FAITH MONTH: DAY 31: “Faith is universal. Our specific methods for understanding it are arbitrary. Some of us pray to Jesus, some of us go to Mecca, some of us study subatomic particles. In the end, we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.” ― Dan Brown
Faith is a funny thing. What we believe becomes our version of reality for life. We are programmed and conditioned to believe as children.
Many of us were taught religious dogma, the rules of the home and family we were raised in. Then there is the conditioning and programming we get in the process called education. In todays’ world, it also comes from all sources of media. This is all a controversial form of conditioning, education, and programming. Most of it is also known as “brain washing.”
I remember coming to the early meetings around here. I was convinced that you were setting out to brainwash me and resisted with all my might. Around six or nine months, it became apparent to me that my brain could use a good washing. I had placed all of my faith in the hands of drug dealers and liquor distributors to save me from life itself.
Every day, I was turning my will and my life over to the care of a powder that was hellbent on destroying me. How much worse could it get? I became convinced that your type of faith might be a better path for me than the one I was walking.
I also remember learning something very important about my early childhood conditioning and programming. That it was based on propaganda and quite a few misguided ideas, along with those I had adopted along the way for myself.
Okay! At one time, early in the days when Russia was exploring Western cultural beliefs, I had the opportunity to meet a very smart woman who came from Russia to explore Western treatment for addiction. They had a huge problem in Russia with alcoholism…lots of vodka there!
She was a doctor, so smart and so kind. I really liked her. We had some wonderful discussions, and our language differences were seldom a problem. But what I learned was that during her childhood, she was programmed and conditioned to believe the exact same things about me and my culture and my country that I was programmed and conditioned to believe about hers!
We were the same age and had grown up with the terrible threat of nuclear disaster at any moment, bomb drills in our schools, and all that. As much as our media and government programmed and conditioned me to believe that Russians were set only on destroying everything American; she was raised to believe the same demonizing things about Americans. Exactly the same! Interesting…I had been brainwashed all my life.
Huge realization, and I was a grown woman. I knew a lot about my culture, but this really brought it to a scale I could not deny. I had placed all my FAITH in people who had lied, all the time, about everything!
I had been lied to about religious dogma that never sat well with me. I had been lied to by my family when they taught me that their brand of love was the right kind and the best kind. I had been lied to by the media when they told me that this was the only and best place in the world.
I am a product of the 1960s, so I heard many others who were tired of the lies, the dogma, the programming and conditioning; and were resisting it and actively fighting it. But I really got it when I could apply it to Step 3 and realize I had turned my life and my will over to ALL of this shit, and none of it was true! WOW!!!!
So, now I could easily see that recovery had given me a much better path. I did not HAVE to believe any of it. I could be as skeptical as I wanted and make a decision, based on my understanding of that Power, on each day; over and over. That I could do. That I have done. That is the thing that I keep coming back for, because I am happy, I am recovering (more every day…screw you if you tell me you are “recovered”!); and this thing is working so well I wish I could sip it from a cocktail glass…hahahahaha! I am eternally grateful for the brainwashing I have gotten here.
Dolphin Hug 