) niyama, recommended practices (niyama).

In our program called "The Heart's Reason," scientist V.V. Raman sees karma as Hinduism's answer to the metaphysical concept of the problem of evil.

(46:49) Jack Kornfield

Jack Kornfield, a prominent American Buddhist teaching at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center, wrote After the Ecstasy, The Laundry, a book about personal growth that draws on writings and teachings of spiritual masters throughout history.

(47:24) Satori, an Enlightenment Experience

"Enlightenment" is the usual translation of the Pali term bodhi. Bodhi, however, more accurately means "awakening." Thus, one who has achieved bodhi — a buddha — is one who is "awake," one who has woken up from the delusion, greed, and hate that drive human experience. In Zen Buddhism, the Japanese term satori carries the same meaning as bodhi.

(49:05) Sila, The Ethics

The Noble Eightfold Path describes the method of transcending the unsatisfactory nature of earthly life. The following three parts of the eightfold path define sila (translated variously as "morality" or "ethical conduct"):

1. Right speech: to abstain from dishonesty, gossip, slander, harshness, and to speak honestly, generously, kindly, and only out of necessity;
2. Right action: to abstain from theft, deception, violence, and sexual misconduct, and to act with respect and compassion;
3. Right livelihood: to abstain from work that harms or exploits other people or creatures (including the production and sale of meat), to abstain from dealing in weapons, alcohol, drugs or other intoxicants, and instead living and working peacefully.