Big Book – There Is a Solution Workshop – Part 4 of 14 – 2004 – Sandy B.

died. It was amazing that Bill happened to write him, and I think six months later he had died. And he wrote back, said, Dear Mr. Wilson, no, I didn't know what happened to Roland. I'm so glad to hear that. That is absolutely wonderful, and thank you for sharing that. He said, Now when I was seeing Roland Hazard, it was so early in the century, I knew that spirituality was the answer to this, but it wasn't safe for me as a psychiatrist to talk about that because I would have been laughed out of my profession. But now, many psychiatrists are seeing that there are spiritual powers and that this is an important component of human beings. And he said, this is what I felt about alcoholics back then. And it went on to describe the situation of being an alcoholic as having a thirst for something beyond ourselves. And the implication is that alcoholics have an extraordinary longing for God. They all sense that something's missing in their lives and they are constantly aware of this emptiness and they search for something to fill this, not knowing what it is. This is called misdiagnosis. We think it's money or sex or power or whatever it is and we find out what it isthrough the process of elimination. Money doesn't fix it. This doesn't fixed it. This doesn' tfix it. We show up at this hokey pokey program that says, oh, we know how to fix that thing. You know that thing inside of you? You know, that thing that's because you're too far away from God. Oh, yeah, yeah. And then lo and behold, that does fix it. Now, there is the core of the problem. So we always have to remember that no matter what we're diagnosing as our problem today, we're misdiagnosing. This is the core problem. So when we go into the big book and it's, what does it say? Our dilemma is lack of power. Now, do we always diagnose it that way? Oh, I just got fired. My kid ran away. I don't know where the heck he is. Oh, my God, what are these feelings that I'm having? It's hard to go. Oh, this is lack of power. You follow what I'm saying? Because our mind just is quickly interpreting and going, oh, no, I need more money and I have to go find my son and I need to do that. That's why I am so upset. No, that is not why you're upset. My friend Marley says misery is optional. So if we are troubled, it's because we have a circumstance which is neutral that is bothering us. That's the problem, not the circumstance. See, the guy next door has the same circumstance, but his spiritual condition is such that it's not troubling him. It is just a circumstance. Oh, I lost my car. Oh,I'll find it tomorrow. You see what I'm saying? It's not a major event. He goes, well, I'll notify the police. And the guy over here is losing, he can hardly breathe. My car, my car, they both had the same circumstance. This guy is not being troubled by it. This guy's being troubled by the circumstance. What's his problem? Lack of power. If you will go to, the power doesn't make you find your car. The power gets you undisturbed. and the problem wasn't the car missing. The problem was that it bothered you that it was missing. You see the difference? It is a very core issue, and so as we go, even in the beginning, of course, we can't even conceptualize this. I'm sure there's people sitting out here now going, what? What do you think? But you can't have a life without circumstantial issues and problems. Yeah. I mean, it's unavailable. If we think the solution is going to be that we're going to get to a point where we just aren't going to have problems? No, it'll never happen. No, never happen, but that's why we have friends. That's why you go to meetings. That's how we go in there and we just go, well, I've got a little bit of a problem, and then you just go. Well, we have to surrender. We have to, we're gonna get this, and we can get undisturbed again and then move into the situations and resolve them on the other level. now this is it brought out beautifully it's my favorite thing to talk about in the fundamental nature of the problem in the chapter of the agnostic and i think i do this every time i talk i go to those first two paragraphs in the chapel agnestic and it says okay are you new let me explain spirituality to you i'm going to explain it's very simple it's a real easy thing It's not like religion where we tell you about a certain higher power who was born 4,000 years ago. This is our best guess of what he looked like, and this was over in India, and he left these messages, and so you believe what I'm saying, then trust this power, and you're going to be fine. We don't have an AA power. There's no such thing. And spirituality doesn't have a power. It has a path. It has technique to get in touch, and then you can describe what this power is. So they lay it out. So how do you get spiritual then if there's nothing to believe in? You see what I'm saying? How do you do this? Well, you go to the problem as it's laid out in that chapter. And it says very simply, and see if you can follow this. Now, if when you drink you have little control over the amount you drink, everybody. If when you stop you can't stay stopped, everybody, then you're an alcoholic. Okay, so there it is. Yeah, I'm an alcoholic. Okay, now let me tell you what that means when you just said you're an alcoholic If that's the case You are suffering from an illness that only a spiritual experience can conquer And you go, what? I remember my sponsor talking to me and he says Did you hear what I said? You're suffering from a spiritual illness You're struggling from an illnesse that only is spiritual experience It's one of the rare illnesses in the American Medical Association That only a spiritual experience can conker And I said, Bill, I don't believe in spiritual experiences. Oh, you're screwed. I'm sorry. Well, what am I going to do? Why don't you change your mind? Become a former agnostic. Become a dog. And then I'm going, spiritual experience, what is that? You know, I'm not going to believe in the power. What is that ? And the same feeling Bob does. I don't want to get spiritual to make me give all my crap away to the poor. What if it overtakes you and your Mother Teresa and she doesn't go bowling or anything? I don' t want that. You know, I don''t want to become entirely spiritual. I want to be partial. Whoa! So then the next paragraph confronts us. Okay, you're almost spiritual. You're almost there. It says, to be doomed in alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not easy alternatives to face. That's a Jack Benny punchline right there. That is a comedy line. Do you understand it? Okay, you're on the quiz program. You're called up. Okay, Mary, you've got to choose one of these doors. Door A or door B. Die an alcoholic death, live on the spiritual basis. And guess what? Wow. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Is there another door? Doctor, how bad is an alcoholic death? Okay, I'll do the spiritual door. Why do we get spirituals nowhere else to go? They made us a deal we couldn't refuse. We didn't believe in it. we believe that there had to be something behind that door or it's over. So AA doesn't try to prove the existence of a higher power, but it sure convinces you of the need for one. And when you accept to your core gut that you need a higher power, you're 95% there. That's the way I feel. The game is almost over. We just have the other 11 steps. But that's hardly anything. The steps are very easy. It's debating whether you're going to do them that is the hard part. How long does it take to do a fourth step? Oh, four years and three hours. Four years of delaying and three years of doing it. But if we desperately have to get through it all, these things go bing, bing. bing, bing. You can just go through because we're eager to get there. Why are we eager to get that? Are we convinced there's a pot of gold at the end? No. We're convinced that what'll happen if we don't do it. And then when we get there, we go, oh my God, I had no idea I was going to get this jackpot. And when we tell our stories, it doesn't sound like that? We go, well, I came in. I saw this beautiful spiritual program and I just went for it. And then your sponsor goes, yeah, with my hands around your neck choking you, you eagerly sought the spiritual program. So what I'm just covering there is don't misdiagnose anything. The last thing I'll turn back to Bob is, I don't think I've missed more than four days without going to a meeting. And I'll tell you why I don' t want to ever do that. Because I've heard stories about guys with gals with solid, solid programs And they moved. And when they first moved, there was a screw-up and the house heating system wasn't working and this thing and their job sent them over here and then they got sick. And through no real deliberate action on their part, they went maybe a month without meetings. And here comes the tricky part. And they felt even better than when they were going to meetings. ladies and gentlemen I could not handle that you put that in my computer I feel better after a month without meetings than I did with 25 years with meetings I would not know how to handle that where do you file that see what I'm saying maybe I overreacted you were pretty young Yeah, I was young, you know. Maybe in 25 years they've taken the impurities out of booze that hurts you. Maybe I didn't need those meetings all the time. Maybe I was brainwashed. Maybe I'm doing great. I can't believe it. I don't know how to handle that. I never want to have that situation. So I'm just going to keep going and going so that I never have to deal with that. Okay, enough out of me. Back in here. The problem is that you say things so well, it doesn't need anything added to it. I mean, think of that. Think of how well he just went back to something that I have read three or four times in the last three or five years. Three or four months. but drew it to my attention in a stronger way than it was when I read it. And again, that's the nature of a spiritual book is that when you really bring your attention to it, it is new. I mean, I think most of us heard that new, not like the first two paragraphs of the chapter to the agnostic. And isn't that, I mean there is nothing in our society That would support what Sandy said I mean, there's not much I mean the other thing is What you need is, you know Younger women, faster horses and more money Or whatever that song was You know, I think I mean that's what you need That's where your answer is There's a guy There's this book I was reading by Eckhart Tolle Called The Power of Now One of the distinctions he makes Is the difference between happiness He says happiness is a condition that is based on your perception that circumstances are okay. So most of us are thinking, what do you want? I want to be happy. But peace and joy are not conditioned upon circumstances being okay. You can have peace and enjoy and have trouble. Most of us identify the trouble with ourselves. We think we're the problem, that something's wrong with my life, not my life circumstances. And it's really tough to change your life. You know, it isn't so tough to get on a budget, but it's tough to choose. It's tough for you to change who you think you are. And I think that many of us have these distinctions collapsed. And what we're trying to do is kind of change our essential selves. Part of what Sandy was saying is when you access the power, the problem just becomes circumstances. You are now able to be in front of those circumstances. I, for the longest time, had an issue of being angry and occasionally violent with my middle boy. He was just a pain in the ass. He was a challenge to me. And it wasn't like there weren't issues. You know, he would occasionally get arrested or get thrown out of school or something like that. And my attitude was, what are you going to do? I mean, what the heck are you gonna do? I don't know what to do. And I was doing what my dad did with me and my wonderful, wonderful man, my father. But I was dealing with my dad and what my father did with him. It wasn't working, but it's a family thing. And somewhere into the unworkability of that, I got the thought that Sandy talked about with his neighbor. If my brother was parenting my son, My brother would not be doing what I am doing. If there were ten men who had my son as their son, only two of us would have struck them. Where is the problem? The problem is not in the circumstance. The problem isn't my reaction to the circumstance." Life is just full of circumstances. I'll tell you something else about circumstances and problems. I don't think about problems being opportunities. How is God going to get our attention if something wants to change? How is the universe going to gets our attention if it wants to get the message to us? And the message is, it's not working. Okay. Pain. Or your spouse. Or your father. Or your son. It's going to come from the people in your life. Maybe your creditors. Maybe a cop. but depending upon how integrated your life is, that is the universe giving you evidence of the workability and unworkability of your life. And it is a signal to pay attention. And you can change, make decisions, start to do something different. And we take it as, you know, why am I getting this message? Something's wrong. We panic when we do this. And I really think that what it is, is guideposts. You know when they say, what do I do to become enlightened? Chop wood and carry water. What it means is, live your life. As you live your Life, you will be presented with the material you need to become spiritually awake. As you Live Your Life with your spouse, you will presented with unworkability of yourself in relationships. or with your father or with your mother or with your son or with your boss when you live your life in long-term relationships you will be presented with what needs to be dealt with for you to become spiritually awake and then you bring it back into the process you know you bring it back into our practice and Miss Andy said once you start to believe that your resolution is in finding the power the circumstances don't it isn't personal that's the thing that is just so profound to me over a period of time your life isn't personal it's almost like it's not about you I mean that sounds nuts but there's a freedom in that the biggest freedom I've been able to maintain access in my life and I don't even know if this relates to what the heck we're talking about but I am a reactor you know, that spring-loaded 60 miles an hour ahead first type thing. I would get a thought and I would react. And the thought, when I would have it, would be printed on my eyeball. When a thought is printed on your eyeball, it is your reality. There is no other place to look. Okay? So I would think, what else can you do? You know, I mean, I get it and I act on it. Okay? after a period of time as you start to access the first three steps you start to rely on the God of your understanding when you start to get out of your way and you start to realize that your thoughts are not reality there's something wrong with the pattern one of the great conversations we have in Alcoholics Anonymous is you have to have a healthy questioning of your own thinking not a neurotic questioning but a healthy questioning of what goes through your mind our thinkers are not always in tune and so when you have that thought I now have a space between my thought and when I act I have a choice I think I've always had that choice but it didn't appear to me that I had that space nor that choice and at 37 years of sobriety I get the same thought when I'm angry I might have a thought to strike someone But I look at that today, and I think, wow, I haven't had that thought in two months. Where the heck did that come from? I haven'T had that though in a year and a half. Where the hell did that comes from? I am not my thought. I'm no longer a monkey on a string. I'm not a jukebox. You can put a coin in me and push B5. I don't have to play B5 . I used to have to played it. You put me in front of the circumstance, we're going to dance, baby. You want to dance? We'll dance. Okay? But now, you put the coin in, you push the button, and I get to choose. That is like being let out of jail. Without any circumstance in my life being changed, I get to be at peace. In the circumstances, I get to be untroubled, as our book talks about. That is the priority. And therein lies, there is a significant part of the practice and solution. Good job, buddy. We're at the break. Folks, we're getting down to the final hour. And before I get started, I want to thank you all. I mean, I've really had a good time. I've seen a lot of friends I haven't seen in a while and it's been a great pleasure for me. I enjoy this. Like I said earlier, It's nothing like handing out good news. And that's all this is, is to just tell everybody. There used to be a radio commentator named H.V. Kaltenborn, and he used to start his program, there's bad news tonight. And I like to start ours, there's good news tonight, all we got here is good news, And so continuing, my favorite prayer is the St. Francis prayer. and St. Francis was quite a character because he was kind of like us a little bit he was like a crusader with the swords and going off and whacking all the Muslims heads off and just raging heck all over the Middle East in the name of God and he just saw that he didn't want to do that anymore and he started really thinking about what would spirituality be? How do you do it? And he came to the conclusion that you must try to totally eliminate your ego. And that's what he spent his life doing, was trying to find one more thing where his ego was demanding something, so he would sleep outside and he would give away his possessions and do various things. Not to be a nice person, but to keep reducing the ego so that the channel between his spiritual energy inside could open and he would be closer and closer to the pure energy. And as he did that, people liked to be near him just to feel the energy, just to feel that. And so his very being brought joy wherever he went. And that's the main attraction about St. Francis. And you see the birds and the animals and they're all, they just want to hang around that energy. And of course, that's a lot of people That's the energy of our higher power. So the real joy of the whole thing was just go hang around your higher power I mean, that is what it is about but you can't go there because your ego doesn't want you to So the steps are designed to crash all the blockages between us and this flow of energy. St. Francis called it the channel. Help me to open the channel of thy peace. I used to think that the peace was God's peace out here, and if I could get my character defects and do all the steps and open this up, then this peace would come in and I'd just be overcome by this wonderful feeling. That's exactly backwards. The peace comes out from me. It can finally, I can see that I was born with that. It's been in there all along. Part of the suffering that we do is that the real us wants to love everybody we see. The real us just helps other people. But our ego is going, don't fall for that junk. you've got to get out and get yours. You've got to get out and do that and our real self is crying. Why are you doing that? That's not who I am. Let me show you who I am. So your ideas about yourself are totally wrong. You are a magnificent creature who is being blocked by a bunch of ideas that are wrong. Old ideas availed us nothing. So we go and get the heck out of learn in the fourth and fifth step that it's impossible to see the truth about ourselves alone. That's why we go to another human being, and we get to see the fourth dimension of our four-step inventory, which is our third dimension. It's just sitting there. How do you know anything you wrote down is right? Since you rationalize all the time, that list is probably nothing. So when you self-evaluate, you can only do it in two dimensions. So we need always another person. Don't forget the line. People of very high spiritual development always insist on checking with others the guidance they feel they're getting from God. High development, and they still check with somebody else. Check with somebody elses. How many times we go to our sponsor with this problem? They're after me. They're going to get me. And then he goes, wait, wait. There's this, there's that, there is this, and there is that. And then you say, well if you look at it that way, it's a different thing. This is what power is, it is the power to see it differently. When we see it different, it changes everything. So I read a book where the author said, you know what the planet earth is? It's a soul school. That's what it is. That's why it's here. You know, a whole bunch of souls and they're going to school down here. So every, and we come in here and now we're really in a soul school. In order to get through the school, there have to be quizzes and there has to be exams and there have to be things. And so, okay, now we are in soul school, we are going to show you how to use the power of this wonderful program to get through grief. Wouldn't you like to be able to do that with grace and dignity. Okay, then we've got to kill somebody in your family. Now, see, I'm making a joke, but I'm saying these events have to happen. So now your mother dies. Now we're going to have to deal with grief. This is the saddest thing. What would the program have us do? Wow. My mother died and I've got ten years in the program. Why don't I try to show the new women in our group how to go through this with grace and dignity so that when their mother dies, they won't be as afraid of it and they won'T be as frightened of the future. I've been given a very noble challenge here. So I will experience my grief, but I will also experience something bigger than that. Oh, what a new way of looking at it. You see the difference? It just takes every challenge that comes along, and if we can get other people to help us see it, see it as having a purpose. It's not to destroy you. It is to destroy more of our ego. It is for us to have the power of God. It is also to have us come out the other side a different person. And so that's the way I look at all the early steps are opening the channel, opening the channels so this power can flow through. We have to clear up the wreckage of the past, and then when it comes back to me, I'm going to make a comment about six. But what I wanted to get to now is I talked about the promises earlier and the verbs in the promises at the end of the ninth step. It's all these abstract verbs that are only spiritual verbs. You couldn't get that from figuring anything out. It is just a gift that's just handed to you. Peace is handed to your. A way of seeing things. Suddenly life takes on a real meaning. How? Don't worry about how. It just happens. It just happened. You're doing these stupid steps that you don't believe in, and all these things are just happening because the power is causing them to happen in you. And in the big book, there's an interesting sentence right after the promises. It says, now we're at step 10. and it's about the fourth sentence down it says we have entered the world of the spirit and we saw that we entered it when we saw the promises see the promises are using verbs that describe the world of the Spirit so after the first nine steps now we're going to enter the world of the Spirits and that world exists in 10, 11, and 12 this is the world of the spirits so where is the world of the spirit you know what i mean is it another planet is it over there when you go to india up in the himalayas and where's the world that the spirit we find out the world of the Spirit is in the now which is exactly what Bob was talking about in the book that he was kind enough to get me a copy of that the Spirit only exists in the Now there's no other place to find it. So anytime we're worried about the past or frightened about the future, we're cut off from the Spirit. So the whole 10th step and 11 and 12, passing the message on and practicing principles in all our affairs, you look at the 12th step, it lists 100 different problems. You know what I'm saying? You remember the 12 step in the 12 and 12? It's just 100 different problems. And then this is going to happen, and this is gonna happen, and that's gonna happen. Those are all spiritual quizzes. They're all little tests to show you the power that you now have access to. And it'll show, it just talks in there about, now when this happens and you just get closer to your higher power and it'll lift you out of that one. It'll give you a different way of looking at it. It will always show you how these are designed to have you grow and not get destroyed. Your ego is getting destroyed but you're being set free. So problems our attitude towards problems or circumstances changes. And it says that in the seventh step, that our attitude toward pain changes because pain is just the ego being crushed some more and some more. And as we see the outcome and the growth that comes out of every bit of that pain, Bill writes, our attitude about pain changes. we suddenly see oh boy here i'm going to be going somewhere this is and so it all of a sudden it becomes effort it's kind of like when you're out of shape and you haven't worked out when you first start isn't it painful to go over and work out and the muscles are going and this and that well what about three months later when you are in shape you are still doing the same thing that was so painful now you are over there going god this feels so good and it's energizing me and I'm doing this. So your whole attitude about pain has changed because you see the results that are coming. Before we got to AA, we were going to the gutter and every bit of pain was driving us down and now every bit of pain is guiding us up. The course of spirituality is like a beam. When I was taught flying and I think Creighton the same thing, the only navigation they had was the radio range. Remember the radio reach, Creightons? There was no needle. You didn't have anything in there to tell you. You had to listen and pick up this beam, and then if you were off the beam to the right, you heard an A, you know, and then when you went off to the left, you heard a N, dot, whichever they are. And so if you ever got on a radio beam and heard nothing but a solid beam,