The 12 Steps and Spiritual Experience – 2024 Prayers & Promises Workshop – Part 7 of 7 – Chris B.

Wow. It is really, really cool to be here. Raquel, you and your team just put on a great event. Thank you. Thank you so much all right all right so so the prayers and promises of Alcoholics Anonymous basically the way I see them is the prayers are about making an effort, making an effort to align with the spiritual life. So if we want to enter the realm of the Spirit, I really think prayer is absolutely necessary. And the promises, the promises are the things that come true when we do the work of Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, one of the things that I see that makes me a little sad is there's a lot of people who don't know the depths of Alcoholics Anonymous. They don't knows how much gold there is to find in AlcoholicsAnonymous. And I'm telling you this thing is a thousand miles deep. And the promises really are the carrot that Bill holds out to us and promises us if we do this work. Now, I want to qualify a little bit. I'm an alcoholic. I discovered alcohol, that I was an alcoholic in Alcoholics Anonymous basically because I just didn't have a definition of what alcoholism was. I knew that on occasion I would become over-served, but if you would have asked me what is going on with you, I would have said something like, I party, man. Meanwhile, I'm drinking my life into the toilet. So I really didn't understand what was going on, and I'm really, really thankful for the the foundational members of alcoholics anonymous uh understanding what i'm up against what i was up against like the real problem and explaining that so well in the book alcoholics unanimous and then offering offering a way a way out you know um yesterday i was doing a a favor for for my wife she bought a coffee table that opens up and does all this stuff right and of course when you buy furniture today it comes in a big box and you got to put it together and it was funny there were there were 12 sets of instructions with pictures and you know number one number two and I learned long ago to actually pay attention to directions you know for the for the longest time you know directions are for idiots and I would put everything together wrong but but I've learned I've learn to follow really closely you know the instructions and so as I went through instruction one through 12, at 12 I had a complete coffee table that worked the way it was supposed to and it wasn't going to fall apart when I moved it. So I look at the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous today the same way. What did the 12 Steps build for us? They build for us an experience in the realm of the spirit. And that's completely different than what I was experiencing when I was drinking. You know, the two things I learned really, really quickly when I showed up in Alcoholics Anonymous and they were significant enough for me to understand I needed to stay with you. I needed to take this as a piece of business. and those were the first step the first step principles one of them was I got it right away understood right away the phenomenon of craving the allergy to alcohol how it would present in me is the first drink would ask for the second the second would insist on the third the third would demand the fourth so once I started drinking I wanted the 30th drink more than I wanted to 29th it just it create, and this was a different, this was different than a lot of the people I drank with. A lot of people I drink with would have two or three beers, and they were good. What would happen is if there was still alcohol, I was still drinking, and that caused, that caused a lot of, you know, a lot problems in my life. So once alcohol's in my body, you know, move the furniture back, turn the phone off, you You know, don't be calling me up and asking me to help you move or something. I'm drinking. So that was pretty easy for me to understand. It was a heavy lift for me to fully concede that I had the obsession of the mind. Now there's chapters on this in the book because it's difficult. It's a difficult admission. It's an admission of defeat. you know but it's a necessary admission and what that is is I can't not drink on my own unedited will in an unrecovered state alcohol is going to go back in my body doesn't mean doesn't matter if the judge says I'm going to goes back to jail doesn't matter if she says she's going to leave doesn't matter if boss says I am going to be fired doesn't matter if I'm going to lose my license for another 10 years. None of that stuff is sufficient defense against alcohol going back in my body in an unrecovered state. So once I understood that, I knew I needed to stay with you. Now here's the thing I think that fits better into the prayers and promises of Alcoholics Anonymous, and that's after the dash. That our lives had become unmanageable. Now there's been a real evolution in my understanding and experience with this. My first look at, yeah, my life is unmanegeable, you know, I'm living at home with mom with a $100 car. I mean, it was external, right? my unmanageability was, I saw it as external. Today I see it as internal. So my emotional life is unmanable. My spiritual life is non-existent. And what's going on is I am in a toxic experience of self-consciousness. And that leads to an unmanageable life. So what is that toxic experience of self consciousness? What does it look like on Chris? Well, it looks like I'm trapped in my head. I have a mind that wants to kill me. And what it does is it makes me so emotionally uncomfortable, I can't stand it. And it does it by continually rehashing things from the past. I am continually dwelling on injustices that were done to me. People that did me wrong and made me feel small. And bosses that, you know, didn't... And, you Know, I'm constantly like, I can't believe you know like that son of a bitch you know 10 years ago you know and and like these are the trains of thought that are going through my head almost constantly and and and it's it's painful and uncomfortable but I don't know any different because that's the way it's always been right? And if I'm not dwelling on the past, I have waves of anxiety about the future. You know, I create scenarios in my head about what tomorrow's going to be like or what going here is going to Be like or participating in that is going To be like. Oh no, tomorrow's my boss is going to yell at me because I started a fire at the client's house and he's going to yell at him and I'm going to have to yell back because I'm not going to take that crap and then I'm probably going to need to hit him and if I hit him he's gonna fire me and if he fires me I'm never gonna have any money I mean this is the stuff that's going through my head when I first show up and sit down in a chair with you That's what's the turmoil of my emotional life. And it's really based on this experience of self-consciousness. Now, Bill Wilson understood the real problem with alcohol, and he made it very, very clear. He said, selfishness and self-centeredness, that we think is the root of our troubles. We're self-will run riot, though we usually don't think so. Various manifestations of self are what had defeated us. We must be rid of this selfishness or it kills us." He's very clear. Now I read that a hundred times before it really sunk in that that really is what my alcoholism is. That's what I need to recover from right so so so this is the this is the first step as as I see it today as I experience it today the first step is alive and well within me I know a lot more about what I'm up against today then that I have in in the past and I don't want to live like that anymore. It is really, it robs all quality from life to be wrapped up in that emotional bondage of self that he describes in the first chapters of the book. Now in the doctor's opinion, the doctor who I don't really think was a a very religious man and he looked, Dr. Silkworth like looked at, you know, I'll describe it like this. So there was a program on TV a long time ago that I used to watch all the time. It was called The Wild Kingdom. Does anybody remember that? And there was this, they highlighted this woman, Jane Goodall, I think her name was, right? And she went down to Africa and she integrated herself into the guerrilla clans so she would go and she a little bit at a time you know she'd move in and finally the gorillas are okay with her you know and and she's she's a behavioralist so she's studying the behavior of all these gorillas and you know, she's writing it all down. You know, so so Dr. Silkworth he wasn't an alcoholic but he's treating like 20,000 alcoholics. So he's sitting there, he's writing stuff down, you know, like, you did what? You know, you said what? He's like the same kind of person. And when he saw all of a sudden a whole bunch of these alcoholics not drinking anymore, cleaning up and showing up and putting their lives back together he paid it he paid attention to that so so he answers at the end of at the end his writing in the big book I hope you stay to pray now now my first experience with prayer in a I was maybe six months sober and I got a call that was it was like a threatening call from from an old girlfriend you You know, she was going to send these guys over to beat the crap out of me. You know? So it's like, you know, I didn't really date well, you know, my last couple of years of drinking, you know, if you can imagine. And I got what I could get. And that wasn't, you know, there wasn't a lot of quality. So anyway, you know, she's mad about something and she's going to send a bunch of people over to beat me up. So I go over to my sponsor's house. I go, Phil, Phil. They're going to come get me. They're gonna come get me. And like a good sponsor, he goes, huh, I want to see you in a meeting tonight. And do you pray, Chris? And I'm like, pray? Pray? What do you mean do I pray? What's that got to do with it? I need guns. You know? And so that's like my first experience. Now, I really respected my sponsor. I had him on such a pedestal because he was sober, and God, I needed to be sober. You know what I mean? And he had a house, and his children lived with him still, and he had an job and a brand-new car, all the stuff that made him look solid. and uh and that was really the first notice i got that we in alcoholics anonymous chris we pray and and so i started to pay attention to that and i started too uh slowly what what happens is when you come in and you experience things i was experiencing the fellowship right I was experiencing a lot of discussion meetings, and I was starting to make friends. And what will happen is if you're lucky, there'll be an evolution that will happen. You will start to come to believe that some of this stuff that you discounted or didn't think was for you, you'll start to accept some of it. And the change will start to take place. You'll come to believe in a power. I had come to belief in my sponsor and I'd come to believe in Alcoholics Anonymous. But I was still really skeptical about there being a spiritual power that could do anything for me. You know, it's not like I didn't believe in God, but I thought God was like a cosmic Alan Funt, you know? Like he was up in heaven, oh man, this will be, St. Peter, this'll be good, you Know, I'm going to have Chris take three quaaludes and then drive to the police station and ask for directions. Oh, you You know, because there was like one debacle after another. And if there's a divine presence, you know, he's messing with me. So that's the insane perception I had on a power greater than myself. Now, coming to believe in this power, there's a lot of things, because I've worked with a lot of people, there is a lot preconceived notions about this spirit of the universe, this God of our own understanding. There's a lot of preconceived notions that most of us come in with, and the set-aside prayer is beautiful because it's asking us to set those aside for a new experience. If we're going to recover from alcoholism, if we're going to escape that toxic self-centeredness and move into the realm of the Spirit, we're going to have to be open to a lot of things that we might not be open to. This concept of God. And really, you know, I had a lot of ups and downs in the early years about coming to terms with this spirit. But you know what I had a lot of? I had a lot evidence. So maybe I was confused a little bit about the attributes of God and definitions, and there's always a lot questions. But what I have was I had evidence, and my evidence was you. I was watching so many people get better. I was watching people coming off the street, you know, and putting it all together. And in step one, if I admit that I'm powerless over alcohol and I'm powerless over this unmanageability, you know, the stuff that's going through my head, if I'm powerless over that. The solution has to be power, power of some sort. So I had a lot of evidence that the spiritual life is exactly what I need and slowly, slowly I started to buy into it and I started to do, you know, I started to do more things. I started a morning prayer routine. I started an evening prayer review routine. I decided to do some of those things and in almost every instruction in the 12 steps there's a series of promises that will manifest if we work for them. You know, these promises will come to life in your life if you work for him. And there's negative promises too. There's promises that say, if you don't do this or if you skip this vital step or if você permane agnóstico, você provavelmente vai para um mundo de dor. Há três caras na minha vida agora now who I'm just, I don't, folks, I don't care. I'm going to stick by these guys. They're like lifers with me. And, you know, they're drinking and using and causing all this kind of trouble, but there's one thing all three have in common, and that's entrenched agnosticism. They're waiting for the proof. you know they want the proof when the proof is right in front of them the proof is in this room so so and what happens with what happens with these people as they get a lot of time and some things get that some things fall into place and and they build up a bright future an outlook for for themselves and their families. And it all comes crashing down in a series of sprees. And I'm watching this happen all over. Now, what I think the problem is, is their conception of God. Because we can come up with a conception of god that just doesn't make any sense. My early conception was God is, he's in white robes with a long beard, you know, sitting up in a cloud in heaven and St. Peter's next to him with a harp and he's taking notes on all the things that the Chris guy is doing wrong, you know? And when I die, I'm going to go up there, I'm gonna have to face that, I'm Gonna Have to Face Those Sins and it's going to be purgatory at best, you know, if not the burning fires of hell forever. And I got to tell you, I can't stay sober with a conception like that. Where did that conception come from? It came from bad Sunday school teachers or something. It came for me just developing it myself hanging out with some kids I don't know but today I have I have a conception of God that is loving power a power because I have seen this power work in you and through you and do for you what you cannot do for yourself and I've seen this power work, I've experienced this power work in me and through me and do for me what I cannot work for, what I can not do for myself. Now, now in step three, step three is a decision. And so some of the language in the book Alcoholics Anonymous, some of the definitions of some of the terms in Alcoholics Anonymous we see differently today. We just, you know, it's almost a different definition. But when they called for a decision in step three, what a decision was back then was it included follow-through. So today I can decide to go to the store and get busy and not go to The Store. But the way they described the decision was if you decided to go to the store, you know, you're going to the store 100%. So I need to decide to accept the spiritual life as my solution to alcoholism. You know if I'm powerless over alcohol and I'm powerless over my emotional state and I got a mind that wants to kill me you know, there's really no choice. I must accept a power that can separate me from alcohol and I must except the power that will help me return to some kind of sanity. I have to, I have too. And in step three, I make that decision. And there's prayers. There's prayers all throughout it. God, I offer myself to thee. And there's promises. You know, you will start to feel some of the spiritual world. You'll start to experience some of the realm of the spirit as you move through this stuff. Now, I want to share something that was very, very relevant to me just recently. Whether it's appropriate or not, anyway, so there is somebody that handed me a book. Now we hand people books, we recommend books and everyone, you know, I'm usually okay. But this book was recommended to me, and I'm going to follow basic traditions and guidelines and not mention the name of this book, but all right. It's called God the Best Seller. And I want to share a little bit about this story because it was so significant to me and it has to do, believe it or not, with the spiritual life. So the story in this book is this. This guy's a book dealer. He buys collections of books. He buys estate books, you know, a real high-end book dealer, and that's how he makes his money. And there's a family out on Cape Cod that's bugging him. You've got to come out. You've Got to Come Out. We've got some really good books. And it's kind of a long haul for him, you know, so he's putting it off, putting it off. Finally, he goes out there. And as he walks into the house and he starts to look at the books, he is like, oh my god. he it's it's the it's most significant collection of spiritual and religious books he's ever seen in his life and most of them are signed by the author he's looking through him right he's like who who who is this guy who lived here right and uh and they tell him and he gets really interested and he digs in and the guy that lived in this house never threw anything away so he starts looking through personal papers, and he starts to find all this stuff out. And what this individual was, was he was from the mid-20s to the mid-'60s, he was the religion editor for Harper's Publishing. Okay? So this is the individual who colored our perception of religious understanding in the 20th century, because he was the one picking the authors. He was the one who was deciding which is going to be the next bestseller in the religion department. Now, he published, I'll just name a few of the people he published. He published a million people, but he published Martin Luther King Jr., he published Albert Schweitzer, he published Hurd, Huxley, Dorothy Day, all these different people who the thing they had in common was, yes, they were deeply spiritual, but they also accomplished really, really great things. And as the guy's digging through all this information, he starts to find a whole bunch of stuff on Bill Wilson. Come to find out him and Bill Wilson were like this. I didn't know it until I read this book, but he put together the initial publication of The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions and A.A. Comes of Age. And because Bill was his buddy, he made a deal with him that Works Publishing could publish it all in perpetuity. But him and Harper's were the people that formatted those two books and he was part of the editorial oversight. So So as I'm going through this book, it's on Axeman. But he's finding out that this guy, Axeman, not only would he publish these people and was friends with them, but they had deep spiritual practices. They would get together and they would meet and they Would fellowship all these amazing people and authors. And they'd go on meditation retreats. And what book are you reading? You know, what type of meditation practices do you have? And they grew spiritually together and Bill was right in there with them. So what does this story have to do, you know, with the first three steps? In step three we make a decision to engage in the spiritual life and hopefully continue to grow in this and search and experience. And what Axman and Bill and all these guys were, were they were experiential spiritualists. So you think about religion, right? Religion can be devotional. You can go to church and follow all that stuff and all that staff is a really great experience. That's devotional the experiential stuff those are the guys who go really deep in those are the mystics those are the people who want to go all the way in and there's a lot of gold here I'm going to keep digging and that's what Bill did the rest of his life and I believe that's what he's asking us to do in step three and step three. Now I'm going to, um, I'm going to tell one story. This is another thing that may not have anything to do with my topic. Uh, but I like, I like the way I tell it. So, so I'm, I're going to go ahead and do it. Um, all right. So so what I do, what I did for a living, what my career was based on was I, I was a facility manager. And what I would do is, uh, I would run the facilities departments for pharmaceutical manufacturing and research and development sites. Some of the jobs were big. Some of them were small. Someof them were really big. Uh, and, and I, you know, I was, I was the guy that would, uh would be in charge of all this stuff. Well, COVID hits, right? Uh, which was quite a, quite an initial disaster for all of us, right. What do you, what do you mean? what do you mean we can't go to our meetings anywhere anymore? You know, like disaster. But we're resilient, right? We found our way out to Zoom and, you know, we were upside down and we didn't know how to mute and we took the laptop into the bathroom with us and, you know,, we did all that stuff. But we were resilient, we Were resilient, right? Well, anyway, I'm like furloughed when COVID hits and I was never unfurlough. So as time goes by, you know I start to make the decision that you know, I'm gonna I'm going to retire right I'm good. Uh, I meant a step back and And I did you know I turned Social Security on and Medicare and all that stuff. I'm at that age and Folks there's something I like to do more than anything in the world You know, you what? That is nothing Love doing nothing You ever just sit on a couch, like stare into space? I'm telling you there's something meditative about that. There's something deeply spiritual about nothing. It's hard to convince other people, and one of the people I never did convince was my wife. So she walks in Monday, and she goes, what are you doing? I'm like, nothing. She's like, Nothing? Nothing? nothing there's a whole list of stuff that you know for you to do around the house I'm like okay okay you don't have to keep reminding me every six months so uh so I started I started to look around you know for something to do I'm able-bodied I started looking around for something to do and uh I certainly didn't want one of those big pharmaceutical jobs again you know they sucked the life out of you but uh but I was open And so all of a sudden, all of the sudden a job opened up and it was right down the street from me. And it was a facility manager job and it Was for a hospice. So I apply for this, right? And I go down there and they hire me. Obviously, I've got a decent resume. They hire me and I start working there. And I got to tell you, I think I finally got a job that I love, right. I love this job. And they love me. I don't know why, but they do. Anyway, so I'm in charge of four buildings and my office is in a 10-bed inpatient hospice. And after I'm there a while, you know, I get everything under control and I've got a little bit of bandwidth. I start looking around. I start to notice something. You know who ends up in hospice? We do, we do. We're not hard to spot. Liver cancer, lung cancer, esophagus cancer, you know, a lot of smoking related stuff. We're no hard to spot, so I started to pay attention to these people, and I started to go in and talk to them. It's like the facility guy is talking with this guy, But I started to do it, and they let me do it. And I got more and more involved. Now, this is about five months ago now. There were three people in the 10-bed inpatient who were alcoholics. There was a woman who was about to celebrate her 40th anniversary, you know, in the hospice. And I Got a Cake for her family came. We did like a Southern California happy birthday thing for her 40th anniversary. She just was so happy about that, and there was someone in there who wasn't really going to make it, but there was somewhere in there with advanced cirrhosis of the liver, really, really bad cirrhiosis of the lever, and she'd come in to check out. This was a young woman, and I'd go in. I talked to her, and it was very valuable for me to share some stuff with her. But I have a home group that's not far away, and I asked her this question. I go, would it be okay if I brought some of the women from the home group in to talk with you? And she's like, yes, yes. That would be fine. So I go to the meeting, and anybody have an announcement? I got an announcement, I need women for a commitment. And six women go, well, what is this about? And I go, I want you to come down to an inpatient hospice. And their first reaction is like, why? What good is that going to do? And I go, they're asking for, they're reaching out their hand. You know, would you do it? And six of them said yes and they showed up there. Now the woman who was celebrating 40 years was happy as a clam to have a meeting. She was just so happy about that. But these women went in and sat with the young lady with the advanced cirrhosis. And listen, she'd gone in there to check out. she was in yellow it just seems bad shape right and they all got around her and they started sharing and I gotta tell you I swear to God there was a change that day in this young lady it was a change and and the women walked out of there they the experience they had you know carrying the message in a hospice was something they'd never experienced before and this this one woman who had like 30 years said, Chris, that was the most significant experience I've ever had in Alcoholics Anonymous, what we just did. And so they all started to come back and they started to wrap themselves around, especially this woman with the cirrhosis. And I saw a change. She started to fight. Now, a couple months go by, AA is in and out. The nurses are like, it's the AAs again, you know? What did you do, Chris? And a couple months go by and there's a Zoom call that's gonna be very, very important. This woman is gonna ask the question, am I a candidate for the transplant, liver transplant? You know, that's what she's fighting for. And so the AAS are there, the nurses are there. We're all sitting around the Zoom call And she asked the surgeon on the Zoom call a question. Can I get on the transplant list? And the surgeon goes, we're not going to put you on the transplant list. And she goes, why? And the sergeant goes, because we're looking at your labs. You're getting better. I swear to God, it was less than two months later we walked her out of there. You know, can you imagine? Now, now this whole experience blew me away. You know because of this once more, once more I see the promise of a power greater than ourselves doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves working in and through the women in that group. The power worked through those women, I saw it happen. You know what I mean? And so do these promises come true? They come true if we work for them. They come through if we do our job in Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, they come true, if we to our job and Alcoholics anonymous. Now there's one story peter made me promise to to share with you here today and it good it goes back into my drinking right um so i'm gonna i'm going to finish with this but um so it has to do with new york too so this is the 1970s i'm i'm drinking like like a like a fish and But there was some fun things I was still able to do back in the 70s. I could still get out of the house, you know, in the seventies and what we would do in New Jersey, we were about an hour outside Manhattan is we would go in on the weekend and if anybody who's been, who was in New York City in the seventy's understand something, there was cool music going on at that period of time, right? I mean, you would go one night and it would be Led Zeppelin, You know, you'd go in the next night. You know it would be Little Feet. You'd go into the next day and it'd be The Who. You know you'd going the next weekend. It'd be the Grateful Dead and we saw some amazing stuff. Now as an alcoholic though one of the things that I did was I drank to go drinking. Anybody in here ever drink to go drinkin'? Oh we're going out drinking later? Well I'll get started right now thanks. And I remember me and my buddy John are drinking to go drinking in the city. And we went to this concert, and I think it was a Foghat-Wishbone Ash concert. I can't really be sure, but we go in there, and we're good and drunk as we sit down for this concert. And John comes back from the bathroom, and he goes, hey man, they're selling LSD in the bathroom you want to get some and do it and there's really only one appropriate answer to that if you're partying and going to concerts right and that's yeah so so what we do is is we go in and we buy we buy a couple of hits of blotter or whatever we take it and we allow like two songs to go by and then we we ask each other are you are you high is it work no i don't i don' feel anything ah we must have got ripped off well there's more people in there let's let's go back let's go back and buy more so uh so we go back and we buy more we take that and we let another couple of songs go by and uh and we're like yeah still not still nothing still nothing you know drunkard hoots let's try it one more time one more time we'll go you know so one more time we go back and we buy we buy acid from these disreputable looking characters in the bathroom now all i can all i can tell you is this is the concert is over and they're turning on the lights and we are like this i mean i mean so So we are so overdosed on LSD. And if that's never happened to you, the best way I can describe it is imagine Disney World being injected into your eye with a turkey baster, you know? Like, I didn't know all the people in here were Muppets, you know, I mean, it was just crazy. And I remember the lights are going up and we have to leave, right? And so we're like, must stand up, must walk down aisle, must leave venue, you know? And we had all driven in in a van. So we all pile in this van and I remember like curling up in a fetal position saying, don't lose your mind, don't loose your mind. And when you go from Manhattan to New Jersey, the most appropriate way is through a tunnel, right? And so we're all higher than you can imagine and we're heading down to the Lincoln Tunnel and it's like eight lanes, six lanes, four lanes, two lanes tunnel. And we're almost at the tunnel and somebody toward the front of the van goes, "'Hey man, we'll never fit." Right? And so some of us get concerned and we move toward the the front the van and and we become convinced too you know i mean it looks like a mouse hole and uh and so you ever try to back out of the lincoln tunnel took us like 45 minutes and uh and there's some people who aren't afraid of laying on their horn yeah you know you know in in the city i gotta tell you we took the bridge and and made it back safe somehow. But, you know, this is the kind of stuff that was going on in my life. It was absolutely crazy. Do I live a better life now? You know, have I experienced these promises? Do I pray like crazy? Absolutely. Have I experienced These Promises? Yes. And what that's done is that has moved me from that experience of self-consciousness into what I can describe today as God consciousness, where everything is good. All is well. That's really the best promise in the world you get to a place where all is well and uh and i want to i want again i want thank raquel and the team uh for doing this i want to thank roger for being uh the engineer and recording this and and uh alerting me to the fact that i was about to stand up here with my pants unzipped thank you roger uh i i we're friends now forever and uh and you know thank you all for being here what did i tell you guys all right so we're gonna be back in exactly 15 minutes so you know we're starting 11 30 sharp so just