Fr. Bill Wigmore
CEO of Austin Recovery

We were walking home from grade school when it suddenly came into view. We turned the corner, and there, filling the width of our once familiar, four-lane boulevard, stood a two-story house resting on a hundred wheels. All traffic was stopped and people lined the sidewalks watching in awe as the gray and white behemoth inched its way forward at the pace of a lazy snail under a hot summer sun. For us kids, it was a magical sight to behold as well as a shock to what we had, just moments before, thought of as permanence. Change happens. Houses and the lives within them can be uprooted – ripped from one foundation and set down on another. Being self-centered, even at the tender age of seven, I wondered if my house might be next! I had no awareness at all that my own soul would one day need to travel a similar journey.

For some reason, that scene came back to me as I sat down to try to write about the change that happens to us in recovery. I’m sober 37 years this month and still pondering what that change has been about for me as well as for the tens of thousands I’ve watched it happen to all along the way. As the Big Book says, the change can come suddenly to some – perhaps not unlike little Dorothy’s house, ripped from its Kansas foundation and plunked down in the 4th dimension of Oz. But for most of us, and again paraphrasing the book, the change will be far slower and gradual - more like that house I witnessed years ago in my youth. Sadly, for far too many of us alcoholics and addicts, the change doesn’t happen at all.

From time to time, and always in a similar state of awe, I listen or read as someone who has experienced this change struggles to put it into words. Over and over, I’ve read and marveled at Bill Wilson’s “white-light” or “hot-flash” experience. His was an instant change of the Wizard of Oz variety. It ripped the foundation of his soul and transported him to the psychic experience of a whole new inner-world. “Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light and I was on a mountain – and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing … all at once I knew I was a free man. I was in a new world of consciousness.” Bill’s consciousness was changed and because of that change, he never drank again. He saw his mission in life to bring this change to all the alcoholics who were still suffering. His mission remains ours as well.

But words like Wilson’s can only point us toward and never tell us exactly what the inner-change is like. In the end, it is “an experience,” “a journey,” “a transformation,” “a re-birth” – a new destination inside our souls that we must arrive at for ourselves. Only then do we understand the words of one who has known it and tries to point us toward it.

Some years ago, I came upon a spiritual teacher who, for me, comes closest to describing this mysterious, seismic shift. Robert Johnson is a Jungian therapist and the author of Transformation. There he describes this change as the movement away from the three dimensional consciousness that we know, to a fourth dimension of consciousness to which we humans are called. The Big Book speaks about this same “fourth dimension of existence” as the healing place inside where Bill Wilson finally landed – but only after his ego collapsed and only after he called out from the depths of his depression, “O God, if there is a God, help me!” It was following his ego’s collapse and surrender of the self he knew to the God he did not - that the room lit up. (Big Book: “We thought we could find an easier, softer way. But we could not.”)

Johnson writes, “For most people, the transition from three-dimensional to four-dimensional consciousness is exceedingly painful. Medieval Christianity called it the dark night of the soul; Dante called it the journey through hell and purgatory; it was forty days and forty nights in the desert for Jesus; it was a journey in the belly of a fish for many a hero.” In 12-Step fellowships, it is called experiencing the First Step. It comes to us exactly as it came for Wilson: when we concede the hopelessness of our condition to our innermost selves. Johnson then makes his attempt to put this psychic change into words. He says, “The process can be summed up in one sentence: it is the relocating of the center of the personality from the ego to a center greater than one’s self. This superpersonal center has been variously called the Self, the Christ nature, the Buddha nature, superconsciousness, cosmic consciousness, satori, and Samadhi.” Johnson continues, “This relocation appears to be death when viewed from the perspective of the ego…. And death it is! The ego loses its supremacy and goes through a short time of violent suffering.” Johnson dares to call it exactly what it is: a form of suicide that he cautions must be done – but done “without doing harm to our bodies” and most difficult of all, “done with the ego’s consent.”

Another year has gone by since I saw that house make its way to wherever it was going. Another year in which I’ve watched more alcoholics and addicts die form this disease because they would not go inside and die to themselves. But to Wilson and Johnson, and to Jesus and Buddha and to all of those who’ve made it and who are making it - one day at a time – it’s time to say thank you. Have a Merry Christmas and a Really New Year!