Lunatics Anoymous hopes not to follow in the path of those total wack jobs that have gone before. Bill Wilson’s Spiritual Awakening: The Events of December 14, 1934

Bill Wilson was admitted to Charles B. Towns Hospital on December 11, 1934 for treatment of alcoholism. Three days later on December 14th, Bill Wilson experienced a spiritual awakening that he was convinced for the remainder of his life was a conscious contact with God.

Bill Wilson described his spiritual awakening in Pass It On: The Story of Bill Wilson and How the A.A. Message Reached the World (1984) as follows:

“…After a night of wrestling with his demons, Bill called out, “If there be a God, let him show himself.” …The effect was instant, electric. Suddenly my room blazed with an incredibly white light. I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. I have no words for this. Every joy I had known was pale by comparison. The light, the ecstasy. I was conscious of nothing else for a time.

Then, seen in the mind’s eye, there was a mountain. I stood upon its summit where a great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. In great, clean strength it blew right through me. Then came the blazing thought, ‘You are a free man.’ I know not at all how long I remained in this state, but finally the light and the ecstasy subsided….. As I became more quiet a great peace stole over me, and this was accompanied by a sensation difficult to describe. I became acutely conscious of a presence which seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the shores of a new world. ‘This,’ I thought, ‘must be the great reality. The God of the preachers.’”

Bill Wilson was admitted to the Charles B. Towns Hospital to undergo a detox for alcoholism. Detoxing from alcohol in 1934 was a vastly different experience than detoxing from alcohol today. With the advent of modern psychopharmacology in the 1960s, treatment with benzodiazepines has significantly ameliorated the withdrawal syndrome from alcohol (Kranzler and Ciraulo, 2005).

In 1934 at the Charles B. Towns Hospital the state-of-the-art treatment for alcoholism was called the belladonna cure (Pittman, 1988).

Review the symptoms and time course of the alcohol withdrawal syndrome.

After 6 to 12 hours of cessation from alcohol the following symptoms appear: 

Minor withdrawal symptoms: insomnia, tremulousness, mild anxiety, gastrointestinal upset, headache, diaphoresis, palpitations, anorexia.

After 12 to 24 hours cessation from alcohol the following symptoms appear: 

Alcoholic hallucinosis: visual, auditory, or tactile hallucinations.

After 24 to 48 hours cessation from alcohol the following symptoms appear:

Withdrawal seizures: generalized tonic-clonic seizures

After 48 to 72 hours cessation from alcohol the following symptoms appear:

Alcohol withdrawal delirium (delirium tremens): hallucinations (predominately visual), disorientation, tachycardia, hypertension, low-grade fever, agitation, diaphoresis

What is striking about these symptoms is the central role of the appearance of hallucinations as part of the withdrawal process. Recall Bill Wilson was admitted to the Hospital on December 11th and had his spiritual awakening on December 14th. The time lapse between his admission and his spiritual awakening is approximately 48 to 72 hours.

It is clear from the above symptom timeline that Bill Wilson’s spiritual awakening was, in fact, a hallucination not conscious contact with God.

When Bill Wilson was admitted for treatment of alcoholism to the

, he would have received the first line choice of treatment for alcoholism at that institution, the belladonna cure. He had been treated with the belladonna cure on his prior admission as is stated in the A.A. Big Book (1986).

"Upon Wilson 's arrival at Towns Hospital , he was placed in a bed and the Towns-Lambert Treatment was begun. Dr. Lambert described the belladonna treatment as follows: Briefly stated, it consists in the hourly dosage of a mixture of belladonna, hyoscyamus and xanthoxylum. The mixture is given every hour, day and night, for about fifty hours. There is also given about every twelve hours a vigorous catharsis of C.C. pills and blue mass.

At the end of the treatment, when it is evident that there are abundant bilious stools, castor oil is given to clean out thoroughly the intestinal tract. If you leave any of the ingredients out, the reaction of the cessation of desire is not as clear cut as when the three are mixed together. The amount necessary to give is judged by the physiologic action of the belladonna it contains.

When the face becomes flushed, the throat dry, and the pupils of the eyes dilated, you must cut down your mixture or cease giving it altogether until these symptoms pass. You must, however, push this mixture until these symptoms appear, or you will not obtain a clear cut cessation of the desire for the narcotic...

The exact contents of each ingredient are outlined below:

Belladonna Specific
Tincture belladonnae = 62. gm.
Fluidextracti xanthoryli.
Fluidextracti hyoscyami = .31 gm.
Xanthoxylum - Xanthoxylum Americanum

The dried bark or berries of prickly ash. Alkaloid of Hydrasts. Helps with chronic gastro-intestinal disturbances. Carminative and diaphoretic…”

Deadly Nightshade or Belladonna, Atropa Belladonna, and aka dwale, devil's herb, love apple, sorcerer's cherry, murderer's berry, waleberry, witch's berry, devil's cherry, black cherry, divale, great morel, wayberry, naughty man's cherries. It is a well known perennial shrub of the nightshade family Solanaceae). Deadly Nightshade has leaves and berries that are highly toxic and is native to Europe, Western Asia and North Africa.

Active constituents of Belladonna are Atropine, d,l-hyoscyamine, scopolamine, and the dangerous apoatropine, which is contained only in the roots. The active alkaloids are deemed anticholinergic substances, producing effects by binding to, and blocking the action of acetylcholine receptors of the peripheral nervous system.

This effect is termed muscarinic, and is named after muscarine, which is one of the active constituents of Amanita Muscaria fungi. Different from muscarine, atropine binds to the acetylcholine receptor without activating it, therefore making it an effective antidote to muscarine poisoning.

The hallucinogenic effects of this class of agents derived from Solanaceae have been known since antiquity and were referred to as Hexing Herbs. Hexing Herbs were employed by witches as a principal ingredient in Flying Ointments during the Middle Ages.

Relevant to our discussion of Bill Wilson’s spiritual awakening and conscious contact with God is a description of a Flying Ointment induced hallucination found in the grimoire of Abramelin the Mage (1458). It reads as follows:

"At Lintz I worked with a young woman, who one evening invited me to go with her, assuring me that without any risk she would conduct me to a place where I greatly desired to find myself. I allowed myself to be persuaded by her promises. She then gave unto me an unguent, with which I rubbed the principal pulses of my feet and hands; the which she did also; and at first it appeared to me that I was flying in the air in the place which I wished, and which I had in no way mentioned to her.

I pass over in silence and out of respect, that which I saw, which was admirable, and appearing to myself to have remained there a long while, I felt as if I were just awakening from a profound sleep, and I had great pain in my head and deep melancholy. I turned round and saw that she was seated at my side. She began to recount to me what she had seen, but that which I had seen was entirely different. I was, however, much astonished, because it appeared to me as if I had been really and corporeally in the place, and there in reality to have seen that which had happened."

The last sentence captures the essence of the hallucinatory experience. The experience was perceived as real by both individuals but each had an entirely different experience because of priming and patternicity.
Similar hallucinatory experiences are reported in other altered states of consciousness.

For example, sleep paralysis is a condition that occurs in the state just before dropping off to sleep (the hypnologic state) or just before fully awakening from sleep (the hypnopompic state). The condition is characterized by being unable to move or speak. It is often associated with a feeling that there is some sort of presence, a feeling which often arouses fear but is also accompanied by an inability to cry out.

The paralysis may last only a few seconds. The experience may involve visual, auditory, or tactile hallucinations. The color of the hallucinatory experience is determined by cultural context e.g. in the Middle Ages sleep paralysis was interpreted within a religious context and involved incubus and succubus attacks.

In the 19th centuries the phenomenon morphed into the Old Hag syndrome and in the 20th century to the alien abduction phenomenon.

The last example of where primacy and patternicity play a principal role in coloring of a hallucinatory experience is the near-death experience.

The near-death experience (NDE) refers to a wide array of experiences reported by some people who have nearly died or who have thought they were going to die. There is no single shared experience reported by those who have had NDEs.

Experiences of most interest are mystical experience, the light at the end of the tunnel experience, the life review experience, the out of body experience, and bad NDE trips involving tortures by elves, giants, demons. All these experience rarely occur together in.

Blackmore (1993, 2004) suggests that neurophysiologic processes play a principal role in NDE. For example, neural noise and retino-cortical mapping explain the common experience of passage down a tunnel from darkness into a bright light.  If you started with very little neural noise and it gradually increased, the effect would be of a light at the centre getting larger and larger and hence closer and closer.

The tunnel would appear to move as the noise levels increased and the central light got larger and larger. If the whole cortex became so noisy that all the cells were firing fast, the whole area would appear light. Likewise, she attributes the feelings of extreme peacefulness of the NDE to the release of endorphins in response to the extreme stress of the situation and the buzzing or ringing sounds to cerebral anoxia.

Similar experiences can be induced through electrical stimulation of the temporal lobe (including the hippocampus) during neurosurgery for epilepsy, with high carbon dioxide levels (hypercarbia), and in decreased cerebral perfusion resulting in local cerebral hypoxia as in rapid acceleration during training of fighter pilots, or as in hyperventilation followed by Valsalva maneuver.

Ketamine-induced experiences resulting from blockage of the NMDA receptor and the role of endorphin, serotonin, and encephalin have also been mentioned, as have near-death-like experiences after the use of LSD, psilocybin and mescaline.

These induced experiences can consist of unconsciousness, out-of-body experiences, and perception of light or flashes of recollection from the past. These recollections, however, consist of fragmented and random memories unlike the panoramic life-review that can occur in NDE.

Further, transformational processes with changing life-insight and disappearance of fear of death are rarely reported after induced experiences.

NDE stories are now known to a large audience. Thus, when new stories are told about going into the light, etc., one has to be concerned that these stories may reflect what one has heard and what one expects (priming and patternicity). Such experiences are subjectively real and may have profound effects on a person, but they should not be taken literally as evidence of separation of body and spirit, much less of life after death.

Of interest to Bill Wilson’s spiritual awakening, he reported the following:

“Suddenly my room blazed with an incredibly white light. I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. I have no words for this. Every joy I had known was pale by comparison. The light, the ecstasy. I was conscious of nothing else for a time.”

Perhaps, Bill Wilson had an NDE on December 14th?

What is highly probable is that Bill Wilson’s spiritual awakening was a hallucination as a result of, what in modern DSM-IV-TR (2000) nomenclature would be called, Alcohol Withdrawal, 291.81 and belladonna-induced Hallucinogen Intoxication, 292.89. The color of those hallucinations was determined by the priming and patternicity of his evangelical Christian religious indoctrination.

While the above factors would have been sufficient for a Neurobiological Perfect Storm, there is an additional factor that ensured that Bill Wilson would become a true believer in his spiritual awakening and conscious contact with God. That factor was post-event confirmation bias.

Bill Wilson’s Spiritual Awakening: The Subsequent Events

In psychology, confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions and to avoid information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs. It is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference, or as a form of selection bias toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study or disconfirmation of an alternative hypothesis.

Confirmation bias is the final element in the neurobiological Perfect Storm that created Bill Wilson’s spiritual awakening. From Bill Wilson’s own words the events that took place subsequent to his conscious contact with God on December 14th.

First, his encounter with Dr. William D. Silkworth:

“Following my sudden experience, Dr. Silkworth had taken great pains to convince me that I was not hallucinated”.

For Dr. Silkworth to reinforce Bill Wilson’s hallucinatory experience as a genuine transcendental, supernatural, paranormal event is prima facie disingenuous at best. Dr. Silkworth in his exalted position of head of

must have personally observed literally hundreds of cases of delirium tremens induced hallucinations that he did not attribute to a conscious contact with God. Why he may have done it is open to speculation.

Second is Bill Wilson’s introduction to William James’ (1902). Varieties of Religious Experience, again in Bill Wilson’s own words:

“At this point a third stream of influence entered my life through the pages of William James' book, "Varieties of Religious Experience."  Somebody had brought it to my Hospital room.  Following my sudden experience, Dr. Silkworth had taken great pains to convince me that I was not hallucinated.  But William James did even more [emphasis added].  Not only, he said, could spiritual experiences make people saner, they could transform men and women so that they could do, feel and believe what had hitherto been impossible to them…”

And so the circle is closed. Bill Wilson receives the final confirmation from the writings of William James that his spiritual awakening and conscious contact with God were genuine.

To the contrary, Bill Wilson’s spiritual awakening and conscious contact are completely explicable within the confines of causal closure of the physical world. There is no need to violate the law of parsimony by positing the intervention of any transcendent, supernatural higher power to explain his conversion.

To summarize, the confluence of the following elements coalesced to create a Neurobiological Perfect Storm that resulted in Bill Wilson true belief in his spiritual awakening and conscious contact with God:

·    The Antecedent Conditions of Psychological Priming and Patternicity of evangelical Christian Indoctrination.

·    The Precipitating Conditions of Alcohol Withdrawal and Iatrogenic Belladonna Intoxication leading to an Intense Hallucinatory Experience.

·    The Subsequent Fallacious Reinforcement of the Veracity of the Spiritual Awakening and Conscious Contact with God by Confirmation Bias.

In the final section we will offer some concluding thoughts on the implications of viewing Bill Wilson’s spiritual awakening and conscious contact with God within the confines of physical reality.

Bill Wilson’s Spiritual Awakening: Implications of Physical Reality

Bill Wilson was a true believer that his spiritual awakening and conscious contact with God were responsible for him to be able to maintain continuous sobriety for next thirty-six years of his life.  If his power over of alcohol was not due to the intervention of God or a higher power then why did he remain sober for so long?

George Ainslie (2001) in his book Breakdown of Will offers the following hypothesis:

“The great sociologist Max Weber puzzled over how Calvinist theology could have increased its adherent’s self-control when it preached pre-destination, that is, when it held people to be helpless as to whether they would be saved or damned. His solution was, in effect, that the doctrine of predestination transformed a person’s array of personal choices about whether to be good into a single, comprehensive side-bet, the stake of which was the whole expectation of being saved.

Under such as belief system, orthodox decision theory would hold doing good to be superstitious behavior, in that it’s purely diagnostic, so that doing it for the sake of seeing your self do it is fooling yourself. ..However, the authors who point this out don’t considered an important possibility: that the motive to get a good diagnosis was itself part of the mechanism by which destiny worked – that God’s grace consisted of a strong motivation to believe you were saved.

In other words, good works were actually a causative factor of your predestined fate, but only the continuing fear that you were destined to be damned motivated enough works to save you, and only some people were given the capacity for this fear. If extra good works constituted cheating on the test, they did not validate it; in fact, only those who had it in them to cheat this way could do well enough to be saved. It was a recursive system: Diagnosis a behavior, where giving up on the good diagnosis led to giving up on the behavior, which made the diagnosis correct.

A higher power will grant sobriety to some alcoholics, and the acknowledgement of your helplessness against alcohol is a sign that you may be one of those who’ll receive this favor. Such a shift in your concept of causality is not casuistry. It marks the formation of a wider personal rule – staking your expectation of salvation itself against each temptation.

Furthermore, the shift from seeing it as a matter of willpower – “good works” – to seeing it as a mere diagnosis of a preexisting condition – your destiny – strengthens your resolve rather than weakens it: Your concern with diagnosis isn’t superstitious but rational, as we’ve just seen, since diagnosis has causal effects; and furthermore, interpreting this concern without causal efficacy rather than as an element of bargaining deters the arbitrage that usually compromises conscious exercise of will.”

Thus, it is possible the Bill Wilson belief in his salvation by God was instrumental in creating the will to abstain from alcohol for thirty-six years.

Bill Wilson was thirty-nine years old when he finally decided, that as they say in the halls of A.A. “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” He may have believed that God gave him his sobriety, but he was also at a critical age for many people with substance abuse issues.

In our recent paper Branconnier and Moncheski (2009) suggest that the maturing out of addiction is caused by an age-related shift in hyperbolic temporal discounting. Bill Wilson’s at thirty-nine years of age would be at the optimal age for the maturing out process to occur.

Thus, maturing out might be an additional factor in his achievement of long term sobriety.

On a final note, Bill Wilson won his seventeen year battle with alcohol, but was unable to use his Twelve Step program to defeat his nicotine addiction.

Susan Cheever (2004) in her book My Name is Bill – His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous reports a melancholy tale of Bill Wilson’s last days before shuffling off his mortal coil.

Despite Bill Wilson’s victory over alcohol, He remained incurably addicted to cigarettes. He chain-smoked himself into terminal emphysema. Even as he lay in articulo mortis on his deathbed, he puffed incorrigibly as he suffocated. Although he drank nothing for the last thirty-six years of his life, he always craved to drink alcohol. As he approached the end, he repeatedly demanded whisky. The request was prudently denied by his faithfully apostates.

Stoned on deadly night shade.