Step 2 and the Sanity to Realize I Am Not in Charge – Bill C.

Hey everybody, I'm Bill. I'm an alcoholic. My sobriety date is March 27th, 1985. I am very impressed by that. And our last speaker, Linda, what a story. Man, that girl should never drink again. That would be a real mistake. I love men's stories. And one of the things I truly love about Alcoholics Anonymous is the stories of redemption, of transformation. You know the place we come to where we are now it's pretty remarkable and you know the 35 years I've been around I've never been bored. I've mistreated a lot. I don't get the respect I deserve on a regular basis but I have never been board in AA and if you're sitting out there today and you're bored it's because you're boring it's not us you can't make this up man i think i stayed sober a while just on the stories geez you know like how are these people why do they tell these stories and i keep that to myself you know and uh but we do we laugh at the tragedies and we cry at the successes isn't that interesting you know that's one thing about That's how you catch alcoholism when you come to AA. If you laugh, you're screwed because they don't get this down at the Rotary Club or the Kiwanis, you know? It's like if you start laughing, you are in trouble. You know, you get the joke. You know I was – this is a strange time we're in. You know this is Armageddon. We have fires. We have hurricanes. We have viruses. We got political insanity. sanity. We got riots. We've got it all. God hates us. This is the end, you know? And Alcoholics Anonymous is a safe place to retreat to. And we are children of chaos. We get chaos. Matter of fact, a lot of us feel really alive when there's a lot OF chaos. But isn't it interesting? They took away our meetings. My God, what are we going to do? You know, my home group is the Hermosa the beach men's tag now i've been going to that meeting for 35 years i'm afraid not to you know i mean it seems so far it's working pretty good it's the home group it's where a lot of my buddies are a lot on my sponsees my sponsor was in there for years till he moved and i feel a real connection to that and every monday the meetings it's a real aa meeting it starts at 8 30 it's an hour and a half with no break those are real alcoholics not all these one-hour things i don't don't know what they are but it's a light you know i mean it's got to be an hour and a half and it's going to be too goddamn late you know so you got to really want to be there right and uh so we get there a bunch of us about seven o'clock and we have a smoking area they set up for us you know out in the parking lot you know with some chairs and stuff we smoke cigars and and talk stuff you know for an hour иная before the meeting then you hang around for about another another half hour, 45 minutes, because I'm too old now. I can't do until 3 o'clock in the morning anymore. But it's a five-hour ordeal, you know, a four to five-heure thing to go to that meeting. And I've been doing that for 35 years. I rarely ever missed unless I was sick or out of town. And when they took away our meetings, I, like everybody else, thought, oh, my God, what's going to happen? What are we going to do? What's goingto happen to the newcomer? What's gonna happen? And within a week, we were on Zoom. Zoom. The young guy stepped up and said, we have the technology. You know, we will guide you through this process. And we were on Zoom and it was kind of clunky at first and then it got better. And then we started a step study on Wednesday night. And there's a meeting that used to be in my house on Tuesday night. So there's three meetings in a row that Hermosa Beach Men's Stag runs these meetings. There's guys in our meeting now that have got their first meeting was on Zoom. And you know. A lot of the old guys, a lot of older guys or some guys, I don't like this Zoom thing. I don' t like this zoom thing. I'm just not going to do it damn it you know and so you reach out and try to help them get on it and you know some people turned around but the other thing I've seen it happen is you know a lot o fpeople there's what I'm an extrovert. What about the introverts where it's hard for them to get to meetings? It's hard they don't like being around a bunch of people you know you have to make themselves do it. But now all the introverts are on Zoom now, man. It's like, you know, and all the older people, you know, they have a hard time getting out now there because they're older. They've been sober a long time. You go on somebody's meetings and my God, you know? It's a lot of fun. It's kind of like a convalescent home. They're all in there, you know? I see you out there now. I see Joan. Hey, Joan. And I mean, it's really cool. Joan's a rock star now, man. She's speaking all over the damn world, you know. Isn't that cool? I mean who knew? Who knew that that would happen? And I believe, my feeling about it now, I think Zoom has given the world more access to Alcoholics Anonymous than it has ever had. It's changed the face of this fellowship. And I think it's been much more of a positive thing than a negative thing. And I miss you. I miss sitting in the room with you. I mean, being a speaker dude, I miss the audiences. I missthe crowd and the energy that comes from that crowd. I missyou. you I miss being around hanging around you but this zoom thing is pretty cool you know it's pretty cool it's weird looking at yourself while you're talking though I tell you that you know how do I look am I as good looking as you thought I'd be so my story is I was a surfer and a biker and a tough guy and i rarely went to the beach my motorcycle rarely ran and i was afraid to fight but i looked really good i had a chrome nazi helmet for a hat and a primary chain for a belt black greasy levi's big black boots with chains all around them i've got tattoos all over me but i had clip-on earrings i didn't want to hurt myself you know and uh my biker nickname was was horny. I have it tattooed here on my arm, and it's misspelled. It's H-O-R-N-E-Y, horny, with an exclamation mark for emphasis, you know? So that's pretty much all you need to know about me, isn't it? By the time I was 17, I was a bad drunk in high school, You know, like most of us, I think, not everybody, but most of us started drinking around 13, 14, 15, somewhere in there, you know. And, you know, we have a few beers down and then finally you get the job done, you Know, and about 14, I really started going after it. You know? I can remember, you Now, like Linda talked about hanging around with the weirdos by the liquor store and you can find some old creepy dude that will buy us some beer. We would do that. You know, there was a guy that slept behind the gas station in Westchester and we'd go get him and give him some extra money. And he'd go to get us a six pack of beer and keep the change. And we would do our drinking, you know, and then you really get it done. You start going after it. And I went down the rabbit hole. Some people drink successfully for a while and then cross the line. You hear that story. And then there's the rest of us that just went right down the chute, man. I mean, just right away. By the time I was 17, I was a bad drunk in high school. I had a big jacket and a slouch and a sneer and a foul mouth and a bad attitude, and I carried a gun. And I'm from the mean streets of Palos Verdes. Man, there's no gangs in Palos Vertes. Nobody was looking for me. I was a gang of one. You know, it's like I have no idea what that was about, you know, but it looked good to me, you Know, being a gangster. I wanted to be a tough guy, andI wasn't, so I looked like one. And I'm big, I'm six foot five, you know, and I can play the role. So I was a role player. It seemed real, you Know, but I look back on it now, and it just, it was a role. Now, every speaker that tells a story, usually there's a common thread. And one of the common threads is, long before I ever drank, I felt weird and strange and weird. Some people will use the term that I had alcoholic thinking long before I drank, as if there is such a thing as alcoholic thinking, you You know what the professional community says about us? They say that we are emotionally immature. And we hear that and we go, no! I have alcoholic thinking. I have special thinking and it's never going away and you need to consider that when you're dealing with me. You know after 35 years of relatively deep research I think me therefore you are just emotionally immature mature. I don't think we're that exceptionally neurotic, you know? But what happened to us is right in the middle of the learning experience, right inthe middle when you're learning the sophisticated aspects of getting along in society like how to be a lover, how to be a friend, how do deal with authority figures, rightin the middleof that, we medicate ourselves. I certainly did. I medicated myself and I didn't get to AA till I was 37 years old. You know, I wanted to stay out there and make sure that I didn't make a mistake and get sober too early, right? So I waited until I was 37. And that was 22, 23 years of just beating the living shit out of myself, you know? I mean, at 17, I was a bad drunk in high school. By the time I was 22. I was in the Oregon State Mental Institution. It was the 60s, you remember the 60's? And I kind of remember some of it. i've told so many stories about it that i had to quit doing it because i'm really not sure exactly what happened but i made up some pretty good stories i'm pretty sure i did not live with joan baez you know but i said i did for years and but i was in san francisco in the summer of love i was there i was hammered i missed it you ever been somewhere where something really cool was happening and you know that you were there because there's evidence that you Were there You know what year it was, and you have vague memories of it. That was me because I was hammered. I met her. We went up to Oregon to grow our own, and we ended up getting married and had two kids, and by the time I was 22, I was running with an outlaw motorcycle gang. I was sticking needles in my arm every day, drinking like a fish and not coming home to that family, and they were on welfare, and it was awful at 22, short party, short partying. you know that feeling of separation and difference we felt when we were kids that everybody talks about we talk about it like it's an aspect of alcoholism i don't think it is i think every kid feels weird it's part of growing up you know the ego presents itself at about two and a half years old we have a term for it we call it the terrible twos right prior to that the little kid has no consciousness that there's any separation between it and anything then about twoandahalftheego presents itself like it does in every single human being on the planet ego is part of who we are it's not the enemy it's not trying to hurt us it's there to create separation so that there can be reality subject object me and them and the kid realizes when I cry they come you know so it starts crying a lot because it has a lot of needs and if it lives in a relatively decent home it gets its needs met and this is sets the stage right and we become this you know and this feeling of separation that we have growing up in elementary, trying to get along, trying to figure out how to dress correctly, all the stuff. And we look across the room and we compare ourselves to other people. And then we attempt to emulate them so that we can be in the in crowd. The extroverts get really into that the introverts go hide out and play video games and read books, you know, we each of us has our own way of dealing with this trying to try to integrate into the world. Right? So I think the whole idea behind the drinking thing, if I remember remember correctly, is we feel this feeling of separation and not part of it. And then we drink and that feeling goes away, right? I mean, we have, we get a hit out of it that other people don't get. Carl Jung said spiritus contra spiritum, you know, finding spirit through spirit, you know. We have some kind of an awakening and we get bigger bang out of it than other people get. Doctor's opinion, alcoholics drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol no it's like it was really cool you know so we have we i think the whole idea then was to have a couple of pops and get out of the house and go have some fun i ended up naked in my living room watching religious television taking notes all right i'm having sex manaja uno there's like no one else in the room and it's like we're it's getting serious now i mean you don't need any proof that alcoholism is that's physiological other than that last three to five years that you and I were out there. No one would consciously do that to themselves if they had any choice in the matter at all. I mean, there is no party. When I got sober, there had not been a party in a long, long time, right? I mean even Thiebaud, in the Thiebault papers, Thievaud described us as king baby, right, king baby. So I walk into AA at 37 years old. I walk in to Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, I went to a recovery program in 30 days and I get out and I walk into AA. And a good day looking back on it, I probably had the emotional development of maybe a 16-year-old. And this kid was not an honor student. He's not the one that's mature beyond his years. He's the one with a bit of a problem with authority, that kid. Remember him? him. You know, that was me. And I'm scared to death. And I don't even know it. I don''t know that I'm afraid. I think I'm angry. I mean, and you've taken away my medication now. And that rage I had since I was a little kid, it comes roaring back, you know, it really never left. My parents sent me to a shrink when I was 13 years old because I had rage man, you would tell me I couldn't do something and I would flip out. I mean, I had a physiological response to that. I would double up, fall on the floor on my knees. The bile would come up in my throat and I would bang my head into walls and punch things. It was my mother looked at this boy. There's something wrong with the boy, you know? And on top of all my other problems, I grew up in AA. My dad got sober in 1954, right? You know, my mother helped found the Al-Anon Central Office in LA. LA. So on top of all my other problems, I was raised by two people with clear eyes that knew exactly what was going on in my head. I don't wish that on anybody. It's like, Jesus. So my parents were nice people. They weren't bad people. And I was an only child. I grew up in a middle class household. My dad was a hardworking guy, depression kid. There is no rational explanation for me being an alcoholic other than the fact that my dad was and his entire family was i mean there's there's a genetic predisposition but for the rage i mean nobody beat me or hit me nothing was like that was going on where does that come from well one thing i've learned in aa is all i need to know about my childhood is it's over and it was extraordinarily long long well into my 40s and 50s my wife would say my 60s right and now I'm in my 70s I think I'm better finally you know I might have grown up somewhat I think, I believe I've been transformed but it was a slow slog you know. I mean primarily what's going on when you and I get sober is we're gonna grow up now and we're late right it's like the chances of us doing that looking good are really slim, you know. And I have the clown suit in my closet. I keep it dusted off, you know. Lately, I haven't had to put it on too often. But over the years, I've wore the clown suit a lot. The big shoes, the red nose, the whole thing. Eight or nine years sober, I'm coaching nine-year-olds in soccer. My kids are growing up, right? I get thrown off the soccer field for going after the referee for a bad call. Stuff like that, you You know, I was coaching some nine-year-olds one time and they were really bad. And at halftime, they were down like five or six to nothing. So I gave them a lecture on personal pride. I said, you got to go out there and start knocking people over or something. You can't just let them beat you like this. And so the game starts back up and they get another goal scored against them. This is in a middle school. We're in a middleschool on a field in a meddleschool. The parking area was the basketball courts, right? And I parked my Harley there because I'm a badass, right? So I walked off and just left him off the field, jumped on my Harley, fired the thing up, and burned rubber through the basketball courts in this middle school and roared off down the street and just let them there. And then I ran out of gas. Now, it's really hard to look cool or badass when you're walking with your leather jacket and your helmet and you're walkin' home. And I called my sponsor when I got home, and I told him what had just happened. And he said to me, Bill, it's children's sports. And I actually said to him, you don't understand. It's insane at nine years sober. I mean, you know, it is a slow process. And I'll tell you, what will cure you of that is when you've got to walk back out on the soccer field and apologize to all those people, the parents, the kids, and everybody. I mean, isn't that the mechanism we have for changing our behavior is owning it, right? So at 22, I'm in a mental institution. I came back down to Los Angeles, and my dad gave me a job in his little machine shop in El Segundo, and he let me sleep in his garage, my sober dad. and I tried to clean up my life. I tried, you know, and it was miserable. But I met another woman because you can't ever, ever be alone. It's a group effort getting me through life. And there's volunteers out there, you Know. We got married, and we had two more kids. And, you KNOW, I had quit all the hard drugs. You can't find anybody to go along with the concept of social heroin use. So, youknow, I quit shooting dope, and I quit taking acid because you got to be able to communicate with people and with lsd you just don't need the other person you know so what you do is you try to drink on the weekends and smoke pot during the week because it's green and it's from god and it'S not really drugs you know and that's the experiment that's how bill tries to clean up his act you know. So 15 years after the mental institution I'm living in the house with this second wife and the second set of two children the little girl was was three years old, and my son was four months old. And I lived in the house with these people and I had no emotional connection to another living human being. And i don't know that. I don't that's the way it is. I can't stand outside myself and have a separate experience and then compare it to the one that I'm having to determine that anything's wrong. I don't know that! I am not in denial. I am delusional and I don t know that, you know? The thief thinks thinks everyone else is a thief. That's his reality, right? And this psychic change that we talk about is at some point in time, we start seeing the world through a different set of eyes, a new pair of glasses, if you will. You know, that's what we're looking for here is some kind of psychic change where I can perceive the world differently than I do. Because in and of myself, it's a dark place. It's a stark, scary place. And I don't measure up. I'm not good enough. And a guy like me, the way you cover that up is with bluster and bravado and loudness and threat. That's the way You'd Cover That Up. And I had no idea that I was full of fear. I just thought I was really angry. So I walk into Alcoholics Anonymous. This particular day when I'm living with this family, I was up all night drinking one more glass time as it turned out so far. are. And in the morning, like any good gangster, I called my mom, right? It's like, who are you going to call? You know, it was like, next time you see some big tough guy walk into one of your rooms, ask him, do you live with your mother? Because chances are he probably does. And she doesn't understand, you know. So I called My mother and this is a woman that had been an Al-Anon for 30 years by this time, they are organized, prepared and focused. And And she got there inside of a half an hour and picked me up and took me and put me into a place in Costa Mesa called Starting Point. And I spent 35 days in there. While I was in there, they made me wear a sign around my neck. I had to make the sign. We made it in crafts. It was a rectangular piece of cardboard with a string that went through it and it said, I am not a counselor. Because evidently there was some confusion about that, right? And I went to my first shrink when I was 13. I did a couple of tours of duty in a locked-down barbed wire on top of the fence mental institution. I spent two and a half years in group therapy at one time. I'd been gestalted, rolfed, and primal screamed. I know more about myself than is safe to know, right? And so then they let me out. You know, they just let us out like we're okay, don't they? Like go forth, multiply, right. And where did we end up? AA, this is the world's aftercare program. Did you know there's no referrals from Alcoholics Anonymous? Did you that? There's no place you go where you walk in and you say, I'm from AA. They sent me here. That place literally does not exist. This is it. It's metal folding chairs and linoleum floors for the rest of our natural lives. And I walk into AA AA. And two things happened to me that are just pure luck, pure luck. The first one's probably the most important. I just liked it. And nothing would have led you to believe in my past that Bill would walk into AA and just like it. But the first I walked into the Hermosa Beach Alano Club on a Friday night. And all the Harleys were parked outside, which was kind of, this is interesting. it's not my old man's AA right and I walk in there it's the gong show on a Friday night and it's nuts the room is packed everybody's dressed to the nines looking to hook up right this is Friday night at the Hermosa Beach Alano Club a lot of people said it wasn't really an AA meeting it probably wasn't you know but they were hooting people down off the podium all their friends were getting up there and they're counting off the steps and just everybody's got a nickname and it's nut and I stood in the back of the room and I didn't feel part of because I wasn't I didn't know anybody. And I'm standing back there. But by the end of that hour and a half, I'm laughing. I mean, this was nuts. I'm an old hippie from the 60s. And weird has always attracted me. And you people are very strange. And it's always been a source of great pleasure for me and fun. And, you know, finding out who you are, and all of that. And i remember driving home that night thinking to myself, this may not be so bad. And the next night I went back there to see what the action, see what, what the hell was going on, you know? And I, and I've never lost that enthusiasm for it. You know, I have had levels of enthusiasm, but I've Never left AA. I've ever wandered off. I've not gone to meetings. I always been around and God knows I've had my tragedies and I'd had my problems and I had divorced and I have all the stuff we have when and life happens to us. But the common thread throughout my life since I got sober, because my real life started on March the 27th, 1985, and I just simply didn't know it. But boy, I know it now. This 35 years has been a hell of a lot more interesting than the previous 37. The sober story is much more interesting, much more enlightening, much More adventurous. I finally got off the a goddamn bar stool and have done some stuff. I've had a really great life in 35 years, not without its tragedy, but it's been full and rich. The second thing that happened is I asked the guy to help me and he actually did, which doesn't always happen. He said to me, go home and read the doctor's opinion. Make notes on the margin of what you agree with and what you don't. Be at my house Thursday at 5 o'clock and we'll discuss it. So I went home and I read my assignment and I showed up at his house Thursday at five o'clock and he did not trust me that I'd read it. And he had me sit there and read it to him out loud in his living room. Now, subsequently, I have done workshops on sponsorship over a good part of the world. And one rule number one, when you're sponsoring people, make sure they read the book. Don't trust them. Read it with them. It'll probably help you out. You know, if I have to read War Fever Ran High in that New England town one more goddamn time, I think I'm going to blow my head off. But I've been doing it for 35 years, right? I did it this morning with a guy, you know, chapter two. I said, there is a solution. And I told the guy, we better hope so, huh? And we read the book. If you sit and read one-on-one sponsorship, that's the way I was raised. He gave me air time. Each week I went to his house and we read another chapter in the book and we worked the steps. At six months sober, I did a fifth step. And I had an experience. One of those experiences. I had experience. What was the experience? I went home after that. I got quiet for an hour, you know, and then I went Home and I walked in the front door of my house and I I realized, my God, it's going to be like this now. I mean, I was six months sober. I don't know about you, but that was hard to believe. I said, I must have smoked a joint at least. Six. I hadn't been six months over since I was 14 years old. And at six months sobre, I had enthusiasm. enthusiasm. I mean, I'm working the steps, right? I'm figuring I'm starting to, you know, I'm workin' my way into the in-crowd, into the hierarchy of AA, because you think there's a hierarchy, don't ya? You know, for the first 10 years of my sobriety, I was actively trying to make a name for myself in an anonymous organization. You know? Isn't that interesting? But I had no other way. I didn't know anything else. I did not know what else to do. You know? I mean I'm worked my way. And at six months sober, I would really intrigued. But But I had this experience, and my God, this is going to be real. And I think what I really knew is that the old life, whatever that was, is over. So far, so good. What a remarkable thing, huh? What else do we need to know about the spiritual aspect of the program? What else Do We Need to Know? What elsedo I need toknow other than March 27, 1985? What an odd thing to happen, to have the obsession lifted and I've never gotten loaded since except for surgeries and endoscopies and stuff where you get a freebie, which is kind of disconcerting actually. It's not as much fun as you think it's going to be because it's not a party, man. You don't get laid or anything. So anyway, I apologize. So each week I go to this house and I read the book. Six months over, sober, I do a fifth step. And I was married at the time and we reestablished our relationship and said, okay, we're going to keep together because it was getting, it was pretty nasty for a while. And my ex-wife tells me that at six months she realized, my God, this guy's really doing this because nobody trusts us. We get 90 days sober and we want awards, man. The whole family is going, nah, he's not now. No way. He's not going to do this. This is too too radical. And at six months, it gets real. Here's what I think is going on for whatever it's worth. The first step says that we're powerless and they just took it easy on us and they said that it was just over drugs and alcohol because they didn't want us to run screaming down the street. Now after 35 years, I've yet to find anything I seem to have any power over i think it's like everything and i don't think i need any power i don t think power is required lack of power is not my dilemma my dilemma is my inability to accept my powerlessness you know the reality of that like in aa we talk a lot about acceptance you know how you get acceptance if you really get how powerless you are acceptance just happens because there's no other choice look at the geopolitical situation in the world man It's nuts. And I watch it on the news and it drives me crazy and I'm absolutely powerless over it. So here a while back, I shut the TV off. You know, because I have no control over the situation. I clearly have no control over you. I talk to you incessantly about how if you were just a little bit different, the two of us would be a hell of a lot happier. And you absolutely insist upon living your own life and it pisses me off at my core. you know so I'm clearly powerless over you I'm powerless over I'm what have I got any power over you know I had a discussion with some guys about pride you know and then I said well there's certain things I've done in my life especially since I'm sober that I'm very proud of and the conversation went like this well is it pride or is it just gratitude did you really and what have you done all by yourself that you created all by all on your own very very little. Even some of the business successes I've had, there's a whole group of us that work towards this goal. It wasn't just me. Have I applied myself? Absolutely, I've applied myself and I've gained some success. Should I be proud of that or really grateful? I think grateful is a better attitude, isn't it, than personal pride? The ego wants to be proud of itself. The ego is the one that's afraid of death. It can't imagine itself not existing. existing you know if you get to the point where you can actually step outside yourself which i think really happens and this any spirit quality spiritual path is about disidentification with self and one of the first pillars of that arriving at that place is a really a real acknowledgement of powerlessness the understanding that the universe by its very nature is a giving entity it's always supplying me with everything i need i just take exception to what's being supplied, and I suffer. What's God's will for me? God's will is what's happening right now. What else could it possibly be? It's like we have windy discussions about the difference between my will and God's Will. My little ego that presented itself at two and a half years old loves the idea of having a battle of wills with the power that drives the entire universe. You know, what are the odds of that? Right. Isn't that the old feeling of separation? There's me and there's God. There's mean there's something up that this illusion that somehow I'm independent and separate from even nature, you know, which isn't physically possible. You know. I don't need any power. Everything's unfolding right in front of me all the time. Right. All I have to do is have enough self-awareness to take advantage of what's being presented instead of being stuck on what I think it should be. what about accepting what really is you know if I can get the powerless just the drugs and alcohol part the second step then becomes operational I need to align myself with the power I need to be restored to some kind of sanity enough sanity certainly to not drink and use but maybe also enough sanity just to realize a little bit how powerless I really am and I don't need it maybe that's it and do you need a God in order to do Alcoholics Anonymous some people will tell you yes. I don't think so. I think one of the spiritual truths is that you hear around here, all you need to know about God is it's not you. All I really need to Know is I am not running the show. Is the show unfolding? Is it being run? Yes. Well, align yourself with that, you know. Now, what we do when we say we don't believe in God or we have a problem with God, what what we do is we create a God and then don't believe in it, you know? I mean, that's certainly what I do. And isn't God an experience more than a concept? I think in my life that's what it has been. And I have experienced it. And at some point I will try to find some philosophy that makes me feel comfortable about what it might be. But the experience is everything. It's everything. AA is an experience. it's an experience. It's a spiritual path. There's no spiritual side to it. It says very clearly in the book that we treat the spiritual aspect of human nature and then the mental and the physical follow. I think that's really true. I think that is what we do here. That's why it's not therapy. That's way the meetings are not good group therapy. It is not good. You can use it that way, but it is just not very good. That is where we go to find each other. My sponsor said something to me early on in this when we were reading a book together. He said, my job as your sponsor is to guide you through the process of the 12 steps. I'd be happy to sit here and talk to you about what you think your problems are so that you will not share about them in the meetings. He says, the meetings are for recovery from alcoholism, not about how your day went. And I informed him. I said, you know, down there at the Ilano Club, they are breaking that rule right and left. Should we go go tell them. And he said, no, he says, AA is a safe place. You can go there and talk about anything you want. They can't really kick you out. I mean, there's really are no rules. I'm just describing to you my AA, which I'm very grateful that he did that. You know, he told me what he believed about it, you know, and 35 years later, I think that's held true, you Know, and so if I can do the second step, have an open minded enough to be able to say, okay, I'm not in charge. Let's go find out what might be and see if we can align ourselves to it. If we can do that, then the third step becomes operational. Now, the third step is interesting because it says that we're going to make a decision. I get to make a decision to turn my life and will over to clearly what already has it anyway. I think it was nice of them to lead us to believe that we actually have some say in the matter. Well, I've been withholding myself from the totality of all things long enough. I'm going to acquiesce now and allow you to take me. Thank you very much. Where's my trophy? You know, it's like, oh well, you know. That's why I said when I read the book with guys, we get to the third step. I look at the guy and I go, are you ready to do the third step? And the guy says, no. I go why not? He goes, I have a problem with God. I goes, so do I. Let's pray. And the guy says, well, I don't even believe in God. And I go, nobody really does. We're all just whistling in the dark, hoping for the best. Let's pray. I've run out of options. What do you say, buddy? You know, it's like, and the argument just kind of falls, you know, it's they want to argue about God. I argued with God about my sponsor, and he told me to resign from the debating society that they didn't need me here, that I needed them. That's exactly what he, and I thought that's cruel. You know, I think he's on here somewhere. Anyway, what life and will is it talking about? It's talking about the fourth step, the end result of living a life with seeming power, right? What do we end up with? Resentment, fears, and broken sexual relationships. That's what I bring to you. That'S the life with seeming Power. This alcoholic life of me running my life, this is what I BRING TO YOU. you. And what do we learn in the inventory process? I think one of the primary lessons we learn when we do an inventory is I have to stop blaming other people and institutions for my problems. High school is over. It's time to own my own life. I cannot continue to blame these other people in situations for my problems, it doesn't work. I'm powerless over them anyway. way. If the happiness in my life is dependent upon other people's behavior, I'm toast. I'm toast because I have no control over any of that. So I have to stop the blaming. That's the second pillar of spiritual condition. There's powerlessness and I have to stop them blaming. I have own my own life. I do a fifth step and I physically and literally turn it over. I give it to this guy that I'm talking to and this this weird power thing. Here's my stuff. I'm pooped, you know, and he helps me find that fourth column of the resentment list because there isn't much in that what are my faults and mistakes in that first inventory, there wasn't a big fourth column. You know, I mean, I'm blaming this. These are the people that put me in this position. This is the institution. I had the entire federal government and specifically the Department of Motor Vehicles on there, you Know, and you know and talk about powerless, you know, it's like, God, you know, what are we going to do? So I had to stop the blaming. Now that I'm power, I get the powerlessness a little bit and I'm going to try to stop blaming. It's going to take a while, take a few years for that to end but I know I can't do it. I don't need to make a list of my character defects. They will come and visit me with alarming regularity. Then we get into the amends process and these people that I am blaming for all the problems in my life, you want me to go to them and make amends and I do not want to do this. this makes no sense to me. I'm afraid to do it. I think it's stupid, and I feel embarrassed about it. You don't give up. Nobody gives up. nobody goes and surrenders and admits that they're wrong. People don't do that. My God, you know, I'm a master of my own destiny. I can't give in like that. I've invested a lot, and i know it's their money, but I've been hanging on to it for a long time. It seems like mine now. You know, i don't want to do this, but i do it anyway. We do it it anyway, don't we? I mean, this is where people really balk, you know. And this is my experience with it. But I went out and I did it. And what do we learn from that? Here's another big lesson, the third pillar of spiritual condition. Nothing is personal. No one was ever doing anything to me. They were just doing what they do. And I happen to be in the blast radius, as my friend Steve says. Nobody's doing anything for me. Am I doing anything? You know, I'm just doing and what I do, and you happen to be the next victim in line. But nothing's personal. When you start really realizing this, when I go make amends to people that I blame for things, and then I start looking at them in a different light, like my father, I started looking at him as a person rather than who I thought he should have been when I was growing up. And I realized he wasn't, he was just being himself. He wasn't doing anything to me. And my reaction to it was a way, it was a major overreaction. So when this happens, when you realize you're powerless and and you can't blame anybody, and you realize nothing's personal, the egoic construct of who you think you are begins to collapse. Like what am I defending? What am I trying to protect myself against? Who can really hurt me? Nobody's trying to hurt me anyway. You know, what is all this battle about? It's the collapse of the alibi system. And this brings it to 10, 11, and 12. One through nine is about 10% of the program. It's not the work. It''s sober 101. It' s the first semester 10 11 and 12 is 90 percent and the 10 step is the fourth pillar of spiritual condition self-awareness self-await this is not a comfortable transformation self- awareness because now you can it doesn't mean the behavior changes either you can just see now you see that whenever you're disturbed it's always you i hate that line in the book don't you because it smells like them it looks like them i'm convinced it's them But it's not. It's always me. That's a hard thing to look at, and I can tell you this. In that 10-step, which is essentially making amends in the present moment, whatever behavior is plaguing you, it's the beginning of the end of it once you can see it. It just doesn't go away right away. It takes a while. It take some amends process. It takes a little bit of time, but once you see the self-awareness, you stop blaming, you stop whining about your lot in life, progress begins to develop. In the 11th step, you can watch yourself think. You can sit in meditation and focus your mind on your breath. And the little ego, the two-and-a-half-year-old doesn't like being in the present moment. There's nothing for it to do. So it wanders away from the breath. And you notice that it has wandered away way, and you gently bring it back. This is a game-changing experience. This is absolute conclusive proof that who we are is not our thinking mind. That's a stunner, isn't it? We can finally, now finally, we can stop working on ourselves. We're just feeding the beast. It's not trying to hurt me. The ego goes, it isn't trying to hurt me. God knows it needs me for transportation. It's just flat and two-dimensional. It has no depth. It creates nothing. It just takes credit for shit. It takes the past and projects it into the future over and over and again. That's all it does. And you don't have to change it. You don't Have to kill it and smash it. All you have to do is look at it. It is like shining a flashlight on a shadow. It goes away. Will it ever go away? No. No, but once you recognize where it wants to take you, you don't have to go because it isn't who you are. This was a big deal. This happened to me at 20 years sober when I started really getting sick with liver disease. Almost four years ago, I had a liver transplant. I almost died, right? That'll get your attention. You know, that was a bit of a crisis. People were coming over to say goodbye. I wasn't ready to go yet, you know, but I got a transplant. I got my life saved again, again. again. Final thing, 12-step, right? What's the final pillar of spiritual condition? What is the essence of Alcoholics Anonymous? What was missing in me all this time? The character defects are obvious. What about what never developed in me? The thing that doesn't develop in selfish and self-centered people is compassion. We have no empathy. I can't really feel you in my my life. And what was it we felt when we walked into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous? Compassion. Remember, we used to hear people say it's all about the love. But I used to think how hokey is that? I'm here to report to you, ladies and gentlemen, it is all about love, man. That's what it's All about. It's that's what people loved me, they cared for me. Even when they got in my face, you know, they loved me enough to tell me the truth. You know, like they let me into the circle they knew I thought there was a hierarchy so they let me in you know so that I'd finally realize when I got with the people in the hierarchy they're laughing at me because there's no goddamn hierarchy in AA it's all of us together our common welfare should come first and I believe it does could the world learn from that but I started sponsoring you and even though I was motivated by self I fell in love with you I fell In Love With You somewhere along the line I came out of myself and I fell in love with you and I love you more today than I've ever loved you I love my wife more today that I ever loved her I love things today more than I ever love that my heart has been open I have been transformed and I'm surrounded by people that love and respect me like I love and respect them I've learned how to be a friend so I have friends I have a wonderful life today and I'll leave you with this I know my time is up they tell tell you you gotta give it away to keep it, no. You have to give it a way to even get it. That's how you get it, thank you very much.