Daily Reprieve Means the Alcoholic Mind Gets Treated in This Exact Moment – Bob A.

About This Speaker Tape

Recorded April 28, 1995 at the Hole in the Donut, a Prime Time meeting in Santa Monica. After Chapter 5 is read and seven members share about self-will, injured minds, and the gap between hearing the message and applying it, Bob A. takes the podium as main speaker and delivers a sustained teaching on the disease of alcoholism as a mental disease — not a drinking problem.

Bob's anchor is the invisible line. He was told early in AA that crossing it means losing the power of choice over alcohol. Years later he realized it also means losing the power of choice over living itself — the same mind that kept him drunk is the mind he uses sober. He describes two and a half years of being the same man sober as drunk: going to meetings, hating the guys at work, unable to look people in the eye, a wife who got sick on a Thursday and died Sunday morning at three and a half years sober, court appearances, a hospital bed where a doctor told him he had less than five percent and to say goodbye to his family.

He grounds the teaching in concrete scenes: his radiator boiling over on the 405 near Getty Drive and an angel stranger who had left work at four instead of six stopping to help; a doctor leaning on the horn at him merging off La Cienega where the old blood used to rush straight to his head. The ism never dies. It dies when the alky dies. The only treatment is step application in the moment he is in — not after steps one through twelve are complete, but right now, building a character he can live in today.

The mindset is urgent and uncompromising: meetings don't change character, study doesn't change character, time doesn't change character. A conscious contact with a living Higher Power, applied to whatever thought is live in the mind at this second, is the only thing that keeps the disease from doing damage through his mouth, his judgments, his impatience.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Meeting opens at the Hole in the Donut in Santa Monica, April 28, 1995, with the Serenity Prayer and AA preamble
• 2:30 Evelyn reads Chapter 5, How It Works
• 7:00 John, leading the meeting, shares about a small disappointment this week that instantly triggered raging thoughts — anger, jealousy — and the gap he found between asking Higher Power to remove it and actually letting go
• 13:00 Tom shares, back after a relapse, around the program since 1985 but never did a fourth step — the death-insanity-jail loop started running in his head again
• 17:00 James describes his injured mind, the radio talk show that never stops, the debating society that judges every share even while claiming not to judge
• 28:00 Evelyn the nurse: AA gave her back her soul, her conscience, and her life — and the 15-minutes-at-a-time prayer she has returned to this past four months
• 35:00 Bob A. takes the podium as main speaker, opens on the purpose of coming to AA and why he spent his first two and a half years sober as the same man he was drunk
• 45:00 Bob on the invisible line — crossing it means losing the power of choice not only over alcohol but over living itself; step one says the life is unmanageable forever
• 55:00 Bob tells the radiator story on the 405 near Getty Drive — the stranger who normally works until six left at four, pulled over, drove him to the gas station for antifreeze, did the work
• 65:00 Bob on the hospital bed where a doctor told him he had less than five percent, and on sitting beside the judge in court — the few seconds it took to go from losing his stomach to asking Higher Power to be with him