the honest catalogue of what withdrawal feels like
many of the things veteran AA’s ask newcomers to do and believe seem not much less whacko than trying to chew feldspar. E.g. be so strung out you can feel your pulse in your eyeballs, have the shakes so badly you make a spatter-painting on the wall every time somebody hands you a cup of coffee, have the life-forms out of the corner of your eye be your only distraction from the chainsaw-racing chatter in your head
Context
The defense of the rock-eating turns into the book's most exact inventory of early withdrawal: the pulse in the eyeballs, the coffee spattered across the wall from the shakes, the hallucinated life-forms as the only relief from the mind's own chainsaw racing. Against that, chewing feldspar is nothing — the catalogue is what makes the founder's whacko demands proportionate to the whacko condition they treat.