The Event and the Resentment – Workshop: Steps 1 – Part 2 of 11 – Local AA Speakers

My name's Scott. I'm an alcoholic. and because of a loving God that you people have introduced me to. I'm gone already. I haven't had a drink since April 22, 1985. I started crying while I was sitting down there. Colleen got up and she said the beautiful thing that you guys say out here when you tell everybody this is who I am, this is how long I've got this thing. And I just welled up. I just love being here. I love being with you guys. It's my Midwestern home group. I have a lot of people who are very important to me in this room, a lot OF people who I really love, a guy who I sponsor is here, my friend Dick and a lot Of friends, Mark and Zelda, and a LOT OF people WHO I JUST HAVE KNOWN FOR A LONG TIME. I first came out, the first time I ever talked out of town, which I thought was a bizarre thing that they you know, they asked me I thought I was being set up for a hit or something I didn't know what to I come from the Bronx and it's not impossible you know and and the first time I ever talked out of town was at a mini conference in Omaha and I fell in love with you people then and have been in love avec you ever since and I just I can't tell you how grateful I am that you asked me to come out this weekend. I'll be talking for 75 hours today, and I'll be giving my meatloaf recipe out by about 5 o'clock. The schedule's a little different this afternoon. I talked to Dick about it. We'll talk about that later. But we'll start out this morning. I'm going to be talking about the steps, and I will be making references to two non-conference approved pieces of literature. I'll tell you what they are now so we can just get out of the way. My personal favorite history of Alcoholics Anonymous is a book called Not God, written by a guy named Kurtz. It's a non-conference approved piece of literature, so if you're new it's not something you have to read. You're going to hear me make some references to it as the day goes by. I have found it to be something that has enriched my sobriety. And the other piece of scripture that I've written is a piece of literature is a books by Emmett Fox called The Sermon on the Mount. And it doesn't matter if you are a Christian or not a Christian, The fact is it's one of the pieces of literature that was being read by the people who framed the big book of A.A. And in it, there are things in it like Bill makes reference in the big books to varieties of spiritual experience by a guy named William James, and in that book, which Bill was reading before they framed the Big Book, people tell their stories. They tell their individual stories about how they had a spiritual experience. And it's pretty clear that that's one OF the reasons, You know, one of the things that was being taken advantage of by Bill and the early AAs in the Oxford group were telling your story of identification. And, you know, apparently one ofthe reasons why so much of our book is dedicated to personal stories because ultimately that's all I have is my story. And this is different for me today because I'm being asked to do something that I normally try to not do. When I give a talk at AA, I might start thinking I'm so sort of, you now, accomplished as a an alcoholic a bizarre phrase i think uh in the upper echelon of degeneracy uh that that i could actually stop telling my story and start commenting on aa as a whole the sweep of history um the state of the the art and then i'm i think i'm dead i could become a circuit drinker, pretty easy at that point. And I can talk about different things. A friend of mine in AA talks about AA trends. I love to hear him talk because he's one of these guys with 45 years who says from his point of view, there is no good old days. The good old day better be right now. They better be Right Now. And if they're not, you ought to take a look at what you're doing because it says in our book, a fellowship will spring up around you and you can have the fellowship that you crave in AA. That has been my experience, and the minute I give up on that, then I'll start pointing a finger and saying, boy, it's really turned to crap. And it has, because I have. And so I really feel very strongly that I have to tell my story, and I'm going to tell my story today, but I've been asked to do a little bit more. So I'm gonna endeavor to do that and talk about my personal experience with the steps. I have a sort of a request to make of you and a challenge to make up. I am going to ask you, plead with you, implore you to not take anything I say today as an indictment of what you're doing with the steps of the program. I have no idea how you should do this. I do not think for one second that I do it right. I know I do perfectly for me. I haven't had a damn drink in 14 years. And I cannot stop drinking. I had hand surgery a couple weeks ago, and I was told that I needed general anesthetic. Oh, general anesthetics. Oh, oh, general anesthetic. Normal people don't get excited about general anesthetic. They don't. Normal people don' t go, ohhhh, general anesthetic, and l'll tell you why. You're asleep for general anesthetic. You don't get to stay up and be, and enjoy general anesthetics. That's why they call you generally anesthetized. But I'll tell you why I love it. When they give, when they give it to they say count backwards from 100. So you go 199, boom. I love 99. I do. I love 99. 99. But here's the difference. I won't trade my life in for 99 anymore. And I never got, you know, I only had 99 a couple of times. Then I just spent the rest of my life chasing 99. I'd see 99. I'd hear other people talk about 99. But I only Had 99 a Couple of Times. I Just Traded My Life In For It. I Live Like A Loser. Loser, Loser Loser Looser Loser I Settled For A Nickel Today When I Could Have A Quarter Tomorrow Every Day Of The Week. And one of the reasons that they say stay in today, live in today. Get right in the middle of that clap. Live it one day at a time. Which is one of those things Emmett Fox talks so beautifully about when he takes apart the Sermon on the Mount sentence by sentence and he discusses the section on resist not evil, which I'm going to talk more about today. Don't make oaths. Don't making proclamations. Stay right here, right now. He talks about it perfectly, you know? There is nothing new in the 12 steps. If you've studied them at all, you'll know that these are ancient ideas. They're ideas AA didn't come up with, anything new. They came up with a way, a presentation. They cameup with away so that alcoholics could buy the package. And they worked diligently, very hard, right up to the last moment of pressing that big book. They had to keep making changes to keep the loopholes out. Now I know that if you're new, this probably is not going to work for you. We got a membership of 2 million people. We're in 150 countries. We've got 98,000 groups, but I'm sure we won't be able to help you. And the group that we came from, the Oxford group, experienced something similar to a group called the Washingtonians. And if you've studied AA history at all, the Washingtonian's are a fascinating group to take a look at. They were a group dedicated to the cause of sobriety that went away just like the Oxford Group pretty much for the same reason. They got into politics, they got into money, property, and prestige. They got in to personalities and celebrity. And the fact that their leader was trying to make contact with Hitler during the Second World War didn't really help them a lot, but I judge no man. The Washingtonians were huge. In order for us to have a group the size of the Washingtonians in the United States right now, AA has 2 million people in membership, roughly, internationally. We would have to have 10 million people in AA in America alone in order to equal the size and ratio of the Washingtonians. We're talking huge. Abraham Lincoln talked at one of their commencements. They don't exist. People don't know about them. My experience is the only people who know about him is the people in AA who use them as a lesson. And it's because, From my point of view and from the experience of a lot of other people I respect, they took the turn that we have constantly. What a beautiful thing that you guys read the 12 concepts here, which is sort of the � if you're new, it's one of the great corporate diagrams I've ever seen in my life. If you get the pamphlet that talks about GSO and the concepts, it has a � I don't know if it still does, but it used to have a pyramid in it. It's upside down. and the rank and file is on the top and the trustees are on the bottom you can't get lower than a trustee a trusty is the lowest the least powerful human being in Alcoholics Anonymous and some of them believe that and some don't but again I judge no man there's no reason why AA should work, the original alcoholic board kept on telling Bill you don't have enough rules. And Bill kept saying the thing that we know is true. We know it today probably better than we ever have before. They've got alcoholism. Alcoholism will take care of it. It will school them. They don't need any other beating. They're getting the big beating and no one can beat them like alcoholism can. So I ask you during today, please don't take anything I say as an indictment. I'm going to share how I've taken the steps. That's what I'm going to tell you about. And I don't pretend, and I've done some stuff that's probably different from you. You've probably done some stuff that'S different from me, but I don'T think I know any better than you. The steps, as seen by Dr. Silkworth, Silkworth saw them as something he referred to as moral psychology. That they felt for a long time in the treatment of alcoholism that some form of moral psychology, which I never understood until the last couple of years. I never misunderstood what moral psychology was. I had been in psychotherapy for 18 years by the time I got to AA. I was going to be dead, but I was gonna understand it. And I'm not putting therapy down. It's great stuff. It says on page 133 of our book, if you need a doctor, go get one. I got no beef with therapy. My colossal blunder is that I was trying to treat my alcoholism with psychotherapy, which is like showing up at a gunfight with a knife once a week, you know, and just getting this colossal ass whooping. Just whooped, whooped. But doing good work in therapy. But just getting creamed because I was trying to treat this three-fold illness, this bizarre physical reaction to alcohol, mm-mm-mm, general anesthetic, coupled with this weird, weird thinking that turned into this spiritual tapeworm, this soul sickness, this cancer in my heart that near to killed me. And what I got after a while since the whole purpose of this exercise, this is AA is such not a self-help group. It is the antithesis of the whole notion of self-health. One of my favorite people who I'll be talking about today who's no longer with us, he died sober with over 20 years, my friend Howard Cooper, who I just adored. When I was really new, I was six months sober. he was an old-timer, and I was at the AA feed for Thanksgiving, you know, the hell, right? Supposed to be at the head of a magnificent table with my admiring family, who were all like this, you know, by that time. And there I am, you know, at the AAA trough, you know, witnessing the miracle. I was so happy to be there. And Howard walked up to me and said, how are you? And I went, fine. And he said, you know, you don't have to be fine for me. And I just broke down and blubbered and he held me. I just, oh man, did I need to not be fine for a minute. It was just that, you know? And when I started to find out, well, the thing that Howard told me, he was a Skid Row bum, ex-Skid Row bump who had been thrown out of the Salvation Army, which is a personal best for anybody I know. He said, you know those little, I don't know if you have them out here, but when people sell stuff on the street they sell books with the cover ripped off or a quarter or something like that. And down on Skid Row, he said the first thing the guys do is they get the self-help books. They go and they spend because they think they can think their way off of Skid Row. And I've never, I've heard Alcoholics Anonymous in the press referred to as a self- help group. I've seldom heard anything further from the truth since our whole society seems to be driven trying to drive home one simple fact. You can't help yourself if you continue you to try to run this thing on self-will or self-propulsion, you're going to trade yourself out. It's like those stockbrokers who keep just trading you. Ding, ding, ding. Sorry all your money is gone but you did great. It is the same thing as alcoholism that you just get traded out until there is nothing left. When Bill went to the Oxford group after his friend showed up at his home and had gotten religion. And he started going to the Oxford group. The Oxford group had four things that they called the four absolutes. And they believed in absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love. Bill writes about, in Not God, this quote is printed, the principles of honesty, purity, unselflishness, and love are as much a goal of AA members and are as Much practiced by them as any other group of people. Yet we found that when the word absolute was put in front of these attributes, they either turned people away by the hundreds or gave them a temporary spiritual inflation resulting in collapse. The average alcoholic just couldn't stand the pace and got nowhere. What a beautiful expression of it. Because the only thing I ever did absolutely was I got absolutely loaded. Absolutely. And you were absolutely a moron by the time I got there. Those were the absolutes as understood by Scott Redman. And one of the things I love, and I think that Bill would get a tremendous kickoff, as a matter of fact, there's a tape where he even talks about it. There's a tape where we talk about the writing of the book. And he says, I understand that certain people have started to kind of iconize the big book. You know, that a friend of mine, you know, knows a guy who has a little shrine with a first edition you know in the corner and and they wrote it as a as a fundraising tool these guys were trying to put some dough together and they were writing it chapter by chapter and they go give us money and they'd go no i mean it was like and at the same time they knew that they had to get out of text but bill was a promoter you know i'm a bill trying to be a bob you know that that i mean I don't know if you've ever been in a room full of bobs, but it's a snore. I mean, it's just, it'a snore, and without them we'd be dead. We'd be dead because it'd just be all bills, a bunch of self-promoting, you know, blabbermouth boneheads like me. I mean I'm just, I am, I'm a bill aspiring to be as bobbish as I possibly can be. So Bill had a talk. They had written the first four chapters, and now he had to go write Chapter 5. And he realized, this is it. I mean, I'm going to have to put this thing down. I'm gonna have to do it now. I have to now codify what we're doing. He had a conversation with some friends of his, as it's outlined in the historical material, and they put together what they had been doing in sort of a six-step thing. I used to think because of the mention of the six-stepped program in the big book, in one of the personal stories, that there was actually a six-step. It was just a smaller piece of thing, you know, just half this size with six steps. And, in fact, it wasn't codified in that way. It's something they came up with and said, well, apparently this is what we've been doing. And in A.A. Comes of Age, Bill describes the beginning experience of having to sit down with us. He says, so the job until we reached the famous Chapter 5, up to that time I had done my own story and I drafted three more chapters. There is a solution more about alcoholism, we agnostics. We now realized we had enough background, enough window dressing material. And at this point, we had to tell our program of recovery from alcoholism how it really worked. The backbone of the book would have to be fitted in right there. Sprawling on his bed and in anything but spiritual mood one evening, Wilson poised his yellow pencil above the school tablet propped before him. Quickly, lest he block, he scrolled the words out how it works across the top of the page. then paused to meditate about the six-step procedure with his and his associates at the previous meeting had agreed pretty well summed up what they had learned from the oxford group one we admitted we were licked that we were powerless over alcohol two we made an inventory of our defects or sins three sins what an attractive word three uh we confessed or shared our shortcomings with another person in confidence four we made restitution to all those we had harmed by our drinking. Five, we tried to help other alcoholics with no thought of reward in money or prestige. Six, we prayed to whatever God we thought there was for power to practice these precepts. And that's what he wrote. And then he sat and he wrote his draft, which I'm going to read in a second, his original draft of the fifth chapter of the book, which is different, considerably different than the fifth Chapter of the Book as it exists. And then one of the things which I just, only in Alcoholics Anonymous could this have happened. After he finished writing, a friend of his who he sponsored came over with a newcomer barely dry three months. And he writes, this is again in A.A. Comes of Age, I was greatly pleased with what I had written. I read them the new version of the program, now the 12 steps. Howard and his friend reacted violently. So there's a guy There's a puke with three months going I don't like that Why 12 steps? So this newcomer busted his chops He says, why 12 steps they demanded You've got too much gut in those steps They'll scare people away And then they said What do you mean by getting those drunks down on their knees When they have to ask for all their shortcomings removed And then, and this had to be the guy with three months. This is my favorite. Who wants all their shortcomings removed anyhow? So, only in Alcoholics Anonymous are deity Bill Wilson's there and he goes, the new guy, the New Guy walks in and says, ah, this, ah, I don't like that. And Bill started changing it. I want to ask my friend Brent to come up and join me for a second. And what I want Brent to do is read Chapter 5, and what he's going to do is he's gonna stop when I tap him on the shoulder every time we reach a point where the original draft was different, and I'm gonna tell you what the original draft said. So just to show you how much it... This was from the original draft that was sent around to the groups before the groups had their input. Groups. I mean two groups. Come a little closer in here. And this is how the original draft changed from what Bill wrote and input from the newcomer and some other people and what we wound up with today. Chapter 5, How It Works. Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Our directions. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault. They seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. A way of life. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest. Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now. If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it, then you are ready to take certain steps. You are ready to follow directions. At some of these we balked. At some of these you may balk. We thought we could find an easier or softer way. You may think you can find an easier or softer way. But we could not. We doubt if you can. With all the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely. Remember that we deal with alcohol. Remember that you are dealing with alcohol, cunning, baffling, powerful without help. It is too much for us. It is two of us. Too much for you. But there is one who has all power. That one is God. May you find him now. You must find him. Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point. You stand at the turnipoint. We asked his protection and care with complete abandon. Throw yourself under his protection and care. Here are the steps we took which are suggested as a program of recovery. Now we think you can take it. Here are the steps we took which are suggest as your program of recovery 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol that our lives had become unmanageable 2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity 3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him 4. Made made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Five, admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. Six, we're entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. We're entirely willing that God remove all these effects of character seven humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings humbly on our knees asked him to remove our short comings holding nothing back eight made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all. Willing to make complete amends to them all. Nine, made direct amends to such people wherever possible except when to do so would injure them or others. Ten, continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. Eleven, sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him. Praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out. Having had a spiritual experience as the result of this course of action, we try to carry this message to others especially alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs. 12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs. Many of us exclaimed... You may exclaim. What an order. I can't go through with it. Do not be discouraged. No one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints. The point is that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. The principles we have set down are guides to progress. We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection. Our description of the alcoholic, the chapter to the agnostic, and our personal adventures before and after make clear three pertinent ideas. Have been designed to sell you three pertinate ideas. A, that we were alcoholic and could not manage our own lives. A,that you are an alcoholic and cannot manage your own life. B, that probably no human power could have relieved our alcoholism. Probably no humanpower can relieve your alcoholism See that God could and would if he were sought. See that God can and will. And then the next line, which is no longer in the chapter at all. If you are not convinced of these vital issues, you ought to re-read the book to this point or else throw it away. Thank you, Brent. Brent was saying before, Bill probably put that in because he probably thought, well, they'll throw the book away but then they'll have to come by and buy another one and it's kind of a marketing tool. I would have thrown mine away as fast as I would have just, that sucker would have sailed, baby. Really glad they took that up. The use of the word you versus we and I is unbelievably stunning to me. Thank God. What a great thing. What a good thing. What a nice thing that they turned that corner. And it's mirrored throughout the whole book. Right through to the family after where it talks about no alcoholic likes to be told that they can't drink. Nobody, I mean in the world of temperance, and this was a huge turn from the Washingtonians and the Oxford group, nobody wants to be proselytized. Nobody wants to being told what they can and can't do, especially a drunk. There are a lot of attempts that I made in my life. to be rid of the alcoholic dilemma. Nothing ever worked for me except for the 12 steps of AA. Judaism didn't work for me. As a matter of fact, I couldn't possibly have even been an alcoholic because I was Jewish. Jews do not drink because it might dull the pain. You don't want to waste any agony opportunity. and one of the beautiful things in our book that it talks about over and over again is it doesn't argue they refuse to argue when priests come to AA when ministers when rabbis when Buddhist monks come here and it says in ourbook it says it over andover again and it sais it in chapter 7 don't argue with them don't tell them you know God better than them they can quote the Bible chapter and verse say to them you know this but you are yellow in color we seem to know god in a way we're able to bring that higher powers power to bear in a way that's released us from the cycle of spree and remorse and you haven't i'm not saying i know god better than you i'm saying i just i'm doing something that you're not doing yet And it talks about never, ever arguing with a drunk. One of the things in the book that I can't believe that they didn't change, which I always get a huge kick of, is there's many, many lists of promises throughout the entire big book. My favorite thing, and I always, when I'm having a tough time in my life, when I've been wondering whether or not I can accomplish certain things in my life. I always like to go back to the list of what people commonly call the promises in the middle of the ninth step, and one of the things I'm going to talk about today, because the inception of AA really, you can date it from the minute that Dr. Bob started working his ninth step. They really knew how important this immense step was going to be, and really they give them kind of more than any other place in the book, the most different kinds of things you can do, examples of different actions you can take. They really spend a lot of time on the ninth steps and talk about how important it is to be thorough there, because Dr. Bob really didn't stop drinking until he made those rounds that night after the last binge. So I really always try to remember that AA's inception really dates from when our co-founder finally jumped that fence. He was scared that people would know he was a drunk. And they promise, they say you will experience of freedom from fear of financial insecurity. It was 1937. Global financial collapse. People diving off buildings. People, grown men selling apples for a nickel in the street. If there had been a PR guy involved in this, he would have said, don't do that. Don't do that. Promise them anything, promise them anything. But don't, don't do that. It's the most outlandish, outrageous thing they could have possibly told people were that were going to happen. I love my mother's stories about the depression because it gets she gets poorer every time she talks about it. We ate the shower curtains. But I know it was bad. I I know it was bad, and you couldn't really, in terms of promotion, I don't think any PR guy in his right mind would have let that stick, but they did. Step one, I'm powerless over alcohol. My life has become unmanageable. Two, I've come to believe that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity. There are no written instructions in the big book of AA on how to work the first two steps. There are written specific instructions on how to take every other step in the Big Book of AA. There are no specific written instructions on how to take the first two. A lot of people do a lot of different kinds of writing and exercises on the first two steps, and I think they're all fabulous. I did them when I was new. I just can't imagine any exercise that anybody could do to get closer to God where you could say, well, that's not a good idea. I think there are all great ideas. when you read the first three pages of chapter 5 by the time you get to the middle of page 60 it says our description of the alcoholic the chapters of the agnostic and our personal adventures before and after make clear three pertinent ideas so if you've read the first three chapters, the chapters on alcoholism the chapter of the Agnostic 4 and our Personal Adventures Before and After I'm not sure what that means does that mean before I got sober, after I got sober or the personal stories in the front of the book or the back of the books? I don't much really care but whatever that means If I've given that some thought, if I've read the first four chapters, if I'm giving some thought to those personal adventures, it says here that it should make clear three basic concepts. Now, of course, in what we just read, it says, if you don't think you're an alcoholic, reread the book up to this point or throw it away. But what they wound up with, it should made clear three ideas. A, that we were alcoholic and could not manage our own lives. B, that probably no human power could have relieved our alcoholism. And C, that God couldn't. What if he were sought? Being convinced we were at step three. So somewhere in those three pertinent ideas, I am able to take those first two steps on whatever level. And on the first level I took them on, I took him on a very primitive level compared to I mean, how was I to really appreciate the unmanageability of my life until not only I wrote it down in the form of an inventory, but then had to go and take responsibility for it and apologize and make amends? I mean, I want to tell you, the level I was able to take those first two steps with the help and support of that other work was vastly, vastly bigger, huger. And if I continue to take inventory and do that work, my appreciation of those first few steps will increase. I won't become part of the frozen chosen, the advanced course in Alcoholics Anonymous where I start losing touch with that. Anytime I hear a person with time get to a podium and say, geez, I feel brand new again. I always say to myself, because I judge no man, I always tell people, I always stay to myself. No, you don't. No,you don't feel new. You might feel like crap. I'm not telling you you don' t feel like crap. You might fee horrible, but you don''t feel new and if you think you do, you're not spending any time with new people and again, I'm nt trying to diminish your agony. You might fe worse than you've ever felt in sobriety but you're nt shaking alcohol out of your spinal fluid. Every part of your face is not moving in a different direction. You're not a crap magnet. You know how it seems like any crap in the universe just finds its way to a newcomer? You're like a crap magnate, you know? So I'm not saying you don't feel bad, but you don' t feel that bad. And I always say to myself, because I'm so nonjudgmental, I just make evaluations, not judgments. What? that you're probably not spending any time with any. I had a guy in the back of my car the other night. I met him, my home group as a panel at a wonderful rehab in our area, county rehab. Ah, just glorious. And this guy's sitting in the background. He was in the middle of the back on my car, and just a sweetheart, just a great guy. And he explained to me that his four brothers and three sisters and both his parents were dead from alcoholism. They either drank themselves to death, overdosed, or had put a gun in their mouth. nine people. And he looked at me completely honestly, and he said, I don't want to die. And I knew for sure. I mean, I just knew it. The first and the second step again, because I'm doing this work, hit me in my heart again. I said to myself, I can't save you. I am powerless over your alcoholism, over mine. I can pick you up, take you to the meeting. I can sit you down. I'll lend you five bucks. I will do anything I can to help you. Anything. the one thing I can't do is, I can' t save you. I can''t save your life. And I don''t know if it's going to happen for you or not. Is it going to be ten people in that family that wind up dying? I don' t know. Number one, I believed him when he said he didn' t want to die. I don't know if he'll be able to actually be responsible to that wish. And I dont' know if hes going to weather the horrible initial storm, that terrible, wooden, hollow, dead time before God pries your jaws open and breathes life back into you. I don't know. But I know that I felt the first and second step on that incredible level. Now, if I'm not doing inventory, I'm already pissed off I have to pick up the guy. I'm pissed off, why me? Am I the only guy involved in this program? You know, all the crap. All the crap, all of the crap without the 10th step, there's no 12th step for me, right? So because I'm in the car and I'm that pissed off about being there, I can hear him and go, I don' t know. I love you, I'll pick you up tomorrow night for a meeting. That's the limited involvement. I've heard a guy say in AA, and I love when he says this, it seems that a sponsor's job is to keep the newcomer entertained until God takes over. And I love that because ultimately, ultimately that's it. So when I work the steps with a guy, I get up to this point, I ask him if he's read that literature. If he has read that literary, I say, are you an alcoholic? If he says yes, I say okay. Is your life unmanageable? Well, I don't know. Well, can you do some controlled crack smoking? No. Okay, then your life's unmanangeable in the area of crack. Can we move on now? and so that first step I don't care if a guy really believes it or not I don' t go do you really believe it I don''t give a crap if he really believes let's get going here because whatever level you are taking this on now I believe it has been my personal experience that is going to get bigger and bigger the more you get this thing then step two came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity Not would, not should. I don't get to make an appointment. It's possible. Okay? It says there's a couple of lists in the big book. I love them in the first couple of chapters. One's a list of things that people say about us when we're drinking, and one's a lista of things we say about ourself. The things that People Say About Us, which I love, is, oh, you'd think he'd get sober for a while. They tell him if he stopped drinking, if he'd be drunk, he'd die, and there he is lit up again. You know, all of that stuff. And then there's stuff we say about ourselves. It won't burn me this time, so here's how. For God's sake, how did I ever get started again? Or my personal favorite, I'll stop after the sixth drink. Now, I'm also a man who came home one day and emptied an entire bottle of wine into a 32-ounce tumbler and told my wife I was having a glass of wine. So by the time I get to the sixth drank, things get really interesting. And another fabulous one, what's the use anyhow? Boy, don't you just love that one? At any rate, it then says on the bottom of 24, when this sort of thinking is fully established in an individual with alcoholic tendencies, let's say a person prone to the disease, prone to this bizarre allergy. Normal people don't have that allergy. My cousin Roz has never dreamt about walking into a palace made of cocaine. My Uncle Milton has never dreamt about paddling down a river of beer in a canoe. I have, I have. I just want to tell you, normal people don't dream about drinking. They don't. I defy you to produce one normal person who dreams about drinking, about having pitons and scaling a bottle of bourbon. Normal people don'T dream about this. Alcoholics do. So if you're new and you're dreaming about drinking... Well, welcome to AA. And you know, it's a funny thing about the general anesthetic. I can't seem to get that out of my mind. Let me tell you why it's so damned exciting. For the same reason that I used to get excited when I was told that I needed dental surgery. Normal people don't get excited about dental surgery? Normal people don't go, oh, dental surgery, dental surgery. I'll tell you why. I leave out the middle. I go right from announcement of dental surgery to painkillers. I leaveout the surgery. It's the same reason I was able to, my wife and I before I got sober, a guy lent us his car and we sold his car. And that was because we didn't have money for the rent, big duh there. And I looked into my wife's eyes and I said, you know, I'm so sick of being a punk irresponsible kid. Let's not borrow money. Let'S stand on our own two feet. Let'S sell the car. And my wife Nancy said, let'S do. And it's for the same reason. It's for dental surgery reason. I leave out the middle. I go from let's do the right thing to sell the car. I leave out grand theft auto. I leave out forging the pink slip. I live out looking behind me in a minute. I leave out the whole thing. I lead up the surgery. I'll leave out the blood, the sutures than the agony. And that's what they're talking about here when this this kind of thinking is fully established. Why? Silkworth talks about why would they possibly drink considering the attendant misery that follows every time they do it. Every time they do it, I got to tell you the story. This guy who I sponsored for about 15 minutes, he was, I took him down to my sponsor's home group, my sponsor is Paul, Dr. Paul and I got him down there and he was being 12-stepped by Dr. Paul, John A., Cliff R., this group, I mean, circuit speakers. He's surrounded by circuit speakers I think he drank while he was talking to them And they kept him sober for no seconds Like not a minute, you know And I called them the next day all individually To let them know how powerful they were I said, do you know that newcomer you talked to last night? Cliff went, oh yeah, how the hell is he? I said you sent him reeling to a bar Anyway, the guy's fabulously wealthy. I mean, the guy is a fabulously wealthy, incredibly powerful guy. He's drunken himself out of his job, drunken himself off the face of the map. They're paying him 100 grand a month to stay away from the office. He gets sequestered on a privately owned Caribbean island by one of his friends so he won't drink. He stays sober until the day he gets off the island. He cannot stop drinking. He's dying. So I take him on. He gets me up to his house. He says, I got it now. I got it. I said, what? He said, look what I bought. And he brings out one, there's about a hundred copies of the original big, big book left. The big, big pressing of the large book and there's about a hundred original copies left. He said seven grand in cash. I got it. Meaning I'm never going to drink again, right? I said wow, it looks perfect. He said that's right. It's no Martin, it's never even been opened. I said so this has been handed down from loser to loser for 65 years. And now you've got the loser book. Don't open it, it'll drop in value. don't open that sucker man once this kind of thinking is fully established in someone without with alcoholic tendencies they've probably placed themselves beyond human health i love that probably placed himself beyond human help now it says on the first page of the fourth chapter of our book and I love this. The first time my friend Larry ever read this, I'll tell you what he said. It says on the first page of We Agnostics, to be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not always easy alternatives to face. And it's tough. Die in a pool of my own urine? Spiritual life. Tough choice to make. And the first time that my friend Harry ever read that sentence he said to himself, well how bad an alcoholic death are we talking about here? that's no normal person would ever think of how how bad an alcoholic death that's that's dental surgery to me that's leaving out the middle it's the death part that's leaving out at any rate it says that if you have this physical bizarre physical reaction It's gotten mixed up with this weird thinking. By the time we get to We Agnostics, it says, you have probably placed yourself beyond human help. Lack of power was our dilemma. And now I think lack of dilemma is our power, pretty much. We had to find a power by which we could live and it had to be a power greater than ourselves. Well, that's exactly what this book is about. Its main object is to enable you to find a power great enough to be able to live. A power greater then yourself that can solve your problem. Do I now believe or am I even willing to believe that there's a power greater than myself if a man can say that he does believe or is even willing to believe? We emphatically assure him he's on his way. We don't say then, okay, write us a check and buy the following literature. We say, you're off. You hit the floor running. You're in, man. You're In. You've got full rights here. Now, if I say I've come to believe that a power than myself or greater than my self can restore me to sanity and if the spiritual experience necessary for me staying alive is promised in the 12th step, it says having had a spiritual experience as a result of these steps, then all step two really is, is an admission of possibility. Is coming out of the gate, is me saying you know what? I really think this could happen for me. I don't really believe it. Me, I didn't really belief it but look at the evidence. People are telling their stories here. Look at the demonstration around me. If any of this is true, you know something, there's something here How many times have we heard people get to podiums and say, there was something there. I sensed something there and it wasn't what was in their house, you know? And so for me, I really feel that step two has for me been a really big hoop to jump through. That it's an admission that this thing can happen for me and now I want to move forward. And the description of step three and the next two and a half pages in the big book for me are extraordinary. I want to talk about them a bit. I also want to talked during the day about how I take the steps. In the morning, I take these steps in a kind of formal way for me and the way I take first two steps in the morning is I simply say I am powerless. My life is unmanageable I know that you will restore me to sanity. And those are my first two steps in the morning and it's just great for me. I am powerless My life is unmanageable, and I know that you will restore me to sanity. I know because it's happened. Not every day. But it's happen, and I like the way it feels. You know, the pain is not anymore, is no longer the touchstone of spiritual growth for me. It's a touchstone of spiritual health. How many times, and you guys are part of such a powerful fellowship here with so much enthusiasm. How many time have I found myself doing things in AA? because it really feels good, because it's fun, because I like it, because I'm taking pleasure in it. I mean, for me, joy has become the touchstone of spiritual growth in a lot of ways for me. Now, you know, a friend of mine talks about surrender. He says he surrendered like Custer. All his men were dead. His horse was dead. He was out of bullets, and five arrows were coming at his ass, and he said, I give up. I get that I can surrender that way I absolutely get that another friend of mine says he only surrenders when his back is up against the wall and the wall's on fire I like that too and I surrender when I'm in that kind of agony but you know I also at this point in my sobriety for me joy is a real big motivator We absolutely insist on enjoying a laugh. On page 62, there is what I believe the most succinct and exact description of the savage, uncivilized mindset of the alcoholic that I believe I have ever heard. Selfishness, self-centeredness, that we think is the root of our troubles. Driven, driven is not nudged or influenced. Driven implies under the lash of, in slavery too. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate. Sometimes they hurt us seemingly without provocation, but we invariably, invariably means without variation, with no loopholes, always 100% of the time, find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt. I didn't get this. How could that be true? My aunt pinned my arms to my sides when I was a little kid so that I could be hit. How is that my fault? How did I make a decision based on self? I didn't. Is that excusable for her to do? Absolutely not. Completely unacceptable to treat a baby that way. What I didn�t get was the difference between the event and the resentment. Was the event my fault ? No. Was the resentment my fault ?? You bet. with the next 19 years of doing anything I could do to character assassinate her, to make her miserable, to deny her joy, to deny the good will and respect of her fellows? Absolutely. What was going to kill me? The event of the resentment. You know the answer to that. Did I make decisions based on self which later placed me in a position to be hurt? No question about it. The thing I didn't get... Now, I'm Jewish. I had a problem with Nazis. Call me a nut. Okay? had i made decisions based on self which later placed me in a concentration camp no was the event my fault no but the fact that when i heard somebody with a german accent i instantly hated him wouldn't talk to him was that my fault you bet was my self-pity and my opportunism for my self pity and playing the victim because of it my fault absolutely the difference between the event and the resentment, and what freedom to get that. Because I've been confronted with a lot of people in sponsorship who have gone through horrible stuff, and I can't tell them they haven't. I sponsored one guy who was systematically sexually abused as a kid. He was abandoned by his parents with the abuser and forced to live with the abuser for years. Now, is the event his fault? No. Has he been damaged? Yes. Has it changed my relationship with him? Yes, if he gets into an abusive relationship, one thing I do with this guy that I don't do with other guys I sponsor, I sit him down and say, you cannot be there. I will not allow it. He never had anybody to protect him, so I do that with him. It's great. It's just great. Did he place himself in a position to be hurt by being filled with self-pity? Absolutely. The difference between the event and the resentment. And one of the things, and this has been very interesting for me because I've taken it seriously. He, along with a couple other guys I sponsor, grew up in terrible alcoholic homes. They must sponsor other drunks or they'll die. They have to do this work on some level. it's there's an interesting twist for them that a lot of other people don't have that have because of their upbringing they have a notion somehow that the drunk is constantly trying to get over on them and take advantage of them why because that's what happened their whole lives so one of the things i have to we do together is we work the 10th step and say no he's not this you're taking his alcoholism personally is to get them free from that event so that they can out there get out there and be in the world of AA. But as a sponsor, I could say, oh, stop doing that. Well, they can't stop doing it. But we can deal with it. We can say, hey, you know what? This guy's just really sick. This has nothing to do with you. Is this too hard for you? If this is too hard f�r you, let's do something else. And a couple of times it has been too hard for them, but mostly they've been able to stay in it, stay moment to moment, and get the work done. um on page 61 uh one of my favorite things is they talk about the alcoholic in his cups or her cups taking one of two basic ways of manipulating people and that is to either bully and that's the way i thought i'm a loomer i like to loom i like the loom so the light's behind me and i'm casting a shadow on her. I'm a yeller and a loomer or a crier. Love to cry. Tyranny of helplessness works for me really good. I like to loom, I like to cry if I can. If I can work some lumen and crying into the same fight, I'm in the bonus round. And it says there in step three that an alcoholic will tend to either be really magnanimous or a bully, a hostile, cursing, insane bully in order to get their way. Now my usual MO, usual MO is I'm a sterling human being. I'm hell of a nice guy. Then if you don't do it my way, you should die in a flaming car crash, but out of the gate. And I never got it until when I ruined, my sponsor read me that and I just went, ugh. And then it says, it basically says on that same page admitting he may be somewhat at fault he's sure that other people are more to blame I'm wrong but you're wronger in the wrong contest you seem to be winning although I'm wrong but my wrong is already nowhere close to how really wrong you are and that was so meaningful to me because I did it so much. So much that it, one more time in AA, you guys ate my lunch. You ate my launch, ate my launcher, ate my launch. So by the time he got through this section on step three, which again has been a step, which for me, I took on a very primitive level at first and has become much, much bigger for me as time has gone on. And on the bottom of page 62 it says, this is the how and the why of it. First of all, I had to quit playing God. Well, for me, that's been very meaningful. I can't boss people around in AA and assume that I'm stopping playing God I can be saying to God, you know, I think you can keep Saturn on its axis, but I don't think you can take care of my kids and manipulate them in a proper way. I can't do that. Got a laugh from the right person there. It's okay. She's great. And this whole notion of stopping playing God, which for me has been a real cautionary tale in terms of some AA big shot-ism that I've suffered from in the past, that I have to really beware of because I'm prone to it, because I am just so damned spiritual. It's unbelievable Finally getting the respect that I deserve I have a friend named Bobby Ruiz I want to tell you this story Take a minute and tell you the story He was a skid row bum Who near the end went to his home And took off his crunchy clothes They were all stiff from filth And went in, took a shower, and one of his three little daughters turned to his wife and said, Mommy, when are you going to learn that you can't turn that creepy man into a daddy? He heard his daughter say it. He put the crunchy clothes on and walked out of his house. He went to a bridge overlooking the train tracks down in downtown L.A. and stood on top of that bridge and said to God, if you don't want me to die, tell me now. A wind came up and blew him off the bridge back onto the bridge. He walked down to a phone booth, called A.A., and never had another drink. And he's just one of the best guys I know. a graduate of the Harbor Lights down on 5th Street. Great guy. And he made a deal with God about his health and started running and went to run the L.A. Marathon. And when you went down there, you had to fill out stuff about why you were running the marathon and he wrote down, I was a Skid Row bum, the marathon, I made a good deal with the Lord and I made it deal with Cod. The marathon runs through Skid row and that's why I'm doing it. And the guys on Skid Rowe read the article and put together a cheering section for him when he ran through Sked Rowe. The guys were standing there with placards and stuff. And they wrote this because they wrote the article up in the L.A. Times so the guys found out about it. I went down, I had the honor of being asked by Bobby to go down to the Harbor Lights Skid Row Salvation Army place to go downstairs and watch a ceremony which was called the Hall of Miracles. And the Hall de Miracles is you're inducted into the Hall if you've come out of the Harbor lights and you're sober for over three years. One of the tragic things about this is there was no news teams down there. What a terrible thing. You know, to not cover something like that, a room with 100 people who've come off skid row and are experiencing this kind of success. But they weren't there. That's OK. I was. And there were and there were hundreds of people. You know the families there. Everybody's dressed beautifully and their kids are running around. And this is I thought of this one that that baby gave me a little editorial there because I used to get really angry sometimes when kids bugged me at AA meetings. And I still, you know, that can be a problem. But at any rate, what really, this guy in the Salvation Army just straightened me out that day. He said something so beautiful, because kids were running all over the place down there. He said, please do not allow the sounds of the children to make you angry or to distract you. These are the sounds that families that shouldn't be. And it just killed me. It was just so on the nose, you now, on the money. So sometimes when I hear a baby's voice in an AA meeting, it sounds like music to me. And then it says, it does what it does over and over again in the book. It talks about the difficulties that we've had that are real. And then he says, but we experience these difficulties in a way that will actually kill us because we have a sickness of the soul. So we have to take a different position. We have to quit playing God. We have let God be the agent. We're going to be his kid. We're gonna start following him on some level even though we really don't know how to do that yet. What can we do? Well, we're going to really find out big time in a few minutes. And then it says that you might want to, provided that he provided what we needed if we kept close to him and performed his work well. Kept close to Him through Step 11, performed His work well for me, that's pretty much 9 and 12, making amends, carrying the message, and practicing the principles. Okay? And if we do that, we become more and more interested in life as opposed to ourselves. We all know this to be true. or if you've been on the program and done the work for any appreciable amount of time, you know that you will get out there. And I didn't know what a pathetic, tiny little Scott Redman life I had when I got here. I could barely do anything, talk to anybody, or go anywhere. I put my arm around my wife one night. She must have felt my accelerated breathing or smelled my breath. And I heard it just come out of her in a gush. And it wasn't even pointed. She just said, you disgust me. And I thought, yeah, yeah me too, me too. It was just the truth. That's where we had wound up. And my life's huge now, absolutely huge. We felt new power flow in when we started thinking about what we could contribute to life. We enjoyed peace of mind. We discovered we could face life successfully. We became conscious of his presence. We began to lose our fear of today, tomorrow, or the hereafter. We were reborn. We are now at step three. Many of us said to our Maker as we understood Him, if anybody would like to join me in taking step three right now, let's pray. God, I offer myself to Thee to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy power, Thy love, and Thy way of life. May I do Thy Will always. We thought, well, before taking this step, making sure we were ready, that we could abandon ourselves utterly to him. I don't know what that means. I'm not going out and buying a robe now. I'm just, you know, I abandoned myself as utterly as I could at that particular time. And then it says something I've always loved. Because we found it very desirable to take the spiritual step with an understanding person such as our wife. Fat chance. Our wife. Oh, yeah. Let's pray, honey. i don't think so not that weak now with a couple of months of sobriety under my belt i was waking up at night and staring at her juggler vein pumping and thinking couldn't i just press down on that will that work you know i mean i mean surely before i got sober my wife came home and I had I was on the floor I had started cooking something and I died in the middle of cooking I was laying on the floor holding a pan of eggs and the stove was on and my wife came in and kind of touched me with her foot and said how are you? and I looked up at her I looked at her and said I'm exhausted so she found an empty vial and an empty bottle she called the doctor and the doctor said why are you calling me there's a blue Jew on the floor of your kitchen I mean he's called the paramedics so when my wife tells the story it kind of gives me the willies because she always says I hung up and you know I cleaned up a little caught. Then I called another doctor for a second opinion. So I wasn't going to take the third step with her. There's several questions. Sometimes people say, when should I start my fourth step? And there are three, to the best of my knowledge, three places in the big book of AA where it tells you to start your fourth step. In Bill's story, he talks about that he started his fourth step, he did it with Abby his first couple of weeks of sobriety in the hospital. Right here it says that if you expect the third step to have any permanent or lasting effect, it needs to be immediately followed by a strenuous effort to face and be rid of the things in you. Now a lot of different AA families, I know one AA family suggested you don't do your inventory until you're six months. Some other AA families demand that you do it in your first year. I think they're all right. I'm just talking about what's in the book and what's been my experience. I don't think anybody's wrong about this because we're all staying sober. And my favorite place, actually, where it talks about when to do a fourth step is in chapter 7. It says a guy might ask to start the work but it might be a mistake because if he stumbles later on he might blame you for rushing him. Then you turn the page and it says but on your second visit feel free to. So it just says, don't start at the first conversation. Don't get them on the inventory when you meet them that day, which I've always loved. The inventory was explained to me at Six Months of Sobriety. And my sponsor read Chapter 5 to me. And I had heard at that time all sorts of terrible stories about an inventory, about what to do about inventory, about how scary it was. Oddly enough, on the last sentence of Chapter 5, it says if you've done Step 3 and an inventory of your gross or handicaps, you've made a good beginning. All it is is a start. So if you're new here and you're scared of it, I urge you to just do it. It's been my experience. It doesn't even matter how long it is. The longest fifth step I've ever heard was 22 hours. The shortest was 15 minutes, and they're both dead because neither one of them continued with the rest of the work. You know, the third step will have a little permanent or lasting effect unless followed by a strenuous effort to face and be rid of the things that have been blocking me. And it's been my experience that the fourth step will have little permanent nor lasting effect unless it's maintained by the rest OF THE WORK. It just becomes some event, some big event. My life was a series of events. Not a life, just some stuff that happened. And this can just become in a little glass case. My sponsor at Six Months of Sobriety sat me down. He read Chapter 5 to me. He worked the first three steps with me, and then he went back and he gave me instructions on how to do a fourth step from the big book of AA. And there's a lot of, I don't know, controversy. A lot of people do it a lot different ways. I was told to do three sections of the inventory. I was called to do two or three columns of who I was resentful at, why I was resentmentful at them, and what the cause was. And my sponsor gave me a little kind of shorthand for it, which has been very good for me. He called it SPAPS, S-P-A-P?S, Self-Esteem, Pocketbook, Ambition, Personal Relations, and Sex. I'm resentful at my father for not playing with me when I was a kid. What does it affect? Did it affect my self-esteem? Yes, I put an S. Did it effect my pocketbook? Not really. I put a dash when it doesn't affect something. My ambition? Yeah, my ambition is to feel like a fully grown man or whatever. I put in A, personal relationship, absolutely. Sex, not really. So I just put a dash. So I always put a dashboard when it doesn't affect something and I put the initial when it does. And after a while with that shorthand, it was just helpful to me because I was able to write my resentments kind of in a more facile way. And then when I read them, I knew the shorthAND and I was abl e to spit it out that way. So that was one thing that he had me do. The other thing he had m e do is very interesting stuff. Number one, he asked me to ask myself every time I wrote something, is this resentment my fault? Now when I initially wrote my inventory and I came to him and I read my inventory, very few of these things were my fault. She knows the truth. And the fact is, if I finally am able to turn that corner and take a look at it, if I really realize the difference between the event and the resentment it is always my fault there is no possibility of the resentment not being my fault the event is a different case and it was so again so I can't for me when I went how could I have possibly sat down with my aunt and apologized to her if I had never separated the event from the resentment but I want to tell you that when I sat down with that aunt, and I apologized for refusing to open my wedding gift that she gave me in front of her so she would deny her the joy of seeing me open the gift. I mean, mean, means stuff, you know? And I carried that into AA. You know when somebody � I don't like certain AA speakers. I know you guys love all AA speakers, so we're a little different, but there's a few that kind of I find sort of annoying. So what I would do in the old days if somebody said, boy, I heard this guy. He was great. I really liked him. I'd go, oh no, you didn't like him. He's no good. You don't like Him. No, no. He liked Him. He just said he liked Him but why do I have to change His mind? Because I somehow have to character assassinate this guy and until I got it, until I did an inventory I did that a lot. I haven't done a thank God in a long time. If somebody likes somebody why would I possibly try to talk them out of feeling a little closer to God through somebody else? And that's what I did with my aunt. So he asked me to take a look at, was the resentment my fault? Which I found out was a trick question. And now you know the trick. And something that was really valuable to me, because in the description of the inventory, it says on page 66, sometimes it was remorse and then we were sore at ourselves and the resentments I had against myself were just remarkable now, I had a lot of resentments against myself, but don't get me wrong I hated you way more than I hated me I mean, I hated Me fine but nothing compared to how much I hated You I'm not a suicide guy I'm a homicide guy that's just where I go You go first. I vastly prefer your death to mine. I always have, and I am not knocking the suicide people. This is not a put-down at all. I just think it's sort of the flip side of the same coin, but I'm a homicide guy. But what he asked me to do was, every time I wrote a resentment, to ask myself, Scott, do you have any resentment against yourself in connection with this? And boy, it was really helpful to me. It really helped me. You know when a dentist goes in and sees a little pinprick of a hole in the tooth, opens it up, and there's like a cavern in there? There were certain areas of my life that I was able to gain entrance to in that way and say, oh man, the shame and guilt I felt around that was just unbelievable. So that expanded my inventory also. If you're new, I want to share with you now what used to be my favorite sentence in the Big Book of AA. And if you're new, it could be yours too, if you'd like it to be. It starts on the bottom of page 65 and continues to the top of page 66. And what they're assuming is that you have written down a list of resentments. You have written Down a list of what people have done to you. And they don't argue with you, okay? And they say, if you are looking at this list, they say the first thing apparent was that this world and its people were often quite wrong. that's all for today right and i just used to read that before i go to bed don't read the next two pages the next two pages will destroy your life okay because what the next few pages put forward is the following notion that you don't just not like stuff no No, no, no. You hate with a hot hatred that you wake every day in water like a little flower. You care for this hatred. You nurture it. You develop it. You gain, you pick up more evidence to support the hatred. You proselytize and try to carry the word about the hatred and perhaps get some converts over and bring them into the hatred pipeline. you hate with a hate that eats your brain and your heart and turns your life black and throws you out of your own life you don't just dislike stuff if you could just dislike something you'd be in very good shape just disliking is a lofty goal let that be something maybe you'll attain at a later point to just dislike someone Now, it says on that same page, it says something that so explained my life to me. It says that for every minute I spend in resentment, I'm squandering the hours that could have been spent in a more worthwhile way. And it's true. For every five minutes I spend of resentment, it's five minutes wasted. For every 5 minutes I spent of resentment it's 5 minutes that I could have fished or done something I really like. It says, I cut myself off from the sunshine of the Spirit. I drink again and for me to drink is to die. So it's also five minutes I've cut myself off from God. So every five minutes of resentment is 15 minutes down the toilet. And I just want to tell you what a powerful explanation that was for me. My life was exhausting. How many times have we heard people over and over again? I mean, it's the hallmark of AA. How can I do it all? I'm doing so much. Who the hell ever knew that I could do this? My life, I mean, who ever even thought it? Because my life was so exhausting, and I believe that's the explanation for it. When you're on that spiritual hamster wheel, when you're wasting that amount of time, it's just damned exhausting. And one of the things I've been set free in AA, and of course another common malady that we've seen in the program is when people start realizing themselves on that way, some of them, certainly not all of them then become disconnected to the reason why they're able to do that and they spin off and they get cut off from the foundation and some of em do quite well and some em drink and die and some om drink and suffer horribly and I had a sponsor who was an incredible example when he had a hard time he did more and when he did a good time he always did more so whenever he had tough times he never had to say geez I better start doing this he was already doing it you know, and what a great example for me. I've just always done more. And not because I'm smarter or a nice guy or anything like that. I can't tell you how many times when I was new, I heard people get up the podiums and say, you know. Things got good and I drifted away. And I just didn't want to be one of those people. I really heard it. I really heard loud and clear. Things go good and drifted away. So that's been a tremendous help to me. This description of how I experience resentment. Thank you for listening.