the paradox: too enslaved to lose it, praying to lose your mind — "you will find yourself beginning to…"
you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you.
Context
The book's central statement of the trap, and one of its most exact: the very degree of enslavement that makes quitting a life-or-death necessity is the same degree that makes losing the Substance unendurable — so recovery begins at the precise point of maximum agony. And the prayer it produces is not for relief but for the loss of the mind itself, to set the mind down in an alley and walk away from it, which is the honest measure of early sobriety's pain.