Higher Power’s Will for You Is to Abandon Your Will — Yeah Cool, What Exactly Does That Involve? — Sandy B. – Sandy R.

Well, good morning, everybody. We have reached the Sunday morning final hour of our weekend together, and of course, we all are going to have those feelings as we get in our cars and drive away.
And a lot of it's going to be you're going to miss the area and the talks and all that, but you're really going to miss each other.
And I'm sure that many of you have exchanged phone numbers and e-mails or what.
And next time you're visiting Dallas or the next time you're visiting L.A.,
just go out of your way to contact your friends.
And you've got a lot in common.
There aren't that many secrets around.
There's a lot of people who are thinking about it.
There's a lot of people who are going to get around to it when it's more convenient.
But to actually make the decision is rare.
And you know it, and I know it.
You can just look in your own group and see.
All the people who have achieved pretty good sobriety and are staying there.
And the few that have really looked at our literature and saw where the jackpot was and decided to go after it.
So that's why you're a special crowd.
We've been following the story theme throughout the weekend, and we get to the final thing.
And the title is called History.
And of course, the definition of a story is history of something.
And, you know, the history of the United States, the history of Peru.
You could just go through and find books that will tell you the history of all kinds of things.
But it occurred to me you could take that word and split it, and it says his story.
The story of God.
And I would submit that all history is a record of the history of God.
That this is the unfolding of God.
And it's been going on since the beginning of time.
And the scientists have been extremely healthy.
And helpful in helping us to understand what the beginning actually was.
Up until they made their breakthroughs, whenever it was, 20 years ago.
We were stuck with let there be light.
And we used our imagination to light.
Well, the lights came on.
God reached over, hit the light switch.
And there was light.
Now we know that it was something the scientists called the Big Bang.
Where something extremely tiny, with infinite temperature and infinite density, suddenly exploded.
And that was the beginning of God's story for us.
Whatever, 14 billion years ago.
And we followed it.
Paralleling a lot of the spiritual teachings.
As this was documented scientifically.
And so, to me, it's exciting to see man.
And his ability to.
Study to put something that was a vague spiritual story into reality.
And as it unfolds, it's more amazing than spiritual stories that we're attempting to describe it.
It's just more amazing.
Every time they find something and I go, what was that again?
Yeah.
There's these tiny, minute particles.
Yeah.
And they behave differently if you look at them.
What?
I mean, holy cow.
That means we, as an observer, play an important role in the story.
And.
And.
They just tracked how the energy.
And how the matter and energy just.
Spread out.
And began to coalesce and form into clouds.
And.
Until we have one tiny little solar system around one star.
Where we are.
And beyond our wildest imagination, how many billions of other.
Similar places.
The thing that interested me was that they.
Calculated.
The odds on the planets forming.
And then the odds that this tiny thing exploding would end up with life.
And they concluded that it exceeds all laws of probability.
It's absolutely improbable and statistically impossible for life to have formed.
And.
That's an interesting statistic, isn't it?
That put the scientists in a box.
Looked like you were.
Forced into concluding that there must be a God.
Who decided that they wanted life.
In the middle of this universe.
And.
So.
They have postulated that there are billions of universes.
Therefore, statistically, it's not impossible in one of them.
For life to have formed.
And I go, how convenient.
So I'm staying with.
The fact that this.
Is.
Creation.
Ended up with life.
And that.
Perhaps.
The purpose.
Of the whole deal.
Was to.
Materialize.
Us.
Living.
Spiritual entities.
That have the capability to be aware.
Of the universe.
Scientifically.
And of.
A creator.
Because the message board was built inside.
Telling us to look.
For something beyond ourselves.
Disregard all religions.
Prophets or anything.
We have enough evidence inside our own selves.
To realize.
That there's something beyond us.
And so we could say that the.
Big bang happened 14 billion years ago.
And we can break it up into little time segments.
But we know that time is an arbitrary measurement.
And.
That no matter.
Where you are you're in the now.
And so.
A way for us to look at this in a more personal.
And spiritual way.
Is not to say that this.
Boom light.
Occurred 15 years for 14 billion years ago but rather.
That it's still happening.
And we're part of it.
We were.
Part of the original plan.
And this is how it unfolded.
So that it ended up.
With life.
Very special spiritual life.
That could be aware.
Of.
And appreciate.
The magnificence.
Of this creation and our own creation.
It is.
I may be wrong about this but I read somewhere that if you had 150 miles of electrical wire.
And you turn the current on.
And there's nothing on the other end of the wire it's not.
Connected to anything.
The electricity doesn't even enter the wire yet.
It doesn't travel one inch down the wire.
Until there's something on the other end to receive it.
And then it's there.
Boom.
So.
In order to complete.
The deal.
There has to be.
Something at the other end.
If we follow that same analogy into the universe.
You could say in a similar way that.
When a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it there's no noise.
And if we could say that.
If there's no observers of the universe.
How could you ever prove that it exists.
So for it to actually exist like these particles that.
Behave differently when they're observed.
It required.
An observer of sufficient.
Capability.
To observe it.
And then.
It comes into being.
If you follow what I'm saying.
So.
Part of our.
The reason that we were created.
Was to complete.
The connection.
And turn the entire universe into.
Something.
Much bigger.
Than it was without.
Observers.
So I just see us.
As.
One of the most essential parts of God's plan.
And we cannot appreciate that.
From our egos.
We can't.
Make the connection.
It doesn't travel in.
Until we can establish.
The conscious contact.
And it's in the establishing of the conscious contact.
That you see.
A universe that is way beyond what you could see before.
You could see the world.
As you never saw it before.
It literally as our.
Ninth step promises say.
It materializes.
Do you see what I'm trying to lead up to.
But it.
It doesn't materialize.
Until you're ready.
To have it materialize.
You have become.
In contact.
With that.
Which.
Wants.
To show you something.
So it took a leap of faith.
To decide.
To take this course of action.
That.
You.
Are.
In.
Contact.
With.
That.
Which.
Wants.
To show you.
Something.
So it took a leap of faith.
To decide.
To take this course of action.
And the only reason that we take it here in A.A.
Is because somebody else just like us.
Said it worked for them.
And we heard that he was a bigger asshole than I am.
And he's not anymore.
Something.
Amazing took place.
To that guy.
I'm not sure I believe all this.
But I'm curious enough.
To try it.
And so when we finally did.
We were amazed before we're halfway through.
It wasn't that.
It was just.
Amazing.
So we have to suspend.
Traditional.
Belief.
In order to move on.
I go to a.
Wonderful gal.
Been going there for.
15 years.
If I don't get massage in my back.
And she's in the bathroom.
She's got a.
Chinese medicine.
She does all this stuff.
And then she does.
Kinesiology.
Now I don't know if anybody.
If you know what that is.
So we try to diagnose.
Which particular.
Medicine.
Would be best for me.
And.
So we pick up.
Little jar.
Number one.
And she says.
Now hold your arm up.
And resist me pushing it.
So she pushed.
puts that jar down, picks up another one, and then push, push.
He goes, this is the one.
And I'm going, hello?
Hello?
And I go, okay.
You have to suspend a lot of traditional belief to pay for the medicine.
And yet it works.
And there's authors that have written about that.
The eye of the eye, if anybody's heard of that.
So when we're dealing with conscious contact with the creator of this universe,
we've got to get rid of preconceived ideas.
We've got to clean the old ideas.
In other words, it's like a battery, and it won't start.
You've got to go in and clean the terminal, you know,
scrape off all the stuff that won't let the juice flow through.
And then, bam, fires up.
You've all done that.
So following the history story,
that all history is his story,
we move along and get away from the scientists
and get down to our little tiny, tiny spot on planet Earth,
the alcoholic spot.
And we go, well, God came up against the alcoholics.
So what did he have planned for them?
He obviously created them.
Why would a loving God,
create a horrible disease like alcoholism?
Why would he do that?
People are dying and they're suffering.
Well, the answer came in December of 1934
when another light appeared.
And I think about Bill in that hospital room,
and I, in my own mind, call that the big bang of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Because up until that spot,
split second,
there was no hope for any alcoholics in the world
and there never had been.
Washingtonians had some success,
but it wasn't spiritual and it eventually faded out.
So in the instant that that took place,
in one man,
you and I,
50 years later, whenever you all arrived,
were saved.
Because of that event.
Not only did it
remove the obsession to drink,
but it planted inside of the recipient
of this unbelievable transformation,
the commitment,
an unwavering, undying commitment,
to bring this to every alcoholic in the world.
And then the test came up.
Well, let's see how big your commitment is.
And you read the history of Bill and the early timers.
Some of us might have quit
in the first month
or the second month
of helping drunks and nobody getting sober.
And thank God, Lois said, well, you're staying sober.
And then getting evicted and we got no house.
We got no money.
We got no car.
Some AA members go, well, come on, stay with me for a month.
I'll loan you a car.
We could chip in and give you $20 a month.
And that keeps up for almost two years.
And still no big signs of success.
And finally they meet Dr. Bob.
And we start seeing this very slow,
many times it could have gone wrong.
If you want to see God, you have to go to the doctor.
If you want to see God,
study the history of Alcoholics Anonymous.
You will see God everywhere.
He's just in there.
It's just, there's too many coincidences.
There's too many shutting down
of the ideas that they thought up.
They were instruments
in saving your life and my life.
And once again,
we could look at this
as Bill's big bang happening 77 years ago.
Or we could say it's still happening.
That burst of light in Towns Hospital
has continued to this day
being transmitted one alcoholic to the other.
And I submit it's the same energy
that arrived in that light.
And it comes into me.
I'm in the darkness.
Some other messenger who has received this light
comes over and touches my hand,
scrapes away all the stuff
that won't let the electricity flow.
And now I have light.
And I'm no longer in the darkness.
This is not new light.
It's the same light.
It's the same light.
It's as if we had one candle
and we just kept passing it around,
lighting people's candles.
That helps me see
that it's all happening in an instant.
But we can conceptualize it better
by spreading it out and breaking it down in little chunks
and looking at it and all of that.
And so you finally have one year of sobriety
and then you have two years of sobriety.
But when you step back,
the light was turned on and it continues to burn.
And it burns timelessly.
And we don't need time.
We don't need to celebrate an anniversary.
But we do that because it helps new people.
It helps people who are thinking only
in material terms to deal with it.
But as you move on you will see, it's coming along.
It's coming along in the flash.
that this isn't, I didn't plan my life, it just happened.
I said earlier, Alcoholics Anonymous is a happening.
It suddenly happened, and it's still happening.
That's it, it's still happening.
One of the terms that Bill uses in the big book,
you know, he's so wise.
He has many names for God.
Power greater than yourself, the higher power,
spirit of the universe, the spirit, the creator.
I like, in terms of the weekend that we have here,
the great reality.
Now, isn't that a great one?
So you can say,
well, I have...
I had all my stories, and that was my reality.
I want to move to the great reality.
So that would be synonymous with the fourth dimension,
whatever you want to call it.
We're leaving one reality for the great reality.
Let's not screw around with these low-level realities.
Let's go to the great reality.
Well, we have to be willing.
This is why the...
This program is so hard.
And it's going to sound funny in here.
We have to admit that there might be a greater reality than mine.
And even if you're lying in the gutter,
you don't want to relinquish and acknowledge
there could be something greater than your reality.
Mine's the greatest because it's mine.
Can you feel that?
Can you feel it?
Look, you could be out of the gutter.
And that's too big a sacrifice.
I've got to give up my reality
just to have a nice room and meals and be happy.
And that's a...
Boy, you're asking a lot for me to give up my reality.
And so it's important,
if you're sponsoring people,
it's important in your home group
to introduce history.
History.
If you want to advance the spirituality
of your group, yourselves,
the people you sponsor,
bring history in.
It helps us see God
because that's his story.
All history is his story.
We had a meeting,
a peer in Tampa.
Some of us in this room,
you go to it.
And this is how it happened.
You'll see that it was not planned.
A meeting got too crowded.
People were sitting on the floor
or around in the kitchen
trying to listen around the corner.
And a small group decided to start an overflow meeting
just so that the people who came to that meeting
weren't sitting on the floor.
That was the only purpose of starting it.
And there was probably seven,
it was mostly gals,
Melanie,
Mike's fiancé back there,
decided to do that.
And they had met once
and then I said,
well, I think I'll go down
and be with them.
I'd always like to be in the ones
that are starting up.
And they were meeting outside.
And then after it got a little hot
and bugs and this,
they said, why don't we find a room?
So they found a room.
So we had a meeting
with about six people in it.
And it was a discussion meeting.
And somebody would go,
okay, well, let's talk about step two.
Okay, well, we could do it.
Hell, in 35 minutes,
we were through.
Everybody talked.
But you have to stay there
to the end of the hour
in case some newcomer comes.
So we're sitting around
and now we've just turned into
a shoot the breeze thing.
And somebody said,
why don't we come up with something
where one of us prepares some topic
and you talk for 10 minutes.
Then we'll start around
and we could possibly
fill up the whole hour.
And the first person that came in said,
I'd like to talk about Sister Ignatia.
And we went, wait a minute.
We thought you were going to be doing
a tradition or something.
No, Sister Ignatia came around.
They had little handouts.
And they're passing me around.
There's people with two months.
Sister Ignatia, what the hell?
Is this a Catholic organization?
I don't know why I joined here.
And they're passing it around.
And then they go, that's so cool.
She was there.
This is, oh my.
So then,
we had a list of three people
that were, you know,
the next three weeks.
Each one of them came in
with another something.
They looked up on the Google
day history and found
some little thing.
And geez, one new guy came in
with the menu from the Rockefeller dinner.
I'm going, where the hell did you get this?
You know, it's just going.
So it's now probably a year or more old
and we got no more seats left.
A lot of young people are coming to it.
And so there's, there it is.
It just appeared.
Now I look forward to that.
I just get the biggest kick out of going.
I have no idea what it's going to be.
And we have enough old timers in there
so that they can flesh it out and keep it going.
So I'm just passing on how important history is
because it's really his story.
Well,
this is all well and good.
But we still have to try and get
to the fourth dimension.
We can talk about all this stuff all we want.
The best answer I ever saw to the question,
what is God's will for me?
Is this.
God's will.
It's for you to abandon your will to him.
So I'm going to just repeat that.
God's will for you is to abandon your will to him.
Yeah, cool.
I like that.
What does that exactly involve?
See, this is abandon your will.
Your will to God is the big print.
Now we have to read the fine print.
Oh.
Oh.
It's like you're in the middle of the sixth step.
Oh.
Oh.
Oh.
Oh.
Oh.
Oh.
Oh.
Everything.
Everything.
Abandon everything.
Everything.
Everything.
Don't retain anything.
Everything.
For myself.
Right.
I'll get back to you on that.
I'll get back to you on that.
I'm not into extreme solutions.
You know that extreme cage fighting or whatever it is.
You've just gone a little too far with that.
Abandon everything.
Well, sorry, that's what the deal is.
Now, for our purposes of this weekend, it would mean abandoning all your stories.
Every one of them.
And that's where the resistance starts.
This has been going on since writers have been writing about this.
And I don't remember what year John Milton wrote Paradise Lost.
Somebody here probably does, 1700 or, is that close?
Okay.
And it is a great narrative about human beings and heaven or hell.
Or awakened conscious contact versus conscious separation.
Which is...
It's a description of hell.
And there's...
As you read it, you realize that the only people who are in hell are people who choose to be there.
They absolutely choose to be there.
That's their choice.
And they live in mansions.
And they have everything they want.
They have light years of yard.
It's just amazing.
It's just...
But they're all by themselves.
With everything they want.
And they're miserable.
Because all suffering comes from separation from God.
And they go, look.
Get rid of these mansions and ten light years of yard.
You could be with God.
Let me think about it.
Remind you of this chapter of the agnostic.
Die an alcoholic death.
Live on a spiritual basis.
And his punchline is, this is the struggle.
To reign in hell or to serve in heaven.
Do you want to be in charge?
Or do you want to be a servant?
I don't hear any answers.
Do you feel it?
I want to keep holding on.
I'm the storyteller.
I have all these stories.
This is who I am.
I write my own script.
I am...
So what exactly do I have to give up?
Well, you have to give up all your stories.
Not only that.
You have to give up all your...
All your costumes.
All your masks.
All your disguises.
All your wigs.
All your shoes.
Not only that.
You have to give up the key to the costume locker.
And you have to give up the key to the script locker.
Can't go in there and pull a script out.
You have to give up...
You have to give up your opinions.
You have to give up your judgements.
You have to give up your politics.
Most of all, you have to give up your right to yourself.
Because you never belong to yourself in the first place.
I think what an order might be appropriate response.
And so, we find voices popping up when something like that is said.
Give up your right to yourself.
12 and 12 has my favorite reaction to that.
And it's...
It starts with sort of a country term.
Shucks.
Everybody remember that?
Shucks.
If I do that, I'll be a non-entity.
I'll be the hole in the donut.
That sounds so attractive that we postpone it.
Okay, I'll give up the key to the script locker,
but I'm going to keep the key to the costume locker.
I'm going to make a compromise.
I've got to keep a couple of stories just for old time's sake.
No, nothing's going to happen.
So, let me know when you would like to sign up.
For the hole in the donut.
And get rid of everything else.
If you were in Vegas, it would be all in on the hole in the donut.
All in.
So, to make it easier,
Far Corners has arranged...
At great expense.
To help you see through the hole in the donut.
So, I want you to close your eyes and imagine that you have a donut in your left hand.
And you're going to bring it up to your left eye.
And you're going to look through.
And I promise you.
This is what you're going to see.
This is what you're going to see.
I see trees of green, red roses too, I see them bloom for me and you.
And I think to myself,
I see them bloom for me and you.
And I think to myself,
What a wonderful world.
I see skies of blue and clouds of white.
Bright blessed days, dark sacred nights.
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the skies.
Also on the faces of people going by.
I see friends shaking hands.
Saying, how do you do?
They're really saying, I love you.
I hear babies cry.
I watch them grow.
They learn much more than I'll ever know.
And I think to myself.
What a wonderful world.
Yes, I think to myself.
What a wonderful world.
What a wonderful world.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
That's it.
That's it.
Thanks, John.