Working the Steps – D. and Chris S. – Big Book Workshop – Austin, TX – Part 3 of 10 – Bob D,Tom I

I came to the park, and I was so sick, and all the hope of ever getting any relief from drinking was gone now. And a doctor that year in a hospital, a detoxist, told me something. I guess it could have been good information. It was horrible to me. He said, I was in my 20s. He said you're young enough and healthy enough. You can probably go on this pathetic state for another five years or more before it kills you. I come to with that heart that morning, and I'm thinking about what that doctor said five more years. I need to live five more days of this. And I went and got a bottle of wine for courage, and I went to a bridge because I was going to make it stop. And if you had come up to me on that bridge, then you would have said to me, my God, Bob, are you going to kill yourself? Why don't you go to AA and work those steps? You never did that. You went to meetings, but why don't you go to AA and work those steps? Why don't people get involved? I would have told you something. I would've said, listen, you don't understand. AA's not really what I need. I like the people. They're always nice to me. But AA's probably not going to help me. And my experience with that is it's so universal that it's kind of frightening. I've talked to thousands of alcoholics. I have never met an alcoholic in our detox or anywhere that's brand new in the midst of the hopelessness and despair of alcoholism that ever looked at the 12 steps and went, oh yeah, that would work. Nobody says that. Now, I would know if the state wouldn't go, that'll work forever. But no alcoholic ever looks at those steps, and it doesn't look like they will work until after you do them. Then we all say the same thing, well, we found out years ago. Frank, I died a few years ago at 40, over 45 years. And Frank used to say something Chris kind of touched on a little bit. He said alcohol is anonymous. It's not for those who need it. We all know that. I could say everybody knows somebody who's dying of alcoholism that needs this thing. But they don't get it, do they? He said it's not even for those who want it. I go to a detox once a week, and across the street from a detox is an old oak tree. And sometimes the detox is so full that there's no beds, and guys come up there and they get turned away, and they don't know what to do. So they lay under that. There's three wisdom guys that died in their tree. They finally took the rocks out of there because guys in convulsions would crack open their skull of them. It was rocks that were against the bottom of that tree and took them away about a year ago because there were guys dying under there. And I've gotten out of my car, parked right there, and there's some guy, some one or two guys sitting under there, sometimes a gal, waiting to get in a detox, and I'll talk to him a little bit. And if I tell you something, I've had men say to me with tears in their eyes and a level of sincerity that is beyond anything you could ever, ever imagine, tell me how much they want this. But they never get it. Christ said it's because it's not for those who want it, it'snot for those who need it, it's only for thosewho do it. The problem with that for me is I'm not a doer, I'm a thinker. Right? I am not a doer. I'ma ponderer. It's got a chapter for me in the pondering. Because I'mnot a doerer. I'm the guy who likes to sit back and observe for a while. If I like what I see, maybe I'll step out an inch or two. And the problem is if you sit back and watch alcoholics on, it doesn't look like it's going to work for you. It doesn't look like its gonna work for until you do it. Now you got that ego thing. You know there was a great psychiatrist who said one time, the reason so few of us ever get better even though some of us face the accident for years or decades, is that my ego is so sick that I have an inability to listen to anybody in order to hear anything new. I can only listen to see how I'm already right. And if you identify with that, you're in trouble. Because you're a closed system. And if nothing new gets in, nothing changes. If nothing changes, nothing changed. I think the old adage, you know, it's hell and alcohol, just can't tell much. I'm that guy. I'm so full. I'm right about everything. I'm Right. And I'm not a joiner. I have a couple problems with alcohol and service, and the major one is it's full of people. And I don't do people sober well. So how do you become...how do you get...how do you join anything to become a doer? After the suicide attempt, I failed. I was such a coward, I couldn't kill myself. I perched on that bridge trying to make up enough courage to jump and make it stop. I can't do it. I broke down and started sobbing. Ended up in a detox 2,000 miles away in Las Vegas. The Buddhist say all the students raise their teachers up here. I listened to people in there for the first time in seven years. I could hear them. I could never hear you. I can never hear it. I can not stop picking your part. I can't stop tearing you down mentally. I can not stop making you out to be lame. I didn't like AA. One of my best descriptions of ending up in AA that I've ever heard was Joe McQueen, he just said he felt like he joined the Salvation Army Band. I thought oh yeah. I get that. It's like come to AA and all this comes with it. Oh my god. So, I sit in this detox and I don't know what's happened to me but I've been temporarily surrendered by the bottle and the despair and hopelessness of that I can't, I'm stuck in a trap I can 't spring. I can feel myself start departing and I can live without it either. I am in a bad spot and I just can't kill myself. And I started listening to these people and for the first time in my life I could hear him. I remember like yesterday, I was sitting there listening to the guy who's become my sponsor talk about how he was going to commit suicide. And I'm with him every inch of the way. I'm sitting there and I'm nodding my head. I know exactly how he felt. I knew exactly what he was thinking. He was talking about his drinking, and I knew precisely how he drank because that's how I drank. He talked about his failures in quitting and how he'd always go back to it, and I'm just there nodding my head. And I got into being my sponsor, and I started getting involved in alcohol, and he was a guy who was big on service, very big on services. Well, three months go by, and i go to my home group, and there's a woman there named Judy, and she was a counselor in this detox that i was in, and also a member a member of my home group, and Judy pulls me aside, and she says, what happened to you? Can you give me money? She said, you know, I've been in a lot of rehab places, a lot in places. I've had come around alcohol silence for seven years. She says, well, how do you mean? She says what do you need? She says every, I go to a meeting anywhere in town, you're there. She said by hearing your secretary of the group, I said I am. She said so-and-so is sponsoring me, I hear you're calling him a lot. I said oh yeah. He's a good sponsor, he's a tough sponsor. I said, well, he is okay with me. She says, I hear you're taking meetings back into the detox. I said I am. You told her she just got signed up and you're taking meetings into that new meeting in the state prison. I said i am. She said, you never did any of that stuff on all those other attempts. What happened to you? Why are you doing it now? And she stopped me. I didn't know. I didn t have an answer because my last bunk was not the worst bunk. I had some horrific ones. It was just the one. And I don t know what to tell her. I don't know what to say. I d know why now. What s the render of me? What happened to me? And I went to a new meeting right after that and people in A were very kind to me. I tell you, A is fun question. If you want to put out body language and vibes like, leave me alone, we will. We will leave you alone. Now I'm not making that up to everybody because all those one or two guys are off their meds and won't leave you along. For the most part, we'll leave you around. But if you reach out for help, I'm telling you from the moment I reached out for health, the people in A were all over me. They've been all over my system. And this Frank pulls me out of his car after an evening, and he says, I need your help. My wife's on my back, and if I don't get rid of some of this stuff, I'm in a lot of trouble. And he opens the trunk of his truck, and there's some really nice skirts and sport coats and pants that just came from the dry cleaners. And he said, could you take this off my hands? I said, well, did you put a bag on me? He said, sure. Just kind of hoping he might have a car if he wanted to get rid off it. And he gave me a box of books, and they were novels. He heard that I liked to read. I do, I read probably two books a week. These are just paperbacks. There's a couple hardbacks that he'd read already. He said, you might want to read these. They're some interesting fictional books and stuff. I said, okay. I start reading this book right after that. And there's a passage in this book, and it blew my mind. When I read it, I knew exactly what happened to me. I know exactly what the bottom is now. I know why all of a sudden, I'm a doer rather than a thinker. Why I got to become responsible, I knew the whole deal. And what I read in this book was an account of these scientists who were doing experiments on the human brain. And they discovered that the human had a place that had a Latin name and they kept referring to it in this to it in this book is the pleasure center. It's the part of the brain that allows you to experience the high euphoria from alcohol and drugs. And so, in trying to study this, the scientists took these laboratory rats, and they put two tiny wire filaments into the pleasure centers of the rat's brain, and then pass a mild electric stimulus through those wires just enough to stimulate the pleasure Center, and discovered the rat would get high when they did that. So with the deed, it hooked up to Jesus to a pedal in the rat's cage and the rat worried he could hook that pedal and get high. So the rat would just lay on the damn pedal. I mean, he doesn't stop to drink water, eat, sleep. He hasn't even stopped all sex. It's not now, but it comes this part here. And he hit the pedal until he died. used to be dehydrated because it's not even stopping to drink water. But once the scientists realized what was happening, these rats were dying, they would observe them and they'd wait until one was almost dead and they turned the juice off. And now the rat had said, oh, well, nothing happens to him. And he said, paddle again and nothing happens and again and again, and after 10 of his skills were tested, turned the juicer back on, the rat finally guessed it that once and for all, this party's over. and instead of being able to go back to being a rat, the rat curls up in a ball and lays on the floor of the cage to die because without the cheese what's the point and I'm reading that and I'll tear it up because I know that's exactly what happened to me I didn't come to alcohol and synonymous looking for sobriety I did not remember of A because of the short form of the third tradition I didn't have a desire not to drink. I'm an everyday member of Alcoholics Anonymous because the membership requirement belonged for me. Membership should include all who suffer from alcoholism. If a gene were knocked out of a bottle and the day I got to AA and said, I'll give you one wish, it wouldn't have been for sobriety. You know it would've been for a spiritual way of life. I think if I would have had the presence of mind to be legit with myself and with Eugenie, I think I would've said, give me the ability to get high like I got high when I was 18 years old. You gave me five years of that. I wish you'd have told me it was only those five years. The doctor mirrors five years! I would sign that contract in blood. And instead of a big book and a sponsor and a homegrown set of actions that seemed inconvenient to me, and over 32 years later I'm here to tell you I believe this with every fiber of my being. The Alcoholics Anonymous is not designed to get you to quit drinking. Matter of fact, they'll not even place in here to even suggest you quit. You think if that was a big infuser he'd have shot your endocrine system? You think that there would be one case in this country that says, Bob! Cut it out! Stop! And I'm trying to say to you all that this idea of no mental defense is the first drink. Lack of power is your dilemma. The most sincere desires about drinking is no avail to you, Bob. You can't quit drinking. Alcohol is not about quickening. Drinking, it's about one thing and one thing only. And I believe this like I know I'm sitting here. It's designed to allow you incrementally and slowly to turn the juice back on. To accomplish the freedom inside of you and the awakening that alcohol and drugs had once done for you. Alcohol at one time in my life created a spiritual experience. A guy like me who is depressed and feels like he's not even a part of this world, that our tremendous senses are disconnected, a loneliness stuck up inside my head with my feelings and my insane thoughts, and one time could walk into a bar and have four drinks and all of that would fall from me and I'd be plugged in and connected. You ever notice how you can walk into a bar sober, just so locked up and about the fourth drink all of a sudden you can hear the jerk box. All of a suddenly the guy sitting next to you is telling you about his problems and you're really listening. And you keep doing that to you, and you really care. It's like you feel like you've joined a human race. I've had about seven drinks. Man, you kind of love some of these people. Man, these are a lot of people. About ten drinks, and we're cleaning vacations together. And by nine drinks, I feel there's a rightness in the world. I mean, God's in his heaven and everything seems to be connected and makes sense. I can see the big picture now and I'm part of it. And Paul said, I was part of life at last. Now that's a spiritual experience. No matter how you cut it, when I drank alcohol, my spirit came alive. It vitalized my spirit. When it turned on me and no longer worked, I was in desperate, desperate straits. You see, I Was Spoiled. Those of us that at one time, in the days when the hook was set, experienced that magical effect, that freeing spiritual effect of alcohol, it ruins you. Because you'll compare everything in life against that, and everything in life will come up short. And let you can again experience that connectedness and that freedom. But I suspect that guys like me, if I don't find a way to get me off of me and to get free from the bondage itself in a state of abstinence I probably won't be able to stay here because abstinance will be so worrisome, so depressing and so lonely that I can't take it. And after a while, I will turn to something to scratch this itch that I have to scratch. And Alcoholics Anonymous is the only thing I've found in my whole life. And I've tried everything from hypnosis to primal screening. I have rational emotive therapy, good salt, TA, everything you can think of. Every medication I'm realizing. I did a test switch from alcohol to drugs to alcohol to drug as a combination. My sponsor says it's like children on deck chairs on the Titanic. And nothing worked. Once alcoholism turns on you, I've never known a chainsuit that would turn back. I'm telling you, you need to hear about it. You need to know about the guts. The guy in your home group, you didn't drink enough and the party was over and went back and was able to get back to the way it was when he was 18 years old. He'd be coming around meetings going, you're wrong, you're all wrong, you're right on. But we see him come back to the meetings and it ain't no good. It ain't not good. Have your name tags tomorrow. Okay, for Katie, don't cross her... Mark your spot at the table, and we're going to meet back here in 11 hours and 2 minutes. Good morning, everybody. My name is Chris, and I am an alcoholic. I'm having a great time this weekend. Austin is a great town, great people. It's really been a lot of fun. Yesterday, is there anybody here this morning who was not here yesterday? We have a few hands. What you basically missed yesterday is you're in real trouble. Okay? We were talking about step one, and alcoholism is an illness that we minimize. We minimize our problems. We don't understand a lot of times just how much trouble we're in. So it's very, very important to get clear on step one. We did a lot of material last night on Step 1, and that is very, very appropriate because it truly is the key to so much. Your success is really tied in. If you're an alcoholic, your success is Really Tied In to your understanding of Step 1 because that's going to be the motivation. Now, Step 1 is basically saying you've got a mind that is going to bring you back to drinking if it remains untreated with spiritual processes. You've got a body that will ensure you'll drink yourself to death once you start drinking because you've got a physical allergy or a craving once you put alcohol in your body. And that would be bad enough, because that's a death sentence, but wrapped around that is the unmanageability that you suffer as an alcoholic. But, you know, we suffer so much in our act of alcoholism. It drives us to suicide. We feel more hopeless and lonely and depressed than practically anybody out there. It's an illness that is absolutely devastating in all of its aspects. It affects every single part of your life. Parts of your light that you don't even give it credit for affecting. You know, I thought, well, if I could just quit drinking, everything would be fine. Well, I've got to tell you, everything was not fine when I quit drinking. It was way beyond not fine. So I had to start looking at the problems in my life, how they were directly proportional to my alcoholism. And when you start to do that, it can be a very depressing task. I mean, you really start to see that you're suffering from something incredibly aggressive. Alcoholism is incredibly aggressive, and at times it takes a very, very aggressive recovery process. Most of us minimize the aggressiveness of alcoholism. Therefore, we minimize our participation in the recovery processes. and a really good concession to your innermost self about step one and an understanding of what alcoholism is, is very, very important. So that's step one. That really paints the problem very, muy clearly for us. Now we're going to be moving this morning into the solution. If I'm powerless, if my life is unmanageable, So what then is the solution? I'm in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous where I see people that are happy. You know, they seem to have gotten their life in order. They're certainly not suffering the way I felt, the way i was suffering when I walked through the doors. So what, then, really is the Solution? Now, yesterday I talked a little bit about the history of Alcoholic Anonymous and how Bill Wilson hooked up with Dr. Bob and Silkworth and a number of other players in the early days of Alcoholics Anonymous and how he put together the picture of alcoholism and how you put together to picture of the solution for alcoholism. In step two, it says we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Now, when you look at the word sanity and you do a word origin study on it, what I found was it's not necessarily a psychological term. It doesn't come from psychiatry. It basically comes from the criminal justice system. Hundreds of years ago over in Europe, judges were being presented with these offenders who quite obviously didn't understand the difference between right and wrong, didn't really understand the differences between good and evil, couldn't really comprehend the laws that they were breaking or why what they were doing was bad. They were individuals that today we would basically call challenged. And these particular judges were getting sick and tired of handing out unbelievably harsh sentences to people that they truly could see weren't responsible for what they were doing. So the insanity defense was developed. And the insanity defence basically, if you're trying to get off of something today using the insanity defence, what you'll have to do is prove that you were not capable of understanding right from wrong. that you truly weren't responsible for that particular behavior. I had a person that I was sponsoring who was trying to get off of a DUI where there was actually a vehicular homicide included, and he tried to use the insanity defense to get away. And basically the judge goes, okay, you're trying to use the insanity offense. Well, did you buckle up for safety when you got in the car? Yeah. Where were you headed? I was headed to rehab. He was actually headed to rehabilitate when he had the accident. So the judge said, oh, so you recognized there was a problem and you were about the business of treating it. And he said, yes. Then how can you possibly use the insanity defense? So when you look at the word sanity, it basically says it's the same almost as responsibility. Now, I'm one of these people that just beat myself up unbelievably. There's no harsher critic of my behavior than me. And I was so wrapped up in the emotions of the things that I had done, the guilt, the remorse, the self-pity, the depression about the things that I Had Done, that it would have been much better for me to look at this as an illness, as something that needs treatment, rather than sit there and harshly punish myself. Rather, use that energy in a constructive way and try to participate in the recovery process. Now, in step two, being restored to sanity through a power greater than myself, A lot of us have issues with this because we believe it directly reflects on our religion that we were brought up in childhood. Most of us, because of our behavior or our attitude or outlook, have long since separated from that particular religion and can even have prejudiced and preconceived ideas about that particular region and think that Alcoholics Anonymous is asking you to go back to church or something like that. That's really not the case. What the early AAs found was that by practicing spiritual principles, by engaging in spiritual exercises and behavior, they found that the power that eluded them from being able to stay separated from alcohol was granted to them. So they believed that there was a correlation between those two things, and so do I. I believe so much in the problem being alcoholism and the solution being spiritual living. I believe such a thing. I believe much in that because of the outcomes, because of the evidence that's in front of my face all the time. Now, being the type of person I am, I had to challenge everything. I had to have issues with everything, especially about the God idea. It says in this book that we really should resign from the debating society. And a lot of times that's very, very true. To go into this open-minded is, I think, essential. I think it's essential to have an open mind on the spiritual processes that are recommended in Alcoholics Anonymous. And why? Why? It's because our way is not working. The greatest question my sponsor ever asks me when I tell him what's going on is, how's that working for you, Chris? You know? So to be open-minded, would you rather be right about your conception of God or would you rather survive is sometimes the question that we need to ask ourselves. The hoop you have to jump through is larger than you think, it says in the step book. Now a couple of quotes. I love these quotes out of the stepbook. The 12 steps are a group of principles spiritual in their nature that if when practiced as a way of life can expel the obsession to drink and enable the user to become happily and usefully whole. That statement says a whole lot. It's basically saying that the principles that the 12 steps are asking us to do will expel the obsession to drink, which really is the crux of our problem. Most alcoholics are relapsers. But it's also saying we can become happily and useably whole. That's an important statement of hope, that sentence. It's one of the first sentences in the step book. So we're looking at coming to believe that the solution to our alcoholism is a spiritual solution. That's what we're starting to come to believe in step two. Another quote from the 12th book is, Who among us wishes to admit complete defeat? Glass in hand, we've worked our minds to such a state that only an act of divine providence can relieve us of our obsession. What is divine providence? What is your picture of divine provenance? Is that God shining out of the clouds on you so all of a sudden you're cured? You know, I would rather think that there's a correlation between my behavior and the principles that the book is asking me to practice and my ability to be successful in Alcoholics Anonymous and to recover. There's a lot of great information in the book about this. We have to turn toward some different things in AA. It's not asking you to believe in any specific type of God or deity. What it's asking you is to be open-minded, and it's asking you look at the spiritual solution for your life. It's work for so many of us. My own personal experience when I came to the doors of the AA was, I saw my sponsor, Fish Food Phil, as a power greater than myself. I did. This was a guy who was 10 years sober. I couldn't even imagine such a thing. Walking through the door, how do you not drink for 10 years? So that was amazing. But it was also amazing that he had a family unit that was functional. He was divorced from an alcoholic wife, and he had the kids. And he had really good job. And he got a great five-liter Mustang, you know? And he has a lot of things that I was looking at as this individual is successful. So I started to pay attention to him, and I started believe him more and more. A lot of times he gave me suggestions that I couldn't imagine where he got this stuff. I would come to him and I would say, well, you know, the loan sharks are going to break my arms. This is happening. This part of my life is blowing up. And this is going on. And he'd look at me and he'd smile and he's go, Chris, what I'd like you to do tonight is go to a meeting. And I'm thinking, let me tell you this again slower. You know, you obviously don't comprehend the enormity of my issues. And you know what? He did comprehend the normity of mine issues. He understood that this drama, the issues in my life were a direct result of my alcoholism. So he was asking me to keep my eye on the ball and seek the spiritual solution. Don't treat the symptoms. Treat the root cause. You know, he's not sending me out to fix all these problems. He's asking me to keep my eye on the ball and stay with the Alcoholics Anonymous process. And it was the best thing he could have done. I thought there was a giant misunderstanding that he had between what was going on in my life and what he thought the solution was. But I respected him enough because I saw the success in his life to do what he asked me to do. And slowly he started to put together an unending winning streak of being right, which I couldn't imagine. You know, I remember this one time he came to me and he goes, I go to him, I go, my boss shamed me in front of my peers. You know my boss yelled at me this one day in front of my guys and my solution to this was to go and blow up his truck that night. And this made perfect sense to me, to get even for this unbelievable injustice. And so I'm sharing this with my sponsor, and he goes basically, well, Chris, we don't blow people's trucks up in AA, you know, which was an important wisdom teaching. And he said, what I'd rather you do is go there in the morning, you know, ask to speak to him by himself, and basically say to him, I don't really appreciate the way you talk to me in front of the guys. Would you, you know, if you ever have any problems with me going forward, would you talkto me privately and we can work it out? And he told me to go tell the boss that. And I thought he was crazy. The idea of blowing up the truck made much more sense to me. But because of this unending streak of being right all the time, I said, okay, I'm going to do it your way and I'll come back and show you that it didn't work. Well, I did that that morning. I basically talked to my boss and I said look, if you ever have any problem, I'd appreciate you not yelling at me in front of the guys. Just bring me aside and we'll work it out. And he looked at me and he did a little laugh like huh. And then he never yelled at me again in front OF my guys. How is my sponsor so smart? It's basically because the spiritual principles work and my principles don't. Now, I went from having fish food fill as a power greater than myself to Alcoholics Anonymous as a power greater Than Myself. I started to go to meetings like you wouldn't believe. My first six or eight years in AlcoholicsAnonymous, I at least made a meeting every day. Quite possibly 12 meetings a week for my first six right years. I mean, I was a meeting maker. And I learned a lot in those groups. And I started to view my group as a power greater than myself, which it was. But slowly, I had to start developing a relationship with God, my conception of God. I had the start doing it. It was part of the evolution of the spiritual growth, really. It was an outcome from following these spiritual principles that I started to develop a relationship with the God of my understanding. I went to my sponsor one time. I had blown up my life again. I had found this is right. I think that happens to a lot of us in Alcoholics Anonymous. I had about 12, 14 months sober and I found the perfect woman for me. You know, God's reward to me for being sober. And I learned another lesson in sobriety. Two people actually have to be attracted to each other for it to really work. And so this thing exploded like the Hindenburg. Okay. You know I had lost my job in the same week. I mean there was like three or four problems. Listen, there's going to come a time when every one of us is in the barrel And we're sober, we're in AA, and we're in the barrel. And it basically says that those trials and those low spots ahead, for us to be able to get through them, we are going to need to have the spiritual solution firmly in place. We are going to need a relationship with a power greater than ourselves to be able to go through those. Now I am early on, maybe 13 months sober, and I am so devastated emotionally that I just showed up at my sponsor's house. I never did this before. You know, I would always at least call him. And I knocked on his door and he came to the door and he said, Chris? And I was so upset I couldn't even talk. I was like, oh! I couldn'T even vocalize my anguish. And he said well come on in, come on inside, sit down. And you know finally I could talk and I told him all this stuff and again, you know, his solution to my problems didn't make any sense But I vomited all this stuff out in front of him, and he smiled at me. You know how sponsors do in the middle of your horrific misadventures. They're like smiling at you. And he smiles at me, and He goes, Chris, do you pray? I'm like, what? What? Where do you get that? My life is on fire. And He goes to me, do You pray? And I go, no. And he goes, I want you to do an experiment for me. Every morning, I want you get on your knees and I want you to ask God for the strength and direction to get through the day. And then in the evening, I want to get on my knees and thank God for giving you the strength of direction to get through the debt. And he says, Chris, I know you. There's going to be times when you're going to forget to do this. How did he know? And he said, what I want you to pay attention to how the day goes when you do it and pay attention to how the day goes when you don't. I came to believe off of that one experiment. I've got to tell you, the days when I prayed, I was able to get through it with a minimum of self-involved tragedy. The days that I forgot to do it, my world was upside down. I was self-will run riot, though I didn't think so, Running around, you know, causing problems. And slowly, with a lot of these spiritual exercises, what happened was I got put on the path of spiritual growth. And I started to develop a deep and effective relationship with a power greater than myself. There's a spirit out there. You cannot deny this if you're around Alcoholics Anonymous long enough. There is a spiritual power that can be accessed that is transformational for people's lives. And to be able to access it, we need to be open-minded. We need to being willing. And we need the practice, actually practice these principles in all of our affairs where we possibly can. That enables us to access this spiritual power that is so transformational. You see it every day in these rooms. You ever sit in a room and all of a sudden somebody comes in and the lights are on? You know what I mean? They have changed. Their whole attitude and outlook has changed. I believe that comes from the spiritual power. And I believe it's very, very important for us to participate in this. There's another line in the 12 and 12 that says, God will not render us white as snow without our cooperation. How then shall we cooperate? Step two is asking us to look at this, asking us to come to believe in this process. And it's very, very difficult to deny the power of Alcoholics Anonymous and the power of God when you see it in these rooms, day after day, after week, after month, after year. It's right in front of us. And this is basically the solution to alcoholism. It is the spiritual process. How do we come to believe? How do мы develop our relationship with? How do we operate out there in the world, in ways that are profitable for our lives. These are the things that the step process and the recovery process points us at. Now, some of us are burdened with a mind. And what happens is we are the doubting Thomases. You know, you need to prove this to me. I don't understand that. The early theologians were operating from, you know, an uninformed platform. You know, I mean, I was one of those guys that was very skeptical. I was very sarcastic. I was really critical of everything. What finally softened me up to begin to look at this process was the fact that I didn't want to suffer anymore. And I saw so many people, seemingly to me, who had recovered from alcoholism and really put their life in order. And I started to become willing to look at things differently. When you first come into Alcoholics Anonymous, or maybe not even when you first Come In, a lot of times many of us stay this way for years and years and we're very skeptical about this whole process. We have unreasoning prejudice. When we come in that way, we really need to be softened up a little bit. And this is where a good sponsor comes in, helping you to come to terms with the solution to alcoholism. It doesn't make any sense when you're looking at it from an unrecovered state. It's very difficult to comprehend this stuff. I'll tell you another story. I had just started to go to meetings, and I was working as an electrician, and this was back when I didn't understand proper uses of anonymity. I told everybody I was in AA. Listen, if you're new or you're just coming back or you have a relapse, do us all a favor and don't do that. Okay, we don't need one more black eye from you telling everybody you're doing AA and you're relapsing. So I'm basically, I told everybody on the crew of an AA, and this one guy finally just to have a conversation says, well, Chris, what happens at those AA meetings? What's it like? And I told him, I go, well, you know, you show up at the meeting. It's at 8 o'clock in a church basement. You go and you grab a cup of coffee. Then you sit down and they open the meeting with a prayer. It's a serenity prayer. And then somebody has a topic, so somebody will have a resentment. They'll share a resentment, and then everybody else will have resentments, and they'll raise their hand, and everybody will share their resentments. And then they pass the basket, and you put a dollar in the basket. And then at the end of the meeting, we all stand up and form a big circle and say the Lord's Prayer. And the guy is backing away from me. You know what I'm saying? And I start to think, he's right. This doesn't make any sense at all. This doesn'T make any sense at All. These spiritual processes and spiritual practices don't make Any sense until they're understood experientially. You can have an idea of the steps before you take them. You can be very, very sure of your idea before you take them, but you will 99.9% that be wrong. This is material that has to be learned experientially. I'll tell this story to kind of explain what I'm talking about. Alright, you're living up north, you just moved into a house, you don't really understand the house too well, but what happens is you forget to turn the heat off and you go on vacation. You come back and the pipes and frozen, and there's water going all over the place. Now you have two sons. One of your sons is in college. He's becoming a mechanical engineer in the plumbing field. He is studying everything you can study about pipe sizes and flow charts. And he is learning how to put together schematics on plumbing systems for large buildings. And then you have a son who's actually running around in a truck, he's working for a plumbing contractor and he's fixing pipes and he's fixin' plumbing problems all the time. Who would you call to solve this problem? The person who has the theoretical knowledge or the person who has the practical experience fixing the problem? You know, we go after, in Alcoholics Anonymous there's two types of people. There's types of peoples who have opinions and there's types of people who have experience. We need to go after the people with experience for our teachers, because experience is the best way for us to learn. There is so much misunderstanding out there in the world about why Alcoholics Anonymous works. It probably shouldn't work. There are treatment centers, there are treatment professionals who don't understand the 12-step process. There are a lot of treatment centers who say they're a 12-step treatment center where it's really just window dressing. They don't engage you at all in the 12- step process. They engage you in clinical. There's so much misunderstanding about alcoholism and so much misunderstanding about the treatment for alcoholism out there. The people that I know that really understand this are the people who have experienced recovery themselves. I think that there are people out there that can help us alcoholics, but I think who are not alcoholic or who haven't gone through this test, but Ithink it's vital for us to get an experienced sponsor who can helpus through these seeming hurdles of the 12-step process. We're our own worst enemy. We will do anything we can possibly do to not recover as alcoholics. You know, if we have a true understanding of the first step, a true understand of the second step, we would let nothing get in our way of going through steps 2 through 12. We would take a leave of absence from work. We'd kick our family out of the house. We would do whatever we needed to do to be able to concentrate 100% on this 12-step process. But that's not what we do. We minimize, and we don't see the sense of urgency with this recovery process because we don' t understand it experientially. And this is where a good sponsor comes in and starts to move you through the solution to your problem. And the solution is spiritual living. Bob? Bob Nelkohalik. I've got an announcement here. There's three vehicles that need to be moved immediately. They're all, three cars are black. One is a Lexus 300 with a paper plate. One is a Ford F-150, 69CNN4 is the license plate. And the other one's a Honda Accord. And there's all black vehicles, BN57581. Or they'll be towed. Lack of power. Bob, it wasn't our little car that we needed to move. What? It wasn't the one where I parked our car. You're next. Good morning. I think my experience with alcoholism is not unique. As a young kid, in my early teens when I started partying, it seemed like every time I'd go out to get high with my friends, it was like spinning a roulette wheel. And on that roulette wheel there was some cool stuff. There was laughing with the guys, there was drag racing, there was talking to girls, there was going to dances, there was playing music, there was a feeling of freedom, there was little bit of throwing up on that wheel once in a while. An occasional arrest but nothing too big. And over the years, some hideous force came in and started changing the crap on the wheel and putting wet pants and more and more arrests and throwing up through my nose and just horrible, oh, horrible. Those looks from the people who love you that are kind of a mixture of pity and contempt, you know, and on and on. And at the very end, it's like if you're like me, you're spinning that wheel thinking, my God, there's got to be a party in here somewhere. I know it, I know it, and it's coming up. Awful, awful stuff. Which drives guys like me to swear to themselves time and time and time again that I've got to quit this and I'm never going to touch this stuff again. But I always go back to it. In 1978 I heard one of the earlier guys who really got to me he said something that was so funny. I almost fell off my chair because it was me. He said, I quit drinking seriously over 50 times. He says, every time I quit drinking, I got drunker in hell. He goes, this quitting drinking is killing me. And I almost fall out of my chair, because I thought, man, the more I fought the bottle, the stronger its grip was on me. And I was fighting a losing battle. And I didn't know what was wrong with me. I didn'T know what the deal was. And, you know, by the time I got sober, by that time I'd been in and out of alcoholics on us for seven years. I'd beN to hundreds of meetings. And I had many, many serious determined attempts to not drink and not to use drugs. And I always went back to it. In 1978, I tried to kill myself, tried to take my own life because I felt stuck. And I didn't know that I thought I was doing AA because I went to meetings and helped with the chairs and had some service commitments and things like that. But I never – we have three legacies here. unity, which is you're part of the fellowship and you're part of a home group and you practice and live the traditions. Service in all its aspects from helping one-on-one to an alcoholic to being involved in intergroup, DCM, the area even as standing for delegate, the whole kit and kaboom and then recovery which this weekend is focused on that legacy primarily and I had done a little bit of unity and a little bit of service but I had done nothing in recovery except the BS version of a four step in a treatment center that had nothing if you were to measure what I did in that treatment center against what it suggests in this book they're not even in the same zip code and I almost killed myself because I thought I had done AA and it didn't work for me. And over the years, I've seen some very, very fine men and women come to AA and stay sober for long periods of time on the fellowship and service. But it's like a two-legged stool when you only got two of the three legacies. You can stand and sit on that thing for a while, but it is a heck of a balancing act. And what happens is after years or decades of this, you get tired. That's why guys I know with 31 and a half years put pistols in their mouth for 25 years and they just have to go get medication because they can't take it anymore. Or they drink because alcoholism is insidious and it wears on guys like me. Day in and day out, week in and week out. I heard this story 30 years ago, there was this little kid who lived on a farm. And he used to help his dad around the ranch. And one day he's out on the highway at the front of the property. He's mending fence. And He looks and there's a telephone pole there. And on the telephone pole is a big poster. And it says in bright yellow, it says circus. And there's pictures of clowns and elephants on this. Now this kid doesn't know what a circus is, but the poster looks very cool. And it's $1 admission. And he runs back to the house and he says, Papa, a circus has come into town. If I work hard, would you give me a dollar so I can go to the circus? And his dad said, absolutely, son. The day the circus comes and that kid's up before the sun, he's so excited to go to the circus. And his Dad gives him a silver dollar and he heads out into town and he gets into town, and there's this crowd forming along the main street. Because he's a little kid, he kind of maneuvers his way up through that crowd, gets right up on that curb. And he looks, and coming down the streets, this parade, leading the parade is a bunch of clowns juggling stuff, dressed in bright colors and big noses, and it's just, he never, big funny shoes, never seen anything like it. Behind the clowns is elephants, and on top of the Elephants are these beautiful women with sequined feathered costumes. And he'd never seen nothing like that. Behind that is wagons with lions in them and tigers and bears, oh my. And then there's wagons with giraffe heads sticking out the top. And then white stallions with people standing on them. And then more clowns and more animals. It's the most amazing thing the kids ever see. At the very end of the parade, there's this one little clown. He's kind of dancing, juggling and dancing down the street behind the last wagon. And the kid's got the silver dollar. He doesn't know what to do with it. He shows it to the clown. The clown tips his hat. The kid goes, okay, and throws the silver dollars. The clown catches it and dances on down the Street. And the Kid goes home excited to tell his dad about the great circus he saw. The sad part is he never saw the circus. He never got into the Big Top. He was part of the passing parade. And I sat in Alcoholics Anonymous for seven years on a short string as part of the passing brigade. And I was blessed to have a shortstring. The deadly thing is to have alongstring and to be able to suffer untreated alcoholism for a long period of time because hopelessness has inertia and it develops. And that's why guys with 20 years blow their brains out or drink again. And I never was in the big top. And the big talk is where I get the thing I need the most through the process and those steps. On page 45, it talks about the nature of the problem. The real dilemma with alcoholism, and it says lack of power, that was our dilemma. We had to find a power by which we could live, and it had to be a power greater than ourselves, obviously. If you've tried everything there was to try, as I've tried, and you've trying with every bit of willpower in you, It has to be something greater, not only the you, but any human power you've tried to use. But where and how are we to find that power? Well, that's exactly what this book is about. Its main object is to enable you to find a power greater than yourself which will solve your problem. I love the way it says this. It doesn't say we had to find the power by which we could stay sober. We had to find a power by which we could live. The real problem is once I enter into a state of abstinence, I can't live. I am too locked up in my emotions. I'm too lockedup in me. I can' t connect with people. I don' t have the power to get free. Alcohol at one time provided me with that power. Five shots of tequila, I was a free man. I could come out and play. I could be funny. I couldbe light. I couldbeloose. I can talk to people. I get sober. I'm an uptight, withdrawn kind of guy. I'm a judgmental guy. I can't let stuff go. I'm the guy who's prone to depression. I'm prone to self-pity. I'm, I'm proned to worry about crazy stuff. I'm that guy that when I, I stop drinking, I just get my future and my past and my emotions and my very life just on me Like that creature in that movie, Alien, that attaches itself to your face. And I don't have the power to get it off of me. At one time, alcohol, five or six drinks and it would just come off of me and I could get free. But I got so much of me on me that I can't live. I just exist. and alcoholism often feels like you're stuck you know how you should be you observe it in other people you observe the freedom, you observe the laughter. I used to, in periods of abstinence I would walk down the street and I would see people do things that just made me nuts like they were just walking along smiling It just happened for no reason at all. Just happened. Like, what are you, are you smoking something? I mean, why are you happy? People, I hear people say, go on and on and on and did you see the sunset? Yeah, who cares? I mean. You know, I don't get it. I don' t have any joyous connection with life here because I'm so self-obsessed. I'm so focused on me and my feelings And what you think of me And my stuff And my projects And I can't get free And I Can try to will myself free And I cant get free I cant live Lack of power Really is my dilemma In Alcoholics Anonymous steps Three Through nine And then the maintenance and growth steps of 10, 11, and 12 are designed to access power. The power to get free and the power to live. It's as we talked about last night, to turn the juice back on. The same juice I had once found in the bag and the bottle, somehow I have to duplicate a similar sense of freedom within me or I'm doomed. We talk about something in Alcoholics Anonymous that is a little different than what you'll hear in most churches. We talk about conscious contact. One of the things that happens to some of us, and it's a very it sounds like a good thing. Alcoholism is the only disease I know of that will use your mind and your ego, will use your mind in such a way that it'll take good things and turn them into bad things. We lose a lot of people in AA because they come into Alcoholics Anonymous and they get up to step two, and they finally okay, I need God. I get it. And then they leave AA incrementally. They bleed themselves out of here to get more and more involved in the church. Now, there is nothing wrong with the church. It's just not a treatment for alcoholism. Because their problem is not lack of religion. Their problem is not even lack of faith. It's lack of power. I've had the occasion over the years to sponsor four men of the cloth. Two of them drank themselves to death. I remember in the first one, I was not sober very long and a lot of guys had tried to help this guy. He was a priest. He was a good priest too. I'm not talking about deviant priests. This is a good guy. And he called me up a week before they found him dead and he had started drinking again and he's sobbing into the phone because he can't understand why a man of the cloth who prays more in one day than most of us pray in a week, who reads more spiritual literature than most of us will read would ask God to keep him sober and he is drinking and there are bums and bushwhackers in AA staying sober. It seemed unfair to him. And I'll tell you something, it seemed unfair to me. When they found him dead, it blew my mind. I thought, my God, this is crazy. Because I knew something. I knew I was sober only through the grace of God. And if that's true, you'd think a man of a cloth would have a leg up on a bum like me. I mean, I'd think so. But Frank's problem wasn't lack of religion or lack of faith. There's alcoholics that drink themselves to death every day, that pray and have tremendous faith. The problem is lack of power. I live in the desert. If you were to come and visit me in August, there are days when it gets over 115 15 degrees. Now, the Chamber of Commerce will try to tell you it's a dry heat, so is hell. It's hot. It's not. If I were to take you in my car and drive you outside of town about a half hour or so, I'd take you to Lake Mead, one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the western United States, huge lake. Let you get out of the car, let you jump in the water, swim in the water, drink the water until you have absolute faith that water's there, and then I'll stick you in my car, drive you about 10, 15 miles away, drop you off at the side of the road with a map with nine steps of directions on how to get from where I'm dropping you off back to that water. Do you know that if you wander around that desert and don't follow those directions, you will die of thirst with absolute faith that that water's there? But if you don't find a way to get to that Water, you're as dead as the guy who's walking around the desert who never saw the lake and doesn't have any faith that the lake is there. It's not enough to have faith. You have to access the power. You Have to Get to the Lake. You Have To Get to The Source. And in AA, we talk about conscious contact. Something that we strive for all our lives to achieve intermittently because it never seems to last. It comes and goes like the tides. There's a big difference between faith and conscious contact. When you guys go to leave here, to drive home, you go get in your car and you'll drive out on that road with absolute faith that the police are out there, their traffic laws, you better shape up. And you'll drive accordingly to that faith. You get a cop in your rear view mirror with his red lights on, you've got conscious contact And one of them is right here, right now. And the other one's just kind of up in your head. And where does this all happen? Step one, it says we have to fully concede to our innermost selves. There is a place within us, experientially, where all of this occurs. That's why there's often a backwash with the steps. You take certain actions and then ten months later something happens to you. You know, AA works for, there used to be this stuff back in the 70s. We used to call it Creeper Pot. And you'd buy some Creepers Pot. It's very much like AA. You'd buy something like that. You'd get some Creeps Pot and you smoke this stuff and you go, man, this is bunk. I've been beat. And you're on your way to go beat up the guy who sold it to you and you're a block from his house and all of a sudden it hits you and you can't even walk because it just kind of creeps up on you, right? And AA is very much liked that. You do this stuff, and you do this stuff, ah, this is bunk. And then all of a sudden, something happens to you, and my God, you respond differently than you've ever responded before. And you find yourself easily able to stay away from a drink in situations that you absolutely know would have gotten you drunk before. And we've accessed something here. Something is starting to come into our lives. And let's take an eight-minute break, and we'll come back and then go on. The Buddhists tell a story of enlightenment. And their story is that one of their best parables is the story of the Chinese farmer. and it's the story of this old wise Chinese farmer who exists on a small piece of land with his son and they work hard in the fields and they're allowed to live there by the graces of a Lord who expects a large portion of their crop in tithing every year for the right to work hard in the field they don't own the house they live in they don' t own the tools they use to plow the fields they own one thing it's their whole estate and it's tied up in a horse and one day the horse runs off and they virtually lose everything and his friends and his family and his neighbors come over to console him to tell him how horrible this is that you've lost everything you own and this little old Chinese farmer just shrugs his shoulders and looks at him and says I don't know if it's horrible Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. And they look at him and they just shake their heads. You don't think that's bad? You've lost everything you own. And he just says, I don't know. Maybe it Is. Maybe it Isn't. A few days later, his son's standing out by the corral. And all of a sudden, the horse returns. And it's leading a whole herd of wild horses right into their corral The son just stands there watching it all. And then just closes the gate. And instantaneously, this guy has become the richest guy in the valley. He just hit the horse lottery. And now his neighbors and friends and family come over to congratulate him and tell him, my God, this is good. And he shrugs his shoulders and says, I don't know if it's good. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. And they just shake their head and they think, well, we don't Know What You're Smoking, but you don't think you've just now become the riches guy in value? You don't Think That's Good? And he says, I don't know. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. A couple days later, his only son's trying to break one of the wild horses. And he's thrown and he's crippled up pretty good. And he can't walk and he can'T work. And naturally, his friends and family and neighbors come over to console him. To tell him how horrible this is that his son has been hurt so badly. And the little old farmer just shrugs his shoulders and says, I don'T know if it'S bad. Maybe it IS and maybe it ISN'T. And they think, my God, your only son has been crippled up and you don't even think that's bad? And he just says, I don't know. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. A week later the Chinese army came through the valley to force all the young men to fight in a battle where none of them would survive and they couldn't take the son because of his leg. And the little old man knew the most important thing he would ever know is that he doesn't know and it is what I know that separates me from anything that I can access here what Alcoholics Anonymous is proposing is a thing we call humility and a lot of humility is knowing you don't know is to be open minded enough to say what I think is a certain way could possibly be wrong Especially if your track record is based on my track record and anything close to my track record, you have probably been wrong a lot. On page 46, it talks about two things necessary to begin to access the power. And the first thing we get here before we get conscious contact is we get faith. And some power comes with faith. Not enough, I don't think, to sustain us for a lifetime, but some. In the middle of page 46 it says, Yes, we of agnostic temperament have had these thoughts and experiences. Let us make haste to reassure you. We found that as soon as we were able to do two things. The first one, lay aside prejudice. well that sounds very simple but it's not the problem if you have the kind of ego that I got you don't even know you have prejudices because that's not a prejudice that's really the way it is see my ego only cares about one thing and it's being right matter of fact it doesn't care if it kills me as long as after I'm dead everybody realizes how right I was. I have been trenched in that with rationalizations and justifications all to the end game of Bob being right. So a lot of my prejudices, I don't even know they're prejudices. And the book's asking me to become childlike. To get to a point where I know I don' t know. To be an open slate, a clean slay and approach God as if I was a child that knows nothing. One of the prejudices that I've been, I've worked with a lot of guys and one of the prejudice is that this seems so common. I won't go as far as saying it's universal but it has a commonality amongst us. And the problem with this particular prejudice is it's not conscious. It's unconscious. It exists within me on an emotional level. And Father Martin one time said something that I thought was very profound. He said that when intellect and emotions are in conflict with each other, the emotion eventually wins because it's persistent and it wears at you. And it will overcome your intellect. I bet you most of the people in this room have done things that you knew intellectually you shouldn't have done, but your feelings drove you to do them. One of the prejudices that's so common is this sense that I somehow have to some degree merit God's help. The idea that on your very worst day sober, the day you just did something you're very ashamed of, maybe you stole some money and let somebody else take the blame, Maybe you cheated on your wife or your husband or your boyfriend or your girlfriend. Maybe you just did something that is against everything you believe in. That at that moment when you loathe yourself the most, that God's not really there for you. And that prejudice exists in some of us on an emotional level. And the reason it's such a deadly, deadly prejudice is that there's no time I will ever need God more. And the problem is God does not turn away from me. I turn in a sense, in a repositioning of unworthiness away from the light. The problem, any disconnect with God is always on my end. It's never on His. I was over in Florence a couple times I went over there if you like bizarre renaissance art it's a very cool place you'll see amazing stuff there from Michelangelo to Donatello all kinds of people Isaac Newton some great stuff over there and I went over there the second time on kind of a mission to see this statue by the renaissance sculptor Donatella and it was a statue called the Magdalene it's a statue of Mary Magdalena and I'd heard about it but never saw it I finally found it and I'm actually over there on a sober vacation thing with a whole bunch of A's and Al-Anons when we got to Florence they're just being