Sandy B. Steps 7 Through 12

About This Speaker Tape

Sandy B. opens with a self-deprecating slideshow of his life's wreckage: throwing up in prep school, Yale, and as a Marine fighter pilot in an oxygen mask. He describes a spiral of losing a brand new car to a hitchhiker and ending up in a straitjacket in a nut ward.

Sandy uses the metaphor of a slide projector to explain the internal wreckage of the fourth through seventh steps, arguing that we spend our lives trying to fix the image on the screen rather than changing the slides in the booth. He details the painful 'scraping' of the ego required to remove these slides, moving from the 'need to know' to a state of transparency where a Higher Power's light can shine through. He frames humility not as weakness, but as the absence of self, allowing a person to stop being a 'cloud' blocking the sun.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Introduction and disclaimer that this is not a 'how-to' workshop.
• 2:15 Laughter: Sandy describes his 'wreckage' slideshow, including throwing up in an oxygen mask.
• 5:10 Description of hitting bottom: the nut ward and the straitjacket.
• 6:15 Mention of working the steps with a sponsor who kept a pistol on the table.
• 8:40 Discussion of AA history, including the 12 and 12 and the reversible covers of the Big Book.
• 12:10 The slide projector metaphor for the internal condition and the fourth step.
• 16:40 Step 5: The 'third dimension' and the necessity of a sponsor for perspective.
• 20:10 Step 6: The 'perfect help' story and the willingness to have defects removed.
• 24:30 Step 7: Humbly asking a Higher Power to remove shortcomings.
• 28:10 Discussion on the nature of humility as the 'absence of self'.
• 32:00 The pain of 'scraping' the ego and the transition from pain to effort.
• 36:10 The 'need to know' vs. spiritual happiness and the 12th step awakening.