Sandy B. Discovered a New Way to Live After His First Spiritual Awakening

Hello again, everybody. My name is Sandy Beach, and I'm still an alcoholic in spite of that dinner. Wonderful dinner. I want to thank the committee very much. I really had a good time over there. So tonight, I've been asked to share some thoughts about our 12 steps, which we all are familiar with, but sometimes it's fun to just kind of go through them and think about them and just have them around. They're such a precious thing in AA, you know, these 12 steps. My eyes light up whenever I just hear the word, the 12 steps, it's like such a beautiful part of our lives, I mean there they are. I think of them as game plan for living to replace the plan that I brought into AA and my sponsor had a way, he had a good way with words expressing this thing and what he did and I do this with anybody that I'm sponsoring who is intellectual you know how we get these intellectual drunks that are thinking faster than we are and explaining and all this kind of stuff I just say we're not going to discuss any theories we're only going to discuss results and your plan for living is not working I mean that was what he was saying to me you're wearing a wristband from a nut ward your family won't speak to you you're getting thrown out of the Marine Corps you're sick you've had the convulsions DTs, your plan for living stinks. That was what you know and my plan didn't really stink as far as I was concerned. I'd had some bad luck. I had had this and I had that but all of my ideas were still valuable as far as I Was concerned you know. And he just wouldn't listen to him. I don't want to hear any of your ideas. Your plan for a living stinks based on its results. And finally I had to admit that it certainly had some drawbacks as far as I was concerned. So then he shifted the focus to AA and he just said, let's look at the results of the 12 steps. We're not even going to discuss the 12 Steps. We are only going to discuss the results. Look at all these people. Listen to their stories. Look a all these AA meetings. Look at AA Worldwide. Look all of that. That is what the results of 12 Step are. So he just compared my land for living with the results of the 12 steps and I finally had to see that there really was a difference in the results and these people were happy they got up to the podium and they just exuded something that was wonderful and there's no doubt that I wanted what they had and I wasn't sure if I was willing to go to any length I'd do a lot of things other than change my mind, that was where I drew the line into I'd go stand on my head in the corner you know all those whatever you want but when it came to changing my mind it was another story and i think for us alcoholics that is one of the tough ones is just change our mind about something there was a guy named charlie bruton many years ago in washington dc area he's since passed away moved down alabama and he was just wonderful and he used to say it's not the things you don't know to kill you. It's knowing things for sure that just ain't so, and that's what I knew. You know, I had lots of stuff that I knew for sure, that turned out to not be true, and a lot of it was about me, God, spirituality, you all, lots of ideas that were wrong. So when I think of the steps, I think of this wonderful gift that was given to us on how to follow a path to a different place than we could ever dream of going. And so in that context, that's how I like to frame the... Hey, Jack, I was hoping you'd show up. That's the context I'd like to framework my thoughts about the 12 steps. And when I think of the 12 steps, I think of two bookends on either end of the steps. And one is in the first step and it's one word. And then the other bookend is in the 11th and the 12th step. And it's kind of the same word. And the word in the beginning is powerless. That that is how we get into the 12 steps is through the word powerless. That is the key word in spirituality. It sets us up for the whole rest of the program. And the other bookends on the other end are conscious contact or spiritual awakening. In other words, we start out being powerless and the whole goal of the 12 steps is over here, which is spiritual awakening, conscious contact, which is sort of the same thing. So what is AA all about? It's about surrendering through powerlessness in order to achieve conscious contact. Because of what use is knowledge about a higher power if there's no contact? If there's not conscious contact inside, it kind of reminds me of when I was going to church as a little kid. I knew a lot about religion and I knew about God and whatever, but I did not have an internal contact. I didn't have a personal conscious contact inside of me. And so it was just an academic exercise in intellectually understanding things, and that's not what the 12 steps are all about. So for those of us that came into AA with all these old ideas and probably ended up being an agnostic or maybe even an atheist and just sort of that God stuff is too confusing, how simple it was to say, well, that's probably all true. But we don't have to resolve that. We just have to deal with the fact that you're powerless. Can you do that? Because if you can do that, you can have a spiritual program. You don't even have to worry about all those old ideas. If you can just be powerless, you qualify and everything will work fine. So we can stop debating all those other things. So what a wonderful way to capture all of us. You know, it's just so beautiful how this all unfolded because it was clearly the hand of God was working through Bill and the early members of Alcoholics Anonymous to have it come out the way it did, to have this be, to choose these words and to have the steps be written in terms of action taken by other people, not in terms of commandments. If we rewrote the steps and said, you shall admit you're powerless over alcohol and that you're pointing the finger like everybody was pointing the figure at us before we got to AA, that vertical relationship that we had with the judges and the police department and everything. We're down there and they're pointing and that was the flow of communication and come into Alcoholics Anonymous, if you're new, you're not even in the steps. It doesn't say a thing about you. It just says, we did this and we did that. And we did, you know, there it is. And then it said, by the way, if you would like what we have, these are the steps that we took. And so it's just, oh, okay. So it's juste that wonderful way. It just happened to get turned out this way. And a lot of it had to do with Bill writing them and circulating them around the groups and the people arguing and fighting. And God, as we understood him, came out of that. And I always said there's one in the big book, if you haven't heard this, it's pure trivia, but somehow it's stuck in my mind, that in Bill's story, at the very end of it, it says that the road to utopia is found here in Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't know if you remember that sentence. It's in the end of Bill's Story in the Big Book. Well, that word utopia was not in the original draft that Bill was circulating around. The word that he had in the initial draft was heaven, the road to heaven. And one of the places that he circulated, he circulate the draft in AA and also outside of AA to doctors, and one of places he sent it was the Catholic Committee on Publications. And they read that, and they read all about the big book, and they said, this is wonderful. You have a wonderful organization. We think everything's fine, but there's one word that we have a little problem with. And that is that this program is the road to heaven because we think we have the road to heaven and we just don't think that that's such a good word. And so they'll change it to utopia as a result of circulating around. But anyway, there was all these various forces had an influence on how the steps are shaped and we are the beneficiaries of all of that, that all that early hammering out. So when we arrive here and our sponsors are working with us and the groups are talking with us, if we focus on powerless and stop worrying about anything else, just see, are you powerless over alcohol? And I think we should spend 50% of the time on the steps, on that word, until the person can take it 100%. Because if you miss out on being powerless, You're not going to get the rest of the program. And Bill writes about this in 12 and 12 in the Big Book. People who've been sober for years are wondering why they're unhappy. Their sobriety isn't what they see in other people. They're not drinking, but they're very unhappy. The program isn't working. Maybe I don't have a good sponsor. Maybe I'm not taking inventory. Maybe I am not meditating enough. And guess what it was? They didn't admit they were 100% powerless when they went through the first step. They said, yeah, I've got problems. I've Got Problems, and I'm close to powerless, but totally 100% powerless. You know what I mean? They just qualified it a little bit, and the rest of the program just didn't work at all. And Bill talks about that in the 12 and 12, that unless we admit defeat, we're not going to do all those other things. Because if you're not totally powerless over alcohol, then the rest OF the steps are optional. You follow what I'm saying? You might need them. Now, people who are powerless, they desperately need it. You know what I am saying? So if you are almost powerless and you almost need a higher power, you almost needs a sponsor, you almost really need to do the steps, you almost needed this, and you will almost get sober. Which is like almost having a parachute. You know, I almost took one of those. it's like nothing. You know, half measures of ale is nothing, so you end up with zero. So admitting you're 99% powerless over alcohol is the same as saying, I might as well keep drinking. So the first step is hammered and hammered until we can go 100% and see that we're powerless. And I always talk longer on the first steps than probably anything because it is... If we don't do that, 100%, the rest of it just isn't going to work. And when we say we're powerless, and I say this in case there's new people here, that the real part of alcoholism that kills us, the fatal part of alcoholismo, occurs when there's no alcohol present. Now, you know, did you ever think about that? That the part that kills us occurs when there's no alcohol anywhere when you're totally sober and you know you're an alcoholic. You have been totally informed if you drink again, you will die. And your boss said, if you drank again, you're going to lose your job. And the doctor said, one more drunk, that liver is going to explode. And you're wife or your husband said, One more drunk. You're out of the house. I'm divorcing you you're gone so now there's no alcohol anywhere and we are operating at 100 we are torqued up we're going god i gotta i'm an alcoholic my life depends totally on me staying sober now you're not in aa you know what i mean we're not talking but we're just saying this is an alcoholic and he's in the bar explaining this to his bartender i'm a alcoholic i am an alcoholic if i have another drink jesus joe yeah this is serious i'm gonna i'll tell you what's gonna happen to me my ulcer is gonna go and if i am if i ever had a drink and my wife she's could have a beer and my life is going to divorce me if i die yeah thanks and if and my boss And right there, knowing everything there is to know about our situation, we're powerless over alcohol. That's what powerless means. It means you're powerless when you're totally sober and you know everything there ist to know about alcoholism. You still will take the first drink because you're powerless over not drinking. If the only problem was when you drink, you get everything is all screwed up, all you'd have to do to solve that problem is not drink. And then everything would be great. But for us alcoholics, when we don't drink, that's when everything's rotten. Oh my God, I'm sober again. Why did I drink? To get relief from sobriety. That's why I drank. I couldn't stand being sober. I knew that's what AA was. You stay sober for the rest of your life and just go, 40 more years of feeling like this? No way. So it's a strange thing. Being powerless means no human power can relieve your alcoholism. And I was talking earlier about Dr. Young. We were talking about the traditions, and when Roland Hazard went to see Dr. Jung, the psychiatrist, you know, and then Roland HazARD passed the message to Ebi Thatcher and Ebi passed it to Bill Wilson. But there was a great thing about Roland. his father was a millionaire and he sent his son there who he wanted to inherit the business he couldn't get him sober he tried everything in the United States and he kept getting drunk so he sent him to Dr. Young he spent a year with Dr. Jung in Switzerland and at the end of the year Dr. Yang said I have done everything I can to cause this massive personality change personality displacement we call it spiritual awakening and I think I've done it and if we've done that and you're going to be alright just don't drink and have a new outlook on life. And Roland left to come back to the United States and go as far as Paris, and somebody asked him the wrong question. They said, would you like a drink? He said, yeah, I'd love a drink. And all of a sudden he's drunk, and he's back to Dr. Young. Now think about this. Where we got no human power could have relieved our alcoholism. He said to Dr。Young, what are we going to do? And Dr.Young looked at... The best psychiatrist in the world looked at this millionaire and said, there's nothing I can do for you. So he symbolized no human power because it's hard to go beyond Dr. Young. I mean, when you think about it, that was all the power in one person being the best psychiatrist knowing all there is about how to treat someone like this who says to him, there is nothing I Can Do For You. however, I have read about people who have sought a spiritual experience and they have been able to get this massive personality change and I suggest you look for something like that and Roland went and found the Oxford Movement which gave him this profound personality, spiritual change and then when Evie got arrested he had one phone call to make and he called Roland And then when Ebi got sober, then he wanted to go see how his buddy Bill Wilson was doing and pass the word to Bill, and the rest is history. So we have this in our history, you know, that that's what powerless means. No human power. There's no way that you are going to go through the rest of your life without getting drunk. And if you get drunk again, then all the rest OF that stuff is going to happen. That's what the first step does. And so there's not much hope in the first Step. When you finish taking the first STEP, you ought to be going, oh it's much worse than I thought it was you know what I mean it's like wow oh my god and if that happens that's good news that is good news because you know in the spiritual world everything is paradoxical and it's backwards and so that is wonderful news that you got terrified by the first step because now you have an open mind and Bill Rice said in the 12 and 12 we become as open minded as only the dying can become unless you accept the fact that this is fatal and it's going to kill you, not the gal next to you. But you, then we're not open-minded. So suddenly the rest of the steps are very important. Before that they were interesting. You know what I mean? Very interesting stuff. Now they are the lifeline to staying alive and they suddenly become much more important in our lives all as a result of powerless. So see how important that word is in starting us on our sobriety. Once we can get through that, then we can start the process of changing our mind about a higher power, which is what the second step is, came to believe that a power greater than ourselves. So now we really need one, so we're going to have to change our mind about how important a higher Power is, and this, depending on where we came from, is a very difficult process. You know, changing the mind for alcoholics in the beginning is like turning the Queen Mary around in the Potomac River. When you get ready to change your mind, you call a press conference. I am going to change my mind. It only happens once in a lifetime. I want everyone here to hear me. I am changing my mind, I am an alcoholic. You know what I mean? It's like, wow, it's just unbelievable what I just did. and then we find out the rest of sobriety is finding every single place that we could possibly change our mind. All the rest of our sobriete is looking, what else am I wrong about? What else? What else? Before we came to AA it was what else is the world wrong about? They're wrong, they're wrong and now we're finding all we want to do, what else is wrong? I'm going to get rid of it, get ridofit, getridofit and the more we get rid of old ideas that are wrong the freer we are and we start going up. And it all starts here with changing our mind about a higher power. In the 12 and 12 chapter, I mean the big book, the chapter of the agnostic, there's that wonderful line in the beginning, sort of the Jack Benny type situation and there's like two doors that you come up to when you come to the second step. If you read it in the big books, it says door number one, to live on a spiritual basis or to die an alcoholic death not always easy alternatives to face so here you are you've just admitted you're totally powerless and now you were marched up and here's two doors and you have to choose one live on a spiritual basis well we're not going to choose that one what's the other one die an alcoholic death wow you talk about two crappy choices is there a door three somewhere besides living on a spiritual basis? I mean, we all know what that would be like. What, Mother Teresa? I'm over there. I got no credit card. I never go to the Bahamas. Whoa, whoa. I don't want to do anything to do with spiritual basis. I'm going to do spiritual basis when I'm 80. I'm gonna straighten out at the last second, slide into heaven. But in the meantime, I want to have some fun. I mean you know there's no action on the spiritual path. I don't want to get on there I just came here to stop drinking what the hell are you talking about so yeah but do you want this story you pick up the phone talk to your doctor how bad is an alcoholic death I don' t want to make a snap decision here and so lo and behold we choose the spiritual path by default there wasn't anywhere else to go and then later on we're at the podium And then I chose the spiritual path, you know, like we're some sort of a spiritual giant. We didn't have anywhere else to go. We had to go down this damn thing, kicking and screaming. We had no interest in it. We had studied the 12 steps. We looked at them. I talked about this earlier in the traditions, that if you're new, you're going to find that spirituality is very paradoxical and nothing that you read about it will teach you anything. You just know a lot of words. You read all the steps, and it just doesn't make any sense. I remember looking at the steps. Where's the one for money? I got a money problem. None of those. Well, I'm getting divorced. How about a relationship? Where's that? There's no relationship step. Oh, I'll get thrown out of the Marine Corps. I need a job. Where's this? Where's my job step? I knew what my problems were, and I knew What the answers to my problems look like, and they weren't in the steps. You can look in there and you show me the answer to anything in there. It's all mumbo jumbo. It has no connection to me. That's true. That's what it looks like because spirituality doesn't look like it should work any more than booze looks like it should be. It should work. You ever think about that? Somebody says, you don't know how to dance? Drink this. What? Yeah. You drink this glass and you will be able to go over and ask her to dance. You'd say, what, there's dancing lessons in this? Now you could go to your grave and never touch that whiskey and say there's no such thing as there being dancing instructions inside that glass, right? Because you never tried it. And no one could prove that there was dancing instructions in that glass of whiskey. But by God, if you drank it, like most of us, you would intuitively know how to cha-cha-cha because of the power of alcohol. And so this is what the steps are all about. What are the steps trying to solve when you think about it? What is the problem steps are trying to resolve? We just said the word, powerlessness. Only what can solve powerlessness? Not education, not being smart. You can't learn your way out of powerlessness, there's only one thing, power. All we have to do is follow a path that will produce power in our lives, and we call this higher power. And then we have taken care of the problem of powerlessness. We have a power greater than ourselves that can take care of The Dilemma of being powerless over alcohol. We can't. We canít do that, but the steps can. And only us can do the steps. So no way we can stay sober, but weíre the only ones who can stay sobre. You know, it's paradoxical again. The third step talks about that with willpower. So in the second step, we finally go through this great process of changing our mind, came to believe that a power is gradual. Finally, we just accept the idea that there is something beyond ourselves that can restore us to sanity, and we're ready when we do that to make a commitment to the AA program. It's like making a commitment to go to college or make a commitment to get a Ph.D. or make a commitment to join the Marine Corps. And you make the decision and finally you sign up. And the third step is where you sign up. You say, this is it. I am making a commitment to turn my whole life over to these steps. Now, it doesn't get turned over. Sometimes there's a misconception about the third step, made a decision to turn our will and our lives over the care of God. It says made a decision to do it, like making a decision to go to college. You don't get your degree when you make your decision to go to college, you get it four years later. You make a decision, do all that work to get a degree. And in the third step, you're making a decision to be a Christian. You're making the decision to do all the work to get your life turned over. I thought it got turned over in the third step. Just turn it over, turn it over. Everything spiritual, I go up in the bedroom and I'd get up in front of the mirror and I go, you got it? You know, I'm trying to turn it over. This is the way I thought it was done. You just sort of go, you got It? You know they say, go turn your life over. So I'd go, I don't know if anybody else had this problem but I said, I like the idea but I'm not sure I know what the hell I'm doing. I mean that was the feeling I had. You got It. And then I'd go, but I still feel just like I did. You got it, you got IT, you got I and I still felt and nothing was really happening. You know what I'm saying? Please, God, take it, take it, and then I go down and I just go, hmm, I'm not sure if this works. Well, it's just not going to happen that simple. There's a lot blocking me. We turn out, there's a lot of things that are blocking me from having my life turned over. It's like making a decision to leave the gutter. You know, us alcoholics, We end up in the gutter, and there's 100 ropes tying us there. So we untie 99 of them. And we ain't leaving the gutters. You know what I mean? There's still one holding us there, and so this decision is a decision to do the rest of the steps, and it talks about willpower at the end of the third step. It's very interesting because in AA you hear, can't stay sober on willpower, and that statement is absolutely true and false. It's absolutely true and false there's it's true in that you cannot use your willpower as an alcoholic to just say i will never drink again and i will do it on my willpower so it's true you can't stay sober on willpower but the only way you can work the steps is through your willpower because working the steps will get us the power to stay sober it takes willpower to go to a meeting it takes a little power to call a sponsor it takes little power to take an inventory it takes real power to pray it takes wheel power to meditate So willpower is the only way to achieve spirituality, which gets us the power to stay sober. So in that sense, willpower Is the key to sobriety. But you can't stay sober on willpower, you know what I mean? So it's a paradoxical thing, but Bill covers that, that willpower's absolutely essential in working the steps to get the power to stay sober. So now we're willing, we've gone and do the work, and we find that there's a big obstacle between us and a higher power, and it is character defects. I like to call them blockages because it's a more neutral word. It doesn't have a moral thing. You are being blocked. I'm being blocked from access, from contact with my higher power by character defects, and that's what we're going to inventory in the fourth step. We're going make a searching and fearless moral inventory of the things blocking me from my higher power so if you think about that's all it is we're trying to find out what is it in you that is blocking you and the second thing about the fourth step that i've always found comforting is that i didn't create these things that the lo and behold bill writes about character duties is that they all come from instinctual drives that are born in everybody everybody's born with these instinctual drives for sex security and a place in society that's they just come from heaven that's what gives the raw energy to cause human beings to reproduce and to go out and work and to co-become something you have this raw energy and so those drives are very important to survive as a human being it's like the steam in a steam engine it has a fire you know the locomotives and they shovel all the coal in well that cold that hot fire under there is absolutely essential to drive the steam engine but if you ever kept shoveling it even when the gauge said red line don't put the heat up anymore that same raw power could blow the train up you just blow this steam engine right apart and that would be a misuse of the raw energy of the steam engine well our instinctual drives if they're out of control can be our enemy so they're supplying us with all the force that we live need to live as a human being but they can also destroy us when they're under control so when sex or power or greed or anger or resentment any these forces are out of control then they become destructive even though they're absolutely necessary for us to live as human beings and there's a process that human beings go through that none of us knew a thing about prior to coming to AA that puts these forces in balance there's a way of harnessing these instinctual drives that were born with and this process that none of us do anything about is called growing up this is what regular people go through and they become grown-ups and a grown-up is a person who has balance in their lives and has achieved some sort of relationship with these instinctual drives alcoholics are not in that league before we come to a you do not hear people say you know one thing about out New alcoholics, they're really grown up. We haven't got a clue what that means until we get in here. And so that's what the fourth step is. It's inventorying all these drives that have gotten out of whack. And we have the great thing in the big book about the resentments and I'm resentful at the institutions, principles, and people so that we can see how our life is dominated by the world around us and how absolutely painful it is to exist inside of us, and no wonder we're seeking relief from alcohol. I mean, going out there, I need a break from all this turmoil that's going on inside of me. So we're seeing it in alcohol. So that fourth step is really important. We write it out, and we have this tremendous assessment of ourselves that's done fearlessly and honestly. And then we have the fifth step. And you go, geez, what do I need that for? I've done this thing. it's a wonderful honest total assessment of myself and lo and behold one of the things that's probably on everybody's four-step list is rationalization most alcoholics rationalize so bad it's unbelievable well if you rationalize all the time how do you know this list is worth anything I mean if that's your specialty that whole list could be phony baloney you just rationalized around and did all this so we have a process where we're going to put a third dimension on that list and it's called admitting to god to ourselves and another human being what this list is and going with another human Being is like putting the third dimension when I was a photo pilot we used to need two photos of the same thing slightly off you know from a slightly different perspective and you could see the third Dimension you could measure height and depth if you had two views of the same thing. And that's why the fifth step is so important. We get another human being that looks at this same thing and we can start putting, this is more serious, this less, this nothing. We could never see that. It turns out we can never see the truth about ourselves alone. We always need. And Bill writes, people of very high spiritual development always insist on checking with others the spiritual thoughts that they've had. So we learn how important it is to have this close person that we share and there's almost many promises out of the fifth step if you look in the 12 and 12 when we go through this and finally get a perspective on ourselves that we've never had before we walk out of there and we just go whoa i'm really on my way to sobriety i'm almost through the program i've got the worst is over and i'm ready to rock and roll and we come to a step it says this is a little step we'll separate the men from the boys and today we'd writing the gals from the ladies or the little girls from the grown-up women. It would be in there, you know, here's this little step, the sixth step. We're entirely ready to have God remove these defects of character. And you just look at that and you go, I don't see it a big deal. And, you Know, back, I'm sure when Bill wrote the 12 and 12, one of the things he was wanting to do was to amplify what he wrote in the big book on the 6th and 7th. You just have this little couple sentences, you now, we're entirely ready, we just have to have this attitude and say a little prayer on the seventh step, and you're on your way to making a list of the people you had harmed. And then you go to the 12 and 12, and all of a sudden he's writing, this is the step, the sixth step. It separates, and You go, what the devil are we talking about? Well, when you look at it, it suddenly becomes apparent. We're entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. All these defects Of character. Now, if you had all your defects the character removed, you would be like a saint. And the mere thought of being a saint makes me nervous. I mean, you know, a saint? I just want to stop drinking. I didn't come in here to become a spiritual giant. I just wanted some sort of middle-of-the-road happiness. You know, don't get me going in this have God remove all these defects. I mean what if God took away all lust? Don't you think that's an extreme, don't you think like it might be safer to get rid of ninety percent and just I mean that could be I don't know what it would be I mean you know it's it's what if he took away and made me a hundred percent honest. I mean she how are you going to get ahead in business? I mean, you know so as we think about it And Bill writes about this in 12 and 12. We tend to settle for as much perfection as will get us by. You know what I mean? I really do want to improve about to here. God, what I'd really like is make me semi-lustful, semi-honest. You know What I mean. Just make me a pretty good guy. Sort of. And you know, and I have sort of a picture of what this would be. I have an honest reputation. That's good enough. Why be honest? If you have an honest reputation, that should be sufficient. And then you have the discretion, if you have to skizzle somebody once in a while, I mean, you know, so here we are. You know, we're trying to shoot angles all the time and I did not come here to become a saint. I just wanted to stop drinking and this is extreme. This step is perfection and therein lies the dilemma and we really don't want to shoot for that but there's one problem the only help that's available is perfect help and that's where this step becomes such a challenge you know there's a story I used to tell about the little kid with the toothache he was the athlete in grammar school and his coach told him to get 8 hours sleep before the big game and that night he went to sleep and at 2 o'clock in the morning and he woke up, and he had a little toothache starting. He knew if he called his mother, she would give him two aspirin, he'd go right back to sleep. But he didn't. He said, I'm going to wait and see if it goes away. And he waits, and stays awake. And like two and a half hours later, he calls his mother. She gives him the aspirin. He goes back to bed. He goes to sleep, but he does lousy in the game because he didn'T get a good night's sleep. The question is, why didn'T he just call his mother? Just get the two aspirins, go back to sleeping. And the reason was he knew his mother and he knew she WOULDN'T stop with two aspirine. She would go, oh, a toothache. Well, we're going to make a dental appointment and then we're gonna go see the dentist and while I'm at the dentist, he's gonna look at every tooth in my head and I'll have appointments until I have perfect teeth. I don't want perfect teeth, I just want two aspirin to go back to sleep. You see what I'm saying? But the only choice of help he had was the whole nine yards and the only help we have from a higher power is perfect health. Do you want absolute release from alcoholism? And this is the dilemma that Bill writes about. Why are we willing to become entirely willing to have alcohol removed, and it's so hard to become entirely ready to have everything else removed? And he said that's a human dilemma we may never understand, but it may be that alcoholism is fatal and we can see it while all these other things, greed and lust and envy and resentment, they may be ultimately fatal, but they're not quite as fatal as alcohol is and it's harder to become entirely ready so it becomes a lifetime job that we can get as ready as we can and then we continue as we grow on in sobriety to find something else that we're willing to get rid of and to really have God remove. Then in this, well I've got to speed up, in the seventh step these two are just very important and eight and nine go fairly quick and 11 and 12 go fairly quick 10 we'll take some time on but we will stop at 8 because I know we just had dinner 8.05 coming to the 7th step right out of this thing where we're hit with geez, this really involves becoming more than I thought I remember discussing with my sponsor he said all you have to do is stop drinking I said okay, okay and I've been sober a while and he says I also think you ought to stop embezzling down, you know, from the small change over at work. What is this, embezzlers anonymous? I thought this was not drinking. He says, I just think you're going to have to do that. And he said, okay, so I'm going to give up embeZZling and drinking, you know, and then he said if you want your marriage to keep going, you're going to stop having affairs. Oh, is this affairs anonymous? You know, like all I wanted to do was not drink and then this and then this and this. Then I found out it's a two-step program. All you have to doing is don't drink and change everything there is about you those are the that was that was all there was there was always something else to be worked on it was just it went on forever thank god because everything we change frees us to enjoy life even more so here we come to this humility situation in the seventh step very simple thing we're going to ask god to remove these blockages and we're but we really have finally gotten the willingness and so on down. So the question involved here is, what's the difference between regular asking and humbly asking? You know what I mean? You go up to your room and you go, I don't want God to get... God, would you please remove my defects of character? That's regular asking. Now we want to go up there and humply ask. And as Bill writes, humility is not a popular word. You don't see, drink this beer, become humble. Drive this car. People will think you're real humble if you're driving this car. I mean, it wouldn't sell anything. The word is not a big word in the United States. Humble. And yet we're coming into AA and they're saying humility is just a very key thing. And so what has this got to do? You know, humbly asked. And I think it has to do with understanding the fine print in the seventh step. It's real easy to say hey, I would like God to remove these defects of character because we don't understand what's involved. But when we think about it, we are saying we would like to have God's will take place in our life instead of my will. That's what we're really saying. Now, I don't know about you, but all of my problems, when I think about them, could be reduced to one problem, not getting my way. When you think about It, No matter what your problem is, if you cut down to it, it's because something isn't going your way. It's very, to not get my way is very painful. You know, when something doesn't go my way, you know, they promote the guy next to you. She leaves you. It cost 20 times what you thought it was going to cost. Now you've got no money left over. You know things are not going your ways. It's pretty painful and we're saying I would like to totally not get my way. That has to be up on a threshold of extreme pain to not get me my way and that's what the seventh step is talking about. I'm going to humbly ask, I understand that this is going to hurt and I still want to do it I still wanna do it and it does it's kind of like if you're out of shape and you wanna get back in shape the first month or so your muscles ache everything aches and you just go i'm never getting out of shape again you know what i'm saying and then the exercise becomes just effort and it's not pain and the same thing with spirituality when we first start it really is painful to not get our way and to try and have the discipline to have a spiritual program compared to just going with whatever we want it to be doing. And so the seventh step is saying, now that it's been fully explained to you, do you still want to do it? And if we can say yes, then we have done this in a very humble way. I understand the tremendous importance of having a higher power compared to having my way. And I want to go ahead because I understand the allness of God and the nothingness of self, which is really what humility is all about, is to understand there's no such thing as God and me, like two separate things. It's just God. And I want to be in contact with God. The only part of me that's not in contact with God is my ego. My ego lives separate. It created an identity that I'm this and that and this and that, and it's all just stuff in my head that I made up and I put together. But the real me, my spirit and my soul, my essence is connected to a higher power but i can't feel it because my ego doesn't want me to it doesn't wants to have its own power it resents the idea that i'm going to go turn my life over to a high power whoa well i'm not doing a bad job believe me you know and so there's big struggle going on but you know you go over that spirituality you guys it's going to be boring stick with me action action action you know oh oh you know we're torn back and forth between the spiritual life and the material life, and that's part of the problem of being a human being. These steps are accentuating the focus so we can see the struggle that we're going through, and I think that's what the seventh step is about. Eight and nine is getting us ready to live a day at a time. The tenth step is our day-at-a-time thing, but it's very difficult to live a day-a'-time and drag the 80s with you, which are all the things you did while you were drinking in the 80's and all the people you don't want to run into and all the embarrassments and all that, and you're just going, just live a day at a time. Yeah, I am. I don't want to see that guy. It's free enough to live a Day at a Time. You may think it's a great idea, but you can't do it because you're not free from the past yet. So you can'T live in the now and still be connected to the past, and so the eighth and ninth step are the way of settling with the past to the best of our ability, and we do that by making a list of all the people we'd harm, become willing to make amends, and we study what harm is and we learn that harm is much more than just punching somebody in the nose. It's any way that we are out of harmony with the people around us. Harmony is a big word that Bill uses in our steps, living in harmony. You know what harmony means? It means learning how to sing a different note according to the note that someone else is singing. But as alcoholics, we knew one note, and guess what that was on the scale? Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do. me that was the note that we knew when we just came into the room we just went me and then if people could get in harmony with that then we had harmony but if we uh and if they were having a problem getting in harmony avec us we told them more about me until they could really understand me and dann they that's what i thought communicating was just telling you more about me and than once you knew everything then you could do stuff so it would be in harmony I didn't see any problem, but the world didn't really like that plan. And as a result, there was disharmony everywhere I went. And Bill writes that we brought out the worst in people. That our self-centeredness, our alcoholism, our cheating and lying brought out to worse than people. So if our self centeredness brought out at the worst than people, that means wherever we went, people were behaving at their worst. So our world was a bad world to live in. You know what I'm saying? My sister told me that this one guy who was coming to my parents' 50th wedding anniversary, who I thought was such a jerk, and I told her, I said, please don't invite him. An uncle. Said he's so abusive, abrasive, blah, blah. You know What she said? And I had to believe her because she was in AA 12 years at that time. She said, he only does that when you're around. I went, what? no when you're not here he is happy delightful he's he's just a wonderful guy and i could not believe it i couldnot believe it but i had to believe her so i said okay i'm gonna go up and i'm going to treat him like he's my best friend and i really like him and everything and i did and he was wonderful he was absolutely wonderful so it showed me that i generate the behavior in all the people out there so if i can learn in the eighth step how i harm people then i can learn how to not harm them how to live in harmony with them so making a list of all the harm that i've done is laying the groundwork for me living a tenth step in a much different way and so it's a very important step in addition to doing the ninth step to make some retribution um so that we feel better about ourselves we now have no one that we're afraid to see so we make direct amends unless it's going to hurt those people or others we cannot buy peace of mind at someone else's expense and so when I go out and take the courage to do a ninth step making amends wherever I can find these people if I owe them money owe them apology owe them some sort of a thing and I was told and it was suggested to me that um I I said well how do I what do I do when I'm going to talk to one of these people my sponsor why don't you try the truth hmm that's sort of a novel thing try the truth you know so what is the truth the truth is i'm an alcoholics anonymous i'm an aa i'm doing the 12 step of alcoholics autonomous i'm on the ninth step and you're on my list and i'm here to make amends for stuff i've done so that i can stay sober it's very important that i come in and talk to you about this you know i said i never would have thought of that i would have come up with some happened to be in the neighborhood thought i'd come up and you know make up some goddamn story and the guy would be going what was he in here for you know what do you have a spiritual awakening on the street out there i mean it would leave him wondering and so that was always helpful and then not going in alone that stop before you go in and get your higher power with you go into the ladies room in the men's room say the serenity prayer higher power can you come with me while i make this amend because we are doing it with great dignity. We are not in there bowing and all feeling down and out. We're in there with great dignity. We are a spiritual person doing the right thing. This is the right things to do, to go see this person, make an appointment, and say, I would like to make an amend for something and do it with greater dignity, with your higher power. You can almost feel like you come up when the secretary's out there. Would you tell Mr. Brown that we're here to see him and, you know, it's just me and my higher power. This is something to be done with great dignity and if they throw you out of the office, it doesn't matter. You have done, we have done what we're supposed to do and it'll all straighten out later. The point is, we've done it. Having settled with the past the best that we can, we come to the great step of limited data time in the 10th step. Continue to take personal inventory when we're wrong. Promptly admitted it. And you read the 12 and 12, you find out what is the point of a day. Now, you look in there and you know, here's what I think it says. The point of spirituality in living a perfect day. What is a day well lived? And when you read in the 12 and 12, it says a day Well-Lived is one where you do not get disturbed. There it is. You cannot go beyond that. You go through a whole day without getting disturbed. So when you want to see a game plan for how to live a day without getting disturbed, you read the 10th step. And it talks about four-part plan for being undisturbed. If you think about things ahead of time, you really can get undistURBED. You can really increase your chances of not following the old habit patterns of getting disturbed. Like if people cut you off in traffic disturb you all the time, before you go out of the house, just say, I'm going to allow people to cut me off today. come on in as they come around pull in babe it's a free day it's a free date just cut cut cut hey anymore cutter offers that come on and come on and you just beat it you just beat it. You just allowed these people to be wrong ahead of time and that is called in the 10th step oh my god give me those seven after it's called self-restraint it's called self restraint the development of self restraint is the key to the tenth step it is something to be prayed for could I please have from my higher power a ten second cushion between me and the world so that when things happen that disturb me I have ten seconds to allow the disturbance to go way up to here and then come back down to here before i do anything before i say those words that i wish i hadn't said before i give him the finger before i really wish i had before i give my kid that dirty look that he'll remember when he's 35 could i have 10 seconds so that it goes and then comes back down and i go okay self-restraint so that i can have that pray for it ask for self- restraint and I want to cushion when I go out today. Get up in the morning. God, be with me. Give me the 10 seconds. Let me have that because my whole goal today is to go out and try and be in harmony with the people, me. I want it to be a good day and I'm going to be flexible to get in harmony with them and I don't want to be and I won't be and I'll be flexible to get through the day undisturbed. So now comes the rest of it and it says if we find that we are getting disturbed then we've got to do something right away and one of them is an honest analysis of what's wrong. What is this? We all know we can feel it We can feel it when something is disturbing us. And maybe it's because somebody's doing something that's absolutely obnoxious. They're being abrasive at work and all that. If that's the case, then we forgive them. We just go, well, they're probably having a bad day, and I can see that, so I'm going to let them go or just do that. If it turns out that I have caused this friction or whatever it is, I'm gonna make an amend immediately. And when I'm wrong, I'm gunna promptly admit it. All of this is done to return me to a state of not being disturbed. And you know in the tenth step, that's where that spiritual axiom is. If something disturbs me, no matter what the cause, there's something wrong with me. Not with them, with me, what's wrong with be? I'm disturbed! That's what's wrong with me! I'm all upset because you said that. What if I could get you un-upset? Would it be okay if they said that? of course it would the only thing that's bothering us is being upset I never thought of the other side of the equation if I could find a way of being undisturbed while everybody did all these other things it would be okay for them to do all those things and that's what this step is saying all we want to do is focus on me getting undisturd and so we have that, we have the spot check inventory then we have end of the day inventory when we review our day and look over how we might have done something better, review how we might do better the next day in terms of not getting disturbed. Now, when we're not disturbed and we're out interacting with the society at large, we bring out the best in people. And when we bring out the rest of the world, we bring up the best in people, the world that we live in changes. And we like the world that we live in. People are straightening out. And it's comfortable to be out there. And we are causing it all. We are causing the behavior and the feedback by ourselves. And so no wonder as sobriety progresses, we enjoy it so much more because the world itself appears to be changing and it is all because of us working on not changing them but on changing ourselves. That's why this tenth step is so beautiful. Continue to take personal inventory of me. What's causing the disturbance? Let's get undisturbed and then I can move on with harmony. We're much more efficient things occur to us. It's just beautiful The 11th step the main thing I want to say about the 11th. Step is That the biggest problem most of us have is our mind You know what? I'm talking about it's up there. I don't know what it's doing up there, but I'm I'm trying to have a nice day I'm trying to just sit and look at the ocean or whatever. This thing's up here. What are you doing looking at the Ocean? You ought to be worried about those people over there. You haven't got enough money in the bank account. You oughta be making a couple of more sales calls. You're really a rotten son of a gun. Your mother was right. You really were brought up a little kid. Hey, would you guys give me a break up there? There's a process called prayer and meditation that is specifically designed to interrupt this racket. And to give us peace, you know, and say peace of mind, I call it peace from mind. And achieving that freedom from your own mind is fantastic because when that mind can get quieted, the channel between me and my higher power is open. You know, that little voice is there, but this other stuff is making such a racket, I can't hear it. and so through this practice and that's what prayer and meditation takes a lot of practice number one it takes our thinking look at the prayer of St. Francis in the 12 and 12 Lord make me a channel of thy peace where there is hatred I may bring love where there's discord I may bringing harmony where there error I can bring truth you know all these things let me understand rather than be understood all these things I read that and I just go that's the most amazing thoughts you know something I never would have had any of those thoughts on my own that's not stuff that races into my mind maybe a channel i'm out there i'm going to get that guy i got to get that because i'm operating at this level the material level that's where we were all trained to operate these words are at the spiritual level the intuitive level you know when it says we'll intuitively know how to handle situations that's the level that we want to operate at all of us have that in us this is just at a different frequency than you know howto tune in right now but it's if you can operate at the intuitive level you are functioning as a human being with 100% less stress and effort than you are right now so the efforts that we make in prayer and meditation are designed to get us to that level Bill called it the fourth dimension of existence we were catapulted well he had that big experience but later on he had to work for it through this prayer and mediation to open this channel. So that's exactly what it is. And I want this channel, not for selfish reasons, so that I create harmony in the world. You know, so that I bring this and I bring that. So it's always unselfish. But by being unselflish, we have the best possible life. We're talking about the paradox in the traditions that this is really selfish to be unselfdish because it's the best thing that can happen to us. And so prayer meditation and he suggests we go to libraries go anywhere it's not conference approved Bill suggests we get books on meditation find something that you can connect with that you really like I'm in a little church guided meditation down in Tampa I like going with a group of people who sit for 30 or 40 minutes and people read something it just helps me to keep the discipline of this but this is an individual adventure That's what it says in the 12 and 12. Prayer and meditation, individual adventure. Whatever you find that works for you is going to be great. And wrapping it all up in our 12th step is having had a spiritual awakening, having had this personality change that takes place because of all the hard work in this, we try to carry this message and practice these principles in all our affairs. And that's what we're doing when we move on out beyond AA and try in every aspect of our life to bring these principles to bear so that in business transactions, in social transactions, in family matters, we try to bring those principles in and see what results we get from our lives. Thank you for the time. I know I ran over a little bit. It's been a great pleasure to be with you all, and Godspeed in your sobriety. Thank you. Thank you very much.