It's important to get a "sponsor" in twelve step programs. Being based on a spiritual experience these programs offered the role of the sponsor. This is a person who has "got it". Often times they subsequently "lose it" but purpose of the relationship is to transfer the mysterious spiritual experience. This it truly impossible to describe.
As a person who Identifies as an alcoholic I will never know if I really looked at life that differently from ordinary people. Perhaps some genetic predisposition caused my "disease". Whatever the case may be I found that the only way I could truly put down the bottle for a long period was by completely changing my outlook on reality. I live under the assumption that your average person or most people never come to a situation were they have to change their behavior in the face of death. Its rather strange to have to just stop doing something or else.
In the face of this decision I came to realize that I hadn't ever really seen a whole picture.I had these notions about what other people thought and what I was supposed to do but I found my own reasons why I could transgress these rules. It's not important how or what one actually does its the fact that ones own deeply held sense of what is right is offended. Fighting, anger, remorse, shame, paranoia there are so many ways to stay the focus of your own attention. This process is self defeating and eventually own realizes that inside there is something very much the same about all the other humans we come in contact with.
It behooves one to understand that the world is filled with people who may be experiencing things just as we do or perhaps entirely differently but they do experience. If we accept this premise then our consciousness should expand to include the people we come in contact with and ourselves as beings we have a reason to be understanding and forgiving of.The word sponsor might be misleading in certain ways. It has the connotation that the sponsor is needed to introduce one as an OK fella to the group and to your higher power god figure. This is not the case. The sponsor doesn't need support to the sponsee in any way materially or mentally. The sponsor brings the voice of the spiritual experience to another person in a time of desperate crisis. Thus one receives the most valuable this life has to offer at the moment of greatest suffering. I can only say this because I experienced it and that is how it seems to me.
The feelings of faith in the human spirit become very strong. One encounters hundreds of people who were just destroyed by life and their disease who never the less describe a new life that is better than any previous one. This leads one to inculcate the story/mythology/process by which a person can undergo a profound change. This change is like the change one might feel taking a psychedelic drug.
The amorphous quality of value we imbue things with changes fundamentally as it is a projected quality in many ways. It gives a feeling of power over the need to control things. Once one begins to see through things one realizes that there are only a few basic human needs which one is provided almost without fail in this country ,however very very few humans are engaged in any productive activity whatsoever. Things that are produced beyond food shelter and community are not really important. It's not that we don't FEEL that they are important because they are often the things we find most important in our lives.
But structurally- physically they serve no function to help one live. Cars help one live in little detached huts dotting the landscape but they don't shelter or feed anyone. How many farmers do you know? How many carpenters?
So why do you work so hard? Why do you keep putting things off? Why does everything depend on money. This is because instead of spending our time in an environment of people telling a story of self transformation we spend our time alone interacting with the mass media. The mass media consists of two forces. The advertisers only care manipulating you into doing something you wouldn't have thought off doing unless it had been brought to your attention . This fundamental fact underlies all advertisements. You have something of value they want and the only requirement they have is to get it. They just need money. You kinda know this but you feel that it's OK and it doesn't have anything to do with the content. But that just is not the case.
The positing of a need or a lack in people is the job of advertisers but it has spilled over to color all the media. The underlying message is you get something for nothing. If you start looking at the box pretty soon you begin to look forward to looking at it. So here is a thing that can capture your attention without you even really having to choose what to do or look at.
I suspect that the act of staring at a two dimensional object without having to move ones head is a radically new human behavior. Of course so is reading a book but there is a very very big difference. This difference does not mean that anyone is intentionally doing anything wrong. It's just a mechanism inadvertently generated due to the funding mechanism of the mass media. This means that we essentially sell our attention to advertisers with the agreement that they either make or fund broadcast-able events that will in turn capture our attention. Either way it seems the majority of people are either unable or unwilling to choose what to do with their minds.
It's like humans are just dying to to live like a large carnivore. We just get our our food then sit around looking at stuff or eating. As animals we could not have evolutionarily prepared for the advent of the next tool of transcendence. Like say a cell wall(suddenly cells!), DNA(suddenly evolution)every organelle a cell(suddenly specialization),,various forms of locomotion, sex etc. It's like huge jumps in "capabilities" suddenly gel. As we get closer to our time we see things like flight and sight developing. It's weird but it would seem that there does seem to be at least a rudimentary direction to LIFE. First it shows up in some environment like say A tide pool or a hot ocean vent and then "magically" forms appear which can live in other environments. What this takes it some kind of ability which which could not have come about through any experience in the environment the "new" life suddenly finds itself propagating in. Look at an eye It seems so miraculously specialized but this seems to be what happens to life over time. This extreme organization looks extremely over done but senses allowed forms of life to adapt to different environments. But really that is beside the point in a way.
It just seems like one could describe consciousness in a way as another in a long line of strange things like eyes and wings which allow life to somehow start moving in a different space. But then there are now a lot of flying and seeing creatures but it would seem only one conscious one. Wouldn't it seem like maybe in the future there might be more than one. Perhaps as we can look back and try to find some connection between single celled organisms who interact among each other and sometimes(a a very simple way)us and all these huge multi-cellular beings. Viewed as singular and apart these multicelullar individuals(communities of specialized cells working as a system who boundaries are described by the easily discerned(especially through sight)demarcation between whats on the inside or attached to the bag of skin and what is outside and not attached). interact in ways that viewed through a humans eyes and looking at it western way seem outlandishly more complex.
Or to put it another ways the illusion that we experience through our judgment based on highly specialized organs that evolved for a different reasons in another environment altogether resembles the illusion we get when we use our minds eye or "self" to peer from whatever it exists to somehow "model" the eye as a physical collection of specialized cells that somehow looks like it exists to SEE/sense other collections of cells that are perceived as unities from the vantage point of what seems to be the "reason" the "EYE" exists.
So I propose there is another " environment " which our consciousness exists. The "place" of this environment may only be able to seen from the top down (as we model three dimensional space perceived through the physical eye( a collection of specialized cells that look like they are working together to serve conduit for the transmission of three dimension information which is used to model the world. The conception or model that comes out of an illusion created in the brain by a consciousness that exists in another environment but none the less only has "eyes" for our so called physical plane of existence.
