Cultivating and Experiencing “Conscious Contact” with a Higher Power in Alcoholics Anonymous

Many people come to AA less than enthusiastic about the “God part.” How then do they come to experience a relationship with some kind of higher power that they say helps them to stop drinking? Reluctant newcomers are often reassured that they can choose a Higher Power that works for them and are sometimes encouraged to “act as if” they believe, until they actually do. The Twelve Steps as a whole make reference to spiritual beliefs, practices, and experiences as part of the pathway toward recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous. AAs direct their spiritual efforts toward developing a relationship with God or a higher power, thought to have the ability to somehow intervene in the sufferer’s life to help them, whether the power is a traditional deity like Jesus Christ or largely considered non-supernatural, such as the group as a whole.  Regardless of what kind of higher power helps an AA member to recover, many shared practices, and some more idiosyncratic ones, are used in order to cultivate relationships with and experiences of  “conscious contact” (Step 11) with these higher powers. 

This paper will draw on data from my historical and ethnographic dissertation on how spirituality in Alcoholics Anonymous helps some who struggle with alcoholism to get and stay sober. Grounded in archive research and interviews with 34 current and former members of AA, I will report how ongoing “conscious contact” became the solution to alcoholism advocated by AA’s founders and how contemporary members seek such contact today through ritualized practices and resulting mystical experiences. As the Big Book states, “If we have carefully followed directions, we have begun to sense the flow of His Spirit into us. To some extent we have become God-conscious. We have begun to develop this vital sixth sense” (Anonymous 1939/2001, 85). My work puts the spiritual practices and experiences AA members use to establish “conscious contact” with their higher powers into dialogue with anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann’s work on how individuals “make God real” for themselves through a process of spiritual “kindling.” Luhrmann “suggest[s] that prayer and ritual and worship help people to shift from knowing in the abstract that the invisible other is real to feeling that gods and spirits are present in the moment, aware and willing to respond” (Luhrmann 2023, x). Through ethnographic description and interviews, I will show how AA members make “the invisible other” real through their spiritual beliefs, rituals, and experiences and how the realness of a God or a higher power helps some to remain sober. 

The spiritual healing offered by the Twelve Steps relies on members developing a relationship with a “power greater than ourselves”, most formally through Step 11: “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out” (Anonymous 1939/2001, 59). Given this, we can ask (1) what AA's mean by conscious contact, (2) to what extent they are able to achieve it through practices including rituals, and (3) what experiences of “conscious contact” they have had and how these have affected them. Based on interviews, it appears that what AA's mean by conscious contact is that their higher power becomes real for them, becomes an "other" who "wills" something for them and "gives" them the power to carry it out. Through in-depth interviews,  I will demonstrate that the practices engaged in by members of Alcoholics Anonymous to develop a relationship with and experience of a higher power of their own understanding both validate and provide means for engagement with some of Luhrmann’s findings in her ethnographic and experimental work with evangelical Christians in the United States and abroad. In *How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others*, Luhrmann brings the full scope of her work as an anthropologist into consideration to argue that human beings experience God as real through a mental and social process of “spiritual kindling” (Luhrmann 2020, xi). Kindling involves both practices and experiences, with practices often employed to bring forth experiences. Luhrmann contends that the way in which we attend to our inner and outer experiences, both individually and with others, shapes whether and how we interpret them religiously or spiritually, and that we can learn to experience some events as evidence of a higher power or the supernatural. This naturalistic phenomenological approach can help shed light on the specific practices AA members use in order to “come to believe” in and experience their higher powers as real forces in their lives that help them to stay sober. As we will see in detailed descriptions of AA kindling practices, it is this new relationship with an “invisible other” - whether that be Other, such as God, or the invisible other of the AA group as a whole–that AA members say helps them to stay sober.

Luhrmann’s research demonstrates that through both innate abilities (such as the psychological trait of absorption) and training (through “inner sense cultivation” (63)), human beings are able to cultivate culturally specific experiences of the supernatural, some individuals more frequently and powerfully than others. Part of my purpose will be to assess whether specific ways of interpreting the steps (as advanced by atheist members, for example) or alternative treatment modalities are particularly warranted for self-identified alcoholics lacking in certain proclivities or amenability to spiritual training. The AA slogan “it works if you work it,” while motivating to some, may not hold true for everyone, and “fake it til you make it” might actually never work for someone who is just not able to “make God real.” My data also suggests  that the ways in which Americans are taught to think about our minds, as well as our wills (or will power), may make us more susceptible to developing alcoholism and other forms of addiction, and may act as a hurdle to recovery that is overcome, in part, but adopting a new culture with a more interconnected sense of self in the AA program.