Deeply involved in social and political action as I am at the moment, your email on politics and spirituality interested me very much.  I do find it hard to imagine you, Dave, in the role of the Miss Jean Brodie of the Left.  Having started out in the  public service,  followed by journalism,  I learned not to trust either bureaucrats or politicians, right or left.   Mao, Stalin and Hitler talked the talk but something else emerged.   I met many sincere people in public services  but also the devious power abusers in both groups denying rights to citizens.   I feel that the only reliable perspective is Healthy Scepticism about what these groups claim, and their actual intentions and mirage programmes. Have they delivered? Loyalty to a party is a mistake, to my mind, and involves a loss of independence and objectivity.   From being a free citizen you become a follower.  It becomes a fixed belief, a faith that we socialists, or whoever, have the only sure framework, or prison.

I think you will be interested in the following  happening.  Sometime towards the end of the 70s a group here set up a well funded programme for drug addicts.  Their plan also included a concealed  agenda:  to convince the participants that they were victims of society, and it was the enemy and cause of their addiction.   Stoking participants’ anger, and their own ignorance, proved very combustible.   One day the programme  blew up and the staff had to take refuge in the toilets until rescued.   It was closed immediately.

While there is great energy and satisfaction in the kamaraderie of a cause, I am very conscious of  the danger of it getting out of hand and conviction in the rightness of the cause leading to vile actions.  We on this island are still searching for bodies, North and South, victims of “the Cause.”   Anyway , Dave, I tend to lean towards the Buddhist view of interrelatedness/interconnectedness of all beings  as a spiritual beginning.  But I also support Albert Ellis’s view that we are all screwed up, fallible human beings.   It’s not pessimistic but rather compassionate.

  It is also a reason why all human organisations are corruptible, but we can reclaim ourselves and reform our organisations, by keeping  a close eye on them, continuous vigilance and  reform and reappraisal, adherence to ethics, and maintaining permeability of the programme’s interface with society, as Bridger advocated in Rome and which I often discussed with our dear friend Don Ottenberg.  I like the idea of “Listen to the talk, but only trust, or believe, what they do.”

As you know, the TC programme  embraces  honesty, care for others, responsibility, keeping commitments, and mindfulness of what we think and do and the outcome, and an ethical way of living, to mention but a few components of the TC that relate to how to live a more healthy, and perhaps a happier life, and contributing to society.   Awakening to the actual world we live in can be transcending and reenergising, particularly transcending the conditioned self.

I think that the resident has a lot to do making his/her own of a new value system and self nourishing way of behaving, before becoming involved in social or political activism, which, as you know can be a way of avoiding personal change, mindfulness, and responsibility.  

I would tend to regard all of this, particularly personal mindfulness, and altruism  as spiritual and far from nebulous, but you don’t have to see it as anything more than a practical and better way of living for yourself, and others.  An interesting book in this area is Bo Lazoff’s “We are all doing time,” a guide to getting free, available via The Prison Phoenix Trust, Cambridge, UK.

Of course I also believe in social and political action as essential activity (protest and votes), if fairness and democracy are to be achieved and taught to politicians, and telling them what these are about, and we are having some success. 

To you, Rowdy, I would say that frequently AA and NA branches make a dog’s dinner of “It’s a spiritual programme” by not satisfactorily explaining what they mean.   This often results in endless arguments, confusion with religion,  rejection,  and an escape route for disgruntled participants.   I often wonder how many actually do a ‘fearless moral inventory’, if I have that correctly.  

A bewildered member consulted me many years ago having been taken apart at an AA meeting for quoting an American  list of issues that  might  be included in such an inventory.   From the details of the abuse, I suspected that few of them had taken the Step and resented being reminded.   Nevertheless, I have to acknowledge good work done by the Fellowship, particularly as an ongoing resource,  by groups that I  have known about here and in London.

A happy and exciting New Year to both of you and all EFTC members.

Kind regards to you both.   Very, very sad news about Juan!

Jim Cumberton

DPA, Ireland