I’m a Gang of One — There’s No Gangs in Palos Verdes 🤣 — Bill C.
About This Speaker Tape
Bill delivers a step 4-5 talk online during COVID lockdown � he's 35 years sober, got sober at 37, and has been reflecting at length while locked down. He opens by pushing back on the standard alcoholic story that we were always "separate and strange" before we drank. He argues the ego creates separation in every human at about two and a half years old; the difference with alcoholics is that we found a chemical that dissolved it, and then we stopped growing.
We walked into AA emotionally stuck where alcohol first hit.\n\nHe stacks evidence that his own stuckness outlived his sobriety date by decades � the badass teenager from Palos Verdes who was in jail at 17 and a locked mental institution at 22; the seven-years-sober father getting thrown off a field of eight-year-olds for going after the referee; the middle-school Harley burnout after benching a team of nine-year-olds at halftime, followed by the dignity of running out of gas and walking home in his leather jacket; the fourteen-years-sober roadside screaming match with a cop who put his hand on his gun when Bill finally turned around to apologize. The apology, he says, unnerved the cop more than the epithets did.\n\nThe frame of the talk is five pillars of spiritual condition, each mapped to steps. Powerlessness � not just over alcohol but over everything outside his own being.
Stop blaming � the real work of the fourth column is not "my part" but my faults and mistakes, the places where I was the author of my own resentments (his wife cheated with his friend while he was shooting dope, running with bikers, and leaving the family on welfare). Nothing is personal � his amends to his father pulled the rage out of him in the truck on the drive home; he discovered his father had never been doing anything to him, and the two of them went on to share fifteen years of sobriety-birthday cakes at the Hermosa Beach Men's Day as "the Gordon and Bill show."\n\nThe last two pillars are self-awareness � the watcher that develops in steps 10 and 11, which frees him from having to keep working on himself � and compassion, which he says is what he was missing his whole life. He traces his second surrender between eight and twelve years (the collapse of the alibi system), his liver transplant three and a half years ago from Hep C that almost killed him at thirty years sober and showed him how hard it was to accept love, and the slow discovery that somewhere in sponsoring people for self-centered reasons he fell in love with them.
He closes by flipping the clich�: "You don't give it away to keep it. You have to give it away to even get it."
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Timestamps
Full Transcript
kicked us off Carl M did a talk on step one Pete did two and three last week we
got Bill this week it's been it's been a wonderful rollover we're gonna open this
meeting with a prayer and and then we're gonna get right into it...
got Bill this week it's been it's been a wonderful rollover we're gonna open this
meeting with a prayer and and then we're gonna get right into it...
kicked us off Carl M did a talk on step one Pete did two and three last week we
got Bill this week it's been it's been a wonderful rollover we're gonna open this
meeting with a prayer and and then we're gonna get right into it for Bill to talk
about step four Kevin do you want to do you want to put that prayer up do we put
it up
have we been
we use a version of the set-aside prayer and certainly you can ask the God
of your understanding to be here with you and we can connect on that level
here thanks Kim dear God please set aside everything I think I know about
myself this book my disease these steps especially about you dear God
so that I can have an open mind a new experience with all of these things
helping to see the truth of myself amen okay
thanks everybody I don't think I've left anything out I probably have but without
further ado and Bill thanks so much for pressing on and getting here with us I
want everybody here to welcome Bill see if you've never heard him before you're
not going to forget him bill take it away my friend hi everybody I'm Bill I'm an alcoholic
Hi, Bill.
And Zoom is weird.
The lockdown is weird.
Everything's weird.
And we are children of chaos.
Weird works pretty good for us, you know?
And some of us have been around a while, and we don't enjoy the chaos so much.
But it is familiar.
So I'm supposed to talk to you about the inventory.
And since I've been locked down, I've been sitting at home, and I've been doing a lot of thinking.
I have plenty of time to think, and I've come to some conclusions.
And I agree with all the conclusions I come to.
And I will share some of those conclusions with you this evening.
Every speaker tells a story.
Every speaker tells a story.
There's a common thread.
There's some, obviously, to our stories, there's a lot of commonality.
But there's one that's pretty common.
And we all talk about how long before we ever drank or used anything we didn't feel part of.
That we felt separate and strange and weird and out of place.
We have different ways of describing that.
The aliens dropped me off, and I'm waiting for the mothership to return.
I didn't get along.
And we talk about this.
It's like it's an aspect of alcoholism.
Like there's something unique about us that we feel this sense of separation and not part of.
And I don't agree with that.
I think everybody feels that way.
The ego, the purpose of the ego is to create separation.
Every human being has it.
There's a me and there's a them.
That essentially generates separation.
But that's not the reality.
There's a subject and an object.
And I'm not connected to the things around me, outside of me.
There's a mental awareness of this separation.
And you can see it all over the world.
I mean, the way countries are run.
We think that we can legislate all kinds of stuff that we have no power or control over.
And the whole societal structure is centered around this.
That we are the top of the food chain and all of that.
The ego presents itself at about two and a half years old.
Now, prior to that, the little baby senses no separation at all.
That aspect of its consciousness has not entered into it.
And at about two and a half, the ego presents itself.
It's part of the growing up process.
We have a term for this.
We call it the terrible twos.
And the little kid immediately begins to manipulate this situation.
It starts crying a lot.
And if it's raised in a relatively decent household, it gets its needs met.
And it has a lot of needs.
It needs food.
It needs its diaper changed.
It needs all kinds of stuff.
Sometimes it just wants to be held for no apparent reason.
And it receives this.
So this gives validity to this subject-object thing.
Now, all of us here sitting here today,
listening to this in this meeting tonight,
have had the experience of being in elementary school
and looking across the classroom and determining
that if I looked like little Jimmy over there, I'd be better.
If I was taller like Sam, I'd be better.
If I had long, blonde, silky hair instead of this black piece of crap on my head,
I'd be better.
If I was more athletic, I'd be better.
Everybody does this.
Everybody has this experience.
And then we begin to emulate these things.
These people that we think are cooler than we are to try to become part of that.
Some of us are extroverted, and we're very aggressive about that.
And some of us are introverted, and we have more of a problem.
We hide out from it and isolate because social interaction is difficult.
But all of us respond.
All of us have this experience.
This is not an aspect of alcoholism.
I don't think we're that uniquely neurotic.
I think we're like everybody else.
Preteen and teenage years hit, and the assimilation becomes much more sophisticated.
Now we're trying to figure out how to be lovers,
how to work with authority figures as the authority becomes more onerous.
We have to interact with that.
The peer pressure and stuff gets more sophisticated.
Then alcoholism presents itself.
Then we drink.
And we discover, most of us in this room,
that we are alcoholic.
We don't know that we're not going to be able to control the amount of intake.
And alcohol then inserts itself.
This alcoholism inserts itself right in the middle of the learning process,
right in the middle of all the essential things that we're going to need to know
in order to be functional, helpful human beings in the future.
We medicate that.
When I was 17, I was a bad drunk in high school.
I had a big jacket and a sling.
I had a sling.
I had a slouch and a sneer and a foul mouth and a bad attitude,
and I carried a gun.
And I'm from the mean streets of Palos Verdes.
There's no gangs in Palos Verdes.
Nobody's looking for me in Palos Verdes.
I was a gang of one, right?
But I'd already been to jail at 17.
I'd already been to jail for the first time, right?
And I was in trouble at 17.
Now this sense of separation that we have,
this feeling of weirdness and being out of sync and outside the circle
as if there's a circle to be outside of, right?
When we drink, this goes away.
We have a spiritual experience.
And the way we tell the story is that we were odd to begin with,
and then we drank and it cured it.
I don't think we were odd to begin with.
I just think we drank and we stopped learning.
Now some of us are worse than others.
All of us that have been around AA for a while,
there are some people in our fellowship
that have virtually no social skills whatsoever, you know?
And the rest of us are just kind of selfish and weird and arrogant.
We're not sensitive.
We're touchy, right?
Just like a teenager.
Just like a teenager.
I mean, when I got sober at 37, my kid, my second set of two kids,
my daughter was three years old and my son was four months old.
And a few years ago,
my daughter looked at me and she said,
you know, dad, you've grown up quite a bit over the years.
And I was really pleased to hear her acknowledge that fact
because God knows I've been working at it.
But I'm the dad at six or seven or eight years sober
that got kicked off the soccer field for going after the referee for a bad call.
A soccer field full of eight and nine year olds.
And the guy that escorted me off the field was our color.
Right?
I got thrown off the baseball field for screaming and spitting
and just acting like a fool in a little league baseball game.
You know, I mean, just things like that.
I was coaching a bunch of nine year olds one time and they were really bad.
And at halftime, we were down like five to nothing in a soccer game.
And I gave them a lecture on how they should have personal pride.
And you can't allow yourself to be beaten like this.
You've got to go out there and start knocking people over or something.
You can't just allow this to happen to you.
You know, I can imagine one of these, Mr. Cleveland said we can hit people.
And I had, this was in a middle school, right?
And I rode my Harley there because I'm a badass.
And I'm seven, eight years sober, right?
And I parked it on the asphalt where the basketball courts were in middle school.
So the second half starts.
And they get scored again already.
And I just walked off the field, just left them.
I just walked off the field, got on my Harley, like the badass that I am,
and burned rubber through the basketball courts in this middle school
and just roared off into the sunset.
And then I ran out of gas.
It's really hard to look cool when you've just behaved badly in an AYSO soccer game
and burned rubber through the parking lot when you're walking home with your helmet
and your leather jacket.
And your hands, right?
And I get home and I call my sponsor.
And I told him what happened.
And he said to me, Bill, it's children's sports.
And I actually responded to him, you don't understand, right?
And I believe what's going on here now that we're sober is we're going to grow up now.
And we're a little late.
And the chances of us doing it and looking good is really slim, right?
Really slim.
I've worn the clown suit a lot.
I can leave it in my closet right now.
I leave it hanging up.
I dust it off every once in a while because I know I'll probably need it again.
Although as the years have gone by, I've used it fewer and fewer times.
But there were a lot of years.
I mean, I'm 14 years sober and I'm screaming at the top of my lungs at a cop on the side of the road.
For giving me a ticket.
Telling him he doesn't have the right to insert himself into my life.
And at 14 years sober, I'm an official AA guru.
I'm speaking all over.
I'm sponsoring half of Southern California.
And this is me.
This is the real me.
This is me.
And this guy, the guy went back to his motorcycle to write the ticket or call in for reinforcements or something.
And I'm sitting in the cab of the truck and I said, man, you have got to cut this out.
This is ridiculous.
It's not this guy's fault.
This is you, man.
Because I knew.
I know I have some awareness.
But that doesn't mean that I have good behavior.
So I got out of my truck and went back to apologize to him.
And he put his hand on his gun.
And I had a moment of clarity.
And I got back in the truck.
He told me get back in the truck.
And I got back in the truck.
And he comes around to the passenger side window and he asked me what the hell is going on.
And I apologized to him.
I said I have no right to speak to you that way.
This is not your problem.
This is my problem.
And I'm really sorry.
The apology screwed him up so bad that he let me go.
I think the apology was harder on him than the epithets, you know, the MF and all that stuff, you know.
You know, I have actually told him, I said, you know, you jackbooted Nazi.
I would launch.
I had rage.
I had rage.
Since I was a little kid, I had this rage.
And here I am, you know, sober some years.
I'm 45 years old or something.
And there's the rage.
Now, when I apologized to that cop after that, I have never done that since.
I'm 35 years sober now.
The rage seems to be over.
I have been transformed.
I just get pissy now.
My wife says, what are you getting pissy about?
And I said, look, you're going to have to put up with the pissy.
The rage is gone.
But I get to be pissy.
And I think the pissy is about over with now.
I mean, it just seems to never stop, right?
It seems to never stop.
So at 37 years old, I walk into Alcoholics Anonymous.
It says in our book, it says in our book, this is what I want to talk about.
I know I'm supposed to talk about the inventory, and I will.
I promise you.
But what it says in our book is the only thing that's going to keep us sober,
and even I think kind of more importantly or beyond that, more beyond being sober,
to give us some kind of a life that has some purpose in it,
some ability to have interpersonal relationships that have intimacy in them,
you know, where I'm able, where I become less defensive, where I'm open,
and I have these fulfilling relationships that I've seen others seem to have.
The only thing that's going to do that for us is our spiritual condition,
the maintenance of that.
So evidently, I need one of these spiritual conditions.
Maybe even I'm supposed to have one now.
What's it look like?
Where did I get it?
If I have one, what does it look like?
Sometimes we say things, I wonder if we really understand them.
And I've had a couple of experiences recently being around people with long-term sobriety
that went out and drank and then come back and report in.
And it disconcerts me.
Because they're me.
They're me.
You know?
I mean, so what is that?
And the other thing, I guess we have these things called laurels.
And we can rest on them.
What are those?
And do I rest on them?
And it says we're not supposed to rest on them.
We need to keep the ball rolling.
There's some kind of a maintenance procedure for this spiritual condition.
Adyashanti says, you know, some people wake up, they become enlightened.
And some of those people go back to sleep.
Right?
And I've had the experience of being awakened.
I think when we get sober, there is an awakening.
We have cute names for it.
We talk about our heads popping out.
Oh, my God.
What the hell was that last 20 years?
What was that about?
That's a spiritual experience when that happens.
There's no rational explanation for that.
And that has happened to me.
I've been awakened.
Now what?
So I walk into AA at 37 years old.
What's the first thing they hit us with?
You know, two things happened to me when I walked in that are just pure luck.
One is I just liked it.
And I've never lost that.
I've been intrigued by AA for 35 years.
I've really never really been bored.
I've been mistreated a lot and stuff.
I don't get the respect I deserve.
But I've not been boring.
And if you're sitting out there tonight and you're bored, it's because you're boring.
It's not us.
This thing is absolutely fascinating.
You know?
It's like if all you're doing is going to meetings, you will get bored.
But if you're really involved and engaged, it's pretty hard to get bored.
Every time some weirdo comes and asks you for help, like, no, I've done it long enough.
And I go, I wonder what kind of weird crap this guy is going to teach me.
You know?
It's like where has he been up to?
Like people say I did a fifth step, right?
And then my sponsor told me some of his stuff and I didn't feel so bad because he was worse.
Well, I've heard some fifth steps that really shocked me, man.
But I'm an old hippie.
But I'm an old hippie from the 60s.
So weird has always attracted me.
That's when you say to the guy, well, how many of them were there?
How do you do that?
You know?
It's like, I mean, how can you be bored?
How can you be bored?
I've rarely been bored around here.
The second thing that happened is I asked a guy to help me and he actually did.
You know, he said to me, read the doctor's opinion.
Make notes in the margin of what you agree with and don't.
Be at my house Thursday at 5 o'clock and we'll discuss it.
And I did that.
I don't know why I did that.
Nothing in my past would lead you to believe that I would just go along with what some stranger tells me to do.
But I did it.
You know?
And I showed up at his house and he didn't trust me that I'd read it.
And he had me sit there and read it to him out loud.
I've been doing that for 35 years with very little variation.
I mean, I've learned some stuff over the years.
There's things that seem.
A little more significant to me in the book than other things.
But essentially, that's what I do with people.
I sit and read the book.
Rule number one when you're sponsoring people, make sure they read the book.
Don't trust them.
Read it with them.
It'll probably help you.
You know?
And I've been reading that damn thing.
You'd think I'd know more page numbers and stuff, but I don't have good memory retention.
You know?
Now, I'm not that interested in the dogma of it, you know?
But I believe in it.
You know why I believe in it?
Because I've watched it work.
It actually works.
Right?
I mean, you can argue with a lot of the stuff that's in the big book, you know?
There's good arguments for how some things should be changed.
And I've had that.
I've been involved in general service a long time.
Talked to a lot of people about, you know, does it need to be.
But one thing you can't argue with, and I can't find anybody that would argue with me, is the construct of the 12 steps themselves.
We have a way out upon which we all agree.
And we all agree on it.
Even if we're not doing it, we agree on what the way out is, you know?
You don't even have to be involved in it.
You know exactly.
It's on every damn wall we walk into in the rooms, you know?
There it is.
One, two, three, four, numbered for the intellectuals so they won't get them out of whack, you know?
And all of those cute things we say.
But it's really very pristine.
And, you know, over the years, I've gotten involved in other spiritual pursuits.
And there is a beauty in the 12 steps.
That other people from other disciplines that are aware of this really talk about a lot.
You know?
Richard Rohr.
You know, read Richard Rohr, what he thinks about Thomas Merton.
You know?
Anthony de Mello.
You read these people, and they'll talk about Alcoholics Anonymous.
Like, pretty intense, you know?
I mean, everybody believes that faith without works is dead.
And then, hey, what do we do?
We work the faith, man.
You know?
I mean, it's...
We're out in the street with the hookers and the thieves.
You know?
We're not hanging out in church a lot.
You know?
It's kind of like Jesus.
Jesus was not hanging out in the synagogue.
He was out in the streets with Mary Magdalene and his babe and all the other hookers and
thieves.
You know?
Saving souls.
That's what we do.
That's what we do.
And you can...
If Jesus ever comes back, he'll be in the back room of one of the Alano clubs, sitting
in the back row, looking like shit.
And if you're not paying attention, you'll miss it.
You know?
That's...
This is where...
This is the bottom line.
This is trench warfare.
This is the bottom line.
This is the bottom line.
This is the bottom line.
This is the bottom line.
This is the bottom line.
This is the bottom line.
This is trench warfare here.
You know?
We save lives here every day.
So, what's the first concept they hit us with when we walk in here on this path?
The very first thing.
Powerlessness.
Powerlessness.
They want us to tell them that we're powerless over drugs and alcohol.
That was pretty easy for me to do.
You know?
I was pretty beat up.
You know?
It almost killed me.
I'm one of those.
I was...
You know?
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was pretty bad.
And it almost killed me.
Three-and-a-half years ago, I had a liver transplant from the Hep Z and all that stuff.
It almost killed me at 30 years sober.
You know?
It caught up to me.
And I told the doctors.
I said, When I die, if I don't get this transplant.
If I die, I want on my death certificate, death by alcoholism.
I don't want some bullshit liver disease diagnosis.
You know?
I literally drank myself to death.
You know?
Even if I've been sober all this time.
I have come to realize after some years of relatively deep research that I don't seem to
have any power over anything at all. This is a pillar of spiritual condition, the first
foundation stone of it. And this is also a pillar of any spiritual path worth a salt.
Self talks about personal powerlessness, about disidentification with self, this illusion that
we have that we seem to have some control over things outside of our own being. I don't think
that's true. And I don't think we require any power. I think life just unfolds right in front
of us all the time. And it's just our job is to be aware of it and take advantage of whatever's
presented. The universe by its very nature is a giving entity. It's supplying me with everything
I need all the time. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying
to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think
that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm
trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do.
I just take exception to what's being supplied. I think it should be something other than what
it is. And I suffer. I look out in nature out in the world and I determined that some things are
right. And some things are wrong. They don't change. And I suffer. You know, that morality
doesn't exist in nature. There's no morality in nature. There's clearly no morality in the world.
We create that in our own heads and then apply it to what we're looking at. And we suffer.
because it doesn't change. Evidently, you need to be different in order for me to be okay.
And I suffer because you absolutely insist upon living your own life. And it pisses me off at my
core. And I suffer because of that. We have such a problem with powerlessness. We create this thing
called hope. And we talk about it like it's a good thing. And we create fantasy lands in the future
that someday in the future, in this fantasy land, things are going to be good. Things will be
better. Things will be correct. Things will be right. Then we'll be okay. Because the present
moment is incorrect. Absolutely. And all there is, is the present moment. We never arrive at the
fantasy land and we suffer. We suffer. We create whole philosophies about how in some other land,
some in the future, some in the ozone somewhere, things are going to be much better. We're all
going to meet each other.
Because the present moment is awful. Everything here is bad. Death is horrendous. Everything's
awful. And we suffer. Right now, there's a sense that life is dangerous, isn't there, because of
this virus. Life is always dangerous. It is never safe. There's the illusion of security.
And when we're not secure, we suffer. So powerlessness seems to be a principle of
spiritual condition.
If I can grasp the powerlessness just a little bit, just the drugs and alcohol part, not all this
other stuff. The second step then becomes operational. I need to align myself with the
power. I love the old, the homily that you heard in AA forever. All I need to know about God is it's
not me. I think that's the essence of awareness. I think that's true. And Thiebaud in the Thiebaud
papers called the alcoholic King Beatty.
Right? You know, you know what the professional community says about us? They say we are
emotionally immature. And we hear that and we go, No, I have alcoholic thinking. I have special
thinking. And it's never going away. And you need to consider that when you're dealing with me.
I think we're emotionally immature. I think that's what it is. You know, I think most humanity is
kind of emotionally immature. We don't have any corner on the market at it. But when you put us
all in a room, we're all in a room. We're all in a room. We're all in a room. We're all in a room.
We're all in a room together. Man, that is a congregation of self centeredness. That's really
quite special. You know, it's like I walk in the room. And if you're looking at me, it's what the
hell are you looking at? And if you don't look at me, I'm heartbroken. And there's nothing in
between. You know, there is no the depth of my shallowness knows no bounds, right?
So if I can do the second step, do you need a God to do the second step? I don't think so. I didn't.
It's like, you know,
we talk a lot about acceptance in the third step, too. We talk about a lot of acceptance. If you
really get powerlessness, not in an intellectual way, but in a gut visceral level, if you really
get that acceptance just happens, because there's no other choice. I want things to be different,
and they're not and I suffer. Once I get that I quit wanting them to be different.
It doesn't mean I have to like it, but it is the way things are. At some point, if there's going to
be any peace in my life, I have to accept the way things are, whether I like it or not, doesn't seem
to change, doesn't seem to matter what I want. Okay. I need to be restored to some kind of sanity
to help me grasp the powerlessness. That's what the second step is. Then the third step happens.
Now, the third step is interesting. Evidently, I'm going to make a decision
to turn my life and will over to clearly what already has it anyway.
So I think it was nice.
I think it was nice for them to lead me to believe. I actually had some say in the matter, you know,
like we have these long discussions about the difference between my will and God's will.
My little two and a half year old ego, the present is it loves the idea of us having a battle of wills
with the power that drives the entire universe. How is that even possible? Talk about arrogance.
You know, I've been withholding myself from the totality of all things long enough. I'm going to
take me. Thank you very much. Where's my trophy?
You know, Jesus. What's God's will?
What's the difference between my will and God's will like we're going to have this battle.
Let's sit around and talk about that. See what kind of conclusion we come to.
And what's God's will? God's will is what's happening right now.
This is it. We're all zooming here right now. This is clearly God's will.
What could what else?
else could it possibly be? And what life and will is it talking about in the third step?
Well, here we come to talk about the inventory. We're going to make a listing of the end result
of living a life with seeming power. We're going to list the resentments and the fears,
which we don't really know we have. In my case, I was angry. I'm not afraid. I'm angry.
Little did I know that I was afraid and I was covering it up with anger, but I didn't know that.
And I've been to a lot of therapy, man. I've been to mental institutions. At 22, I was in a locked
down barbed wire on top of the fence mental institution. I was in group therapy for two
and a half years at one time. I'd been gestalted and rolfed in primal screen. It's like, I know
more about myself than it's safe to know, but it is my favorite subject, right? But in the inventory,
I discovered, no, I'm full.
Fear. And I think we kind of know that, but we don't want to cop to it. The alcoholic life seems
like the only normal one because it's always got to be someone else's fault. I can never take
responsibility for my own life because it's not justifiable. And then after resentment and fear,
we're going to list all the sex relationships we have that haven't turned out well. Like if what
I'm bringing to the table is resentment and fear, what do you suppose those are going to be like?
Dramatic and traumatic?
Maybe, huh? A shorter list was, when was I not selfish in one of these relationships? That would
have been a very short list. And so we're going to write this down. We're going to put this on
paper. And in the fifth step, we're going to share it with somebody. Now,
if you want to turn things over, if you want to do a third step on something,
do four and five. I mean, I don't think you can do three without four and five. I think that it's
a package deal. You know, I'm going to turn on, what am I going to turn over? Well, let's make a
list of what it is you're going to give away. You're going to quit fucking with, right? What
do you, what is it you're going to really give away here? Well, these resentments, these people
that did it to me, you know, these, these people, but here's the second pillar of spiritual condition.
This is, you discover,
this in the inventory process. What we're really looking for in that resentment list is the fourth
column. Now, some of the Talmudic scholars in AA, you can have a debate with whether there's three
columns or four, and some people have gotten really creative and they've got six or seven or
eight or nine or 10 or 12 goddamn columns, you know, and I'm not interested in any of that, but
I get it. I understand it. I understand we're really trying to get down to causes and conditions.
I think that's important.
The inventory is important enough to do poorly because you can always do another one rather than
agonize over it and fill out a phone book full of detail, but you can do that. I mean, I've listened
to a lot of those like that, and people have really put a lot of hard work into it, and I,
I get it. I, I understand it, but what we're looking for is that fourth column where it says,
what are our faults and mistakes? Not what was my part, although there might be a part,
but that's not really what it is.
What it's looking for is looking for the faults and mistakes. Now, let's say you were molested as
a child. What part did you play in that? Nothing. You were clearly a very innocent, tragic victim
of someone else's lust, but if you're 40 years old and you're still carrying that resentment
around with you, at the bare minimum, you're unforgiving, and it's not about the perpetrator,
is it? It's about you carrying this resentment.
It's about you carrying this resentment around and carrying it into every relationship you get
into, so at some point, there has to be some forgiveness, more of an art than a science,
I'll tell you that, and that didn't happen to me, but I've worked with some people where it has
happened. You run into that a lot in Alcoholics Anonymous, kids that are grown up in dark places
that they have no business being in, in alcoholic homes, you know, it's awful, but this is about
freedom, isn't it? Isn't it about freedom?
A real lesson that I've found lately as I sat and thought about this, the spiritual condition,
one of the pillars is I have to stop blaming other people and institutions for my problems.
High school is over. It's time for little Billy to grow up and own his own life.
No more of this blaming.
All I need to know about my childhood is it's over, and it was extraordinarily long,
well into my 40s, right? It's over now. I have to move on. I have to stop the blaming,
and for me, that's one of the big lessons, or more precisely, one of the big experiences
of the inventory process.
The sponsor can be very helpful in this because in my first one, there wasn't much of a fourth
column in there, and he brought some things to my attention.
My wife cheated on me with my friend. Well, what was the situation at the time? Well, I was running
with an outlaw motorcycle gang. I was sticking needles in my arm every day, and I was drinking
like a fish, and I wasn't coming home to that family, and they were on welfare. That's what
was going on.
Well, maybe she was...
looking for love somewhere else there sure wasn't a lot of it coming from you was there
what are my faults and mistakes how conveniently i forget that part of the resentment how convenient
of me my father was on the top of the list you know he did this and he did that he didn't you
know i i really hated my father he didn't like me much either when i was a kid i was a spawn of
satan you know i was a bad kid i was trouble and pathetic and sad and embarrassing it was
embarrassing being around me you know it wasn't cutie tough guy fonzie kind of stuff i was pathetic
and i was in trouble all the time and it must have been when i left home at almost 18 years
old they were standing by the front door waving and smiling glad to be rid of me it was like that
you know it just it wasn't fun my mother's the one that drove me to the
mental hospital
institution up in oregon you know i mean it was there were sad moments and things and then i'm
embarrassed and i'm ashamed and i'm full of remorse and regret and i cover it up with alcohol and rage
you know the the we i lay waste to the countryside around me and anybody that came around me
it was awful you know it was awful it wasn't cute alcoholism isn't cute you know i didn't go
anywhere i didn't accomplish anything i didn't nothing happened i just got loaded for 22 23
years
and when i got here i was in bad shape and i did that inventory and it was a lightning with even
with all the therapy that i've had working on stuff when i did that inventory with a stranger
i told him some secrets i wasn't ever going to tell anybody nothing major but there are those
things that i think i am a lot of them you do in a closed room when nobody's looking that stuff that
you think you are the pathetic sick shit i shared that with this guy he asked me at the end of it he
said is there anything you're going to tell me about it and i said no i'm not going to tell you
you're not going to tell me tell me now and so the thing i didn't write down i told him and i
i never told any therapist any of that stuff that's an interesting phenomena isn't it isn't
there some spiritual connection between us strangers when we get together what is that
you know what that's called that's called intimacy some people like to call it trust
it's more than just trust because i don't even know this guy how could i possibly trust him
why i don't have a good explanation for that every time somebody comes me to this day and they do a
fifth step i go man this dude's actually going to do this man i'm always impressed you know
i'm all that's always impressive to me but he doesn't know me you know maybe he gets some kind
of signal that comes from me that i'm okay isn't that beautiful coming for where i come from isn't
it amazing that people trust me and respect me i think that's incredible you know maybe i should
do it myself and respect myself if other people feel that way about me isn't that interesting
that's very spiritual you know that's not psychological that's spiritual
so i have to stop the blaming if i'm awake now and i get a little bit of a powerlessness and
i stop the blaming my character defects are going to come and visit me with alarming regularity
you know i don't even have to list them it's not about working on myself they will be presented to
me and if i stop the blaming i'm going to be able to do it myself and i'm going to be able to do it
if i'm going to own it then now i'm going to have to deal with it and when they present themselves
and i get it and i don't feel good about doing that behavior again that's the beginning of the
end of it it doesn't go away right away it takes a few years for stuff to really go away but i don't
get the kick out of it that i used to when i'm arrogant in front of people i walk away from that
i go god damn i did it again when they interrupt somebody in mid-conversation and take the center
of these stuff i do and i walk away from i don't feel good and i had to turn around and start
saying i was sorry a guy finally said to me in a he says bill why don't you just stop doing it we're
tired of hearing you apologize but that's the vehicle that's the mechanism of leaning into that
stuff that's the beginning of awareness i get into the immense process now what am i going to
learn from the immense process you know what i learned from the immense process when i go to
these people that i've blamed for my life and my character and now you're going to learn from me
you want me to go say i'm sorry to them which makes no rational sense to me at all i don't want
to do it i'm afraid to do it i'm embarrassed i feel like a geek you know i don't want to give
in i don't want to lose points i don't want to i really don't want to do it and the ninth step is
where the transformation really happens when you go to those people and you don't want to do it you
make the amend you turn and walk away from that you are changed right then and there and you know
what you learn from that the third pillar of spiritual condition nothing is personal
nobody was ever doing anything to me they were just doing what they do and i happen to be in the
room and sometimes you're in my blast radius am i doing it to you no i'm doing what i do
and you happen to be in the vicinity but none of it is personal none of it
you'll find this in any spiritual path worth its salt whatever discipline it comes from
nothing is personal
it's about disidentification with self and when you're selfish and self-centered as we are as
most humans aren't really everything is goddamn personal everything's happening to me you can't
do that to me and it's not happening to me it's just happening and i'm in the room
my father wasn't doing anything to me and when i went and made amends to him i had an experience
and what the experience was is my the rage got pulled out of me you know i didn't want to
lose the battle with him and i went to him and i made the amends and i went when i was driving
home i started sobbing i couldn't stop crying and after that i tried to get close to him and
you know what i realized about all that he was never doing anything to me he was just being who
he was he was this poor kid from alabama you know self-made man depression kid not very emotional
wasn't the kind of guy that you hugged and stuff he was just that guy he was one of those guys
people call him the greatest generation
well you could argue about that but he was one of those guys he was a world war ii guy right
when he would look at me he just saw this lazy ass piece of shit he didn't like me
you know i mean that's that's just who he was you know and and he was a sober guy he got sober in
1954 his sobriety date was march the 28th mine is march the 27th he was 37 i was 37 isn't that odd
and for 15 years the last 15 years of his life we gave each other
birthday cakes and the hermosa beach men's day it was the gordon and bill show
and i found my father in alcoholics anonymous because he never was doing anything to me
my god look at all the time i wasted hating that poor stupid bastard you know what a pathetic
thing what a waste of time but some people miss it completely never realized that that's what we've
done when i did my fifth step at six months sober i had an experience i went into my front door of
my house and thought i was going to die i was going to die i was going to die i was going to die i was
going to die i was going to die and i thought about the guy that walked in there six months
earlier and i realized it's going to be like this now i wasn't sure what this was but i knew that
the old life was over that's stunning people pay good money for shit like that man you know that
happens here every day the old life is over isn't that stunning what a stunning experience
what else could that be but grace and spiritual whether you believe it or not
you explain it
it to me did i do the right thing and pull myself up by the bootstraps i don't think so
but in the ninth step now i begin the transformation process now i've got three
things i get i'm getting the powerless thing i'm gets coming clear it's getting a little bit
clearer now i have to try i'm working on stopping blaming other people for my problems i realize i
got to do that now and i've surrounded myself with some other aa guys primarily that aren't
going to let me get away with this shit of blaming and that we're all got spiritual
consent with each other say ah stop whining joey you know those days are up we all get it right
we're so we've got some support and now i realize i'm beginning to realize that nothing's personal
you know what happened you know what that is you know what happens when that happens
this egoic construct of who i think i am begins to collapse
the alibi system is done who am i going to blame nothing's personal what do i do now who the hell
am i bill wilson talked about this i'm going to do what has been given to me and when i've got this
being the hole in the donut yeah we become the hole in the matter of fact we realize there's no
damn donut you know this whole thing is an illusion it talks in a it talks in the big book
a lot it doesn't talk about denial to be in denial you got to actually know some shit
but it talks a lot about delusional being delusional that i think this me i've got to
defend and protect myself you know we talk about boundaries and stuff like there aren't you know i
don't i don't i think that's too bizarre to me like what boundaries what am i boundering what
am i protecting right talk about being defensive defensive of what this personality that i think i
am this begins to follow fall apart one through nine is about ten percent of the program it's
just sober 101 it's the first semester that's it this is not the work that we've just described
the inventory is not the work it's just the beginning of what i need to have in order to
start the program
work 10 11 and 12 is the work in 10 the fourth pillar of spiritual condition presents itself
self-awareness as compared to self-obsession when the self begins to collapse the construct
of who we think we are awareness happens we develop the skill of the watcher being able
to watch ourselves move through life this changes everything everything changes now
it's very disconcerting it's very painful
a lot of people
run away from this when this happens it's it's like it shakes the ground like well who am i now
really good question every once in a while it's a really good question to ask yourself who do i
think i am because that who you think you are is just that it's you thinking about who you are
you know people talk about things like the true self you know what's the true self i don't know
but the washer seems to be closer to it other than this ego that keeps wanting to be in the future in
the past in meditation you're going to want to be in the future in the past you're going to want to be
in the past you're going to want to be in the future in the past you're going to want to be in the past
in meditation you're going to want to be in the future in the past you're going to want to be in the future in the past
In meditation, you can watch yourself think.
This is a great tool for self-awareness.
When this happened to me around 20 years sober, it changed the entire game.
I focus on the breath and then the mind, the little ego, the two-and-a-half-year-old that's, like, growing up a little bit.
He doesn't like being in the present moment.
There's nothing for him to do.
There's never anything wrong in the present moment.
We need to work on shit.
There's some important stuff going on here that needs a lot of time and effort applied to it.
You know, as soon as you start relaxing and stuff, it goes, wake up!
You know, it's dangerous, right?
And it wanders away from that present moment.
And you notice that it has wandered away.
And you gently bring it back.
This is absolute conclusive proof that who you are is not your thinking mind.
This changes everything.
You can finally stop working on yourself.
You're just feeding the beast.
It'll take any kind.
It'll take any kind of attention it can get.
And we talk about it in the third person, don't we?
We say, my head's out to get me.
Well, it's not out to get me.
It needs me for transportation.
It's not trying to hurt me.
It's just flat and two-dimensional.
It's stupid.
It creates nothing.
It just takes credit for shit.
You know?
And it just takes the past and projects it into the future.
It's part of me.
It's not some alien entity.
But on a spiritual path, you're forced to look at it in order to save your own ass.
Because it's the one that gets you all cranked up and OCD.
And all the stuff that happens.
You know, they've got all kinds of labels.
Like, one that I like is, what is it?
Affective personality disorder.
Exactly.
I have that.
I drank for like 23 years.
I'm a little fucked up, you know?
Sure.
Give me a label, you know?
Give me a label.
But all of it is just like self-centered, childish kind of behavior, right?
So now if I can look at that, it changes everything.
I don't.
I don't have to work on it.
I don't have to change it.
I don't have to write shit down.
I can just ignore it.
When it comes up with stuff.
And here's a little internal dialogue.
It'll warn you about something that isn't there.
It does that all the time.
It's called tomorrow.
Which isn't here.
It'll warn you about stuff.
Like, pay attention.
Be careful.
Here they come.
Right?
And what you do when it does that, you say to it.
You don't try to shut it off because you can't shut it off.
It's there.
It's part of you, right?
But you can talk to it.
And you can.
You can look at it and go, I really appreciate your input.
I know you're trying to help me out.
And I really appreciate that, you know.
But I'm going to get on with my day now.
See you later.
And you just move on, you know.
And it works, believe it or not.
Meditation is a great tool for this.
Then finally, and I know I'm running out of time here.
In the 12th step, 10, 11, and 12 is 90% of the program.
It's the work.
In the 12th step is the vehicle.
It's the mechanism that's used to bring about all this awareness.
All of this.
You start working with others.
Our very lives depend upon our constant thought of others
and how we may help meet their needs.
Selfishness and self-centeredness was the root of my problem.
I don't think they were kidding.
And my experience is, this is very true.
This is very true.
Okay?
So then you come and I go out and I aggressively try to get you
and I start working with you, right?
For the first 10 years I did this, it was all about myself.
I was trying to make a name for myself in an anonymous organization.
And I actually accomplished that.
You can do that.
But it's very weird, you know?
And then you crash and burn, which is a real critical part of this journey.
Between eight and 12 years sober, the second surrender happens.
But I won't want to tell you about the third one and the fourth one.
It's like, but that second surrender,
and what I call it is the collapse of the alibi system.
This actually, I had an emotional and mental breakdown.
Just the sheer weight of carrying my personality around.
But you come to me and you ask me for help.
And somewhere in this process,
even though I was motivated solely by self,
there was no real, real compassion involved in it.
But somewhere in this process, I fell in love with you.
Irrespective of my motivation, I fell in love with you.
And somewhere in there, I don't know exactly when,
I started thinking a little bit more about you than I did myself.
I started worrying about you and caring about you.
I became proactive and would start to call you
when I knew you were going through a tough time.
People showed me how to do this, by the way.
I did not come up with this on my own.
I had some really wonderful teachers.
I still do.
People that do this, that live this, believe it.
It is the hub of their life.
And I want to be that guy.
Not this arrogant, pompous, preachy guy.
And you can hear it in my voice.
My default mode is preaching and telling you what to do.
But I fell in love with you.
And this brings us to the fifth and final pillar of spiritual condition.
The actual foundation stone of what spiritual condition,
is, is compassion.
And that's what I've been missing all my life.
Selfish and self-centered people do not have compassion.
And they don't know they don't have it because they never had it.
It isn't like I lost it.
Now I'm trying to find it again.
You taught me that.
When you started entered in my life, I cannot do this on my own.
Faith without works is dead.
I thought I was the teacher.
Now I've come to realize you have,
always been the teacher.
Sometimes I am, but you are always the teacher.
You bring something to the table.
You've invited me into your life.
You've had me come into the birthing room when you were having your babies,
because you wanted to be there.
And you'd hand me your babies right when they were steaming.
You know, what a shock to the, who would invite me?
Who would invite this guy with a bullshit biker with a clip on airing into
something so sacred as that.
And then I've held your hand.
I've held your hands when your babies are dying because you wanted me there.
When I was dying a few years ago, you came to me and I,
and I felt how hard it was for me to accept the love.
Isn't that interesting?
Life is experiential.
God is an experience, not a concept.
In an Alcoholics Anonymous, we experience it and we're human beings.
So we try to label it, but so what?
The experience.
The experience of it is stunning.
And it seems to me, it lives in the space between you and I.
And the closer I am to you, the closer I am to it.
And isn't what each one of us experienced when we walked into AA was this compassion?
Don't you remember?
You don't remember what they said, but don't you remember the people that were
just kind to you that made sure that you had a seat that went and got you a cup of
coffee, gave you a cigarette, maybe stood out and just bullshitted with you about
stuff.
You don't remember for 45 hours.
You don't remember for 45 minutes after the meeting, and then you came back and they
remembered your name.
Isn't that what saved your life?
Isn't that what it was?
That's what I remember.
You loved me.
I mean, when I was this loud, arrogant asshole that was telling everybody how to do it,
you know, for people stood under the tree and waited for me to fall.
People that cared about me.
And when I fell out of the tree, they let me bounce a couple of times.
So that I know that I'd fallen out of the tree.
And then they held me, wrapped me and held me and took care of me.
I had an amazing fall from grace and a very public fall from grace because I'm a human
being.
You know, I'm not some AA guru.
I'm a human being, but I'm a believer.
I believe in it.
And I'll leave you with this.
You've got powerlessness.
You stop the blaming.
Nothing really is personal.
Self-awareness is key.
It's everything.
Being aware, being more than awake, but being aware.
And then compassion enters and your heart opens up and you can love fearlessly and recklessly
because there's nobody can hurt you.
There's nothing to defend.
You get the whole cycle of life around here.
It's a real full life and it has a lot of pain, but it has a lot of bliss and a lot
of wonder.
And people will tell you here that you got to give it away to keep it.
Not.
Not at all.
That is not true.
You have to give it away to even get it.
That's how you get it.
Thank you very much.
got Bill this week it's been it's been a wonderful rollover we're gonna open this
meeting with a prayer and and then we're gonna get right into it for Bill to talk
about step four Kevin do you want to do you want to put that prayer up do we put
it up
have we been
we use a version of the set-aside prayer and certainly you can ask the God
of your understanding to be here with you and we can connect on that level
here thanks Kim dear God please set aside everything I think I know about
myself this book my disease these steps especially about you dear God
so that I can have an open mind a new experience with all of these things
helping to see the truth of myself amen okay
thanks everybody I don't think I've left anything out I probably have but without
further ado and Bill thanks so much for pressing on and getting here with us I
want everybody here to welcome Bill see if you've never heard him before you're
not going to forget him bill take it away my friend hi everybody I'm Bill I'm an alcoholic
Hi, Bill.
And Zoom is weird.
The lockdown is weird.
Everything's weird.
And we are children of chaos.
Weird works pretty good for us, you know?
And some of us have been around a while, and we don't enjoy the chaos so much.
But it is familiar.
So I'm supposed to talk to you about the inventory.
And since I've been locked down, I've been sitting at home, and I've been doing a lot of thinking.
I have plenty of time to think, and I've come to some conclusions.
And I agree with all the conclusions I come to.
And I will share some of those conclusions with you this evening.
Every speaker tells a story.
Every speaker tells a story.
There's a common thread.
There's some, obviously, to our stories, there's a lot of commonality.
But there's one that's pretty common.
And we all talk about how long before we ever drank or used anything we didn't feel part of.
That we felt separate and strange and weird and out of place.
We have different ways of describing that.
The aliens dropped me off, and I'm waiting for the mothership to return.
I didn't get along.
And we talk about this.
It's like it's an aspect of alcoholism.
Like there's something unique about us that we feel this sense of separation and not part of.
And I don't agree with that.
I think everybody feels that way.
The ego, the purpose of the ego is to create separation.
Every human being has it.
There's a me and there's a them.
That essentially generates separation.
But that's not the reality.
There's a subject and an object.
And I'm not connected to the things around me, outside of me.
There's a mental awareness of this separation.
And you can see it all over the world.
I mean, the way countries are run.
We think that we can legislate all kinds of stuff that we have no power or control over.
And the whole societal structure is centered around this.
That we are the top of the food chain and all of that.
The ego presents itself at about two and a half years old.
Now, prior to that, the little baby senses no separation at all.
That aspect of its consciousness has not entered into it.
And at about two and a half, the ego presents itself.
It's part of the growing up process.
We have a term for this.
We call it the terrible twos.
And the little kid immediately begins to manipulate this situation.
It starts crying a lot.
And if it's raised in a relatively decent household, it gets its needs met.
And it has a lot of needs.
It needs food.
It needs its diaper changed.
It needs all kinds of stuff.
Sometimes it just wants to be held for no apparent reason.
And it receives this.
So this gives validity to this subject-object thing.
Now, all of us here sitting here today,
listening to this in this meeting tonight,
have had the experience of being in elementary school
and looking across the classroom and determining
that if I looked like little Jimmy over there, I'd be better.
If I was taller like Sam, I'd be better.
If I had long, blonde, silky hair instead of this black piece of crap on my head,
I'd be better.
If I was more athletic, I'd be better.
Everybody does this.
Everybody has this experience.
And then we begin to emulate these things.
These people that we think are cooler than we are to try to become part of that.
Some of us are extroverted, and we're very aggressive about that.
And some of us are introverted, and we have more of a problem.
We hide out from it and isolate because social interaction is difficult.
But all of us respond.
All of us have this experience.
This is not an aspect of alcoholism.
I don't think we're that uniquely neurotic.
I think we're like everybody else.
Preteen and teenage years hit, and the assimilation becomes much more sophisticated.
Now we're trying to figure out how to be lovers,
how to work with authority figures as the authority becomes more onerous.
We have to interact with that.
The peer pressure and stuff gets more sophisticated.
Then alcoholism presents itself.
Then we drink.
And we discover, most of us in this room,
that we are alcoholic.
We don't know that we're not going to be able to control the amount of intake.
And alcohol then inserts itself.
This alcoholism inserts itself right in the middle of the learning process,
right in the middle of all the essential things that we're going to need to know
in order to be functional, helpful human beings in the future.
We medicate that.
When I was 17, I was a bad drunk in high school.
I had a big jacket and a sling.
I had a sling.
I had a slouch and a sneer and a foul mouth and a bad attitude,
and I carried a gun.
And I'm from the mean streets of Palos Verdes.
There's no gangs in Palos Verdes.
Nobody's looking for me in Palos Verdes.
I was a gang of one, right?
But I'd already been to jail at 17.
I'd already been to jail for the first time, right?
And I was in trouble at 17.
Now this sense of separation that we have,
this feeling of weirdness and being out of sync and outside the circle
as if there's a circle to be outside of, right?
When we drink, this goes away.
We have a spiritual experience.
And the way we tell the story is that we were odd to begin with,
and then we drank and it cured it.
I don't think we were odd to begin with.
I just think we drank and we stopped learning.
Now some of us are worse than others.
All of us that have been around AA for a while,
there are some people in our fellowship
that have virtually no social skills whatsoever, you know?
And the rest of us are just kind of selfish and weird and arrogant.
We're not sensitive.
We're touchy, right?
Just like a teenager.
Just like a teenager.
I mean, when I got sober at 37, my kid, my second set of two kids,
my daughter was three years old and my son was four months old.
And a few years ago,
my daughter looked at me and she said,
you know, dad, you've grown up quite a bit over the years.
And I was really pleased to hear her acknowledge that fact
because God knows I've been working at it.
But I'm the dad at six or seven or eight years sober
that got kicked off the soccer field for going after the referee for a bad call.
A soccer field full of eight and nine year olds.
And the guy that escorted me off the field was our color.
Right?
I got thrown off the baseball field for screaming and spitting
and just acting like a fool in a little league baseball game.
You know, I mean, just things like that.
I was coaching a bunch of nine year olds one time and they were really bad.
And at halftime, we were down like five to nothing in a soccer game.
And I gave them a lecture on how they should have personal pride.
And you can't allow yourself to be beaten like this.
You've got to go out there and start knocking people over or something.
You can't just allow this to happen to you.
You know, I can imagine one of these, Mr. Cleveland said we can hit people.
And I had, this was in a middle school, right?
And I rode my Harley there because I'm a badass.
And I'm seven, eight years sober, right?
And I parked it on the asphalt where the basketball courts were in middle school.
So the second half starts.
And they get scored again already.
And I just walked off the field, just left them.
I just walked off the field, got on my Harley, like the badass that I am,
and burned rubber through the basketball courts in this middle school
and just roared off into the sunset.
And then I ran out of gas.
It's really hard to look cool when you've just behaved badly in an AYSO soccer game
and burned rubber through the parking lot when you're walking home with your helmet
and your leather jacket.
And your hands, right?
And I get home and I call my sponsor.
And I told him what happened.
And he said to me, Bill, it's children's sports.
And I actually responded to him, you don't understand, right?
And I believe what's going on here now that we're sober is we're going to grow up now.
And we're a little late.
And the chances of us doing it and looking good is really slim, right?
Really slim.
I've worn the clown suit a lot.
I can leave it in my closet right now.
I leave it hanging up.
I dust it off every once in a while because I know I'll probably need it again.
Although as the years have gone by, I've used it fewer and fewer times.
But there were a lot of years.
I mean, I'm 14 years sober and I'm screaming at the top of my lungs at a cop on the side of the road.
For giving me a ticket.
Telling him he doesn't have the right to insert himself into my life.
And at 14 years sober, I'm an official AA guru.
I'm speaking all over.
I'm sponsoring half of Southern California.
And this is me.
This is the real me.
This is me.
And this guy, the guy went back to his motorcycle to write the ticket or call in for reinforcements or something.
And I'm sitting in the cab of the truck and I said, man, you have got to cut this out.
This is ridiculous.
It's not this guy's fault.
This is you, man.
Because I knew.
I know I have some awareness.
But that doesn't mean that I have good behavior.
So I got out of my truck and went back to apologize to him.
And he put his hand on his gun.
And I had a moment of clarity.
And I got back in the truck.
He told me get back in the truck.
And I got back in the truck.
And he comes around to the passenger side window and he asked me what the hell is going on.
And I apologized to him.
I said I have no right to speak to you that way.
This is not your problem.
This is my problem.
And I'm really sorry.
The apology screwed him up so bad that he let me go.
I think the apology was harder on him than the epithets, you know, the MF and all that stuff, you know.
You know, I have actually told him, I said, you know, you jackbooted Nazi.
I would launch.
I had rage.
I had rage.
Since I was a little kid, I had this rage.
And here I am, you know, sober some years.
I'm 45 years old or something.
And there's the rage.
Now, when I apologized to that cop after that, I have never done that since.
I'm 35 years sober now.
The rage seems to be over.
I have been transformed.
I just get pissy now.
My wife says, what are you getting pissy about?
And I said, look, you're going to have to put up with the pissy.
The rage is gone.
But I get to be pissy.
And I think the pissy is about over with now.
I mean, it just seems to never stop, right?
It seems to never stop.
So at 37 years old, I walk into Alcoholics Anonymous.
It says in our book, it says in our book, this is what I want to talk about.
I know I'm supposed to talk about the inventory, and I will.
I promise you.
But what it says in our book is the only thing that's going to keep us sober,
and even I think kind of more importantly or beyond that, more beyond being sober,
to give us some kind of a life that has some purpose in it,
some ability to have interpersonal relationships that have intimacy in them,
you know, where I'm able, where I become less defensive, where I'm open,
and I have these fulfilling relationships that I've seen others seem to have.
The only thing that's going to do that for us is our spiritual condition,
the maintenance of that.
So evidently, I need one of these spiritual conditions.
Maybe even I'm supposed to have one now.
What's it look like?
Where did I get it?
If I have one, what does it look like?
Sometimes we say things, I wonder if we really understand them.
And I've had a couple of experiences recently being around people with long-term sobriety
that went out and drank and then come back and report in.
And it disconcerts me.
Because they're me.
They're me.
You know?
I mean, so what is that?
And the other thing, I guess we have these things called laurels.
And we can rest on them.
What are those?
And do I rest on them?
And it says we're not supposed to rest on them.
We need to keep the ball rolling.
There's some kind of a maintenance procedure for this spiritual condition.
Adyashanti says, you know, some people wake up, they become enlightened.
And some of those people go back to sleep.
Right?
And I've had the experience of being awakened.
I think when we get sober, there is an awakening.
We have cute names for it.
We talk about our heads popping out.
Oh, my God.
What the hell was that last 20 years?
What was that about?
That's a spiritual experience when that happens.
There's no rational explanation for that.
And that has happened to me.
I've been awakened.
Now what?
So I walk into AA at 37 years old.
What's the first thing they hit us with?
You know, two things happened to me when I walked in that are just pure luck.
One is I just liked it.
And I've never lost that.
I've been intrigued by AA for 35 years.
I've really never really been bored.
I've been mistreated a lot and stuff.
I don't get the respect I deserve.
But I've not been boring.
And if you're sitting out there tonight and you're bored, it's because you're boring.
It's not us.
This thing is absolutely fascinating.
You know?
It's like if all you're doing is going to meetings, you will get bored.
But if you're really involved and engaged, it's pretty hard to get bored.
Every time some weirdo comes and asks you for help, like, no, I've done it long enough.
And I go, I wonder what kind of weird crap this guy is going to teach me.
You know?
It's like where has he been up to?
Like people say I did a fifth step, right?
And then my sponsor told me some of his stuff and I didn't feel so bad because he was worse.
Well, I've heard some fifth steps that really shocked me, man.
But I'm an old hippie.
But I'm an old hippie from the 60s.
So weird has always attracted me.
That's when you say to the guy, well, how many of them were there?
How do you do that?
You know?
It's like, I mean, how can you be bored?
How can you be bored?
I've rarely been bored around here.
The second thing that happened is I asked a guy to help me and he actually did.
You know, he said to me, read the doctor's opinion.
Make notes in the margin of what you agree with and don't.
Be at my house Thursday at 5 o'clock and we'll discuss it.
And I did that.
I don't know why I did that.
Nothing in my past would lead you to believe that I would just go along with what some stranger tells me to do.
But I did it.
You know?
And I showed up at his house and he didn't trust me that I'd read it.
And he had me sit there and read it to him out loud.
I've been doing that for 35 years with very little variation.
I mean, I've learned some stuff over the years.
There's things that seem.
A little more significant to me in the book than other things.
But essentially, that's what I do with people.
I sit and read the book.
Rule number one when you're sponsoring people, make sure they read the book.
Don't trust them.
Read it with them.
It'll probably help you.
You know?
And I've been reading that damn thing.
You'd think I'd know more page numbers and stuff, but I don't have good memory retention.
You know?
Now, I'm not that interested in the dogma of it, you know?
But I believe in it.
You know why I believe in it?
Because I've watched it work.
It actually works.
Right?
I mean, you can argue with a lot of the stuff that's in the big book, you know?
There's good arguments for how some things should be changed.
And I've had that.
I've been involved in general service a long time.
Talked to a lot of people about, you know, does it need to be.
But one thing you can't argue with, and I can't find anybody that would argue with me, is the construct of the 12 steps themselves.
We have a way out upon which we all agree.
And we all agree on it.
Even if we're not doing it, we agree on what the way out is, you know?
You don't even have to be involved in it.
You know exactly.
It's on every damn wall we walk into in the rooms, you know?
There it is.
One, two, three, four, numbered for the intellectuals so they won't get them out of whack, you know?
And all of those cute things we say.
But it's really very pristine.
And, you know, over the years, I've gotten involved in other spiritual pursuits.
And there is a beauty in the 12 steps.
That other people from other disciplines that are aware of this really talk about a lot.
You know?
Richard Rohr.
You know, read Richard Rohr, what he thinks about Thomas Merton.
You know?
Anthony de Mello.
You read these people, and they'll talk about Alcoholics Anonymous.
Like, pretty intense, you know?
I mean, everybody believes that faith without works is dead.
And then, hey, what do we do?
We work the faith, man.
You know?
I mean, it's...
We're out in the street with the hookers and the thieves.
You know?
We're not hanging out in church a lot.
You know?
It's kind of like Jesus.
Jesus was not hanging out in the synagogue.
He was out in the streets with Mary Magdalene and his babe and all the other hookers and
thieves.
You know?
Saving souls.
That's what we do.
That's what we do.
And you can...
If Jesus ever comes back, he'll be in the back room of one of the Alano clubs, sitting
in the back row, looking like shit.
And if you're not paying attention, you'll miss it.
You know?
That's...
This is where...
This is the bottom line.
This is trench warfare.
This is the bottom line.
This is the bottom line.
This is the bottom line.
This is the bottom line.
This is the bottom line.
This is the bottom line.
This is trench warfare here.
You know?
We save lives here every day.
So, what's the first concept they hit us with when we walk in here on this path?
The very first thing.
Powerlessness.
Powerlessness.
They want us to tell them that we're powerless over drugs and alcohol.
That was pretty easy for me to do.
You know?
I was pretty beat up.
You know?
It almost killed me.
I'm one of those.
I was...
You know?
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was...
I was pretty bad.
And it almost killed me.
Three-and-a-half years ago, I had a liver transplant from the Hep Z and all that stuff.
It almost killed me at 30 years sober.
You know?
It caught up to me.
And I told the doctors.
I said, When I die, if I don't get this transplant.
If I die, I want on my death certificate, death by alcoholism.
I don't want some bullshit liver disease diagnosis.
You know?
I literally drank myself to death.
You know?
Even if I've been sober all this time.
I have come to realize after some years of relatively deep research that I don't seem to
have any power over anything at all. This is a pillar of spiritual condition, the first
foundation stone of it. And this is also a pillar of any spiritual path worth a salt.
Self talks about personal powerlessness, about disidentification with self, this illusion that
we have that we seem to have some control over things outside of our own being. I don't think
that's true. And I don't think we require any power. I think life just unfolds right in front
of us all the time. And it's just our job is to be aware of it and take advantage of whatever's
presented. The universe by its very nature is a giving entity. It's supplying me with everything
I need all the time. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying
to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think
that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm
trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do.
I just take exception to what's being supplied. I think it should be something other than what
it is. And I suffer. I look out in nature out in the world and I determined that some things are
right. And some things are wrong. They don't change. And I suffer. You know, that morality
doesn't exist in nature. There's no morality in nature. There's clearly no morality in the world.
We create that in our own heads and then apply it to what we're looking at. And we suffer.
because it doesn't change. Evidently, you need to be different in order for me to be okay.
And I suffer because you absolutely insist upon living your own life. And it pisses me off at my
core. And I suffer because of that. We have such a problem with powerlessness. We create this thing
called hope. And we talk about it like it's a good thing. And we create fantasy lands in the future
that someday in the future, in this fantasy land, things are going to be good. Things will be
better. Things will be correct. Things will be right. Then we'll be okay. Because the present
moment is incorrect. Absolutely. And all there is, is the present moment. We never arrive at the
fantasy land and we suffer. We suffer. We create whole philosophies about how in some other land,
some in the future, some in the ozone somewhere, things are going to be much better. We're all
going to meet each other.
Because the present moment is awful. Everything here is bad. Death is horrendous. Everything's
awful. And we suffer. Right now, there's a sense that life is dangerous, isn't there, because of
this virus. Life is always dangerous. It is never safe. There's the illusion of security.
And when we're not secure, we suffer. So powerlessness seems to be a principle of
spiritual condition.
If I can grasp the powerlessness just a little bit, just the drugs and alcohol part, not all this
other stuff. The second step then becomes operational. I need to align myself with the
power. I love the old, the homily that you heard in AA forever. All I need to know about God is it's
not me. I think that's the essence of awareness. I think that's true. And Thiebaud in the Thiebaud
papers called the alcoholic King Beatty.
Right? You know, you know what the professional community says about us? They say we are
emotionally immature. And we hear that and we go, No, I have alcoholic thinking. I have special
thinking. And it's never going away. And you need to consider that when you're dealing with me.
I think we're emotionally immature. I think that's what it is. You know, I think most humanity is
kind of emotionally immature. We don't have any corner on the market at it. But when you put us
all in a room, we're all in a room. We're all in a room. We're all in a room. We're all in a room.
We're all in a room together. Man, that is a congregation of self centeredness. That's really
quite special. You know, it's like I walk in the room. And if you're looking at me, it's what the
hell are you looking at? And if you don't look at me, I'm heartbroken. And there's nothing in
between. You know, there is no the depth of my shallowness knows no bounds, right?
So if I can do the second step, do you need a God to do the second step? I don't think so. I didn't.
It's like, you know,
we talk a lot about acceptance in the third step, too. We talk about a lot of acceptance. If you
really get powerlessness, not in an intellectual way, but in a gut visceral level, if you really
get that acceptance just happens, because there's no other choice. I want things to be different,
and they're not and I suffer. Once I get that I quit wanting them to be different.
It doesn't mean I have to like it, but it is the way things are. At some point, if there's going to
be any peace in my life, I have to accept the way things are, whether I like it or not, doesn't seem
to change, doesn't seem to matter what I want. Okay. I need to be restored to some kind of sanity
to help me grasp the powerlessness. That's what the second step is. Then the third step happens.
Now, the third step is interesting. Evidently, I'm going to make a decision
to turn my life and will over to clearly what already has it anyway.
So I think it was nice.
I think it was nice for them to lead me to believe. I actually had some say in the matter, you know,
like we have these long discussions about the difference between my will and God's will.
My little two and a half year old ego, the present is it loves the idea of us having a battle of wills
with the power that drives the entire universe. How is that even possible? Talk about arrogance.
You know, I've been withholding myself from the totality of all things long enough. I'm going to
take me. Thank you very much. Where's my trophy?
You know, Jesus. What's God's will?
What's the difference between my will and God's will like we're going to have this battle.
Let's sit around and talk about that. See what kind of conclusion we come to.
And what's God's will? God's will is what's happening right now.
This is it. We're all zooming here right now. This is clearly God's will.
What could what else?
else could it possibly be? And what life and will is it talking about in the third step?
Well, here we come to talk about the inventory. We're going to make a listing of the end result
of living a life with seeming power. We're going to list the resentments and the fears,
which we don't really know we have. In my case, I was angry. I'm not afraid. I'm angry.
Little did I know that I was afraid and I was covering it up with anger, but I didn't know that.
And I've been to a lot of therapy, man. I've been to mental institutions. At 22, I was in a locked
down barbed wire on top of the fence mental institution. I was in group therapy for two
and a half years at one time. I'd been gestalted and rolfed in primal screen. It's like, I know
more about myself than it's safe to know, but it is my favorite subject, right? But in the inventory,
I discovered, no, I'm full.
Fear. And I think we kind of know that, but we don't want to cop to it. The alcoholic life seems
like the only normal one because it's always got to be someone else's fault. I can never take
responsibility for my own life because it's not justifiable. And then after resentment and fear,
we're going to list all the sex relationships we have that haven't turned out well. Like if what
I'm bringing to the table is resentment and fear, what do you suppose those are going to be like?
Dramatic and traumatic?
Maybe, huh? A shorter list was, when was I not selfish in one of these relationships? That would
have been a very short list. And so we're going to write this down. We're going to put this on
paper. And in the fifth step, we're going to share it with somebody. Now,
if you want to turn things over, if you want to do a third step on something,
do four and five. I mean, I don't think you can do three without four and five. I think that it's
a package deal. You know, I'm going to turn on, what am I going to turn over? Well, let's make a
list of what it is you're going to give away. You're going to quit fucking with, right? What
do you, what is it you're going to really give away here? Well, these resentments, these people
that did it to me, you know, these, these people, but here's the second pillar of spiritual condition.
This is, you discover,
this in the inventory process. What we're really looking for in that resentment list is the fourth
column. Now, some of the Talmudic scholars in AA, you can have a debate with whether there's three
columns or four, and some people have gotten really creative and they've got six or seven or
eight or nine or 10 or 12 goddamn columns, you know, and I'm not interested in any of that, but
I get it. I understand it. I understand we're really trying to get down to causes and conditions.
I think that's important.
The inventory is important enough to do poorly because you can always do another one rather than
agonize over it and fill out a phone book full of detail, but you can do that. I mean, I've listened
to a lot of those like that, and people have really put a lot of hard work into it, and I,
I get it. I, I understand it, but what we're looking for is that fourth column where it says,
what are our faults and mistakes? Not what was my part, although there might be a part,
but that's not really what it is.
What it's looking for is looking for the faults and mistakes. Now, let's say you were molested as
a child. What part did you play in that? Nothing. You were clearly a very innocent, tragic victim
of someone else's lust, but if you're 40 years old and you're still carrying that resentment
around with you, at the bare minimum, you're unforgiving, and it's not about the perpetrator,
is it? It's about you carrying this resentment.
It's about you carrying this resentment around and carrying it into every relationship you get
into, so at some point, there has to be some forgiveness, more of an art than a science,
I'll tell you that, and that didn't happen to me, but I've worked with some people where it has
happened. You run into that a lot in Alcoholics Anonymous, kids that are grown up in dark places
that they have no business being in, in alcoholic homes, you know, it's awful, but this is about
freedom, isn't it? Isn't it about freedom?
A real lesson that I've found lately as I sat and thought about this, the spiritual condition,
one of the pillars is I have to stop blaming other people and institutions for my problems.
High school is over. It's time for little Billy to grow up and own his own life.
No more of this blaming.
All I need to know about my childhood is it's over, and it was extraordinarily long,
well into my 40s, right? It's over now. I have to move on. I have to stop the blaming,
and for me, that's one of the big lessons, or more precisely, one of the big experiences
of the inventory process.
The sponsor can be very helpful in this because in my first one, there wasn't much of a fourth
column in there, and he brought some things to my attention.
My wife cheated on me with my friend. Well, what was the situation at the time? Well, I was running
with an outlaw motorcycle gang. I was sticking needles in my arm every day, and I was drinking
like a fish, and I wasn't coming home to that family, and they were on welfare. That's what
was going on.
Well, maybe she was...
looking for love somewhere else there sure wasn't a lot of it coming from you was there
what are my faults and mistakes how conveniently i forget that part of the resentment how convenient
of me my father was on the top of the list you know he did this and he did that he didn't you
know i i really hated my father he didn't like me much either when i was a kid i was a spawn of
satan you know i was a bad kid i was trouble and pathetic and sad and embarrassing it was
embarrassing being around me you know it wasn't cutie tough guy fonzie kind of stuff i was pathetic
and i was in trouble all the time and it must have been when i left home at almost 18 years
old they were standing by the front door waving and smiling glad to be rid of me it was like that
you know it just it wasn't fun my mother's the one that drove me to the
mental hospital
institution up in oregon you know i mean it was there were sad moments and things and then i'm
embarrassed and i'm ashamed and i'm full of remorse and regret and i cover it up with alcohol and rage
you know the the we i lay waste to the countryside around me and anybody that came around me
it was awful you know it was awful it wasn't cute alcoholism isn't cute you know i didn't go
anywhere i didn't accomplish anything i didn't nothing happened i just got loaded for 22 23
years
and when i got here i was in bad shape and i did that inventory and it was a lightning with even
with all the therapy that i've had working on stuff when i did that inventory with a stranger
i told him some secrets i wasn't ever going to tell anybody nothing major but there are those
things that i think i am a lot of them you do in a closed room when nobody's looking that stuff that
you think you are the pathetic sick shit i shared that with this guy he asked me at the end of it he
said is there anything you're going to tell me about it and i said no i'm not going to tell you
you're not going to tell me tell me now and so the thing i didn't write down i told him and i
i never told any therapist any of that stuff that's an interesting phenomena isn't it isn't
there some spiritual connection between us strangers when we get together what is that
you know what that's called that's called intimacy some people like to call it trust
it's more than just trust because i don't even know this guy how could i possibly trust him
why i don't have a good explanation for that every time somebody comes me to this day and they do a
fifth step i go man this dude's actually going to do this man i'm always impressed you know
i'm all that's always impressive to me but he doesn't know me you know maybe he gets some kind
of signal that comes from me that i'm okay isn't that beautiful coming for where i come from isn't
it amazing that people trust me and respect me i think that's incredible you know maybe i should
do it myself and respect myself if other people feel that way about me isn't that interesting
that's very spiritual you know that's not psychological that's spiritual
so i have to stop the blaming if i'm awake now and i get a little bit of a powerlessness and
i stop the blaming my character defects are going to come and visit me with alarming regularity
you know i don't even have to list them it's not about working on myself they will be presented to
me and if i stop the blaming i'm going to be able to do it myself and i'm going to be able to do it
if i'm going to own it then now i'm going to have to deal with it and when they present themselves
and i get it and i don't feel good about doing that behavior again that's the beginning of the
end of it it doesn't go away right away it takes a few years for stuff to really go away but i don't
get the kick out of it that i used to when i'm arrogant in front of people i walk away from that
i go god damn i did it again when they interrupt somebody in mid-conversation and take the center
of these stuff i do and i walk away from i don't feel good and i had to turn around and start
saying i was sorry a guy finally said to me in a he says bill why don't you just stop doing it we're
tired of hearing you apologize but that's the vehicle that's the mechanism of leaning into that
stuff that's the beginning of awareness i get into the immense process now what am i going to
learn from the immense process you know what i learned from the immense process when i go to
these people that i've blamed for my life and my character and now you're going to learn from me
you want me to go say i'm sorry to them which makes no rational sense to me at all i don't want
to do it i'm afraid to do it i'm embarrassed i feel like a geek you know i don't want to give
in i don't want to lose points i don't want to i really don't want to do it and the ninth step is
where the transformation really happens when you go to those people and you don't want to do it you
make the amend you turn and walk away from that you are changed right then and there and you know
what you learn from that the third pillar of spiritual condition nothing is personal
nobody was ever doing anything to me they were just doing what they do and i happen to be in the
room and sometimes you're in my blast radius am i doing it to you no i'm doing what i do
and you happen to be in the vicinity but none of it is personal none of it
you'll find this in any spiritual path worth its salt whatever discipline it comes from
nothing is personal
it's about disidentification with self and when you're selfish and self-centered as we are as
most humans aren't really everything is goddamn personal everything's happening to me you can't
do that to me and it's not happening to me it's just happening and i'm in the room
my father wasn't doing anything to me and when i went and made amends to him i had an experience
and what the experience was is my the rage got pulled out of me you know i didn't want to
lose the battle with him and i went to him and i made the amends and i went when i was driving
home i started sobbing i couldn't stop crying and after that i tried to get close to him and
you know what i realized about all that he was never doing anything to me he was just being who
he was he was this poor kid from alabama you know self-made man depression kid not very emotional
wasn't the kind of guy that you hugged and stuff he was just that guy he was one of those guys
people call him the greatest generation
well you could argue about that but he was one of those guys he was a world war ii guy right
when he would look at me he just saw this lazy ass piece of shit he didn't like me
you know i mean that's that's just who he was you know and and he was a sober guy he got sober in
1954 his sobriety date was march the 28th mine is march the 27th he was 37 i was 37 isn't that odd
and for 15 years the last 15 years of his life we gave each other
birthday cakes and the hermosa beach men's day it was the gordon and bill show
and i found my father in alcoholics anonymous because he never was doing anything to me
my god look at all the time i wasted hating that poor stupid bastard you know what a pathetic
thing what a waste of time but some people miss it completely never realized that that's what we've
done when i did my fifth step at six months sober i had an experience i went into my front door of
my house and thought i was going to die i was going to die i was going to die i was going to die i was
going to die i was going to die and i thought about the guy that walked in there six months
earlier and i realized it's going to be like this now i wasn't sure what this was but i knew that
the old life was over that's stunning people pay good money for shit like that man you know that
happens here every day the old life is over isn't that stunning what a stunning experience
what else could that be but grace and spiritual whether you believe it or not
you explain it
it to me did i do the right thing and pull myself up by the bootstraps i don't think so
but in the ninth step now i begin the transformation process now i've got three
things i get i'm getting the powerless thing i'm gets coming clear it's getting a little bit
clearer now i have to try i'm working on stopping blaming other people for my problems i realize i
got to do that now and i've surrounded myself with some other aa guys primarily that aren't
going to let me get away with this shit of blaming and that we're all got spiritual
consent with each other say ah stop whining joey you know those days are up we all get it right
we're so we've got some support and now i realize i'm beginning to realize that nothing's personal
you know what happened you know what that is you know what happens when that happens
this egoic construct of who i think i am begins to collapse
the alibi system is done who am i going to blame nothing's personal what do i do now who the hell
am i bill wilson talked about this i'm going to do what has been given to me and when i've got this
being the hole in the donut yeah we become the hole in the matter of fact we realize there's no
damn donut you know this whole thing is an illusion it talks in a it talks in the big book
a lot it doesn't talk about denial to be in denial you got to actually know some shit
but it talks a lot about delusional being delusional that i think this me i've got to
defend and protect myself you know we talk about boundaries and stuff like there aren't you know i
don't i don't i think that's too bizarre to me like what boundaries what am i boundering what
am i protecting right talk about being defensive defensive of what this personality that i think i
am this begins to follow fall apart one through nine is about ten percent of the program it's
just sober 101 it's the first semester that's it this is not the work that we've just described
the inventory is not the work it's just the beginning of what i need to have in order to
start the program
work 10 11 and 12 is the work in 10 the fourth pillar of spiritual condition presents itself
self-awareness as compared to self-obsession when the self begins to collapse the construct
of who we think we are awareness happens we develop the skill of the watcher being able
to watch ourselves move through life this changes everything everything changes now
it's very disconcerting it's very painful
a lot of people
run away from this when this happens it's it's like it shakes the ground like well who am i now
really good question every once in a while it's a really good question to ask yourself who do i
think i am because that who you think you are is just that it's you thinking about who you are
you know people talk about things like the true self you know what's the true self i don't know
but the washer seems to be closer to it other than this ego that keeps wanting to be in the future in
the past in meditation you're going to want to be in the future in the past you're going to want to be
in the past you're going to want to be in the future in the past you're going to want to be in the past
in meditation you're going to want to be in the future in the past you're going to want to be in the future in the past
In meditation, you can watch yourself think.
This is a great tool for self-awareness.
When this happened to me around 20 years sober, it changed the entire game.
I focus on the breath and then the mind, the little ego, the two-and-a-half-year-old that's, like, growing up a little bit.
He doesn't like being in the present moment.
There's nothing for him to do.
There's never anything wrong in the present moment.
We need to work on shit.
There's some important stuff going on here that needs a lot of time and effort applied to it.
You know, as soon as you start relaxing and stuff, it goes, wake up!
You know, it's dangerous, right?
And it wanders away from that present moment.
And you notice that it has wandered away.
And you gently bring it back.
This is absolute conclusive proof that who you are is not your thinking mind.
This changes everything.
You can finally stop working on yourself.
You're just feeding the beast.
It'll take any kind.
It'll take any kind of attention it can get.
And we talk about it in the third person, don't we?
We say, my head's out to get me.
Well, it's not out to get me.
It needs me for transportation.
It's not trying to hurt me.
It's just flat and two-dimensional.
It's stupid.
It creates nothing.
It just takes credit for shit.
You know?
And it just takes the past and projects it into the future.
It's part of me.
It's not some alien entity.
But on a spiritual path, you're forced to look at it in order to save your own ass.
Because it's the one that gets you all cranked up and OCD.
And all the stuff that happens.
You know, they've got all kinds of labels.
Like, one that I like is, what is it?
Affective personality disorder.
Exactly.
I have that.
I drank for like 23 years.
I'm a little fucked up, you know?
Sure.
Give me a label, you know?
Give me a label.
But all of it is just like self-centered, childish kind of behavior, right?
So now if I can look at that, it changes everything.
I don't.
I don't have to work on it.
I don't have to change it.
I don't have to write shit down.
I can just ignore it.
When it comes up with stuff.
And here's a little internal dialogue.
It'll warn you about something that isn't there.
It does that all the time.
It's called tomorrow.
Which isn't here.
It'll warn you about stuff.
Like, pay attention.
Be careful.
Here they come.
Right?
And what you do when it does that, you say to it.
You don't try to shut it off because you can't shut it off.
It's there.
It's part of you, right?
But you can talk to it.
And you can.
You can look at it and go, I really appreciate your input.
I know you're trying to help me out.
And I really appreciate that, you know.
But I'm going to get on with my day now.
See you later.
And you just move on, you know.
And it works, believe it or not.
Meditation is a great tool for this.
Then finally, and I know I'm running out of time here.
In the 12th step, 10, 11, and 12 is 90% of the program.
It's the work.
In the 12th step is the vehicle.
It's the mechanism that's used to bring about all this awareness.
All of this.
You start working with others.
Our very lives depend upon our constant thought of others
and how we may help meet their needs.
Selfishness and self-centeredness was the root of my problem.
I don't think they were kidding.
And my experience is, this is very true.
This is very true.
Okay?
So then you come and I go out and I aggressively try to get you
and I start working with you, right?
For the first 10 years I did this, it was all about myself.
I was trying to make a name for myself in an anonymous organization.
And I actually accomplished that.
You can do that.
But it's very weird, you know?
And then you crash and burn, which is a real critical part of this journey.
Between eight and 12 years sober, the second surrender happens.
But I won't want to tell you about the third one and the fourth one.
It's like, but that second surrender,
and what I call it is the collapse of the alibi system.
This actually, I had an emotional and mental breakdown.
Just the sheer weight of carrying my personality around.
But you come to me and you ask me for help.
And somewhere in this process,
even though I was motivated solely by self,
there was no real, real compassion involved in it.
But somewhere in this process, I fell in love with you.
Irrespective of my motivation, I fell in love with you.
And somewhere in there, I don't know exactly when,
I started thinking a little bit more about you than I did myself.
I started worrying about you and caring about you.
I became proactive and would start to call you
when I knew you were going through a tough time.
People showed me how to do this, by the way.
I did not come up with this on my own.
I had some really wonderful teachers.
I still do.
People that do this, that live this, believe it.
It is the hub of their life.
And I want to be that guy.
Not this arrogant, pompous, preachy guy.
And you can hear it in my voice.
My default mode is preaching and telling you what to do.
But I fell in love with you.
And this brings us to the fifth and final pillar of spiritual condition.
The actual foundation stone of what spiritual condition,
is, is compassion.
And that's what I've been missing all my life.
Selfish and self-centered people do not have compassion.
And they don't know they don't have it because they never had it.
It isn't like I lost it.
Now I'm trying to find it again.
You taught me that.
When you started entered in my life, I cannot do this on my own.
Faith without works is dead.
I thought I was the teacher.
Now I've come to realize you have,
always been the teacher.
Sometimes I am, but you are always the teacher.
You bring something to the table.
You've invited me into your life.
You've had me come into the birthing room when you were having your babies,
because you wanted to be there.
And you'd hand me your babies right when they were steaming.
You know, what a shock to the, who would invite me?
Who would invite this guy with a bullshit biker with a clip on airing into
something so sacred as that.
And then I've held your hand.
I've held your hands when your babies are dying because you wanted me there.
When I was dying a few years ago, you came to me and I,
and I felt how hard it was for me to accept the love.
Isn't that interesting?
Life is experiential.
God is an experience, not a concept.
In an Alcoholics Anonymous, we experience it and we're human beings.
So we try to label it, but so what?
The experience.
The experience of it is stunning.
And it seems to me, it lives in the space between you and I.
And the closer I am to you, the closer I am to it.
And isn't what each one of us experienced when we walked into AA was this compassion?
Don't you remember?
You don't remember what they said, but don't you remember the people that were
just kind to you that made sure that you had a seat that went and got you a cup of
coffee, gave you a cigarette, maybe stood out and just bullshitted with you about
stuff.
You don't remember for 45 hours.
You don't remember for 45 minutes after the meeting, and then you came back and they
remembered your name.
Isn't that what saved your life?
Isn't that what it was?
That's what I remember.
You loved me.
I mean, when I was this loud, arrogant asshole that was telling everybody how to do it,
you know, for people stood under the tree and waited for me to fall.
People that cared about me.
And when I fell out of the tree, they let me bounce a couple of times.
So that I know that I'd fallen out of the tree.
And then they held me, wrapped me and held me and took care of me.
I had an amazing fall from grace and a very public fall from grace because I'm a human
being.
You know, I'm not some AA guru.
I'm a human being, but I'm a believer.
I believe in it.
And I'll leave you with this.
You've got powerlessness.
You stop the blaming.
Nothing really is personal.
Self-awareness is key.
It's everything.
Being aware, being more than awake, but being aware.
And then compassion enters and your heart opens up and you can love fearlessly and recklessly
because there's nobody can hurt you.
There's nothing to defend.
You get the whole cycle of life around here.
It's a real full life and it has a lot of pain, but it has a lot of bliss and a lot
of wonder.
And people will tell you here that you got to give it away to keep it.
Not.
Not at all.
That is not true.
You have to give it away to even get it.
That's how you get it.
Thank you very much.
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