A Rational Theology That Had Nothing to Do With Religion – Jay S.

Welcome to the Tuesday night recovery speakers history workshop. Thank you for joining us tonight. My name is Tim and tonight we have a great workshop on from psychic to psychedelic presented by JS in Sedona, Arizona, and looking forward to tonight's presentation, and we meet every Tuesday night at the same time and at the the same Zoom ID number. And next week, we are going to have Nancy Kay on Tradition 3. So join us again next week for another great presentation. And this meeting is being recorded. The audio from tonight's presentation as well as all of our past presentations can be found at recoveryspeakers.com. And I will be sharing a link to where you can find those recordings in the chat in a moment. And this meeting is not affiliated with any 12-step organization, although our goal is to focus on the history of AA and other 12- step fellowships. RecoverySpeakers.com is dedicated to preserving and making the audio history of AA and the 12-Step movement available for everyone today and in the future. We share a daily email that features a different speaker talk from the Recovery Speakers Audio Library. Included in those daily emails are links to the recordings of this meeting, and it contains the flyers of our upcoming presentations and any events that we want to share with you guys. and if you would like to receive that daily email, you can subscribe through the link that I shared in the chat a few minutes ago or you can send me an email at info at recoveryspeakers.com and I will get you added to our email list. And if you are able to, we accept contributions which allow us to continue our work. I have posted our PayPal and Venmo accounts on the chat and tonight after Jay's talk, we should have some time for Q&A. So if you have any questions throughout tonight's presentation, write down your questions and be prepared to ask them at the end of the meeting. And I'm also going to close the chat during the presentation and we will open it back up at the end. And that is it for me. I am going to turn it over to Mike to introduce Jay. Thanks, Tim. As always, thanks for setting it up and doing all the legwork to make these happen and getting it organized and then calling the meeting. Happy New Year, everyone. I'm so grateful that you're here. We've got 150 people online right now, and we'll probably have more in a few minutes. The meetings have continued to grow. They've continue to be exciting and we've been able to have some great presenters give some wonderful information i've been so grateful for everybody and uh for jay i kind of feel like jay is like part of recovery speakers because jay and i have been close for a long time and he's given us a tremendous amount of encouragement and he has always said yes whenever he's been asked to do something so you know getting ready to introduce jay it's just a thrill but it's more than just guest a guy on here to present. Jay has put his heart and soul into compiling and putting together a book that's going to be available soon, and I hope he'll talk a little bit about that tonight and maybe tell us how we can get that. But if he doesn't know yet when it's time, you're going to be able to get it through us. You're goingto be able the information through us and find out how to get it you know recovery speakers mission is to preserve the audio history and to make that available for all future generations we do this through um audio uh different audio formats we've got reel-to-reels we've got wire recordings we have record albums anything that has been created for AA or recovery that has been put on a media. We have been gathering that, preserving it, putting it online and making it available. And I say for free, I want to state that no one is profiting from recovery speakers, okay? No one makes any money at recovery speakers. This is an altruistic project that we feel strong about. out. We have been dedicating our time and our money to this for the last 10 years. We would love to ask you to help out the best you can. We're still waiting for our final approval on the 501c3, but the IRS says it's in queue, so it should happen any day. We will keep you informed on that. Next week, we've got Nancy Kay coming back on to talk about tradition number three, And she has done such a good job on one and two. I'm hoping that we can get Nancy to come back this year and do all 12 of the traditions so that we Can Put That All Together on the site under Nancy. All right, I think that's all the housekeeping I have. I just wanted to, again, tell everybody, thank you so much for being part of Recovery Speakers. If you're not receiving a daily speaker recording from us and you'd like to, please send us an email at info at recovery speakers. And just say I want to be added to your email list. And we don't spam you with a bunch of emails. We send out a daily speaker. We've sent two or three emails during the week just to let you know what else is going on. So without any more from me, Jay, it's so good to start my day with you and end my day with you i give you j s from sedona arizona folks uh well hello everyone and it's wonderful to be with you uh this evening and i am uh as always thrilled to be here in the work that uh that tim and uh mike are doing and have done is is amazing and uh and we are, we are on the cusp of a brand new era in recovery. You know, it used to be that, that when I went out on sales trips, that I would take a cassette player and pack it in my suitcase and take, you know, some cassettes when I, cause I'd be out for a week and didn't know which meetings I could get to and all that stuff. And now we can download stuff. And then there's another remarkable thing that's happened. And I really feel that it's vital that you know and that you pass on to everybody that you can, aside from this incredible resource, that Stepping Stones now has a digital archive available for you to be able to go in and have your own relationship relationship with Bill, Lois, and a lot of the folks. If you did not receive their newsletter from December, they have a seven-page document that was written by Nell Wing talking about what Christmas was like at the office in the early days. And it is one of the most most wonderful things. And all you got to do is go in and sign up for the archive and you can get it. And it's really wonderful because it used to be that in order for me to do research, I would have to fly to New York. I would have to have requested from the Steffing Stones people certain certain files. They would get them. I couldn't take pictures of it. You had to either record it or transcribe it, and you only had so much time that you were able to be with the information. You couldn't marinate with it.You couldn't soak into it,and now you have the opportunity to actually get Bill and Lois's writings and to spend time meditating upon it. this is this is tremendous this is it's a it's a great new day and you won't need geeks like me telling you what they found so it's wonderful thing although you know I'll still be here to call stuff I know that a lot of you guys are friends of mine been here we've been together before but there's there's a couple of things that I'd like to say first of all what I am is I'm an independent scholar and by that what it means is that I am not tied to any institution. I'm not tied to the General Service Office. I'm NOT tied to the Stepping Stones Foundation. The work that I do is not on their behalf. It's upon my own desire for scholarship and the like. And I always like to say that when you run across people that are doing historical investigation, ask them up front what their prejudice is. Because a lot of people pretend that, oh, they're altruistic about it when they actually have a real agenda. Mine is that I'm allergic to fundamentalism in any form whatsoever. What do you mean by that? Well, 30 years ago when I was in my sober man phase, I would spend a lot of time telling you what Bill meant. He meant exactly what he said. He meant what he broke. And so I reached the point where I saw how wrong I was in the interpretations that I was giving things, and so I always say beware of those who will tell us what it is that Wilson really meant. um the uh the other thing that i'd like to do is uh to uh introduce to you bill wilson as one of the most adventurous intellectuals of the 20th century now we have a lot of um a lot of wonderful folklore about bill much of which he created himself for instance instance, you know, we think a lot about him being a power driver. But when you read his letters, you find out that what he's talking about is the first five years of the movement. He's talking abut the time up to really the book being published and that was the power And he suffered greatly from wondering if he hadn't have been forceful in the way he was, would Ebi or Hank have stayed sober? And I don't, I think that we have this idea of him being a Hamlet-esque character and what it's been my privilege to do and what my book, Bill W. and the Frontiers of Consciousness, which will be available from Higher Font Publishing probably a year from now, maybe a little longer. I'm turning the manuscript in in just a few weeks and it takes a while for them to do their job to get things set up so that the book can be properly launched but anyway what this work is about is it's about Bill Wilson's life outside of Alcoholics Anonymous now in 1955 Bill turned the movement over to the movement And I like to say that that's when he started living his own life, maybe with a little more enthusiasm than he felt that he was able to prior to that. Now, Wilson was a medium and the last time that I was here, we talked a bit about that. And so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the psychic aspect. But the way that I like to take a look at Wilson's life, the way that it makes the most sense to me, is that there's two phases. There's pre and post-towns, or pre and post-sobriety, but also in the way that he thought and processed things. And if you take a Look at Wilson, he was part of the first generation of people that were educated without the yoke of religion on top of it. That they were the first generation of people, even though they were educated by Victorians, there had been the great debate between Thomas Huxley and Wilberforce over origins of the species, and the scientists had won, if you say, and they had been unfettered from the rules that religion had placed upon them previously in higher education. And so this idea that material reductionism, that everything that is, in order for it to be true, must be material and must be able to be reduced into blocks that, as our friend Eckhart Tolle says, you kill and then die sick. But anyway, when he had the experience at Townes, this man who had been an atheist, a rather militant one, had a personal experience. His mind and his heart and his point of view changed. And I believe that the rest of his life he was trying to make that change available to others in a variety of fashions because he had seen from his own experience that spirit was available through a number of modalities. And so in 1953, in 1953 Gerald Heard, one of the great philosophers of the last century, One of the people that really intellectually paved the way for what later became the Beats and the 60s. he had a philosophy of the evolution of the spiritual and emotional and mental perceptions of the individual that we were on a cusp. Many say that was the dawning of the age of Aquarius. We were on acusp that was going to allow humanity to evolve in a way that we would not need the violence and the other things that we currently use in order to get our ways. He chaired a program on spiritual healing and what they were working at doing was it was at the Wayne Wright House in New York. Anyway, and at this seminar in 1953 was a huge group of educators, theologians, priests, and philosophers working on, and scientists working on spiritual healing. and how they could develop a methodology, how they could develop a service, how they could develop a way to infuse regular congregational churches with these healing techniques that people were experiencing. And some of the folks that were there that weekend, Gerald Hurd was the prime presenter. Um, Eugene Exman, one of the great friends of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I'll talk a little bit about him was, uh, the person who put the program together, Eileen Garrett, the founder of the parapsychology foundation, uh. Lucille Kahn, who also worked at the parasycology foundation. But she and her husband, David, were the supporters financially of Edgar Cayce's work in Virginia Beach. Carlton Sherwood from the Parapsychology Foundation, Tom Powers and Aldous Huxley. And Huxey was not able to to attend that day, but he was part of the part of the program. So these are these are people that are getting together to try try and create some kind of energy that could be proved to people that were stuck in three dimensions, that there was another dimension and that there were powers that could maybe be applied in normal church life. life. In 1956, Wilson goes to Santa Monica, and I'm going to read you a little teaser from the book for a few minutes here to kind of move into this next phase. August 26th, 1956 was one of the the most important days of Bill Wilson's life. On that sunny Southern California afternoon, two friends brimming with excitement approached the bungalow of Margaret Cage on Spoleto Avenue in Santa Monica, California. There they were greeted by Dr. Sidney Cohen, chief psychiatrist of the Sautel Veterans Hospital in Brentwood, California, along with Professor Gerald Hurd. Dr. Cohn was the preeminent psychedelic researcher on the West Coast, and aside from his duties there, teamed with Professor Hurd in investigating the psychological, spiritual, and creative effects of the new medication, LSD. D. Wilson's friends and spiritual advisor, Gerald Heard, had arranged to have Dr. Cohen provide Bill with what was then referred to as psycho chemotherapy. Dr. Cohn and Professor Heard had been introducing a number of Heard's artistic theologian business and political associations to the new medication. Heard and Wilson, accompanied by Bill's close friend and Tom Tom Powers, close friend and editor Tom Powers entered the living room. Wilson was filled with conflicting emotions. On one hand, his good friend had assured him of the safety and the efficacy of the medication on depressives and suggested that the unit of experience it produced might be useful given Wilson's horrific battle with depression. depression. On the other hand, Dr. Smith had been dead for six years prior. Wilson had been the sole authority and point of contact for the Blossoming Fellowship. Even though he was surrounded by friends and supporters, Bill felt an innate loneliness and the despondent depression had only been exacerbated by a feeling of separation from everyone. By 1942, 1942, Wilson realized that he was again alone. None of the, quote, participating partner relationships AA members were enjoying could ever be his. Wilson was plagued with waves of self-doubt and recrimination. Was there something that he could have done to help Abby Thatcher or Hank Parker stay sober? The sudden white light experience of Towns Hospital was central to a's founding and his sobriety bill had found profound trepidation of what might happen slow down a minute jay you're with friends i'd get a little excited wilson describing his uh state of mind prior to uh the event in the letter to the reverend sam shoemaker said before trying lsd the very thought that three blue pills might precipitate any such experience as I'd had in town's hospital was almost revolting. If this could be so, then was not the first experience phony? What virtue could be left in fasting, prayer, meditation and the like? But I've since come to a different point of view. At 1 p.m., Dr. Cohn took three blue 250-microgram doses of LSD and dissolved them in water and handed it to Wilson. He drank it and climbed on the couch. Wilson's companions, Professor Hurden Powers and the late arriving Will F., decided to leave for lunch. As Wilson and Cohn discussed the history of Alcoholics Anonymous, the material—serious researchers' differentiation of these alkaloids from drugs—took effect. William Griffith Wilson stepped through the doors of perception and into what he later described as an experience along spiritual and mystical lines. During the experience and ever after, Wilson knew I was not hallucinating. On the contrary, I felt more alive to spiritual and absolute reality. I think LSD makes for a deeper and wider range of consciousness, more life, not less life. nor was it the kind of thing that one sees through an alcoholic or narcotic case the drug in its effect seems to bear no resemblance whatever to such stimulants or sedatives neither tom nor i have had the slightest addictive urge to repeat the experience after an hour bill cried out oh my god i want to cry the profound realization that all is well in spite of appearances Alas, I feel great relief. Curiously, I don't associate this with any other drug experience. It's not for naught that you are called the father of lights. After an hour and 15 minutes, Bill announced, how relaxed, how alive, identical. Identical, asked Dr. Cohen? Identical with my first conversion, Bill replied. line. Dr. Cohn asked, would this help alcoholics? Bill answers, they do carry their paranoia into sobriety. And just for the contextual, this 1955 paranoia is an extreme and unreasonable feeling that other people do not like you or are going to harm or criticize you. you. Dr. Cohen, do you get this kind of reaction with alcohol? Bill, no, different. This is the conversion type of experience. It still lacks the light and the ecstasy, but the peace is here. Later, Wilson had an awareness of all things passing under review. Yes, that's it. Laughter and joy. The way. It has no trouble with it. Pain is the touchstone. Pain is the destruction of Bill, yet there is no destruction. Later, Wilson went for a walk in the garden experiencing a communion with all living things. There was a luminosity emanating from flowers, from bricks and the smell of the fresh cut grass. He also felt a feeling of unity with all souls. souls. By five o'clock, the group went their separate ways. Bill took a walk to the Miramar in Santa Monica and enjoyed a lovely meal during which he engaged the caterer there and his girlfriend. The girlfriend was a very active AA member in Los Angeles. The conversation revolved around his enthusiasm for the waning experience. After supper, he drove to Beverly Beverly Hills, spending the night with Chuck and Elsa Chamberlain, two longtime friends and confidants, and tried to communicate this proof of his conversion experience at Towns. Three days later, upon reflection, Bill wrote to Dr. Cohen, The outstanding residue seems to be this, all the assurances of my original experience renewed and more. The sense of the living of all things and the sense of their beauty has been considerably heightened and restored. Due, I suppose, to long periods of exhaustion and depression, this aspect had pretty much been lost. I can report this in spite of the fact that on my arrival home, I had a severe reaction of anxiety, weakness, lack of focus, and the like. But this time, the depression factor was pretty much absent. Neither can I connect this backslide in any way with the lysergic acid experiment. I still think I'm much better off having had it. When Wilson returned to New York after a session with Dr. Cohen, he was a changed man. The most significant aspect was that for the first time, he had confirmation and confidence about his experience at Towns Hospital. His hot flash was the foundation upon which Alcoholics Anonymous was constructed, yet it had always been a nagging and fierce that somehow it had not been a true Jamesian sudden spiritual experience but rather a type of mental derangement. One of the many reasons that Wilson had shied away from the experience was his concern that his own white light experience at towns would be invalidated. To his profound surprise and delight, it confirms his original original experience. It had been almost 22 years. The town's experience had faded to a memory which must be recalled instead of an insight to be lived in. Ever the enthusiast, Bill wanted to share this good news with those that could hear it. He knew there would be tremendous blowback from people in the fellowship if they heard. Such a confidant was Dr. Henry Thiebaud, longtime friend and supporter of AA due to the remarkable recovery of his patient, Marty Mann. Bill shared Professor Hurd's notes of the Santa Monica session, which Thiebaugh read with highest interest. Thiebau applied to Sandoz for a small amount of research materials and was rebuffed by the testing requirements for qualification, which he did not have the time or inclination to do. But Wilson asked Dr. Cohen if when he came to the East in July of 57, the men might meet and Cohen provide Thiebaud with a few doses so that he could construct this trial on a small sample of selected patients. Gerald Hurd had been working with Dr. Cohn to provide the psychedelic experience for important and adventurous intellectuals. These men believed that the effects of LSD showed the vast uncharted potentialities of the human mind, showing the edge of man's next stage of development. But from Los Angeles, they could only do so much. They wanted a second group based on the East Coast. But who could put together such a potentially volatile enterprise? Prize. Professor Hurd turned to his friend, a man who knew the strength and benefits of anonymity, Bill Wilson. So Bill goes home to New York, and he gets together with Eugene X-Men, who is one of the really fascinating characters in AA history. I don't think he gets the run that he deserves. X-Man, his main contribution was that he put the arm on the people at Cornwall Press to charge Bill and Hank the same price for printing the book Alcoholics Anonymous that he did for all the publications, all the books that Harper's did there, which was a huge benefit. X-Men had a sudden spiritual experience as a teenager. And so when he read a proof of the big book that Bill and Hank brought to him, he immediately had a fast friendship with Wilson. What X-Men did to make sense of his experience was is that he He became one of the great cheerleaders for the varieties of ways that people could have religious experiences. And he became the publisher of the religious books at Harper's. And the people that he got published and got out into the intellectual community of the United States were incredible. One of the things that people would do is say there was a man by the name of, I want to get his name right here. Garma Chen Chi Chang and he was the first person to teach Zen Buddhism in the United States Harper Brothers published his book and then when these teachers would come to New York to kick the book off, Lucille and David Kahn would open their home in New York as kind of a salon where these people could give talks about different spiritual things. And then, you know, people could sign the books and do all that wonderful stuff. This milieu of people that that uh that x-men knew he published martin luther king's uh works from the very beginning um was very very broad and deep and so he had connections with all kinds of people that were looking at things from a non-traditional standpoint and so they tried to decide well how are we going to how are мы going to do this as i As I mentioned, in 53 and 54, they're trying to use spiritual healing as a way to demonstrate to people that are stuck in materialism that there is another dimension, there is another way. They are trying to come up with a methodology that can be replicated using LSD as a way of demonstrating to people that there is another dimension that's available. So how are they going to do this? Well, Kahn and Hurd had developed a methodology and Keith Dittman that they were using at UCLA. So they decided that they would do the same thing. Bill's close friend, Helen Wynne, had taken a large house in Chautauqua, so they would use that. They got Dr. Robert Laidlaw, who was the head of psychiatry at Rockefeller Hospital, who was a close friend of Eileen Garrett, who is the head of the Parapsychology Foundation and he would be the medical administrator of these tests. They came up with a line of questioning prior to, they had questions that were asked during people having the experience and also they had a debriefing session afterwards and then And then three months afterwards, they would again get together with people. One of the things that I was able to find was the actual documentation of all of these different sessions. And I've been working on this stuff for years and it just came to me last year. And so this group they called the Basic Group, and what their stated purpose was – and this is in a funding proposal that was given to the Parapsychology Foundation. Foundation. Tom Powers, Bill's editor and Helen Wynn were the people that really did all the organizational and administrative work. They kept all the records and did all the scheduling and the like. And so just to let you know, see there's this There's this canard that's out in public culture about bill-dropping LSD. Nothing could be further from the truth. A proposal for future operational guidance of the LSD group. One. LSD activities and projects conducted by people who are not members of this basic group are outside of the group's direct responsibility. Such activities may interest us individually or as a group, but they are not within our control or formal concern as a group this view is uh assumed in the following statement one the group will operate within the chief interest of the group as described on this memorandum um that uh um that no one will take take any other psychedelics, just a second, without the medical director's committee signing off on it. No member of the basic group shall take or give LSD or related materials regardless of the source of such materials outside of regularly scheduled sessions of the group under any circumstances except with the knowledge and approval of the medical Director's Committee. Special projects, and we'll get to this in a minute, involving the use of LSD and sanction of the basic group's medical director, but operating outside of the chief interest of the Basic Group and involving the participation of one or more members of the group may be proposed so i mean these these folks are they're studying not depression they're studying not alcoholism and psychedelics what they're looking at is number one is there a replicable experience that people have? Is there a way that people describe the relationship with absolute reality, God, whatever you want to call it? And is there any similarity in their experiences? And if so, what are they? Now, the folks that were part of this group, that were invited to be part of This Group, it's quite amazing. So there's Lucille Kahn, Eugene Exman, Carlton Sherwood, who was a noted philanthropist and did lots of work with all kinds of religious nonprofits. That was kind of his specialty. Lib Symington, who was a good friend of Helen's and of Bill's and worked at the office. A little more on her later. And by the way, Mike's got a couple of Lib-esque talks that are great that are on the site. Arthur Ford, the noted psychic and the man who cracked the Houdini Code. Paul M., who is a member from the Chicago area, who Tom Power sponsored. Dr. Helen Yoder, who was the medical director when And Laidlaw was not available. Richard Kahn, Lucille's husband, John Ford, Helen Nguyen, David Kahn. Dr. Grandma Chen-Chi Chang and Rachel Davis Dubois. You may remember her as the initiator of interracial education back in the 1950s. The other participants, of course, were Professor Hurd, Tom Powers, Dr. Cohen, Will F. And so these are the members of the group. And over a three-month period every week, one of these people would have an experience and there was a list of the others who were present at the time that they would have this supportive group. Usually one of the people would take a microdose in order to have an empathetic connection with the person that was having the main experience. Got a list of the doses that were taken, the times. Do we have permanent transcripts? Do we Have the recordings and the like? and uh and so that's the work that the group was doing um there were also uh so there was also a man by the name of eugene riley zip was his next nickname and he was a close friend of tom powers and he Was the guy that bankrolled a lot of this they had to pay Hey, Dr. Leblanc, what in today's terms would be $3,000 for a day's work there running one of these sessions or Dr. Yoder. So this is not a thing where people are going off and in some unguided thing. This is a medically supervised, structured environment that lead people to have a certain type of experience. This is what they were trying to do. Doctors Abram Hoffer and Humphrey Osmond, close friends of Bill's, were starting to do work that was similar. um uh al hubbard was uh had a clinic that he was running in vancouver uh british columbia that was uh working specifically with alcoholics very very early with this hubbard was the person who um really shifted the focus of this type of work previously what people had had been doing was uh they'd been using lysergic acid with alcoholics trying to scare them straight uh putting them in a in a straitjacket and uh and then giving them 100 micrograms and and then saying this is what's these are scenes of coming attractions this is what delirium tremens is like and uh they didn't know you can't scare an alcoholic Alcoholic. You can concern them for a little while, but it isn't going to change their behavior. But when Hubbard came to Weyburn Hospital where Hoffer and Osmond were working, he said, you guys are off the beam. He said there is a spiritual component to this that's true and that if you do the proper set and setting, setting, you'll get certain results. Now, if you're interested in what that set and setting is, um, you can, uh, Google, um, the Spring Hill Experiment CBS reports. And in it, they actually do a follow in 1966 or 67 about, uh LSD use with an alcoholic and some other people. One of the the reasons that I love this particular piece is that my mentor, Dr. Sanford Unger, who ran the psychedelic program for the National Institute of Mental Health, he actually initiated it and he started working with alcoholics very in the beginning of this and then with cancer patients and people that were dying. All of the same work that's being replicated today. Let's see. I think, oh, oh I wanted to talk about, okay, there's one other little thing i'd like to include so the basic group is talking about intellectual spiritual artistic political expression can this material help broaden people's vision vision that's what the that's what the medical director that's where everybody kind of signed off on but what happened along the line is that a bunch of these people were also mediums like Wilson and they started to find out that people who had taken this material had higher scores and precognition this idea of what uh being able to see the future um which in those days was was being codified by using zener cards the person who started that work was dr jb ryan who established uh the parapsychology the first parapssychology uh school it was at duke university and so Bill starts working with J.B. Rhine because they're getting information about people being sensitive and stuff working in a way that was quite different Carlton Sherwood who was on the board at Duke University and a supporter of J.P. Rhines suggested suggested um that the next time that uh helen win had an experience that she tried this precognition work and her scores went up exponentially a few weeks later she and lib are working in the ouija board together and again this is how these people live this ishow some of us still live maybe not the ouiji board but We're working with some pretty interesting stuff. And and the control on the board says that if Lib will try LSD under the sentence setting that her precog scores will go off the charts for six weeks, just for six Well, they do that. And it actually does. And so what happens is, is these people that are psychically inclined start to get very excited because what Bill's desire was, was to create some kind of a rational theology. It didn't have anything to do with religion. It didn' t have anything to do with superstition that could be proven so that people might take a little different point of view about the way they treat themselves and each other. And so they got very enthusiastic about being able to work with this prestigious university, this great doctor, guy who invented the term ESP and the like. And And that was another enthusiasm that came out of this basic group. It was the thing that kind of spelled the end of it. The work that they did really was only between August and November of 1958. It was just a few weeks' time, but they were able to glean this incredible information from some very, very remarkable and fierce intellects. And so that's kind of from psychic to psychedelic back to psychic again. So I'd be delighted to take any questions that you may have. The one caveat that I'd like to say again is that in no way am I recommending anybody be involved in any kind of psychedelic activity that is not medically supervised and is not, you know, there's lots of people that this stuff can help and all that stuff. up, but I am in no way am I suggesting that any exogenous substance for anybody's spiritual growth that's self-directed is something that's in line with what I understand the movement to be. But that's a separate thing, but i just wanted to make sure that was very clear about that. thank you Jay great job hey Jay I'm gonna ask people to raise their hand Tim had to leave so I still have to figure that piece of this out but if you have a question for Jay please raise your hand and I will try to figure out how to make that work and right now a dare I think Be patient with me, folks. I'll be right here. I'll get this figured out. Adair, you can unmute. Do I have that right? Adair? Did you have your hand up? I see Greg S up there, Mike. All right. Let me go up to Greg. Greg, I was told it would be, here we are. Greg S asked to unmute. All right, Greg, see if you can unmute. Am I here? All right. Thank you. That was absolutely wonderful and fascinating. I can't get this off my screen now. I guess my question is, and thank you, i'm a fan of the fellowship myself so i got a lot of stuff out of other books and you know this stuff my question is is there any record of how many times he indulged in this and according to pass it on i think lois joined him also well um yeah all this stuff is in is hidden in conference approved literature okay um and if you haven't read chapter three and passed it on in uh 23 pass it on and a while you might you might do it i'm really uh uh bill wilson was involved he was one of the major i didn't have time to get into this but but he was one of the major players in the psychedelic movement. People would reach out to him who were involved in all kinds of different research to ask about how the basic group were, blah, blah. And discuss different medications and the like and ways that they were using it. I don't have any idea about how many. I don'T think there was a belt that he was wearing that he notched. and I really think that I need to come up with a language indulge that's not I'm not a fan of how many times yeah no I don't have a clue I don' t have the secret belt thank you thank you Jake I just wanted to ask that question yeah thanks jay thanks for the question hey mike i'm going to ask you to handle this because i think it'll go quicker if you just because you're more comfortable with it so mike k would you do the q a please all righty i'm gonna jump in here and we've got thanks greg s we've got brian b up next i'm to go ahead and uh i don't know that this will be any faster or any better it'll probably be a little different uh lmno ryan well it's for sure it's going to be longer all right good to see you man when you hover over his name it'll say ask to unmute i think you're unmuted right now. I'm already unmuted. Right, I just did that for him. All right, thank you. Hey, I'm just wondering, not that it has anything to do with AA, but it's not really an AA-centered meeting. I was just wondering what is that new resurgence of interest in this psychic side of life again? And you mentioned Duke as one of those places. What are other places that might be interested in that sort of thing, Jay? Well, I mean, Duke University is the oldest. But you can come here to Sedona and it's filled with it. You might take a look at Greg Braden's work. um there there's a there's a hotbed of people that are using the latest scientific research about communication um you know I you know I mean we can go back to uh what was that great film something about what we know there's that it was the Japanese doctor that that was able to crystallize water and if you spoke to the water in a certain way it would crystallize accordingly whether it was whether it was angry or happy but you know I I can't think off the top of my head where to send you my friend i'm i'm sorry about that i i uh i just a little muddled on that so but check out greg braden um uh actually the uh the people that are published in my book higher font h-i-e-r-p-h-o-n-t uh they do a lot of work with don miguel ruiz and his sons um i don't know if you're familiar with the four agreements and the like that the whole shamanic movement is very much uh you know this idea that that we've uh we've lost our connection with the the earth and with the spirits that that are are there and if we re-establish that that weekend um also uh and and then i guess you know here here you go i just had to talk long enough. If you want information about this psychic stuff, where the validation is really coming from is from the near-death experience movement. See, it wasn't until Dr. DeBakey transplanted the chimpanzee's heart that we were able to stop death in the way that we've been able to. And so we've had people that have gone further than they ever went before, And then they come back and they give us reports. Wonderful example, my friend Evan Alexander wrote the book Proof of Heaven that later his latest work is Living in a Conscious Universe. So there's some good places to go. Good resources. Thank you. Loretta V., would you like to unmute? you i would um jay the movie you were trying to think of is what the bleep do we know and yeah thank you so much and the water experiments for dr emoto yeah yeah yeah um so my question is other than uh higher scores and precognition can you say any more about the results that they found Oh, no, just that that was, see, where I get most of my information is from Bill's writings. When I went to Duke University, the correspondence between he and Dr. Ryan, I was able to get, but they weren't talking about the data that was being done with Carlton Sherwood. And I couldn't who he was sharing it with the Duke. I couldn'T find see Wilson already was convinced. Mm hmm. So so this was not. This was not something that he was looking to prove to others so much as but there's just lots of lots of fun letters about that kind of stuff. I highly recommend this book, Nothing So Strange. It's the autobiography of Arthur Ford. And in it, there's a great thing where he talks about getting 12-stepped and about what it was like getting sober. And he and Wilson were very close friends and the like. So, but they were convinced that they had, you know, that, see, if you, you know, like my work and the things that I talk about, there's no way that it's going to appeal to any skeptic at all. And I have no desire to. All I want to do is contextualize it within the framework of this is how these people live. This is what they saw. So I don't find anything about it unremarkable. I don' t either. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Kevin. Would you like to go ahead and unmute? Yes. Can you hear me, Jay? I can always hear you, Kev. You talk to me all the time, even when you're not here. Even when I'm not aware of it. Thank you. What a great presentation. So first off, thanks so much. And what really great research into a part of Wilson's life that has not gotten much exposure. So thanks for that. I had two quick questions. I just wanted to make sure I got this right. I think that I heard you say that the basic group, which is this group of people carrying on this stuff in New York, did you say that their work really only ran from August to November 1958? Is that right? Or did I miss something? That's where I've got the data and the tapes from and all that stuff. There were other things that members were involved in, but the thing was is that they couldn't afford what it was that they were doing in that fashion. And they wanted to button that up. So yeah, that's what I've got. And your sense is that it was such a truncated period of time because they didn't have the money to finance and to keep going. Right. And I think they'd also demonstrated to themselves that there was a replicable experience that people were having, having that they all experienced very, very similar things and that they may have hung different phrases on it, but there was very much a sense of that there was this unitive experience available to anyone want and that it could indeed um change one's uh perception of one's place in the universe so so maybe it was a maybe it ended because of a combination of of financial difficulties and feeling that they had they had accomplished at least one of the main things that they set out to do is that right i think that's very fair and also this the group fractured because some of them got into the psychic stuff and were very enthusiastic about that and it was kind of laid out that hey we're only going to be doing things this way and so bill and helen and lib and and the folks that were doing the stuff with carlton sherwood who not alcoholic a lot of these people were not alcoholics you know which is Yeah. You don't know where they met to do this. Did they have a single place where they regularly met? Helen's house. Oh, it was Helen's house? Yeah, it's Helen's House. She'd taken a large home where they were able to do the stuff. And when her place wasn't available, they did it at Dr. Helen Yoder's house? One other real quick question. I don't want to take any more of the time from the group, But I was really interested. You mentioned Googling Spring Hill experiments, CBS reports. Is that the thing? Yes. And that's that's from you said that was from 66 or 67. Which by that time, LSD had gotten, you know, like, you knows, it had all the cachet of poison ivy. I mean, it was a terrible reputation and had been vilified. So I'm just wondering what they were reporting on in 1967. no no it was great it's charles corral and he's it's just pre you know the where with the 60 minute folks let me see if i've um no i don't i don'T like if that if if i can google it and that'll get me there that's good yeah i don' t want to take up but but the thing is i may be wrong on the on the year oh okay and one of the other things just for everybody that's involved involved with this. Um, uh, Sandy Unger did the psychedelic therapy and did all this stuff for the National Institute of Mental Health. And he found that he could only help four alcoholics a week or i mean a month 50 alcoholics a year and um and so he ended up uh at the behest of the state of maryland doing the free first residential alcoholic treatment program program and uh where they were doing uh a 30-day intake in like 28 patients so he was able to uh oh it's spring grove i'm sorry it's Spring Grove the Spring Grove experiment and Spring Hill was the name of the the uh the uh alcoholic program that that Sandy uh that sandy did was it and for those of you i'm sorry spring hill in connecticut that place no no it's in uh it's maryland um okay uh the spring grove experiment yeah uh 1965 okay thank you jay thanks so much great great talk thank you and those of me who don't know kevin hanlon is one of the producers and directors one of the finest documentaries available and make sure that you get the the uh five cd box set um the the pbs version uh when you read it all right i'm just gonna i'm not gonna do that just gonna interrupt jay and tell you tell everyone that kevin is going to be coming on here in the future and giving a presentation for us so he and i have he and I have played phone tagging and I disappeared. So Kevin, I owe you a call and I'll be following up with you soon. Okay. All right. Thank you. To get you on the calendar, buddy. Thanks, Kevin. Reg R, it looks like you're unmuted. Go ahead with your question, bud. Hey, Jay. Good to see you again. Really appreciate the presentation. And actually, you've already answered my question. My question was concerning the spring grove experiments. So thank you so much. I always appreciate hearing you and all your great research. And thank you. Thank you so very much. That's all I got. Thanks, my friend. Appreciate it. Amelia, would you like to go ahead and unmute and ask your question? Yes, thank you, thank you so much, Jay. I just appreciated it so much and I can hardly wait for your book. um mike i could ask you lots of questions but i am really curious again about david hawkins was he part of that spring grove or part of the lsd i know he was now the only the only stuff that The only stuff that I have about Dr. Hawkins is regarding niacin, which will be another – actually, the next talk I'll be giving, if Kevin and Tim will let me, is on cosmic consciousness. consciousness but um uh but um yeah the um the the only the only correspondence that I have it's really interesting because I I went to Dr. Hawkins's family and said you know did do you have any correspondence and the like the only stuff I've got is one letter from Bill thanking Hawkins for getting a niacin trial done at the clinic that hawkins was working at in new york and um yeah that's that's that's all that i've got but yeah he was not he was part of the basic group um or any of that stuff i've gotta uh yeah huh interesting thank you yeah Yeah. Thank you, Amelia. Eduardo. Can you unmute yourself, Eduardo? Yeah, there you are. Okay. Yes. Hi, Jay. Thank you. Eduardo, how are you, buddy? I'm fine. Thank you for your efforts and great to be here with you and Mike and Kevin and so many others. What I'm being exposed to with people with addictions, not in any clinical way, although they're going to centers like in Costa Rica under the guidance of a shaman of some sort. And they're experimenting with ayahuasca. Scott and I'm just wondering if you if that ties in in any way or you you're aware of anything that's going on again it's something that uh it's a kind of a hodgepodge of people yeah so kind of the fun things so i've been fortunate to be sober for 43 years and change and i've seen a lot of people well-meaning try and cure alcoholism right now it seems that it's the shamans that are going to cure alcoholism right um now i know a number of shamans and they are definitely highly educated in their field maybe as educated as any doctor i don't know And there's a difference to me between the use of psychedelics in helping alcoholics that cannot find sobriety and what I like to call psychotourism. and these going to the centers in different parts of Latin America and injecting the local culture with the well-heeled American things so that they can get spiritually right or saying that Bill did this, They use Wilson's work as justification for trying to come up with a cheat code. Now, this is my feeling at the, you know, currently, that what people want is a cheat Code. they uh they don't want to do the work that the fellowships have created that is sustainable see you use an exogenous substance ayahuasca lsd mescaline you know we can increase the list that as an item um what happens is is that people that have addiction will turn to the substance instead of their substance and so say nine months later there's a crisis in life i will turn to whatever it is that gave me my awareness and i will use that again the problem is for certain types of people the second dose is never like the first so you have to either increase it or what you do is change to another substance and um the problem with addiction is is that you know it's this whole thing of it's the substance instead of the self in alcoholics anonymous what what is offered to people is a sustainable spiritual experience that's transmittable and uh they are well-meaning friends the shamans and other people that are involved in psychedelic movement um i don't know if i'm saying well meaning with my tongue in cheek or not but let's give them the benefit of the doubt anybody else alcoholics and but that see that unitive experience what happens when one has the unitive experiences is that one sees that there is no good and evil so how can alcohol be evil here go these people in alcohol blah blah blah sooner or later I can drink or what's being offered to people is this profound spiritual experience But what it really is, is it's a spiritualized self-knowledge. And for a certain class of people, self-knownledge didn't get it. So I hope that answers your question. I would never call anyone that was referred to a clinic by a trained professional to deal with emotional or PTSD or any of those things that many, many alcoholics have. I would Never question that therapy or say that it wasn't correct. But the whole self-directed psychotourism, personally, I'm not a fan. To reflect, I appreciate your insightfulness on that. It's kind of affirmed by my experiences that the people at a meeting, this is out and about in coffee houses and what have you, not within the fellowship of our fellowship, that they are addicts who have found through herbs and other substances freedom from their addiction to whatever substance they were once addicted to. And they're being invited sometimes through people that are willing to sponsor them, like employee employers kind of doing this as a gift for their employees uh select group and they're they're seeking this kind of what you might call awakening um or some type of enlightenment through the substance i haven't met any that um it's only been a few that i've actually met but i haven'T seen it really reflected but they are not um living a spiritual way of life you know but again that's that's that's an outside deal you know that's an outside deal people for a long time have been doing all kinds of wonderful weird things but but anyway yeah it's it's just an interesting phenomenon you know of this era Yeah. Thank you, Eduardo. Thank you. You're up next, sir. Thank you Mike. Thank you Jay for another deliberate presentation. I really enjoyed it. My question is Because Tom Powers. Yes. Was Tom, didn't he and Bill have a serious falling out? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And given their relationship during this period in time, did you know what that was all about? well um actually uh our friend kevin uh gave me the best uh i i love akram's razor and that's the philosophy that whatever is the simplest uh solution is probably true True. And ultimately, Kevin suggested that the breakdown between Tom and Bill had to do with jealousy. That Tom was jealous of Bill's relationship with Ellen and that Tom had been probably the closest person to Bill for about 15 years. And then suddenly this was usurped by this incredibly intelligent and insightful person. person, Tom said that he believed that Bill's depression was behavior-based. I think it's organic. So he had some ideas about certain of Bill's activities that he felt were the cause of the depression, Tom went off and founded his own movement called All Addicts Anonymous. It became this very interesting little group of people in upstate New York. I visited him and interviewed him. And it was just a very, it was what Alcoholics Anonymous was not. And I think that the one thing that I would say is that it was incredibly hierarchical. And one of the great things about Wilson was his allergy to hierarchy. But anyway, you can go – you can look up the All Addicts Anonymous stuff. Jeff, that Powers was a fascinating, fascinating person. Really one of those great AA members that you don't hear a lot about. But anyway, he was something. And I just, April, I was just looking here. I've got a got a Gerald Hurd letter regarding the UFOs that I found for you so they did, he was looking he was watching the skies thank you and my second question is do you think that Tom was was a source for the orange papers or what we now know as the orange papers? Well, that's an interesting thing. I never occurred to me, but, but no, you know, by, by the time the orange newspapers got rolling, see when I met him, Tom's dementia had really started to kind of engage and Tom was, uh, but that's a, that'S, it's a very interesting thing, uh, kevin if you're still on um i'd love to i'd love your uh your input on that um but and i'd like for him to put his stuff in the chat yeah well i yeah i just i'm sorry jay didn't didn't the majority of the stuff that came out of the powers camp come from tom's son and other people not tom senior directly yes Yeah. Is there any documented statement that validates that Tom Sr. had this separation? Yeah, well, I mean, OK, so for my interview with him, there were a couple of things. Number one, Tom said that he split with Bill over Bill's philandering. hearing he said that um and he also said that lois was every bit as guilty as bill was and um that um she condoned it or permitted it and um we'll go we can do a whole session on that stuff but you know i mean it's it's like um but um the other thing was so his idea was he broke with Wilson because Wilson had strayed too far from the absolutes this is what Powers said and if you look at the early All Addicts Anonymous stuff that's kind of what they're doing now it's always interesting that Powers was the one calling Wilson out when Powers had an incredibly shall we say colorful sexual past himself and there's all this stuff and all addicts anonymous about that um powers did some really fascinating stuff um one of the things he did like i know that nobody here on this zoom ever thought of ways that they might improve alcoholics anonymous but when tom founded um all addict's anonymous he did all of of it man i mean like you had to do yoga every morning you had to go to confession you know you had that you had the you know change your eating right you had do this you had did that one of the books that he developed was this great books on the way to God and the deal was is that if you're going to be going along spiritual lines you have to read all of these you know over time read all of these books and you know and it's it's all great stuff but it was more of an edict than it was a uh um an invitation shall we say one of the great things that uh an interesting thing that happened is is that in one version of the the book uh there's Islamic texts and then they get removed later on. So, I can't, you know, but it's, but anyway, Powers is a fascinating character and that, you know the Orange Papers, Abel, you know the thing is is that you know what what I'm trying to do is give the proper contextualization of a lot of that slander and um uh you know i i uh i may have mentioned this before here but i'm a feminist and uh so when i heard that bill had a mistress i had an opinion about that And then I made the mistake of looking up a definition of mistress circa 1955. The definition is a long-term love affair known by all three parties. I believe with all my heart it's possible to love more than one person at a time, completely. And I also know that from a physical standpoint, given the three ectopic pregnancies that she had young, that Lois was not able to be a partner in certain ways. um and powers insistence that bill's life be idealized in the way that he wanted to to be idealised one of the things that um the union work that bill did in the early 40s that It was very helpful. He said, it's one thing to live one's life in service of others. It's an entirely different thing to have a life of your own. To live one s life in the way that others want you to be. And I think after 1955, Wilson started more and more to live the life that he wanted to live. Thank you. thank you very good thank you azel jack uh would you unmute please