Daily Reprieve Means Right Now, Not Tomorrow’s Meditation or Next Week’s Meeting

About This Speaker Tape

Bob leads a Monday night stag meeting in Sherman Oaks on October 3, 1994, and delivers a long, intense teaching on untreated alcoholism as a mind disease that keeps running whether the drink is there or not. For years he sat in meetings, read the book, prayed, and was still the same man sober as drunk — suspicious, raging, fault-finding, unable to drive his own car after leaving a meeting, the kind of man who almost killed a neighbor over some flowers. The message he now says he needed then, and still needs today, was never delivered: the disease lives in the mind, in self-talk, and no amount of meetings or reading will touch it without step application lived in the now.

He hammers on Step 2 as the pivot. Self-talking is a power. As long as he listens to himself he stays in the disease, because the character he brought here was already built a long time ago. The cure is not more meditation tomorrow or a tighter relationship with Higher Power next week — it is Higher Power-consciousness right now, an open mind right now, a power greater than self right now. He ties this to the daily reprieve language on page 85 and to his own near-death in a hospital, where self told him he would die and his Heavenly Father told him to stay.

Perry follows with the story of riding in a car today with a man he felt was playing him. Without the application, he says, he would have grabbed the guy by the throat; instead he thanked him for the ride. Nelson shares about coming off antidepressants while his wife is on the road with a rock-and-roll band. Kenny admits he spent the day refusing to talk to anyone, calling this way of life a full-time job. An unnamed woman describes losing it on two puny movers and neighbors who would not help, and vowing to go buy flowers and apologize. Bernard, two years sober, describes glacial, almost unmeasurable progress under his sponsor Ted.

Bob closes by insisting this is not an option. Either you do this now, or you die. Announcements cover an all-day workshop October 29, a coffee-maker commitment for three weeks, and the gate key. The meeting ends with the Lord's Prayer.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Opens Monday primetime stag, Sherman Oaks, October 3, 1994 — purpose of the meeting is to talk about alcoholism
• 3:00 For years the disease of alcoholism grew in him without the alcohol — same man sober as drunk
• 7:30 Neighbor ran over his flowers and he almost killed the guy — completely lost it over nothing
• 13:00 Reads 12 and 12, Big Book, Sermon on the Mount, Dr. Tiebout all night — boning up for a tomorrow that doesn't come
• 19:00 Step 1 as character-building right now — powerless over alcohol and life unmanageable drunk or sober
• 25:00 Step 2 — self-talking is the power that has to be replaced by a power other than self
• 31:00 Thought he had to wait nine years for the program like his sponsor had — you do not have to wait
• 42:00 Perry shares — without the application he would have grabbed the guy in the car by the throat
• 55:00 Bernard at two years sober — glacial progress is still measurable progress under sponsor Ted
• 1:18:00 Announcements — October 29 all-day workshop, coffee commitment, gate key, close with Lord's Prayer