Between pain and suffering and agony
The Collapse of the Ego
“Turning the impossible into possible”
"Detox from Drugs at a Luxury Holistic Center in Thailand and Israel"
The disease of addiction is the beginning of a disease of the "ego"
The Collapse of the Ego
The disease of addiction is the beginning of a disease of the “ego”
(Bill Wilson, founder of AA)
The topic I chose to begin the book with is a complex, problematic topic, subject to debate and raises deep philosophical questions and doubts. I chose it because, in my understanding, it is a condition and basis for the work of the 12 steps, and it is also a deep foundation in the Buddhist concept in its varieties and forms.
After sixteen years of addiction to hard drugs, I went through what Bill Wilson and William James call “the conversion of the ego” and in simple words, the collapse of the ego (the system of perception, thought, memory, belief, defense mechanisms, etc.). It was a severe personal and mental crisis. I experienced psychosis, a sense of loss, a disintegration of the self, I lay in the same position for many days, almost without moving, I felt overwhelmed with emotions and thoughts and that I was going crazy, I fought not to be hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital, I was in a catatonic state.
I remember that from this state a deep understanding arose in me that there was no more “My Eastern Father”, this figure that I had clung to until that moment, she was dead. These were two complex and unbearable weeks of abysmal suffering, a feeling of terrible loneliness, being swallowed up, a threatening bottom, abandonment of everything I loved, a feeling that I was lost in a world in which I had no part.
I was violent towards myself, I cut myself, only a miracle and divine grace prevented me from committing suicide in those days.
Later I understood that without a complete defeat of the ego, my recovery would not have been possible, that reaching “unbearable suffering” is a condition for recovery from addiction.
This is what happened to Bill Wilson in the collapse of his ego, this is what led him to a spiritual experience, this experience crystallized into a path, a method, a self-help, which was born due to deep despair that led him to enlightenment and writing the 12-step approach in a few days.
Don’t know what you don’t know
“I know that I don’t know, but there are people who don’t know this,” said Socrates, a sentence that later became a common saying in the world of Jewish Hasidism, and a cornerstone of every spiritual teacher. The founders of AA built this wonderful 12-step program out of absolute recognition of the need to “crush the ego”, in the recognition that you don’t know! You don’t know what you don’t know.
The understanding of the founders of the step program was unequivocal. A way must be found to introduce a “new idea” into our atomic heads as addicts. The opacity and closure of the “addict” creates a kind of rigid “ego” with a host of defense mechanisms that are characterized by it that maintain the addiction. An opening had to be found so that addicts like me, wherever they were, would receive the message that they could no longer control the substance they were addicted to and abusing.
Bill Wilson says that “people driven by pride or selfishness do not stand up to all their limitations,” and they needed to be helped to find a crack in the walls their ego had built, through which the light of reason could penetrate. It was important to know that the purpose of each of the 12 steps was to achieve greater humility. Without a measure of humility, no alcoholic or drug addict could remain sober.
The 12 steps required me to go against my natural desires; they immediately shattered the remnants of my ego. The fifth step, which we will discuss later, recommends that I confess to myself, to God, and to another person the exact nature of my flaws. This step is more ego-destructive than any other step.
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Key Elements of Drugs Detox:
Medical Supervision: Drugs detox must be conducted under medical supervision, as the body may experience withdrawal symptoms. These can include nausea, anxiety, muscle aches, and insomnia. A medical team will monitor and manage these symptoms to ensure the patient’s safety and comfort.
Holistic Therapies:
Holistic Therapies: Many detox programs incorporate holistic therapies such as mindfulness, yoga, and meditation to help individuals cope with stress and anxiety during the detox process. These therapies support the mind-body connection and contribute to overall recovery.
Tapering Process
Tapering Process: Drugs detox often involves a gradual tapering of the drug to reduce withdrawal severity. Doctors will slowly decrease the dosage over time to allow the body to adjust to lower levels of the substance.
Psychological Support:
Psychological Support: Like any addiction recovery process, detox from Drugs includes psychological support. This can involve counseling, therapy, or support groups to address the mental and emotional aspects of addiction.
Post-Detox Treatment:
Post-Detox Treatment: After completing detox, continuing treatment is crucial to prevent relapse. This often includes participation in ongoing therapy, group support, and the development of new coping strategies to maintain sobriety.
The ego as the source of the disease of addiction
The disease of addiction is described in the 12-step literature as a chronic disease that cannot be cured, but only temporarily stopped. The disease is present in the background throughout the addict’s life, even if he does not actually use any psychoactive substance. Therefore, members of the “Narcotics Anonymous” program do not present themselves as “former addicts,” but as “clean addicts,” or as “recovering addicts,” those who are in a process that will never end. There is no complete cure for the disease of addiction, because there is no complete abolition of the ego.
I remember myself at the beginning of the journey, when I was still not aware of the language of the 12-step program or its ideas; I claim and tell that I was in a lifelong prison of my ego, a prisoner of my thoughts, feelings, and desires, acting on them without any ability to restrain myself. But the moment I underwent a spiritual awakening, I realized that all my days I had been a slave to my ego. The ego that imprisoned me and forced its desires on me.
This awakening made me want to try to understand things about my ego, to understand what this prison is? Who is it that imprisoned me? What material is it made of? I set out to search for many years for answers to these complex questions; in Judaism, in Buddhism, in the various psychoanalytic approaches, according to the 12-step approach, and to ask: What is the “I”? Who is the “I”? What is the “ego”? What is the “self”? I searched a lot, and today the answer is much clearer to me, I am both and, I have both of this and that in me, and I will address this in detail later. The basic goal of the path is to help me as a person free myself from attachment to the “imprisoned self-structure”. To free myself from a mistaken perception of the nature of the self and the “I”, in order to reach the true nature. In other words, I had to give up ordinary everyday awareness, my immediately identified lower “I” in order to achieve higher awareness.
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The Ego and the "Steps" "Whoever has ever built a new paradise, has drawn the strength for it from his own personal hell" (Socrates)
My hell was the ego, the clinging to it. Over time, along the way, I learn that it exhausts me on a daily basis. The ego can be my disadvantage or become my advantage. The ego that was my hell has become for me, with time and practice, a source of blessing, as I learn to wound and destroy it. To transform from a self-centered person into a person of compassion, love and infinite capacity for giving, hell has become heaven for me.
After Bill Wilson completely failed in his attempt to get a drunkard to stop drinking on his own strength and his pride, he realized that only the power of spiritual experience can change a person, and spiritual experience is always associated with disaster and the collapse of the ego. Change, he understood, only happens following a “total collapse.”
“In my case, Bill Wilson says of himself, what helped me reach the collapse were things my doctor told me, that I was hopeless, words that increased the deep feeling of hopelessness, and it was from the depths of hell that the vision of Alcoholics Anonymous emerged for me. The abysmal darkness in which Bill Wilson was, the realization that he was suffering from an incurable disease, was what reborn him, was what made him surrender completely, admit total defeat.”
And honestly, who among us is willing to admit total defeat? No one! My natural senses as a human being rebel against this idea of helplessness, and the literature of the 12 steps says “total defeat is the root from which our entire group grew and flourished.” This is the beginning of all beginnings, letting the ego collapse, that is, this is the first step.
“A Power Greater Than Me”
When I wanted to investigate and reach the source of pain, I first had to investigate and reach the very root of human reality. Who am I? What is my true nature? Where does my power of growth come from? Where does the existence and basis of the life of this “thing”, known as Avraham Mizrahi, on earth come from?
While moving and searching, I came more and more to understand that I do not have a separate and fixed reality, I cannot fit under one definition that would include all of my essence. The “I” is not a separate and defined reality, there is a “someone” and a “something” separate from me, who give me life and existence.
This understanding made a crack in the wall of my pride, a crack through which I began to see additional sources of power. In my previous state, in the state of “use”, there was a large screen that separated me from the power greater than me (God, the group, the mentor, the therapist), between me and the secret of power and existence – I lived with omnipotent thoughts, I thought that I was the power of reality.
This perception continues throughout my recovery, I am recovering, I work, I am a therapist, I am a psychologist, I am a businessman, I am everything – I am everything. And when this is my perception of the world, and my ego encounters obstacles, it is filled with disappointment and despair over and over again from places, things, people, and situations.
"The Reduction"
The 12-step program speaks of “unbearable suffering.” That only from the bottom of unbearable suffering can one grow.
As the story of creation in the Jewish tradition describes, the world was filled only with divinity, all infinite light. In order for there to be a world, God had to shrink, to remove His light to the sides, to be deprived of Himself, from being “omnipotent” – and thus the world came into being. This process is called “reduction.” This shrinkage led to the process of “breaking the vessels,” which are all those worlds that preceded our world. According to the Kabbalah, the world was created in a fracture.
So too with man in general and with the addict in particular, in order to be created, to be reborn, we are required to give up the old. Renunciation is like death or at the very least a deep fracture. This process is reflected in all drug and alcohol addicts, a feeling of “omnipotence” that leads to a great fracture from which growth begins.
The process of breaking occurs to make room for new information, because otherwise no new information can be added. When a person is completely filled with himself, he cannot be helped. Therefore, the 12-step program relies entirely on the complete breaking of the ego, and “suffering” is a necessary condition and event for “ego collapse.”
Until the addict goes through this complex process, his ability to recover is highly questionable. Addicts cannot recover without reaching a mental, emotional, social, or financial bottom. The recognition that you are there at the bottom is critical. This is the admission of “helplessness.”
This matter is described in detail in the Book of Psalms – “A Song of Ascents from the Depths, O Lord, I have called You” (Psalms 111). According to the Zohar, these are the depths of the soul, and only when a person reaches these depths, the painful abysses, does he raise any cry of helplessness and undergo a spiritual awakening.
This spiritual awakening may manifest itself in several ways; for example, Bill Wilson describes the experience as a burst of energy in which he is suddenly bathed entirely in an unnatural light and with the knowledge that his prayer has been answered, his pain heard somewhere in cosmic space. I myself had a similar direct experience, I experienced a powerful moral and intellectual awakening and the clear truth of life was revealed to me.
Spiritual awakening
Bill Wilson’s ego collapse brought him enlightenment, and this is how he describes what he went through: “I experienced an electricity beyond description, the room lit up, I was blinded, I knew only ecstasy, the hills lifted me up, it wasn’t air, it was a wind that blew into me, suddenly a thought came, you are a free man and then I calmed down but I was still lying on the bed.”
Many psychiatrists claim that Bill Wilson was psychotic. Nowadays, he would probably be hospitalized and given tranquilizers and tied up. Bill Wilson always said that he was grateful to Dr. Silkworth for calming him down and telling him that he was not crazy and to keep what he experienced.
At that time, Bill Wilson says that he received William James’s book “The Religious Experience of the Sufi”, from which he learned about the possibility of reality conversion, a state in which one undergoes “conversion and spiritual transformation.” Bill read the book with great enthusiasm, and identified very much with the claim that some are born twice, and their second birth leads them to the understanding that they live from now on to serve those who have only been born once.
In the 12-step program, we call this a spiritual awakening. William James called it “conversion.” In his book, he explains the ability to be born again, to experience religion, to find security, expressions that come to mark the process from a state in which the “I” that was previously divided, inferior, unhappy, not worthy of itself according to its knowledge, reaches an inner unity and becomes excellent, happy, worthy of itself according to its knowledge.
This is the spiritual awakening according to the 12-step program, this is the conversion that William James talks about, and this is the spiritual awakening that I went through. From a state of being a lonely person with no future, no hope, no dream, I became a social person who never stops dreaming and a silversmith to spread the light of love in the world.
Psychological Support:
Psychological Support: Like any addiction recovery process, detox from Subutex includes psychological support. This can involve counseling, therapy, or support groups to address the mental and emotional aspects of addiction.
The House of Choice
Looking back, I see that I went through thirty years of slavery and servitude, I was an “idolatry” idol, the greatest of all the idols I worshipped, celebrities or big names from the world of crime in whom I saw a role model.
When I sobered up, that is, when I woke up, I realized very quickly that my choice was conditioned by the wounding of my ego, the deepening of my personal crisis, the feeling of my own worthlessness. It didn’t take long from the moment I “came clean” to the moment I realized that I would not benefit from continuing to blame the environment. Blaming my parents, the establishment, God and his wife, would not help me at all!
This is how Bill Wilson puts it: “We must not adopt the hopeless philosophy that we were victims of our environment, life or heritage, that only these forces decided for us, this is not the path to freedom. We must believe that we can choose.”
The first step brings us to raise a white flag, to surrender, to acknowledge our helplessness, to acknowledge our lack of control over our illness, to acknowledge our need for help. The second step teaches us to accept help. The third step educates us to begin making the right decisions, and the right decision is surrendering to a greater power as I understand it. That is where the choice begins. It is a choice to give up the familiar and known, a choice to begin learning to consult, a renewed and daily choice to give up the control that I am so accustomed to.
It is a choice that is beyond ego consciousness, beyond the influences of the past, beyond the influences of fears, resentments, guilt, and complacency, toward free choice, and as Bill Wilson put it: “We gain freedom when we choose to live a spiritual life.”
Is there no me?
The sages of the Dao (ancient Chinese philosophy) warn us again and again about the self-contradictory effort: “The ego that strives to eliminate the ego and does not understand that this is precisely a manifestation of the ego.”
The goal is to reach the feeling that there is no separate and permanent I. And this is difficult, after all, we see with our senses that there is a concept called “I”. When someone calls us, we answer them. I think of myself as an Israeli, as a father, as a husband, as a clean addict, as a teacher, as a football fan. I, and everyone else, have a perception of separateness.
Indeed, this perception is not really perceived, it is there, but there is no ability to put it into a clear framework, neither in conceptual analysis nor introspection, it is impossible to physically or mentally isolate any entity that corresponds to this individual “I”.
The feeling of my self is innate, everything that is attached to it was created under the influence of the society and environment in which I lived and under the influence of my personality, therefore there is really no complete liberation from this “I”. Even those who have awakened spiritually, and are included in the collective consciousness, do so at regular intervals, and inevitably return to separateness. This awakening is described in the book of Ezekiel with the words “again and again” – I run towards perfection and return to separateness, only each taste of that perfection returns me to a different separateness, less divided, less patterned.
My run towards perfection helps me neutralize the false ego, the fixed separateness, the false perception of who I am. The pursuit of it gives rise to the understanding in me that the ego is our false idea of myself, a counterfeit of my mind, the product of a false and powerful environment. It is an idea of my narcissistic compulsive ego that operates with incessant obsession in me, whose power derives solely in relation to others, through comparisons.
When I wanted to rebuild myself, I had to do what is called “ego deconstruction.” The act of destruction must be clear, and although for many years we don’t know exactly what is being destroyed, the general goal is clear: we destroy the separate ego, this illusion that separates me and makes me think that I am more, that I am everything and everything is me.
