Humility and Service – Workshop April – Part 4 of 8 – Sandy B.

Excuse me. I think just about everybody's here, so we can go ahead and get started. Why don't we just take a moment of silence followed by the serenity prayer? God, grant me the serENITY to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. Well, I hope you've all had a good first day and a good night's sleep and a chance for the fellowship. I can tell just looking around here that whatever group you end up in having a conversation it's going to be stimulating and interesting and that's really one of the main reasons for having these things is you can have some lectures but then you can have time to reflect with other people and learn that it's fun being part of something big and not trying to be something big ourselves but to just be part of it which is really what we are. We're just part of this and I think we were talking sort of the theme of the whole weekend has been trying to understand conscious separation from as Chuck Chamberlain put it and one of the great steps forward is to go from being something to be part of something and that that is our new identity whether it's, for me the first time I was a coffee maker was a big deal I've got lots of time so I'll tell you some stories my sponsor and I were both marine captains and I was senior to him but he was my sponsor so that didn't cut me anything and we had a little group outside of the Quantico Marine Base called the Dumfries Triangle Group and in this group it was a speaker meeting, two speakers and we probably had six members that were there fairly regularly and others who came kind of drunk but they'd be there and so when we went up to D.C. because we were 40 minutes away people would see us coming and they'd go because they didn't want to be tapped to drive down there to talk to four people. Something about egos in AA. But anyway, he ran the whole show. We had a podium, a big footlocker kind of a thing and inside of it was the whole meeting. The coffee pot, the slogans that go on the wall, sugar, cream, you name it. The collection basket and we'd get to the meeting early he'd open it up and had the combination lock and all that kind of stuff so after about I had about six months he says to me I'm going to pick you up early tonight we're going to have a business meeting so we get to the place there's just two of us and we're having and we've got and we have and we are having a business meeting and he's up at the podium and I'm I'm there And so he announces that for the past year he's been the coffee maker, civil service rep, treasurer, the guy that gets the cake, the guy to get the speakers and all of that. And in AA it's customary to rotate these guys. Are there any volunteers? and boy there was no place to hide my hand is like that and I went oh god I hate this you know something it wasn't long before I really got a kick out of the fact I had the key to the church and there wasn't going to be a meeting unless I showed up people were going to be standing outside locked out and it just brought it really made me feel great that I had this in the combination into the podium and go in there and pretty soon you got it down in a routine, you know, where the pamphlets go. And I can still remember that feeling. I'm really part of this thing now. So I'm sure if you all have done that and remember what a thrill it was. And I'll also tell you, he had gotten speakers for the next three weeks and then I had to go ask and it really, I was very reluctant to do that because someone might say no and that might collapse my program the rejection from someone saying no so I delayed and delayed and finally it's my week and I almost asked several people at meetings but I didn't and now we met on Sunday and it's Saturday and we were at a meeting near Fort Belvoir and there was this army major named Jack. And I went up to him and said, Jack, how would you like to talk tomorrow night down there? He said, okay. And I didn't have a second speaker. I was going to sit there and go, I don't know where that second speaker is. They haven't showed up. So anyway, I'm there. And one of the members of our group was a jockey who at one time I guess had been fairly well known named Dave, but he drank a lot. So he'd come to the meetings and kept his bottle outside and he'd go out and have a drink and come back in and he was there that night. So I went through the thing of reading the preempt and he passed the basket and all that and then I said, now our first speaker is Jack. Well, I didn't know that Jack was drunk and he gets up to the podium My sponsor knew and he Was laughing already and he Gets up to The Podium and announces that he's Jack I'm an alcoholic and I'm resigning from Alcoholics Anonymous and I thought he was just kidding so I waited a little longer and he explained how when he came to AA he didn't know how to drink properly and now because of all these wonderful AA members he could drink a fifth a day and didn't get in trouble and then he went on to talk about his drinking story and I'm looking at my watch and I look at my sponsor and he's just smiling. How do you get out of this thing? And I was rescued by the jockey who listened to that and finally he stood up and he said, that's a damn lie. He said, I drink a fifth every day and I get all screwed up. I got a bottle outside. You come out and we'll go out there. So they went outside and now there's dead silence in the room and I wasn't moving and my sponsor got up and he made a few comments and he said, we'll be closing momentarily with the Lord's Prayer but I suggest all of you come back next week to see what Sandy has in store for us. That was my first service position. But it was all to make the point of what it feels like to stop being something and become part of something. And in order to do that, we obviously have to abandon our old identity as something that is separate from everything else, which is causing all the problems that we have. That's exactly what Chuck's point is. Because of that separation, because our perception that we exist as a separate person, that's where all the problems come from. If we're just part of God, what problem can you have? You follow what I'm saying? It's like a leaf on a tree complaining about the view. It's down at the bottom and the other leaves are up at the top. And you follow what i'm saying and it's this how come i got to be down on the bottom of the tree, he would be taking on the ego identity that we all have and he would exist as a separate thing from the tree in his mind. And of course he isn't. And so this is what every human being does. You can't help but do it. But when we get to AA, we have a chance to undo all that, to dismantle the old identity. And it certainly can't be done just like that. It's done one painful change at a time, but as the changes produce great results, we change our whole attitude about pain and it becomes effort. It becomes something that we already know is going to make us feel better, so we take it out of the category of pain. Bill writes about that in the seventh step in the 12 and 12, our whole attitude about pain changed when we saw the benefits that we got from this process of humbly asking God to take more of this separation away from us. So it's interesting that spiritual growth is done by getting rid of things rather than acquiring anything. It's done by surrendering, by giving up, by inventorying and have it pointed out to us that we're seeing it wrong. So it's a constant process of getting rid of things and as we get rid of Things you actually feel lighter. The burden that we are carrying becomes lighter and lighter as we Get rid of this old idea that we Are separate because if we are separate you have to take care of yourself You have to protect yourself against all the other people that are trying to get theirs. You have the plan for your future. Who else is going to plan? There's just all the things that go in when you're self-sufficient, and it's you taking care of you. I remember asking Chuck, he was saying that God will take care of everything. I said, well, what about that thing about God takes care of those that take care of themselves? He said, that's wrong. God will take care of anyone who asks. Anyone who asks and so we're here this weekend we're in AA and each one of us is on an individual adventure to try and get rid of as much of ourselves as we can in order to enjoy what will be there when that happens and And part of that process is to have truth revealed to us. And we talk about that in our book a lot, more will be revealed, more will being revealed. And it's not like it's revealed by typing it on a piece of paper and showing you the words. It just comes and you just feel it and now you see things differently. they say that truth cannot be expressed in words you just experience it words can lead us to the truth but you can't write the truth in words it is something that has to be experienced your own personal truth and the ultimate truth would be to only feel that you're part of God which would be quite a wonderful event And all of us are striving towards that and hoping that someday we can get close. In my own life, I guess it must have been five years ago, you know, I've been serious about this program. I've done a lot of outside reading and activities. And I suppose I labeled myself a seeker from about the 25th year. and that's a good label to put on yourself that you're now a seeker, a God-seeker. I used to fly airplanes and we had heat-seeking missiles and I like to think of myself as a God seeking missile. I'm just, where is, well, I'm going, I think those are helpful when you see yourself in something like that light. So anyway, I was reading something about the Dalai Lama and, you know, you just look at this man and you know he's on a different level just by looking at him. And I said to myself, well, why don't you do that? Just, you now, why don' t you become fully awakened like the Dalai Lama? Well, those words hadn' t left my brain when the backlash started from the rest of them. What are you talking about? You're a piece of crap. You couldn't become something like that. Don't you ever tell anybody you had that thought. They'll get all over you. And there was just this war that went on with the idea of that thought, but then I just stopped and I thought about it and I went, anybody could do that. In other words, the potential for that is in everyone. It's not like you were born and only this one is going to make it. So I just said to myself, well then let's go for it. Well, I'll never get there. But the fact that I said that has changed more things than I can imagine. It's almost like I have an awareness that oh yeah, that's absolutely, it probably could happen today. Do you see what I'm saying? That could happen today. I could just be walking across the courtyard there and suddenly see through the veil as it is. And all I know is that that decision has really brought a lot of change just from that, just opening, taking away all the resistance that I had to that even happening. When you think of all the resistances by just saying, no, that couldn't happen to me, that guarantees that it's not going to happen that is an absolute block that something like that so I just passed that on now the topic that today and then I'll keep going on some other areas it was a very difficult one to try and tell some stories about and to get some sort of a narrative that would talk about the present moment, the now. If you had asked me before I thought about it or anything, why don't you get up and say a few words about the now? I would have come up and said, well, you know, the now, like right now. You know, the present moment. I know, but you've got 30 more minutes. Could you keep going? You know, the now. You're all familiar with the now It's like it's not the future and it's nicht das Vergangenheit, it's the now and that would about exhaust the discussion if you follow what I'm saying and so I made some notes for myself because they have stories And I started with the sentence out of our big book, God could and would if he were sought. And that brings up the topic of seeking. Sought is quite a spiritual word in our literature. And just right there, God couldandwouldifhewere sought. so I have to somehow move closer to God that doesn't mean I move from this part of the room to that part ofthe room it's a movement in consciousness I haveto move closer to God in consciousness but at least I decided to and the other place we see that is in the 11th step sought through prayer and meditation to improve our, so in two places we're given the concept of seeking. That this is step one in advancing ourselves down this spiritual path is to become a seeker. And so then later on when we drew near he disclosed himself to us. That's another line out of the big book and I think it's in those quotes that are in the pertinent passages. And so, the question comes up that if you're seeking God, where do you go? In other words, if God is everywhere, where to you go to seek God? What would be the place where you would change your consciousness in seeking God? And I wrote, is there a place where people for ages have successfully found God? Is there such a place? If so, where is that sacred place? So now we've kind of framed where do you go to actually do this seeking? And this is like a poem. It's not a poem, it's a little bit of writing. And it says, I dream of a place where all dreams end. A place where love, truth and light were born. a place known as the land of the ages God's kingdom the ultimate reality or the world of the spirit all out of our big book a place far away from us in distance and time a place called right here, right now and that's where God lives I dream of someday awakening and returning to my land of origin a land known as The Now the eternal present moment God's only home and I think as we feel that we go, that's right that's exactly true you can sense that that is right on target that that's where God lives he's there eternally and so if I'm going to seek God I have to seek the now because there's no other place you can go but we don't spend much time in the now we're not geared that way we spend a lot of time regretting the past that takes up a lot of the day is to review how we screwed up yesterday and how other people might have screwed us over and so on down and then we start thinking that boy I got all these things tomorrow they're going to come up and some of them are quite frightening Some of them require a lot of planning. So our minds are geared to shift from the future to the past and blow through the now like it's a freaking dot. And we never stay there, never really stop long enough to experience what it is. And there's a great deal of difference between a day at a time and the present moment. now a day at a time is a big step in the right direction because before we got to a day at a dime we were carrying last year and next year and now we've narrowed it down to just live today just go through today but it's still possible to go through the morning worrying about the afternoon and go throughthe afternoon regretting what you did in the morning but at least we're not regretting what we did four weeks ago we've only we've narrowed it down to just the morning and we've narrowed down what we worry about to just the afternoon so that's a big step in the right direction but we're still avoiding getting rid of all of that and so I jotted down that both religion and science and I don't mean that religion totally ignores the present moment, but a lot of the discussions that take place and especially in science is about the past and the future. We can document the big bang this happened, this happened and we know that in another hundred million years this is going to happen and that star is going to implode and become a black hole and there's very little discussion about this second This thing called the now. So the now has kind of been moved into a spiritual discussion, which is what we have in Alcoholics Anonymous. For many people it's a theoretical place. It exists in theory and we understand that, yeah, sure, there's such a thing as the present moment. It occurred to me the only way to get there is to eliminate time. And time was an arbitrary construct anyway. It was so we could have watches and we'd all know to come here at 8.30 and then you're going to meet somebody at 12.30. But it was developed as a way of making things convenient, but it became a reality. we are so connected to time that we think of it as a real dimension and it takes us completely out of the present moment so if you imagine being able to live totally in the now the only way I can talk about this is to make up stories and you ran into another guy who's living in the know and you might notice that he's wearing a watch and you'd go why are you wearing a watch if you live in the now well it's a fashion statement it's got this nice leather band and it's kind of a nice face well let me ask you something what time is it well it' s right now and you come back an hour later so what time it is now it's right now so you can picture you would have a watch and that's what it would say all the time and you'd just look, and after a while, you'd stop looking. You follow what I'm saying? You would never care what time it was. You would suddenly... Why do I care what Time it is? What is Time? Time is just telling me that I've got something that's going to happen. Oh, I'm late! I mean, just... You see what it's doing to our mind? I'm early, I know I'm not here. I'm not and so time has a tremendous force on us spiritually moving us to all these different places and now with all this technology and texting and all that wow I'm one second behind those people found out a second ahead of me and I'm this and allthat so you can see how sensitive time has become but it has no value in our spiritual lives time. So the elimination of time and getting rid of time looks something like the way the steps get rid of character defects. In other words, we're eliminating a resentment. We're eliminating this and then what's left is our true nature. As we eliminate connections with time And what's left is the now. In other words, we are eliminating everything that is distracting us from the present moment. And so I read a writer who said the now is the end of the ego. There's several things I remember reading where it was the endoftheego. Gratitude was another one. Enthusiasm was another on. And certainly the presentmoment. There's no role for the ego in the presentmoment. There's nothing can be planned, there's nothing, there is nothing can be discussed. You can't write about the present moment. There's no documentation of the present moment. You can only experience it. You experience a sense of just being here now and there's no interest in what the time is or where you might have to be or any of that. And I think I talked last night about Toll's line, why everybody's in a hurry and they're in a hurried to get to the next moment. Always going to. And when we do that, we're telling ourselves constantly that things are going to get better. That's the reason for moving on and having this goal or having anything that is time-oriented because it's going to be better. Better than what? Better than the present moment. How do you know? Have you ever stopped and looked in the present moment to see how it is? How do you know that tomorrow will be better than this moment if we've never looked at it? And as we take the time to try and exist in that present moment, we suddenly realize it can't get better than miss. This is the ultimate. Where I exist and experience my higher power and whatever is there for me to experience and that's the end of my mind thinking about it. There's no judging, there's no comparing, there just is. Well, it's easy to talk about that but it's pretty hard to get there. That is the real struggle because we're so connected. and so here's another story and this one has to do with the past the present and the future and they get together and they go you know there's a lot of tension between us we're pulling in all these different directions why don't we have a meeting and we'll discuss how we could resolve all the tension that exists between the past, the present, and the future. And they said, all right. They all agreed. And they says, where do you think we should hold the meeting? Well, there's a nice conference room. I just had something to eat over in this conference room right around the corner. It's got a great table. It's a very lovely room. A lot of class. That's where we ought to meet. There was no problem agreeing with that. Then they said when should we hold the meeting? And the past said I think we should hold it two years ago. We're all familiar with that. It won't be a surprise. You know, we won't get caught. We know what two years ago was. That's when we ought to meet. That's the best place to exist at all is two years ago. Just go there and stay there. And the future disagreed violently and he said no no no that's boring that's not exciting at all the path I already know what that is well let's hold the meetings two years in the future it'll be a complete surprise to all of us it'll just be amazing that's where we ought to hold the meeting and the president said well geez guys I'd like to go along with you but from where I sit if we go back two years in the past and hold the meeting then, it'll be now. And if we go two years in the future, when we sit down to hold the meeting, it'll been now. So I think we ought to hold the meeting now. And the other two couldn't argue out of that. Oh, I don't know. So they went in. And they went into sit down at the table. And as they took their seats, the only one left was the now. there was just one person at the table the others had disappeared and there was no conflict it was a very peaceful meeting and it could last forever in that and a part of us goes well that's fascinating but I got a life to live can you feel it well that is great some guru go sit on a freaking mountain top but I've got to earn a living. So we're not going to spend any time doing this. And that's what most of us do, we write it off as impossible. And yet when we engage in meditation and reflection on a regular basis, we find that we're starting to experience We're starting to experience what an awakened consciousness or conscious contact, as Chuck called it. We start to experience it personally. And as we experience it, we want more. It is just something that... And the more we experience that, and Chuck used to talk about this and Bill writes about it, The more we experience that, we're experiencing a state of total undisturbedness, to make up a word. And in that state, life becomes so simple and so easy. Decisions that were so difficult to make seem to come automatically. So if we're talking about our business, ah, jeez, we're wrecked on this, we're going to have a meeting. And so instead of planning for the meeting, we just can get in that state. And while there, wow, I see how that should be resolved. I see what's going to happen. I see why that should being resolved. That's the only place that the intuitive energy can come in. And I think in the 12 and 12 Bill writes about we become more efficient and we're not wasting all our energy in worry, anger, whatever it is. And so you can see that these can coexist, that we actually could spend a great deal of time in the now and continue in the material world. And it's not mutually exclusive. Let's see. another way of looking at it is I am giving up everything that I created your identity all of our identity is connected to time it's connected to accomplishments in the past goals in the future accolades we talked about it in the resume that that is who I am and if that could be dismantled I would be much closer to the now. So as we become part of something instead of being something we're taking a giant step forward into living closer and closer to the present. Because if you're just part of something you're not concerned about it you're still part of it. You're just a part of something. Something isn't concerned about the past and future. AA, as a spiritual organization, isn't concerned about the past and the future. We may study the history, but it's strictly helping the next alcoholic in this present moment. That's where all of its energy is. The next sentence that I thought was very now-oriented was entirely ready to have God remove all our defects of character. we could actually say entirely ready to have God remove everything that connects me to the future or the past. Because those are the things that connect us to the future or to the past, our character defects. So there's a step that is very helpful in moving towards Then in the 12 and 12 and step 11, Bill writes, we may be granted a glimpse of the ultimate reality, God's kingdom. And I don't think he's exaggerating when he says that. When he talks about a glimpse of God's king, he's talking about experiencing conscious contact, experiencing the sense of your own creator being present in your life in that moment. And I think I talked about the promises where we suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we couldn't do for ourselves. Those are moments of having glimpses of this conscious contact and all of those dismantle the separation that Chuck was talking about because the separation is constructed out of a building material called thinking that's the only thing that separates us from God are all the thoughts that we had that we are separate. All the thoughts that we put together that tell us we're a separate person. Because the only way you can exist separate from God is to make up a story that you exist separate from God. That's the only possible way. It's like being underwater and making up a storey or in the air. In other words, it's impossible to be under the water and be in the area but you could go under there and make up a story about it. And if you're a good storyteller, you could actually feel like you're flying instead of swimming. That's how dramatic our story about being separated is. It's that powerful so that we actually feel it. I remember seeing a hypnotist one time just to show you the power of thought. and he had somebody come up. He had a cup full of pencils and he said, take one of these pencils and put it on the table and they did and then he said okay now I'm going to put you in a trance and so on down. He put him in a Trance and he says now when I snap my fingers you're going to wake up and I'm gonna ask you to pick up that pencil but I'm telling you now that pencil weighs 600 pounds and so he snapped the guy comes over he says go get that pencil for him the guy goes over he can't budge it he cannot budge that because his mind told him it weighed 600 pounds now when you see something like that you realize the power of our thoughts to create a very disturbing reality for us to live in And a very scary one. It's a Hollywood plot of the ultimate magnitude where it's impossible for us to believe that it isn't real. Just as that person couldn't believe. Well, of course you can't pick this pencil up. It weighs 600 pounds. No one could. and so you can see what we're up against when we first start on this battle to get out of the story that we made and every human being makes and it also makes us aware of how lucky we are to even be in a group where this is what we're talking about I mean that's what this is why we have meetings it's just amazing that we sit around we were talking a little bit about this when I was having something to eat just to show you the difference before we got to AA if six guys who hadn't seen each other in a while found themselves having lunch or dinner a typical conversation would go something like Jack, what have you been up to? Oh, I finally got my handicap down to six. And we just merged with another corporation and boy, did it work out well for me. And I still got that girlfriend. Boy, she is absolutely amazing. I'm going to Europe next year. Going to see most of Europe and finally got rid of the Jaguar and got a Bentley and whatever it is. and the next person will say well I'm back in graduate school and I'm studying this and you know what it sounds like you go all the way around describing the most favorable things to impress other people that you could think of now we get these guys they all become alcoholics and they get an AA and they've been in AA a number of years and they meet each other and they're having lunch and one of them said Jack, what's going on? Man, I really screwed up last week. I really pulled a boner at work. I had to go make amends to my secretary. It was, wow, boy, but I was just glad to get that out of the way. Oh, I had too make two amends last week and suddenly we're on the total other side of the equation talking about our imperfection, sharing that we're all imperfect and loving it, feeling absolutely thrilled with being able to tell the truth and not impress anyone. Now, sometimes we do exaggerate and we go, you know, well, I made five mistakes last week. Well, I've made seven. We've got to be worse than the other person. So there may be a little exaggeration there. But in general, we're talking spiritually. it just comes freely out of ourselves what a mess I made last week of my daughter's wedding I had to go back and lost my temper over this I mean, what a conversation to lead with and we do it with and when we hear it we go, I could have done that we don't go, well, I'm not like you we go I could've done that and then there's this sharing on this imperfection level What a healthy thing that is to separate us from the ego identity. It's a very big step towards the present moment. So you can see all removal of character defects, all of the things that the program are doing are pushing us towards the current and the present moments, towards God, towards our true self, because all three are the same thing. so it is we think we're not making progress towards it but we are it's almost like we don't talk about humility but we really ought to talk about it more and we really ought to talk more about the fact that I'm getting closer to the present moment as we're working the program this sort of captures that what I've just been talking about in this little story the guy's walking along and there's actually like a cave and a door on the cave and it says The Now. And he goes well I finally found The Now maybe I can get in there. So he walks up and knocks on the door and the voice inside said who's there? And I go oh I'm Sandy Beach. Now come on back when you know the secret. When I know the sacred so I go talk to my sponsor and other spiritual advisors and finally, bingo they give me the answer so I knock on the door and say who's there and I say no one come on in no one is there in other words there's no identity at the door and I can easily go in there's nothing connecting me to an ego identity That Bill would call it in the 12 and 12, a non-entity. You remember that in step three? Turn my life over. Well, I'll become a nonentity, I'm going to be the hole in the donut. Which would be a perfectly spiritual entity, a monentity or a hole in the donut, in other words, God, if I turned everything over, I'd be nothing and that's true. The ego would be nothing and would be home free. So as we're reducing the size of our ego by getting rid of character defects, we're getting closer and closer to the present moment, even though we don't talk about it that way. So you can see we're probably much more familiar with it than we realize if we just keep taking a look at it. Then, this is kind of wild, but sometimes my mind is rather bizarre. Anyway, we're at, is this the Franciscan Center? Yes. And what made me think of spiritual disciplines that have tried to become as spiritual as possible or to get to the now. And the Francincans are certainly one of them. The Jesuits are another one. and if I'm not mistaken the Jesuits become extremely knowledgeable they almost all get Ph.D.'s and are incredible students whereas St. Francis had a different take on all this if you recall St. Francis he believed in depriving himself of everything poverty just help everyone, give your clothes to someone deliberately feel uncomfortable so that you can adjust the pain and not complain. All in an attempt to kill his own ego. And when you read his life story you can see that he really came close. He came so close that people wanted to be near him just to experience the spiritual energy. And the paintings have the birds and and the deer coming out to just be in the energy of St. Francis. And so I said, well, maybe we need something in AA like that. We need an order. And so this is the one I came up with. See if I can get any of you guys to join this order. And I called it the Wilsonian Order of the Present Moment. And I figured Wilsonian, because yeah, Bill Wilson, okay, yeah, I'm going to join. I'm gonna get into Sandy's Wilsonian order of the present moment. So now before you get nervous, I am going to tell you ahead of time, you get to keep all your shit. So we haven't lost the room yet, right? It's not like St. Francis, you can't own anything. I think they even, in some of the monasteries, they just have two days' worth of food supplies, never any more. And then they go out and beg and give that to the poor. So you can see there's a... We're going to really go down to nothing. So in order to get in the Wilsonian order of the present moment, you just have to take the following oath. And this is the oath. Will you abandon and renounce your own personality all of your goals, all of the causes that you're involved in? Will you get rid of all opinions? Will youget rid ofall fears? Will you got ridofall memories of the past? Will yougot ridof all your beliefs? Get rid ofal hope. Get ridofal power to choose. Get ridoffaith. Get rid offall resentments. all desire to know or understand all plans for the future let go absolutely and we can hear the voices what an order I don't think I can join it do not be discouraged none of us are saints we're willing to grow you can see that that would be a lot to give up wouldn't it do you feel the resistance to giving up goals or causes or judgments or opinions those are pretty precious possessions aren't they I'm not going to give up my political opinions well you can't join my order because you have to take this bow if you want to get in here. And so I think that kind of summarizes the reason that we can't get there. And this also could be the oath you take to get close to God, or this could bethe oath youtake to getclose to your true self or the truth or whatever. So these, it's a small list, but it certainly captures the essence of why we're not enjoying the present moment like we're entitled to. And don't forget, we're titled to all of this. This is ours. It's just sitting there as a wonderful gift. This is our true nature. It's our birthright. It's exactly what we were at one time before we made up a story that that's not true and went off on our prodigal son journey, which is really a mental story journey until we hit a bottom of some sort and were lucky enough to be sent in the opposite direction and to have guides that are taking us there. So then I had a few thoughts that are kind of disjointed, but I felt they were connected to the topic. And the first one is, do you believe in God? And the answer is no, I believe in letting go. And you go, wow, I don't know about that one. But letting go is going beyond belief. And I love the phrase, it's beyond belief, you ever heard that phrase? This is amazing. It's beyond belief. So what is beyond belief? Letting go. Because belief creates something that I know. This is what I know, I believe this. Well, do you think there's anything beyond that? Do you think the unknown is beyond anything you can believe? Well, then you have to let go of that belief and then you can experience it. You can't take the belief with you into the now. It can get you there, just like faith can. Faith can get your right up to the edge of the now, but then you have to let go of that and go on in. So you can see hope is the same way. Eventually letting go, and we're letting go of the whole laundry list that I just read, is going to be the ticket in. faith is letting go there's no other need for faith that's what faith is for is to let go you see how different that is it's just a different way of looking at it that's why that's not what it's for it's letting go and that's how God gets in we let go and let God and boy there's part of us that doesn't want to let goes well let go almost I'll just keep a little remember George Carlin and your stuff he did that whole routine about your stuff I gotta have a house to put my stuff in and then when I go on vacation I put some of my stuff in the suitcase but then when i'm at the hotel somebody invites me over for an afternoon so I take some of that little stuff with me when Igo over there and our stuff is ourselves and it's just letting go of all of that then there's this is another way of looking at us as not being separate. There is only life. There is nobody who lives a life. I'm part of life. So in other words, I don't have a life, I'm a part of the life itself. It's another way of ending that separation. There's life and we're all part of it but we don't have a separate one that is ours. We're all part of the total life. Again, that's designed to get rid of our story that my life is separate and it feels so unnatural because we're sitting here going, but I am, I have a life. We've been taught that and we've thought that the whole time. We cannot conceive of ourselves as just being part of life itself. You cannot say why anything happened, just except you can't know. This desire to know is another one of the great ego weapons to use against us. There must be a way of knowing this. There must Be a Way of Knowing God. and it turns out we can't know God but we can experience God and the experience can be experienced but it can hardly be put into words words are so inadequate when we're talking about spiritual things and I thought about a good example of that let's say a friend of yours when you were 20 years old Well, he'd never been drinking. You were trying to describe to him the effects of drinking to talk him into having a drink. And what would you tell him? Well, you feel good. And he'd just go, well, I feel good now. It's impossible to put into words what drinking does to a human being. But if you could get him to take a big slug, he could find out for himself with no words he would have the experience that you were trying to describe but describing what alcohol does to people like you and I is beyond our word capability you just go look just drink this and you'll see what I'm talking about so experience is the word that we're talking about when we're taking about spirituality you experience it and it's damn hard to put it into words but you don't have to see we want once we experience something we want to understand the experience which is a total waste of time why do you want to understand the experience because I like to screw it up I like to ruin the experience by trying to understand it yeah it was just the most wonderful feeling came over me and I tried to figure out what caused it and why it was wonderful, pretty soon it sucked. That was working on understanding something is such a waste of time and yet our intellect is geared for that. Let me figure that out. Let me think about it. Let me try to figure that up. I think, oh yeah, this is, I knew I had a point to make. I haven't made one yet, so we'll keep trying. I guess you'll be the judge of that. It's in the big book where Bill writes, something of great moment is apt to occur. And I got thinking about that great moment. What, you know, and obviously a moment is the now. Something of great movement. Isn't that an unusual choice of words? Something of great moment is about to happen. And when I think of a great moment, some of the great moments we have is getting sober. When you have a moment like that, I would call it a singular moment. It's a moment where second it happens, all of your life is changed. Everything is changed completely by that singular moment. In history, they would talk about the printing press, the atomic bomb, Christ arriving on Earth. I mean, there are moments when we look back and we go, after that moment, everything was different. And I think out in the cosmos, they call them singularities. Certainly the Big Bang was a singularity. I mean... Out of nothing came everything. And black holes, I think they call singularities. Here's a sun that's been burning for 8 billion years and suddenly it's gone. And light can't escape from it. It's an event of such magnitude that things are different from that day forward. And so I got thinking about was there a big bang in AA? was there a moment when from that day forward everything was different than it was the day before and I know I would get in an argument with historians in this room as to which moment in AA history is the big bang and I knew that it would come down to three choices one of the choices would be when Bill was pacing around in the Mayflower Hotel I see some heads nodding That's their big bad. And it occurred to him that he better call another alcoholic, and he did, that he realized he needed help and he needed to be giving help. And certainly that would be one. Another one might be when Ebby was sitting at the kitchen table with Bill, his drinking buddy, and Ebby's blabbing on about religion and all that, And Bill is not having anything to do with the talk that Ebi is issuing. What Bill can't get out of his mind is what Ebi looks like. And he's been transformed somehow, and he keeps staring at it. He doesn't care what he's talking about. And that led him to even try or to reduce his resistance to God just in that instant. So that would be choice number two. And then this is, my choice is the next one because it makes a better story for the lecture. And that would be Bill's spiritual awakening itself, which certainly was something that occurred in a, literally in the moment. Just one minute, it doesn't exist and the next minute, something of incredible magnitude has happened. and what happened in that split second was total freedom from alcohol in an instant the obsession to drink is gone it never comes back the total freedom from alcohol and at the same time as part of this singular event an insatiable desire to show every alcoholic in the world how to have this experience. The pass-it-on phenomenon that was part of that moment. And because of that moment, it is being passed on. It's being passed on all over the world, whatever it is, 140 countries who translated into 60 languages. Three million, three and a half million miracles came out of that moment. Now, if you eliminated time from our thought, the way you would describe the Big Bang is not by saying it occurred 14 billion years ago, you would say it's still happening. It's still happening that singular moment is still happening we're all a result of and part of that moment. It is still going on. Everything that was set in motion in that instant is happening and I would submit to you that Bill's awakening is still happening. That what happened there is still happening through all of us. It didn't happen 73 years ago. It's still happening Now when we look at it that way you can see we've eliminated time and it feels nice. We're part of that moment. That's all. We have no other identity. we're part of that moment we're a part of the obsession being lifted and we're apart of passing it on it's a package deal it's impossible to have a spiritual awakening and keep it the very nature of the awakening is the urgency to pass it on the desire to share it it is there I used to tease newcomers I don't know if it's still true I've lost track of it, but back in the 60s and 70s, when I heard a guy say, you know, I think I'll get a degree in psychology and start helping other addicts and go work in the treatment center. I'd go, you've got about two years, right? And he'd go yeah. And I said, well, three years, that'll go away. And you can move on to something else. this sense that you have something that's precious that has to be handed around is so powerful that you're going to make it your profession. Now, some people actually do that. And I actually remember having that and taking some psychology. You know, I'm going to go out there and I'm gonna do all this. It was part of my own transformation was this desire to pass it on. So I think I'll just wrap it up. I don't know where... That seems like enough time to talk. I think I'll just wrap it up with this what shifted us to see things more in the present moment was the change in perspective and we've been talking about that since I've been here change in how you see things and I'm sure you could feel it when I said we're part of Bill's awakening, that that is still happening through us. It was an event that we're a part of. And it's a new way of looking at ourselves and of time. We're partof that moment. and as long as AA keeps expanding it will be part of that moment it'll be just a moment in the continuation of that instant or you can say it happened 75 years ago and now it's this year and the events that are happening this year are separate they're not connected and once again we put time back in and I don't know For me, it felt very spiritual to think of AA as still happening instead of tracking it every decade. We went through this phase, that phase, this phase as if something different is going on now than what happened in that instant. So maybe those will give you some ideas for questions or whatever. I looked in the question box itself and I didn't see too many. So we've got a lot of hours to kill in answering questions, and so we can either do it by having them written down or we'll sit here until people raise their hands like the Brentwood group. But let's take a 15-minute break and come on back with some questions, okay? Just one second.