August 18: Our Actor

Topic: Our Actor
 
Our actor is self-centered – ego-centric, as people like to call it nowadays. He is like the retired business man who lolls in the Florida sunshine in the winter complaining of the sad state of the nation; the minister who sighs over the sins of the twentieth century; politicians and reformers who are sure all would be Utopia if the rest of the world would only behave; the outlaw safe cracker who thinks society has wronged him; and the alcoholic who has lost all and is locked up. Whatever our protestations, are not most of us concerned with ourselves, our resentments, or our self-pity? BB 61-62
 
“If only they would…..”,”but if they would….” “If people would just stop…..” This is my actor projecting my desired outcomes onto others which in my experience never did anything but get me addicted to what was going on outside of me. Allegedly, NEWS, means North, East, West, South…so BREAKING NEWS-seems to do just that-break us. Distract, deplete, divide and conquer. If all of my attention is on the lastest breaking news, or how others’ behavior is going to affect me, then I have just made them the author and director of my play. Hence making them my Higher Power.
 
Everything about the actor is external. A wise man once told a group that sought to discredit and kill him ” First clean the inside of the cup and dish, so that the outside may become clean as well.” The ego operates in the upside inverted world where it comes first. That wasn’t, in my opinion, how God designed us. The Sripit was always supposed to usurp and lead the mind while working in a cohesive union with God. 
 
If the Spirit was in charge what would come out of us and from us would be inherently good. Whereas what comes from the mind is a cluster “F” of projected thoughts formed from being gaslit and traumatized and all the feelings and emotions that come along with it. So when an alcoholic says “Oh, I’ve been thinking about you!” I immediately retract as I want nothing to do with what’s going on in their head! It can’t be GOOD!!
 
Think of when you were a child how fearless and free you were until that one thing, or things, happened that caused you to seperate, or to think you were separated from God. 
I remember mine very clearly, and from then on I felt dirty, unworthy, guilty, sick to my stomach, gross, icky, insatiable, frustrated, angry and betrayed. That’s quite the load for a 4 year old! And from then on it was all about getting my desires, wants and needs met externally based upon those feelings in my guts that were led by ego because I knew God wanted nothing to do with me. 
 
So smash cut to age 37 living all those years doing things only to feed the insatiable demands of the ego. What the ego told me to do, I did. I had no power of choice to choose. I basically had years of accumulated garbage, taking on other peoples accumulated garbage, and also the entire world’s accumulated garbage as I had no means of armour to shield myself from it. When one is void of any sort of life training, one will obviously do what needs to be done to get what they think they need. “THINK” they need, not what they need-remember, nothing good coming from an alcoholic mind, so what ends up being manifested, or created, is wreckage out of chaos coated in defects.
 
I get here and you tell me that the minds gotta go. It can’t run the show anymore. God actually never left me, but that it was I who blocked God out with all of the things I was enslaved by that I used in the place of God. You told me to use God instead of my go to mechanisms for relief. Replacing bad habits with good habits leaves no empty spaces. 
 
You gave me some designs for living that worked on getting the inside of the cup clean so that my life became manageable. When my life is manageable I am not looking to things for relief. If I am filled with God and AA, then I don’t need to distract myself by being indignant about the clown world or involve myself with the goings on of others. Successfully staying on my side of the street.
 
I have a choice where to put my energy and resources now. I choose to invest my time into my family, my community, my AA groups, my garden, my yard, my home, my job….which keeps me very much busy, inspired and amused so I don’t need to be “entertained” or “informed”. I can pray for our world, my friends from high school/facebook people, but I certainly do not need to turn my will and my life over to them or allign my spirit to it which is a form of consent to align when I put it first; whatever it is. 
 
I only have control of this, right now. Everything outside of me depletes my worth and value because the noise isn’t being charged up by God (the solution) it’s being charged up by the collected trauma of people watching it (the disease)  
 
The Actors value is determined by how others perceive them. Others have their own defects by which their perceptions are conceptualized. If I am the receiver of their perceptions, and that’s where I draw my value and worth, then I am enslaved into a box by their experiences. If I am the embodiment of the spirit authentically designed in the image of the creator, then I am free to become the woman God intended me to be before when I placed the personalities above principles and got lost. 
 
The truth will set you free!!
 
Please share about the Roles you have played in your life that didn’t work. Or the roles you cast others in to make you better about yourself. Or share your own chosen Big Book passage and how you personally relate to it!
 
Chop Wood, Carry Water!
Hilarie