Desperation and Surrender – 12 Step Workshop – Part 2 of 3 – Bob

I love the breaks it's all of a sudden there's a couple hundred conversations starting with the word I so I'm in a trap I can't spring and in the beginning of the chapter we agnostics it talks about these this this two-pronged fork I'm impaled on and it says if when you honestly want to you find you cannot quit entirely entirely sounds a bit extreme doesn't it I mean they don't really mean entirely do they I mean that's just that's this over-the-top to it's fanatical entirely I mean what about what about marijuana it's organic what about if I can go to a doctor and get pills I had doctors down to a sock I could get pill I could give the waters I could you know I just I just go in there and imagine I'm sicker than I am and just get a doctor to start writing for me I'm just what about because I could quit drinking and not entirely but I quit drinking for the most part if I can stay if I could switch to something else which my sponsor calls he says that's like changing deck chairs on the Titanic but the truth is I got a big secret and I can't quit entirely because ain't no good sober because of all the things that so court talks about all the bedouinments on page 52 that's me when I'm sober the page 60 through 63 that's meat when I'm so burnt most of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous is it's not talking about the alcoholic in his drunken condition is talking about what we're up against in sobriety so I can't quit entirely unless something would change and I can't change myself. I've tried. And then the second thing it says, or if on drinking of little control over the amount you take, well that's always been true for me. I start and I don't know where it's going to go. I know it's going to be bad but I don' t know what form bad is going to take this time. So I got both those things in the book says if that be the case you may be suffering from an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer doesn't seem like good news to me i remember sitting in a in a rehab in maine i was people in a told me i was up there at a geographic i thought i was up there to avoid incarceration uh i was in and i was on my way to the hospital in mother seaton hospital in this rehab and they had a prison group come in from thomaston state penitentiary and these i'd never i've been around aa by this time for i don't know you know several quite a few years i've Been to quite a Few meetings but they had A speaker out of the prison who was one of the trustees he was a lifer in there well i'd Never seen anybody like this guy He had really long hair and a long beard. I had long hair and a wrong beard. I was hoping for a tryout for ZZ Top, I think. I don't know. And he had been an outlaw motorcycle guy and he was covered with tattoos. And tattoos... This is like early part of the 70s. Tattoos are not chic. Nobody has tattoos back there except convicts. And they're inked, they're blue ink prison tattoos. He's covered with them. He's got arms that are just huge. Like this guy must be pumping iron five, six hours a day for years. Tough guy. He's talked about carrying a shotgun and pistol whipping people. Took no crap from anybody. Man, I'm listening to this guy thinking, man, I would drink with this guy. because when you're secretly weak, pathetic and afraid and you don't know if you have enough anger to cover it up you want to drink with guys like that because they got your back and I thought oh man I'd drink with this guy and then he started talking about very personal stuff how he'd come to sometimes in the morning and he'd be in terror like a scared little kid And I thought, oh my God, you felt that way? Because I used to come to like that. Almost in a fetal position, not knowing what I did the night before. Man, this tough guy's like that, and I'll tell you, he's hooking me in. I'm ready to sign up for AA. And then he talks about being arrested for shooting this cop, and ended up in prison, and he went in prison. He went to his first AA meeting, and he said he connected to AA and then he found God. The minute he said he found god I sat there and I went oh no! Oh no, not him! He's cool! Oh what have you people done to him? Oh no! You've turned him into a sunbeam for Jesus! Oh no!! Not him! Because I had a lot of fear of God and a lot of prejudices and a deep-seated, down to the core of who I was sense that if there really was a God, I'm never going to be quite good enough for Him. I'm just too stained. I'm too bad at being good, and I'm very good at being bad. I can be good for a little while, and then it's like I out-good myself. I can't be good anymore. When I'm good for a period of time, it's like putting torque on my bed. It's like a bungee cord effect. I'm like, whoa, there I go the other way. It's bad. It's a bad deal. So I'm not God material. But the book says to one who feels he is an atheist or an agnostic, this experience seems impossible. but to continue as he is means disaster especially if he's an alcoholic of the hopeless variety now that is an odd thing to say in other words there's alcoholics and then there's Alcoholics of the Hopeless Variety and I think there's some truth to that you know I look back over my life and I was an alcoholic from the very first time I ever drank but I wasn't the hopeless for a matter of fact I had tremendous hope for years you know I'm gonna I'm like an engine that wouldn't start I'm going to I'm not going to but I had a lot of hope I mean it was like I'm gunna meet her I'm guanna get in a band I'm guna you know matter of act this will sound strange but it's really true hope just about killed me because as long as I was a hopeful person, I couldn't be desperate enough, because hope will negate desperation. That idea that hope, the book says, hoping against hope, we were not true alcoholics. And finally in 1978, I became an alcoholic of the hopeless variety, and then that's when the total idea, the two delusions were smashed. The idea that somehow, someday, some way that I'm going to be able to get the ease and comfort again. I'm gonna be able, I'm just gonna be free. I'm not gonna be up in the middle to get high and have it get me free like it, so I can come out and play like I used to. That I'm gunna be okay. I'm runna find a way to jumpstart that party and that I'll control it reasonably enough to keep the damage down to something legit. I didn't ever fancy I'm going to keep damage down at nothing. But I'll tell you, in my alcohol logic, six months a year in jail in exchange for a little bit of partying seems like a good deal to me. I mean, that doesn't give you a high mental health quotient if you look at it that way. That was a good exchange for me because I needed the relief and I needed to be able to get the freedom I found in the bottle so desperately and I pretty much at the end I'd have done just about anything to get it back and I couldn't get it back and I couldn't get it back down at the bottom of the page it says if a mere code of morals or a better philosophy of life were sufficient to overcome alcoholism many of us would have recovered long ago we found that such codes such philosophies did not save us no matter how much we tried I think that was that was the motivation behind me being a therapist at one point. I think it was the motivation between going to all the AHP seminars and, you know, the stuff with Ellis and Silverman and it's, you know, all the TA stuff and all that stuff is I'm thinking that if I had enough information, a better philosophy of life, if I understood the inner workings of my emotions and my mind surely I can beat this thing or as the book says rest satisfaction and happiness out of this world through the knowledge but the problem is it talks about that right here it says lack of power that was my dilemma lack of Power Now, the book refers to the lack of power for what? It says we had to find the power by which we could live. This is so much more than the power not to drink. This is the power to solve the one end of the equation. The problem with abstinence. The problem mit depression. The problem wit anxiety. The problem whit loneliness. The problem with feelings of not fitting. The problem of not being able to be a team player. The problem with being so driven by this need for self-grandizement and self-gratification that I step on people's toes. The problem to live. I need the power to live because I don't live. I struggle in conflict until I can't take it anymore. And so I need the power to live. And it's, I think there's a, you know, oddly enough, I think step two is we, there's a lot of places in AA where we lose people. Step two is one of those places. You know, if you're like me and you come here and you're a bit God-resistant, and I think there are people that are God- resistant that are clergy, and they're God- resisted. even though they have a head full of information about God they don't have an experience with God and I'm God resisted because I'm afraid of God I remember as a little kid I could only hear the negative I didn't hear about a God of love other kids did because I am only listening for potential problems my mind is like a problem seeking missile all it does is threat assessments all the time That's all it does. And so it didn't hear about a God of love, but it heard about a god of judgment, a god who could see in the dark, which that's really bad. A god that judges me for what I think. Oh my god, I'm always out of line in my thinking. I don't mean to be. I try to be good. I can't be good too long. I just can't. Even to this day, I'm sober over 38 years. You get me on a bad spiritual hair day, which means I'm full of myself and I have two movies that have a tendency to run in my head one is sex and the other is violence I could be driving down the freeway going, I'll kill him I'll do her this idea that God judges me for what I think is like hideous oh my god just kill me I mean, oh. So I'm God-resistant when I get here, and yet I'm so broken that I went to a man in the detox in 1978 and did something that was so out of character. And as I did it, I almost started to cry. I pleaded with him. I said, would you sponsor me? And if you will, I'll do anything you ask me to do. and the journey began and he wanted me to do crazy things that I didn't believe in one of the first things he asked me to do, he said well I want you to get down on your physically get down your knees every morning every night and I want você to pray I said listen I don't believe in God, he says I didn' t ask you if you believe in God I asked you to pray well if I don' t believe in God and I pray I'll feel like a hypocrite He said, I think you've been a hypocrite all your life. What's the difference? Just do it. And so I started to take actions that I didn't believe in, that I did not think would work, but I was so demoralized and so broken that AA people took advantage of my weakness and changed my life. but I had to be the alcoholic of the hopeless variety there's no more moves here for me see I watch people get sober they got moves they got plans little plans and designs they got a way to go you know and they attack AA like a used car salesman right they got moved I didn't have any moves left I had no more moves I was so tired of me, so sick of what I've been reaping the way I felt in life I had no more moves and so I started taking these actions that would lead me into believing in God and you know what happens those of you that have done that it's remarkable it's unbelievable one of my favorite lines in this chapter it says that god does not make hard terms with those who seek him from the moment i started positioning myself in the universe as if god was a possibility he started to appear and he started working through the very very fabric of the universe and mostly through people. I can't tell you how many dozens of times I'd go to a meeting and I'm just distraught and confused and messed up and there'd be some stranger there talking about exactly what I need to hear, exactly when I needed to hear it. I used to listen to cassettes from speakers. I'd be having a bad day and some guy gave me this stupid cassette. I said, can I help? I put it on anyway oh my god that guy's talking about what i'm going through how who and the question is who's the choreographer behind all who's like lining his crap up i mean what i mean how because it's like what happened all of a sudden i'm a good luck back magnet when i've only been a bad luck magnet and it all shifted as if life itself in the universe shifted from the moment i started the repositioning of myself a guy 37 eight years ago say that he thought AA could even could also stand for altered attitudes I didn't know what that meant I didn t even like that word attitude because people are always on me you got bad attitude I don't even know what means I just they're just it's a put down of some sort but a guy in AA was a pilot and he talked about how pilots talk about attitude when you're landing a plane that your attitude is your angle of approach so aa is designed to alter my angle of approach to life from the selfish taker to the surrendered giver it's designed to change it's a repositioning in life to catch something i don't even believe exists and that's the grace of god when i was a little kid i i uh well i wasn't that wasn't there i was a teenager actually in in lieu of being sent away it was my third time in juvenile court in lieu of being set away to the the juvenile home uh my parents made a deal with the judge and i got to go to this disciplinary school upstate new york on the finger legs like and it was on we The dorm we lived in was an old motel on Lake Cayuga. Or Cayuga, I guess you'd call it. It's been a long time. But this school, the next door was another motel, and we all had docks. And they had a fleet of little sailfish boats and motorboats and stuff like that. And me and my buddy are smoking pot and drinking wine one day. And it's about the end of October, beginning of November, pretty close. And I don't know about you, but when I get high, I become the guy who knows all things. Do you know what I mean? And I've never been in a sailboat, but we knew we could sail. We were sailors. We could feel it in our bones. I mean deep in our bonds. And we went and stole one of those little two-man sailfish, you know, and we're paddling out to the middle of the lake. Well, this lake, it's a big lake. And the wind is so strong on this lake that in the wintertime when the lake is frozen, they have the ice boat races. And those ice boats whip down. I mean, they're fast. So this is a quick lake with sailboats. So we get out there. Somehow we get, we don't know what the hell we're doing. We get that sail up and it catches the wind. And oh my God, we're zipping across that lake and we're still, whoo, this is really cool. and then we started realizing as the shoreline is coming at us that there's no break in here there's nothing and my buddy who's brilliant also like I am he said oh he said we have to come about well how do you do that well I don't know I'd say you got to change something with the sail and the rudder and just and so we started to try to do something we don't Know How To Do which has come about and that wind that is so powerful it'll take you anywhere you want to go with tremendous speed also has the power to turn you upside down keel up sail down in the water and the end of october beginning of november in upstate new york so we're hanging on to this hull of this boat in water up to here and we're going to get hypothermia we might die One of the teachers had seen us out there. He was watching us with binoculars. He jumps in a motorboat and comes out and rescues us. I think that that's what happens in AA. What happens in AAA is there's been a force, a power in this universe that I've been going, it's wrecking me because I don't know how to set my sail to catch the grace. The grace, God's grace, He doesn't withhold it from me. It's my divine right. It's My inheritance. It's Mine. The problem is I'm an idiot. I don't know how to catch it. And I come into Alcoholics Anonymous and enter into a surrendered repositioning of my life which is designed to set me in a life in a different way, in a selfless, altruistic way so I can catch the grace. and it's an amazing, amazing transformation. But we lose people here because they break through the God barrier as I did and it feels like when you come to believe, especially if you're resistant, you finally come to belief, it's a epiphany-like experience. You go, oh! It feels like you arrived somewhere. My God, I believe me in God like this? I mean, you know who? But you haven't arrived anywhere. Truly, if you have arrived somewhere, it's at the beginning of the journey. It's not the end. Because coming to believe is only step two. There's a whole bunch of stuff to do after that. Because your newfound spiritual experience will evaporate in time. we have a history the human race has a history of this guys like Chuck Dietrich Jim Jones, David Koresh people who had effective spiritual experiences and they never took it any farther and they Never Had Any Sponsors They Never Had Accountability because their ego grabbed on to the experience of God and used it for its own aggrandizement you know Everybody know who Jim Jones was? Jonestown, Kool-Aid, killed thousands of people. If Jim Jones would have had a sponsor, you'd know his sponsor would have said, Jim, the Kool Aid's a bad idea. So we lose a lot of people here because they think they've arrived. But there's more. Because coming to believe, having faith is far from what we're aspiring to here. We're aspiring to conscious contact. And there's a big difference. Those of you who drove here, when you leave here, you'll get in your car and you'll go out on those roads and you go out there with faith. Faith that there are traffic laws and there are police to enforce them. And that faith may curtail your driving a bit. You get a cop in your rear view mirror with these lights flashing, you've got conscious contact. And one is right here in your now reality. And the other is of the mind. Which is fine. The problem is when it comes to alcoholism as Father Martin used to say when your intellect and emotions are in conflict with each other the emotions always win. The intellectual knowledge and belief in God when your feelings are putting the screws to you don't sustain you. You better have found a place somewhere where you've been connected to God even though you lost it because everybody loses it. Nobody gets it 24-7. Now there are people on TV that say they do but they're asking for money. I'd be suspect of that. What most of us get is like the tides. It comes in and it goes out. It comes on and it's gone. It comes to me, and I get self-reliant, and it comes away. And then I surrender and it becomes in. I get full of myself. I get connected. There are days in my sobriety where I'm so plugged in I should have a tent and a tambourine. And then there are other days when I pray on my knees to the air with no feeling or sense of anything, in desolation. But that's okay because I still pray. I still go through the actions of Alcoholics Anonymous whether I'm plugged in or whether I've disconnected. Because if you take the first couple letters off the word spiritual, you have the word ritual. I do the ritual of spirituality, the actions. I make my commitments at the detoxes. home group I return my phone calls to the people I sponsor I take the actions I don't be refused to be so selfish and so self-serving that I only do what I feel like doing people here who only do when they feel like doing don't survive themselves you have to take actions that are more that are greater than how you feel and so i take the actions some days i don't feel like doing them there's a here's a funny here's the funny dynamic i bet you i'm not the only ones ever experienced this you ever ever told somebody you're going to meet him in a meeting and you told him that two days ago and now the day of the meeting comes and you go oh god i don t even like that meeting there's a lot of stupid people there I don't want to go to that meeting oh man, I told the guy you gotta do what you said ah crap, I don' t want to go to the meeting and the meeting I don''t want to go to, I come out of it going man, that was the best meeting I've ever been to isn't that odd that I don'T know what's good for me matter of fact, over the years I've learned if I resist it it's probably going to be good If there's something about me that doesn't want to do this thing, it's probably going to be good for me. I've never had that resistance when it comes to self-gratification. I've never had a girl call me up and say, come on over. There's nobody home. And I go, oh, I don't think I'd like that. No, I think I'd rather go to a meeting and work with a new guy. I may choose to go to the meeting and work with a new guy rather than do that, but it's not a natural... I don't have a natural resistance to the things that are bad for me, but I have a national resistance to things that good for me. And some of us wonder why we can't manage our own lives. well on page 46 it talks about two things if I can lay aside prejudice this is a hard and crucial thing I think in order to access God and to grow along spiritual lines you've got to know that you don't know You've got to be suspect of all the things you've judged in your opinions and your judgments. You've gotta lay aside all those prejudices, all those pre-judgments and become childlike. Know the most important thing you'll ever know is that you don't know. The Buddhists have many, many stories about this and they is a form of enlightenment is to know that you don't know and so get to if i get to a place where i'm willing to consider the possibility that all my thinking may be wrong now if your real ego dominated and you're really in the bondage of self you will this will be hard hard idea for you because the ego demands that it's right. Matter of fact, I've got the kind of ego it doesn't care if it kills me as long as after I'm dead everybody's walking around going well, you know, Bob was right. He's dead but he's right If I can lay aside all my prejudices and get simple enough and humble enough to know I don't know then the second thing is express even a willingness which is in the early actions of AA when they tell you to start praying and start positioning yourself in life. If you're having the middle of the day, if things are going bad, stop, pause. Pause and turn your consciousness towards this power. I don't know if I believe in God. Doesn't matter. Stop and turn Your consciousness towards This Power. What if God doesn't exist? Stop and Turn Your Consciousness Towards The Power. and let's watch what happens. And what they're really suggesting is what a scientist would consider a working hypothesis. They're presenting me with a theorem, with an idea that I do not believe. You're telling me that there is a power source in the fabric of existence, it's even down inside of me, that will transform my life and line everything up in synchronisticness? Well, I don't believe that. perfectly all right we're going to start acting as if that's true and let's see what happens let's say what happens if it's not true it'll it'll show itself as being BS pretty quick but if it is true you're gonna notice some things that are changing you're going notice some things that are happening and you will come to believe the only way a guy like me can I go every summer for last 15 years I go over to England probably just about every summer I'm going this the end of August this year and which is a great time I went one time for this rock-and-roll musician at party over there for a famous guy who went for his party on new year's eve one year that i'll never do that again that i don't know how people live in the in the uk in the winter time it's brutal it's really oh god but in the summer time the first time everyone over there uh i was really spent a lot of days down in the old historical part of of london which is westminster that's That's where Buckingham Palace is and the Abbey and the Parliament and Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park, all that stuff. It's all there. It's a beautiful older part of London, a very historical part. And back years ago, a lot of the streetlights were still the old poles. They hadn't changed them all out yet. Now they've almost all been changed out now. The last time I was over there, of course I didn't look diligently, but I couldn't find any of the old pole lights. But years ago, you'd find all the streets are lit by gas streetlights and the old poles would have this little box on the side of the pole just about mid-chest level. And it was welded shut and painted over. over and what that box was years ago before they had the technology and before they had the computerized deal that turns the gas on and lights it, they used to have a guy that would walk up and down the streets of Westminster with a key and he'd open that little, that box, was actually a door. He'd open that little door, he'd stick that key in there and he turned the gas off and then he'd reach up with a long pole with a flame on the end and light the streetlight and close the box, go down to the next one, do the same thing. Well, you could climb up to the top of the highest building in Westminster and look out over the city, and you couldn't see where the guy was lighting the streetlights, but you could see where he'd been. And as a result of the actions of willingness, expressing a willingness to believe and taking those actions and positioning myself, I could sit in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous I was two years sober, and I couldn't see where God was at that moment that I could see where He'd been in my life. And by this time, I'm sponsoring a bunch of guys. You really want to see the hand of God up close and personal? Sponsor people for fun and for free. And watch. And don't try to solve their problems. Don't tryと solve their problem and you will watch God work. It's amazing. It's like there's an old story, it's just like this too, about this priest, he's walking down the street and he's coming along the street and at the bottom of this really steep hill and he looks up at the top of the hill and there's this little kid about four years old on a tricycle and the kid all of a sudden is barreling down like a bat out of hell, barreling Down that hill. The priest's watching him and he hits this bump at the end And he flips over and just scuffs himself up. And he goes, God damn it. And the priest goes, son, son. Don't say that. Say, God bless me. The little kid goes, okay, okay father. Alright. About a week later, the priest is walking down the same street. He looks up. Here's that crazy kid coming down that hill again. Oh my God, the kid's crazy. Well this time he's really ripping along. He hits that bump in the bottom, flips over, just smashes the front wheel of that tricycle up. He's torn his pants up. He's bleeding, gets off the bike and he goes, he sees the priest. He goes, God bless me. And the wheel of the bike straightens out, his pants just go back together. The cuts heal up and the priest goes, god damn it. some of us get jaundiced to the experience of God and you got to get those new people right you got it get it's some of this forget how to do conscious contact we take it for granted Granted, in Northern California, in Monterey Bay, there was a cannery. And the fishing fleet would come in and they'd drop all their fish off there. And this cannering processed the fish. And what they started doing is they'd take the fish guts and they put them in this big pile in a gurney on the dock outside the canneries of the building. Well, in that Monterei Bay, there these pelicans that were just the most astute fishermen i mean these pelican were amazing birds they could from a great height they could spot a fish and they could dive in and go under the water and catch that fish and beautiful well when the cannery started putting up these piles of fish guts on the docks the penguins or they're not the pelicans started eating the fish guts and gorging themselves every day on these fish guts they didn't have to work for it it was just right there it's like a free buffet and they did that and they Did that and he did that for generations well a few years ago vitamin company came along and made a deal with the cannery to buy all the fish guts to process them into fish oil for their vitamin company. All of a sudden, one day there's no fish guts and the penguins are walking around the dock aimlessly. And some of them are starting to starve because it's been too many generations where they don't know how to fish anymore. And they're dying. And some environmentalists saw what was happening and what they did is they went to another bay and they found these young adolescent penguins and they brought them to the Monterey Bay and the young adolescents taught the old timers how to fish again right that's why we always will work with newcomers because you can get jaundiced by the fruits of your own recovery here and forget how of fish and the newcomers will help you to connect with God, to have a spiritual experience again, to renew everything that you'd had here one thing I'll talk about this for about five minutes and then I'm going to turn it over to Adrian page 55 two short paragraphs really just sort of encapsulate everything we're going to discover in the rest of the process in steps four through nine it defines in these paragraphs the problem and it defines the solution and it starts off by saying and this is in the section where it talks about all our doubt and prejudices about god it says actually we are fooling ourselves for deep down in every man woman and child is the fundamental idea of god deep down in me how could something it's nice to hear the old timers talk about the God within listen to this still small voice of the God within how they used to like to just be quiet and commune with the God within not me I tried it in early sobriety, I tried going home and just communing with the guy within I discovered when it's quiet out here it gets really noisy in here. I felt after about 30 seconds that I was having a panic attack and I turned the TV on. Chamberlain used to talk about God being in here, not in me. How could something so good and so powerful be in something I secretly knew to be so bad and so weak? It made no sense to me. I go inside me. I don't run into God. I run into legion. I mean, I run into a whole bunch of chattering crazy people. That's why we don't recommend meditation to people that are brand new and if you're going to try it no sharp objects around it. Because your head starts, doesn't it? It starts I'm just going to commune with God and then I'm going to think about tits. No, no, no don't think about that. It's like I'm communing with God and I wish that guy at work would die. No,no,no it's just like it's horrible. So the problem is, and the book says it, God is hidden within me, but it's obscured from me. It's blocked by three things. By calamity. We all know what that is. Wilson talks about his spiritual experience in town's hospital was easily pushed aside by worldly clamors. It's the chatter in your head. It's the voice that never really goes away. It just talks to you. And do you ever notice that the chattering voice in your head is a more reasonable voice than your sponsor's? This is a voice that kind of... This voice gets me. This voice is reasonable. This voice says things like, You know, don't listen to your sponsor all the time. He's old. It says things like, you don't have to pay all your taxes. You don't even agree with everything the government does. It says Things Like, it's not really a lie. You're just withholding big aspects of the truth. It says thing like, they said to stay away from the new girl. Maybe they want her for themselves. you know it just talks it just says it's just a manufacturer of bs right and it's always self-grandizing say it always has to do with my money property and prestige and my gratification and my self-aggrandizement it's a self-serving voice because it's the voice of the enemy my friend don says something it's brilliant when i first time i heard him say it he said And you want to know what the devil sounds like? It's the voice of the negotiator in here. It's The Chatter. If you looked at the Old Testament, you went back into Genesis and you read it in Genesis in the original Hebrew. When you get to the part where they introduce the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the word that they use in the Hebrew would not translate into the English as the word for serpent. it's actually the word they use to describe the sound the serpent makes it's the hiss it's always there whispering it's a whisper it's voice it's seductive voice it's of the enemy if you listen to it it will convince you to quit your job because they're mistreating you it'll convince you that she's probably cheating on you so you should cheat on her it's the voice that will get you to cheat it's the voice, that will, get you, to lie it's the voice ,that scares you and worries you into being the person that you're eventually not going to like very much It's the voice of the enemy. The second thing it talks about is pomp, a good word for ego, is I get so full of myself and my judgments and my opinions and what I know to be right that there's no room for anything. There's no room for God. There is no room you. I live in Bob Bob land. It's all me. My primary when you're full of pomp your primary purpose is you and your gratification your feelings your relief and then the third thing it says worship of other things hard one to see how i a guy like me now that i'm sober and i'm free from alcohol how i could worship anything and then i'll tell tell you a little story i was told this a thousand times probably but it's it's the best best story i got for worship and other things i was a little over a year sober and i was ending my first sober relationship i don't think there's anybody on the planet more narcissistically self-involved than an alcoholic ending a relationship man i'm telling you you can go up to someone that's ending a relationship and just start to talk to him and say you know i just came from the doctor i have terminal cancer in two weeks to live and he'll go you know what else she said you know it's like owns you it just like owns your and and i'm i'm in that spot it's consuming me i can't i i'm I can't be alone and I can be with people it's a bad place so I go to a meeting hoping to get some kind of relief, but when you're spiritually sick, which means you're really full of yourself, you can't hear anything in a meeting. God could be trying to talk to you through the people and hey, you won't hear it because the voice in your head is louder than reality. And so I'm in the meeting and all I can hear are my own thoughts and my own thought are having conversations with her. Now she's not in the room, but the conversation is like when I see her, I'll say this and then she'll say that. Then I'll says this and she'll says that. And then I will say this and she will realize how wrong she made me and beg for my forgiveness. I just love I could sit for hours and think those kind of thoughts and puff myself up with some feeling of having power So I'm sitting in the meeting doing all that. Plus, she's an AA member but she's not in that meeting so I got some weird spring attached to the back of my neck hooked into the meeting room door. Every time the door opens I go, huh huh, not her. Huh huh, right? So at the end of the meeting, I'm worse. Because it's one of those meetings where every full of happy couples in the subject is gratitude. Oh, Jesus. So there's an old-timer there visiting from California, and I asked him if he wanted to go out to coffee, and we went out to copy, and I got him hostage in a booth because everybody in my home group is just tired of me talking about that relationship. I've worn them all out. I've warned them out. And I got this guy in the booth, and 20, 30 minutes I'm telling him about her and how wrong she is and all this stuff. And he's just listening to me and listening to me. And when I run out of gas, he said to me, he said, kid, have you ever thought about the first commandment? And I bristled with a little prejudice. I said, nah, not really into that. Just into AA. And he starts laughing. He says, yeah, I know. He said, God, you and I are a lot alike. Guys like us have a hard time with the thou shalt not part of the Ten Commandments. when you're in charge you don't like anybody telling you what to do I get that he said the Ten Commandments were originally written as statements of spiritual cause and effect and when they were translated from various languages they got an authoritarian spin put on them by some well-intentioned untreated Al-Anons I suppose and so as the First Commandment exists today in the English is I am the Lord thy God thou shalt not put false gods before me. He said I'll tell you what my experience is he said God loves me no matter what. I can't do anything that will stop that I can put anything I want between me and God, he still loves me the problem is if I do that I just put something between me and god and I block the light he said when you worship something it doesn't mean to bow down to something it means to obsessively turn your consciousness towards something said you want to know what you worship very simple at the end of the day before you go to bed imagine a pie graph of everything you've been thinking about that day and the thing that would dominate and own that pie graph would obviously be the thing you've been obsessively turning your consciousness towards and I'm a visual guy when he said that I could picture the pie graph little sliver for a little serve for work and the rest of it was the relationship and intuitively I knew why I was in such desolation and why I felt so alone and so depressed and so lost because I put this relationship and its illusion of the validation and security it would bring me right between me and you, me and AA, me in God, and me in life itself. It had cut me off and separated me because I was obsessed with it. I wish I could tell you. I've never done that again but I've done it. it again. I've done it, and I never did it that bad with a relationship again, but I've done it with problems with my daughter, and I've done it with resentments. They're not really resentments, they're people that I just need to think about until I get them straightened out. I've done them with money and fear, and I've done them with a lot of things. And I think the whole gist of Alcoholics Anonymous is, as my grand sponsor would say, is to uncover, discover, and discard the things that stand between me and you and me and God. Chuck used to say there was one problem and it contained all problems and that was conscious and unconscious separation between me in you and me in God. And my job is to remove the things that are blocking me so I can be free just like I was when I was 16 years old and alcohol lit me up and set me free so that I can be free and I'm not a hostage to my own thoughts and emotions. Alcoholics Anonymous is one of the main goals it's in step nine is a new freedom. I have to if you're sober and maybe you're sober a couple years and it kind of at times feels like you're doing time you're missing something here. There's more here than that. Alcoholics Anonymous is to provide an intermittent freedom sometimes more than more than intermittent but that's what I'm here for and so I'm entering into a process that never ends of uncovering discovering and discarding there's nothing and I'll tell you I'm sad to tell you this was twice 20 years over 20 or so before I understood the reality of this. There is nothing more important than the maintenance of my spiritual condition. And that was not true for many, many years here. Money was more important. Sex was more importan. What you thought of me was more important. Money, property, prestige, sex. I put a lot of stuff. I sold my spiritual condition for crap because egomaniacs with no real true self worth will do that time and time and time again I'll tell you this story there's an old American Indian story some of you have heard it about this little brave he goes up to the shaman of the tribe and he says to the old man old man I don't understand I'm confused and in a lot of conflict there are days when I feel the presence of the great spirit and I'm full of love and I want to help the women in the tribe and I wanna run with the braves and I feel community. And then there are other days when I just hate and resent everyone and I am full of fear and I don't wanna be left alone and I fell like leaving the tribe and just going off by myself. What is this? And the old man said, son your life is like two dogs caught in a sack in mortal combat to the death. One dog represents love and light and the other one represents selfishness and fear and anger. And the little brave says, well, which one wins? And the old man said, the one that you feed. Here's the problem with the second half of step one. my natural inclination is to feed the wrong dog every single time that's why I'm a little over 38 years sober and I have a sponsor and I've accountability with him I would like to be grandiose enough to tell you that well it's just me and God now I've had a spiritual awakening I get all my direction just right from God I don't need a sponsor anymore well that's true on a spiritual good hair day the problem is when I need direction from the most is when I can't access it because I'm too full of myself and too full of my own fears and self interest so I will always need accountability here accountability of a home group and commitments and having a sponsor God I wish I was the kind of guy that could work these steps so well that I could click my heels and I'd be back in Kansas, but I've not been able to do that. And that is the great blessing in my life, that I have not been able to become well enough to no longer need AA in all its aspects. The ego would like to tell me at times that I've arrived. You stay in the trenches long enough you see what happens to the people that arrive. I don't want what they, I don t want to happen to me what happened to them. So I stay small, I stay accountable, I try to follow, I tell my sponsor everything, he gives me directions and I don�t argue. Some of them, I was just putting a band together and oh God, so I grew a little goatee. I thought oh I like this, this is cool. My sponsor told me to shave it off at Stateline. I went immediately and shaved it off. How could I not? I sponsor a couple hundred guys, how can I not if I don't do what my sponsor asked me to do how can i ask them to do anything? I have to balance the equation. I have be the sponsee I want my sponsees to be otherwise I'm a hypocrite again right I have to have integrity oneness as Chuck used to say you cannot compartmentalize your life you can't be a spiritual giant over here in a lecture and a predator over there it that you can't oh if you could do that it'd be great but it bleeds it bleed and you don't see how it bleads because you're one person in one life and so I remain accountable i don't always like what my sponsor says but everything he's directed me to do and since i've been fit i got him when i was 15 years sober has been for my benefit it's enhanced my life and saved me often from me so i i stay in the middle of alcoholics adrian take me out do you want me to go or do we want to take a bathroom break it looks like yeah we'll take a bath and break yeah lunch is well sure all right okay Come on, you ready for lunch?