Overview
A “cosmology” is a study or body of work exploring the origin and structure of the universe as reality.
Commentary
Recovery programs like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Recovery Dharma are inspired by religious systems while those like SMART Recovery are rooted in the guidelines of scientific institutions, but each group has its own cosmological foundations. I would argue that a strong portion of one’s affinity for a group stems from alignment in cosmological preferences.
To relay an anecdote, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and AA both initially appealed to some of my own intuitive feelings about the universe. Towards CBT, I enjoy the expressive value of pattern-recognition and computational or algorithmic thinking, as I have a tendency to map interactions between different phenomena as information exchanges, so the notion of pruning a model of reality of irrational distortions that defy the body of propositions vetted through my epistemological foundations is very appealing. It’s perhaps no coincidence that my undergraduate degree is in Computer Science and that CBT emerged in a late 20th century paradigm shift away from the modes of psychoanalysis that view the self as an emergent property of chaotic base drives, sometimes termed the Cognitive Revolution. The earliest theoretical foundations for Artificial Intelligence as we practice it today emerged from close collaboration between cognitive scientists and computer scientists, though the focus on scaling through data and computation has occasionally spurred on estrangements that sideline direct interpretations of reality in favor of industrialized instrumentalism that mechanistically explores connections for predictive value. Where I began to take issue with the cosmology of CBT is perhaps the same place I might begin to take issue with constructions of world ontologies from older neurosymbolic paradigms, which is the subjectivity each individual loads into their axiomatic premises of the world, shaped by both the biases of their unique lived experiences and epistemic injustice afforded by their institutionalized positions of authority. Predictive power certainly provides a remedy for that, and one can look to both Hindu and Buddhist traditions of logic and epistemology to find elaborate defenses of instrumental perspective before modern industrialization and the scientific management mythos. But if we then look at the overall efficacy of CBT, we don’t find meaningfully different outcomes than most other forms of therapy, and in fact, we don’t find even consensus about interpreting cognitive distortions between practitioners. It becomes very difficult for me to then see humans as information-processing rational machines whose suffering is intrinsically related to dysfunctional irrationality, as if the changes in our species and societies has ever been predicated on anything approximating a priority for demonstrably objective rationality. I feel that there’s a momentum to this perspective that emerges out of Enlightenment-era Cartesian dualism that places the mind as an immaterial substance independently, and often above, the body as a material substance, and then supposing that the ordering of the mind will produce ordering in the material nervous system. That ordering of the mind is itself a modernist objectivist concept which supposes that a grand design can be crafted through the perfection of an initial set of axioms and their applications, akin to a software-hardware dichotomy that privileges the creative possibilities of mathematical designs over the fundamental limitations of hardware-based calculation.
New waves of CBT counteract these impulses by inquiring about the core beliefs and inferences people make within the context of their own life, not unlike attempts within the field of AI to construct localized ontologies within symbolic reasoning systems that eschew the grand narrative of universal ontological principles. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is implicitly a recognition that the cosmological foundations of conventional manualized CBT fail to account for the constraints that our minds operate within that shape our experiences. For instance, our minds are not capable of deleting memories or modifying an algorithmic information-processing protocol the way that mechanistic models of memory found in computational devices can, and our memories are themselves constantly reconsolidated artifacts of the present. The notion of rational linearity that updates itself as per some Bayesian inference analogue echoes the notion of linear evolution in cultures and civilization that form the Enlightenment teleology of modernism.
Towards AA, my initial impression was that its cosmological premises invite us to sublimate the dominance of the individual self in favor of transcendental relations of meaning. It’s common enough for most religious and spiritual systems to counsel against rigid evaluations of the self through connections with material, worldly configurations, or at least that’s what tends to appeal to me about those frameworks. I might have been a smidge too eager to project impermanence and Jungian archetypes from a collective unconscious onto the “surrendering” of one’s ego, as AA literature asks us to seek a “Higher Power” from an independent, higher reality. After all, Carl Jung wrote to William Wilson (Bill W.), the founder of AA, describing the need for some kind of wholeness of the self that an ego cannot rationally construct for itself, nor can medical science provide a physiological reparation of, necessitating something of a spiritual awakening through religion or collective comraderie. Addiction itself is not the result of occasional failures in a system otherwise using rational impulses to navigate reality but an intolerance for the experience of reality. AA cosmology leans into the contradictions of dualism like an elaborate koan: one surrenders to the powers of a higher reality to gain freedom in this reality. For Enlightenment ideals based in a mind-body dualism, the exhaustion of intellectual and rational approaches is celebrated as a rite of passage. This spiritual awakening represents the collapse of the ego’s resistance to accepting conscious contact with a Higher Power. Yet, the very schema of the AA program as a series of Steps and Traditions risks the development of a dogmatic set of institutions that maintain a new system of rationality. Rather than honoring Jung’s appreciation for Rudolf Otto’s articulation of the numinous that we can consciously contact through archetypes of the collective unconscious, the Protestant roots of AA can drive a fierce moral surveillance that becomes an end in and of itself, dragging one away from the direct experiences with the numinous and individual self-discovery with a dependence on the group consciousness.
I’m most biased towards Recovery Dharma (RD) as having roots in something “vaguely Eastern.” It stems from a cosmology that views suffering as a structural part of the human condition rather than a deviation from the prescriptions of a Higher Power or universal order. Our self-awareness of our finite impermanent selves causes us to seek something infinite and permanent, even if only through temporary participation in a meaningful project that lasts longer than our lives. I’m often reminded of Albert Camus’ discussion of the absurd condition we find ourselves in when we ask for answers about meaning and purpose from an uncaring universe and the suffering that accompanies that existential isolation of an independent embodied reality. However, the resulting prescriptions are entirely different: Camus advocates for living in rebellion of absurd meaninglessness by choosing to embrace the passions of the moment, while Buddhist philosophy advocates for the cessation of craving and attachments in favor of mindful acceptance.
I split the difference, I suppose, in my preference for Kashmir Shaivist traditions that accept an infinite scope of the universe as the sole principle of permanence within which all other things are impermanent, interconnected, interdependent finite contractions. The suffering and the yearning that stem from our inability to achieve permanence are ends to themselves, for the creativity and curiosity to comprehend the breadth of experience are apathetic to pleasure or lack thereof. Nietzsche’s use of [[amor-fati|amor fati]] comes close to this perspective in which suffering is as irreducible a component of experience as pleasure, and so to appreciate the full breadth of experiences that lead to wholeness is to appreciate even the suffering of the condition of addiction on its own terms. To feel an utterly irrational need for something we don’t even want can be revelatory.
Consequently, though I find the cosmology within Recovery Dharma’s interpretation of Buddhism the most palatable to my own convictions, I couldn’t honestly say that I attend with the purposes of deepening my engagement with Buddhist principles. Hindu and Buddhist sects have engaged in plenty of ideological and cultural exchange over the centuries, so it feels easier to find common metaphysical and ontological vocabulary in RD than AA for me. Still, I would be thrilled to find a peer group that approaches recovery with a radical appreciation for existence rather than the cultivation of the principles of non-self or a surrender to a Higher Power through faith, rather than a curiosity towards what one’s intuition creates.