Self-Will and the Failure of the Intellectual Plan – Sandy B.

New Year's Day, coincidentally, we're on step one, so we're right at the very beginning of this whole program. And on Saturday morning, we go through them one at a time, so it takes 12 weeks to get through the 12 steps. Then we have one week on our traditions, which are very, very important, and then two weeks on the history of AA, and then we start all over again. So today is fun just getting started into this thing. If there's anybody new to AA, maybe you'll find this particularly useful. And our first step, which we talk about in our program, simply says that we admitted that we're powerless over alcohol and our lives became unmanageable. And this is the doorway into Alcoholics Anonymous, is through that first step. But before I get to that first steps, let me just make some general observations about AA and our steps to sort of start this thing out. Alcoholics Anonymous is now in probably 120 countries with 60,000 to 70,000 AA groups and 2 million miracles of sobriety where hopeless alcoholics are now living very happy and productive lives. And so the reason for mentioning all this is that it works. It's not a theory. When you look at these 12 steps, you don't look at them and go, God, I wonder if this would be any good. You know what I mean? Which is how a lot of us read this stuff. Well, I don't know. That doesn't seem to apply to me. The point is, this has been working for a number of years. AA was started in 1935 with just two people and we talked about that in our history and now in this relatively short period of time There's hardly a town in this country that you will go to that there isn't an AA group. And around here, there's meetings morning, noon, night, midnight meetings, men's meetings, women's meetings. You name it. There's meetings just everywhere that you go. And society is pretty well accepted AA. And it's just a remarkable phenomenon. And so we have the meetings and we have sponsors and wehave the literature and wehave conventions and we have retreats and we've got all kinds of activities. But let me tell you something, the heart of Alcoholics Anonymous are the 12 steps. That's the deal. All the rest of it is just the atmosphere, the AA world that we're in that pushes us back to the 12 step. If there's anything that happens in sobriety you will find if you've been around a while is that we just go to meetings to keep reminding each other what the answer is because our own brains are out there during the week making up a new answer, which is how we used to be, you know? And we found the world was too intimidating and I better move to California. I better leave my family and go get a new one. I better quit this job. I better punch this cop in the nose and I'm out of here. Those were all the old answers that we come up with and our brains still think that way sometimes And so we come here to constantly remind each other, no, this is the answer. In spite of what you think, this Is what the answer is. And the answer Is these 12 steps. And so when we think about them, if you're new, what do we mean when we say these 12 Steps? Well, I like to think about Them as a game plan for living. That's what it Is. If you just joined some team, they would show you the game plan. This is how it works. And that's what these 12 steps are. And the main thing that happens when you try the 12 steps, it's like jumping ahead 15 miles all on the first step. The biggest thing that happened when you tried the 12 Steps is you stopped doing it your way. And that causes an immediate reversal of direction for most of us and all kinds of wonderful things to happen because think about it. Most of us don't want to change. We come into here and we have our own plan. No, this is me. This is the real me and this is how I live and this Is my style. This is how l operate. And you put it together so it's yours. And our pride doesn't want us to let go of our game plan. When we come to AA, no one goes through the theory of your game plan but they will be very abrupt about a few things. They'll look at you and they'll say, You know, as I look at you, I draw the conclusion that your plan for living sucks. That's just sort of my inference as I look at it. I look back at you because let's face it, when you arrive here, you're not on a roll. There aren't too many people who come into AA on a role. You know what I mean? Like, wow, my life is so good, I think I'll add AA to it. Put on my resume, you know, and show that I'm a humanitarian. People come in here when their ass is on fire. And so you come in there, you're wearing a wristband, family won't talk to you, car won't run, clothes don't fit, you have no friends, you can't stand your job, you think of committing suicide or murder or both, and you want people to follow you. You know what I'm saying? You want to hear my ideas about how to live? No, I don't want to hear your ideas. I want to Hear Your Ideas so I could end up like you. So what I'm saying is AA is very result oriented and we don't discuss theory. We simply say see these 12 steps? There's no theory to discuss here. they just we're going to tell you how they work and show you how to do them we're not going to discuss you know the logic behind them or prove them in any fashion we're simply going to do this we're gonna say now your plan for living has produced you so we got to abandon that plan okay that's out we got it get rid of that right wouldn't you agree with that and then you've got to look in the mirror a couple more times and go, okay. Now, what we're going to do, we're gonna take you to AA meetings all over the place. And at AA meetings, we're gonna have drunks stand up, and they're gonna talk. And some of them are gonna be tall, some are gonna short. They're gonna be old, they're gonna be men. Theyre gonna be black, theyre gonna be white, they re gonna be Orientals, gonna be Hispanics. And they're gonna get up and talk, and you're gonna get to look at the results of the 12 steps and then we're going to ask you to just do one thing go look in the mirror look at the results of your plan and then look at the results what you see here and make a decision which do you want and that's what happened and we have that in our chapter five if you want what we have and what we have is what you see at the meetings you see people with happy sobriety who seem confident who are looking forward to every day, who talk in a way that is appealing to you, who have the sense of humor about life, and you just go, I like that. We don't get up here and go, you know, I'm a big shot, I have this job, and I have to screw that. Big shots with jobs commit suicide, and they're alcoholics. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking About how people feel on the inside. There's no resumes getting into AA. As a matter of fact, if you're new to AA, you're going to find we brag in the other direction. Before you come to AA, you talk about, well, I went to school here and I am this and I got money in the bank and I'm very important. You come in here and it's like, you were arrested 12 times? I was arrested 13 times. And my drinking took me way down, way further than your drinking took you. So in here you find people exaggerating in the other direction. That's the strangest thing you've ever seen. Oh, no, I'm much worse than you. Because we notice at discussion meetings the guys, well, I've been arrested 12 times. Everybody listens, you know, sounds like one of those stockbrokers, you know. Well, my broker is Charlie B., and Charlie B. says, oh, it's just the New Year's. We're going to settle down next week, I promise. So what we're saying is we know it's very difficult to let go of your control of your life. And we're not going to try to analyze it. We're just trying to very humorously go directly to the point that it's stupid to continue the plan you've been using because you are the result of it. And if you're so happy, write a book. I mean, when we come here, we're miserable. And yet we cling to these old ideas. And so this plan, and it's a spiritual plan. It's not an intellectual plan, so you've got to get used to some changes here. And you'll find that there's a lot of paradoxes in a spiritual plane. It is things don't look the way they really are. You take certain actions and it doesn't look like they would do anything. It doesn't work. It doesn' t look like it should work. When you study, and you will in spite of yourself, you will study the 12 steps. You will come up to them, if you're new, skeptically. Well, now what is this? Now they've convinced me I'm an alcoholic and I ought to stick around. Maybe I will do this. And then your intellect will take over and you'll go, okay, I'm going to admit I'm powerless. I'm gonna come to believe in a higher power. Yawn. I'm Gonna Make Amends to People. I'm Going to Do This and I'm Goinng to Do That. And you're going to go through all the 12 Steps And you're going to conclude that it's not going to really do much of anything because that's what your brain is going to tell you. Your brain is gonna tell you, disregard the information you have by looking at all those happy people in AA. Forget that. You're smarter than that. You can read this and it just isn't going to work for you. That's what our brain will tell us because it doesn't look like it should work. I'm going to say that. I'm not going tell you that ahead of time so that you don't get faked out. AA doesn't looks like it would work. It doesn't look like it should work. You explain AA to the social scientists of the country and they still are very skeptical about it because it doesn't seem right. It doesn' t look like it should worked. You take a bunch of drunks, you stick them in a basement from 8.30 to 9.30, they talk about resentments, hold hands, say the Lord's Prayer and go home and it works? That's it? That's the whole deal? Uh-huh. Except we smoke a lot too and drink a lot of coffee. that's what happens there yes it does work so it doesn't look like it works because it's a spiritual solution drinking didn't look like it should work did you ever try and analyze drinking suppose you were 16 years old you're afraid to go out on the dance floor and someone said to you Fred come over here see this glass chug a nugget you will know how to dance now if you were sort of the doubting teenager you would go what i drink that and i will know how to dance what the hell you smell it and it smells like motor oil you know what i mean it's some kind of rotten gut whiskey and you say it doesn't make sense i drink that i know how to do it no prove to me ahead of time that if i drink that i don't know how to dance how could you do that you couldn't this guy could be 70 years old and never have a drink and still claiming that if he drank it nothing would happen because it's one of these things you can't understand you have to experience and the same thing with this program and these steps they won't make sense till after you do them and then you'll go whoa now i see now it is revealed to me what happens just like when you poured that whiskey down and you got like steve martin those happy feet woo and you were out there doing the dances people never saw before but it came to you in other words something happened this alcohol contained the power when it got inside of you to literally transform you and the way you looked at things And that's why we drank. Alcohol had a very definite parallel to a spiritual program. It was certainly not an intellectual way of life, alcohol. Alcohol was a power and we relied on it to change us so that the world looked good. The world actually stayed the same when we drank, world didn't change. But when the way we looked at the world changed and we liked it, It's like it changed the world into technicolor. And so drinking was my game plan for living, and it was for most of us alcoholics. What was your plan for leaving? It wasn't a very complicated one if you're a typical alcoholic. Your plan for moving was step one, get a drink. Right? A problem occurs. You're trying to make a decision. You're tired. You need energy. Whatever it is, what was step 1 in your plan for living go get a drink and then more will be revealed you remember that it was like you didn't really see the whole thing you just knew if you did certain things you would come up with the answer and you would know how to function in life perfectly and so that was alcohol was a very sort of a chemically spiritual path because it just did the same sort thing that the program does, only much quicker. It's sort of an instant conversion. You just got three drinks down and you became serene. And it was a marvelous transformation. And it all takes place in the privacy of your own body and mind. And nobody sees it coming. They see you all uptight. And then 15 minutes later they say, hi! You know, you're buying everybody a drink and you don't have any money. And you have a day at a time philosophy. Each can be married tomorrow we could be dead who needs the rent money it's not due for a week i may be dead at the end of the month and i won't owe the rent you know it was that wonderful freedom to be stupid so anyway there's a marvelous parallel between that so all of this requires no intellect that's the point if you can check your brains at the door when you're beginning this program and simply follow it like you did when you went to kindergarten you know just become like a little child because what you're going to be done if you're new you're just going to being led out of the darkness by the people who are coming before you and it's just that's how it works the longer people have been in a a the closer they're getting to the to this wonderful answer and they're pulling their pigeons and they pull the next crowd and we're all just going and so when you're new you just stick your hand out you get a sponsor you get a home group and just allow them to lead you right along now if you did that you'd have the most wonderful sobriety you can imagine the problem is our brain and our ego me being led that doesn't look good i gotta start interjecting my own thinking into this thing besides at discussion meetings they want to hear what i have to say because they call on me and i certainly want to look good when it comes around to my turn so we're always trying to come up with something intelligent to say at meetings so that people will like us well they already love you we don't have to do that you just have to share from your heart how you're feeling that day you don't have to come with the answer to the universe and so the program is a very simple thing but i'll guarantee you, you will complicate it. You will complate it by resisting. That's all that'll happen. You will resist every damn step along the way. And Bill writes about this in our literature. But the first step is the one that we cannot compromise on. The rest of them are things that we work towards and they are perfect goals that we're trying to achieve. But the first step we can't screw up on we cannot fail to do it a hundred percent and that's what we're going to emphasize for the next 10 or 15 minutes is what does this mean in this first step when it says we admitted we're powerless over alcohol that our lives have become unmanageable it's basically saying my game plan for living has to be thrown out the window i am going to do a lot of changing here and you know what you have to change and this is almost insurmountable when you first come to aa you have the change your mind this is you know like an alcoholic changing his or her mind is like the queen elizabeth turning around in the potomac you know what i'm talking about it's like 50 million tugboats are pushing on this end and that end and finally the alcoholic goes okay i'm an alcoholic you remember the decision that you weren't an alcoholic no i'm not an alcoholic the denial and all of that went on for years and then finally at whatever it was all right all right so i am an alcoholic and have been for 31 years and that's an amazing transformation yesterday you're not an alcoholic and today you've been one for 31 years just think about the mental turnaround on that particular one right there and well the rest of sobriety is going to consist of hundreds more of changing our mind and in the beginning most of us want to call a press conference hi i'd like to announce to the world i'm about to change my mind you know like i've never done this before and i probably never do it again so i thought i'd call everyone together we hold on to our old ideas we you know why because you put them together you're the author of all those old ideas even though they suck you hold on through them you know i know they're terrible but i thought them up it's that wonderful ego that if you're in jail you know that song if i was still drinking that would be my theme song i did it my way i know i'm in deep shit but i got here i mean there's some value there right and it's almost like they're going to write a folk song about me the ultimate loser and they'll and everybody will go what a guy what a guy you know look at that he's in jail and he's puking and he refuses to ask for help boy he's hanging right in there pukin and oh he just went down the toilet let's write a song about him And I sort of have this, you know, as you're going down the toilet, you sort of imagine everybody just going, what a guy! Wow, what a guy! And they're not. They're going, what an asshole! That's what they're saying. But we don't see it that way. We just sort of glorify, wow, I'm hanging in here with these stupid ideas when a weak guy would have caved in and followed some good advice a long time ago and straightened his whole life out. Oh, no, not us. Not our arrogant pride. No, no. I'm not straightening out and asking for help and chickening out. I'm either going to do it myself or fail. And of course, if you're up against alcohol, you're going to fail because it's a power greater than all of us. That's what makes us alcoholics. So it's this marvelous thing of either go down the tubes or ask for help and you're stuck there. How far down the tube is down the two? you know so the first step is saying we're going to have to give up totally totally surrender so what do we mean when we say we're powerless over alcohol this is a very important thing and i always like to probably emphasize it at every meeting but especially here today where i know we have lots of new people most people think when we when we said what do you mean when you're powerless over alcohol they said this is what most people will say when they're new they'll say oh that means that whenever you drink, you get all screwed up. That when you walk up and you take alcohol and you pour it in, all kinds of bad things happen. You never know what's going to happen. And that's what being powerless over alcohol is. That once you pour alcohol into your system, it's Russian roulette. That's what it means. And we say, no, that's not what it mean. That that, what I just described is not a very big problem. What I just described is not a Very Big Problem. If your only problem, now listen to this closely, if your only problem is whenever you drink, you get all screwed up, then you don't have a Very Big Problem because you are exactly the same as someone who has discovered their body is all getting covered with rashes and they lose their breath and they don't know what it is and they go to the doctor and he says, oh I've done some tests and you are allergic to lobsters. And so whenever you're out eating seafood if you eat lobster you're going to have this happen to you. So now we know exactly what this person's problem is. Whenever they eat lobstERS they get all screwed up. They don't need to go to meetings with other lobster eaters and say to one another, how did you not eat lobster at that seafood place last night? Oh, it was awful. They brought some claws around and waved them in front of my face and I carry these claw crackers around in my pocket just in case and I got a bib ready and there's none of that. you just find out that you're allergic to this kind of seafood and all by yourself for the rest of your life you just don't eat it people go want some lobster no that's the end of the problem so do you see the difference between that and the drinking problem if we said hey we found out what your problem is it's alcohol just don t drink anymore are you as happy as the person who was told don t eat lobster anymore not quite not quite because there's really a much bigger problem isn't there you know what happens if you don't drink alcohol for the rest of your life you're going to be sober for the next couple of weeks for the last half hour for the whole rest of your life all the time 24 hours a day 365 days a year you will be sober remember that I forget that comedian and used to drink a lot, and he said, when I get out of bed in the morning, when the guy who doesn't drink and I get off of bed, and I don't get out of bed all day long, that's as good as he's going to feel all day. And that's how I thought about being sober. When somebody said, you're going to be sober all the time, I suddenly blurted out, well, wait a minute. That's my problem. Every time I'm sober, I don' t like it. We really ought to call this Sober Anonymous. Why do you think I went into a bar? A bartender, could you over here a minute? You're not going to believe this. I'm sober again. Have you got something that could fix this horrible situation that I'm in? Yes, have three of these. You will not be sober after... Thank you. One, two, three. Ah, there I am. Thank God. relief from sobriety one more time so we had a different problem us alcoholics have a problem that alcohol fixes everybody focuses in on the problems that alcohol cause and that doesn't help you understand alcoholism at all i mean if you could get non-alcoholics put a funnel in their mouth hold them still long enough and pour enough of that stuff in there they would have a lot of the problems that we have they would throw up a lot and they would get liver damage and they would have high blood pressure they would have a lot of the things that we associate with alcoholics but it wouldn't help us understand alcoholism at all so when we say that we're powerless over alcohol what we really mean is yes there's some bad things that happen whenever we drink. But the real problem is, even after alcohol, its damage, the illness, everything is explained to you in excruciating detail about you personally, you still go out and drink that's the problem there is no way that you on your own can avoid taking the first drink which sets up all the rest of the problem this is the real problem it occurs when we're sober and our brain is working 100 percent and we walk in we may not do it exactly this way but we walk into a bar and we're we say i'm an alcoholic mr bartender if i drink again i'm going to lose my family i'll probably be in jail again and the doctor says a lot more health problems are going to happen to me could i have a beer um i'm gonna get arrested again probably have to go through dw make that two beers and i'll go through dw ice thank you and it's like we understand the problem but we're going to do it anyway. We're going to do it anyway it is insanity what that is involved there that's what powerlessness over alcohol is it is a situation where we have no defense against the first drink we may last a month we may last a year but there's going to come a situation where we decide to take that drink and it'll start the whole rat race all over again and if you haven't had it in your own life you can talk to the people in here who've gone out and slipped and slide and and let them explain to you what it's like after some little period of sobriety to go pick up a drink just one and then bam it's off to the races and the beating and all of that is just horrible and this progression that alcohol takes us on this downward slide is devastating if you think you've had trouble if you just gotten here and you think you've Had trouble from drinking that's just the beginning if you don't stick around here. What's left is just five times worse. It just gets worse and worse, and there is no way that you can learn anything that'll help you not take a drink. If there's anything you pick up here this morning, it's this is a spiritual program where we don't learn anything. We surrender into it. We say, I am powerless. When you say you're powerless you shut off your intellect because your intellect keeps wanting to figure out your alcoholism even as i'm talking right now part of your brain is saying yes but maybe i can figure it out maybe up in canada they will develop some new powder that alcoholic rats are taking and they seem to be improving and you find yourself in a health food store getting some powdered carrots may be because your brain doesn't want to accept that there isn't some way you can drink again. It just doesn't wanna do that. So we have to totally surrender and get involved in this program so that our brain doesn'T keep taking over. And that's what surrender is in this first step, admitting that we're powerless over alcohol and that our lives became totally unmanageable as a result, that we really weren't in charge. A lot of people are reluctant to turn their lives over to AA, to their sponsor, to their higher power, whatever we talk about in this spiritual program and you're going to find that that's our second paradox that if you want to be totally independent the way you do it is to become totally dependent on a higher power. Then you can be independent because we may think that you are free. You may think you're independent, but you have no control over your life at all as an alcoholic or as an immature, sober alcoholic because your emotions are totally in charge of you. You get up in the morning and you say, well, I think I'll go out on a job interview because you need a job. And fear says, don't leave the house so you don't leave the home. You see what I'm saying? And something else, you get an idea, you're free now, Go do anything you want. You're free. You're not drinking. And you have the idea, and then some other emotion, maybe jealousy says, no, don't go make the amends. Don't be nice to her. Don't do this. And so your emotions are just jerking you all over the place. And what the program, by becoming dependent on the program and a higher power, you are given the power to put all those emotions in place so that you are now free to make your own decisions at last. And so, that's the second paradox. The first one that we're talking about is in the first step. How do you beat alcohol? How doyou beat it? And here's the paradox. You beat it by surrendering. You see, it's just the opposite. How doyou win anything? By giving up. That's exactly what happens here. It's like a person that's drowning sometimes. They're struggling so hard, the lifeguard has to knock them out in order to save them, in order for them to save their lives. And in order of saving an alcoholic's life, they have to totally give up. They must abandon the old way of living and stop struggling against this new plan or you won't make it. And that's why we have sponsors and meetings to just keep going, Wrong! I mean, I can't remember my sponsor how many times he'd just come right up in my face and just go, wrong, wrong again. And I didn't want to hear that. But all I knew was my old way of living. And so when they'd say, well, what do you think about that? I think we ought to punch them. Wrong, wrong. And so that's what happens in here is that we get people who are willing and what we basically do if you're new and we're at the end of time, we'll stop in a couple minutes. What we basically doing whether we realize it or not, We give other people in AA permission to interfere in our lives, to come over and talk to us at a level that you don't normally do. In other words, I walk into a meeting and if I'm not doing too well, people walk over and go, what's the matter? You know what I mean? And I go, nothing. Don't tell me nothing. What's the manner? They have my permission to go beyond that normal social thing where you don'T cross that line and go right in there and go, what is it? What is it. What is it? Force it out of me. And then we help and then they get me back on the path. And so we do that to each other and we make sure we don't see somebody for a while. We call them up. Normally you wouldn't do that. You say, well, you can't stick your nose in their business. We got to stick our nose in each other's business. I mean, that's what we do to each another when we come here is give everybody has permission to stick their nose in my business. See me not looking good. Come up and ask me what's going on because that is concern and so this is why this succeeds in here uh is because of that and that's all part of this surrender so if you're new think about this step and really work on it you must take this a hundred percent if there's any must in the program i think it's around this first step you just have to abandon any thoughts that there's some way that you can manage being an alcoholic and not surrender into this spiritual path because I'm sure it doesn't take people long. They look ahead and all of a sudden steps two and three and four, eleven and so on down you start seeing God and you go well I don't want anything with this God or higher power stuff so I'm not out of here I'm going to do this seriously well let's save that for when we get to those steps but we understand that resistance so if you're new start the new year out by just picking up a handkerchief, you know what I mean? And just go, this is it. I totally give up, but this is what you're in charge of. You don't give up everything. This is your job. Totally give up. Just follow what the damn sponsors in the meeting tell you to do. Go to this meeting, go there, yeah, yeah. And then your job is evaluate the results. Compare the results of this new stupid plan, which you know can't work, with the way your life was going. That'll be your job over the rest of your sobriety. And we do that at meetings where we stand up and we tell our story and we just go, let me give you an evaluation of what it's been like to follow this stupid plan for 29 years. Fantastic! You see what I'm saying? And you hear our evaluation of this plan. So if you're new, give it up. Totally give it a try. Give it up and then report to us how well it's going. We've got a great way to wrap this thing up with the Lord's Prayer for anybody who would care to join in. Hey, Park Sir. Heart in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom the power and the glory forever and ever Amen keep coming back it works if you work it well good morning everybody and welcome to the Saturday morning live group of Alcoholics Anonymous my name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic how are you all doing this morning? well it's great to see everybody here this morning and we always start out by giving a special welcome to anybody who has never been to this meeting before if you're just joining us at this particular meeting why we hope you get something out of it and hope you enjoy it and we certainly want to welcome you and if there's anybody here this morning who is new relatively new to Alcoholics Anonymous if you have just gotten arrived here in this fellowship good we want to welcome you and uh let you know how much we care and also to let you Know that everybody in this room has been through those feelings that you're having where you just are not sure you're in the right place and a little bit of fear anxiety I ought to get out of here before it's too late and I think these people are too serious about all this not drinking and they don't understand I'll never make it or whatever feelings that you're having why all of us had those and all we can tell you is they're going to go away and your life is going to get a lot better there's going to be a lot of wonderful surprises in store for you if you will stick around here on the other hand if you go back out there's nothing but more trouble whatever has happened before it'll get worse so please go against your better judgment and stay here until a lot two or three months goes by and then you'll have a chance to see how this works it's customary to start our meetings with our preamble Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience strength and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking there are no dues or fees for AA membership. We're self-supporting through our own contributions. AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization, or institution. Does not wish to engage in any controversy. Neither endorses nor opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety. And you'll hear that read at just about every meeting that you go to and it serves as a very good reminder at every meeting to go through this tells exactly what Alcoholics Anonymous is and what we're doing here this morning and by last count at 250 other AA meetings in the Washington DC area every day that's a lot of groups and you will find if you get the directory the where and when that there's a meeting near where you work and near where you live, and whether you want to go at night or in the morning or noontime, you want a woman's meeting a men's meeting, a non-smoking meeting, an smoking meeting, whatever you will be able to have a pretty good choice, and that's really a luxury living in a big metropolitan area. You get a tremendous choice like that. We have a few announcements to get out of the way. One, we ask you to go in once. Alright. Gone. Thank you, Charlie. Or are you wishing them good luck? Okay, if you haven't been here before, let me explain. If you're new to AA, this type of meeting is a little bit different within our fellowship in that most of our meetings are either speaker meetings or discussion meetings. And this one is a classroom-type meeting. We have four or five of these in the Washington, D.C. area, and they were started 25 years ago. Some was in there. One of them was, anyway, the Steps and Traditions on Tuesday night at the Presbyterian Center. And it was just an idea where you'd get somebody who'd been sober five or ten years, have them follow the literature to the best of their ability, and then go through our steps. And it could be a place where new people or people who have been around a while and want to sort of get refreshed on the program could come and sit down and know that it wasn't a discussion thing so they weren't going to have to sit there and worry about what they were going to say when it was their turn, you know, to talk on the seventh step and you've got to look smart. You're listening to what the other people are saying but part of you is trying to get your act together about, well, what am I going to do to really sound good here tonight? and so it's this way everybody just can sit back and you know ahead of time that we're going to go through the 12 step here now I think all the other groups go through them three at a time and do the steps once a month they go one two three five and then you're finished and start again the next month over here we used to do that but after about eight years I think we shifted over to doing them one at a time. And so our format is that we go through the steps, one step each Saturday. At the end of the 12 weeks, we have one week on the traditions. Then we have two weeks on the history of AA and then we start all over again. Today we're on the second step. We just started last week. If you weren't here, we just started the new year out with the first step last week and then will just plow right along, take about three months to get through the whole deal. Now, the second step talks about coming to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, and that's the thing we'll be focusing on this morning. But very briefly, we always review, for those of you that are new, we get new people here every week, why we focus on the steps and then sort of lead into the second step. The emphasis on the steps is that's what AA is. That's what Alcoholics Anonymous is, are these 12 steps. The 12 steps are what individual members of AA do in order to stay sober and get happy with sobriety. And those two things are absolutely necessary. I mean, that has to happen. You have to get comfortable and happy with your sobriety, or it's going to be almost impossible to stay sober for any extended period of time. That's what going on the wagon was. Going on the wagon is an attempt to stay sober and miserable at the same time. You know what I'm talking about? Anybody who tried to go on the Wagon, it was your willpower against all, you know, it was a huge sacrifice, and it was very difficult, and that's why that particular program doesn't work on the wagon anonymous um just because they don't have any steps you know all you do is don't drink and grin and bear it and it just is too much and you just collapse and it's hard so the steps are designed to enable us both to not drink and be happy with not drinking and so if you've been in aa a while and you're not reasonably happy you're doing it wrong You're just not following the directions. And that's why we go back and review all these steps week after week. So this is what individual members are doing now that we have the meetings and we have sponsors and wehave all these other activities in Alcoholics Anonymous. But all of that is just designed to force each one of us to continue working the steps. That's what the whole point of AA is, is to get us back to the steps. The steps are the answer. It's the solution. And very often our brains, as you go along in life, I don't care how long you've been sober, your brain will tell you, no, something else is the answer The answer to my problems is that blonde back there. You know what I'm saying? The answer for my problems is going to Hawaii and getting the hell out of here. The answer to my problem is a BMW. That's the answer to mine. And we have to keep coming here going, wrong again. The answer is contained in these 12 steps and we have keep reminding and go back because this is the solution. And so we talk about the 12 steps as a game plan for living and the purpose of this game plan for living is to replace your plan for living. That's the main thing that happens in the beginning. We get rid of your plan. As soon as we get rid of your plans, you shoot ahead about eight miles because we as alcoholics have come up with a very bad plan for life. Now it may sound good. I'm sure your philosophy of life sounds good. It's just nobody wants to listen to your plan because you're wearing a wristband. You know? And it's just hard to get anybody's attention. Hey, you want to know about my way of life? No. We don't want to talk about your way of living. We don' t want to go on and know about your way of light. It doesn' t look like it works. I know it sounds like it works because you' re real smart. Whether you' r street smart or college smart all of us think we're smart when we get here we're smarter about ourselves than anyone else in the world and what AA does by switching over to a different plan the biggest thing that happens is we stop doing what we've been doing all our lives that got us here and so that is one of the great advantages of trying these 12 steps is that we abandon in our old way of living and thinking. The second thing is you get to look at the results of the 12 steps. That's what AA, if you think about it, in a way, AA is like a great big show-and-tell operation. We have speaker meetings every night and we say, oh, tonight we're going to hear from a young lady who's about 30 years old. She has three years sobriety. Here is Mary. And then Mary gets up and you get some look at three years' sobriete. you get to hear this story I used to be this locked up in here and all that and now I am what you see right here and this is what's going on with me so you get to look at the results of the 12 steps all the time you got a sponsor you got his friends or her friends you got discussion meetings and you're hearing things and you are watching people and you looking real close and you were seeing the results of the twelve steps and that's why we say in chapter 5 if you want what we have this is how you get there this is the steps that you follow that will take you to this type of sobriety and you'll notice in AA we don't talk about if you work the steps then you'll be like me you'll have a Cadillac you'llhave an airplane you'llhavethis you'll havethob that isn't what we're talking about we start talking about different things that you will have you willhave peace of mind you willhave self-respect you will have friends you will feel like you belong in society you will feel a part of something and all of these things that we talk about are different measures of success than we used to have and that is a very important difference and so this is what Alcoholics Anonymous is it is this wonderful plan for changing our lives and producing the results that you see in the other people at the meeting and you see it and you know, you recognize it and you suddenly realize nobody's here conning you and there's no scam going on. There's no angle to be shot. It's just one other drunk trying to show this drunk how to get out of the hell hole that he used to be in and that's the end of the game and it's done out of sheer joy of passing on this message to the next person because when it works for you it reinforces my faith that this really is true, what's happening here. And so that is what I think AA is. And we talked last week about our first step, which I talk about every week leading into any other step because it's the doorway into the program and that's admitting you're powerless over alcohol, that your life became unmanageable. And we focus on the word powerless because that sets the stage for a spiritual program. That's what this is. it's a spiritual answer rather than an intellectual answer and we're all used to intellectual answers when we come here and intellectually you want to figure things out that's how you do it you figure it out and then you think up an answer and that's what we try to do with your alcohol and we come in here and we go that's the old way and that doesn't work Nobody has been able to think their way out of alcoholism ever. Knowledge doesn't help. It doesn't helped because your problem is not ignorance about alcohol. We can teach you all about alcohol, and when you are the world's leading expert on alcohol and alcoholism, if you're an alcoholic, you will be a drunk expert. People will come to listen to what you have to say. they may have to wait until you sober up. But it will not help you to stay sober because that is not the problem of alcoholism. Our first step tells us what the problem is. We're powerless over alcohol. So learning doesn't make you powerful. Learning doesn't change anything. You just have a smart drunk. And so we have to understand that. If powerless, if you understand the first step when I say I'm powerless over alcoholic, what you have said, whether you realized it or not is, I have a situation where I need a higher power. That's what powerless means. It means I on my own can never stay sober by myself. I cannot ever stay sober and we say you're powerless over alcohol we mean when you're sober. It's not the fact that when you drink you get all screwed up. That that's an easy problem. The real problem is when And you're stone cold sober and you know if you take one drink, you're going to get all screwed up. Guess what you do? You take the drink. Well, I'm going to be all screwedup. And down it goes because there's no way to not take it. Something inside of us always causes us to go back. Well, maybe this time nothing bad will happen. Maybe it'll be different and we're back in to have the beer and then it's off to the races. so when we say we're powerless we mean that when you are in perfect control of yourself when you're healthy you're back in the big bed you have a job and you've got money and you're you know you're just feeling perfect there's no way that you cannot take the first drink that's what we're saying and if you don't believe that you've gotta go back over your own life and finally acknowledge that until you die you will keep going back to that first drink. That's what being powerless is. And as you go back to the first drink, all the rest of the bad things as the disease progresses will happen and you will have a very bad ending. And that's what alcoholism is. It is absolute inability to avoid taking the first Drink. And it drives the rest of the world crazy. It drives our family crazy. It drives us crazy. It's just so frustrating to see a person who understands exactly what the situation is and goes out and drinks anyway. And we promise, and we do all these things. So being powerless, but it's good news because when we say we're powerless, it ends the discussion. That's it. You're not semi-powerless. You're powerless. And if we're powerless, then we need to find something to deal with being powerless. And that's what the first step does. It is surrender 100%. And if we don't do it 100%, the rest of the program won't work. It's the only step we do 100%. And we've known people, and I suppose I was a little bit that way, who've been around here four or five years, and the program isn't quite working right. And you know why? Because he never really surrendered in the beginning. We held reservations in the back of our heads. Well, I'm 98% powerless. But maybe they'll come up with some kind of a cure. And maybe they will invent a vitamin that you'll be able to take and then I'll beable to drink safely, whatever that means. Drinking safely. You know what they talk about? Would you take a pill if they invented a pill so you could drink socially? Not me. why would I want to drink socially? I mean, social drinkers they drink one drink and go to bed. I mean would you pay good money for a pill that would let you take one drink and go back to sleep? Go to bed? You're not the kind of alcoholic I am. I would only take one of these pills if you could get shit-faced every day and nothing bad would happen. and everybody would still love you. All right, okay. I don't think they're going to invent one of those. So anyway, this powerlessness is such a wonderful word because it's spirituality without recognizing it. When we say we're powerless, We really are stripped of any way of solving this thing and we must totally rely on something else. And in the beginning, this something else may be your sponsor. I'm in a point where I'm totally relying on this person who calls me up and tells me what meeting we're going to and what chapter to read and what this to do and what that. That is a spiritual attitude. That is saying, of myself, I'm nothing. I must rely on something else. And that is the beginning of spirituality. That's how you get in. So that's why that is The Doorway in. The surrender. The absolute saying, that's it. Now when you surrender and you sort of turn your life over to AA or your sponsor in the beginning, you don't give up control of everything. you still are in charge of a very important part of this. Your job is to judge the results. That's your job. And you say, go ahead, I'm going to follow the instructions that you folks have, but I'm gonna sit back and give you reports from time to time on how it's working. And that's your big job in the beginning is to compare the results that you're getting by following directions with the results you were getting when you figured everything out yourself. And most of us report amazing results, much to our surprise. I heard spirituality explained as well as I've ever heard it explained by one teenage girl explaining to a younger teenage girl spirituality. She turned to her and with the most sincere look you can get with peer pressure, she just went, this shit works. That was the... because so many of us are skeptical when we arrive, and that's exactly what the second step is all about. The second step, having surrendered, having caused us to absolutely admit defeat, look what they throw in our face while we're lying on the ground. Now you're going to come to believe that a power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity. all of a sudden they've brought god into the picture they've tried to disguise it with the power greater than yourself but we know what they're talking about and as soon as they bring that in now we're gone now we got a problem now we Got a Problem and the problem is described by Bill in the second step and the Problem is that you have just started a great debate with almost everyone who arrives here. Oh, higher power? Oh, that God stuff? Well, let me tell you where I'm coming from on that. We have a problem sponsor. I'm not going to be able to just buy into that because... And then you explain who you are and where you're coming from on this higher power stuff. And the debate begins. and in the past whenever someone has brought this up you have been very good at winning the debate well let me tell you where I'm coming from on this higher power spirituality stuff the way I see it and then the bullshit starts the way i see it is religion has caused more damage in this world than anything else that's kind of where I am coming from you know what I mean and you just have all this wonderful stuff of where you are coming from and so therefore I don't think I'll be able to go along with this well you're going to find that when you try to debate this issue in Alcoholics Anonymous you keep losing you lose to everyone I mean you lose to people who never went to grammar school and you lose to old people and you use to young people and you lose to westerners I mean it's amazing some of the things that happen so why do you lose? I'll tell you why you lose because they won't discuss theory they just discuss results and they go oh you're not going to be able to buy into the program too bad you're going to die next you want to buy in wait let's keep the discussion going a little further here You know, normally when I start my line of crap about spirituality and philosophy, somebody else tries to counter it with several logical moves and this and that. I'm not used to just having results thrown in my face like that. But that's all they do. It's incredibly practical. And they just dump this on us. And so we come up against this problem that is confronting us in the second step. and after you go through the second step if you're typical you're going to find that you do a lot of laughing at yourself afterwards but as you're going through this incredible intellectual debate you find it very very challenging and painful what's involved in order to accomplish the second step is something that is beyond the grasp of many of us it is called changing your mind changing your mind I remember the first time I heard that I said well if you're right why would you change your mind I mean that was sort of where I was coming from I never recalled ever changing my mind before and I could understand how other stupid people would change their mind and as a matter of fact that's what I tried to do a lot was to get other people to see things my way. And so, you know, but here they're talking about changing your mind. And that's really what the second step is all about is the great debate that is going to rage within you over this higher power issue and then eventually changing our mind. And Bill writes about this in a very humorous way at the beginning of the 12 and 12. I mean, in the big book. There's a chapter in the Big Book called We Agnostics. It's the chapter of the agnostics. And I remember reading that or seeing it when my sponsor gave me a big book and I knew what was in that chapter without reading it. Some people know that. I had, you know, a lot of them just... Oh yeah, I know what's in there. You can tell from the title, We Agnostics, that that's the Chapter that shows agnosticks how to stay sober as opposed to buying into all this God stuff over here in Chapter 5. and when you read the chapter you can summarize the chapter of the agnostic in three words and it's change your mind. That is what the chapter of the Agnostic is. Become a former agnestic. That is the basic message in the chapter of the Gnostic. And Bill writes a very funny thing in there and I think that this is what happens when we come to this crossroads. We've met with powerless over alcohol and now we've come to a crossroads in the road here and step two is sort of explains it to us and i always like to give the analogy of jack benny i love to tell the jack benney story when i get the chapter uh step two and the jack benny the great humorist and back in the radio days he just had this great radio show and he was known as a person who could not part with a penny i mean we had the first nickel he ever made he even had a little safe in his house and they had a pay phone in his home for guests when they game you know they wouldn't use his phone and so this one radio show he's walking down the hallway just hear the footsteps click click click quick click and then you hear this stick up man's voice goes stick them up and Benny goes right and the stick-up man says your money or your life and then the silence starts and it's five seconds and it is ten seconds and you can hear the studio audience starting to laugh and 20 seconds have gone there's nothing there's just been dead silence and finally the stick-up man can't take it anymore and he says well and Benny said I'm thinking and he was caught on a dilemma and to some of the outside watchers of this it's kind of humorous dilemma your money or your life there's the money but he's struggling there with this huge dilemma. Well, we can see these dilemmas maybe in an alcoholic's life. We take an alcoholic, young man, he's been from a small town, not a big troublemaker, but he gets drunk a lot and he gets drunken public and he goes up in front of the judge and the judge gives him lectures and so on down. But as time goes on, as the judge releases him back into the community, the people are starting to go, this kid is always causing trouble So they start leaning on the judge, and they're going, look, you can't just keep putting this drunk back on the street. You've got to do something. So finally, with all this pressure, the next time the young man's in there, the judge says to him, I'm sorry, you've been drunk in public 15 times in the last three months, and I'm going to have to do Something, so here it is. And half the town is in the courtroom to see what they're Going to do to this young man. And the judge said, here's the deal. It's either a year in jail or one AA meeting. Your choice. And if we don't have the Jack Benny syndrome again. Five seconds of silence, ten seconds of silence, twenty seconds of silence, and all the people are just going, what's wrong with that kid? He's standing up there one year in jail or one AA meeting, you know, why is he... Well, in order to get inside his head, we have to get inside his head to see why this dilemma is causing this tremendous crossroads. He was a bar drinker. He drank with his friends down in the bar and over the years some of the people would get in so much trouble from drinking that they would go to jail and once in a while some of them some of those people that were in the bars would get so bad that they went to AA and he watched all this very closely and he made one observation the people that went to jail came back and the people that went to AA he never saw again in the bar so one AA meeting meant gone forever in his mind and so he had this huge dilemma of one you know and he just struggled with it well and it's funny, you know, because we're sort of back here and we know what AA is and we don't know and we just laugh at him trying to make this choice between a year in jail and one AA meeting. Well, in the big book, in the chapter of the agnostic, we have a similar crossroads that you and I all come up against when we're new in AA. Here's the crossroads. You come up and there's one road going this way and one road doing that way. and what it says in the chapter is to live on a spiritual basis or to die an alcoholic death are not always easy alternatives to face so we've come up against two doors or two roads this is where you are at the second step you have two choices up to you go ahead and make a choice one, live on an alcoholic basis two, die an alcoholic death And guess what? Long period of silence. Spiritual basis. Alcoholic death. Call up our doctor. Doctor? Yeah, hey listen. I was just trying to settle an argument with a friend of mine. How bad is an alcoholic death? Really bad. Damn. spiritual basis or alcoholic death wow is there a third door that we might try can you imagine but this is where we are in the second step live on a now why is that because we have said living on a spiritual basis is going to be awful and that's what I said I didn't know what it was I had no idea what it was but I knew that I didn' want to choose it you know what I'm talking about And so here it was, coming to believe. The thing that was blocking me from making any progress here was changing my mind. I just couldn't change my mind about something very fundamental. It took me years to figure out what it was I was resisting changing my Mind about. And I'll tell you what I was like. This is where what really happened with me. I want you to imagine that it's back in the 1400s and you're in Europe and you have finally made it as a businessman. You are an entrepreneur over there and you Have just cornered the entire European market on maps. Every map that is sold in Europe is distributed by you and you have warehouses and are ready to start raking in the dough and living the good life. And some clown named Columbus has just returned with a preposterous story that the world is round. Now, it doesn't matter that the word may be round. It's just not convenient that it be round at this moment. Because if everybody buys into his story that it is round, your inventory is worthless. You see what I'm saying? It's Just totally destroyed. And you know something very similar happens when we say that we're going to turn our life and come to believe in a higher power. it's like our entire inventory of thinking about what the world is, how you live is worthless and you know why? because we are very self-centered people and that's part of the disease of alcoholism is to be self-centred and our center being ourselves caused us to draw a map of the world that we live in with us at the center and now we're being suggested that that is totally erroneous and that a higher power is really at the centre of everything and if that's true we're going to have to change more damn things than you can imagine. The implications of this step are just too much and so we try to wiggle out of it and we tryと come up with all kinds of well I think man can get along intellectually. We have all the different types that Bill mentions in the 12 and 12, the intellectually self-sufficient, the people who are disgusted with religion, a person who had faith and then lost it and then we come up with whatever reason that it is that we're not going to be able to follow this and each one of them Bill just deals with as he talks about the reality of our situation. What we have, You see, all human beings are confronted with this, I think, as they go through life. Bill writes, it's a very interesting thing that he writes here in the big book. I may have to use my glasses to read this. But I think it's very helpful in understanding the dilemma that we're in. If a mere code of morals or a better philosophy of life were sufficient to overcome alcoholism, many of us would have recovered a long time ago. But we found that such codes and philosophies did not save us no matter how much we tried. We could not wish to be moral. We could wish to Be philosophically comforted. In fact, we could will these things with all our might, but the needed power wasn't there. Our human resources, as marshaled by the will, were not sufficient. They failed us utterly. and so it was very frustrating to try and have values and never be able to live up to them and I know a lot of people that arrive here have that sense that I am a good person and I'm trying I have values and god damn it if I just lived by them if I could live by them if I'd just stuck with them I could do it and I could be alright we all wanted to be that and we just kept failing and we Just Kept Failing you know why we failed? We were trying to live spiritually without a higher power. I was trying to be a moral person on my own. And we find out that what our problem was, was lack of power. And this is where we change our perspective on this whole thing. In order to be A Better Person, we need to rely on a power to be The Better Person. And that was where we were wrong. Our egos wanted us to say, and all of us were self-centered, ego-driven. And I didn't realize I had said this because I never really said it in so many words. I said, other people need God in order to be spiritual. I can do it alone. I mean, is that the height of egocentricity? Weak wimps need God in order to get out of this mess that they're in, but real strong willpower type people can do it themselves. And this is a joke. I mean, this is an absolute joke. It's just impossible. And so this again became part of the dilemma of the second step. This wonderful idea that somehow I could make it on my own. and that's why we have sponsors and that is why we have the great ego deflation here in the program and people come up and poke us in the chest and they are trying to get us to stop trying to do it by yourself as soon as we are willing and all it takes you don't have to understand you see AA I know a lot of us when we are new and this will be the last point and then we will wrap it up we think that once we agree to the second step. Once we have an open mind about the second step, then AA is going to come in and explain this religion to us. And it turns out that's not going to happen at all. There is no Alcoholics Anonymous God. There is no God to be explained here. All the 12 steps are very valuable principles which if followed will lead you to a source of power that will make your life wonderful and it'll be up to you to explain what that power is. AA does not prove the existence of God, we specialize in convincing you of the need for a higher power. And the need is you're an alcoholic. And that's where we have the edge over other people who could was frustrated by life, wondering why there's no meaning and why they don't fit in. And we're all self-centered as human beings and at some point we suffer some sort of a situation that causes us to change our perspective and to try and become higher power centered and then everything fits in because this is how it really is. A map of the universe with the earth at the center started driving astronomers nuts because they started looking at stuff and it wasn't moving as if the earth was the center and eventually they had to change and found out the sun is what everything went around and then they said oh that's why that moves you know yeah well now it makes sense and as soon as we shift from being self-centered where you are the center of the universe and move over to a higher power center then everything oh yeah that's right that's here and that's everything looks different and because we're seeing it the way it really is and so this shift oh the point i was making is everyone is confronted with this but the alcoholics have the edge. This is the gift that I think the alcoholics have. We either try this new way or die. You know what I'm saying? Alcohol is waiting out there. We talk about this if you're new, maybe you don't know this, but around every AA meeting, like just outside the building here at NIH in the grass where the grass is about this high are hundreds of thousands of half pints of vodka and they just they're down below the level of the grass and they just circle outside the meetings and they wait for somebody to come out and say, the hell with this AA. I'm out of here. And then they jump up. One of them jumps up and he just waves and you go, God damn. Half pint of vodka just sitting there. Must be God's will. and then you see what is the problem that's going on right now we have a person who's not interested in trying AA so he's about to get interested you see how you get interested vodka gets you interested oh you don't want to try the spiritual thing well come on over here and then you pour it down and then alcohol beats the crap out of you wham wham you ready yet no not ready so how do you get ready to become spiritual drinking and puking and going to jail and all of that whereas non-alcoholics don't have that strong man standing out there to drive them back into this path and so in a bizarre fashion we're the lucky ones who are driven back to this wonderful road and not left we don't Have the choice of just aimlessly wandering we don' t aimlessly wander you don't find alcoholics we're out here getting in deep trouble we're not aimlessly wandering if that would be a terrible sentence we'd start drinking again or we're here and then we stay here because we don't want to go back out there and get beat up by the vodka anymore and then we start down this road and then wonderful things happen and then you take credit for it I mean that's just then I decided to become spiritual and life's been wonderful ever since and we leave out the part about the vodka bottles patrolling the area threatening to beat the crap out of me if I didn't become spiritual so you can see the wonderful irony of how we get down this road that the second step is clearly one of the great things coming to believe it's a great debate changing our intellectual position on a higher power to accept the reality of the situation that we're in each person struggles to go through it And if you're like the rest of us, when you finish the struggle and finally make the decision to come over here, you're going to laugh at yourself. I can't believe I stood there at that goddamn door. Let's see, alcoholic death or spiritual basis? I hope nobody saw me standing there. We're at the end of the time. We've got a great way to wrap this thing up with the Lord's Prayer for anybody who would care to join in.