Sandy B. on Fear, the Marine Corps, and the Al-Anon Lady Who Stopped Him From Running

There we go. Yeah, can we move that closer? Is that okay? Thanks. Morning, everybody. My name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic. It's not that my knees are bad, I just like sitting on bar stools. Anyway, I'm very honored to be here in the middle of all this spiritual energy and listen to the speakers and presenters. It's really very moving. And I've known for a long time that there's great AA in Texas, and I've known a lot of the great Texas AA-ers. And I'm glad to be here. When I think about Alcoholics Anonymous I get goosebumps that this society exists on planet Earth like an oasis and it just expands by one alcoholic talking to another there's no real plan other than God's plan and when it's time to go in the next country it goes there and then pretty soon it gets translated and then it just keeps moving and I don't think when we looked at the very beginning we could have dreamed that this could have happened and and it did and it finally got me in 1964 and it dragged me in. And I fell in love the first night. I was very sick. I was an outpatient from a mental ward and shook and was frightened and I had been drinking even as an out-patient and they knew, I knew they were going to catch me and throw me out of the Marine Corps, and I somehow just dialed AA on this Sunday. Back in those days you didn't go to a meeting, you were taken by your sponsor. You called and then they sent you someone to your house. He came, a great big guy named Bill Terwilliger. He was my sponsor for 42 years. And all I remember him saying was, get in the car. That's all I remember. And I went there to the Manassas group and it was a group anniversary and it went on forever. I had been sober three hours when the meeting started and I was sober eight hours when the meeting ended, and they had group anniversaries. They had turkey and ham, and I wasn't eating anything, and I just shook, and people were so happy with sobriety, and then they had square dancing after it was over, fiddle players, and old Charlie Lyndon was a member out there, the Arkansas Traveler. Some of you may remember old Charlie. And I at one point decided to leave. Nobody was paying attention to me. I was snuck out on the porch and it was sleeting. There were no street lights. It was just like, I don't remember exactly. It was an odd fellows hall and I couldn't tell which way to run. It just was confusing. And an Al-Anon lady named Betsy Lynch came up and put her hand on my shoulder and I turned around and I looked like an angel and she said, come on back in, it's going to be fine. And it was, and it's been fine ever since. And so my hat's off to Al-Anon from the first second that I got here. I'm going to talk a little bit about my story, but I like talking about our society more than anything. And, uh, so I'll try and do it in ten minutes, the brief version of a crash. And I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut in 1931. My parents went through the Depression and survived. They were really just positive outlook. I have one sister. She has 31 years in AA now. While I'm doing statistics, I have six children and 15 grandchildren and two daughters in AA and one grandson in AA. So I've got three generations covered. I hope you're all doing your share. None of my sons made it in. All three of them were into drugs and alcohol in college. And I pictured the four of us talking at a conference some day. And they, one by one, said, well, enough of that. I think I'll straighten out and be a normal, responsible, wonderful citizen. And part of me is ashamed of them, to tell you the truth. I don't get it, to say the truth, but they're wonderful. and I had the same feeling that every other alcoholic has, that I didn't belong in that family. I didn' t belong on planet Earth. My mother was a Catholic. My father was a Protestant. He had to convert. His family was very upset, and I sat in the church with my sister who still goes there and thinks it's the most wonderful place in the world, and from the day she went there, she felt comforted and loved. I, on the other hand, felt like it was sort of a German prison camp of some sort. The little Gestapo nuns were coming up and they were speaking in Latin and God knows what they were plotting. I was very nervous about confession because I knew they were gathering evidence for the trial later on. and so I was not a cappy little kid. I was always on the edge of fainting or very nervous, and I was probably about nine. I looked up at the crucifix, and it was enormous and just couldn't miss it, and it Was like it spoke to me, and it said, Little boy, do you see this? And I went, Well, that's what God did to his only son that he loved. guess what he's going to do to you and that did it boy I was just I did not like going there it just scared me now that's not what the church taught that's what I decided that it taught that's why that's when I made up in my little head and my sister saw an entirely different world and so it ended up I was a very good student a good athlete in spite of having polio I recovered from that it was a miracle and I went into a little prep school funneled me right into Yale University I got down there for the first time in my life I felt that I was in the wrong place I had worked on their buildings I was in construction, did all kinds of climbing and that kind of work. But these guys that came from all around the country, they were all rich and they were All Handsome and they all knew what was going on and I didn't know why I was In Their Midst. It was that sense. I knew they were going to discover an imposter and ask that I leave because I certainly didn't qualify to be in their ranks. And so I hadn't had a drink yet and I felt very uncomfortable. But I was at a social event where I just couldn't even approach anybody to talk to them. I could see in their eyes that they didn't want to even know me. And so I did have some drinks and after about two and a half, I turned around and unbelievably everyone wanted to know me Everyone in the room was begging me to be their friend. I couldn't believe this. It was like, my God, what is this all about? And I just ran over and started talking to everybody and I was free from my fears. My creativity had been released. I could be me for the first time in my life and I understood what people were saying. Isn't this a wonderful world? And And I said, yes, it is. And I wished I had started drinking in grammar school. It was just wonderful. And later on, I said to myself that that was three drinks. I wonder what 20 will do. And I did that and got sick. And you know what it feels like the first time. And I slept on the bathroom floor and vomited. And it just felt so awful as the sun came up. and I remember sitting on my bed with my head splitting and the thought occurred to me, are you going to drink tonight? And it was just a split second and I went, yes. Yes. This hatchet in my head is a small price to pay for what I had last night. Because what happened to me is what happens to all alcoholics. It was close to a spiritual awakening. It solved every problem that I had. It told me who I was. It made me at peace with you, with the world, with God, with myself. It was just such a power to transform my world. And without realizing it, I naturally was willing to pay any price for this. And I started paying it with grades. The high grades went. And then the athletics went. And then I'm getting in fights, and now I'm in jail. Now I may not graduate, but I did, barely, probably by .00001 at the best. And the Korean War was going on, the draft, and some of us joined the Marine Corps. And after the rude awakening of their greeting when you arrive, wow, I went off for six months of training to be a platoon leader and while I was there I decided I'm going to do this for the rest of my life and I was part of something and it was something and I it was an honor to be in there and I've only wanted to be in two outfits in Marine Corps and AA and I'll tell you and I saw a training movie about pilots that looked attractive so I signed up. I'd met a lovely woman, we got married and we went on our honeymoon and went to Pensacola, Florida and I got air sick on the way down in the commercial planes and that air sickness lasted for a while but eventually I was very good at it and I would be number two or three in each phase as we went through carrier and formation and so on down And lo and behold, in Kingsville, Texas, I finished and got my wings. Went through Corpus and then Kingsville. I remember it was rather dusty. And I was sent out to El Toro, California. I remember driving across Texas, drinking beer. I thought that there was something wrong with my car because I was still in Texas. I think I had been driving for three weeks and I was still in Texas. And I got to El Toro and we went into a Marine training squadron and it was so exciting. And by the time I got finished there, the Korean War was over and we got sent overseas into a frontline fighter squadron with the hot stuff airplanes of the 50s. They're all in mothballs now, but they were very exciting then. And I began a very exciting adventure. We had six children, got transferred all over, did all kinds of different jobs, flew about 12 different kind of airplanes, came out of being a flight instructor in Pensacola and was sent to a photo squadron at Cherry Point during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And these planes were the fastest that I had flown. The Crusader was 1,000 miles an hour and then our radar plane was easy to fly. It had the radar guy and the straight wing and you could fall asleep and that thing would keep going. So we flew both type of missions. My alcoholism had progressed to the point where I was experiencing withdrawal symptoms in the plane because I was not drinking for 8 to 10 hours prior to flying. And it started as just like a loss of vision, a peripheral vision. And then I would have the shakes and then I Would start to sweat and then l Would be extremely anxious and l'm all alone in the plain and I said, this is just passing. It'll go away. But each month it got worse. And I remember a period of about eight months and near the end I just didn't even want to get in the plane because I didn't know what was going to happen. I was not going to make it. I wanted to just get out of my own skin. I've talked to other alcoholics. They'd be getting a haircut and they had to leave. You just can't stay where you are anymore. You must run and go out and that's what I was experiencing in my body but there was nowhere to go and so sometimes I'd fly with one hand on the ejection seat and I fly the mission they could fly all mission with the stick it had all the buttons on it to take the pictures and all that and the finale came oddly enough in the radar plane and that we were on a flight of four on the cross-country and I started realizing that I had to get out of there. And I started looking around and that plane didn't have an ejection seat. I mean, I was going to get it out. It was just, I'm sorry but I'm leaving and I just thought it's gonna have a heart attack. It would just you know these withdrawals were getting worse. And that plane you had to pull a panel up and there was some kind of a chute, and you slid out the bottom, and I was looking at it, trying to remember how it worked. And I suddenly remembered the guy next to me didn't know how to fly. And I said, well, I can't do that. So I called for an emergency. I declared an oxygen emergency. And when you have those, you have to land immediately. So the flight leader, believing it, found an Air Force base nearby and the four of us landed. And we went to the club and drank. And they found no problem with the oxygen. And I came out the next morning and I just turned to the flight leader and I said, I'm not going to do this anymore. and it was quite a bit of shame to go back to that squadron and face my buddies, this very exclusive squadron, only 15 pilots, no lieutenants and it took about three months for headquarters to give me a new specialty since I wasn't going to be flying and I could feel them looking at me and I was doing the legal work and they'd come by and I wouldn't even make eye contact with them. I just felt like I was a failure after almost 13 years of flying I had failed, I'm a piece of you-know-what and I couldn't believe it. I could see them looking up at me and I felt so happy when I finally got transferred out. Well last year I was out in Los Angeles and I was invited to talk at the Brentwood group. Great group, God. 500 people, it's all fired up, it's really something. And there was a lady coming there to get her 30-year medallion and her husband is not an AA but he comes to meetings with her and he's been a great supporter and he was driving her there because she wasn't feeling too good and she mentioned that she was excited Sandy Beach was leading the meeting and he said, Was he a pilot? And she said, yeah. She said, I think I know him. Tell him to come out and let me talk to him. So right before I'm going up to talk, I go out and meet this guy who I've never seen. And he looks at me and he said, 1962 you were flying an F3D radar plane in a flight of four on a cross country and you declared an oxygen emergency and the planes landed and you never flew again. and I went, how did you know that? He said, I was in the plane with you. And I went wow! I said, really? And he started filling me in on what was really going on. I only had my vague memory and he was another pilot and there'd been a hurricane evacuation and when that happens you fly all the planes somewhere safe, and then you drink until the hurricane goes by. And so there wasn't any radar guys going. It was all pilots that were going to go. And he had been recalled from American Airlines for the Cuban Missile Crisis and had just retired maybe eight years earlier as the second senior pilot at American. And there he was. And so he came back the next day and brought photographs and all this stuff. I was up at a conference in Oxnard and started filling me in on who the guys were and what was going on. And then he said, did you know how popular you were in that squadron? Do you know much everybody loved? Do you now how much it broke their hearts? Oh, the colonel was doing everything he could. It was just killing us that you were going through that. Oh my God! so I had to go back to 1962 where I had all the shame and go erase, erase, erase, erase, erase, erase, erase, erase and put in love and it felt great. I actually went back and changed my past and it was and it felt great. That's what Alcoholics Anonymous and spirituality is all about. That's what old ideas of Baal is nothing mean. They mean our old ideas are the ones we made up under the circumstances of the time and then we emotionally reacted to those ideas and we've been suffering ever since. And that was one of those great freedoms from that three-month period and now I look back on it and it feels wonderful. There was no alcohol program in the military. There was nowhere for an alcoholic to go. There was nothing they could do to help me. Nobody ever heard of AA. And so it was just a blessing. And I was out there last week, and I saw him again. And we sat and talked. What a wonderful thing. Anyway, I got, believe it or not, retrained as an air traffic controller and did that for a couple years and it came time and then I was overseas and I drank around the clock and I was very, very sick. I lost 50 pounds due to malnutrition. It was a disaster waiting to happen and I came back to Quantico, Virginia and had a ground mal seizure and that's how I ended up in Bethesda Naval Hospital and about five days the DTs started, and I guess I was screaming and running around. They put me in a straitjacket and locked me up for six months. So that was how they treated alcoholism in 64. But in the hospital, an AA group talked their way in, even though the psychiatrist said they didn't have any alcoholics, and that's how I heard about AA. So that some months later when I was an outpatient and at home and I'd started drinking again and I called the inner group and they sent this guy over and he took me to meeting every night and the two of us were captains and when it came time for promotion neither one of you get two years to get promoted to major or you're out and neither one of us made it the first year he had been in the same nut board and the second year he made it and I didn't and so myself and my family and I mean my six kids with two years sobriety are dumped out I had a big resentment about God okay God I did everything you said look what you're doing to my family look at us we're out in the street this is this is your love oh boy I really had a thing going with God I had wonderful resentment and I just sat home I didn's I didn' talk about it because people will get it away from you if you talk about it. You want to keep a resentment, don't tell anybody about it for God's sake. Just stay at home and cook it in the oven. It'll get big. There won't be any room for you with your resentment. It'll be so big. And about three months after I was out, the team of officers that I was working with, they went around putting out a presentation about the Marine Corps. It was headed by a general and they were going to Denver to do a presentation and they flew into a mountain. So if it had been fair and I got my way, I would have been on that plane and I knew when I read it in the paper that God knew I read it and I felt kind of humble because I'd just been cursing him and I said something like, well, if you just told me this was going to happen and I wouldn't have been saying all this stuff. So I guess that was my first lesson in that you can't tell whether an event is good or bad. Events aren't good or Bad, they just are. They just are, we put the label on them and then we have to live with it. It just is. and so that started my journey I ended up with several other jobs but I had a wonderful career with the credit union movement which is a wonderful blessed group of people that provide good service to people that need it it was an honor to be their lobbyist up in Washington I remember coming down to the Texas Credit Union League and talking they were way ahead getting a bank and doing a lot of stuff and so I had a great career with them and then I retired to Tampa, Florida 13 years ago and I adore it there I live on the water and there's no tourists and it's quiet and it' s a wonderful place so I have a lot of time to reflect about Alcoholics Anonymous and God and our history and our steps and our traditions and all the people I've met and the memories and I love it I love to reflect on what the world must look like through God's eyes. And the more I do that, the more Iím getting closer to seeing what He sees. And I really believe that thatís the point of everything is to eventually get rid of my old way of seeing things and be allowed the privilege of seeing God's world as it really is and to see you and I as we really are. And that's just fun. There's no other way to describe it except fun. What a cool thing. It's never bad. It's always good. When I make it up, it's bad. When I create my own reality, it's always bad. I never make up something good to sit up at night. And so this is what has happened to me as a result of these steps. When I sponsor someone, I sponsor people my own way and it's changed over the years and now I sit them down and I tell them the first day that I'm your spiritual guide and you will have a spiritual awakening and it is going to blow your mind And when you have it, you will see a world that is so nice and comfortable that there won't be anything for alcohol to fix. And that's why it's easy to not drink. I'm already comfortable. What do I need alcohol for? And I feel that way myself. Bill writes in the 12 and 12 and Step 6 that we've been granted a perfect release from alcoholism, A perfect release. I haven't thought about drinking in 43 years. When I look at alcohol and I'm troubled, I can hardly remember why it would help. Now eating a stack of pancakes seems to help or 50 pounds of cookies. So I indulge in all kinds of other things. But alcohol, I don't understand how it could possibly help. it's been put in the category that it's so different and that I call freedom freedom from alcoholism and it's contingent of course on my being able to maintain this view of God and you and I and that's a very simple thing to maintain I just stay close to AA I work with people every single day I probably go to two meetings a day. I hardly do anything that isn't AA. That's who I am. I just love it in the midst of this society. I think about AA this way. We were talking about, there's a lot of things that we say that I see different now. things happen in God's time well there's God and he's wearing a watch why don't you ask him what time it is he looks at his watch and I'll tell you what he says it's right now always has been and always will be how about that watch it says it's the time it's always right now no moving parts and it's almost right for eternity it's all ways right and so that's the only place that God can be found we can't have contact with God in the past or the future so how do you get there? We talk a lot about the now but how do You get there well I thought about that and I said to myself I think You get There the same way that You get to the truth about Yourself which is what our steps do and how do we get to the truth about ourselves we get rid of everything that isn't the truth that's what we do the steps are nothing more than getting rid of get rid off character defects get rid old ideas get rid this get rid that and then it gets revealed to you as an individual God will constantly reveal more reveal more reveal more and so I said Well, maybe that's exactly how the now works. I get rid of everything that isn't the present moment, which is the future or the past. Now a lot of us don't want to get rid of those things. I don't wanna get rid of my plans. I don' t wanna get rid of my causes. I don''t wanna get rid of m y opinions. I don ''t wanna get rid of my memories. I don nt wanna get rid of... There's all these forces that I created that I think are important that I want to hold on to. I want a dream I want this dream. Okay, fine. Go ahead and get it but you won't get God's dream. Go ahead. Well, you're asking too much. You're asking too much in step six. We're entirely ready to have God remove all of my defects which is all of me. everything that I constructed I like to think of my defects as my kingdom my world the one I put together the one in which I live the one that I'm the center of that's my kingdom and I started putting it together when I was a little boy and I made a very scary place to hang out I don't know why I made it that way but I did I filled it with, I'm no good, the world's no good. Watch out for this. This isn't fair. It's not fair. Nothing's fair. See that? Look around. Not fair, not fair, non-fair, nonfair. And I took God's world full of light and I patched it all up with my ideas about everything. And pretty soon there's no light coming through. I just have the world I assembled and lived in. And it got lonely in there, and I got desperate. I was tired of it. I'm tired of being alone, tired of hanging out in there waiting for me to think up something else to scare me. It's lonely in There. And I got down to a point which I just recently realized where I became hopeless. And it just occurred to me there's a hopeless paradox or a hope paradox. I became so hopeless as a result of my drinking that I didn't even know what hope meant anymore. I was absolutely without any hope. And guess what happened? I grab God's hand God seems to come to us in the garbage pile in at the bottom at the bottom and I realized that if I'm hopeless I can touch God's hand if I'm hopeful I'm going to touch God'S hand later down the road. I'm so hopeful that I will be happy someday. I'm så hopeful that I'll be with God someday. I'm só hopeful that everything will work out well someday. That's a lot of time spent away from the present moment. Matter of fact, that's where I spend most of my life. Waiting, waiting for the next moment which is going to be better than this moment. Oh, it's going to be a lot better. Boy, when I get promoted, boy, when we have a baby, boy. When I get to retire, boy! I'm this close. I don't know to what, but I'm this close all the time. And I never stopped to see if it was already here. Wasn't it handed to me the day I was born? It's here. I have to stop and eliminate everything that separates me from God and the present moment. I think the search for God and for the present moment and for my true self is the same search. Find one, you'll find all three. Find one, you'll find all three. And so I love the search. What does it say? How many times does it say seek in our literature? God couldn't would if he were sought. Sought to a prayer and meditation. Become a seeker. I remember when we were flying jets, they came out with a heat seeking missile. And when they fired that thing and you're in the other plane, you're generating a lot of heat with that jet engine. And that little missile is going, I wonder where some heat is. Pretty effective thing. It goes right to the tailpipe. Boom! And so I think that we can become God-seeking just like that. My hero in AA is Chuck Chamberlain. I suppose Bill's writings. I had such a lack of perspective on history that when my friend Hal Marley would say do you want to go to New York and meet Bill Wilson I'd go no I haven't got enough money besides what do I want to meet him for I need money, I need a job he went up there six years in a row and then Bill died what do you think I would give to have met him to just have shaken his hand and say, I met Bill Wilson. But Chuck Chamberlain and I did meet and I went to his house and sat and looked over the Pacific and listened to him talk and listen to him talk and talk about conscious separation. In my consciousness I felt that I was separate from God. When I honestly you could have put a lie detector on me and said, do you feel God? No, I don't see him anywhere. He's nowhere in my consciousness. That's because I had built a kingdom of my own and he wasn't in it. That's the only way I could ever get separated from God. God is everything. If God is every thing, then he's me and you. And how could you be separated from God? I mean, how could você possibly be separated from God. And I think I made up a poem, I don't even know if I can remember it. Where shall I hide, I said, where I will never find me? I know, I'll pretend that I'm not mean or you nor he. I'll hide in my story and pretend that it's real. I'll believe what I think and I'll feel what I believe. and I lie trapped in a web of my feelings and forget that I am the creator of the web. Oh boy, what a joke on me! What a joke! I myself, through my own thinking, self-centered thinking, created a place where God doesn't exist and I dwelled in there and it got very lonely and I didn't believe you when you said there was a God. But I had one thing that everyone has and you can't get away from it and that's the need for God. It's there. There's this emptiness. There's these things and there's this remembrance of what the union with God feels like and it's missing and it won't go away and alcohol temporarily fixed it but it's still there and it stays there and we try to fix it with everything else power and sex and drugs and whatever but it won't go away it's still there it still says you're lonely you're still just you you're not there you're in that shell and my sponsor started pulling me out and I love it I love what I see I see now that you and I are connected I see that if I am rude and hurt you it hurts me hurts me right away I'm hurting myself when I offend you and I can see that now it used to be a theory now I can't see it and it's wonderful to realize that we're all connected that we're all just part of God's great creation. I think the steps are described in a letter that Bill Wilson wrote in his later years. and he wrote to someone he says as I reflect upon AA this is what I see I see an utter simplicity which encases a complete mystery this is a simple program and in its simplicity we walk in to the mystery of the universe it's so simple it's mind-boggling in its simplicity. When I first got here, you said don't drink. I went, don't drink? I've got a lot of problems. Don't drink? You think that's the whole solution? Now what do I tell the new guy? Just don't drank. Two words. That's the entire plan. Don't drank and then come over, and we'll talk, and we'll be guided. And so if I looked at AA today, and I tried to reduce it to two words, the entire AA program, I would say it's very simple. Let go. That's it. How about that? There's nothing else to do but to let go absolutely. Now, to let goes absolutely requires a lot of faith, because you're jumping into the unknown. We're going out where God lives. I'm going to let go of everything I'm familiar with, my little resentments, my little prejudices, my little favorites, all the things that are familiar. They're miserable, but they're familiar, and I'm going to reach out. I love the paintings, Michelangelo, of man reaching, reaching out and trying to touch, and part of him not wanting to, holding back, holding back. My pride doesn't want me to let God win. I want to stay in my own kingdom. Let God have his kingdom, I want one of mine. I don't want to go there. See, in my kingdom I'm the king. Everything I do, what I say, goes. But it's miserable. It's terrible in here. It's awful. It's dark. It's rotten. It stinks. I've been here forever. I can't stand it. But at least I'm in charge. At least I'm in charge. You're talking about a place that's full of happiness and light and love? What's my role there? Servant? You want me to go from a king to a servant? Me? A servant? Yeah, that's the happiest you will ever be is to be a servant. And so how do I do that? let go let go let go some more let go of this let go of that letting go I mean how could it be that simple some of our speakers have talked about they ought to put a warning label on problems and the warning label says warning do not think about this problem it'll make it blow up when we have a problem, the first thing we should do is to let go of it immediately like a hot coal. God, I got this terrible thing here. That's the best thing you could ever do with any problem that you have, is immediately go, uh-oh, a problem. Just let it go. I tell people to go to the movies. You got terrible problems? Everything's wrong? You're thinking of suicide, go to the movies. Buy a ticket. When you go there, go out to the street, look at the tickets, see how long the movie lasts. Say, look, God, I'm going to be in the movie for two hours and 13 minutes. I'm gonna give you everything because I just want to watch the movie. I just wanna watch it. I love the cartoons. I loved the previews. I love all that. And I want to just watch the movie where you watch everything while I'm I'm watching the movie. And then you just watch the movie, yay! The popcorn, I get popcorn, Coca-Cola, I'm like this. I don't rent movies, I go. I want to be there in the movie theater itself, watching, and then I come out. Amazing, the work he did in two hours and 13 minutes on all those problems. They seem to be in harmony. They seem to somehow be all right. I see solutions. God is doing for me what I can't do for myself. When I see the sentence, this too shall pass, I go, perhaps it should say this too can be let go of because it's not going to pass until I let go of it. You want some help? Yeah. I can help you let go off it. Oh, OK. and there it is. Whatever needs to be taken care of, God is standing there. What do you need done? Let me do it. Let me doing it. And part of me doesn't want to do that because then he gets the credit. I'm reduced to a non-role in my own life and I realize now I try not to pay much attention to my life I try to just watch it what's going on with me today look at that how about that as almost an observer a bystander well look at this there you are worrying I'll be at the movie don't wait up for me there's part of me that likes to keep worrying and I go good you do worry I'm going to go off and go to a meeting and listen to my friend talk. Al-Anon talks about detachment. I think we can detach from our own lives. Just stay on our spiritual path. Stay with our hands in hand with God. And so that letting go is the utter simplicity and we walk in and just think of how our literature ends. walking hand in hand putting our hand in God's and just walking that's what's available if I'm willing to let go and so it's no wonder the sixth step talks about the struggle of perfection of perfectly letting go no one can become perfect obviously, it's impossible But perfect help's available. So the only thing standing between me and total contact with God is my reluctance to let it happen. And that's what's standing between you and perfect happiness is the reluctance to let us go. To let it happened. Isn't that amazing? That we just sit there ruining our own lives. Yeah, I could be happy but I'm not going to let me yet. I'm not through with me yet I got some more beating up to do, I got somore guilt to do I gotsome more rage, Igot some more I mean you can just feel it You mean I'm just going to give all this up? I won't even keep track of the election? Wow Can you imagine that? So anyway I see wrapping it up that that utter simplicity is just that. It's just letting go. And we walk into the mystery. I really believe that God is a mystery, the universe is a history and we've got to stop using our ego to figure it out. There's nothing to be known, there's just something to be experienced. We can sit with great wonder. I sometimes think, Scott, that the favorite prayer I could give to God is, Wow! Wow! Look at that. An elephant. Look at dat. A quasar. Look at tat. Look at zat. There's so much to look at and go, wow. But unfortunately, we have all these things we gotta do. and it's the silliest thing in the world. I realize how many years I spent solving problems that I created. Well, let me see what I can worry about this afternoon. I'll give you an example with the downturn and the crashing and the stock market and all of that. I go to Club Yana which is where I go and this person's laid off and that person's layed off. The club is filled with drama and I'm retired and I just get my little check every month so this stuff is having no effect on me am I grateful? Yes but I'm also wanting to be in on the action I don't get to go whoo biggest drop in history who did you hear that so i went home and i thought and thought and thought and i said you know if this keeps up we could have total anarchy let me run on the streets with guns and knives and they'll be looking for people who get a check every month And they're going to come to my house. They're going to put my hand down and they're going to cut off my little finger and they'll go, you sign it over or we cut off this one. Every ten minutes another one. I go, oh my God. So now when the stock market goes boom I go oh my god I'm going to lose a finger. So I'm in the game with everyone else. Yay! If you don't think you create your own problem, look at our steps. Our whole program is to help us dismantle what we put together so we can see God's world. If you're new, you're in for the experience that you were born to have. That's why you're here. You're a prodigal son and a proddigal daughter who's going to go home. You remember it. And when you see the light and you start feeling God's hand, you'll say to yourself, how could I have forgotten? I've been there forever. How could I Have Forgotten This? So this is not just getting sober. This is the whole point of being a human being. And Dr. Young said that. And he said a very interesting thing, and then I'll wrap it up with this, in his letter back to Bill after he told Bill how happy he was that Roland Hazard had gotten sober and that he had thought of alcoholism as a thirst for God, which I think is a very nice way of looking at being an alcoholic. Well, what's an alcoholic? Oh, I have an extra longing for God. Isn't that a nice, that's a nice disease to have, you know what I mean? An extra longing for God. But he went on in the next paragraph just to make a general observation about planet Earth and human beings. He said, I've been studying human beings for 70 years and they have to struggle against evil. We would call it character defects. And he said, unfortunately, evil always wins unless a person can have a spiritual awakening and be in a society that enables them to maintain and increase that spiritual awakening. He was describing utopia, which we know is Alcoholics Anonymous. This is the ultimate society that could be created in a spiritual fashion and look where they went to get the citizens in the garbage pile. They went down into the stinky, rotten cesspool of humanity and created heaven. Thank you all very much.