Step Nine: The Promise of Intuition

We Will Know Peace

“We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.” (Big Book p. 84) How many times in your life have you been faced with a decision, and did not know what to do about it, but then a day and a half later, awakened in the middle of the night, sat up in bed, and said to yourself, ‘Aha!’ and went right back to sleep? Somehow, the answer came to you without having to go through days of research.

In the early days of 1970, when I was taking a course on human behavior, the instructor was trying to describe how the brain functions. He explained that the human brain has approximately ten billion cells, yet we use only about one billion of them. He explained that these cells store everything we experience in our lifetime. More current events are easier to remember than things in the distant past, but they are all in there somewhere.
He then likened it to a file system where, if you ask a question, the more current answers come immediately. But for more distant memories, the brain starts searching the files, and while it may take time, eventually the answer will come.

With all the mental chaos that we bring with us when we enter Alcoholics Anonymous, we have a lot of what I refer to as “unlearning” to do. We go through the process of trying to rid ourselves of alcoholic thinking and replace it with sound principles and values.

If we are fortunate enough to buy-in completely and do a thorough job of housecleaning, so to speak, we can start using the ideas that we hear and see others use successfully. And we get a surprisingly good result.

We may hear as many as twenty or thirty people share at any given meeting. Can we remember everything we hear? To me, the answer is yes. I could come up with a dozen boilerplate AA clichés about how the answers come to me, but it does not get any simpler than the mental file cabinet theory.

Sometimes it seems that I am learning even when I am not even listening. It is like getting it through osmosis. If you have ever heard of the police trying to get a witness to remember a license plate number by hypnotizing that person, you understand what I mean. It is in the subconscious. There is a curtain-like screen between the conscious and subconscious mind. This is what keeps us from going mad due to the busyness of it all.
I never underestimate the capacity of my mind when it comes to problem solving. Attending AA meetings on a regular basis and interacting with people who have had similar experiences and found similar solutions to their problems gives me a very encouraging outlook for the future. Many of the answers that I am seeking are right in front of my face. Some others are deeper in the file cabinet.

Most of the time, when faced with a dilemma that is causing me any kind of distress, I can refer to my simple request of my higher power. “God, please show me what to do and please give me the strength to do it.” I do not do well on my own. It is surprising how often I awake in the middle of the night, say ‘Aha!’ and go back to sleep again. It seems that intuitively the answers come.

By Rick R.