AA’s 11th Step states: 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.

“Don’t make a big deal about AA’s ‘prayer and meditation,’” writes pro-AA author Dick B. … “It is nothing more than praying and studying or ‘pondering’ what you are reading.”[1]

This is simply not so. As discussed in ‘Alcoholics Anonymous and Contemplative Spirituality,’[2] advocates of contemplative spirituality are using AA and other 12 Step groups as a launching pad for their meditative practices. Nor is AA’s contemplative potential a new thing. As a treatment website notes, “AA and 12 Step Fellowship have known for years that spirituality or some form of contemplative meditation is an important part of treatment.”[3] (italics mine)

AA’s definition of meditation has no limits and no boundaries. For most it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Word of God. AA cofounder Bill Wilson felt meditative knowledge from anywhere in the world could be valid.

It should be noted that AA apologist Dick B. has written numerous books and articles portraying AA and the 12 Steps as Biblical in origin.[4] This is a concern because Christians who join AA based on these erroneous claims may become involved in the very meditative practices this author minimizes.

In ‘Standing Fast in the Last Days,’ Warren Smith describes his entrance into the occult. He recounts how a psychic, a woman who uncannily knew many details about him, told Smith the spirits on the other side needed his permission to work in his life. Watching this DVD recently, it reminded me how similar this is to AA’s 11th Step.

In the 11th Step, one reaches out to whatever force may be serving as the “higher power.” In AA and other 12 Step groups, “god” can be an Archangel, a mysterious spirit, or virtually anything else. Through prayer and meditation the person seeks “conscious contact” with this higher power not only for revelation of its will, but for the power to accomplish it.

Such spiritual acts of submission and permission have been given by many who have participated in the 11th Step over the last sixty years. Those who enter meditative states through the 11th Step have issued a potentially horrifying invitation.

“Do not participate in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead even expose them.” (Ephesians 5:11)

AA’s wide-open meditation lends itself to considerably more than praying, studying, and pondering. As the 11th Step meditation website acknowledges, “There is growing participation in Centering Prayer by members in 12 Step programs.”[5]

For those unfamiliar with this term, centering prayer (mantra meditation) can lead participants into the altered state of consciousness known as the Silence. In such a meditative state, supernatural deception abounds.

Ray Yungen, using the experience of an English mystic as an example, notes that when the meditative, mental void was created, “a spiritual force had filled it.”[6]

What force? Where, really, is 12 Step spirituality leading us? Should we not be warning people about AA, rather than welcoming it into our churches?

Yungen and others have noted that contemplatives almost always end up believing God is in all, and all is in God. Despite the wide-spread fallacy that AA is Christian in origin, 12 Step spirituality is also a pathway to pantheism and panentheism. The 11th Step is a key component in this.

The Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book informs alcoholics, “Sometimes we had to search fearlessly, but He was there. He was as much a fact as we were. We found the Great Reality deep down within us. In the last analysis it is only there that He may be found. It was so with us.”[7]

Richmond Walker’s meditation book, Twenty-Four Hours a Day, has been used by millions in AA. It serves as a spiritual teaching manual. The October 24 meditation states, “God, the great Spirit of the universe of which each of our spirits is a small part, must want unity between Himself and all his children.”[8] (italics mine)

Many lost and hurting people are in AA. Those who enter the meditative silence through the 11th Step may well end up seeing themselves as part of God, or believing that God is within—the very teachings in Twenty-Four Hours a Day and AA’s Big Book.

In the very first biography of AA cofounder Bill Wilson, Robert Thomsen describes Wilson’s understanding of God. While in the hospital for alcoholism, Wilson had an incredible supernatural revelation. Thomsen writes:

“There could be no doubt of ultimate order in the universe, the cosmos was not dead matter, but a part of the living Presence, just as [Wilson] was part of it. Now, in place of the light, the exaltation, he was filled with a peace such as he had never known. …He had heard men say there was a bit of God in everyone, but this feeling that he was part of God, himself a living part of the higher power, was a new and revolutionary feeling.”[9] (italics mine)

As this belief continues to spread, Christians must understand the Scriptures.

“For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own son in the likeness of sinful flesh as an offering for sin…” (Romans 8: 3)

We must be able to explain that God dwells only in those who accept Christ as Savior.

“However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him.” (Romans 8:9)

It would also be good, very good, to let addicts know we love them, and that our God, who gives eternal life, is able and willing to deliver them.

Endnotes:

1. http://silkworth.net/dickb/meditation2.html

2. Alcoholics Anonymous and Contemplative Spirituality, http://www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com/blog/index.php?p=1625&more=1&c=1

3. http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/addiction/berman/treatment

4. http://www.dickb.com/author.shtml

5. www.11thstepmeditation.org/...styles/centering_prayer.php

6. Ray Yungen, ‘For Many Shall Come In My Name,’ Lighthouse Trails Publishing, pg. 20

7. Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., Alcoholics Anonymous, pg. 55

8. Richmond Walker, Twenty-Four Hours a Day, Hazelden Foundation, Oct. 24 Meditation for the Day

9. Robert Thomsen, Bill W., Harper and Row, pg. 223