Ego and Humility – Big Book Workshop Jan – Part 5 of 6 – Scott L and Matt C

Hey, a service. Good motive. I'm ready. Well, the chairman's about ready to end the meeting, says anybody have a burning desire before we close the meeting? Billy raises his hand, tells everybody in the room that the tumor they found was biopsy, came back, it's malignant, he has a very short time to live. I remember sitting there thinking, feeling this big, thinking to myself, geez maybe on the day he found out he was dying saying hi to bob's not a big priority maybe onthe day hefound out hewas terminally ill and he was going to die that he was so afraid and so scared as i would be and up in my head as iwould be that he didn't even notice i was there and all of a sudden i realized that the look i saw in his face had nothing to do with me it had to do with him and it was like a little postcard from god dear bob you don't know crap love god you know it says in here the wrongdoings of others fancied or real had the power to actually kill if i'd have if i attacked this guy who did nothing but help me on the worst day of his life and then found out later the truth what I did, I'd have had to go out and drink myself to death. I'd never been able to come back into the rooms where he was so loved and get recovery. I would have died. And I'd had died over nothing, over something that was imagined. And, I'll tell you, that was an important thing because in something, and I had a couple little incidences like that where I got really slapped in the face of how wrong I am when I think I'm right? And if that's true for Billy Taylor, could I be that wrong about my mother and my father and my sister and the police and the employers and the running partners and the cops? Could I bethat wrong about everybody on my list? Is it possible? Now, the ego goes, no, it's not possible. Is it possible that I could be that wrong? And I've got to tell you something. In my experience, if you can't stand being wrong, you're going to have a hard time in recovery because it's necessary to dismantle this judgment machine that is the ego and to get humble. And the only way to do that is to really get how wrong my perception is that I am not all that. I don't know. I don' t know. Very, very important stuff. Scott had touched on this was our course. You know, I think this really is the course. This is where... And I have a tendency to want to talk about this part of the process more than any other part because it's really what set me free. uh when i could really realize and get uh how this person was perhaps like me spiritually sick and this is not this isnot a well person looking down on a sick person this is a sick person looking at another sick person and seeing how they're struggling with these things just like I am. It's a commonality, it's a unity, it is a sense of community that this person that has hurt me was driven by some stuff that you know something that stuff is driven me and I have struggled with the same stuff and on occasion have acted badly because of the sickness inside of me and consequently have hurt a lot of people. You know, I had a tremendously long eight step list of people I'd harmed. And I got to tell you on the square there was not one name on that list of those people I hurt that I set out consciously and intentionally to hurt. But I hurt them just the same. And if that's true for me could that be true for them? Could they have been just as driven by their fears and their emptiness that makes them clamor for more of anything to make them feel better about themselves. Could they be that sick too? And to really start to get it and to give to them the same tolerance, patience, and pity that I would want you to give me if I was wacko and just self-will run riot and crazy and driven by fear. and the reason that you want to do this is there may come times in your sobriety where you're all of that and you're going to find that the people in Alcoholics Anonymous are not going to throw you out they're going allow you to when you're really at your worst they're gonna love you they're not gonna be so crazy about your behavior but they're gonna love ya because they know that you are not column 2 your column one that's been by your illness is making you do the things in column two that the illness is not the person and that is a tremendous tremendous thing uh the last thing i want to talk about we'll take a break and then i want it when we come back i want tell you one resentment story but In the middle of page 67, the last thing we do after the prayer, and the prayer is very important, but this is an amazing thing. It's setting me up to answer some questions by first of all telling me that I must put out of my mind the wrongdoings of others. In other words, I can't reserve the right to answer these questions in the shadow of the things they did that were screwed up. It even says it a little further down the page. It says, though a situation had not been entirely our fault, we tried to disregard the other person involved entirely. That means completely, entirely. and i this is very important because i am a master at hiding my selfish self-centered behavior in in the shadow of anything i can find that you've done wrong but what if i did this and this is not looking for our part no the book doesn't use that i think that is a dangerous way to approach this if you're going to look for your part because if you're going to look for your part there's an implication there's another part and whose part do you think is worse and bigger not mine and you know how that this came to me i had a guy i sponsored him this we used to say that we used to say well we're gonna look for our part now and and he looked for his part and then he went to make amends and got out a hand on him and it got a little worse because he got a Little aggravated that they didn't admit their part. The book says there ain't no parts here. We disregard the other person involved entirely. Putting out of our minds the wrongs others have done. So in other words, what if you have to look at what kind of son or daughter you were not in the shadow of the sickness of your parents but what if you had perfect parents? What if you just had to look at what kind of son or daughter you were in its own light? What if you can't use the wrongdoings of others? What kind of a son or daugther are you then? Oh I don't like this. This ain't good. See I need the leverage of what I can find wrong with you to justify me but what If I really looked at how self What if I answered these questions in this light and really looked at how selfish I was on its own, how dishonest I was. It doesn't matter you lied to me. How dishonest was I? How self-seeking, how frightful? What if i had to really look at that? I'll tell you all of a sudden, when you start doing that, you can feel your amends list getting longer. Right? And I think for some of us, this is the first time we stand up in God's light and take the responsibility. And I'm no longer blaming anybody. I'm not longer justifying my self-centeredness, my selfishness by what you did. Well, look what you made me do. I'm standing up and for the first taking responsibility. We'll take a break for lunch? Let me stick a couple more pieces in here. I discovered for myself the source of all of my anger, and this may ring true for you or it may not. I have found the sourceof all ofmy anger comes from being right. I have never been angry when I wasn't also right. I have been right when Iwasn'tangry, but I'veneverbeenangrywheniwasntright. And that rightness is based onthat judgment we talked about before. and when I get out of the business of being right I don't find myself being angry and it's a very freeing thing there's something else that's important to me too and that's it as I finish this prayer thing as I got to where I could check off my father's name which I think was the last one on my list on my first list I had a new freedom and a new happiness I felt different I didn't have that reservoir of hate inside me and I was just a better guy and people were asking me things like have you lost weight well I like to be asked that and the truth is that I had I had lost the weight of all of that poison that I'd carried around in my soul for all these years and that this is the portion of this step that digs out the most of the poison out of my soul and I feel different I smile I sometimes tell people you want to look for a sponsor look around a meeting for someone who's smiling when nobody else is and to make sure they aren't glassy i'd check their pupils but um because the people that's my experience who come through here and actually do what we're talking about here they get that and they find a lot of things just to be funny that that life becomes much lighter and that's what happened to me and uh and i have another one that's important to meand that's that that i found that a definition of freedom that works for me. Freedom is when I accept full responsibility for living with the results of all of my own actions. At that point, I'm free. I'm ready to do absolutely anything that I'm prepared to live with the result of. That the rules apply to me. My history, my MO, is I'm going to understand the rules as thoroughly as possible so I can break them effectively and get away with it. That's my history. I cut my own Vietnam tour 17 days short by shooting an angle. That's what I do, and I do it well. And to get here and embrace the idea that the rules apply to me and I don't need to do anything thinking I'm going to get away with it. I need to expect to have the logical and predictable consequences. And my freedom is based on having cleaned up my past as best I can with God's and a sponsor's help and embracing the idea that I am prepared to live with the consequences of everything that I do because there will be some. And we're a long way from finished with step four. We'll pick it up there. We are running a few minutes late here, and I think what we ought to do is take – we had planned an hour and a half, and I Think we're going to get real generous and make it an hour and 34 minutes. We'll start at quarter of 2 instead of 1.30 so we make sure everybody gets lunch. And we love you and can't thank you enough. Hi Bob Darrell and I am alcoholic. Hi Bob. Welcome back. Some of you, if you're new and you haven't done your inventory out of the book or maybe you've done an inventory like I did my first two, the life story and then the stuff out of the 12 by 12, the seven deadly sins and you're not, you're a little restless, irritable, discontent. Maybe you got a little depression going on, you're having a hard time connect with AA and the hardest thing about doing an inventory is admitting you need to do one. And why do it? What's the point? It's to get free. it's to turn the juice back on i'll uh i'll share two little examples of of what i've seen happen one is in my life and one isn't a guy i sponsored years ago um i was listening to a fifth step of a guy uh and he uh he came from an alcoholic home his father was a very very bad drunk. Not only was he a bad alcoholic, he was also very violent and he was a rageaholic. And this guy would get drunk and beat his son unmercifully, consistently on a regular basis. He ended up in the emergency room a couple times where he had to tell lies and make up stories because he was so ashamed of what was going on at home. He didn't want anybody to know about it. This had made his childhood a living hell. He had to create a whole fantasy life at school because he didn't want anybody to know what was going on at home. He loved and hated his father at the same time. And there were a couple times when his dad would get in so much trouble as a result of his drinking that he would stop drinking but that was that was just as bad because he'd be so irritable and angry sober that he'd scream and yell and smack him and get to your room and shut up you're stupid and a couple occasions we suspect that his dad may have gone to aa a little bit or maybe a church or something because he there were a couple times he had brief periods where his dad would not just get physically sober but have a little Bit of a change of heart and he'd make the promises I'm going to buy you a bicycle, and I'm going to take you to Disneyland. And they'd go back to drinking, and the beatings seemed to be even worse. And this was a resentment that had owned this guy. It had owned him for decades. It had affected his ability to work. He couldn't work for people because he had these problems. He couldn'T be a team player. He couldn'T deal with authority. So he had these little businesses that he'd start up, and they'd goes for a few years and fail, and he'd start another one. And he had a hard time with relationships because from time to time would end up being a little bit like his dad in the relationship. And it was a bad deal. He had been to therapy, I think, for about eight years. He'd done everything in therapy that he could do. He did all the gestalt stuff, the beating the pillows, the gestault chair where you imagine your father's in the chair and you scream and yell at your dad. And then you sit in the chair and respond back. And, you know, all that stuff. He did all that step. And none of it seemed to help him. So we're going through this process. And about a third of the way into his resentment list, he has his father, which really should have been the first one. And he starts talking about his dad and everything his dad did. There was several bullet points there. And what had been hurt, threatened, affected, injured, or interfered with, as the book says. It was everything. It was all the aspects of self, from pride to personal relationships to ambitions. Everything was all affected. And then we get to the point where we start talking about the deadliness of these resentments. We get to this was our course, and the book asks us to realize how we are perhaps like the person who'd hurt us spiritually sick, but spiritually sick. And I read a little passage out of the 12 by 12 to him that I think is such a beautiful passage. It's in the 10th Step Inventory where it says as we approach true love and see what real tolerance of others is, we will become more and more apparent that other people like ourselves are frequently wrong as well as emotionally ill. And we'll start to see that they, like ourselves, are suffering from the pains of growing up. And then I said to him, I said, you have to see how you're like your father. And he was steaming by this time, and he just started yelling at me. He says, I ain't like my father. My father's an animal. And all this venom started coming out of him and really kind of frightened. If you've ever been in the face of that, it's a little frightening. And I kind of backed away a little bit. and I'm just sitting there, and he's spewing all this stuff out. I'm thinking to myself, well, he's not prepared to look at this from an entirely different angle. I see that. And when he runs out of gas, I didn't know what to say to him. I just said, just go on with the next one. He starts to read the next resentment, and I am not hearing him because something is going on within me. And what it is is I suspect is a result of a prayer that I say before i listen to a fifth step where i ask god to use me make me useful and um is he saying this i something's just come into my mind and i finally stopped him and i said i want to go back to another resentment he says he gets a little defensive like you know you want to talk more about my dad and i say no no not that back at the very beginning that that woman that rejected you that uh used to you at least to live with for a while you lived with for quite a while he said what of it and i said there were kids there he said yeah i said i was just wondering if in that relationship if there was ever a time when you were drunk or stoned on drugs or hung over where you might have done anything to hurt those kids and he gets this washed out look on his face and he hangs his head down and and and uh i don't know what's going on he lifts his head up he's got a tear coming down one side of his faceand he says in this horrible voice he says I'm just like my god damn father I said how did you feel about yourself when you hurt those kids he says I couldn't stay drunk enough I said do you think your dad's any different and he took a minute it was like he was thinking he said you know I don't know I haven't seen my dad in years he said my sister is the only one that has anything to do with him anymore And she tells me that he's the most miserable person she's ever known, that his liver and pancreas are so bad that he has been physically forced into a state of abstinence because his body will not metabolize alcohol. And she says he's neurotic and depressed and miserable and all alone. I said, do you think you could be like that? And he said to me, after a moment, he said, I guess that would be a vision of my future without Alcoholics Anonymous. And we went back to the last part. We did the prayer and then went back To the last prayer. And I told him, you're going to have to say this prayer for a while, I think. And we Went back to The last part, disregarding the other person involved entirely. And he started to look to see what kind of a son he was, not in the light of his dad's sickness and violent, crazy, insane behavior, but just on its own. And what he discovered is he had been a terrible son. He used his father's sickness, and anger, and violence to justify, he borrowed thousands and thousands of dollars from his dad, never paid back a dime because his dad's right and justified it he had gossiped and slandered his father to everybody all the friends of the family all the people in the family to pump himself up and to make make himself feel smugly superior and consequently had turned everybody helped turn everybody against the father except for the one sister and when he really looked at this in the light of his own disease and his own sickness he realized what a horrible son i've been what a son and he he went to make amends to his father and his dad lived in this little trailer in this trailer park out in the middle of nowhere in california and he went down there and called me before he went in he was scared and i said he said i said what are you afraid of he said the monster and we talked a little bit i said call me when you get when you get done and he was properly armed and he he went up to the called me later and told me he went up to the trailer and he was shaken inside he knocked on the door and what answered the door was not the monster it was a scared pathetic depressed little old man and he said he looked in his father's eyes and he saw himself and he uh started to take care of his dad and he used all the money that he owed his dad to in order to pay for some of his dad's care and he took care of his Dad until his dad died. And he'll tell you to this day that the greatest gift Alcoholics Anonymous had given him next to his sobriety is he got his daddy back. See, the problem is he never really saw his dad for what his dad really was. His dad was just like him. Maybe exaggerated, maybe a little sicker but it's the same thing all right and when he started my first sponsor you said something to me one time that knocked me over I went to him with a resentment and I went on and on explaining this resentment to him when I ran out of gas he he said to me says well you know what you need to do now don't you and I said well I guess I need to forgive him and he says, no, you need to understand him. And once you understand them, the forgiveness is automatic. There's a word that we hear a lot that most people don't know what it means. It's called the words compassion. Comes from two Latin words, com meaning with and passio meaning pain. When you have compassion, it means that you are able to sit with their pain. In other words, you get them you really get them and this is i think this is where we're starting to get returned to a sense of community as i start to see myself and i start to develop compassion uh for the people that i've hated so much um you know i talked earlier about when you do this you're building a weapon you don't even need well i'll tell you about a time when i needed it thank god i had done the the inventory work out of the book and i'd helped a lot of guys do the same thing because when i was in my 11th year of sobriety uh i was married to a gal we had a daughter who i just adored she was i was there when she was born uh cut the umbilical cord gave her a first bath she stole my heart never giving it back it's just it's an amazing the probably prime most best love relationship I've ever known in my life probably ever will know and we were married for quite a few years and my wife came to me one day and she said I want a divorce and I live in Las Vegas and in Las Vegas you can get a divorce pretty quick but I didn't I did we didn't get one right away I talked her out of it and I because I didn'T even know there was a problem when she came and asked me for a divorce, I was flabbergasted. I thought we had the ideal marriage. We just spoke at a conference last year on relationships together. Remember that? You know, I thought we had a great marriage. And I said, can we do marriage counseling? And we started doing the marriage counseling. And my sponsor had retired and he bought a bus and he was driving around the East Coast. So I was using a guy that I sponsored. Craig is my confidant about the marriage problems and I'd go to the therapy and the marriage counseling and then I you know Craig and I talk about what was going on and well she came to me one day and she said no more counseling I want out in Vegas should get a divorce really quick we were divorced on a Thursday the next day Friday I find out that my daughter and my just just ex-wife move in with Craig my best friend and I find that they've been sleeping together the last year of my marriage and I'd find out that it seems like everybody in AA knows about it except me now I'm over over almost 11 I'm over 10 years sober and I am been tell you've been telling me for 10 years there's no such thing as a justifiable resentment I got one now I mean I can even get old-timers to agree with me you know I just I'll tell them my tale of whoa and they'll say things oh and bob didn't you just buy her a new car and the the holes in my hands from the nails would open up a little more you know and uh and i started to get real sick and god took so good care of me he i i knew that the answer was in the force was in resentment process of processing the resentment in the book but i couldn't do it right away it was too close. It was like a sore that you can't touch just yet, right? It was too close. And so what God did is he threw waves of new people and people not so new to sponsor that we're all going through relationship difficulties. I'd pile about four or five of them in my car. We'd go to the meeting. We would be the depressed section of the meeting, right. You could hear the secretaries tell the chairman don't call on them but they got me they gave me islands in my day where I was relieved I would list be so caught up in their pain I was relief of mine temporarily and it came to pass that I was able to finally go back and do this process in the book and I listed both their names column number one column number two cause what they did the infidelity the lies etc etc column number three what had been hurt threatened, affected, injured, interfered with, everything. Pride was big on the list. Sexual relationships, pocketbook, ambitions, everything, every aspect of self was hurt. And then the book says, are we prepared to look at it from an entirely different angle? And I was finally, I was like the rat. I don't want any more cheese. I just want out of the trap. and you know you can get a little gratification from being a victim and look what they did to me for a little while but after a while man it's just where's the after a While I just want out of the trap I really wanted out of the trap and the book says and this was our course that we must realize how the person who had harmed us was perhaps sick perhaps like us spiritually sick I started to be able to put myself in their shoes and when I put myself in her shoes, I tell you, I didn't really like what I saw because all of a sudden I realized that here's a gal who fell in love with a guy in AA who was kind of her hero and she put everything she had into this marriage and she wasn't involved in AA to anything really very much at all And in no time at all, she found herself married to a guy who was working 70 hours a week because he had this opportunity to take over this business. And he had all these A commitments and all these sponsors and sponsees. And the truth was she was married toa guy that just wasn't there very much. And I started to get a sense of her desolation and loneliness in that marriage. And because of the way she'd been raised in an alcoholic home, she did not have the ability to speak up or say anything. Later years, she learned, but at that point, she couldn't. And when I really got her desolation and what it must have felt like in the loneliness of being in a marriage where your partner's not there, I started to get how easily it would have been for her to have an affair. I remember there was one point in it I thought to myself, oh my God, how did she make it as long as she did? And I could understand easily how I could have done the exact same thing if I had been driven by the exact same feelings and been in her shoes. I could see it very clearly. And with that comes the compassion, and the compassion is when you really get their pain, you also get their consequences. the ones that you can't see because they have the facade on the outside you never see the price they paid because it's inside and I started realizing what would happen to me and how I would have felt about myself and what would have happened to my spirit if I would've done that and I thought oh my god it's amazing she didn't drink and she almost did she had a tough time and i started seeing where i'd been selfish because really it had all been about me i never once even stopped to consider even wondered i didn't even wonder i just thought everything's great i didn'y even wonder that there was a problem i didn''t have never asked myself caught up in my little plans and designs and my building the business empire and all my stuff and me me me never once even asked myself how's she doing oh is this as good is this okay I never even asked her, never asked myself. Self-centered, dishonest. I built a case about what a tremendous husband I was. Oh, and I took care of her all right, and I was never cheated on her. But where she really needed me, I wasn't there. And I could get it. I really could get... I remember when I went and made amends to her. I don't remember the exact words, but I said something along the lines of, I want you to know how sorry I am that I didn't even understand what was going on and I wasn't there for you and I left you lonely enough that drove you to do something that I know really is against your nature. You would have never done it if I'd have even put a little bit of what I needed to put into that. And when I told her, she started to cry She started to cry because all she ever wanted me to do was get it. It's just to get how she felt and understand. All she ever want me to be able to do is get it, all she wanted me do was understand. And I never did because I was too wrapped up in me. I was two wrapped up me. And then I did the same thing for him and he was easy. I mean, he's a guy. I'm a guy, I mean guys are knuckleheads. Guys, you put a guy in a right situation, lonely enough, horny enough, and some girl makes the moves and does a couple things. He caves. He doesn't mean to cave, but he caves. I mean, you've got the most principled guy in the world, and he gets alone with a girl, and she touches him a couple different ways. A couple things happen, and those principles, just he can't find them. They were there a minute ago. They were here. I know they were. And I understand that. I've made some – I've done some knucklehead stuff. what's happened to me over the years is I've learned to protect Bob from Bob so I don't put myself in situations where I may do something later I'm not going to feel good about and he was when I put myself in his position, he was a lonely guy couldn't even get a date I remember one time he said to me he's so lonely God if I could just have what you have with Karen someday I didn't know he meant specifically I thought he meant in a general way. And I could get it. I could getting it. And I started sponsoring him. I made amends to him and started sponsoring him again, and her and I and him, we all became very good friends. We used to sit at my daughter's games. She was on the soccer and baseball and basketball team. We'd sit in the audience together and cheer and scream like crazy people. Their relationship never survived. it was kind of a shame i actually as his sponsor i spent a lot of time and effort trying to save their marriage which is when you if you tell a normie that they wouldn't believe you but that's the that's and i'm not making that up that is the truth and i and i did it for because i really believed that they were better suited than her and i were they were a better fit unfortunately it was started on such a bad premise that it's hard to recover it's harder to overcome that when you start a relationship out like that it's hard to overcome that and they couldn't overcome it and it didn't survive and they ended up getting a divorce and she's uh she doesn't go to a anymore i don't even know if she's an alcoholic she's she's a minister she moved up to northern california went to divinity school she's minister in a church and i just thought in my humble way i may have driven her closer to the Lord. I don't know why. No, no, no. I don' t know why I said that. Jesus. But we're very good friends. I hear from her every Mother's Day I send her something. Every Father's Day she sends me something. We talk occasionally on the phone now. It's long distance. We used to see each other and we're good friends we're probably better friends now than we were when we were married and my daughter is i'm her father and she's the light of my life and we there's never a week doesn't go by that we don't spend a day together and we talk on the phone all the time and she'S MY BUDDY AND SHE'S A WONDERFUL WONDERFUL WONDEFUL PERSON I AM VERY BLESSED SHE'S AN ADULT NOW SHE RUNS ASSISTANT BRANCH manager of a bank and in college good kid that's the freedom that this provides people like us because what was blocking me while I was resenting them, what was blocking me except aspects of self because I loved them ego got hurt I resented them and I was separate from them and when I got right again all of a sudden it's back, it's restoration right back to where it was before the resentment occurred. It's a powerful, powerful thing. Scott? Thanks, Bob. That's an amazing story, isn't it? Don't doubt the power. Don't doub the power page 67. Get back to a little more nuts and bolts here. It says referring to our list again, putting out of the minds, out of our minds, the wrongs others had done. I would propose that that for me was virtually impossible until the forgiveness is in place because when i thought about someone that i resented i thought about the resentment i had no way to to to unhook those two and so it was necessary for me to do those prayers and get to the freedom of receiving their forgiveness before i was able to put out of my mind the wrongs others had done resolutely look for own mistakes and bob made the great point not my part but my mistakes what were my mistakes where had been selfish dishonest self-seeking or frightened That list is all over this book, and I'll mention it as we come to them in other places. Selfish, I want what I want, andI couldn't care any less if it hurt you. Dishonest, I'm willing to lie to get my will. Self-seeking, Iwant what Iwont, andi don't have any interest. It's different from selfish in that I don'thave any interest in whether it hurts you or not. It's just not on my radar. And frightened is the fear I won't get mywill in the past. And one of my teachers said, resentments when I didn't get my will in the past. Anger and depression are when I'm not getting my will right now. Fear is the concern that I may not get my well in the future. There it is. It says, though a situation not been entirely our fault, we try to disregard the other person involved entirely. So they've told me that twice, and yet I can't do it until I've gotten through the forgiveness process. Where are we to blame? The end towards ours, not the other man's. When we saw our faults, we listed them. We placed them before us in black and white. I use that for a fourth column. And I think there are a lot of really good ways to do this with your sponsor prayerfully. A couple of my mentors do it in other forms, and I admire all of that. This is just what I do. So if you follow this thing the way I lay it out, then you will have under four on all of the right-hand pages in the resentment portion of the inventory, half of a page, two lines. where I can write my mistakes. That's not a lot of room. We're not here for self-flagellation. My mistake, next to girl left me for another guy, my mistake, I got caught dating someone else. Well, maybe the mistake was dating someone else, but initially it was just being caught. I knew you'd get that. And next, high school football coach didn't play me as much as I deserved. What did I discover? When I went to practice, I didn't practice very hard. Oh. So I got to look and see, did I have mistakes? And I'm going to go back again to those who were abused as children. I don't think that child did anything to deserve that kind of abuse. And yet there is a fourth column or there is this paragraph if it's done another way. And maybe the mistake was carrying all that pain and allowing that to mold my personality in the way I approach the world rather than getting help with it and getting free. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe continuing to want to hold on to the resentment, maybe that was a mistake, so there are mistakes in all of them. It says we admitted our wrongs honestly, we're willing to set these matters straight. Sounds very much like step eight, the willingness to set these matters straightforward. um this next paragraph and i'm going to summarize we are now a full hour behind schedule by the way and schedule is a bad choice it's a plan it's not a schedule we try to open up to it then as many new people as there are we take more time in the early steps and that's that's what we lit up the last night anyway so this next paragraphe says fear is a bad thing trust me that's what it says page 68 um for moving right along we reviewed our fears thoroughly put them on paper even though we had no resentment connection with them so for our so what i have them do is turn five or six pages in the resentment inventory make a big old dog here so you can find it because when leave some room because you may find some more resentments as we're still in this process now you know what to do with them and let's have a list of your fears And for our purposes here, we have fears that have a resentment connected and we have fears that don't. And you know, fear of snakes, fear of death, fear of, for a lot of men, fear of holding a baby. That's not an uncommon fear. Fear of failure is a real common one. Fear of success also. My fear of success was based in the fact that I knew I was garbage. If I succeeded, it was dumb luck. And if I succeeded in public, you'd expect me to do it again and I knew it couldn't. It always was back to my expectations of your expectations of me and it says we asked ourselves why we had them thank god they told me because i had no idea didn't have a guess and said wasn't it because self-reliance failed us and i like to have the guys that i sponsor once they have their list of fears and uh and i have them right on both pages because and i've got a friend who who gets a four column inventory out of this fear thing i still don't know how he does that i know that he's staying sober and sober, the people he's sponsoring. And they look like they're doing great to me. So I think there are a lot of right ways to do this. But for me in this portion of this inventory, all I need is a list of my fears. The rest of these are observations and prayers that are not written. I haven't prayed the list once and asked myself this question. If I were totally God reliant, would I have this fear? And the answer in all cases for me is no. I had an experience when I was sober two years, I was sitting at my desk typing. I got a little twinge in my lower back within 10 minutes it was the most pain i have felt to date and we were in the car heading for the hospital and uh it occurred to me that i might be dying i've never felt anything like this and and i thought gee i've offered god my will on my life but i never offered him my death then i said i'm not asking to go but if it's your will and it's time take me and my fear of death's been gone for about 23 years. And so I observe that it is because self-reliance fails me, it's why I have any fear. If I'm totally God-reliant, I don't have a one of them. Next paragraph, we're now on a different basis, the basis of trusting and relying upon God. Roman numeral 16, XVI, third or fourth edition, they match up on this one. Bill Wilson is about to leave the Oxford groups, and he's taking some but not all of their things with him. About eight lines, ten lines down he says, though he could not accept all of the tenants for the Oxford groups, he was convinced of the need for moral inventory, confession of personality defects, restitution to those harmed. That might be different from an apology by the way. Helpfulness to others and then this is the one that gets me. The necessity, I suppose that's important, the necessity of belief in and dependence upon God. And the thing that strikes me in there is belief in and dependence upon God are separate concepts. That you can believe there's a God and not have a higher power. An awful lot of us get here that way. Back on 68, we trust infinite God rather than our final selves. We are in the world to play the role He assigns. Step one, section B, my life remains unmanageable to me. I'm in the role to play i'm in the world to play the role he assigns and i like the analogy that god created a particular animal and he gave this animal a hunger just for the leaves that grow at the top of a particular kind of tree and he also gave the giraffe a long neck so he could get to him i have a long leg for god's will for me but it was necessary for me to dig the poison out of my soul first to find out who i was it says just to the extent that we do as we think he would have us and humbly rely on him does he enable us to match calamity with serenity looks like permission to make a mistake. The extent that we do is we think he would have us. I don't always know what he would help me do next, but when I'm trying to do what I think God wants me to do, I still make mistakes, but I make a finer quality of mistake today than I ever made before. We have a name for that. You know what that is? It's progress, right? Progress is making the same old mistake a little less often or making a new and finer quality mistake. That's what progress is because beyond that would be perfection right and I'm convinced. It's not my job to be perfect It's just not well if it's not in my job. To be perfect. Is it not logically my job make mistakes and I'm good at And And all my life if you said we learned from our mistakes Not true how did a form if we learn by our mistakes? How do guys go to jail the second time we learn not true not true? I never learned a thing from my mistakes. What I learn from is living with the results of my mistakes We have 5 out of 12 steps that address that 4, 5, 8, 9 and 10 Are about me embracing the results Of my mistakes And that's where the learning process occurs I'm like the dog that wets on the rug What does he learn? Absolutely nothing When does he start learning? When you rub his nose in Well, me and the dog have that in common We like to have our nose rubbed in it And it is I insist on embracing the results of my mistakes that I learn and when I come to that situation again do I think oh that was a mistake no what I think is do you remember when you had to make amends the last time you did something like this I'm not terribly fond of amends would you like to make amends again no well then don't do it and I don't and that's the learning process for me and i think it's okay that i make mistakes it's okay because i believe that that mistakes and lessons are paired if i had learned the lesson already i wouldn't be making the mistake so is the fact that i have made this mistake that opens me up for the possibility of learning that particular lesson one of the problems i have is that when i realize i've made a mistake there's anger there's energy that comes and it comes from me in the form of anger And if I allow me to thrash myself for not being perfect, which is my history, I don't let that energy do its work. What I need to do is to quit beating on me. Beating me up is never the next right thing. Never. And I have to do something to get rid of that energy from the anger. And I think beating up a tree with a plastic baseball bat's a good choice. I think beaten up a bed with a tennis racket, as long as there's no electric blanket on it. That's kind of an important detail. But I sit in my office chair and I grip the handrails and I growl and I swear, and you would not want to hear it. And I do that until the energy's gone. And then I can get back in focus and see if I can't get focused and learn that lesson. And then when I get that lesson, my next assignment is to make the next mistake so that I can get involved in the next lesson. And my mission, we were talking about over lunch, I don't think my mission is to get the last lesson. My mission is to be in pursuit of the next one. That's all. That's all. Because when I do, it takes all the heat off because I always had to be perfect before. Well, now I don't. We never apologize. Never. That's kind of a big word. Never apologize to anyone for depending upon our creator. My experiences and my fears are always in the future. There was a lady in Nashville who was in recovery. She was a good friend of mine. and she was standing in line at a bank to cash a check or something, deposit or payroll, something. And all of a sudden there was a hairy arm around her throat and a pistol in her ear. And she was a hostage in a bank robbery. And she talked about it later, and she said that all of her fears were in the future, that if she stood there moment by moment, she was really okay. She was physically a little uncomfortable. She was not free to go about her business, but she was vraiment okay. Her fear was that he would shoot her in the feature or that he would abduct her. But moment by moment, she was really okay. And that crystallized it for me, that whenever I'm in fear, I'm In the Future. What I'm really doing is borrowing pain from the future. And if I could reach far enough into the future and find enough pain, or into the past, if I can find enough paint in some other day or other days and pull that into today, I can make today so bad I can't stand it and will have to have relief of some kind. And I think that the salve for that is the word today. My disease is not very creative. It hits me with the same old garbage. And it's always the what ifs, and if they do that, and if the other end is so on the stock market, and just chasing all that stuff. And if I stick the word to that, if I put the word of the day into all of the questions, all the power goes away. And I sometimes say to a guy I sponsor, yeah, I believe that's a problem. I believe it's a real one. Phrase the problem for me one more time I want to hear the word today in the problem And then let you and I explore answers That contain the word Today Let's get out of the business of fixing the rest of your life We're no good at it And it takes all the power away And I encourage them and I encourage myself To use the word TODAY a lot in our speech But also in my thoughts and my prayers And it take all the Power away from that stuff For me it is part of The salve for the fear, the faith things too but being just in this day Bob says it so beautifully there's one who has all power that one is God may you find him now now isn't when I find God it's where and that I can't safely leave today with the single exception of holding my sponsor's hand doing this kind of review I can not I can' t leave today safely and Dr. Paul used to say that it's like me and God are on a tandem bicycle and he's up front staring I'm in the back pedaling Now, I can steer any time I want to, but he will not pedal. And when I go into the future, I'm steering, and he doesn't go with me. Twice it says in this paragraph that I don't apologize for God. And then it says we ask him to remove our fear. So there's a prayer. Direct our attention to what he'd have us do, and that's not what it says. It says what he would have us be. And I wonder for a long time, well, what would he have me be? Well, I found the answer, strangely enough, in the big book on page 133. And I think this is it. Second line, we are sure God wants us to be happy, joyous and free. Yeah. One of the guys I sponsor says free had to come first. The way I got free was doing the 12 steps. When I get free, I can then become happy and joyous. And I thank anything that I can add to that list that fits is within the master's will for me. Happy, joyous, free, and trying to be a good dad. Mm-hmm. Happy, joyful, free and trying to be an employee. Trying to be a good employee. Yeah? Happy, joyous and free cheating on my taxes. Nah. Sorry. And then a powerful promise at the bottom of page 68 that once we commence to outgrow fear. Shall I go on or do you want to do a piece of fear? I could do something. Yeah, rather than go into section. Yeah, why don't you go ahead. Yeah, we're already hopelessly behind anywhere We're going to have to stay over until Monday night. Yeah, yeah. Which will add a few resentments to some of your lists. Yes, sir. I'll see you in your prayers. A couple points on fear. I had a hard time with fear. I remember sitting down and trying to make a fear list, and I drew a blank. I couldn't think of anything I was afraid of. Now, I was four years sober, over four years sober, and I can't think of anything i'm afraid of i went to an intergroup monthly speaker meeting and there's a guy there from out of town bunch of us went out speaker and some of the old-timers went out to eat after the meeting and i'm telling this guy that i'm doing another inventory and i'M at my fear list i finished my resentments and i now i'M doing fears and i don't have any fears and he said really i said yeah i don'T i DON'T HAVE ANY FEARS he said can i ask you some questions And I said, yeah. And he said, are you afraid of large, angry, barking dogs? Well, yeah, but everybody's afraid of them. He said, we're not talking about everybody. We're talking about you. Well, Yeah. He said good. You can put that down. Are you afraid rattlesnakes? Wow. Everybody's afraid. Well, we' re not talking abou everybody. We're talki ng about you Okay. Black widow spiders? Yeah. Are you fraid of what people think of you? Yeah. yeah are you afraid of being embarrassed yeah are you afraid that no one will ever love you yeah are YOU afraid of success and then what people will expect of you yeah are You afraid of failure are You afraid of growing old alone are You afraid to be getting sick and not being able to take care of yourself or are You afraid that God isn't doesn't really love you the way they say in AA are You afraid of cancer I used to get my early sobriety had cancer every third week I got in the tape bank I got 400 magnificent death's bed speeches recorded but I've never got to use uh are you afraid of uh stuff catching up with you from your past and he went on and on he finally says so is there anything you're not afraid of and jeez and what I realized is that I was afraid of being afraid so much so that somewhere as a kid I developed this idea that I didn't even know I had but it was a part of me and that is if you're afraid there's something wrong with you if you'RE afraid you're less than a man if you're afraid you're vulnerable and people take advantage of you so i disconnected myself from the emotion of fear and i i developed certain defense mechanisms a lot of more anger and rage that if i was threatened i immediately went right to anger so i never had to experience fear but i was really afraid um and the book says that we think our very fabric of our existence was shot through with it. And that's so true. It is the driving force in my life. The book says earlier that we're driven by a hundred forms of it. I didn't even know that worry was a type of fear. I didn' t know that apprehension, anxiety, was a type of fear. I didn't know that guilt was a fear of stuff catching up for me from the past. I didn't know any of that stuff i i used to wake up worrying about did you ever wake up and just lay in bed just worrying about stuff thinking and running scenarios of conversations with people that aren't even in the room that you might meet later that day and right i don't even know that that's fear that's how asleep at the wheel in my own life i am i'm not and i don'T think i have any fears. And I was looking for fears like a fish looking for water. It's what I lived in. I lived with fear. And the book goes on to say that these fears set in motion trains of circumstances which brought us misfortune we felt we didn't deserve but did not we ourselves set the ball rolling. Psychologists refer to that as self-fulfilling prophecies. I heard a guy years ago in AA say, I've never had a problem that has hurt me as much as my solutions to my problems. And this cuts really to the essence of why even with 30 years of sobriety, I cannot manage my own life. It's because I will make my fears come true. i'll give you a couple examples um i had a fear early sobriety my the first relationship i was ever in uh i got involved in this relationship and i was i had this fear and the fear was that she's going to dump me so what happens i obsess on the fear to such a degree that it makes me crazy i become the guy that's always watching her in a meetings if she hugs some guy i'm like hey, hey. I'm pulling the guy aside after the meeting. You don't be hugging my girlfriend. People are looking at me like I'm a little crazy, right? One time she left the room and I started going through her purse to see if there were any guys' cards there or guys' phone numbers. A couple times I would go by her apartment in the middle of the night, make sure nobody's cars are there. I am nuts. She said to me one time after a meeting, she says, every time I look up at you at the meeting. You're looking at me. Well, yeah. And what happened? My fear of being that she was going to dump me drove me to act like such a guy that made her dump me. I remember the day she couldn't take it anymore. She's told me, you're smothering me. I remember the day she left, I felt gut-shot, like I wanted to crawl under a rock. And in the middle of the pain and the desolation was a little voice that I've come to understand as my ego. And the voice said, yeah, but you were right. I like being right. Desolate, devastated, a basket case, but right. i can tell you 10 examples of that and that's why i can't manage my own life i will i will hurt myself and it's it's a weird thing and and yet this this delusion that i'm a victim of that i can rest satisfaction and happiness out of the of this world by managing well is more than just resting happiness it's also protect that i think i can protect myself from imagined threats on the horizon. As if I fancy myself as John Wayne with a .44 Magnum. Don't mess with, make my day, don't mess with me, right? But the truth is, if you were to look at me objectively, I'm more like Barney Fife with a 44 Magnum, right. I'm continually shooting myself in the foot as the defender of my life, right? And I don't get it, right, and I don' t get it. So this stuff has got to go. It's got to g o. In the middle of the page on 68, it talks about trust two times as being the answer. well what do i uh what's that mean i went to a retreat one time when i was a couple just first couple years and i was talking to an old timer and i hadn't really i hadn'T worked this really worked the steps yet i was getting close to hitting another bottom and going through the steps and i uh i'm talking to this guy old guy and i said you know i got all this anxiety i worry all the time and i'm anxious about stuff and he said do you pray and i said every morning i say the third step prayer and a bunch of other prayers and i pray every night and he says do you have faith in god and i say absolutely i know that i'm sober today only through god's grace and he said well that's all well and good but do you trust him and i must have looked at him like what's the difference and he sad there's a big difference he said guys like you and i can pray fervently daily, have all the faith in the world and still die of alcoholism. And I saw that later in people. I've watched some tremendously strong religious people with a lot of faith die of alcoholism." He said, we must have something higher than faith. We must have trust. And he says, I'll tell you the difference. If you went to a circus and you sat in the audience and you watched a tight wire act and you watch the guy come out to the edge of the wire pushing a wheelbarrow. You could sit there and watch him at the platform with the wheelbarow, with all the faith in the world. He's a professional. I bet you he's done it a thousand times. I have absolute faith he can walk across that tight wire pushing that wheelbarower. But if you had trust, you'd go up and get in the wheelbarrows. And when he said that to me, I got this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Because I know what he means. He means I have to take my hands off my life, stop protecting it, defending it, justifying it and really get in the wheelbarrow. The problem is I understand that intellectually. And I think it's a great idea. I think people should get inthe wheelbarow. I like reading about getting in the wheelchair. I like going to meetings and discussing getting in the wheelbarrow. I like going out to coffee with people and philosophizing about getting in the wheelbarrows. I just ain't getting in the wheelbars. And I ain't get in the wheelbarrows because I got this fear down inside me that if I ever did get that vulnerable and surrendered ultimately to God and got in that wheelbarrow, I'd get halfway out that wire and hear the voice go, is it Bob? Father Martin said when emotion and intellect are in conflict with each other, emotion always wins. God, if there's a hell, it's got to be in that place where you know intellectually I've got to get in the wheelbarrow, but emotionally you just can't. You can't because it makes you a bad guy. What happens? Well, page 53. Right in the middle of the page says we became alcoholics crushed by self-imposed crisis. We could not postpone or evade. We had to fearlessly face the proposition that God is either everything or else he is nothing. He either is or he isn't. What is our choice to be? Many, many times in my sobriety I've been crushed by self-imposed crises that I can't maneuver my way out of. I can postpone them. I can evade them. I cannot fix them. They're coming at me. I did this stuff. I didn't think it was going to come to this, but it's coming at me and there's nothing I can do about it. The first one was the hardest and probably the most monumental. When I was just a couple, maybe two months sober, I guess, or so, I started to get overwhelmed with anxiety because I had warrants out for my arrest and I was supposed to go back to Pennsylvania and do two years in prison, plus some tack-on time for crossing a number of state borders, I suppose. I didn't know what they were going to do to me, but I figured it was a minimum of two years. And a guy in AA convinced me that I was stuck. I had to turn myself in. I didnít want to turn my self in. I donít jail well. I donít want to do this. And he said, kid, youíre going to die of alcoholism. He says, how long are you going to make it looking over your shoulder until the anxiety of every time a cop car goes down the street and your gut just knots up because you don't know if he's got your picture on his dashboard. How long are you going to go like that until you will be forced by your emotions to pick up a drink or some sort of medication? And I knew what he was saying is right. There's no maneuver room here. And he says, You can't run. You're going to drink. And he walked me through the process and had me write this letter to my PO. He made me give him the address of where I was living. I thought that was a bad idea. I wrote this letter. I told him in the letter I'd call him in 10 days and that I was willing to come back there and do the time and anything they wanted me to do and sent the letter off. I remember dropping the letter in the mailbox and then the minute I dropped it, I'm trying to get my arm in there to get it back. I remember that like it was yesterday and my head going crazy. You know, I want to leave. and I made it through those 10 days. I wanted to bolt, but they talked me out of it, and I got to that 10th day when I told him in the letter I'd call him, and I called him, and this woman answers the phone, and she says he's expecting your call, and she puts me through, and my PO gets on the phone and says to me, he says, I've talked to my supervisor, we've talked with the courts, and you don't have to come back and do the two years, but your case is going to be transferred to Nevada. You have to go to CRS and go to DUI classes. You have send us money for the restitution and the court costs. You're going to have to give UAs and report to this guy, and you're going do all this stuff. And it was all stuff I could do, and I could it all as a free man. And I remember hanging up the phone, and it was the most amazing feeling of freedom. It was as if I smoked something that was really strong. Like it was amazing. And it was like a postcard from a God that I don't really even believe in yet. And the postcard said, Dear Bob, I got your back. And it Was the first time in my life as a result of being crushed by a self-imposed crisis that I had to get in the wheelbarrow because there was nowhere else to go. I was out of alternatives. and then the next time it gets a little easier because I remembered that God took care of me that time and then after a while you just get in the wheelbarrow because it takes a guy like me a long time to trust God I don't trust easily and that doesn't make me a bad guy it's just the way I'm wired and I think there's a lot of people in Alcoholics Anonymous like that if it wasn't for a lack of alternatives we'd never do most of the stuff that we're forced to do in aa except that we don't have a choice scott page 46 try to put an exclamation point on what he just did five lines from the bottom 46 we found that god does not make too hard terms of those who seek him to us the realm of spirit is broad roomy all-inclusive never exclusive forbidding to those who earnestly seek it is open we believe to all men continuing on 68 says now about sex many of us need an overhauling there i won't ask for a show of hands on that and um and i'm gonna skip part of this paragraph we are no kidding way behind which is, I think, a great excuse. But on the next page, about eight lines down, it says, we want to stay out of this controversy. We do not want to be the arbiter of anyone's sex conduct. Well, I had a problem with that. And I went to my mentor and I said, what? How, how, how? And he said, well, this is what I do, he said. For the men that I sponsor. And I have adopted it myself, so I'll share it in case you can use it. When I get a new guy to sponsor, if he's married, it's pretty obvious. But if he is single, I say to him, I'm going to ask you to leave the ladies alone until I get you through these 12 steps. There are two reasons. One is I want your time and energy on this step work. The other, as sick as you are, your chances of attracting a healthy female are zero. Now, you may currently have one fooled, but there will be a time limit on that because healthy women run screaming from guys like you. and um now you may choose to ignore my advice in this category if you do ignore my advice don't bring me the problems you create for yourself here i've already told you what i think what you need to do see and that solves my problem i don't have to listen to it and then between you and me the truth is i handle the first one with him and talk about this and then i don'T handle it anymore um and it says um so we all have sex problem would hardly be human if we didn't. And here's the great question. I think there are two great questions on the page. The first one is, what can we do about them? It says, we reviewed our own conduct over years past. Where had we been selfish, dishonest, inconsiderate? Whom had we hurt? Did we unjustifiably arouse jealousy, suspicion, or bitterness? Were we at fault? What should we have done instead? We got this all down on paper and looked at it. It does not tell us how to get it down on paperwork. And I've seen a lot of great ways to do it. I'm a column inventory kind of guy, and I like to use whom had we hurt for a first column. Selfish, dishonest, inconsiderate makes a nice second one. Jealousy, suspicion, or bitterness makes a Nice third one. Where are we at fault? What should we have done instead is the fourth one. Page 124. For those of you who read the book regularly, you know that they sneak stuff in that wasn't here before? 124. They completely rewrote this page about a year and a half ago and added two huge paragraphs that were not here, just in case you missed them. It says, Henry Ford once made a wise remark to the effect that experience is the thing of supreme value in life. That is true only if one is willing to turn the past to good account. We grow by our willingness to face and rectify errors and convert them into assets. The alcoholic's past thus becomes the principal asset of the family and frequently it's almost the only one. This painful past may be of infinite value to other families still struggling with their problem. We think each family which has been relieved owes something to those who have not, and when the occasion requires, each member of it should be only too willing to bring form of mistakes, no matter how grievous, out of their hiding places, showing others who suffer how we were given help as the very thing which makes life seem so worthwhile to us now. Cling to the thought that in God's hands the dark past is the greatest possession you have. The key to life and happiness for others. With it, you can avert death and misery for them. I want you to know why I'm about to do this. And there it is. Bob has a beautiful saying. He says, if you want to get free of your past, make it useful. I'm going to share this for that reason because somebody in here might die if I don't. And because I got free. And I'm gonna talk about my last column on this, where we at fault what should we have done instead? And mine simply, I only have three entries. They appear in several places and the entries say I should have told her the truth or they say I should have left her alone or they said I should've told him no. I'm a heterosexual male and I had homosexual experiences from the time I was 12 until I was about 18. I had been so beaten down by my father that I couldn't tell anyone one no for any reason, and I'm not beating up anybody in that category. I sponsor a homosexual guy, and one of the biggest problems he has is the sickness he got in trying to have heterosexual relationships, all right? So I'm Not Accusing Anyone Here, all right? I was not the victim here, but I had been so beaten down that that's where I was, and I was 18 when I was able to say no, and that was my last one. And I share that Bob and I we believe between us have heard about 300 fifth steps and we believe that over 90% of adult heterosexual males have had a homosexual experience of some kind in Tennessee they don't all have them in Tennessee just kidding But I wanted to share that, because if one of you guys is holding that one, if that's someone you can't tell, see me at a break. I'll be happy to talk to you. And a lady friend of ours who's sober over 30 years, we asked her, and she said in women it runs about 80%. So just, you know, welcome to the human race. And then it says here back on, if you don't think God has a sense of humor, back here on page 69 in the middle, it says, in this way we tried to shape a sane and sound ideal for our future sex life. So that's the purpose of the mission here. We're not here to thrash me about what I've done wrong in the past, but to help me shape a insane and sound ideal for my future. And since we subjected each relation to this test, was it selfish or not? We asked God, uh-oh, we're going to talk to God about sex. Oh my goodness. Well, Well, here's a newsflash for Scott those years ago. Who do you think invented it? Did you ever think about that? Yeah. Who do YOU think invented It? Okay to talk to him about it. Nice job, by the way. Thank you very much. So we ask God to mold our ideals and help us to live up to them. So there's a prayer. I want you now, Mr. Newcomer, and as you've done these columns, we looked at this thing, to pray and ask God to mold your ideals and hope you'll live up to them unless don't confuse don't get confused about ideals and what that means. Ideal doesn't have anything to do with her hair color or dress size. Ideals has to do with your behavior in this category. And after you've prayed that, I want you to sit down and write what your sexual ideal is. What do you and God, what can the two of you agree on is your behavior in this catagory? And the today word comes to play in here. Don't chase our tail here. We don't need to know what it would be if you're single now, but we don't needs to know if you were married but temporarily separated but not legally separated but you thought she had a boyfriend but you weren't sure. We don' t need that one today, Stanley. What we need is the one given your current situation. And I think if you go past the third line writing it, I don't think you understood the question. Mine is real simple. I'm married to a spectacular woman. She's supposed to get all of my sexual energy. Mine's pretty simple. Yours may or may not be. I do not require them to read these to me. I invite them to, but I don't require it. And it says, we remembered always that sex powers were God-given and therefore good. Neither to be used lightly or selfishly, despised or loathed. Whatever our ideal turns out to be, we want to grow toward it, to make amends where we've done harm. That sounds familiar. Provided we don't do more harm. We treat sex as we would any other problem in meditation. oh my heavens we're going to talk to God about it again we ask God what we should do about each specific matter the right answer will come if we want it God alone can judge our sex situation this the first full paragraph on 70