Originally Posted by
Dalek 
Is the absence of AV activity good?
Is the presence of AV activity bad?
Does such thinking not suggest that abstinence is dependent on, or improved by, AV silence?
Is such thinking itself not therefore AV?
Good questions, Dalek. Thanks for the discussion.
Neither the presence or the absence of AV activity is valuable in itself. My AV is a normal experience. My AV is any idea, or feeling, or behavior, which supports drinking alcohol. My Beast is a timeless thing, an eternal monster, and time is conceptually completely unknown to my Beast. So, the intervals between my AV are unimportant.
My abstinence, if discovered to be mistakenly dependent on whatever, including your examples above, would be routinely disqualified by my AV, and I would begin struggling with my alcoholic addiction in that case.
My Big Plan, (Which I did not, at such time, know it to be called a Big Plan) was forever set into my psyche more than 3 decades ago, my free choice, that I would never ever get drunk again, has no conditions. None. Nada. Zilch. Totally unconditional.
My sobriety, on the other hand, is loaded with conditions, lol. I hope we can both see the differences, yes, between sobriety with my alcoholism, and my being simply existing sans-alcohol by way of abstinence. This is important to grasp to understand where I'm coming from.
My AV can never be silenced, or defeated. My AV can be recognised, and that is sufficent. Nothing more is required for my successful abstinence to continue. As already said, sobriety is another story, yeah!
My wording about my AV not becoming active when I state my subjective understanding of alcohol as a poison was my response to what was being said about whomever stating that alcohol is a poison. The suggestion was their AV would jump all over the poison statement. My experience is that my AV dosen't respond either positively or negatively to my intellectual stance.
