NON-FICTION: Higher Power Example 1: Foreign Language

Believing in a higher power to restore sanity involves admitting that you are not control, that you cannot do it on your own.

This can give us both relief and hope. Relief to find out there is someone or something out there that understands the problem that plagues us and/or has the answer.

It also gives us a feeling of empowerment that allows to be humble at the same time, since we are giving over power in our lives to something outside of ourselves, we are giving up power, and submitting to something else, foregoing safety and our need to maintain walls that we think keep our ego's safe.

As for learning another language, we must also give up control and the pretense of independence.

If our actions do not conform to the standard, we are wrong, we have failed, and we can only try harder to conform.

At the same time, we know that all we have to do is wipe away the reactions and reflexes of our native language, and allow our minds to receive the new sounds and patterns.


To learn the language of other people, we can do nothing but imitate them, and accept that they're sentences are right, if they make them, and ours are wrong, if we make them without first relying on imitation.

The sounds we make in a foreign language are dependent on imitation of others. If we insist against all the speakers of French, that our American pronunciation of their words is correct, than we only maintain error for the benefit of a false ego.

The more we hold onto to our native habits of grammar, pronunciation and connotation, the more we reveal the illusion of independence.

Learning a new language means giving yourself over to it, allowing your mind to edit out your own language, wipe away your linguistic reactions and classifications, and submit to a new system.

Each time we go through this denial of our established habits, and thoroughly submit to the new grammar, writing, sounds, and patterns, we then come out stronger, finding that our old habits, laid into our minds as children, are completely undamaged.


The unproven, unaccounted for neurological impediments to learning a new language are so annoying in that they never take into account the primacy of denial in learning a language, that is, the primacy of denying our linguistic reactions.

When we see a incomprehensible page of text, we must allow our mind to absorb and tune out the reaction that tells us: "This is foreign, this is not understandable."

That reaction, that anxious sense of alien-ness, is, in my experience, the greatest impediment to learning a new language.

So too with alcoholism is there a reliance on one's native habits, habits of coping through mood alteration, shutting people out to maintain your independence, your freedom from the control of others, your freedom to ruin your life.

To start dealing with alcoholism, you have to give it up. Give it up to Jesus if you want. Give up to the people who have been through this. Give up to your family, to the ghost of your dead relatives, to your children.

But you have to give up the pretense of control. As trivial as it may seem, the same goes for language.

In learning a new language, you are not in control, you are going to constantly make mistakes, feel helpless, stupid, and imagine or hear yourself laughed at.

But this is the way through to fluency. And giving up the illusion of control, of the ability to do it your own way all the time and still succeed, is also essential to finding the tools and means to replace alcohol with a healthy ego.