Step Two and Restoration to Sanity – AA Joe H Step Study – Part 4 of 11 – Joe

My name is Joe. I am an alcoholic. We do have a lot to cover tonight, and I'd like to kind of review what we've done so far. It helps me to be centered where we are. And I think everything we've covered up to page 43 is most of step one. And we talked a little bit last week about the second half of that step, the unmanageability of my life and different places where we find that in this book to help me look at the unmangeability of it. I think probably what I'm most grateful for is that both parts of this step were not given to me based on my life outside here. the circumstances that we did not find my disease in the result of my alcoholism you know, DUIs jail lost relationships that we found the disease within we found a disease in my body I can't control the amount that I drink once I start and we found my disease in my mind for some strange reason i can't seem to keep myself stopped because i suffer from obsessions that get me back to the first drink we began to look at what we are going to start to look at later on in step four the root of my disease which the book will tell me is a spiritual malady and that that's within and we looked at a guiding page for the unmanageability of my life which is page 52 where um i find those things within you know so what i'm saying is i'm real grateful they helped me find that not only the disease but the unmanageability of my life within because if i couldn't find it within i'd have to fix everything out in the world to make to make me better and even when that happened in my past it still wasn't all right inside now don't take me wrong when i say this but i've never really had a problem with step two now i've had some old conceptions like of a punishing god and a god that was keeping score that i had to put aside that i did have trouble with but i'd never really have a problem getting to step two once i've seen the first step now i had a problems with step 2 when i glossed over the first steps and didn't really experience the hopelessness of the powerlessness and the unmanageability of my life, I had a problem with step two. But I've really never seen anybody really having a problem with step one or step two that had a clear first step because there's nowhere else to go. I think the miracle of these steps is that each preceding one opens the door to the next. And I think there is a door between the first and second step and if I can really experience it, if I experience the first step, it takes me right up to that door and it's open. and it's not about acceptance. I don't think acceptance of the first step takes me into the second because if it is acceptable for me to remain powerless and for my life to remain unmanageable, then there's really no need for me to go on to the second step, to take it to God. But the admission, the experience of conceding to my innermost self the powerlessness and the unmanagability and the realization of that hopelessness took me to where there was nowhere else to go but to the second step if I wanted to continue to live so I think there really is a second step decision or choice made do you want to live or do you wanna die and if you've seen where your power has gotten you living now where are you gonna get some power I can't really see the insanity I can' t really go to the idea of being the need for being restored to sanity until I see the insanity. I can''t really go to the second step in a good mood and I'm not going to be open to the idea of being restored to sanity and that i need a power greater than myself to do that until i see that i am insane until i say that i can't restore myself to sanity on my own power so we look at the insanity of each part of the disease what's the insanity of the body well the insanity of the body is that i think i can control the amount that i drink if i take a little bit see i think I can take a little bit this time it'll be different I think I can have two drinks because I think i can control my body after I put some in it the insanity of my mind is that I can stay stopped I can keep myself sober now I can control the stop the insanity of my emotions is that I think I can fix them I can make him better and the insanity of my spirit is that i think i can fix that too that i can self will spiritual growth and then i can cheat i can treat this process i can make myself more spiritual and see all those things are insane i can't control how much i'm going to take if i take a little i can to keep myself stopped i can fix my emotions and i cannot self-will spiritual growth i cannot make my spirit well we once again use page 52 to look at the unmanageability of our lives i have trouble with personal relationships and that really has to do with how i see them and experience them within not am i in one or is it going on or is it satisfying is it the way i want it to be can i control my emotions can i make misery and depression go away can i makes that feeling of uselessness disappear can i make fear go away can i make myself happy you know we take we take those questions on page 52 and we um we ask ourselves now that i'm sober can i can i sit in a chair and fix myself on my own power and i was asked to look at what booze and drugs used to do when they were working and believe it Whether or not when the alcohol was working, it used to make all those things in the paragraph on page 52 better. It made personal relations okay for the time being. It made the emotions I didn't like go away. i wasn't so prone to misery and depression when the alcohol was working feeling of uselessness would disappear they asked me when we looked at the unmanageability of my life is now that I'm sober can I sit in a chair and do what booze and drugs used to do with my own power can I fix myself can I stop those things on page fifty two from happening i heard a story about the way alcoholics think about this old guy on his deathbed and he's been sober forever he's on his dead bed and his wife is right there with him and in his last breath he looks up at his wife and he says um honey you do you remember when i was shot and and you were right there and you stood by me and do you member that time when we lost all our money and business and you were right there and and you stood by me do you remember when I had my first heart attack and you were right and he stood by and you're right here today and you've used you've stood right by me and he said after all this time i've realized one thing you're a jinx you know and that when i heard that i thought you know that's really how i think how i used to view the world so i need to see the insanity before i can go along with the idea of being the the need to be restored to sanity i need to see that my mind is different when it comes to alcohol and drugs that it thinks it can control how much i'm going to drink if i start and it thinks it can keep me stopped and it things that can fix my emotions and it think that can make myself spiritual and what that it is is ego i think my ego has been so strong at times that it thinks it can exist without my body that i can die and it'll go on so i started i had to get a glimpse of that insanity before i could go along with the idea that yeah i'm insane and i need to be restored to sanity because i'm not you're not going to convince me i needto be locked up in the state hospital or i need a straitjacket or i need thorazine or shock treatment but i started to see that when alcohol and drugs are concerned and the way my mind runs my life that i'm strangely insane But I also needed to see that you take the alcohol and the drugs away, and I'm still insane because that's when my mind is really going to get me. That's when it's going to tell me I can drink again, and this time it'll be different. And that's where my mind will tell me you can run your life just fine on your own power. And that' s when my might will tell that it can fix me and that I can make everything all right. All I need to do now that I'm sober and the alcohol is out of the way is to exert my will a little bit harder and work on this and work on that and make myself a little more honest and make yourself a little moron selfish and everything will be just fine and I needed some time to see that that was futile you hear people talk about it all the time hitting a sober bottom so I hope if anything we have begun to see that lack of power is our problem and we covered everything up to the question on page 47 or they asked me a short question which I was told is the first half of step two and I believe if you have seen and experienced everything upto this page that the idea of being willing to believe that there is a power greater than yourself is more like a necessity rather than something that you have to work at I think you're right there, if you've really experienced this process up to this point. All I had to say is, yes, I'm willing to believe that there better be a power greater than myself. I did not take my second step on virtue. I took it out of desperation. And they tell me that as soon as I can say that I do believe or that I'm even willing to believe, they assure me that I am on my way. that it has been repeatedly proven among us that upon this simple cornerstone a wonderfully effective spiritual structure can be built see now we've put that first stone on the structure and the structure is the foundation that i have in the first step the knowledge of the problem and that i can't fix it and that first cornerstone like when they put a stone in a building and put the date on it that first cornerstone is willingness to believe that there is a power greater than myself we talked about a process to go from belief to faith and you don't just take the second step one day wake up the next day with absolute faith in this power that you really don't know yet or have had much experience with that it is a process. To go from a simple belief yes i'm willing to absolute faith and that that comes through the rest of the steps to make a decision based on this simple belief to take some action in four through nine after making a decision in step three to take some actions four through 9 and get some results and then based on those results i'll have faith you know i got to see it where most of us if you're anything like me we're hard-headed stubborn people that need to be shown i needed to be shown you take this and you put it in here and you mix it with this much and you chuck it down and things straighten out you don't feel so weird not a place and you're not so afraid and you go out there on the streets and you become whoever they want you to be i needed to see that that that was real i neededto get some results from booze before i had any faith in Well, it's the same way in this program. They start to ask me to put aside my prejudice and that I'm obstinate and I'm sensitive. They hope it's not a tedious process like it was for some of them. Well, for me, I think if I look at my life and we all look at our lives, that coming to believe that we can't do it and that we need some help has been probably a tedious process for all of us. meant jail and families and relationships and money and jobs it was a tedious process see i never thought that i looked at any of these ideas in the first two steps until i came to alcoholics anonymous i started to see that i've been dealing with the ideas inthe first two steps if not all of them way before i ever came to aa i'vebeen looking for power and ways to manage my life and i've come to believe in some some of the strangest higher powers you could ever imagine alcohol and drugs women sex and money they talk about this this practical individual of today like you and i and that i'm a stickler for facts and results that's exactly what we better get from this process of the rest of the steps we better get some facts we better give some something we can see and feel in our life you know don't just tell me nifty things in these meetings and then let me walk out of here and i can't put any of it to use something better happen in these steps to where i can see it and feel it in my life and then i better be able to direct it and use it this power better be that practical and they give a description of that in this in this paragraph on page 48 simply because it is impossible to explain what we see, feel, direct, and use without a reasonable assumption as a starting point. So I ask myself, what's the reasonable assumption? The reasonable assumption that we can use as a start-up or a starting-point is that God can and will and that I'm willing to believe that. On the next page they start to talk about the prosaic steel girder and that they're governed by precise laws and that these laws hold true throughout the material world. We have no reason to doubt it when, however, the perfectly logical assumption is suggested that underneath the material worldview and life as we see it, there is an all-powerful guiding creative intelligence right there. My perverse streak comes to the surface and I laboriously set out to convince myself that it isn't so. Well, the same thing happened to me in this program when they suggested the idea that within me, within each and every one of us, we would find an all-powerful guiding creative intelligence. That brings up something in me that I needed to look at why that bothered me, and it bothered me because of my old conceptions about—that I had been raised with. They asked me on the bottom of that page to lay aside prejudice, even against organized religion. Now I saw that I couldn't do that and I was very grateful for a prayer and I can't stress the importance of what this prayer has meant to me each time I've gone through these steps. Not just the first time, but from the very first time I was asked to use this prayer and I used it for several weeks each time. And that prayer is, please let me put aside everything I think I know about my disease, these steps, this program, and especially God, for an open mind and a new experience with my disease. With myself. With these steps. And with you. And the first thing my head wants to say is, well, you want me to throw all that stuff away. you want me to throw away everything i think i know and they didn't say that they said put aside that we would just leave the garbage behind and that whatever was true and whatever was of god would come back anyway and i've used that prayer each time i've gone through the steps and it's it's a it's very powerful prayer the middle of page 50 when they talk about one proposition that all these men and women are agreed on that every one of them has gained access to and belief in a power greater than himself this power has in each case accomplished the miraculous the humanly impossible well i think there's a key word there and that is access to you know how many of us in this room had belief in god power greater than ourselves different conceptions we came to this program with how many of us have had belief probably everyone in this room in their own way at different times but how many of us have had access to you know i that's what this process is about you know I choose a simple conception at the second step and I think pretty much the rest of this work is about gaining access to that power so I can see it and feel it and use it and direct it yeah I know that I had belief in even though it was messed up and and and it wasn't real uh useful for me but i never had access to a power because see that's when i'm those are the times i'm really going to need this program you know when when that next obsession hits me when i want to go do this or when i want to do that and i know it's wrong and i can't keep myself from doing it or i get an insane thought or i wantto do something i know is insane but i can't keep myself from doing it those are the times this work had better have given me a conscious contact that i can tap into and have actual access to some power that i don't have so i think they're telling me there i need a little bit more than just a belief in i need access to this power here are thousands of men and women worldly indeed they flatly declare that since they have come to believe in a power greater than themselves and to take a certain attitude toward that power and to do certain simple things there has been a revolutionary change in their way of living and thinking well that's very interesting because we have done one of those three things at this point in the second step since they have come to believe in a power greater than themselves we have begun we have began to do that just by being willing but what about this certain attitude i think they give me that certain attitude on page 55 and we'll look at that and i think after that it says and to do certain simple things means the rest of these steps in the face of collapse and despair in the case of the total failure of their human resources step one they found that a new power peace and happiness and sense of direction flowed into them this happened soon after they wholeheartedly met a few simple requirements there's another point in this book that tells me there's more than one requirement back in the chapter there is a solution they said it would be about confession of shortcomings and a couple other things that were required for a successful consummation leveling of pride and self-searching here once again they say that this will this will happen soon after i wholeheartedly meet a few simple requirements although there's only one requirement to be a member of the fellowship there is more than one requirement for me to be able to participate in this recovery process once confused and baffled by the seeming futility of existence they show the underlying reasons why they were making heavy going of life doesn't say the underlying reasons why i was making heavygoing of my drinking they say leaving aside the drink question they tell why living was so unsatisfactory now the underlying reason and we're beginning to get a glimpse a glimpse of that root that they'll describe on the next page the unmanageability of my life and the second half of that first step has very little to do with the first half unless i'm still drinking and drugging they're asking me to look at the underlying reasons why i was making heavy going of life you know maybe some of those underlying reasons are lack of power selfishness and self-centeredness and what they're going to describe on the next page when many hundreds of people are able to say that the consciousness of the presence of god is today the most important fact of their lives they present a powerful reason why one should have faith it's interesting it doesn't say there that when many hundreds of people are able to say that the belief in a power greater than themselves is the most important fact in their life they see the consciousness of the presence of god there's a big difference between just having a simple belief and experiencing the consciousness of the presence of god then they start to talk about theories and using my mind and how i used to be fettered with superstition and tradition all sorts of old fixed ideas and they equate it to how people thought about columbus and galileo and they asked me aren't aren't some of us just as biased and unreasonable about the realm of spirit as some of these ancient people were about the realm of the material you know and i have to look at has my mind been fettered by superstition what i was raised with in tradition and all sorts of old fixed ideas about what spirituality and and this idea of a power greater than myself meant and i was held back by a lot of old ideas when it came to an idea that there might be a god personal to me that could be found within and work in every area of my life then i want to pull out the old tapes he keeps score he's unjust he's punishing he's keeping track and he certainly gave up on me a long time ago for some terrible things that i did and they asked me to start to lay that aside to choose a new conception we get to page 52 and i'm not going to go into this paragraph again but they really get me down to my to the root of my disease and the unmanageability of my life in that middle paragraph when we look at personal relationships and can i control my emotions and can I make misery and depression go away and that feeling of uselessness and the idea can I makes fear go away on my own can I made myself happy they go on to say when we see others solve their problems by a simple reliance upon the spirit of the universe we had to stop doubting the power of god our ideas didn't work but obviously for these people that some of us have seen in this program the god idea did and we all find our eskimos we all find the people that that hold out that shining light for us in this program when we ask them how they did it and they and they tell us how they do it they talk about the right brothers beginning with a childish faith and that that childish faith was the mainspring of their accomplishment i was told that i have just begun the same way my childish faith is yes i'm willing to believe the next page they begin to talk about logic by the way i can also use that paragraph on page 52 for a guy today to see if I'm suffering from untreated alcoholism you know not only does that fit me before I ever took a drink and all the way through my drinking when the booze wasn't working but it's also another one of these pages that describes these symptoms of untreated alcoholism that I can look at today is that me today they start to talk to me about logic on the next page and they say that i like it i still like it it's not by chance i was given the power to reason and to examine the evidence of my senses and to draw conclusions you know that's really all we've done in the first two steps we've examined the evidence in step one we've drawn a conclusion i'm powerless my life is unmanageable we agnostically inclined would not feel satisfied with a proposal which does not lend itself to reasonable approach and interpretation i think step one gives us a more than reasonable approach and the idea that i get to choose my own conception in step two gives me an interpretation that's satisfying to me now the first step didn't satisfy me but it answered a lot of questions and but the realization of step one made me real uncomfortable but it answered a lot of questions i had in the back of my mind for years but i was satisfied when for the first time in my life i was told at step two that i could choose my own conception i never went anywhere where they didn't say i had to believe the way they believed now for the First Time i get to choose my Own Conception and even however inadequate it might be it would be sufficient to make a beginning we come to the second half of the second step the second major question in the second step, whatever you want to call it in the next paragraph when they say when we became crushed when we become alcoholics, crushed by a self-imposed crisis that we could not postpone or evade when I really see step one when I can't postpone it or evate it You know, I postponed doing something about my alcoholism for a long time because I didn't think there was any hope and I was just ready to die until one day that that was not acceptable. The powerlessness and the unmanageability in my life for the first time was not unacceptable because I did not want to die. But when I experienced the reality of the first step, I could not postpone or evade. I had to fearlessly face the proposition that God is either everything or he is nothing. God either is or he isn't. this is the second step choice it's probably about the last choice you'll have you'll make but you'll see you you later will have more choices in your life than you've ever had and maybe you'll experience that there is no choice over alcohol when you're spiritually fit and i do have more choices in my life than i've ever but really since i've taken the third step it's not about making choices it's about asking for direction but here we are at a choice you're either going to choose that this power is everything and it is or that it's nothing and it isn't now the first time i took this it was god is either everything or i'm nothing god either is or i'm screwed because i really had seen the first step um the times that i have gone through this work since then the idea of god being everything has been both terrifying and also filled with a lot of hope because see i want to doubt god in other areas of my life today and i have faced my agnosticism each time through the steps well i know he can take my alcohol and drug problem, but I don't know if he can work over here. I don' t know if we can work with business. I don''t know if you can work in a relationship and I'll just have to work on that myself. You know, I've had to face that agnostic part of me with other stuff each time I've gone through this work. But I've always had to come to this question. When I've seen the powerlessness of it, when I have been willing to believe that there is, I've always had to come to this question next. Well, is this power everything or is it nothing? Is it or isn't it? What's your choice? I even know a guy in Denver who went through this work and said that he made the choice of the second step, that God is nothing, and went through the rest of the work that way. But I don't want to do that. terrifying but i also know if i'm willing to face that terror what if he doesn't work this time i did look at that idea this last time through the steps from a man who sat down with me who does this work on a regular basis for 26 years and he said each time you go through the steps you get to the second step do you always look for why there should be a god for you personal in your life and i said yeah he said well why don't you look at the idea that this time maybe there won't be maybe you've gone to the well one too many times and as i said with the first step if i'm willing to face that terror i will come out on the other side with a new freedom because he's always been there and it's just made for a new experience but the idea that god is everything or nothing the first time took it out of my head to see what i would like to do after saying god is after after saying this what i'd like to do is then try to have them figure it out and put in a neat box and have it all wrapped up before i take the third step prayer because i think i have to understand god to take the first step but what i realized was if i can choose that god is everything there's nothing left to figure out intellectualize wrap up in a nice little box so i have it understood before i make a decision to turn my will and my life over to it there's There's nothing left to understand if God is, and he's everything. I can go on. I don't have to intellectualize this. I don' t have to figure out God to go to him. And if I could figure him out, I'd be him anyway, so that was kind of futile. But there was some relief there for me intellectually. There was also some emotional relief. I think the second step has always been for me about hope. is where they lay out the solution and then they're going to tell me in the rest of the steps how to find that solution they talk about arrived at this point i'm squarely confronted with the question of faith doesn't say i automatically have it they said i'm confronted with a question of fate i can't duck the issue i've already walked far over the bridge of reason my own thinking toward the desired shore of faith the outlines and the promise of a new land that i got in this program brought luster to my tired eyes and fresh courage to a flaging spirit friendly hands stretched out and welcome i was grateful that reason had brought me this far but somehow i couldn't quite step ashore perhaps i've been leaning too heavily on reason my own thinking that last mile and i didn't like to lose my support you know am i really free to let go without understanding at first see that's my pattern i come up to something that's a risk i learn everything there is about it and then that takes the that gives me the control because i have it all figured out and understood but am i really ready to make a leap of faith even though that's small bit of faith that i have at this step and it's really just a simple belief but am I really willing to let go you know like that old story about the guy who jumps off the the cliff halfway down he grabs onto a branch it saves his life and he's hanging there holding onto this branch and he he says a prayer to god and here's this voice from the clouds and and and the voice says let go of the branch and He thinks about it for a minute and looks back up and He says is there anybody else up there you know am I really willing to let go that branch and fall without knowledge of what's down there? This feeling is natural, but let us think a little more closely. They're asking me to let go of my thinking and they're asking you to think a Little More Closely. Without knowing had we not been brought to where we stand by a certain kind of faith. For did we not believe in our own reasoning? Did we not have confidence in our ability to think? What was that but a sort of faith? Yes, we've been faithful, abjectly faithful to the God of reason. So in one way or another, we discover that faith has been involved all the time. They're starting to help me see where faith and worship have been a part of my life. We found that we've been worshipers. What a state of mental goose flesh that used to bring on. Had we not variously worshipped people, sentiment, things, money, ourselves? And then with a better motive, had we not worshipfully beheld the sunset, the sea, or a flower? Who of us have not loved something or somebody? How much do these feelings, these loves, these worships have to do with pure reason? Little or nothing. We're not these things, these loves and worships these feelings these worship were not these things the tissue out of which our lives were constructed did not these feelings after all determine the course of our existence it was impossible to say that we had no capacity for faith or love or worship in one form or another we've been living by faith and little else maybe I need to find a faith in something that I haven't tried because I've tried most every kind person there's things i think they're helping me look at the idea that no human power can relieve my alcoholism and that god couldn't would if he was sought imagine life without faith were nothing left but pure reason it wouldn't be life but we believe in life of course we did we couldn't prove life in the sense that you can prove a straight line is the shortest distance between two points yet there it was could we still say the whole thing means it was nothing but a mass of electrons created out of nothing meaning nothing whirling on to a destiny of nothingness of course we couldn't the electrons themselves seem more intelligent than that at least so the chemist said hence we saw that reason isn't everything neither is reason as most of us use it entirely dependable though it emanates from our best minds well the lack of power was our problem and that question is where and how are we to find this power and they said that's exactly what the rest of this book was about main object is to enable me to find a power greater than myself which will solve my problems well i think this is the page that tells me exactly where and exactly how to find that power this is where the book answers itself and in these next two paragraphs that are going to tell me exactly how and exactly where to find this power. My favorite two paragraphs in the book. I heard a Catholic priest from San Diego who used to teach priests, and you know, who I'm sure read a lot of religious books, and he said, don't ever let anybody tell you that this book or this program is not dogmatic or pragmatic that the next paragraph we're about to read is probably one of the most dogmatic things he'd ever read when it came to God. It talks about here we've been fooling ourselves for deep down in every man, woman and child is the fundamental idea of God throughout my life that may have been blocked or obscured by calamity terrible things that happened by pomp my ego, by worship of other things but in some form or other it has been there. For faith in a power greater than myself and miraculous demonstrations of that power in human lives are facts as old as man himself. We finally saw that faith in some kind of God was a part of our makeup just as much as the feeling we have for a friend. This next sentence will tell me exactly how and the sentence after that will tell me exactly where. Sometimes I'll have to search fearlessly. That's interesting, they use the same two words as in the fourth step. But he was there. He was as much a fact as we were. That's how. Search fearlessly where? I'll find that great reality I've always been looking for deep down within. in the last analysis it is only there that he may be found yet we're going to sit in meetings and hear people say they just find God in the group or they just find God comes through other people or they find him in a lamppost or a tree or a light bulb of course God's in the meeting of course God comes through other people but thank God some of those other people told me that maybe I should look within myself and find the same thing that they had. And that the rest of these steps would be about searching fearlessly within myself to find this great reality I've always looked for and that I would find this power deep down within. And they've answered themselves from page 45. They've told me exactly how to search fearlessly and exactly where, deep down with them. And in the last analysis it's probably only there that he may be found. And they don't say probably. I found a promise there because I'm tired of analyzing. They said in the last analysis. That was just a key word for me because I'd been in an analysis for so long that I wouldn't maybe have to keep on going on and on and on analyzing it, trying to figure it out. Maybe this would be the last thing analysis as far as my search and I would know where it was and then from there it would really begin we can only clear the ground a bit but if our testimony helps sweep away prejudice enables you to think honestly encourages you to search diligently within yourself then if you wish you can join us on the broad highway and I think that's the attitude they wanted us to find from page 50 since they have come to believe in a power greater than themselves to take a certain attitude toward that power and to do certain simple things I think this is the certain attitude because they go on to say with this attitude you cannot fail so i asked myself what's that attitude if i can lay aside prejudice if i think honestly if i've been encouraged to search diligently within myself i can find god they tell a story about a minister's son and his experience it was sudden it's a good story and at the end of that story they go back to the same idea that was expressed in the story at the last chapter more about alcoholism this idea of choice that we've talked about since a couple chapters ago this idea of choice the story at the end of more about alcoholism on page 43 said I wouldn't exchange its best moments for the worst I have now I would not go back to it even if I could well the guy on page 57 says except for a few brief moments of temptation the thought of drink has never returned in such great times a great revulsion has risen up in him seemingly he could not drink even if he would there was no choice God restored that sanity what was this but a miracle of healing seemingly he could not drink even if he would circumstances made him willing step one he humbly offered himself to his maker then he knew and i don't think they meant that by circumstances from outside i think to me that means the realization of the first step and the circumstances that bring me to the second step. Even so, has God restored us all to our right minds? Maybe there should be a question mark there, rather than a period. To this man the revelation was sudden. Some of us grow into it more slowly, but he has come to all who have honestly sought him. When we drew near to him, he disclosed himself to us. i've heard people actually have the arrogance to say as i reveal myself to god he will reveal himself to me and i think that's pretty egotistical i think what they mean there is as i review myself to me he will review himself to you i mean what in the world is there left to review to god i think it's as i begin to see the truth he will show me the way I remember somebody saying that if I've run from the problem I've also run from the solution because if the problem was within the solution is within there's only one must there's Only One Must in this chapter on page 44 after a while I had to fearlessly face the fact that I must find a spiritual basis of life Thank you.