Step 2 – There Is a Solution Workshop – Part 3 of 14 – 2004 – Sandy B.

And as I'm saying the message, the power of it is just lighting me up like a light bulb. I'm just sitting there going, da-da-da, da, da. And when I get through, I go, jeez, this thing is amazing. This thing is Amazing. And I have it for that day. And then my mind comes in, not as amazing as you could make it. Not as amazing. You ought to start your own program. but I can't say that to anybody, buddy. So I'm forced back to the message, back, it's so simple, it's just there and it's simply an opening of the channel so that this thing, I have to open the channel and let this come out and it is in this flow of energy out from us that we can experience it. You see, this energy is already inside of us. This spirit is already there. But unless it flows out, you can't feel it. It's blocked. It's self-centeredness. Screw those people. I've got to take care of myself. And so now you don't even know this power exists. It is in the release that you can feel it, and so that's why it's so exciting to sponsor somebody because you've got go, oh, what are we talking about tonight? And, you know, some of you will call me up and go, well, tonight, I forget. I've got 20 people or whatever. They're doing one step a week, and, you Know, somebody's coming over, and I just go, now what are we on tonight? You know, they have to keep track. And I go, step eight. And I goes, oh, good, he's coming Over to talk about step eight Then he sits down, and I'm all ready to go on and on and On and on. And so where have I been? I've been back in this damn thing. I've Been back in there and get this stuff. And it's there, and it's true, and it's real. How do you prove it's true? Results. That's it. No other proof. There's no other proof. Results And look up at the AA It's there It's not a theory It's real, you get to see it It'snot on a blackboard Now did you see step one, see step two And now you can see, obviously as a result of these, you have a spiritual awakening, right You can see it, you can't see it? You have to do it. And then you see the results. And when I see, God, I'm taking up all the time. One more story. This is what it feels like sponsoring people and carrying the message. There's this minister who's walking along. He's been a minister for many years. And he sees this young boy kind of crying, he's really sad, and he goes up to him and he says, what's the matter, son? He said, I got my final algebra exam tomorrow, and I try as hard as I can, I can't grasp algebra. Even with the book open at home, I cannot do the homework and get it right. I'm at a total loss, and there's no way I can pass this test. My parents are going to be disappointed, and I'm just so sad about everything. And the minister looked down at me and said, son, I'm going to tell you something. I want to tell you about the power of God. I am going to tell you this, that if you get enough faith and you pray hard enough, you will pass that test. And the little boy said, what? He said, you trust me, son. If you get enough faith and you pray hard enough, you will pass that test. And they separated, and probably about a week later, the minister happened to run into him again, and he said, hey, how did you do? And the little boy says, I passed. And the minister said, You passed? He He said, yeah. I cut all the faith that I could muster and I prayed with all my heart and I passed the test. And he ran off whistling and happy and the minister said, holy shit! And sometimes I watch what happens to new people and that's what I feel like saying. And I just go, how the hell did that schizophrenic depressed maniac look at him up there? He's making sense. He's blah, blah, and I forget the power of this program. Anyway, that's about it. Yeah, and I think everything in the world says to us that we have to be the source of our own power and what we are are channels. We're like sprinklers. You know, we don't look with very special designs, but we don'T look very pretty unless water is going through. And most of us have our hose clock, and that's one of the things doing the work of the program unclogs the holes so that we can display the design and your head does not see all of us have this experience in meetings I mean it is I guess we got ten minutes there's two things one's a personal story my son Peter I just talked to him yesterday and he's uh in england scared stiff uh peter was a guy who was just kind of a catastrophe 60 miles an hour head first no helmet spring-loaded uh he's now got 13 or 14 years of sobriety and he just got accepted to oxford business school 33 years 32 years old and uh And he feels like he's way over his head, and he is. There was a time in our lives when Linda and I, just to maintain our sanity, used to have to hold hands and pray every night for Peter. I mean, he looked like he was killing himself. Peter went to six colleges. He never got the concept of attending until he went to the fourth college. He got registry but not attending. And so now, some of the changes he's made, he made late. But because he stayed sober and he matured late, so many of these young people today, they're 30 years old, but they're like 20 years old. They aren't 30 years older maturation-wise. And it is so unlinear that he is where he is having the opportunity to do what he's doing. It is, like, impossible. If you could have walked in Linda's and our bedroom while we were in tears praying for Peter, I said, stop worrying for God's sake. He's going to be at Oxford in 14 years. He's gonna... I would have thought without a second, Creighton sponsored him for a while, I would've thought it was the prison at Oxford, Mississippi. It would not have occurred to me. It would never have occurred. It would have not have occured to me And one of the other stories I want to tell you is about Creighton. Creightон lived in Minnesota for quite some time, and now he lives in Tennessee, I think, Mississippi. And CreightON developed a health disease due to Agent Orange. He's developing a kidney issue, and he's needed a transplant. And CreaitON was on an airplane. I may not tell this exactly, but Creighton's on an airplane. And the stewardess comes down and says, would you like a drink? Creightan shows her his AA medallion and said, I don't think I'll be drinking today. I have to be home on Wednesday. You know, that kind of a response. And the gentleman sitting next to Creightin, Ryan, is a couple of seats away and he sees Creightn show the medallions and Ryan pulls the medaillon out of his pocket and says to the stewardess, he doesn't think he's going to have a drink either. And those two started talking. Three or four days from now, Ryan is going to give Creighton his kidney. Creightons were particularly difficult to match because of some of the markers and some of the health experiences that he's had in Vietnam, and he was far more difficult to match than a normal person, and Ryan matched him almost identically. My son Bill, who has 17 years of sobriety, moved to Europe for four years, and he went sober about five years at that time. And I supported him for three or four months. I told him that I wouldn't do it afterwards, and he worked at the World's Fair. He needed a job, and he went and applied at the U.S. Embassy in Madrid. And nothing happened. Didn't get him a job. So he goes to an AA meeting in Madrid, and the man who interviewed him is at the AA meeting. Bill is now not in a three-piece suit. He's in a T-shirt and Bermuda shirts. And they go through the meeting. At the end of the meeting, the guy who interviewed them came over and says, I'm really impressed with you. Why don't you come over and interview? And Bill is wondering whether he should tell the man that he already has interviewed two days before. And Bill said, I have interviewed with you, sir. It was, you know, there are so many things happening in life that you can't see with your mind. That you can feel with your fingers. That you don't know anything about. that you have so much power available to you in the living of your own life, and you don't get it. You are walking around with $1,000 bills crushed up in your pocket, and they're turning off your lights because you haven't paid your utility bill. You don't getting it. I mean, there really is a solution. There really is power. And that we're intended to be pipes, not the well. That when the power comes through us, we get to be the instrument. We get to play our music. and that each of us is an instrument, intact, fully constructed, nothing missing. And then what we've done is we've obscured that. We have added, you know, it's like we're a metallic instrument and we dragged it through the junkyard of life and we showed up in AA and it's a big metal ball with a bunch of metal that we have accidentally attracted and we've dragged it to the junk yard of life And through doing the steps, we start to pry off pieces of junk. And little by little, we get to start to get closer to the source of who we be. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. Are we done with the hour yet? Yeah. 1230. 1230, I give you Sandy. I have to go to the bathroom. Well, I don't know the stuff I have on my mind now. I'm saving for the afternoon, so I think I'll just tell you a couple stories maybe. I'm going up next week to, not next let's see, next month November 17th to Washington D.C. and I had a compatriot Hal Marley who passed away a few years ago who got sober the same year I did and he and myself and Ed Chandler who's down in Texas now were the class of 64 up in the Washington area. And we had dinner after we got to know each other for a while. We started having dinner once a month, especially in the years when we had 20 years to 30 years, somewhere in there. We had dinner almost every month. And Hal ended up, he was a retired Air Force fighter pilot and was an air attache to Poland in the Cold War and had very interesting careers, went with OEO for a while, but ended up at the State Department as the director of the alcohol programs at the state department. He would be calling ambassadors back to go to treatment, you know, that kind of a thing. And so he loved to operate up at the super high level. I used to kid him and say his only resentment was there's no class above first class, so he could be up there. And he was very close to Bob Pearson, who was the manager of the General Service Office at the time, and with his worldwide communication system at State Department, he was plugged in to every AA event on the planet. I mean, if I had a question, you know, do I know anybody in Peoria? And he would go, yes, Andy. Remember this Jack used to live here and now he's in Peolia and he'd have his phone number. It was like the Internet in one guy, you Know. As far as AA was concerned. And he preached gratitude. I mean there's people all over the country that have attitude of gratitude pins and he just would, Mr. Gratitude, Dr. Grатitude. February 27th in the Reflections. Yeah, that was in the thing the day he died. But the story I want to tell you is about Hal, that he was so plugged in that nothing happened in AA without him knowing it. I mean, when they're getting ready to plan the international, he knew where they were having it first so he could come around and, oh, the international's going to be in Toronto. It's goingto be, you know, whatever it was. And just had to be the first. And then we'd be at the dinner ad night once a month and each guy would treat and go to their favorite restaurant and then we'd talk about AA and it was always about what's going on and this and that. Well, I was at an AA group one night and I took a chance, a raffle and I won a 12 and 12 and I got home and I was just thumbing through you know, I keep them and then I can give them away to people and so I was thumbing through this thing and I went, God, look at this what a weird thing the thing had been screwed up by the printer and the pages, some of the pages were out of sequence. They were back and forth. I knew something told me keep it, keep it. I didn't know what I was going to do with it but I knew this thing was going to come in handy. And then it dawned on me about six months later and I said I've got to go find that 12 and 12. I want to see if in there there's a place where you know on the pages like a half a page where the step ends and then you turn the page and another step starts and it's out of sequence. So here was step 8 followed by step 11. So I bring the book to the dinner and I put it on the table and Hal, which is, what's that? And I said, I'll tell you after dinner. It's a big deal, Hal. This is the first volume. of the new 12 and 12. And, of course, he's looking at me like, what, what? I mean, he is very suspicious. So we have dinner, and we get through the meal, and I say, you know, Hal, I've been doing this step class. I don't know how I got into that, but I did a Saturday morning step class for 19 years. And, you do it week after week, and he was well aware of that. And I said, Hal, I've been doing this thing for 12 years. And I set up about a year ago. I started through them and it occurred to me they're in the wrong order. It was like I was being blasphemous. You know what I mean? What? And I knew and so I suppressed it. I said that's ridiculous. But it kept coming back, Hal. every time I went through it was clearer and clearer and clearer that are in the wrong order so I called Bob Pearson well I could see the look on his face you call Bob Pearson without checking with me first you know and I told him, I said Bob I'm having this crazy thing it's happening to me and he dismissed it but the more I talked about it he said well I hear a few points over the phone could you type it up your rationale for all of this. So I sent him in about eight typewritten pages, Hal, and showing how the sequence should be changed. And he's still looking at me, you know, like, what, what? And you know something? They formed a committee. They ran it by the trustees, like they could run it by without Hal knowing. And this is the new 12 and 12. And as you can plainly see, here's step 8 followed by step 11. And Ed and I swear that for a millionth of a second there was fear in his eyes. And he grabbed the book away from me and he said, So that's just an anecdote about how Marlowe... We're at the end of the time. We're there. Me to start, which I think is unfair. I have a quote from a meeting on Friday morning with a few of the guys in the audience. I thought it was a great quote. Alcoholics, at our best, we are the elite of the mentally ill. Alcoholics at our best, we are the elite of the mentally ill. And the other quote I just love, it said, the monkey is off my back, but the circus is still in town. I mean, where else would you go to get those kind of pithy You know, all sorts of things. I started, I don't really know where to go to this. Andy and I didn't exactly have a path, but we were talking about the solution and we intend to kind of end up with something that is more specifically spiritual. So what I'm going to talk about and see if Sandy wants to relate to it is what I started to talk abut was problems in sobriety a little bit that I said that many of us, when we first come in, get a real burst of energy, really like what we hear, get kind of on a honeymoon. We make a great growth period for the first two or three years. And by the way, these are obviously generalizations. I'm going to talk about people getting in trouble at five, six, seven, eight years and not everybody gets in trouble with five or six or seven or eight years. These are just kind of what I'm saying. I believe what I'm saying, in general, patterns that are fairly common. And Bill talks about some of this stuff in the big book. But when we talk about, you know, when he talks about, now you've been sober long enough where you know that all your problems haven't been removed, you've got problems other than alcohol, and that we're going to be doing these spiritual practices over our lifetime. But most of us kind of get on a plateau. So let's just say we've made great progress through the first two or three years. Is that for me? And then what happens is you start running into, what happened to me is I started having problems I didn't think I should have. I'm an idealist. I came in and you told me that you had an answer for alcoholism. You told me the unmanageability of my life was a result of my alcoholism that alcoholism was physical but also mental and spiritual, if I took the principles of the steps, applied them to my life, and changed, I then thought, well, ipso facto, I can get rid of the problems in my life. All my life it seemed to me that everybody was telling me, Bob, you're fairly well equipped to live life, and I could do it for short spurts. If life was a sprint, I had moments of brilliance interrupted by long periods of mediocrity and failure. But I only looked at the moments of brilliance. People always said to me, you know, you're well equipped. And I thought, yeah, so if I got rid of the problems, I could get back on top and, you know, I'll start doing it. Well, I get sober. I think all my problems are going to get solved. They come up. I start working on them, and they don't gets solved. One by one. I had an interesting issue. I went to a psychologist not too long ago with one of my sons working on a father-son issue, and in that thing he said, I work with a lot of upper middle class kids, and he said one of the biggest problems I have is the problem they have leaving home. They're used to the family level of living, and they leave home and they go down about six stories. In our society today there are going to be lots of kids that aren't going to do as well as their parents. And boy, did I identify with that when I left home. I mean, this idea of now I have to buy toothpaste or gas. Gas was what I charged my father. I was so spoiled. And so I was real immature. I came in when I was 23 years old. I didn't really learn how to work until I was 30. And I had a level of fear that I didn t even identify. So I had problems getting up in the morning. I I had problems managing my money. I had gambling problems. I had anger issues as a father, those sorts of things. One by one they'd kind of come at me and I'd try to take them on. And I was singularly unsuccessful at managing or getting rid of my defects of character in my early sobriety. And at first I thought, oh, I'm just not doing this right. I'll just jack it up a little bit. And I'm going to five meetings a week. I'm sponsored. I sponsor people. I'm starting to give talks. I do jail stuff. I'm doing institutional stuff. And I'm thinking, oh, this is just timing. I'll get it. You know, well, I didn't get it Well, I tell you, by my fourth or fifth or sixth year of sobriety, when you still don't know how to work, you get an idea that something's wrong, you know, that you don't have a pass, you know. You're really going to have to get this thing handled. And if you don' t get it handled, you're not going to live a very good life. And I didn' t have an answer. and what happened to me is I got more and more scared and I kind of thought maybe this is just another deal where I do a great start and poor finish you know I've done that one a lot now I'm going to do an AA you know it works for other people it doesn't work for me and I really believe without hesitation that it worked for you now what I lost the belief in believe it or not was step two I went back so out of desperation when my pants caught on fire at seven and seven between seven and eight years of sobriety i'm thinking about suicide really thinking about genocide not just sort of thing i'm not thinking about drinking but i'm thinking about you know i don't want to go through this cycle again and uh the answer was you know sandy and i have been exposed to some of the great teachers in a and i've in my home group i mean one of them for me one of my great teachers is warren and there were other models for me. And those people all had a level of spirituality that I did not have. But the problem that I have with spirituality is if I was going to develop spirituality, I'm going to build a relationship with God, right? Well, if you develop a relationship with God you do not have to be a rocket scientist to figure out he's going to want you to get rid of your subscription to Penthouse. You know, I think. I'm not positive. Or stop your gambling habit that's four or five hours a day you know and maybe get on a budget maybe you know not stop spending 500 more bucks a month than you make and you know stop being angry or violent with your children I mean you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out that you've got three or four patterns of behavior in your life that are probably going to get right on the line as soon as you open up the relationship so I thought what the hell is the use of I've been trying to change those things for six years what the Hell's the use developing a relationship with God if you can't fulfill the conditions of the relationship. So as soon as I clean my act up, I'll go put my application in. But putting it in ahead of time, it just isn't going to work. And I was stuck in that place for two and a half years. And finally, out of desperation, I went back to the steps. Step one, real easy. You know what I was missing? Step two. I lost step two i believed it for us but not for me you know i mean crazy i believed it without question i believed that for us i could tell you that this program of restorative sanity when in fact i was living my life with a level of unmanageability and i didn't believe it for me and i had to regain that and out of the pain now pain the touchstone of spiritual growth an alcoholics anonymous pain got me to a second surrender and my ego got suppressed enough that I finally got to a point and said okay it's all got to get up on the table let's put it on the table I'll put anything on the tape I'll my marriage in the table I put my business on the table put it all on the team and I started to look around and of course when I extricated my head from my backside I made a discovery is that there were people in my own meeting with bigger problems than I had, with smiles on their faces resolving those problems with the steps. And I came to believe again that God was going to restore me, not us, me, even though us, to sanity. I did a third step on my knee with my sponsor in his office and I went through and I did the fourth and fifth step. And after I did, it was my third, fourth, and fifth steps. I'm seven years sober at this time. And after I did that, I had a relapse into my defects of character of some significance. One day where, you know, where I went to work late, left early, got in the backgammon game, won 600 bucks, came home, got into a fight with my wife and slapped one of the kids. One of those days you'd like to have it videoed and sent to the general service office to show what eight years of sobriety can do. And I said, gee, it happened again. And I'm saying, well, weren't you there? I'm seeing, yeah, but it was so habitual. It's like I'm in a blackout. So I'm out of relationship to my own life. I mean, that's how nuts it is, okay? And what I realized in that moment of truth, when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, when I took step one, I was stripped down and I stood naked in front of my alcoholism. At eight years of sobriety, I was stripped and stood naked in front of me out of the unmanageability of my life, out ofthe powerlessness of mylife sober. And I realized that I couldn't do it, that onmy own resources, I was insufficient to the process. And then I got a second thought I hadn't had in a hell of a long time. You are right where you're supposed to be. And I was allowed to take the sixth and seventh step, which I had not taken at depth until I was eight years sober. You know, I was trying to get rid of my defective character. I don't have the power to get out of my character. And in that surrender moment, okay, I took the sixth or seventh step and four of the major problems I was dealing with in my life disappeared that night. Okay? Now, I had to put supports in. I talked to my sponsor and made appointments about when I'd go to work and how long I'd stay at work. I gave my wife the checkbook. I stopped gambling that night. So I had to do things that would help support that decision, which I often had not done in the past. So this pattern where fairly serious crap going on fairly long into sobriety, while it's an unattractive pattern and one that I'm not trying to advertise, I think it is not uncommon. I think it is that many of us end up in a plateau in early middle sobriety where we have fairly serious, and I think our alcoholism goes underground. The physical part gets cured, and the alcoholism starts to express itself in compulsive and obsessive behavior in some other area of our life, sexually eating, money, you know, wherever the hell it comes out. I was a generalist. I had two or three. There are some people who specialize. You know, they just have one. And, but I don't, very few people are exempt from what I just described. And that the pattern of your alcoholism goes underground and continues to express itself in your sobriety, in your life. And I'll tell you something, those patterns of compulsion in my life, it was like drinking. It was like being on dry drugs. I had blackout-like moments. I had, I was hiding stuff. I had patterns of behavior that were very familiar to me in my sobriety. But when I went in order through the steps and got to step six and seven and started to have a second spiritual surrender, but the only reason I had that surrender, I think, is because I went through the steps. The only reasonI was able to do six and seven at that depth is I had the first five alive and well at that moment. and I was in as much pain. But I told Warren, I said, I feel like I'm dying of thirst lying next to a lake. I said I can pass the test. I know what to do. I just can't do it. I know What to Do. I'm not doing it. And I'll tell you something. I think that a lot of us, when I said we are not under-equipped, I see people in Alcoholics Anonymous that I think are enormously talented people and whose lives do not seem to reflect that talent. And if I were to put it two places, one is I would say it's a type of, when you have unresolved problems, they are like miniature black holes. They suck the joy out of your life. They just drain you of energy that you need to live your life, and I think it's the irresolution of those things that drain us of that spirit that Sandy was talking about when he said, I get to share this spirit. Well, he gets to share it because he's open. His pipe's unclogged. But I think, you know, certainly at seven years of sobriety, I had a little log jam in front of my pipe. There was no spirit coming out. There was a little pus leaking out the end of the pipe, but there was no great spirit coming from out of it. And so what I want to say is I don't think that's as unusual as I thought. I thought it was unusual. I thought It was dirty. I was ashamed, and I did not want to share it. My sponsor knew about 60% of what was going on. I know that over here you tell 100%, and I think that's terrific that you do that. I was only telling myself 60%, by the way. So that's why my sponsor only had 60%of it. I wasn't strong enough to give myself the right truth and the level of honesty. But when I put it all in the line, and, you know, what happens is you die. What do you got to do? All you got to do is die and change everything. Other than that, there's not much left to do. But I know that one of the things that holds us back from really in an open and willing way offering ourselves to the God our understanding is we think we're going to disappear. You take away my defect of character and you take away some of those things. Where am I in that process? Well, I'll tell you something. You're going to be more there than you've ever been in a real and substantial way. You're going to have a chance to be in your life in a more powerful way than you've ever been. It is the opposite, because you have now freed yourself of what's been holding you back. You have had all these layers of crud. All these years you thought you were the Chevrolet. You've been putting new tires on it. You've put new hubcaps on it, you've had that son of a bitch painted eight times. You're dragging up and down. You are the driver! And you've paid almost no attention to the driver. And so when we get out of the external solution, when we got out of painting the car and putting new hubcaps on it, as soon as I get the next 50 grand, as soon I get this, as soon the right woman or man, as soon a new breast job, as soon... I happen to have a very good one. You probably haven't noticed. But most of us, without even realizing it, are externally oriented. We're looking outside of ourselves for the answer, and we don't expect, and it's just the opposite. It is just when you start to find the answer inside is when you really can start expressing your life. So what I want to say is that I don't think it's uncommon to get stuck. I think the nature of spiritual walk, what do they always say? The greatest temptation, once you have found God, is to be tempted with the removal of God. The dry periods are the toughest periods of time you will have. Maintaining a lifetime relationship with alcoholics anonymous is not easy. Maintaning a lifetime relationships with your sponsor is not easier, or a spouse. That is what life is about. It will put you in front of you. Long-term relationships will put in front you of the unworkability of your life. If you were going to be a 40-year member of AA, you're going to have to resolve relationship issues and life issues of some significance quite a number of times to remain vital, active, and important and keep your program alive. So the unworkability is not uncommon. There is a solution even though it looks like it's proving to you in the middle of your sobriety that it doesn't work. It is the opposite. What I found in retrospect, what was happening to me is that my nose was being pushed in something more real. That there was a pile of manure, that my noise was being push in it, and rather than my life getting worse, I was simply seeing it as it was. I did not see it as was at one year of sobriety. I did now see the causes and conditions. I did know see the level of unmanageability. and through the work and the steps it was like God's hand was at my back pushing me a little bit closer to the reality of my life and it felt like it was going backwards it was the opposite it was moving towards what was in my way and I think a spiritual journey and you know what what's in your way is an illusion the path of spiritual growth is through the fire not around it the fire is an illusion Everyone in this room knows that when they've changed a significant piece of unworkability in their life, it produced energy, not pain. It was an experience of joy, not paint. And why we resist because we think we're giving something up and it's painful when we get close to seeing the truth. So I think our walk in Alcoholics Anonymous is that walk. And we're going to run into periods where it's going to be easier than other periods, and we're going to run into periods where it seems like it doesn't work and that's the nature of a spiritual journey. Thanks, Bob. I enjoyed that immensely. What I want to talk about is going back to basics. But before I forget it, because I get these ideas that go in my head, I want just to make an aside about a phrase that we hear that I've been thinking about lately. Things happening in God's time. Has anybody ever heard that thing? Well, it's just happening in the name of God. It's happening in god's time and this is what I think about that. I think that's crazy. Let's say that you haven't had a job in a while, and you're running out of money, and you are panicking over it. You are freaking out. You can't sleep. I mean, it has just got you. So you go to your higher power, and you decide to pray about it. and you pray, God, please find me a job. Please help me find a job so that I can systematically save a little bit out of my paycheck and allow this money to build up so that it will take away this terrible panic that I have over this situation. The prayer is asking for something that takes a long time. We just prayed that our problem be solved in about a year. Instead of saying, God, could you please remove my fear over my situation now? And we get it now. So in other words, the time frame that we established is what we got. And then we blame it on God. Well, it's just happening in God's time. Oh no, that's exactly what you asked for. So I'd like a job, and then I'd save up the money, and then i'll do that. And then, because in our own mind, we think we see a solution, which is an intellectual solution instead of a spiritual solution. The spiritual solution is the closeness to the higher power where there are no problems. You see, they just get lifted out. When it's lifted out and the fear is gone, your creativity rushes back and you suddenly dream up a perfect place to go look for a job that you wouldn't have been able to think of while you're in a panic state. I mean, it is so funny. So I'm throwing that out. Now, I'm sure there is such a thing as God's time, but I'm saying a lot of times we set the stage for something that's going to unfold over a long period of time and we're impatient. Well, we're getting exactly what we asked for. And so I just throw that out as something. Now, the thing about the basics, there was a story about people visiting a friend of theirs in the hospital who was in an oxygen tent, and they're carrying on a conversation through the plastic. You know, how's it going, Joe? Oh, doing good. I'm feeling good, yeah. It looks like I might be getting out in a couple days. And they're, hey, can I get you something? No, no, I'm fine. Well, go help yourself to a banana. They're having this thing. And when the guy comes back with the banana, he's eating it. He steps on the oxygen hose. And as they're visiting, Joe is displaying some symptoms of not doing too well. He's getting shortness of breath. And, you know, so they buzzed the nurse and she comes in. Oh, my God, maybe it's his heart. Maybe let's take it. And they're thinking maybe we've got to get him some insulin. I don't know, get the doctor. Have you done his medication? And then somebody looks and goes, You're stepping on his oxygen hose. They step off and everything's straightened out. But for a while there was a complete misdiagnosis of the situation. and i think that we can easily misdiagnose our problems as they occur to us and so i like to think about what is our problem did you ever now before we come to aa we were told about that all the time how many of you remember what was their favorite thing that people would point at us You know what your problem is? You're a lazy son of a... You know What Your Problem Is? We were being told all the time what our problem was. When we came to AA, they tell us again, and I'm going to get to that in a minute, but where did they get this? Where did they gets this? This is what your problems is. And I like to think that, you know, what is alcoholism? Maybe we should all agree on what it is. because there's many definitions, the American Medical Association, all kinds of things. And I'm sure if we went around the room, everybody here would have a definite, oh, I can't drink safely. It's an obsession of this and a compulsion of the mind and an allergy of the boop and the beep. And they have all of those things that we could use as a definition. But here's where I like to go to establish, you see, because if you're going back to the basics, that is the basic, right? is an agreement of what the problem is. And I'd like to get Carl Young back involved when he sent Roland off. Now, the ending to that story, and Bob knows it very well, is that after AA had been around for a number of years, as a matter of fact, it was just about up into the 1960s, Bill Wilson realized that he had never given Carl Jung the credit that he deserved, because he really had established the fundamentals of the surrender into AA with Roland. And so he wrote him a letter. Every so often they'll have this exchange of letters between Dr. Jung and Bill Wilson in the grapevine. If you ever see them, you ought to read them. And Bill just wrote to tell him that maybe you don't remember, but Roland Hazard, you treated him. And as a result of what you told him, he went here. And then he came and we started this organization. It's now all over the world. It's Alcoholics Anonymous. And you played the key starting role in getting this all done. And then Dr. Young wrote back and it was right before.