Dog Turds Wrapped in Gold Tinfoil — That’s What We Call Our Worst Defects and We Guard Them Like Treasures 🤣 – Bob B.

I'm Bob Bazanz. I'm an alcoholic. For the grace of God and the power of the AA program, I haven't had a drink since the 10th of December, 1967. For that, I'm very grateful. I'd like to thank Dick Martin, I think, for putting my name on the list for doing the steps. I didn't know I was doing that until sometime after. It's kind of like an assignment. I've only done this a couple of times before, and it's somewhat intimidating for a number of reasons this week, and I just had dental surgery. So if I sound like I'm a little bit off, I'm having implants put in my front. Clancy talked about if you're really spiritual, your teeth grow back. Mine fell out, and I don't know what the hell that... It's an old story, one of those drunk stories. I was down in Notre Dame, and I got really drunk one night, and in a blackout, I got out of line on the bus, and an upperclassman cut my tooth in half and beat the crap out of me. So I flew home to get my teeth fixed, and I got drunk, and I got in a car accident and got the steering wheel in the mouth and, you know, crapped up the other ones, and then I got them... So they did a lot of dental surgery and kind of put them gingerly back in place, but they were always loose. And then just as I was giving a talk last year with Tom Ivester, one fell out. So I gave a talk to 2,000 people with my front tooth missing, and then I had the other ones. So I'm in the process of having implants put in, and that's... Dentistry is not... Dentistry is not my best thing. The other reason it's a little intimidating is I got a couple of people here. Of the people who I would ask to sit down and go through the steps of the book, Earl Husband and Tom Brady would be two of the people that I would ask to go do that. So it's always, even though you know they're brothers and supportive, it's always a little kind of like carrying coals to Newcastle, you know, when you go do that. I'm going to go through the steps the only way I know how, and I'm going to go through them with my own experience with the steps, and I'm going to talk about... I'm going to talk about them in two ways. I'm going to talk about them as I took them when I first came on the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I'm going to talk about them as they relate to my life today and what I'm trying to do with them today. And I'm simply going to, you know, walk through that story. I am not going to go through the book page by page and go do that, although I think that is one of the more powerful ways to do it. I started drinking when I was 14 years old, and I was 4'11", weighed 95 pounds, and was kind of an insecure kid, and I've been trying to compensate for that fact all my life. I developed a big mouth and did a lot of daring things and have been in trouble, you know, all the way through grade school. High school, I started drinking, and it was a love affair. I was, as I say, I was insecure. When I took alcohol, all of a sudden, I felt like I, you know, found the secret. I thought everybody else got to school an hour early, held a meeting, and decided what was going to happen for the day, and I missed the meeting, and I was always trying to catch up. And, uh... I pretended I was at the meeting, and I'd say, hell of a meeting, you know, that kind of a deal, hoping you'd talk about the meeting and I could find out what happened. And, uh, when I took alcohol, hell, I didn't care about the meeting. I had my own meeting. I mean, I just... It gave me a sense of ease and comfort. It brought me together. It gave me integrity. I felt scattered. I felt inadequate. Alcohol pulled me together and gave me a sense of being and self that I had never had. I went and chased alcohol as hard as I could and drank alcoholically all the way through high school. In my high school class, 120 guys, we've got 12 members of Alcoholics Anonymous that I'm aware of. We had a couple of us almost died of alcohol poisoning. Now, my five best friends, four of us, are in AA, and two of our wives are in AA, and a couple of the guys are in Al-Anon. So we had a pretty good... Not only did we have a lot of alcoholism, we had a lot of recovery. And, uh, you know, I drank as much as I could, as hard as I could, until I just couldn't stand it anymore. I drank my way out of the university. I went to the University of Notre Dame in the middle of my senior year. Got a medical release from the Army for alcoholism. Came back to St. Paul, finished college. When I finished college, the family asked me to leave home. And I was one of seven kids, number two, and I was the family horse's ass. I was just, you know, in trouble all the time. Bad example to the rest of the kids. Couldn't follow the rules. My old man was a great guy. He was my hero. He died two years ago. And, uh, you know, those guys that came back from the Second World War made life look easy to me. I don't know, they were just like heroes. I mean, they played hard, they worked hard, they came back, they built businesses. They were just big men and women. I mean, they raised big families. They just, in some ways, it was a simpler, better time. But what they did were, they did powerful things. And I just loved the way they lived. I mean, they, you know, they drank the way I wanted to drink. They had cocktail parties, and they drank, my father drank a hell of a lot. And he had developed the problem of alcoholism when he was about 60 years old. And didn't drink for the last 20, years of his life, thanks to some part, some limited participation in AA and treatment for alcoholism. Uh, and I wanted to be much like them, but I couldn't. It seemed like I had a lot of talent, a lot of ability, and a lot of opportunity, but I was good for short stretches, and the stretches were a little bit, you know, I couldn't take on too many long-term projects and do them very well. And, uh, everybody told me what I had was a drinking problem. I was diagnosed an alcoholic when I was 19 years old by a psychiatrist who I still see, not as a patient, but I see him socially. You know, I'm, I'm born and raised in the same city, so I see, one of the nice things about that is I see the people who I came into Alcoholics Anonymous with, who I went to grade school and high school with, and I see the psychiatrist all the time. Not too many psychiatrists were diagnosing 19-year-old kids alcoholic in 1962, but he did. And he recommended that I go to Alcoholics Anonymous. And, uh, I thought he was nuts. I didn't like that diagnosis. Liked it even less. He referred me to a psychiatrist down in Notre Dame when I went back to the U.S. and said, I went back to my senior year and I went to the library and I started reading something on alcoholism and I got some sort of, I got a book that related alcoholism with, uh, latent homosexuality. And, uh, that was all I needed. At about, at about 20 years of age, I wasn't secure to start out with, you know, and I thought, God, now I have to deal with the fact that I might be a latent homosexual. And it was just too much for me. I didn't want part of the psychiatrist and didn't want any part of alcoholism at that point in time. And, um, drinking didn't seem to be a problem to me. It seemed to be an answer. I don't know why I was the guy who needed a pint in me most days to feel okay. Why is the noise in my head that different? We're talking today, I had a, my spiritual advisor, a son, a grandson, 10 years old, tried to commit suicide last week. Why is, why is the message in one person's young head at 10 years of age that he would consider, taking his life? You know, why was the message in my head? Why was the noise so loud that I needed a half pint or a pint to quiet it and feel part of, you know, the rest of the world? I don't know why that was. It just was. I've been different, you know, since I can remember. Most of us have that keen sense of difference. And I don't think, in many ways, I think everybody in developing their identity feels that difference. I think alcoholics feel it in an exaggerated sort of way and our response to it is so exaggerated and so different. Almost, to death. Almost to death. Alcohol gets so important to us, we can't view life without it. And I couldn't view life without it and I didn't think it was a problem. I thought it was the answer. And it wasn't until I got to Alcoholics Anonymous, you know, the only reason I got here, I was 23 years old, I was, you know, I had just run out of rope. I had a large liver. I was, you know, about to lose a job. I was newly married and in trouble around. I wasn't newly married. I was engaged to be married and I was in trouble in the relationship. And just everything was, you know, kind of falling apart. And I came to Alcoholics Anonymous because it had been recommended to me a couple of times and I got into enough trouble that I got scared enough that I called AA and two men came out and talked to me. And when you're young and in trouble, you talk to a host of people. I have, I mean, I'm telling you that I have talked to an awful lot of doctors and psychologists and deans of colleges and judges and I've talked to attorneys and police and, you know, bishops. I mean, I have, you know, the family, it wasn't like they didn't want to get me help. You know, it looked like I was trying to kill myself. It looked like I had something very seriously wrong with me. And, you know, they'd always have this conversation in front of me and I wasn't usually a very big participant in the conversation. It was about me. But it wasn't an interactive conversation. And when the conversation was done, there'd be a recommendation as to what I should do. And I actually, I really expected, I guess because I'm still kind of a young guy then at 23, that I'd go meet these two men from Alcoholics Anonymous and I'd go through much the same process. They would sit me down and interview me and ask me a bunch of questions. And that isn't what happened at all. Two men sat me down in a cafe sometime in July of 1967. And I was in a suit that I'd worn for three or four days. A buddy of mine got married and weddings were always an occasion where you could drink for three or four days. And I'd been out on about a three-day run and I was in pretty, you know, I was a little bit shaky, a little bit sweaty and not doing very good. And those two men explained to me that they were there as much for themselves as they were there for me, that they had had a serious drinking problem and they had found a way out of that drinking problem and they wanted to share their story and wanted to share their experience and wanted to share what they had found for a solution for them. They weren't getting a toaster for signing me up. There was no business that was going on. It was just, you know, they were just, and that day my life changed. There's a power in sharing your life with another human being. One of the great traditions we have in Alcoholics Anonymous is we share our experience, strength, and hope and not our ideas and not our thinking. There's a strength that when two men sit down and talk about their experiences in such a way that I identified with them and that day my life changed. I drank again after that twice, but it was never quite the same. The power of that experience and they took me to a meeting that night and I started to go to meetings and I was allowed to make the great discovery. Many great discoveries would change my life. One was that alcoholism was a disease. I didn't know that or didn't know it in a way that made any difference and the other was that it was physical but it was also mental and spiritual and that they told me that I had a disease that once I crossed the line from private drinking into alcoholism that my alcoholism affected me all the time when I drank and when I didn't drink and I can't tell you how important it was for me to know if there was a mental or spiritual or emotional aspect of the disease of alcoholism because if, I thought what people were saying is what's wrong with you is drinking bourbon. Stop drinking bourbon and your life's going to be okay. Most of us have had some forced periods of sobriety and I had a couple of real serious scrapes and I had had two three month periods of abstinence during my drinking career and my life didn't get better. I didn't all of a sudden become what I thought you were telling me I'd become if I just wouldn't drink and I thought that proved that I could quit any time I wanted to and I thought it proved that drinking was not my problem and you actually told me that drinking was not my problem. Drinking was my symptom. Alcoholism was my problem. Now what we did in Alcoholics Anonymous is once we took our last drink of alcohol we used the 12 steps of the recovery program of AA to find a different way to live and it was in that process if we didn't find a different way to live we were going to go back to drinking because we didn't know how to live without drinking. I don't think I've ever been told a truer thing than that. So I came to Alcoholics Anonymous I drank the last drink I had was on my honeymoon in Acapulco in 1967 I dove off those cliffs where those divers dive off of at La Cabrada and on the airplane on the way home I had my last drink of alcohol on December 10, 1967. Now sometimes you know it depends on what kind of mood I'm in and what kind of story I'm listening to sometimes you hear the story and then you say and then life was wonderful. You know I had a serious drinking problem had a fair amount of ability I could never put that ability to work I didn't know what the hell the problem was I finally found out that my problem was alcoholism I came to Alcoholics Anonymous I got sober and it's all okay and that's not exactly the way it was. I got some time to think and it's not exactly the way it wasn't. I'm also giving the talk in front of my two sons Bill and Peter and Earl I think if they could probably give part of my fifth step and I think they could give 20% of it that's a little intimidating too. So the good news is that I have things on them so we kind of cancel out I think that so it's kind of a mutual admiration society. My son Bill has nine years of sobriety my son Peter has six. As you'll hear in my story I could have been about as big a horse as Bill was. I could have been about as big a horse as my sons might not have wanted to come to Alcoholics Anonymous. And you know sobriety is one thing but wouldn't it have been a hell of a deal for me to be a big enough horse's ass to have had my children have alcoholism and have them not want the recovery I had? I would have had abstinence but would I have had the emotional recovery that Bill Wilson talks about? I don't think so. So it's more than not drinking. There's a quality to life in sobriety. And that's what I'm going to try to talk about before and after. So here I'm 23 years old. I'm sober. And I start out. Step one. I had a time admitting that I was powerless over alcohol that my life had become unmanageable. As I said, alcohol seemed like it was an answer to me. But to get to a point, one of the great things when we talk about Bill compared to alcoholism with other problems, he says one of the great distinctions is it seems like in alcohol, we're literally killing ourselves. And one of the reasons that we can get a perfect release from alcoholism where we can't seem to get a perfect release from some of the other problems in life is that it has to do with the kind of basis of life itself, that we can get this perfect release from drinking. Because it just violates the principle of life. And many of us came here with our lives at risk, that if we would have continued, we would have lost our lives. We would have continued to drink. We would have died in a car accident. We would have died with a bad liver. We would have died, you know, someone shooting you going out a window or whatever the hell it was. And so that's why he thought we could do that. It's very tough for us, I think, to get to the bottom line and really find out that we think that, you know, especially when we're young, that alcohol has us in that kind of a grip. Most of us think that we can quit. I was a person who thought I can take it or leave it alone. And yeah, it causes me trouble. Sure, I drink too much, but basically, hell, I drank better than almost anybody else that was around. You know, I out-drank most of my friends. There were periods where I'd, you know, where I'd get sloppy and lose some of my tolerance and I'd fall over the line and, you know, get sloppy when I didn't want to get sloppy. But most of the time, I was a pretty good drinker. And so physically drinking didn't seem to cause me the problem. Most of the problems I had were in sobriety. You know, when I was hung over, when I was coming off a drunk, when I was trying to get back to work, when I was doing, you know, when I was trying to be a student, when I was trying to function. And so it didn't seem to me that, you know, when I was trying to get back to work, you know, what the hell are they talking about? Alcoholism. I don't have alcoholism. I got a drinking problem. You know, and as soon as I get these other problems straightened out, I'm gonna have, you know, I came in here and they said, you know, what's wrong with Bob is swallowing bourbon. Well, just before I went back to my senior year in school, you know, I got robbed, rolled, pistol whipped, and shot at and thrown out of the second story of a hotel and ended up in a state of shock in a hospital. And they were gonna keep me in a psychiatric ward and not let me go back to school. I went back to school in the condition that I wouldn't drink. I went back and I didn't drink for the first three months of my senior year. And hell, I didn't, you know. I was a guy who liked everybody assuming that I'd be okay if I, you know, if I ever put my mind to it. I never went to school. You know, people used to, you know, Bob would be, hell, I mean, God, he goes to school one day a week and he somehow scrapes by with a C average. I bet if he ever really went to school, you know, he'd really be a good student. I liked people assuming that, you know. I mean, it scared me to death that if I ever put everything I had on the road, it wouldn't be enough. You know, I mean, you know, I'd get it, everybody assumed that I had just part of it out there. Hell, I had all of it out there. I mean, they have no idea what an alcohol, you know, they think being an alcoholic, it looks easy, right? Just managing the misinformation takes enough energy that the most normal people had to do that shit they couldn't get dressed in the morning. And, you know, and so I went back and I didn't drink for three months and I didn't all of a sudden become that great student, you know, a well-managed kid. I was as anxious as I was. I wasn't as interested as I've ever been in my life. I still had trouble going to school. I went to class, I couldn't study, couldn't stay focused, couldn't keep my mind on what the hell I was doing, was always looking for a card game. Finally, I just, to hell with it, and I went back to drinking. But when I came here, you know, what's the power of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous? The power is in surrender. When I did come here, finally, when I showed up in Alcoholics Anonymous, I was beaten down to my knees. I was scared. I was at a point where, I really think, that surrender happens to most of us when our egos are literally ground to dust. When I came here, I had that opening. When your ego's ground to dust, you're in a space. You have a, there's a clearing. There are people, you can receive information in a way that you've never been able to receive information before. You ask a question, you get an answer, you have an answer. When you're sober a year, you start to ask the question, you get an answer, you're not sure they're right. But there is a... There is a space when you're beaten up enough that when you came in, when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, I was beaten up enough that I could get the message I was surrendered. And I started to get the message of what alcoholism was, that it was an allergy, that it was a condition, you know, that I had a phenomenon of a craving, an allergy to the body, you know, an obsession of the mind. And with my mind left to my own device, I had no protection against that first drink, and I was doomed to go back and repeat that process over and over and over again. And I had done it enough, you know, not enough for some people, but I'd done it enough for me that I wanted that over with. I was so sick, and I didn't know if I was an alcoholic. I was just so sick of being such a lousy person. I mean, I, you know, the high cost of low living. I just, I mean, I was so disgusted with myself. I wanted for me much of what I think everybody in my family wanted for me. You know, if you would have asked my family, hell, they thought I was killing myself. I mean, they thought I was voluntarily trashing everything of value in our life and their life, and that wasn't true. I just, you know, I'd start drinking, and that person who, you know, had the few drinks didn't know anything about the promises or, you know, commitments that they had made, and I was off to the races. So I came to you, and you told me that I had a disease. It was clear that my life was unmanageable. I connected the two, and I had a period of learning, and I had a period of suffering. Surrender and Alcoholics Anonymous that lasted almost nine months, and it was one of the best periods of time I ever had in my life. About the time I was nine months, my ego started to reassert itself, and then I wasn't sure, you know, I'd ask a question, wasn't sure that I got an answer. I started to, you know, rely on the information I have, started to become, you know, self-reliant and those sorts of things. I think one of the most difficult things, if the power of our program is in powerlessness, if the power of our program is in surrender, and I'm going to talk a lot about surrender today, how do you surrender? How do you tell someone to do that? You know, if you go out to that table that they got a Dicope Tapesot have out there, they must have 25 people presenting the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. There has never been a time, you know, this is the history of movements. If you graph the history of movements, you know, we start out with an oral tradition. When I came in Alcoholics Anonymous, the big book was important, but it wasn't as dominant as I see it today. They used that book and they, you know, it was given to me on my first, when those guys called on me, they took me to the meeting, bought me a big book. I read that big book, you know, the very first night I got home. It was important. But it wasn't used the way it's used today. In some cases, I think it's misused today. In some cases, we use that book like some of the stronger, more traditional right-wing religions use the Bible. We use it as an authority and we beat each other up with it. We use it, we quote from it. It is one of the most powerful pieces. One of the most powerful pieces of literature I think that ever been written. I don't know where you would go to have a life transformed with the regularity that we see them transformed in Alcoholics Anonymous. But I promise you, if you think that you can learn everything there is in life in 164 pages, you're going to be disappointed because you cannot read and memorize 164 pages and have the wisdom and the orientation to be able to go take that out on the road and live it. There is more to it than the words. It is not mechanical. It is spiritual. There is more teaching about the 12 steps than there has ever been. There is, you know, so as a movement we go from an oral tradition into a written tradition and we are starting to develop a dogma. And we got good guys and bad guys. If you think this way about it, you're okay. If you think that way about it, you're not okay. And so we have the Brown Shirts for Bill group, you know, the real right-wing kind of conservative group and then we, you know, and, but we're very much getting liked, you know, but that is what we're hearing. We're starting to use it as a dogma. But we're starting to use it like it's a brittle, rigid, didactic sort of thing that there's right and wrong about how to do it. Most great spiritual works, I think, when you read them you have an experience. Every, that's why every time you read the big book it's different. It is not, you know, the words don't change. But in the reading you have an experience and there's an interaction. And I think when we're in our very best shape we have an interaction with God. And we start to be more open. We start to have a change. But if the steps were mechanical, if it truly were formulaic, none of us would have any damn problems. Every time we had an issue, hell, we'd just say the third step prayer. Click our heels, we'd be back in Kansas. I mean there would not be, there would not be a problem. I'm serious. I mean if you got a problem and you're really willing and able to turn that problem over, you make a decision to turn your will and your life over to the care of God, you're done with that problem. Now the problem is a lot of times you go click your heels and say the third step prayer and no one's home. You bring the wrong attitude to the party or whatever the hell it is. But what I want to stress today is, and I think sometimes in the early stages of putting these steps in action in our lives, it has to have structure. I mean it has structure in the book. It's written with structure. So it isn't as if there isn't structure in it. And we enter those processes, and you can't understand it when you're new. When you enter that process, sometimes in a mechanical way, there's nothing wrong with entering it in a mechanical way. If you enter, you know, to whatever degree you're open, it will make you unmechanical. You will start having, to whatever degree you're surrendered, you will not be mechanical. But, you know, for most people, especially when we're new, structure helps us give a road to get on that road and a process and some curbs on the side of the road and the right, you know, and what you want a person is you want the person in this book. You want the person with the answer to the question, to the problem of alcoholism. But I found myself sober and alcoholic synonymous, you know, about a year. When I came in, I had, you know, five or six other issues that were going on, and I'm going to talk about these five or six other issues as I go through all the steps. I had a problem getting up in the morning. I had a problem going to work. Once I got to work, I had a problem staying at work. I had financial difficulties. I spent $200 or $300 more a month than I made, and if you do that over a long period of time, you'll end up in debt. And I had financial problems. I was newly married, you know, had a couple of young kids, and I was loud, angry, impatient, immature, you know, and sometimes violent. I'm not very proud of that, but that's the way I was as a parent. And I had a gambling problem. It was more like a hobby, four or five hours a day, three or four days a week. It was kind of like a second job. I made $5,000 to $10,000 a year playing backgammon, and I literally thought at one point in time I wanted to be a professional gambler. It's how I wanted to support myself. It was one of the great choices, you know. Now, I had all these problems when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, and in my first year, I didn't notice them. I mean, it's just amazing to me that, you know, I think they all got kind of handed to me at once. I don't know if I would have had the courage to kind of take them on. But when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, and I admitted that I was powerless over alcohol and that my life wasn't manageable, I just immersed myself in Alcoholics Anonymous. Meetings, sponsor, going out, you know, to give talks, going out to the workhouses, doing the different things. I was just at everything that I could be at, and I was on a honeymoon. And it wasn't until kind of the end of my first year of sobriety that I started to get in touch with what my program had to do with my daily living. Now, I went all the way through, and I did a fourth and fifth step when I was about three months, four months sober. And I'll talk about that when I get to those steps. So it wasn't as if I didn't go through those processes. I'm just saying I did not have a deep awareness. Of my flaws and my defects of character. During my first year of sobriety, at the end of my first year, I started to get a sense of them. But I thought, if I got the problem and you got the answer, if I'm an alcoholic and the answer is the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I got these six or seven other things that are going on in my life, and if I got the problem and you got the answer, hell, those things ought to go away. And I found myself sober a year, having significant issues that I didn't think a guy sober a year should have. And I thought, I wanted nothing more than to stop measuring my sobriety in months. I thought, God, if I ever got a year. They used to talk about, you know, my sponsor more than any other guy. I remember they told me that the physical part of the deal was 10%. I remember I just was baffled by that. I mean, I thought we were spending a hell of a lot of time in Alcoholics Anonymous talking about how not to drink. And we spent almost no time talking about how not to drink. I used to sit down with them, and they'd be going over guys' bills, doing eighth and ninth step work, and talking about fights with wives, and problems at work, and all this sort of stuff. And, you know, it was very clear to me that they used this program for living. And as I started to get in touch with my problems, I thought, I'm going backwards. I mean, I got, you know, I'm starting to make a list, and I'm sober a year and two years. My problems didn't go away right away. Hell, they didn't go away, you know, they didn't go away in three years, four years, five years, six years, and they haven't gone all the way in 28 years. So I'm going to talk, as we go through this, I'm going to talk about some of the issues and how they expressed themselves in my life. So today, how do I deal, you know, if the power of the program comes through when I don't have any power, if the power of the program is surrender, how do I surrender? How can I stamp my fingers? I'm telling you that today, you know, the book says we're recovered. And I'm telling you that I think once you get rid of the physical parts of alcoholism, the mental and spiritual part stays. I think there's a condition that is with us, and I think we have experiences of life that are exaggerated, and our responses to an awful lot of those experiences are exaggerated, and that we need to continue to use the 12 Steps to the Republic. We've got a lot of moving parts. If we go over any extended period of time, but we stop treating our disease of alcoholism, we get sour in a big hurry. I mean, I have a gift of being an ass. Okay, I can do that. That's like riding a bicycle. Shit, I can do that. Just bam. I'm back. I mean, I can be a horse's ass. No training. No warning. I mean, I can snap back. I don't have to be taught how to do that. I just have a gift for doing that. When you have that kind of gift, and when you have that kind of groove worn in your life, when you have certain patterns of thinking and certain patterns of action, certain patterns, you know, that you have, you're going to fall back into those patterns sober. I think that many of us have patterns of compulsive and obsessive behaviors that when we stop drinking, our alcoholism goes underground and starts to express itself in certain areas of our lives. We're specialists. Most of us have one or two areas of significant unmanageability. I'm kind of proud. I had five or six. I was kind of a generalist. But what I want you to know is that we all leak. They don't make people who don't leak. Okay, when the pressure comes down on us, so I think that a hell of a lot of us started to use sex, or money, or food, or buying, or school, or I don't know what. We started to use, we had that pattern of excessive, you know, compulsive behaviors, and many of us found ourselves two, three, four years sober having those patterns sober in our lives, and then came back in gambling, anger, violence, those sorts of things that express themselves. In my mind, that was alcoholism. Okay. I was able to eventually deal with those things one by one in the Program of Alcoholics Analysts. But when I came in. Today, I have to realize that I'm still powerless and unmanageable, that I have serious flaws, that I treat those flaws like they're the manifestation of the emotional and spiritual aspects of my disease of alcoholism. I treat them with, I have a practice. I have a practice today. I don't think you can get well without a practice. I don't think you can get well without a community. My practice is meetings. My practice is the steps. My practice is my sponsor. My practice is spiritual reading. My practice is my spiritual advisor. My practice is my community. I have a practice to deal with my alcoholism, which is still here. Am I recovered? Yeah, I'm recovered. Am I problem free? No, I'm not. What does our book give us? It gives us a spirit. Am I awake? Yes, I think I'm awake. I am more awake to the issues in my life today than I've ever been. I used to be asleep to most of the issues in my life. I used to hurt people sleepwalking. I used to strike my children when I walked in my sleep. I used to yell at my wife when I walked in my sleep. I used to spend money I didn't have when I walked in my sleep. And I had a lot of issues when I was asleep. And one by one, through the process of the 12 steps, I've come to an awakening that today I don't tend to have the issues anywhere near the same degree. Unfortunately, I still have the problem of thinking. I still have some of the same goofy thoughts in exactly the same way with no difference that I had when I was 25 and 26 and 27 years old. But today I have a detachment from some of those and I kind of watch those go through. But if you, I think coming to surrender is a difficult thing to do. I think it is a profound experience. I think total surrender has happened to me three or four times in my sobriety. I've had different degrees of surrender a couple of times. But I surrendered when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous the first time. I surrendered when I was eight years sober. And I had another major. I surrendered six years ago. I think I've had three profound surrenders at depth. And I've had other periods of time where I've been pretty close to that. But I think of how many times someone said, how many times have you been surrendered flat, no question about it, down on your knees, surrendered, I'd say three times. So I don't think surrender is a condition that most of us can maintain. I don't think it's something that, just because you understand what surrender is, that you can call it at will. I do not think in any sense of the word that it is mechanical. The steps, because they're spiritual in nature, you bring yourself with a certain orientation and a certain attitude toward the steps. What is that attitude? I don't know that I could describe it. Part of it's honesty. Part of it's humility. Usually, usually we, the world helps us surrender. Usually when we are moving towards a serious change in our lives, there's enough problems around us that our egos get ground down in that process. But most of us, if we're serious and are about the process of trying to grow spiritually, are in that progression and are trying to expand our spiritual life by working with others and try to expand our spiritual life by continuing to have a conscious contact with the God of our understanding. Those of us that are in that process, know that it's an up-and-down process. Know that it's a lifetime program. Know that the ups and downs, the overall graph of it is upward, but that at any given period of time, what is best about what we bring to the process is that it be relentless, that we have a practice that we do on a daily basis. I, today, am powerless over my alcoholism and I am unmanageable. It is an attitude. What does that mean to me today? One of the things it means to me today is, I question my own thinking. Now, I'm not like I'm paranoid, but I mean, I think a healthy questioning of your own thinking is one of the greatest tools that you can have. I used to have a thought and I'd act on it. I mean, I just, you know, no question, it was my thought, it was what I, you know, it was thought-action, thought-action, no space, you know, like a jukebox, put a quarter in, push B5, you got B5, I was off to the races. But I'll tell you that I think that most of us end up in traps where we think that what we now know is going to give us an answer. So when you're sober, three, four, five, six, seven years, you know the steps. You have an experience with the steps. You may know the book well enough that you could point to a page and someone could say, what's the answer? Most of us could give a 15-minute presentation on any step once we're sober six or seven years. Most of us, if someone walked up as a sponsee and asked us a question, could give a reasonably good answer and good direction on the problem that we may have ourselves not be doing, very good at. So I think that most of us on a day-to-day living get put back to sleep and stop relying on our powerlessness and start relying on our information. Start relying on what we know. The idea is, is you get me well from alcoholism and I'll take it from here. You get me well from the disease of alcoholism, I'll manage my job. Okay, I'll take care of my money. You know, I'll do my parents, you know. And I, for a long time in Alcoholics Anonymous, I thought that's what, it was, you get me well from alcoholism and I'll manage the rest of it. Well, give me a break. I mean, I had, no one told me that and I don't know where the hell I got that idea and it doesn't work. But I, in my first pass through sobriety, I literally somehow took that mistaken approach. The second step, I think that we lose more people in sobriety out of the second step rather than the first step. The second step said that we, we came to leave the power greater than ourselves to restore us to sanity. That was a no-brainer for me. I mean, I thought, you know, I mean, I never spent much time on the second step. It was just, of course, you know, I'm powerless, I'm unmanageable. Do I, did I come to believe that a power greater than myself? I did so many things intellectually. I was a conformist. I conformed and I had a hell of a lot of resistance underneath that I didn't really know that I had. And when I came in, I took the second step. It was part, I believed it. I didn't have any issue with it. But when I was five, and six, and seven years sober, and I was having, I had as much debt at seven years of sobriety as I did when I came. I came in the first time and I had six or $7,000 in debt. It was, I actually had nine. It was a year and a half salary. I was making 500 bucks a month. That was a lot of money for me. Best thing ever happened to me, my father bought a little shopping center up in Brainerd and I had to move up to Northern Minnesota. I moved up there and I didn't spend any money and I worked up there long, hard hours. And I paid off most of my debts in my first 18 months of sobriety. Well, I found myself at seven years of sobriety having as much debt as I had when I came in. At seven years of sobriety, my life was more unmanageable, it seemed to me, than it was when I walked in the front door of Alcoholics Anonymous. I was a poor parent. I was, you know, we're having marital issues. My wife, you know, I'm overly active in Alcoholics Anonymous. My wife's starting to wonder if one of the places I'm supposed to practice the principles is in our home. I thought, God, that's none of her business. You know, she's supposed to have her program. I'm supposed to have mine. I mean, what the hell is she, you know, and I'm gambling. I'm, you know, got serious problems with gambling. I, you know, I got a job. I left my, I worked for my dad for three or four, I worked for my dad as long as we could both stand it. And he asked me to leave again. Why was that? He asked me to leave the house and then he asked me to leave his business. I thought my job was telling my father what he did wrong. And that wasn't why he hired me. I don't know what, my two brothers ended up working for my father and they worked, everything worked out just fine. But for some reason, my father and I were always nose to nose. And he was a, he was a great guy. So at seven years of sobriety, I'm as unhappy with my life as I was when I walked in the front door of Alcoa Lysanomis. Not particularly happy in my marriage. I don't feel particularly good about what kind of a parent I am. I'm in debt. I started my own company with a partner. Now you wonder if I'm working only two hours a day, why I'm in trouble at work. You wonder why the company's not working. You know, why, why are we having, I'm supposed to be a salesman. I don't make sales calls. It's tough. I mean, if you're not, I used to spend most of my time phoning up reports and stuff. It's, I mean, it's, I wouldn't even take the chance that you'd grab me by the throat and force me to sell you something on a call. I just, you know, would kind of make up these stories about, you know, I am, you know, so this is who I, this is what was going on. Now I'm going to, you know, four meetings a week when I'm sober, seven years, you know, not counting the luncheon meetings. You know, I'm sponsoring people. I'm starting to give talks. I'm active in service. I've got a sponsor who I see, regularly. I'm talking to my sponsor about some of, most of my issues. I don't think I'm always talking in depth. I don't think I'm telling, I don't, I don't think I have the strength to face my issues. You know, I'll tell you something about surrender that I think. When I came in and took the first step and surrendered, I think I stood naked in front of my alcoholism and I looked it in the eye and saw it in a way I had never seen it before. Truth changes you. Maybe all the first step is, is the truth. You know, the truth will set you free, but the first it'll piss you off. I mean, it, there is a power in truth that you may drink again, but you will never be the same. And I think that most of us, there's an intimidation of facing the truth of the issues in our lives. I mean, I don't know why I could tell you that I gambled inappropriately for eight years and I never wanted to admit I was a problem gambler. I don't know why the hell it was that I spent more money than I did. I spent more money than I made all the time and didn't want anybody to know that I had a problem with spending, that I was a compulsive spender and that I had financial problems. I don't know why it was that regularly I struck my children and did not want to know I had a problem with violence or anger. Okay, I did not want to be a person who had those problems. I'm gonna tell you something about something you can't have. What you can't have has you. It manages you. When you couldn't have alcoholism, it owned you. When you could have alcoholism, when you could stand in front of it, when you could be with it, something could change. Well, during the period of my life, when I, onward from my first year of sobriety, through the seventh year, I started to lose hope in the second step and didn't know I'd done it. So when I got to seven years of sobriety, I figured that this is, Bob, this is how you do everything. You're a great starter, you're just a lousy finisher. You know, I don't know what the hell you're gonna do. You're seven years sober. You're in a hell of a lot of trouble. I don't know if you gotta go to Gambler's Anonymous. I don't know if you gotta go, you know, this isn't working for you. It seems to be working for other people. They're still telling, they're still asking to give talks, talking like you're doing good. You know, I'm saying, God, can't you see it? I'm in the meetings with you. Can't you see my pain? My sponsor, I think, is not appreciative of what I'm going through. I mean, I thought he was older. I thought he was, you know, my sponsor's kind of, I think he knew what I was going through. I don't think he expected a 29-year-old kid to be perfect. I don't think he was surprised by my unmanageability. I sponsored 26 and 27, I expect my children to be perfect, but I sponsored 26 and 27-year-old guys, and I don't expect them not to have issues. So when I, you know, I mean, I have a little different perspective on this right now than I did when I was going to them. But I'm telling you that I could have put my hand on a lie detector test and said, do I believe the second step for us? Do I believe God's gonna restore us to sanity? Answer, yes. Needle doesn't move. Seven years sober. Do I believe God's gonna restore Bob Azan to sanity? Answer, yes. Needles all over the place. I don't believe it anymore. I believe that I'm a good starter and a poor finisher and that I have, part of what you do when you surrender is you give up your identity and your ego. And I stopped being Bob and I became an alcoholic. When you become an alcoholic, you have lots of teachers. Over the period of the next seven years, I became Bob again. And I started to look for someone who would know Bob so well that they could look through Bob, speak to me in such a powerful way that they could somehow reach inside and touch the very essence of me and help me change the problems that I didn't seem to have the power to change. I never found that person. What happened to me is I'll tell you when we get to step six and seven is I had another surrender. I became teachable again in the same process that I was here. At 25 years of sobriety, I was a man who had a lot of work issues up until eight years, I had to surrender. After that surrender, my life took off like a rocket ship and I had 10 or 12 years of unbridled success and everything that I did turned to gold. I made enough money to burn a wet elephant. I just, I was in the right place at the right time. And I just, you know, I had two years where I made a million dollars a year. I made a lot of money. And then when I was 25 years sober in 1986, something like that, or I wasn't, I was only 21 years sober, they changed the tax law and I was in real estate investment. And I lost, I went from a net worth of, you know, eight or nine million dollars to zero in a period of about a year and a half. I had issues with failure and I had issues with success all my life, you know, and I'll start talking about fear later on. But at 25 years sober, I had to come to believe in the second step again. And I'm telling you that there's a power that if we don't, sometimes when we're having problems, what do we do? We go right to the fourth and fifth step. We know. We got the first three steps. I mean, there's no problem. I know I'm powerless. I know I'm unmanageable. I know God's going to restore me to sanity. I've made a decision to turn my will and my life over to God. What I need is some more damn information. I'm telling you, baby, there isn't anybody in this room that needs more information. I'm serious. We got, there isn't anybody in this room that needs any more information. We got, we may be suppressing it. We may be denying it. But we don't need any more data. And if you're married, hell, you can get the data very easily. I mean, it's right there. So I mean, it isn't, it's always accessible. If you're a parent, you can get the data. I don't, you know. I, at two different points in time in my sobriety, after my initial sobriety, I have had to come to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity. I was not powerless. And I was having enough problems. And not only was I not powerless, I was relying on myself and my own information and my own work and my own ability to get myself out of the trouble that I was in. And I didn't believe God was going to restore me to sanity. The last time, I think when you're in deep trouble, you either get more active or less active. In AA, I got a little bit more active. And I started, I got a gift. I started to see the magic again. I started to see people with bigger problems than I had, with smiles on their faces walking through the walls. I started to see the power. I started to see the power. and i came to believe at seven years of sobriety and i came to believe that 21 years of sobriety that god would restore me to sanity so do not assume as you go through the process in your sobriety that you because we know the words i have the damnedest time listening to someone read how it works you know i'm glad that you didn't do all the readings i think we're getting like a high mass every place we go we got you know we got we're up and down and holding hands and doing circles and three or four readings and you know dr jack used to talk about ritualism was one of the things that helped take down the washingtonian movement and i think we have some real issues with ritualism and alcoholism but uh do not assume because we know the words we become so familiar that it breeds contempt and sometimes i don't think you can go to the fourth and fifth step or the sixth and seventh step when i talk about my life changing with the sixth and the seventh step if you don't have the power current of the preceding steps it isn't like you can't do it it isn't like you can't do an inventory but when we're talking about what do you bring to a spiritual process how do you get the humility how do you get the honesty how do you you know how do you be it is not about doing transformation is a change in being and that is why our program is so powerful because it transforms people because we step out of the process of doing because doing will not get you there and we have an alteration in our very being and the moment we have an alteration in our being it's immediate this book is just full of quotes about the moment i made a decision to go through it that i had the feeling that my problems were relieved the moment immediately i mean it is just we'll talk and and usually bill's describing something that's really kind of a serious problem or an attitude or a powerlessness and then all of a sudden he follows it up and he says but you know our problems seem like they were so large that you know they we would never solve them but bam the moment i made up my mind to go through with it the moment i surrendered the moment i got turned my will in my life over to the power power i had a sense of the power being added i had a sense of change i had a sense change of direction the third step is to change the direction of your life change the direction of your life change the direction of your life so i feel told by a lot of people that i needed that long-term prevention of that kind ofesters and do it over a short period of time in my life so i thought would be great to borrow bosnian law principles and it turns out to be it's all in prayer because of produk that comes from bad way it gets but do not see it and do that you two it will make you work you guys and we have to Where is that way To the best of my limited ability when I was that age and that sober, I did the third step. I think my ability to interact with the third step has been greatly limited by who I thought God was and what I thought my relationship with God was. I've always had a number of practices in my life that I didn't think God approved of. So I've always had kind of a, as soon as I get them cleaned up I'll have a complete relationship right now, you know, I can only have a partial one. And I've also had this goofy thought that, okay, I'll do God's will. But when I'm done doing God's will, can I have some time to do mine? I mean, you know, I mean, I'll do it. I mean, I got, you know, if I have, you know, I mean, it's okay and I know that you got to do it and I know that we've got to make some of these changes, but do I get my turn? Okay. So we've got some definitions and I'm going to come back to this a little bit when I talk about step 11. Okay. But we, I think in our very deepest sense, think that God's will is not our will. And I think that if we were to draw a straight line between where we are today and profound spiritual awakening, deep, powerful, profound spiritual awakening, that when we arrived at that deep, powerful spiritual awakening, we would think that God's will and our will were the same. I will tell you that I think that most of us have been put on this earth. And given an instrument to play. And it's a unique instrument that we are unique expressions of God and that many of us get almost all the way through our lives and never get the instrument out of the box. Much less know that we have it. If we had any idea, and I think at the deepest level of our being, we are God. We are not all that God is, but all that we are is of God. And that when it comes to the very fulfillment of our lives, the lasting fulfillment, not the candy, I'm a guy who has never had enough. I mean, I'm telling you that when I made money, I mean, I had two Mercedes, I had 100 suits. I had, I mean, I, I do a shallow well, I'm a lot of people don't. I mean, I got, I just, I mean, I'm telling you that I got a gift for shallow. I don't know where the hell I got it, but I got it. And but lasting when you want to talk about lasting. When you want to talk about where the pieces, when you want to talk about how do you get the noise shut off? You know, when I talk about where is lasting happiness, where can I get the mindfulness? How can I be present? The happiest times in your life is when you are not there. When we are not there, God is there. So I think that without question, those of us as we have spent our time in Alcoholics Anonymous, we get a little bit more willing to understand that. Maybe God's will for us is our will, that it is eventually that there is less difference in those two things. And that so many of us, I walked around and I, I think when you grew up in certain faiths, you get, I grew up as a Roman Catholic and you know, we thought we owned guilt and you know, as you, as you get spread around and you start to see Southern Baptists and Jews and other, you know, sorts of things, you find out you just rented it, you didn't own it. And there's lots of different, you know, all sorts of different, you know, backgrounds and into it. Yeah. But, you know, I was brought up and not, not out of a sense of blame, but feeling that I was dirty, feeling that I was, as soon as I learned how to masturbate and drink, I'm in trouble. You know, I can't, you know, I'm out of the boundaries of what I'm supposed to do. And I, you know, and I love the church. I love my experience. I had many mystical experiences in my church. Was an altar boy, thought I wanted to be a priest. And then when you start not being able to play by the rules, then you can only partially participate. I never wanted to be a guy who partially participated. I wanted to play. I wanted to helmet. I wanted to be, you know, on the team, baby. And so I've always had a exaggerated sense of separation from God. Now, we have an arrogance that we sometimes think that we invented being a human being. You know, like I invented the process of being a human being. We've been around for a long time. And our problems, if you've listened to first steps, you know, I'm sure if you're a priest and listen to confessions. Boy, they aren't unique. They are monotonously similar. You know, so, you know, it seemed like the only way he made us was flawed. You know, I mean, it didn't seem like, you know, there's a whole group that, you know, get to have it, you know, all together. I mean, there are people who seem more manageable and more middle of the road and, you know, do the same to do it. But I mean, you have to get to a point where I think you start to have compassion for yourself. I mean, the plain point, in fact, is we are flawed. We are not going to get rid of all our defects of character. I think it's vitally important that we deal with the most serious defects of character and vitally important that we deal especially with the defects of character that harm other people in our lives. But don't worry about getting rid of all of them because it isn't going to happen. And the process about which most of us go through to try to get rid of our defects of character is such a tortuous process. But what I want to say is that, first of all, that it has been necessary for me over a period of time to become less guilty. It has been necessary. It has been necessary. It has been necessary for me to become more compassionate to myself, to deepen my relationship with God because I have not been able to rid myself of all the things that separated me from God and to really try to chase God's will, to really try to be open for what God can do in my life today, to turn my will and my life over to the care of God. There's got to be a sense of my powerlessness. And, you know, if I'm going to turn my sexuality, if I'm going to turn my finances, if I'm going to turn my marriage. If I'm going to turn my lust, if I'm going to turn my anger, if I'm going to turn my violence over, there's got to be such a deep relationship, you know. So many of us have to deepen and broaden who God is for us and kind of get off that we invented being especially bad or whatever the hell it is. And I think that that is a process that is a lifelong process. I think that happens in the 11th step and it is necessary. It is necessary for us to, that that will automatically happen if we try to deepen our spiritual walk in life in an alcoholist anonymous, that will happen. That has been one of the most necessary things for me to do is to be open because how else can it be present to a day? I am all, you know, not so much today, but most of my life when something bad would happen, I just positive was just going to screw my whole life up. You know, this deal's got to close. I got to go make this 20 grand. I don't have this 20 grand. I'm going to go down the chute and it's just, you know, I'm positive that this, my life now pivots on what's in front of me. I'm positive that when my son gets arrested that my life's over and it means I'm a bad parent or whatever. I'm just positive that at this moment there's just nothing worse that could happen to me than what's in front of me. Well, for most of us, if you're a sponsor, someone will come over to you with a very similar problem and we don't feel that way about them at all. No, because we know that. We know that. First of all, these things happen in life. Life is, I mean, the definition of recovery isn't the absence of problems. Okay? So we're not shocked that, number one, that they have the problem. We know that right at this moment they're consumed by the problem and they think their lives will be altered, you know, inexorably and won't work. But we know that they will see this as part of a piece of fabric and a year from now they'll be able to look back on it and it will look different than it looks right now. Right now it's imprinted on their eyeball, you know, and it looks one way. When it gets out here, we're going to have a, it's going to be a different. They're going to have a different look and they're going to have a perspective and they're going to see it. But in order for us to have the kind of peace that I think that we need for emotional sobriety, we need to have that attitude and orientation for ourselves as we go through what's happening to us in our lives today. I have more peace today that I, when something's happening, that I don't know exactly how it's going to fit and that I know right now it looks like it's the worst thing in the world and that it is part of the fabric of my life. And for some reason I'm in front of this right now and I can't do anything else about it. And I'm going to do the very best to know how to do and we'll see how the hell it fits in later. I have more peace with that than I've ever had. So I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God. I mean, I, I think that is a, directing our will is, I'm going to come back and fill in some of the stuff later on about that. The fourth step, and we started at 1.30 and it's about 1.30, it's about 2.30 now. 2.35, 1, 2, 3. Let's take a coffee break. Thank you. Six and seven and we'll take another break and then we'll come back. If we're really going to change our lives, you know, what is the, you know, we get surrendered and we have a deep sense of, you know, our life not working and if we're really going to get well physically also. mentally and spiritually and to get rid of the profound defect of character that Bill talks about being the cause of our alcoholism, we have to do an inventory. We have to get in touch with the things that, you know, the issues and the problems that are going on in our lives. The book Obliquely, I said I was a Catholic and the book Obliquely refers to Catholics wanting to go to confession. I did my first fifth step when I was three and a half months sober and I did it as a general. Confession and the process of my fourth and fifth step was not very deep, was I used the big book on the 12 and 12 and an outside guide and mostly what I wanted to do was get rid of the boulders. I didn't know at that time. I had a lot of secrets and I had, you know, some things I had done that I was deeply ashamed of and certain things that were going on and I went up and I did. I did what for me was at that point in time what I, you know, I just did what I did. I did the best four step I knew how to do and I did a fifth step and when I was done with that, two things, someone said it was the most profound experience I had. The profound experience I had was number one, one of forgiveness. I don't know that I had ever, I don't know that I had, that was the first time in my life I'd ever been surrendered to that degree. And I think the, having the fourth and fifth step in that environment was a profound experience for me. I experienced forgiveness. I also clearly can look back on it now and know that I had already in the book talks about it, I had already made up my mind that I was going to change those things. And otherwise, why would I be putting them down? You know, why would I be saying these are not what I want? Why am I saying they're defects? Why am I saying that they are problems? The big book, so I did, I have done four fourth and fifth steps in my 28 years of sobriety. And there's some people think that you do one. Some people think that you do it annually. I know people who do it weekly. They're inventorying everything. You know, they just carry pencils and papers around with them and boy, they inventory. I have used, since my initial sobriety and since my initial fourth and fifth step, I have used the fourth and fifth step when I've been in crisis or clearly stuck. When I've been in a place that I feel like I really need to move on, I have then been able to turn enough attention where I really feel like I am willing to go back and do a fourth and fifth step. I don't think you can do a bad fourth and fifth step. I think anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. If you wait till you do it perfectly, you've got a long damn wait. If you want, the best directions with the big book that I've ever heard anybody give, you can ask Earl Husband. Earl Husband, they do not have Earl's tapes out there. I recommend that if they get them, Earl does a presentation on the book and especially his action of the fourth and fifth step that I think is as good as anybody I've ever heard do it. On Wednesday nights at 7.30 in his house, he has people in. I was there for most of the last 7.30 meeting that he had about four weeks ago. He does 6,000 people through his home. Going through the book and going through the steps. There is so much concentration today on the form of the fourth step. As I say, when we went, there didn't seem to be as much formal teaching or rigidity about how to do a fourth step. I found the big book when I first got into the fourth step confusing for me. I found the 12 and 12 somewhat confusing for me. I found the outside guide helpful, including... clearing up some of those difficulties. The outside guide I used actually tried to follow the format that was in the 12 and 12. I think it is far more important the intent that you bring to the process. And it isn't as if form is not important. If you don't have any form, I think you're in danger of missing the whole damn deal too. The fourth step is laid out very well in the big book and obviously with more thoughtful reading than I had given it in my first three months of sobriety and with a little more direction than I had in my first three months of sobriety, I think it's perfectly understandable. And I think that, you know, we start to list our resentments and we get into the, you know, why we're resentful or why we're angry and then we get into, you know, what that, you know, caused and we get into what our pardon that was and go through the inventories of fear and sex. And Bill deals with it. One of the things that I think we also ought to notice is when we talk about how the big book is the only, you know, gives explicit directions. Is Bill dealt with different subjects, sometimes very differently in the 12 and 12 than he did in the big book. And I, you know, some people think God wrote the big book and Bill wrote the 12 and 12. And I only want to point out that, again, that we're, I think we need to have a little clay in the process rather than all cement. I think that how we be in the process of doing these things, the heart that we bring to them, the intention that we bring to them. I see people doing inventories all the time and I don't always see the change that I think that, you know, information is not as much as the heart we bring to the process and God can speak to our heart. And sometimes we may not even have the words and God will bring it. I think we do need a guide and we do need a, I have my own, you know, as you get older in sobriety and I'm not, you know, haven't reached 30 years yet, but one of the, you start to have the freedom to have your own form. And I have something that I now, I advise my sponsees to do. And I say, if you're having trouble with the way the four steps laid out in the book, I'm going to assume right now that I'm sponsoring a guy who's 30 years old and married. And I said, would you like, let's say 35. What I'd like you to do is get your wife and your mother-in-law and your parents, one of your brothers and one of your sisters and your boss, your sponsor, two people, you work with two creditors and a neighbor and bring them over to your house and serve coffee. And then what I'd like you to say is we have this stuff and I'll call these anonymous that we're trying to get in touch with our defective character and the unworkability of the things in our lives. And I'm having trouble identifying what those are. And I wondered if you, if you'd help and then leave, give them tablets and then leave. And I may only have two or three, but I don't think I'd like to give more than one of those. And I think it's thing for today. But I'd like you to tell us what today is about I think the most important points that I, you know, you're getting me, you know, Tom, we're talking about Bob White today, you know, how you get, I think you get on trends, you get on, you know, patterns of thought, you know, Bob would get on, you know, that last talk he gave at Canyon Conference and then the power on powerlessness and the power being added. There's a talk by Bob White at the Canyon Conference and Bob's been dead like 13 years. Bob White from Whitney, Texas, Canyon Conference, about 1981, 2 or 3, is the talk on powerlessness that is just wonderful, and about the power being added. But, you know, people, we laugh when we talk about having that blanket party, and you know why we laugh about it? And here's what I want us to get a sense. I think if I asked everybody in the room to raise their hand and said, how many people would like to change the things in their lives that don't work? And if I asked a show of hands, I think most of us would raise our hands. How many of us would like to get rid of our worst defects of character? And if I asked for a show of hands, I think most of us would raise our hands. Now, when I told that story about inviting your mother-in-law, and your parents, and your siblings, and your sponsor, and your sponsees, and your children to a meeting, most of us wouldn't call that meeting. And I want to tell you why you wouldn't call it. Because you wouldn't want to know. You don't want to change. I mean, if there's something that I want you to hear underneath of all the stuff that I'm talking about, is we have the assumption that we would like to change. And I want you to know that you've got a piece of you that says, look, I'm going to make a deal with you. You can do all the goddamn stuff. You can do all the steps you want to do. You can go to all the meetings that you want to go to. You can get a sponsor. You can inventory anything you want to inventory, but get this straight. We're not changing A, B, and C. You got it? You know, just as long as you know that. I don't give a damn. You know, you can do the steps. You can go do anything you want to do, but just get this straight. We are not changing A, B, and C. Not only do we not want to change, we don't want to change. We don't want to change. We don't want to know. We've got deals with our wives. Don't bring this up. We've got ways of handling it. I've had ways of handling it. There are certain subjects. You can come at me, baby, but it ain't going to be for free. So if you're going to come talk about this, there's going to be a price. So we've got messages. We've got deals in AA. We're going to hang out, and the deal is I'm not going to call you on your stuff, and you're not going to call me on mine. You understand that? You bring up a problem that I got, and we're going to start talking about it. You know, that little girl you got stashed on the east side, you know, tied up in the garage. We are not going to, you know, you start. So the deal is, is we're going to talk about steps. We're going to talk about the program. We're going to talk about traditions. But we're just going to stay out of each other's faces. If you've got deals like that, and many of us have deals like that with our children. I had deals like that. Don't talk, you know, don't, I didn't want to know about my violence. I didn't want to know about my being a horse's ass. I didn't want to. I didn't want to know about certain things. And, you know, so I had messages and ways of having certain subjects that I didn't want brought up, not brought up. Most of the serious problems we have in our lives, we think are our treasures. They are many of the unworkabilities we have in our lives started when we were awfully damn young. You know, the first time we were on a football team, and we, you know, goofed up, and the coach chewed us out in front of a whole bunch of people, we made a decision we ain't ever going to be on another team. And for some reason, we've had trouble with teams, and organizations ever since. Someone told us we were dumb at math, and we never wanted to put ourselves in a situation where we were dumb at math. So guess what? We don't handle the checkbook, and we don't do this. And these are just incidences that happen to us, and we start living our lives out of decisions that we made. Sometimes our ears are too big, and our nose is too small, and different parts of our body aren't the way this, you know. And we live our lives out of some of these things that were embarrassing and difficult for us when we were young, and we have never been able. And so what our problems are today, in many cases, were our solutions that we developed to the problems that we had. You know, someone said, I've never had a problem so bad as a solution that I brought to it. So, you know, I think your psyche says, this is a tool. It's like alcohol. You know, alcohol was a tool. It worked a lot. There were times when it didn't work, and when people would come up and criticize it, we'd say, yeah, but I mean, most of my life it's worked. Okay, anger. It's not much fun, but I'm telling you, you know, it's a tool. And I brought that, you know, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And I brought it with me a lot. You know, I brought it with me, you know, lots of different places. And it always seemed like I was in front of jerks. I don't know what the hell it was, you know, and I had to take them out. It just seemed like, you know. So you will, as you go through, many of the things that you repeat, the reason you repeat them is that they are, the very best way, your problems are the very best way that you have decided to solve certain issues in your life, and they don't work. They look like treasures. What they are is dog turds wrapped in gold tinfoil. Okay, they are not treasures. They do not work. They are not you. One of the things that we have to do is start to distinguish behavior from who we are. I used to think it was who I, you know, we talk about shame. I had a lot of shame. And that, you know, just a gift, the gift that keeps on giving. And shame, one of the things you can't do is distinguish what you do from who you are. So one of the reasons I think I had a great deal of difficulty changing some of the things in my program of Alcoholics Anonymous is that I thought those behaviors, my gambling, my money spending, my sexuality, the different things that I did, they weren't just things I did. They were who I was. They represented who I was. What they were, were behaviors. That's all it is. They were behaviors. You can drop a behavior without changing who you are. If you somehow have identified it with the very essence of who you are. How do you change it? How do you stop being an ass? How do you, if you're a bad guy, how do you stop being a bad guy? Where are the directions? Now, if you've got a gambling problem, you should go talk to your sponsor. You get an end of the steps. You could do something with it. But how do you, how do you change being an ass? And I, because I was a guy who did a lot of things that hurt people and disagreed, you know, and didn't agree with my own values, I had a kind of a general underlying feeling I was a bad guy. And for a long time, I wasn't very effective at dealing with certain issues in my life because I dealt with them in that way. And I'm saying that as you, as we go on, some of the things to, to pull out some of the, you know, the roots and some of the problems that we carry through later in life, we want, you know, you know, people have those. I'm saying, you know, I want to make sure that I'm getting what I want to get, you know, and you're not getting what I want to get and you're not getting an answer to that. And you're not going to take away from it. this program eventually is about being a lover. If you want to know if your program's working, baby, just look and see if you're moving in the direction of love because this is where it's going. And to do that, you've got to get rid of the things. It's pretty tough to be a really angry guy and be a good lover. I mean, you know, it's going to keep getting in your face, you know, and that's one of the things. The good news is I've hung around long enough that I've taken a number of different cuts at that over my lifetime in sobriety, and I'm going to get that one nailed. I am not going out as an angry old man. I'm going to go out as a lover. And it isn't easy because I've got a deep rut around anger. I've got a gift for anger. I had some training, you know, and had a lot of familiarity with it, and that's the way it is. But once you start finding out that under anger is fear, and there's a lot of things we don't want to take a look at, and what you are is a big, you know, you're afraid to face certain issues in your life, and anger is the response that you get when you get afraid. Then it doesn't seem like maybe you're such a horribly bad guy that maybe you can start to take a look at certain things that you're afraid of. That's a little bit less scary. Well, it's pretty scary, but it's a different sort of thing. Maybe not as much judgment about it. So in my fourth and fifth steps that I have taken and the four times that I have taken a fifth step in Al-Khalis Namas, each time I have come to them, I have been getting closer to the causes and conditions in my life. And it is difficult. You know, it's hard to go to a fourth step when you're 25, you're sober with the same optimism that you may go to one when you're sober, or, I mean, six months sober. Because when you're virginic in that process, you can take a look at it and say, I'm going to do an inventory, and I'm going to, you know, as the book talks about, we're getting ready to eject this stuff out of our life, and I'm going to eject it out of my life. Well, boy, I must have left some space because a hell of a lot of what I ejected, you know, didn't get all the way out the back door. You know, it kind of must have had the screen door shut. I had, you know, a few of the things got out, but, you know, a few of the things stayed, and what the hell am I dealing with? And so I've had to get down to causes and conditions, and I've had to be willing to, and this, again, is where I say, if you're going to do a fourth step when you've been sober for a while, you really have to have the first three steps alive. I just think that we have so much, you know, when Emerson talks about, or it wasn't Emerson, doesn't matter, Thoreau talked about most men lead lives of quiet desperation. I mean, I think an awful lot of us in Alcoholics Anonymous live lives of quiet desperation. That we listen to the hopefulness of an AA talk, and we think, isn't that wonderful that person's had that? I can't have that. That we're sitting out here, we have the most powerful lesson you could have, that God has taken out our physical alcoholism written branch, one of the worst habits we had, almost killed ourselves with it, and we're walking around with financial problems that we don't think can be solved in the program of AA. We're walking around with marital problems. We're walking around with sexual problems. We're walking around with sexual problems. We're walking around with sexual problems. We're walking around with sexual problems. We're walking around with sexual problems. We're walking around with sex problems, work issues and stuff like that, and it's less like we're walking around with thousands of dollars in our pocket, and we don't know we have it, and we're in trouble with the electric company because we've got a $50 bill to turn our power off. We have no earthly idea of how much power is available to us and what our lives would be like, but we have trained ourselves that certain of these things that we have are treasures, and that to get in their face and get at them would raise havoc, and it might be that they are the very essence of who we are. And that to do that, we'd have to kill ourselves. Change is viewed as dying. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross talked about the stages of death and dying. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. So you've got cancer? No, I don't think I have cancer. They really haven't done all the tests we're going to check on, and I'm coming back, but I don't, you know, just keep praying I don't think I have it. Anger. Why the hell is this happening to me? Why am I walking around, you know, just say, you know, okay, bargaining. Please relieve my cancer. I'll go to China. I'll change my life. I'll do, I don't want to die. Relieve my cancer, bargaining. Now when you get through with denial, anger, bargaining, your nose is right up against it. What's next? Depression. Now, Scott Peck wrote in a book, Further Along a Road Less Traveled, and he has the one on death and dying, the road to Omaha, and he talks about this. What he says next is a word I had not heard, and he said, but if depression does its work, I never heard anybody do that. I'm not talking about clinical depression, so I'm just talking about, you know, I'm not trying to play doctor. I'm just talking, we get periods of time where we're depressed. But if depression does its work, and I took it to mean to grind the ego to dust, you get through depression, and you come out with acceptance. Clancy talks about there is no pain in change. All the pain is in resistance to change. If you listen to the wise people, most of us are trying to avoid pain. The path is through the fire, not away from it. If you're going in the path of spiritual growth, if you're going in the path to clean your life up, you have to go. You have to go towards the fire. And it is instantaneous. You will not get burnt. You will go through it, and you will be okay. But most of us want to avoid the confrontation with the issues in our lives. We are not willing to go through it. Now, what he says after this, he says, you know, we all assume that when you're dying, you go through those five stages. He said, almost no one does. They go through the first three, and they get to depression. The pain of depression is so great, they back up, and they go back into anger, bargaining, and denial. And then he says something interesting. He said, and this is the process you go through with major changes in your life. Change is like dying. We do not, the issues, if I asked all of us to write down the top three problems we have in our lives, they are not new. They are not months old. They are not weeks old. They are not new. And they are not pretty, and they are not fun, and they do damage to people we love. They are not new. We do not want to change, and we do not want to know. Now, it's literally like there's two people occupying the same space. There's your ego and identity, and there is God-centeredness. When you've got your, you know, your ego and intellect running your life, you've got a 17-year-old in charge of your life. And you've got someone that sees everything in duality, and it's us and them, and we're going to take no prisoners, and we're not going to talk about what's going on, and we're going to, you know, as a wise man once said, you spend the first half of your life building an identity, and you spend the second half of your life trying to get rid of it. We are not the Chevrolet. Most of us think we're the Chevrolet. We're out getting new hubcaps, painting it up, polishing it up, putting a new top on it. We're the driver. We're the driver. Now, one of the reasons we can sit in rooms like this and talk about life and talk about the program is because inside the car, we're all the same. You know that movie, Cocoon, you know, when they all took off the suits, you know, and they were, you know, this, like, figure of light underneath? We're all the same. We're just little people driving around in tanks with a slit, you know, going around like this. But if we ever got out of the damn tanks and got together, the essence of who we are is the same. And the behaviors and issues we have are not who we are, they are what we do. They are behaviors. Okay? And you can change them without changing who you are. And I think if we do not have that distinction, and if you don't know what a resistance to change we have, and I think that that is when you're being dominated by your ego, you can't change. It is to die. And you have to find a God-centeredness. You have to find a power greater than yourself. You have to die. Your ego has to get diminished enough in the area. One of the reasons I never... Who the hell wants to go... I just did a block of work. I was working around anger with a psychologist. I'm 28 years sober. Who the hell wants to go to a psychologist? I went to a psychologist and I said... I go to the spiritual group and I was asking my spiritual director and he introduced me to this psychologist. I liked the guy. An interesting guy, new school of psychology. And I went to the guy and I said, I want to kill anger. I said, I've made enormous progress over this over the last 15 years. I'm not the same guy I think I was 15 years ago, but it ain't dead. I want it dead. So I want to open up my heart. I want to open up a conversation. Most of the people who I use for advice I've been in conversation with so long, I just thought it might be interesting to have a fresh conversation. Not just with my sponsor. It isn't like I'm afraid to have the conversation with my sponsor or my spiritual advisor. I wanted a fresh conversation. I said, the other thing was, I've got a great life. I've got great kids. I'm married. I'm the same woman for 29 years. I've got a good business. Life's good and I'm not as joyful as I think I should be. And I want to be... I don't think... I have a proper appreciation. It isn't like I'm not grateful. I am grateful. But I've got an eye for what's next. I need this next thing to happen. I need to have this do it. I've always got my eye on the next thing and what has to happen. And I don't think I have the... I don't think I'm ever going to have the peace and joy and satisfaction in my life until I enjoy what I have. You know, Lao Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching, you are rich when you know you have enough. I have never had enough. So... I don't even know where the hell I was. I'm sorry. I don't... This isn't... You know, this is... Oh, the psychologist. So I went... Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, this... I don't know why... This feels kind of risky. I don't have any way I'm going. I'm just kind of sharing what's going on. So I went to the psychologist and I entered into this conversation and pretty good conversation. Did about 25, 30 hours of work with the guy in a concentrated period of time. Got done. And again, I was able to bring some... My home is the program. It seems like I have done a fair amount of work what people would call outside the program, but to me it's what's inside my 11th step. You know, no one can tell me how to improve my conscious contact with the God of my understanding. But the place I drag everything back into to have the context fit seems in the tree I hang it on is the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is, you know, that's kind of how I digest it. And... I want... I think, you know, one of the great questions in life is when did you stop growing? When did you stop growing? Because a lot of us come in here, get involved in the steps, make the changes. We must have set our minds that there were certain things that we set goals for. If all we had happened to us, what we wanted to have happen to us in our first year of sobriety, we'd be cheating ourselves. There'd be a whole bunch of... You know, I mean, we have no idea how deep this thing goes and how, you know, how much we can do with the program of Alcoholics Anonymous in our lives. I want to be... I want to have the mind of a beginner. I don't want that crazy gerbil track that most beginners have. But, you know, Suzuki, the guy who talked about, you know, who brought Zen to the West when he talked about there is no room in an expert's mind to learn. What you need is the mind of a beginner because I can teach a beginner. So if you can be in something fresh, I can't hear how it works. I have trouble. I mean, I say to myself, I'm going to listen. And then somewhere in the middle, I'm so familiar with the words that I get ahead of the reader. And the next thing I know, they're on the sixth step when I stop listening before they started the steps. I know, you know, now there are times when I can get in front of it and I can do it. But what you need is the mind of a beginner so that you can learn and to remain teachable that is the posture and process that we need to be in the Alcoholics Anonymous. The fourth step, you know, to be able to continue to be truly interested in doing an inventory to find out what doesn't work in your life and to know it into such a way that makes a difference. I say that we don't want to know and we don't want to change and that there is part of us that stands in agreement. There's a different place that when we're in that place, we have the courage. We will be able to stand. It is not pleasant to stand naked in front of your deformities. It takes a courage. It takes a strength. It takes a humility. But we have this thing about change that change is to kill us. You don't change by resistance. You change by waking up. Our program promises, spiritual awakening. What happens is you go through the process of the steps and you become awake and as you awaken, the crap falls off. There is not, you don't grab it by the throat. There are times when it takes effort. But mostly, you go through a process of growth and who you are when you have grown is no longer appropriate to who you were before and all of a sudden you find out that a lump of crap fell off the car. God. God does not dwell at round you. My thoughts don't work. What I want is you to probably step out from the suffering, but also go to God advice and seek salvation. God surely knows what works. God is pleased with you. You will get your salvation. God is pleased with you. What happens in heaven and you will receive the salvation