What is Your Biggest Enemy in the Process?

Is your biggest enemy the big bad ego and all of its story lines tempting you to make the illusion real? The car crash, the sickness, the lack of money, the winning of the lottery, the special relationship, the angry friend, the ect., etc., etc. all screaming to you to make them real.

No. Your biggest enemy, the biggest hindrance to your progress is something we will call “the drift”. The Course calls it mind wandering, but those two words really have too much animation to describe “the drift”. Imagine that you have a bathtub filled with a nice warm bubble bath and you step in and just zone out. You are so comfortable and relaxed. You could just stay there forever. That is “the drift”. It is your comfort zone. Your ego thinking program that runs all day, every day. Even if you think you don’t like the results, it is like a nice warm bath. It is familiar. What you don’t realize is that you are really soaking in a tub of warm feces that the ego is telling you is a soothing restful bath. You are soaking in familiar stinking thinking and getting stinking results. That is “the drift”. You wake up in it. You spend most of you day in it. If you are going to become a master you must be aware of and define your drift. “You are much too tolerant of mind wandering,” the Course admonishes. Right now “the drift” is the norm in your experience, inspired thought and action the exception. We need to flip that around. We need to get into an aggressive plan to become aware of our participation in “the drift”.

You wake up in “the drift”. You should have a plan first thing in the morning to remedy that. Maybe read the Course first thing, set the intention for your day, call a buddy, call your coach, automatic Holy Spirit write or whatever else the Holy Spirit prescribes. We need to be proactive. The rest of our day should be generously peppered with anti-drift activities. Be aware. “The drift” is most dense when you are alone with your ego. Especially in the first months of getting sober off of ego thinking it is important to spend as much time as possible with your teammates and not alone. At the very least be in communication with them throughout the day.

Another drift intervention is to always assume you are in “the drift”. Another way to say that is to always be standing in, “I do not know”. Always be standing in the question. A trick of the ego is to make you believe that “the drift” is ordered, calm, and certain. The truth is that “the drift” is chaotic, turbulent and unstable. The Course tells us that we have turned everything upside down and think that things are the opposite of what they are in truth. This is a good example. In conclusion: Beware the drift. Pay attention. Examine your thinking. WAKE UP. No one is going to get you up. You have to set your own alarm or take your own cold shower. You have to do whatever it takes to blast yourself out of the drift until you no longer go there out of habit. So get blasting!