"Our troubles, we think," says the AA Big Book, "are basically of our own making." So, in fact, are our entire lives. We have created them ourselves; if there are problems, we have created the problems; if we are happy, we have created the happiness.

This idea -- that we create our own lives, that we even create the "I" that each of us thinks she is -- is one of the hardest lessons for us to learn. And that is not merely because we live in the West. In Buddhism, the notion that what we see is one with our seeing it, that our birth, life, and death are all created by our egos, is known as "dependent origination," "interdependent arising," or some similar phrase. One of the rare occasions on which the Buddha reprimanded one of his followers was when that disciple suggested that dependent origination was an easy idea to grasp. Not so, said the Buddha, and cautioned him not to suggest such a thing again.

Part of the reason that it is so hard for us to see that we invent ourselves and all the circumstances of our life is that the apprehension is not, and cannot be, an intellectual one. We can read, think, and discuss until we are sick of it, and we will never be convinced of its truth. Instead, the insight must come from our experience, and the primary means of its discovery is simple meditation. For it is meditation that reveals to us that there is no "I" stuck inside us that is the central reference point of our lives. All that we experience in meditation is the experience of meditation, without any sense that we are experiencing "I."

And that's one reason why meditation is so important a part of Step 11. It is one of the few roads to the genuine insight that this "I" that we're so worried about doesn't really exist at all -- no more than those troubles which are basically of our own making.