Honesty Equals Sanity – Paul M.

Thank you. Good evening. My name is Paul Martin. I'm a shy, sensitive alcoholic. I appreciate the chance to be here. It may help me overcome my shyness. Judy and I have had a great time here And we want to thank all of you Because it's really been an enjoyable time I don't go to a lot of conferences anymore And I'm very happy to be here Of course at my age I'm happy to do that I'm glad to be anywhere I sobered up when I was 25 That was 1947 In May I was 72 years old That's a lot older than I intended to be I'm going to start taking up jogging Because that's the only way I'll ever hear heavy breathing again for years I was afraid of dying young and now it's too late I stayed in one of those motels a while back that has a mirror on the ceiling and I woke up in the morning and I looked up and I thought I was being attacked by a giant prune Judy and I do want to thank all of you we've really had a great time it's a real pleasure to see some folks that I don't see very often anymore Judy and i met in the travel agency she was looking for the last resort any of you who are interested in losing weight there's the valium diet you take four valiums for breakfast and the food falls out of your mouth the rest of the day. I've really been... It's been a good experience here in the altitude because it gives me a preview of what it's going to be like if I ever get Alzheimer's. For those of you who are worried about Alzheimer's, there is one real benefit. You get to hide your own Easter eggs. I did a lot of things for a living through the years. I ended up writing for a Living, and I do quite a bit of traveling these days, and a while back I was in the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. It's about 600 miles west of Ecuador in the Pacific, and it's where Darwin got the idea for the theory of evolution from the giant tortoises and the finches. And while I was there, I learned that during mating season the giant tortoises get so excited they try to mate with large rocks. It's kind of like your average AA picnic. I spent quite a bit of my early years chemically enhanced. I did a lot of talking in tongues before it became popular. And I came to AA because, like many of us, I had no place else to go. And I had a great blessing the last time I got drunk, and it was August of 1947. and I could no longer lie about the state of my life. Probably the most honest I have ever been before or since because I've gotten in a lot of trouble since I've been sober by lying, cheating, and stealing. I made a great discovery after I'd been sober for a while. I got in a little bit of trouble and I got into a lot of dishonest business activities. I had a great deal of greed with very little talent and it looked like I might go to jail for a while with the year of sobriety and I talked to some friends and I said, I think maybe I missed something in this program. They said, my boy, you missed the whole program. They said you kept such an open mind that it blew right through. So I thought, well, I'll take a look at the big book. I've heard about it. It's sometimes said if you want to hide something from an AA member, the best place to put it is in the big books and I suspect that's correct. And I read it and it said do an inventory. So I did an inventory and I've done many fourth steps and fifth steps since. But I followed that with a fifth step and for the first time I really understood what the AA program was about. For the first times I understood myself and God and you in ways that I never would have without working the steps. 1948 in the spring I heard Paul Stanley talk in Chicago and Stanley said over and over in his talk he was the number 5 AA from Akron and he said AA is of itself sufficient and he says and he's said this again and again and I was not quite sure that was true because I felt some of us perhaps needed a little psychotherapy and Iwas coming to the conclusion that some ofus were destined for far more spiritual growth than others and unquestionably I was one of those so destined but as time has passed I have come to believe that what he said was 100% correct. AA is of itself sufficient. In the 12 and 12 on page 15 it says, AA's 12 steps are a group of principles spiritual in their nature which if practiced as a way of life will enable the sufferer to become sober and happily and usefully whole. And in my experience that is 100% correct. I have never seen an alcoholic and I get in trouble from working the 12 steps too soon. And I have seen many, many get in travel from working them too late or not at all. Going to meetings and not drinking do not treat my alcoholism. Working the 12 Steps treats my alcoholisim. If all I do is go to meetings and not drink eventually I suffer from untreated alcoholism that comes out as depression, anxiety fear, hostility, apathy, boredom? And the answer at that point is to use the answer that was always there. Work the 12 steps. The answer is not Valium or Librium or some endless therapy that they come and go with the seasons. The Answer is to Use the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Incidentally, did you see the divorce settlement between Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold, they get joint custody of 14 therapists, 700 pounds of Prozac, and a six-hour video of codependent no more. But I began to see, and this was with a year of sobriety, that AA had the answers that I needed. And I began to see that this is where I will get my answers. I've I had two problems that I look back on. I come from a long line of Lutheran ministers, and in spite of that fact, I believe in God today. I got too much religious education and too much secular education. I got educated way beyond my intelligence, and it didn't take too much to do that. I would have made Phi Beta Kappa if it hadn't been for my grades. But if I look at these stories of Bill Wilson, Earl Treat, and Dr. Bob in the big book, what I find is that Bill had his spiritual experience in the first week he was sober, led by Ebi to work the first eight steps of the program. Earl Treat was sponsored by Dr. Rob. He worked with Dr. bob in Akron and came back to Chicago to start AA there. Dr. bobs took Earl through what would be the equivalent of the first 8 steps in 3 weeks. Dr. Bob worked the steps himself. He got drunk and rushed out and started to make amends. I think if we want to sponsor people and really help them, get them right into working the steps immediately because those are the places that you and I will find the answers. Why do I, with almost 47 years of sobriety, keep working the Steps and going to meetings? I think initially we start because we're running from pain. Initially, we feel so bad that we will do anything, even work the 12 steps to feel better. And then we reach a point where we get comfortable. And I think then we have to make a choice. If we get uncomfortable and we start to get those things that we want, why continue to try to grow spiritually? and I think at that point we see a vision of a continuing spiritual experience that will give us a better life than we could possibly get any other way and I thank you for that. And I think that is the incentive and the goal to continue to do the work in Alcoholics Anonymous. I go to a working step group that meets on Wednesday night. It's a step group that the, well what's the word now? The desire and the work is to continue to work the steps and inspire each other to continue to work these steps. And what we find is that we get a lot of people who come to see us, some with a lot of sobriety, 10, 20, 25, 30 years of sobrietty who are in very, very bad shape because of untreated alcoholism. Four years ago I got a call from a man from Janesville, Wisconsin who was sober at the time about 22 years. he was suicidal he considered killing himself and he thought that was probably a bad sign so he called up and he had talked to me 10 years before and he said I'm thinking of becoming a counselor what do you think of it and I said well I think it's really a rotten idea so he went ahead and did it and he worked as a counselor in Janesville, Wisconsin and he was going to a psychiatrist who wanted to give him some pills and he knew that was a bad idea He had taken one fourth and fifth step when he sobered up, made few if any amends, came down to our meeting on Wednesday night. It was a Wednesday when he called me, and he began to work the steps. He took not one but many fourths and fifths steps. He began to make amends. He had an initial list of 30 people on his amends list. Very, very quickly he lost these symptoms of untreated alcoholism. His whole life changed for the better. The format of our group is that each week we take one step. We go from 1 up to 12 each week, or rather over a 12-week period. And we have somebody who leads the meeting and then everybody comments. And the comments are not real long because our experience has been that if you talk about what you actually know and what you're actually doing, it does not take very long. and a new person comes into that meeting and says I'm new or I'm sober 10 years and I feel terrible after the meeting the people converge on him and they get him started in doing the work we've had an awful lot of people come to that meeting in terrible shape and very very quickly they're in very good shape simply from working the 12 steps Dr. Vincent Dole was a non-alcoholic trustee He retired about 1976, and in his retirement remarks, he said that my concern for the future of Alcoholics Anonymous is that its principle of personal service may be eroded by money and professionalism. The AA message is a message from one amateur to another amateur. That's how it started, and that is how it works. in 1962 I read an article in the grapevine it was by a psychologist Dr. Hobart Maurer at the University of Illinois and Hobart knew a lot about Alcoholics Anonymous though he was not an alcoholic and he said that there is no such thing as a white lie any lie is a lie that gets us in trouble from my own experience I can tell you that's true. I've had a lot of trouble being smarter than I actually am, and I've got a lot more experience and I have had a ton of trouble trying to pull angles that just don't work. And I got to know Hobart quite well, and in 1973 I was writing an article on alcoholism, and I called him up and I said, Hobart, what do you think of psychotherapy for the sober alcoholic in AA? And Dr. Maurer, who has impeccable credentials in psychotherapy said if the alcoholic will work the 12 steps and develop the fellowship within AA this will be far more effective than any psychotherapy I know anything about. And what he points out is that AA will enable you and me to quit drinking but the 12 Steps will deal with those things that are wrong with us when we're sober provided we work and rework them. It's all here it's always good for me to remember that AA is where the clergymen come to find God's help to stay sober, and AA is where the psychologists and psychiatrists come to find the kind of group therapy that will bring them sobriety and order in their lives. We have a tendency sometimes to look in every direction except where the help lies, which is in the 12 steps. I used to hear it said that alcoholics are smarter than other people. I don't know where that came from, I know it was never started by anybody in Al-Anon. I think everything is connected to everything else. I don't think that if I lie, cheat or steal over here, I can avoid having it affect my life badly over here. And again and again, I have done something, for example, made an amend and suddenly my life gets better over here, over here I was sober a couple of years ago we had a meeting on, I think it was the 10th step. And I suddenly remembered that when I was going to high school, I had stolen a pair of football shoes. So I went to a high school in a little town down in southern Georgia. The town was so dull that if you took LSD, you'd have visions of Lawrence Welk. So, I called up the football coach and I said, I stole a pair of football shoes many years ago. He said, well, when did you graduate? I said, 1939. He said oh my God. So I sent him $200 with a letter but I have to continue to do these things and I do not believe I would be reminded of what needs to be done if I did not go to a meeting where people work and rework the 12 steps. Somebody has said that the ego is like a baby. It has a tremendous appetite on one end and no sense of responsibility on the other. In my experience, that's perfectly correct. And the only way I can deal with that is by working the steps, and I cannot do that without your help. I continue to go to AA because it gives me a better life than I could possibly have in any other way. Alcoholism is known as a disease, and that is a helpful designation. However, we have to be very careful when we look at it as a disease, because it's a disease which is not treated with pills, hopefully, and not treated with radiation and not treat with operations. It's treated with a spiritual program. It is treated with turning our will and life over to God. It is treating with searching in fearless moral inventories, confession to another human being, restitution, prayer and meditation and helping others. And when we call it a disease, we have to remember that this is a disease with a spiritual answer and a spiritual treatment. And to ignore the difference between this and other diseases is to deny the guts and the core of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Some years ago, I was on a board of directors that Dr. Maurer had. He got two grants from the Eli Lilly Foundation. MaurER had concluded that people break down because they have lived dishonestly, secretly, selfishly, and irresponsibly. And Maurer had been a strict Freudian, and he was a great believer in that, and then he got depressed and found that it not only didn't help him, it didn't helped anybody else. In fact, he used to tell this as a joke, but he was elected president of the American Psychological Association, and after he was selected, he had a breakdown, and they locked him up in the hatch. So he wrote them, and he said, you know, I really don't think I ought to be your president under these conditions. And they said, no, Hobart, that's all right. So he was installed as president of the American Psychological Association while he was being treated for depression. So Maurer began to study the work of Harry, Stack, Sullivan and others and he concluded that if we violate our consciences, we feel guilty. And then if we feel guilt, we get depressed and we get anxious and we have all these other problems. And Freudian psychology says you bring the conscience down to the behavior. He said bring the behavior up to the conscience. And he also said, and I had never heard this before, that there is great benefit in taking more than one fifth step. He said that the more people who know all the truth about you, the freer you become. You are your secrets. And if your secrets are bad, then you have all kinds of problems. And I thought, well, there's no way I can understand this. I had taken one fourth and fifth step when I was quite new, and I started to do that, and I found that my life improved in many ways that it had not improved before. And I also found that working with other people, another thing I learned from Maurer was that if somebody came to him to talk about themselves, he would talk thoroughly and completely openly about himself. He would take a fifth step with that person. And he said that's a very good idea because it helps the other person to open up. So in our group, we began to do this, and we found this very helpful also. We do a lot of work with fourth and fifth steps. We do all kinds of things together. We do lots of meditation. We do lot of amends. In our group we believe that men should take fifth steps with men and women should take sixth steps with women. We find that working on that basis there is less tendency to generate new material that requires additional fourth and first steps. but Maurer had these two grants back in 65, 6 and 7 and he had a lot of I was the only non-professional on his board and we had a guy named William Glasser you might have heard of years ago reality therapy and Glasser said a couple of things none of these professionals incidentally believed in therapy they said that people break down and a lot of people would rather be in the nut house than go out and work so they would rather be considered sick and I think we have certainly gone overboard on the designation of sickness to a lot of people who are considered sick when in reality all they need to do is go to work I think it was T.S. Eliot who said many people think they're emancipated when in realidad they're only unbuttoned so that in our group we began working with that and we began working with other people on that basis and it's remarkable the good results we got with this it keeps me in good condition I still exercise I know it's hard to tell but that keeps me in better physical condition and this continuing work with the 12 steps keeps me in better psychological and spiritual condition I spent some years well, I got out of the service I'd been a pilot in the Navy in World War II and it was part of the act. I'd done an amateur boxer before that and I had this act that I glued together. It was the athlete and the lover and the pilot and the general genius because if you don't know who you are you have to invent somebody and I got out of service. I've been a pirate I destroyed two aircraft in World war II they both belong to the United States Navy. A friend of mine pointed out if I'd gotten three more, I would have been a Japanese ace. So I got out and I tried to box and I tried to drink and then I got into AA and worked on construction and then I became a professional wrestler for three years. That's right, that's what I think. That's when television, that was about 1950, television was very new around Chicago. We had the only TV programs that were rehearsed at that time. And I did that for, I was telling some folks the other night that I was privileged to be in Bill Wilson's home on several occasions, and one time was 1951 when I was still wrestling. And I learned that Lois Wilson was a great wrestling fan and used to watch the shows out of Rainbow Arena in Chicago that I used to appear on. That's probably my only claim to fame. But I went to work on construction, and I worked on construction in northern Greenland at the Air Force Base in Thule. I worked in Iceland. I worked point Barrow, Alaska. when I was drinking people said I was a smart young fellow and if I quit drinking I'd go far and with four years of sobriety I found myself working as a laborer 850 miles from the North Pole which was a lot farther than I had planned to go but we didn't have a group I used to read the big book every day and I have read it over and over and over. I worked in Greenland in 51, 2, 3 and 4 and I worked on Iceland in 55 Fifty-six and seven, I was airport manager up in Point Barrow while they were building the dew line. We had an AA up there who always said he was unique. Nick, his father was Jewish and his mother was Eskimo. And he always said to his knowledge he was AA's only Jewskimo, and I think that's probably correct. But I read the big book many, many, many times. And you know the amazing thing is there's a phrase that something speaks to your condition. It's a Quaker phrase, and the big book does this. I can read it right now, and I will see something in there that I never saw before or perhaps before I was not in condition to understand it. So I really believe in the big books. I think probably if we charge $500 a copy, white people would pay more attention to it. But I didn't start out to be an alcoholic. I started out to being a clean-living American boy, and as you can tell, something went awry. I started out my growing up years in Oak Park, Illinois, which is a Chicago suburb. I'm the only professional wrestler our family has ever produced. One of my grandparents was a medical doctor. My other grandparent was a Lutheran minister, a doctor of divinity, who was a well-known Luther scholar and listed in Who's Who. My mother was a schoolteacher. My father was a Lucifer minister and a doctorofdivinity, also listed in WhosWho. He was also a very badly behaved alcoholic. I have an older brother and a younger sister, and when I was 12, my mother began fearing for her life, and she took us, the three children, and she went to a hotel for a week, and she left him a letter. And he went down, he obviously saw the letter and saw his lawyer, and went down to South Georgia where he had this sister. And that fall, he picked me up coming home from school and drove me down there about nonstop and entered me in school, and suddenly I had no contact with my friends in Oak Park or the rest of my family. And it didn't make me an alcoholic. I think it certainly moved it along a while. I don't know when I became an alcoholic because when I was 7 or 8 years old, if nobody was looking and there was some beer or wine in a glass, I'd snap up a gulp or two. And down there, when I got down to South Georgia, the town was too small to have a village idiot. We all just used to take turns. But my aunt had a liquor closet, and I'd pick the lock on her liquor closet. Then I'd take a drink out of the whiskey and add a little water and put it back in, and I would do that. I don't know where I learned it. I was probably an alcoholic in some previous incarnation. But when I was 14, I got drunk for the first time, and that was incredible. You know, I think with every alcoholic, when you get drunk, it registers, and you know that you don't have to be smart and you don' t have to take the Dale Carmichael course as the man said he took the Dale Carmihael course so he could remember names but all you need is the price in that bottle that's all I needed I had been an excellent student in Oak Park, Illinois and I got down to South Georgia and I was lucky if I could see straight I was in the same shape as a dyslexic nun who didn't believe in dog so I drank my way through high school and I started a college all my energy went into sports and I went to Emory University for a year and a half and left right before I would have been thrown out and I came back to Oak Park where my mother and brother and sister were headed another college World War II had come along, and I was boxing for a club on the west side of Chicago. And a lot of strange things began to happen. I was blacking out when I was 19 or 20 and starting not to remember what was going on. But if you're in good shape, and i was in good shape, why, you can, of course, throw that off. Later on, I used to have to jumpstart my liver. but the war had come along and I decided to be a naval aviator and I went in I can take a hint when I was a cadet I could only get drunk on weekends and of course when I got commissioned I could get drunk all the time I flew single engine seaplanes that were catapulted from cruisers and battleships. You went from zero to 60 miles an hour in the space of about 40 feet. It wouldn't cure a hangover, but it really took your mind off of it for a little while. I had a regular routine. I would get up in the morning and I would take my gagging exercises and then I would go down to the flight line. And somehow I never drank in the morning, because if you go to bed blind drunk at 3 a.m., and you get up to fly at 6, you don't need a drink, you need a seeing eye dog. And I'd wobble out over the gulf, and then come back in and get drunk that night. And i'd do this about nine nights straight. The tenth night, I would stay home and go to sleep about six, and get up about six in the morning, and dann I'd be in great shape again. In the summer of 45, I was 23 years old, and I drank all the time. I didn't eat too well, and my nutrition was off and I went into a Navy hospital I had pneumonia and went into DTs and I thought well that's interesting I got drunk before I got out of the hospital I had a couple of roommates in the hospital and one of them was a pilot in the photo squadron they brought him in about three o'clock in the morning drunk he'd gone swimming and he cut his big toe open on a piece of submerged metal he came in with a lady that we assumed was his wife the next day his wife showed up and it was somebody else the rest of the time I was in the hospital his wife and his girlfriend came to meet him to visit, they never met we figured that just goes to show that if you live right the Lord will take care of you when I was sober a couple of years I met a man who was sober awhile and he said when he came into AA he had a drinking problem and a marriage problem he said AA straightened out my drinking problem and my sponsor ran off with my wife which straightened down my marriage problem he said this program will work if you let it so I got out of service I ended up at Norfolk after the war ended and I read the 20 questions when I came to AA and I think I answered about 3 or 4 yes and then some years later I read them again and answered I think either 19 or 20 yes I was a little more honest but after I sobered up I heard about alcoholics being sensitive people and I recall that when I was in Norfolk a friend of mine had fixed me up with a blind date and in her honor I got blind I was starting to have a little stomach trouble and when we took her home we had to stop the car so I could throw up and then as I was walking her to the door I went behind a bush to throw up and then I was very hurt because she wouldn't kiss me goodnight so i started making the various experiments on quitting drinking i'd gotten lost at norfolk and they sent me to great lakes to get out of the service in december of 45 and i was separated and i traveled for three days and three nights to get to oak park where i lived which was 50 miles away and i decided that i'd go to cincinnati for new year's and instead i ended up drunk in milwaukee for three days. I was born there, I guess I went back to see what went wrong and I ended up on New Year's Eve I had drunk myself sober on New Years Day but I had a very traumatic experience I ended with what had to be the worst looking woman in the middle west she frightened me into six weeks of sobriety she looked like a million dollars and the only reason I say that is because I've never seen a million dollars and she looked like something I never saw before and I began running around trying to find answers for my alcoholism I tried drinking only after 5 o'clock and only on weekends and when I worked, if I took more than half an hour for lunch, they had to retrain me and I became a drunkard and I started buying all the books that will straighten out your life and I read one by a New York psychiatrist and he said we become alcoholic because we have too much pressure on the brain and he makes you a compulsive drinker and you have a lousy personality and he says by doing a spinal tap you have an alcoholic personality and you're no longer an alcoholic well I knew there was a lot of pressure on my brain because something was forcing all the hair out of my scalp I wrote him and asked him if anybody in Chicago could tap my brain and he said no, so I bought another book and I got Rabbi Liebman's Peace of Mind which was very popular at that time and it was very, very inspirational and I thought boy this is going to transform my life And then he committed suicide, and I thought, this is more change than I really need. So I bought Dorothy a Brandy's Wake Up and Live. And she said, act as if it's impossible to fail. You ever try that with the dry heaves? So I read all these books, and I ran in all directions, and nothing ever got straightened out. And I continued to drink. It was kind of like the farmer who came to the doctor, and he said, you know, doctor, there's a problem at home. My wife and I are having a very poor sex life. Is there anything you can help us with? And the doctor said, well, when are you most in the mood? And the man said, well, about 10 o'clock in the morning I'm in my tractor plowing and the sun is high and the air is clear. And he said a couple of times I've tried running home but I'm exhausted so there's no point in that. And the doc said, why don't you take your shotgun and when the mood strikes you, fire your shotgun. Your wife can come out to the tractor and see what happens. And so two weeks later, the farmer went to see the doctor. And he said, that was just terrific. He said, we're getting along better than ever. So a year later, the farmer ran into the doctor in town. The doctor said, how you doing? How's your wife? Farmer said, well, I guess you didn't hear. She's dead. The doctor says, I'm sorry to hear that. What happened? The farmer said, well, she ran herself to death during hunting season. Well, I just about ran myself to death trying to find some way to either stay sober or drink without getting into trouble. And I was always losing my car and I'd wander around. I think there's nothing more beautiful than an alcoholic who has been reunited with his lost automobile and I couldn't remember where my car was and I'd walk around and then I would find it and I would say, my car and I cry a little bit and then i jump in it and drive off and hit something but in january of 1947 i decided i was an alcoholic i had a great example in my father's drinking And I always used to say that I'm never going to drink like that. Or if I ever start to have trouble, I'll quit. And then I couldn't quit. And I went on the wagon knowing I was an alcoholic in January of 47. And I didn't want a drink. I knew it was the first drink. In April of 47, I was at a party and somebody gave me a 7-Up with booze in it. I'd asked for a plain 7-up and I drank it. I thought, well, I will jump back on the wagons tomorrow. And the next day, the wagon had left. And I chased it all over Chicago for the next four months. And I learned the other half of the lesson. I learned that the knowledge of my alcoholism is insufficient. If I am to stay sober, that's where it starts, but then I need help outside of myself. And I got drunk in August of 47, and I wasn't in trouble, but I could no longer lie to myself. and I called the downtown office in Chicago on a hot Saturday morning, and I talked to a lady. I said, I would like some information about your organization. I guess she thought I was from the FBI. And she said, is it for you? And I said yes. And she says, where are you? And I told her, you go home, and somebody will call you. And right away I had 8,000 places to go. I hadn't been invited anyplace for months. She said, this means a great deal to you, doesn't it? And I say, yes, ma'am. So I went home, and I waited, and a man called me in about an hour. And he said, come on over, and I went and talked to him. He was sober five years. And he told me what alcohol had done to him and what AA had done for him. And the next day, he took me to a meeting at the Austin YMCA. And I walked out. I did not feel any better, any different, but I haven't had a drink since. So something happened. And I have experienced what I would have to call the miracle of Alcoholics Anonymous one day at a time ever since. Frequently in spite of myself. Frequently en spite of oneself. Nobody can throw me out of AA, but I can throw myself out if I live in a way consistently that is contrary to these principles. And I will guarantee you it does not work very well. AA is about change and I started to hear about change. My sponsor was a good guy, but he never told me what to do, and I could not figure out what the questions were. I think if I could have figured out the questions, I could Have figured out The answer. And I wandered around, and I finally blundered into Doing that inventory in that fifth step. And then I began to make some amends. And I began To understand a little bit About what the program was about. I came into AA, I was a fallen-away atheist, I didn't believe in anything. but I was not fighting the idea of a power greater than myself and I was very grateful to hear that nobody in AA argued about whose higher power was higher because the way I had been brought up they said if you don't believe this way you will be part of an eternal marshmallow roast and you might be one of the marshmallows and when I would ask why they would say that's because God loves you and I rather quickly decided I could live better with less cosmic affection. But I came to AA and I came to believe and I started to work the steps. Sponsorship in the view of those of us who go to the group that I belong to is sitting down with somebody if he's brand new and showing him and taking the third step aloud with him like it says on page 63 and helping him do an inventory and then swapping a fifth step with him if he wants to take one with me and encouraging him to continue to do this, because I long ago gave up the idea that one-fourth and fifth step was adequate. I have seen the results of continuing to do isso. What I talk about tonight is what I have experienced. If you don't want to do it, that's fine with me, but if you have not tried it, there is no way you can possibly understand what it will do. Craig, I think it was the other night, talked about that quote from Herbert Spencer, the only guarantee for everlasting ignorance his contempt prior to investigation. So I began to do these things and I began to change and I began to understand that really here is what I need to do. These things will change my life. I heard about one man who changed a great deal. He got to be 80 years old and his kids had left and his wife moved out. He'd worked 80 hours all of his life so he got a new toupee, got his face lifted, got some thousand dollar suits and a new Mercedes. The first day he put the whole thing together. He put on a toupee, a new suit. He got in a Mercedes and he drove four blocks and he got killed in an automobile wreck. And he went to heaven. He says, Lord, why did you let it happen? All my life I never had any fun. I'm finally going to enjoy life and I got killed. Why? The Lord said to tell you the truth, Charlie, I didn't recognize you. So I began to work the steps. I had a long bout with being, when I came back from Greenland, or rather Alaska in 59, I found that they were doing a lot of things in AA they had not been doing when I left. They were having banquets and delegates and committees and so forth and conferences and there was a clique that ran them. So I got my own clique and ran everything I could get my hands on and very quickly became a legend in my own mind and I had a strange experience because I started having bad relationships with people. A lot of people did not understand God's will when I explained it to them. So I found myself in 1968, sober 21 years, not in very good shape And I went to a meeting, and a couple of us had a Coke afterwards. And one of the men in the group was somebody I sponsored. And he was sober about three years. And I was explaining how he felt. And he said, well, why don't you write out a new list of people you've harmed and go make amends to them? Well, I thought that was poor advice to give to one of AA's leaders. But I thought if you ask for advice, try it. I wrote out a list, and I had 12 people on there that I had harmed sober. not because I'm a sick alcoholic or a victim or suffering from a disease but because sober I can be just about as manipulative and angry and hostile and dishonest as I ever was drunk. In fact, I can do a better job now. So I made amends to those 12 people and that brought me to something I had been trying to do for years. I hadn't seen my father since 1941 and now we're up to 68 and I knew he was sober I used to call him and suggest that we get together. I believed that perhaps 99% of the harm in that relationship was on his side, and yet I understood also if there is an important relationship in my life and it's sick, I'm going to be sick until I do everything I can to make it better. So after making those amends around Chicago in October of 1968, a business trip came up to Miami, and on the way back I stopped in this little town and I had called the man in the directory. I used to play baseball with him, he was a judge then and I went and visited him and then I went to see my father unannounced and I rang the doorbell. He was then about 82 and he came to the door and I made an amend to him and then told him who I was and I said I'd like to come in and talk with you and he said come in and we talked for maybe 25 minutes. That was October of 68 and March of 69 I had the feeling I should go see him again and I did, unannounced, and we visited for another 25 very, very painful minutes. I went home, and two weeks later he died, and I went to his funeral, keenly aware that if I had not gone to see him when I did I would have missed an opportunity forever. Easy does not always do it. If anybody here has anything like that in your life, do it now, because a month from now the opportunity might be gone forever. everything is connected to everything else after that second visit I was having a quiet time home in Riverside and it was as if a layer of my life had peeled away and suddenly I saw another ten names that went on my eighth step from before sobering up that I had never seen before over and over I have seen one thing to do in the program and then if I do it I immediately see something else to do and then do that it continues to open. And I think that no matter how long I live, I will always have things that I can do in the program that will make my life better, will enable me to wake up and become a sane, conscious, useful human being. So I continue to work the steps through the years. And where I am today when I sponsor somebody, I don't try to function as a therapist or a guide or a spiritual guru, I spent a lot of time looking for a guru and then I spent a lot OF TIME trying to convince people I had already become a guru. There's a big guru market in AA. But I don't tell anybody how to run his life. My experience has been that if this person will work the steps, he will find all the answers he needs. As he changes through the steps he will find everything he needs there is no reason that somebody who makes an amend and was unemployable suddenly can find a job. I've seen that happen over and over and over. It's happened to me. Most times in my life, the quickest way out of a problem is through the 12 steps. And the group I belong to is the key to my program and my life because without them, I would not remember what I need to do. So we spend a lot of time working with people and we don't have them paint our fences. We don't have them do our cars. we just have them work the 12 steps and that's the message I see in the big book and that is the message that Abby carried to Bill that Bill carried to Bob that Bob carried to Earl Treat and thatis the message that we try to carry in this continuing working step group we have a lot of sobriety in that group we've got people with more than 40 years we've gotta number between 30 and 40 number between 20 and 30 all the way down to less than a year. So when I sponsor somebody, we talk about step two. I think that honesty equals sanity. And I think also as I go along, I conclude that only the spiritual life is sane. All of these other things that I have pursued that I thought were real never were real and finally never were important. We take the third step a lot. I take the first step a little bit more often. I take it every morning at the beginning of my meditation. I use the third step that's in the big book. And I also take Step 7 aloud with myself in the morning as part of the beginning of meditation. We do a lot of work with Steps 4 and 5. For the inventory, we use the seven deadly sins, as the 12 and 12 suggests. We also use resentments, dishonesty, selfishness, self-pity, fear. And we suggest that the individual write a thorough inventory looking for where he is wrong. I've taken five fifth steps this year. I'm not trying to set a record, but a lot of people have come to me and wanted to swap a fifth step, and I swapped one with them. I always find that it is beneficial. And again, if you haven't tried it, you cannot possibly understand it. We then swap fifth steps, and if this man I work with wants to swap the fifth step with me, we go ahead and do it. I encourage him to continue to do this with other people. I try to take Steps 6 and 7 daily at the start of my meditation. Step 8, we suggest that the person list everybody he's ever harmed, alive or dead, whether he wants to make amends to them or not. We've noticed through the years that a lot of people will make amens, but they really hate to pay back money. So we suggestthat on the eighth step, if there is money that is owed, why list the amount and always on alongside the names list the names of the people and i have again in my own life you can say this is step 10 i don't care what you call it but my experience in doing this over and over has been tremendously beneficial and we've had a lot of people come in i had a man call me i met him at a conference in toronto in 1984. He was sober 24 years, totally out of his mind. And he heard about untreated alcoholism and he had tried therapy and everything else imaginable. He came down for a weekend with an inventory. And on that weekend, he swapped eight fifth steps with eight people from our group. He went back with a written list of people to make amends to his eighth step. And again, what we have found is that the compression of fifth steps really breaks people loose from things that have been bothering them. Depression, anxiety, these kinds of things invariably respond to that kind of effort in the 12 steps. And he went back and he started to make amends. And he had one of them, he was married, but there was a lady who had become pregnant years before he got married, and he had abandoned her. and this was something he wanted to do something about but he didn't know what to do and he made the amends that he could find and he kept trying to find this woman and one day he was having an art exhibit near Toronto and this woman came up and tapped him on the shoulder and it was her but I think those kinds of things will invariably happen if we do what we can do if we continue to work and rework the steps because guilt burns up vitality If I am not working the steps and freeing me from the dishonesties in my life, then I'm not going to have the energy to live the kind of life that I would like to live. My experience has been generally I'm forced into doing these things. It's kind of like the Marine who was in the saloon and suddenly let out a shout and he flattened this lady, this old man next to him with a karate chop. Let out a yell, he says, I'm a United States Marine and that's karate from Japan. Little old man got back on the stool and started to drink some more. Suddenly, the Marine jumped up, whacked him again, let out a shout, and he said, I'm a United States Marine, and that's karate from Japan. About a half hour later, the bartender looked up from mixing drinks, and he saw the same little old man wandering in, but he was busy and didn't pay attention, and he heard a thud. And he turned around, and the Marine was unconscious on the floor. As the little oldman left, he stopped in front of the barteller. He said, when that so-and-so comes to you, tell him that was a hammer from Sears and Roebuck. When I went up to Greenland to work in 1952, I had experimented with meditation some and I began meditating an hour and a half a day up there. And the meditation is part of my Step 10 because I try to take step 10 at the beginning of the day, at the begining of the meditation. And I think step 10 can be expanded to include more than simply what I have done wrong. I think it can be extended to take a look at my life and see what I'm doing with it. Do I really believe that the spiritual life is important? Do I believe that it's important to work the steps and work with others? Years ago I started tithing, not because of good motives because somebody said it would improve my financial condition, which was terrible. I was giving 10% of almost nothing, so it was quite easy. I was sober about two years, and I continued to do that through the years, and I found it tremendously helpful, tremendously beneficial. I give to things like the Working Boys Center in Quito, Ecuador, the Hadley School for the Blind, or those kinds of things. And what I find it does is that it levels out my income so that I always have enough. I may not always have as much as I want, but then I never need as much as I wanted. So step ten is a part of the beginning of my meditation. And when I was up in Greenland, I began to do that hour and a half a day of meditation, in addition to working ten hours a day, seven days a week for eight or nine months straight. I made an interesting experiment, awareness up there, because I found that if I went to work at seven in the morning, and worked till noon, and then I had lunch and went back to work from 1 to 6. Every two weeks they paid me, and this was called earning a living. I had never understood that before, but I continued to meditate, and I had made a lot of experiments with prayer to get my own way. Nothing has made me happier than getting my own way, than frequently getting rid of what I got when I got my own way. And I began to pray as Step 11 says, praying only for knowledge of God's will in the power to carry that out. And I began to understand, in my experience, that the quality improves with the quantity. The more I do, the better the quantity, the quality of the meditation. Meister Eckhart, who certainly knew something about prayer, said that when I pray for something, I do not pray. When I pray for nothing, I really pray. And what I have found is that when I put in enough time asking for nothing—simply taking a phrase or a word, turning my thoughts back to it no matter how much they wander that my life improves. It gets calmer, it gets simpler. I get those things that I need and get rid of those things that I don't need. Bojack was a lightweight fighter in the 40s and he was a light weight champion about 44. A very religious man. He was a black man from the Augusta Country Club in Georgia. And Bill Hines asked him one time if he prayed and he said yeah. And Hines said what do you pray for? And Bojack said, I pray that it'd be a good fight and nobody gets hurt. And Heinz said, don't you pray to win? And BoJack says, no. If I pray to winner and the other boy prays to win, then what's God going to do? And I'll guarantee you he knew a lot more about prayer than I did when I was reading all those books for expanded consciousness and expanded spiritual stature. So the message that I understand is simply that I help another alcoholic work the steps Martin Buber, the Hasidic scholar, used to tell the story about Rabbi Zuzia. And Rabbi Zusia was an obsessive admirer of Moses and constantly berating himself because he did not live up to his idol. And one night he had a vision while he was sleeping, and a voice said, When you die, you will not be asked why were you not Moses, but why were you not Zuzio? AA will enable me to become what I should be. I don't have to be somebody else. For years, my identity lay in the eyes and minds of other people. And that isn't the case anymore. Who I am is good enough. And if I work the steps, maybe it can become better. The 12-step is summed up in the experience of a man that bounced around AA for a number of years drunk. And then he came back, and this time he came to our group and he began to work the 12 steps, and he became a man. He began to change. He had three boys. The youngest was eight years old, and he was in a class for retarded children. The father was an incredibly badly behaved drunk, and the boy couldn't learn. And as the father changed, he came into our group in January of 71. And asthe father worked the steps and changed, the boy went from a classfor retarded to a regular class doing average work. And asthefather continued to work the steps, the boy did better and better. He graduated from high school when he was 18, and I had lunch with his father, and i said, how did your boy do in high school? The father said he made the honor role every grade period but one. He was a varsity football player. The father says he wasn't retarded, I was retarded. He said none of that would have happened if all I had done is quit drinking and not work the 12 steps. And that's the message that I find in Alcoholics Anonymous by working and reworking every one of these 12 steps, if you and I change through the program that change will be reflected in the lives of everybody around us. I learned it from you and am with you because I would never forget it or I would never remember it without your help. Thank you very much.