A Moral Experiment Worth Ten Intellectual Investigations – Jay S.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Jay Stennett, and I'm an alcoholic. God's doing for me today what I couldn't do for myself, because it's about, what, 9.45 on a Sunday morning in, where am I, Lafayette, Louisiana? And I haven't had anything to drink yet today, which is just bizarre. And this is a picture of my fabulous wife, Adele, and I in Coast Switzerland at the International Center for Peace and Reconciliation. It's there that the Oxford group put together, and it's a wonderful spot. I'd just like to show her off. The talk I'm going to give this morning is the varieties of spiritual experience, because I believe that if William James was writing, the book today, that he would call it spiritual experience as opposed to religious experience. And I'm going to be using a lot of different words. It may make you nervous, but just understand that they're the words from that time. Sin, conversion, all these types of things. And again, I am not here by any stretch of the imagination to tell anybody that I think that there's a better way that Alcoholics Anonymous should be. I believe that God is. He's doing a really good job with us right now. And I've been sober since the second day of May in 1979, and although I found it necessary, I haven't taken the front drink or sniffed any glue or done any of that other stuff. But I believe that the Alcoholics Anonymous that I experience today is far superior to the Alcoholics Anonymous that I came into. The reason I'm showing the wife off, I just want to tell you about a little variety of spiritual experience that I had on Monday. I was giving a cake to my good friend Bill C. And when I left the meeting, I'd had some indigestion. I was feeling a little... And I started to get short with some guys I was talking to. And I'm not generally a snippy person, except that some coon-ass Cajun guys that I know. But anyway, so I got this feeling, and I thought, well, I'm going to go across the street and have a yogurt. And if I don't feel any better, I'm going to go to the hospital. Now, I am not a hospital-going kind of guy. I got about halfway through that frozen dessert, and I got in the car and I drove to the hospital. And as I walked in, I knew I was in kind of a deep trouble. And I got in there at 10 minutes to 11, and they threw me down and ran a catheter in me and put a stent in me within like 40 minutes of me getting there. So I come to. Actually, they just twilighted me. I didn't even come to. And I'm going, uh-oh. The last thing I want to do is let Bobby down. Because there's all kinds of anger management thing, but there ain't no Cajun anger management, as I understand it. So anyway, I'm laying there, you know, and my wife comes. And we're both just delighted that this 99% blockage in my heart is... My heart was healed. It was healed. It was healed. No collateral damage, no nothing. And so we're all tickled to death, but I'm thinking, I've got to get to Louisiana. So in the morning, the cardiologist comes in and he goes, well, this is what we're going to do. You follow this plan of action. You've got another 60 years on the planet. Sounds good to me. And I say, excuse me, I've got one little problem. I'm supposed to be giving a talk in Louisiana on Saturday. And he looked at me. He said, do you enjoy this talk? I said, well, yeah. As a matter of fact, I do. He said, I said, it's a history talk, so I really can't get somebody else to just jump in and fill it. And he goes, okay. And my wife says, well, he's going to be real busy. He's going to be active. He's going to be around a lot of people. It's going to be, you know, he's going to be real. And the doctor looks at me and he says, why don't you tell me about what you're doing? He said, tell me a little more about the conference. And I said, well, actually what I am is, I'm a strange chap with a queer idea of fun. I'm a historian on the spiritual antecedents of the movement, Alcoholics Anonymous. And he looks at me and he goes, oh, you're carrying on the legacy of Bill and Bob. My wife looks at him, her jaw dislocates, and she goes, are you one of us? And this man smiles and shakes his head. And I said to him, he said, yeah, we can figure out a way to get you out of here early enough and get you on the airplane and get you down there by Saturday. I said, I've already checked. You know, she brought me my iPad. I said, I've already checked. There isn't a flight that I can get down here. And he goes, hmm. I said, I'm booked to go Wednesday night. Now, this is Tuesday at like 9 o'clock in the morning. And he goes, well, are you traveling alone? Yeah, I am. He said, I don't want you tearing the wound. He said, I said, I'll check the bag. He said, well, I think this is really important work that you're doing. He said, we'll get you out of here before supper tonight. You can get on that airplane and get down there. So, if that ain't a variety of spiritual experience, I don't know what is. And how would I be here? I mean, he wasn't the doctor that operated on me. He wasn't the doctor on call particularly, but he was doing the rounds. And it was somebody that allowed me to come and be with you. So. The varieties of spiritual experience. William James, Sam Shoemaker, Carl Jung, and you. Now, if you're going to start a story, you've got to have some place to start it. I like starting it in places for very strange people. This is... The Charles B. Towns Hospital for the Treatment of Drug Addicts, Alcoholics, and Neurostetics. Alcoholics and addicts together. Oh! How could that happen? And what's a neurostetic anyway? Neurostetic, they used to be able to... You used to be able to go to the hospital for a case of the jitters. But if you want to know, nowadays it's those people that have been using crystal meth alcoholically that are sitting in your meeting going like this. That's what it is. Now, while Bill is in that hospital, he has this tremendous white light experience. He was horribly depressed. He'd given a surrender a couple days before at a mission. Now, this is a guy who was not religious. Wanted nothing to do with it. And he's down at the mission getting on his knees, surrendering, to Jesus. And he's going... He's starting to think about it. And he's going, Oh, my God. What have I done? This is beyond bad. I mean, the next time I go down to Wall Street trying to pitch a deal, they're going to go, Oh, Bill! Would you do a little kumbaya for us before... And he's just getting more and more and more depressed. And he says, If there's a God, will he show himself to me? And he has this... This experience. Now, the next day, his buddy, Ebi, comes down. Bill tells Ebi the story. Ebi was not impressed. Because there were lots of people that were having those types of experience. There are lots of people that are having that type of experience. And he said, Well, yeah, okay. And he went back to the mission and he told the guys. And they gave him a book called The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. William James. William James is one of the fascinating characters in American philosophical thought. He was the first professor of philosophy at Harvard University. He was also the first professor of psychology there. He came from this family that was very strange. If you ever would like to get lost on the Internet, his father was a Swedenborgian minister. And the Swedenborgians are a very mystical Christian sect. They're very fascinating. They're very fascinating. They're very fascinating. Anyway, he was a brilliant man. And he was always a seeker. Here he is going to Brazil in 1865 on an expedition. Or maybe he's going to a rave. I'm not sure. Kind of the same clothing. Good look, huh? Anyway, he always had this... As a younger man, he had a... He called it a soul sickness. He was... He was... He was never quite right. His mother considered him to be a... a hypochondriac. Always having some physical thing wrong with him. And in this book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and it's not really a book. What it is is it's a set of lectures that have been compiled. James says that while the revelations of the mystic hold true for the mystic, they are only true for the mystic. They can be considered by other people, but that experience is only a personal experience and valid for that person. And thank God that we don't all have to try and mimic somebody else's experience. What we have is a set of spiritual exercises which produces an experience, a personal experience for an individual. So, this particular book, this set of lectures, was delivered at Edinburgh University just after the turn of the last century. And it was a huge thing. This book was read by just about everyone in the United States and through much of the world that was involved in any type of helping profession. In other words, if you were in seminary, if you were a medical doctor, if you were in any kind of social service, this was a book that was read. And it was a... kind of a standard that most people read. Now, if you go to the book, and I believe that James and Terry have a CD of the book, Varieties, that's available. They've got it condensed down so that you can listen to it instead of have to read it. And that's a lovely service and thanks for doing that, guys. I like to always recommend to people, don't start in the beginning. Because it's a lot of philosophical stuff, background stuff. Start in conversion, which is lecture nine. And in it, this process of conversion, the way that James defines it is, it's a self which is consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy, that it becomes unified, consciously right, superior, and happy. And I would submit to you, that happens in meetings all over this area of the country. That we come in lost, knowing that we're doing the wrong thing, unable to change it, desperate, and what happens? We become unified. We become whole. Now, in this book, what James talks about is that God has two families. Of the children on the earth, there are the once born and the children who are born. And the children who are born are the ones who are born. And the children who are born are the ones who are born. And the children who are born are the twice born. So who are the once born? These people see God not as a judge. They're healthy minded. These people are not distressed by their imperfections. You will never see them at meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. I mean, you've met them. They're like content, happy all the time. But what about the twice born? The candidates for being twice born? These people are wrong living. They have impotent aspirations. They are filled with self-loathing. They are self-despairing. They're completely consumed by self. You're going to find them all over this room. Oh no, that's what they used to be like. That's right. So the candidates then for the conversion, and again, when I say conversion, what I'm talking about is change. Or if you want, you can use the word sobriety. Okay? First, the sin he is eager to escape from. And the second is an idea that he longs to compass. In other words, I know that what I'm doing is off. It's wrong. I can't stop. I want to be like, I want to stop drinking. I, you know, I just stopped in for a beer and I got a crack pipe in my hand. What the hell is that? Okay? Okay. Well, what about agnostics? Well, this is Alcoholics Anonymous. We let everybody in, including agnostics. And he said about the agnostic, what they do in regards to a spiritual experience or a religious experience is they veto it up front. They will not talk about it. They will not engage in a dialogue. They'll just say, no, I'm not going to let it in. And they see faith as something weak and shameful. Now, there's also a couple different types of spiritual experience. One is the educational variety. What is that? What is the educational variety? Well, James talks about it. It's much like an athlete that's involved in playing any kind of a sport, you know, and you keep practicing and practicing and practicing. And then one day, the game just seems to go through you, just seems to play through you until your wife comes at you with a five iron. Oops. A little contemporary reference. And then there's the sudden variety. And James said that it was very much the same as the educational, but what happens is it's developing unconsciously until suddenly it erupts, just bursts through you. Now, what happens in this sudden spiritual experience? This experience like the one that Bill had as opposed to the educational like Bob had. Well, voices are often heard. After the surrender of the personal will, Bill turns his, you know, he says, help, please. And then it's as if an extraneous higher power had flooded in and taken possession. Higher power? Boy, that's Alcoholics Anonymous. They stole that. Lecture was given in 1901. That's when it was given. That's when it was given. The higher power has been around a lot longer than Alcoholics Anonymous and has been referred to as such. Now, this is a great, if you like drunk logs, this is a great one. It's called Down on Water Street. And it's the story of Samuel H. Hadley. S. H. Hadley. The monitor on his photo there says, yours for the long run. Or the lost. And Hadley was a horrible alcoholic. Really just a bad guy. And his story is in this book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. In the conversion chapter, in chapter nine. Why is it that the religious people or spiritual people are always using the, the, the sudden? Well, it's because it's a better story. It's an easier story to tell. The results are the same. But it's an easier story to tell. And Hadley, in this book, Down on Water Street, he talks about, you know, that it's not the first, it's not the last drink that hurts a man. It's the first drink that ruins a man. First drink? That's Alcoholics Anonymous. Book was written in 1912. Okay? So, I mean, all these things that we're acting like, well, this is, hey, hey. What we, I believe what we are is we're a continuum of spiritual unfoldment. And in this book, in, in conversion, Hadley's story is there. And he says that he's, he's, he's stuck in this bar. He's been drinking. He's, he's just, he can't get out. He makes it out, gets down to Jerry McCauley's mission down on the Bowery. He gets, he gets down there and he, and he gets down to make a surrender. The guy's been, Jerry McCauley's been preaching and Jerry was a drunk who'd gotten redeemed. And he goes down and he gets on his knees and he, he asked McCauley to pray for him. And McCauley says the same thing that Sister Ignatia used to say to people. Pray for yourself. God loves to hear new voices. And he says, Jesus, will you help me? And all of a sudden he says, the glorious feeling of the noonday sunshine entered into my heart. He says, I was flooded with light. And then he says, from that moment till this, I have never wanted a drink of whiskey or seen enough money to make me want to take one. So, so Bill talked about, how this book, the Varieties of Religious Experience, always confirmed to him what had happened. Well, there it is. See in the light. In the book, one of the things that's mentioned, a guy's quoted that says, dipsomania, which is an old term for alcoholism, the only cure for dipsomania is religomania. Yeah. This is a book that came out called Twice Born Men. It's a clinic and regeneration. It's by a guy by the name of Harold Begbie. And it's a great book. You can get it now on the internet. They've got it in paperback. But it tells a lot of stories about guys and gals getting sober in the Salvation Army at the turn of the last century. And this guy, Harold Begbie, and he calls it a footnote. To William James' Varieties of Religious Experience because what the book really has is different personal stories. So this book, like a book that you and I own, has a variety of personal stories that allow people to identify. Or as it says in the book, it says the reason that we have the stories is so that people can tell how it is that they entered into their own relationship with God. And Begbie says that conversion is the only place where a radically bad person can be changed into a radically good person. Anybody sleep with someone like that here in this room? Later on, he writes another book called More Twice Born Men. We've got a theme going here. But this particular book is about the personal spiritual experience of a group of people called the Oxford Group. It was also released under the name The Life Changers. And what they used to call the Oxford Group people were the Life Changers or the Soul Surgeons. So this is Frank Bookman. He's the initiator of the Oxford Group. He had a spiritual experience in Keswick, England. He'd reached a bottom where he was consumed with resentment. And what he did was he was listening to a woman talk, was taking a look at the cross. She was talking about the cross of Christ. And he saw the cross collapse into an eye and he goes, Oh my gosh, I'm as wrong as these people were. And he went out and he sent out some letters of amends. And when he sent those letters of amends out, he was lifted. The resentment never really came out. The resentment never really came out. The resentment never really came out. And so he came up with this, because he was paying attention, that you've got to be clean in order to carry a message. Later on, he develops a set of steps when he's at Penn State University. There were four. The first one was sharing. We call it our third and fourth step. Our fourth and fifth step. The thing is, is that I, when I was a kid, somebody would introduce me to someone who had a problem and I would sit down and talk about how I used to have that problem. I'd tell them what I used to be like and what happened and what I was like now. And if they identified and shared back with me, then what we'd do is we'd do the third step. We'd surrender. We'd go, You need some help, man. Would you like what... And so that's the way that they did it. And then after surrender, the only way that they believed that surrender would take is if you immediately went out and got into restitution. Immediately went out and made amends. And then after that, the fourth step is about getting guidance in how God wants us to live our lives and everything we do, great or small. And the main thing was carrying this message to other people that are suffering. Anyway, he's in Kuling, China. And he's there and he's giving a talk. And there's a young man there by the name of Samuel Moore Shoemaker. And Sam's there and he's listening to this guy talk. And he said, This is pretty good stuff. And when he gets done, Sam had a Bible study that he was doing for some Chinese and he didn't like China particularly and he was having a difficult time with folks. And it wasn't really, you know, he'd always been successful in everything that he'd done and he couldn't imagine why it was that he wasn't able to get things rolling. So he goes up to Frank and he says, Frank, if you go and talk to this guy, I got one guy in my class, if you'll come to the class and talk to this one guy, I know that he'll change. And if he changes, everybody else will go along. They'll get on the bus. He's the key man. Frank looks at him and says, What's wrong with you that you can't carry the message? Sam was just a little ticked off. And he went home that night and he was angry and he was consumed with the resentment. And then he realized, he said, I've been a fraud for God. He said, I've been doing all this stuff, but there's a couple of cards I've been holding for myself. And the next day he got together with Frank and Frank asked him what he should do and they prayed. And Frank said, go tell the truth. And so he went and told the truth to the class. And that man that he wanted to change, changed. And he ended up becoming Frank's, Frank's partner almost. They ran all over the world sharing this method of personal regeneration, this soul surgery. Sam said about Frank, the man is a mystic. And when you get to know him, you'll realize the truth of what James says, that we have got to accept the experience of the mystics as a valid experience. I mean, you run across people in Alcoholics Anonymous that, you know, they're not the same as you. They're not the same as you. They're not the same as you. They're not the same as you. They're not the same as you. They're not the same as you. That there's something going on with them. And you can't quite put your hand on it, but you know that something's going on. You know that what they're saying is true. Later on, more about the same thing, Sam writes a book called Twice Born Ministers. Now, you have to remember that in the consciousness, back in, this is a hundred years ago, that people, many people thought that the way that religious truth came, was from the pulpit down. And that you had to go through the pulpit to get a relationship with the power. And these guys shouldn't have any trouble, right? Well, Sam wrote a book about people that were professional God peoples, that were ministers, that had the same experience that he did. And so this is a collection of those stories. Now, see if, when Bill gets out of the hospital, he and Lowell, and Lewis start going to three Oxford group meetings a week whenever he's in New York. See if this stuff doesn't sound familiar. Religion is a risk. It's a gamble. There are only two alternatives here. Either God is, or God isn't. What's your choice to be? Sound familiar? Yeah, this book's written in 1932. Actually, it's not books. It's, they're collections of sermons, actually. On conversion, on this thing about changing. And I like to think that this is a lot about sitting in meetings. He says you can go to the station, and there's the smell of luggage and the stir of travel, but people haven't gotten on the train. Conversion happens when you get on the train. And as you folks know, recovery happens when you get on the train. Recovery happens when you get on the train. When we start to work the steps. Now, a lot of folks say this act as if is some awful thing that these unwashed pagan alcoholics are inflicting on the Christian world. We actually got this whole thing from the Oxford group. See, they always talked about you don't have to believe anything, but you do need to make an experiment. And one of the ways that they talked about is act as if. You choose a hypothesis and act as if it's true and see whether it is. If it is, cool. You can report it is. If not, you can discard it. So when it comes to doing these spiritual exercises, doing these 12 steps in order, out of the book, you know, reading, turning pages with folks, it's just try it. We don't have to debate about it. Just see what happens. And if it doesn't work, you know, throw us away. It's no big deal. And on action, on working the steps. A moral experiment, we got 12 ingredients to the experiment, 12 steps to the experience, is worth 10 times an intellectual investigation in apprehending spiritual truth. In other words, you ever meet somebody that wants to, oh, I'm stuck on the third step. Where? Well, I have to figure out God. How about this? How about you make this spiritual experiment? And then let's see what happens. We don't have to figure that out. And on transformation, about the folks that have had the experience. You know, you come into the meetings, I'm not drinking, I'm not using. These people are talking about God and all this weirdness and working with others. And I... But they're not drinking. And they're bringing home the paycheck. I mean, you could act like, well, I don't believe in what they believe in, but there's something going on. And so this is the thing, that you could question the interpretation of the experience, but you can't question the transformation itself. They're not drinking. They're not using no dope. And this is something that Sam said about Bill. Something way beyond Bill was working in the amazing shrewdness, he gained and his insight into working with alcoholics. Now, one of the fun things about the Internet is you can start searching for stuff. And one time I put Carl Jung and William James in the same search and bang. I got this picture at Clark University in 1909. William James, this guy Stanley Hall, who was the president of the university, wanted to raise some money. And he went to William James and he said, hey, we want to bring somebody over that will get some thoughts stirred up here and we can raise some money for the university. Kind of the same thing. You bring some lame speaker from out of town and see if you can't get people to come and show up. Things never change. You're never a prophet in your own land. Right? Well, let's have Bobby do it. No. Anything but that. So anyway, James says to Stanley Hall, he says, hey, there's this guy called Freud that started this stuff called psychoanalysis. Why don't you invite him over? Because it's revolutionary. It's different. And so Freud comes over and he brings with him his associate, Carl Jung. Now, Jung, you know, later on in his life, talked about that modern humans rely too heavily on science and logic and would benefit from it. And would benefit from integrating spirituality into their lives. Some people think that he was reincarnated as Eckhart Tolle. I'm not sure. And so he and Jung and James get together and Jung later on in a letter said that I spent two delightful evenings with James alone and was tremendously impressed by his clarity and his lack of intellectual prejudice. He was a brilliant man that had an open mind about spiritual matters. He said, I was also interested in parapsychology. Now, parapsychology, which was happening a lot in those days. In other words, there was seances and relationship with spirits and all this stuff. So I was interested in parapsychology and the psychology of the religious experience. So that's what these guys talked about for a couple of days. In 1961, one of my favorite pieces of AA literature is the correspondence between Jung and Bill W. Bill wrote a letter to Carl Jung and let him know what was up and what had happened. And he said that, you know, I want you to see how it is that this movement that's helping all these drunks get sober and you'll see this astonishing chain of events actually happening. And I said, well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Long ago in your consulting room. Now, Jung was working with this guy, Roland Hazard. And when he wrote back to Bill, he said that his diagnosis of Jung was that his craving for alcohol was a spiritual thirst at a lower level. It was kind of like the surge of our being for wholeness or union with God. He says medieval language. In medieval language, union with God. So how do you get out? How do you get out of this thing? Well, Jung says that there's a couple different ways that you can do, a few different ways, but one is that you might be led to that goal by an act of grace or through honest contact with friends. And I would submit to you that the fellowship of the Spirit South is exactly that. It's the honest contact with friends. People telling the truth about things that they wish weren't true in their lives, how they started to apply different things in their lives and how things changed, no matter where they are along the path. And he said the helpful formula is spiritus contra spiritum. Jung says to Wilson, he says it's interesting that in Latin you use the same word for the most depraving, as you do for the highest spiritual experience. So what he says is that the way to combat this problem with spirits, which is the way of calibrating how much alcohol is in a bottle of booze, you do it with the spirit or the fellowship of the spirit as we're doing here. So what is this change of events? This chain of events? And again, the value of a spiritual experience is not the value of the spiritual experience, it's the value of the spiritual experience. The value of the spiritual experience is not in the blinding of the flash or the amount of time it took for the educational variety to come, but in its fruits. How do we know that it's real? So we're going to go through a couple different types. We've got the sudden, which are Frank Bookman, Bud Firestone, Bill Wilson, Marty Mann, and the educational, Sam Shoemaker, Roland Hazard, Abby, and Dr. Bob. So what happens with Bookman? I talked about him being lifted out of this experience. Well, what makes his experience valid? How do we know that it was valid? Well, what are the fruits? He founds this thing, the Oxford Group, that touches the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world. He, it later becomes moral rearmament. I mean, these guys actually tried to stop the Second World War. It was bizarre. Outlandish. Um, he brings this, this idea of, it's a personal matter. You don't have to go through an intermediary. So from this technique of working steps, one informed person with another, the whole thing of the personal growth movement comes. It's, it's getting those people out that are the experts and talking about people directly that have had an experience in a change. And he passes it on. You know, Sam Shoemaker, well, what comes from Shoemaker's experience. Shoemaker's was educational. Sam gave him the bad news or Frank gave him the bad news. Sam got the resentment. He goes home. He does a few things, they get together. He'd make some amends, and, and he has an experience that changes his life. And what are the fruits of that? Well, he's, he's the, uh, it becomes the, kind of, the Oxford Group, uh, one of the, uh, in the United States. And he starts working with a lot of people out of this parish that he ends up being called to in New York City, a very powerful place. And a guy that young isn't supposed to get a job like that. But yet he was invited there. And when the vestry asked him, when they invited him to come, we want you to come to Calvary Church, he said, I'll do it. But the only condition that I'll do it on is that it's not going to be about me. We're going to teach the people in the congregation how to do the soul surgery. That's what we're going to do. And they invited him, and so he starts doing this. Now he runs across a guy by the name of Bud Firestone. Bud's got a bad drinking problem. He's from Akron. We talked about it last evening. He's got this horrible allergy. When he drinks, he goes sideways, beats the wife. It ends up in the papers. It's not good. Families, they don't know what to do with him. Sam was known for being a person that could get a surrender out of a person really, really quickly because he was able to be honest about his own problems with people. It was in the one-on-one. It was not the philosophy. He and Bud get together on a train. He talks about the nature of his problems. Says, do you think you got it? Bud says, yeah. He said, do you want some help? Bud says, yeah. They get down, and they make a surrender, and Bud's drinking obsession vanishes. Bizarre. Bizarre. What's the fruits of that experience? The gratitude of a father. Mr. Firestone and the other industrialists in Akron get together, and they put on a house party. A house party is just like one of these things. They invite these people from all over the world to come and talk about what they used to be like, what happened, what they're like now. There were men's groups and women's groups, and groups for men. There were men's groups and women's groups. There were men's groups and women's groups. There were men's groups and women's groups. There were men's groups and women's groups. Two different groups. Drugs for drug addicts. Groups for gamblers. They addressed compulsive overeating in the Oxford group. They'd talk about folks that were powerless over food. And at that thing, who shows up? Bob and Ann and the Cyberlings. Later on, Shoemaker has this guy show up, Roland Hazard, who's been treated by Jung. Jung's told him, you're toast, man. We can't do anything for you. You're done. You're going to die. to die drunk. And literally, that's what used to happen. Just 75 years ago, the medical profession, there was nothing they could do. He says, you're done. He says, oh, come on, there's got to be something. Nope, there isn't anything. Well, okay, maybe there's one thing. Here and there over time, people have had a spiritual experience which has revolutionized the way that they look at life, and the drink problem has been lifted. He said, align yourself with some group, do what they say to do, and maybe it'll happen to you. But it's about as likely as you being hit by lightning. And look at all the lightning that's been hit in this room. So what about Roland's experience? What was valid about Roland's experience? He has this thing where he's drinking and going to meetings, and he finally gets hit. He's reading a book, and he identifies, and he stops drinking, and he starts working with others. And who does he carry the message to? He carries this educational variety message to a guy by the name of Ebi Thatcher. And Ebi was an awful drunk. He was just an awful drunk. But he ends up... He ends up quitting drinking, at least long enough to go in front of the judge, and at least long enough to go down to New York. And we've got a document that says his surrender date was the 2nd of November. So that says it was like three weeks before he makes the call on Bill, the first call on Bill. And the soundness of Ebi's experience. He didn't like doing quiet. He didn't like doing quiet. He didn't like doing quiet. He didn't like doing quiet. But he did it. You ever meet... I know that this isn't true down here, but I go all over the planet, and there are places where people actually think that the second half of the eleventh step is extra credit. Well, I'm not good at it. Do you think any of these clowns were good at it? And what about the rest of the steps that we're not good at? I mean that whole not drinking thing. I had a real problem with that. I wasn't good at that at all. But I was able to hang in there and get on it. Well Ebi carries this message to Bill. And Bill has this tremendous experience. And how do we know if it's valid? Look at this room. There's three times the amount of people there were when Bill and Bob counted noses four years in, or three years in. And so Bill has this sudden experience, right? And he carries it to the doctor. And the doctor really wanted to have a sudden experience, but he didn't. In fact, he talked about that the first two and a half years that he was sober, that the thought of a drink was almost always with him. But he never picked up. And then finally, we've got to get a gal in here, right? Another sudden experience, and here's Marty Mann. This woman is tremendous. And if you haven't read the biography that just came out about her a couple years ago by the Browns, it's just marvelous. This is the first woman that really stayed in Alcoholics Anonymous. She wasn't the first to come in and get sober, but she was the first one that actually stayed in Alcoholics Anonymous. This is the first woman to actually stay in Alcoholics Anonymous. But she was the first one that actually stayed in Alcoholics Anonymous. And then we got this one. Here's Marty Mann. And, And she was a high society gal and had lots of money and a great capacity for drinking. And she's in a family that loses all the money in the Depression. She's a charity case in a nut house. And one of the multi-leith copies of the big book had gotten to her psychiatrist. And he brings it to her and she reads it and she gets all hopeful because, oh, here it is. There's an answer. And then she sees that God's involved and she throws the thing away and she goes, I didn't have anything to do with that. A couple days later, she's still walking around the nut ward and she's going to get drunk at a nurse that's pissed her off. And she remembered that there was something in the book about that. And she goes back and starts reading more about alcoholism. And she identifies. And she has this huge experience. And everything changed. And she gets scared because the last time she'd had an experience like that, she was drinking and she'd walked out a third-story window. So she goes running to the doctor and he's sick. Or no, he's with a patient. And he pounds on the door and he opens, what's up? And she tells him what's up. And he goes, no, no, you got it. This experience you've had, it's valid. See, he had read the varieties. Shoemaker had read the varieties. All these people that helped us had read the varieties. He said, go back and keep reading that book. And she did. And this woman's recovery founded the National Council on Alcoholism. And more importantly, she was the point person. And you can't believe the amount of grief she took. She was the point person with the professional community that helped start what they called the Big 12 Step. Because, see, they used to just jail us. But once the American Medical Association declared that alcoholism was a disease, her work, the National Council on Alcoholism, people like Chuck and Bill and all these folks that were working on that, and probably our friend Dick who's here, that big 12 step changed the way that the legal and the medical profession looked at the disease of alcoholism. Now about the spiritual experience Shoemaker says that I believe that it's relatively sudden for many and it's a combination of suddenness and gradualness for others. And those of us who've been on the path for a while you don't just have one. It's like you don't just fall in love once you can fall in love again, again and again. Wilson said regarding his experience he said that I don't see any difference I don't think that it's any way superior than the one that all, all got that? All AAs have that we've all had the transforming spiritual awakening. He said I think it's a time element. He said I got it in five minutes. Some people it takes five months some people it takes five years. But he said with me it collapsed and it's the thing that kept me faithful to Alcoholics Anonymous during those years. He said I personally see no great advantage in the tremendous experience. But for me today some people know that alcohol doesn't have an altar. So I believe what's important about it is a life of double experience. Or rather greater thick that lives in my life. But that isn't it. It is the fruits. It's not the experience. And just for a moment, if you'd be so kind, go back in your mind's eye and see where it is that you first came in to Alcoholics Anonymous, that first meeting. What was on the walls? Who was there? How did they greet you? How did they treat you? How did they treat you? And when did your experience happen? When did you experience that first change? Thank you. And who led you to that experience? Your sponsor? Your sponsor? Your sponsor's friends? Their families? And the sacrifice their families made so that you could recover from alcoholism? Your sponsor? Your sponsor? And what are the fruits? The fruits of your experience? And your family? With your children? Your neighbors? Your family? Your family? Your family? Your family? Your family? Your coworkers? Your family? And then you are carrying the message in Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous. Thank you. For me, what happened was I was about four or five months sober. I was sitting at the 2 Plus 2 meeting in Westwood, the Westwood Community Church. I was listening to a woman by the name of Liz Lopresti talk. And she talked about how as she drank, that everything that made a human being a human being was stripped away from her and she became nothing but an animal. And I identified a depth. And as I listened to this woman share, the room left. It went whoosh. It was white. And I was afraid. My conscious mind said, Oh, this is an LSD flashback. I'd taken a lot of LSD and I'd never had a flashback. And my heart said, Pay attention. And I did. And what came over me was not intellectual. It was more of a feeling. And the feeling was, in classical religious language, they call it the peace that passes understanding. There's no way to express it. And as I sat there in all knowledge and all love and all joy, knowing that absolutely everything was all right, because I'm involved, I actually started to frame a question. What about war? And the feeling that came over me was, I got it. I got it. And I sat there. And in this amazing point of consolation, I don't know if it took eight minutes or 12. It wasn't very long, because this woman was talking in the meeting. And as she started to wrap up her pitch, I gradually started to come back into the room. And as I came back into the room, behind the speaker at this place, there are three stained glass windows. God is... God is love. And that's what first came into my vision. And I looked around the room, and it was pretty apparent that nobody else had been on the train that I was on. And I didn't know what to do. And I was afraid. The next day I went and I talked to my sponsor, and he couldn't hear what I was saying. I went to a priest friend. He couldn't hear what I was saying. But the third guy I talked to, he'd read the book. Varieties. And he'd been a professional God person for a while. He says, yeah, I've heard of it. He said, Jamie, I would love for this to be my story, but it's not. He said, but the people that have reported to me, it sounds just like that. So what do you do with a situation like that? What do you do with a gift like that? I knew that I'd been kissed. I talked about it once in a meeting, and a guy took a swing at me. AA in 1970. United was a lot more fun than today. And we're so nice now. And anyway, but I just kept my mouth closed. And I kept active as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I only talk about this thing occasionally because I don't want to divide myself. But every time I talk at these things, there are people, that have had the experiences, that don't talk about them. And we don't need to talk about them, but we need to live them. And one of the great tragedies in my life was that I didn't live as though I knew that absolutely everything is love, that everything is okay. And this moment in and of itself is absolute perfection. So how do we know if it's real? Every woman and man in this room has had the transformative experience. Every woman and man in Alcoholics Anonymous, the Al-Anon family groups, Cocaine Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Cutters Anonymous, 250 anonymous groups, all of them, what are the fruits? Well, and James says, impossible things are possible. New energies and endurances are shown. The personality is changed. The man is born anew. They didn't drink all day long. What is that but a miracle of grace? Thank you very much. Thank you.. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.