Spiritual Awakening and Total Surrender – Workshop April – Part 1 of 8 – Sandy B.

Sandy Beach from Tampa, Florida. Thank you guys. More agendas are back on the table if you need them. Do you want this table or no? I'll try this. Okay. There, that will work, huh? That's about it. Okay. Well, I really want to thank all of you for inviting me out. And I know a lot of you and I've been to LA Alcoholics Anonymous quite a bit and I love the AA out here. I just am delighted with it all. I'd like to start out with, I'd like to offer up a prayer to get this started. God, we miss you. We miss you so very much. We seem to have lost our way and we're very lonely without you. We want to come home to you more than our hearts can bear. Thank you for our complete defeat. Thank you for the pain of the downward journey. Thank you for leading us to each other and to the path of seeking you. Please allow each of us this weekend to experience your presence, and through that, to show others how to know you. May we always be in the present moment with you. Amen. This will probably be a little bit different than what you've been used to. Many years ago, I decided that I would try and think up a weekend with talks and ideas that wasn't done in the traditional way of taking the big book and studying the steps or the traditions, but tried to get to the real essence of our spiritual program, the spiritual journey. And so that's what we have. And the first lecture that's on schedule is a title that I chose because it's a little bit different. Back to the basics of awakening. And I know whenever you hear the term back to the basics, you don't normally associate awakening with it. But I would submit to you that that is exactly what the basics are for. Is to achieve the awakening that's in our twelfth step which says having had a spiritual awakening as the result of this program. And so I want to just focus on that during this talk. Now, people attending something like this fall into many different categories. There's some people here who have been around a long time. You're old-timers in AA. And maybe you're here to jumpstart or maybe you'RE here because you want to take it a little further than you've been. Maybe there's some that have been having some problems and they want to come out and see if they can get unwound from those problems and get back on track. And maybe there's new people who are coming here for the first time to experience something like a weekend with 140 other men who are trying to accomplish the same thing. And I would say that as a result of activities like this, there are people amongst us who will choose to become seekers to a higher degree than they have been. Whether they've been around 20 years or not, you may elect to do that. And when we do that, we change the priorities in our life and really try to put first things first, which is to get as close to God, your creator, as you can get. And when people elect to do that very often the results are manifested in a rather short time, probably within six months or so. and you will see them in your home group and I call them beacons. They just have an energy about them that is quite attractive and when they share at meetings you listen and you go I never would have thought of it that way. That was really interesting what Jim just said and he probably said it in a very simple way it was just a comment on a topic and he just came up with two sentences and it just left you with the feeling that just said it all you know what I mean do you know that feeling that you get when you hear something that is really on and I think back when I had the chance to meet Chuck Chamberlain and he was definitely a beacon if not a lighthouse in terms of having an energy about him that you just couldn't dismiss. You weren't sure what it was but you knew it was there and it was pretty powerful and I don't know why but he took a liking to me in my early sobriety, I had about 15 years and invited me down to Laguna and I got to sit in his chair and listen to him talk to other people and I just was taking it all in I'm just going man this is just amazing and I felt wonderful but I didn't know what he was talking about you know what I mean I just thought this has to be good I mean just feel the energy in the room and just look at the man's face this is just remarkable what I'm hearing but then later on when someone asked me what I heard, I said, well it was great. It was just amazing. And so that happens. And it happens in AA because something causes an individual to seek in a different way than they have been. And that happened to me probably about 20 years ago. And I think I got the idea from having met Chuck and then from looking at The Eleventh Step, where in both the Big Book and the Twelve and Twelve it talks about prayer and meditation being an Individual adventure. It suddenly isn't a we program anymore. This is one person is going to either engage in the prayer and meditation and the seeking and encourages us that our libraries are full of books, there are many teachers. Suddenly you find that there is something happening that is AA's the foundation but this is, we're going to lift to some individual place so that we can understand and see the AA program from a different vantage point. And it'll be unique to you. But as you talk about it, your take on the program will be slightly different. And very often that take is very attractive. People want to hear more about it. Where did you get that idea? And you, in turn, can encourage others to go off on this journey. We don't have to. A lot of people do fine without it. The AA support system is very good. But I have some thoughts about the AA support system, and this is what it looks like. If you went back about 50 years ago in AA, in most small cities and even some of the larger ones, there was only one meeting a week. Now imagine that, one meeting a week, how are you going to stay sober on one meeting a weak? Well you really look forward to the meeting, that's the first thing, you are really looking forward to that. And the second thing is, you might find a buddy that attends the meeting and halfway through the meeting meet him for coffee. But mostly, you prayed like hell. That's how you did it. You just prayed like Hell. God, please help me get through. Only two more days to the meeting. I'm reading the book and it's only two more days to the meeting. I'm going to make it, I'm going to making it, and I'm gonna make it. So if we fast forward to today, there's hardly any place in this country where there's only one meeting a week. Matter of fact, we have a rather big smorgasbord of meetings. We got 5am meetings, 6am meetings, 12 noon meetings, five o'clock right after work meetings, seven o' clock midnight meetings, men's meetings, women's meetings, gay meetings, couples meetings, discussion meetings, speaker meetings, picnics, retreats, conventions. We've got pamphlets on everything. There's no subject that hasn't been covered, except for old guys, and maybe they're going to come out with one for them. My point is that we have such a far-reaching support system, you don't have to hardly pray at all. You follow what I'm saying? You could have halfway livable sobriety on the support system itself. I go to the meetings, talk to other people. I'm involved in this, I'm involved in that. And that could be maintained for the rest of your life. And you could check out with 35 years of reasonably good sobriety. Now Bill had a comment about good. And I think he quoted Lincoln when he said good is the biggest enemy of the best that there is. because we're just comfortable enough to not change. Yeah, it really would probably be a good idea to push myself a little further, but I don't have to. I'm not in the crisis mode. And so that's why we can just stay there. And so things like this, people come to these things because they know inside of themselves that there's so much more, that we really aren't all the way home, like the opening prayer said. And we really do miss God. And we're going to do something about it tomorrow and so on and so On. And so I thought about this and I tried to come up with something that would address that so that we're moving maybe beyond the conventional to see where it takes us. And so when I came up with the idea of awakening, back to the basics of awakening. I started with this thought and see what you think of it. The 12 steps says having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps. So we start out with the premise that awakening is the solution. That is the solution. If awakening is the solution, what was the problem that it addresses? And you know, you just go, I don't know. Unawakened. Sometimes they talk about being in a dream. You're going to awaken. St. Francis said by dying we awaken to life eternal. So what is this? What is it that awakening fixes? Now my take on that would be this. Self-centeredness. We're self-centered in the extreme. And we're told that when we first arrive here. Alcohol, well everybody's self- centered. But alcoholics do it in the extremely. and what I would call it is a self-centered trance. We're stuck in our own vision of the world, and we're not going to leave it because we honestly believe that we're seeing the real deal. But we're only seeing it from inside ourselves. and I would submit to you that if there's 140 guys here there's going to be 140 different experiences this weekend and we're all sitting in the same room and some people are going to walk away saying, I like the old way better but they're all going to be different And so I really think that the 12 steps are designed to smash this self-centered concept of reality that we all have. and in preparing for this the second lecture I came up with a title that I thought would appeal to everybody's ego Contemplative AA everyone would go yeah Plato I'm sort of like Plato I'm glad I'm doing that and when I did that I went online I was looking around I came back I came out with a paper that is back there that you can pick up at the end of the lecture. And there was a doctor who wrote a paper Addiction, Meditation and Contemplative Practice and his name was Dr. Natcher. And he decided to disagree with all the other doctors on what addiction was. and he decided to approach it by acknowledging that there's a psychological factor, there's social factor, there's physical factor but they're leaving out consciousness. They're leaving out the spiritual state of consciousness and as he explored a way of explaining this lo and behold he came up with Dr. Carl Jung and Roland Hazard and the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous when, as you know and it's in the paper and at the end you can pick this paper up and I think you'll find it fascinating especially where he starts criticizing us a little bit but he quotes Dr. Young and Roland Hazard being there and all the psychiatric treatment for a year is of no avail and Roland gets drunk again and comes back and says, is there no hope for me? And he said, no, there's no hope. I can't do anything but there are, I've seen some recoveries from a spiritual or religious experience. maybe you ought to go out and try one of those and we all know the story that Roland went out and found the Oxford movement had this spiritual experience passed it on to Ebby and Ebby passed it on to Bill and Alcoholics Anonymous got started resolving the problem of alcoholism by changing the state of consciousness and going from as Chuck called it conscious separation from God to conscious contact with God so our whole program is designed to enable us to have conscious contact which changes our state of consciousness and and he quotes Dr. Young in that letter to Bill that they publish in the grapevine every so often see if I can find it What were Young's recollection about his final meeting with Rowland? What did he write in response to Bill Wilson's thank you note? Here are Young's words. His craving for alcohol was the equivalent at a low level of the spiritual thirst for wholeness, expressed in medieval language, the union with God. and so his whole theory is that everyone is suffering from separation from God only they don't diagnose it as that we don't diagnosis we didn't think we were drinking because we were separated from God we thought we had a nervous breakdown and we couldn't fit in with society and everything was unfair and this is the only way to fix it but underlying all of that was a dissatisfaction with life itself that we couldn't really put our finger on restless, irritable and discontent that can be diagnosed psychologically it can be diagnosed many different ways why am I restless, why am i irritable, discontant Dr. Natcher and Dr. Young would say it's because you're too far away from God and Alcoholics Anonymous came along and proved the case by being the only successful treatment of this spiritual disease by having a program where steps are put together to enable an alcoholic to achieve this union with God anyway he goes on to talk about this in general and well I'll do it from memory he talks about how spiritual programs have come up in the past that were very effective and as time goes along they get diluted and lose their effectiveness and then he points to AA and he says I see something similar in Alcoholics Anonymous I see that back when the Oxford group was working and when AA first started the emphasis on one person helping another one to have a spiritual awakening was rather intense and that there were transformations of a greater magnitude than is common today. There's plenty of them today, but it isn't the vast majority of the people that have them. And as I look in my group, there's just lots of people who are happy just going to meetings and talking about the steps sometime, but who have missed the point that their entire problem is separation from God. and those of you that have read New Pair of Glasses which is Chuck Chamberlain's retreat that they transcribed into a book, I guess most people have heard of it or have read it, I don't know how many have heard of it? Almost everybody I'm in California after all laughter laughter and one of the points that Chuck makes, one of the fundamental points in that whole weekend. And we all know it, but we never explore it. He makes the statement that there's only one problem that we have that includes all problems. And that problem is conscious separation. That in our consciousness we exist separate from God. And the answer to that is conscious contact. So having said that, if that's true then discussion meetings would be kind of boring because someone would come there and say well my wife just left me but I went back and improved my conscious contact with God and I feel a lot better somebody else could say well I just lost my job but I just went back and improved by conscious contact with God and I feel a little better so you'd hear the same damn answer from everyone and that leaves us in a very uncreative position and so knowing that we are free to comment well what I like to do when this happens and we're coming up with our what we think I like the word I like it to go rummy I like you know so in other words we come up with I don't know I go to a club and I listen to people handling problems. And I would say that 90% of the solutions leave God out. Do you follow what I'm saying? Isn't that odd? That as spiritual as we are, our ego causes us to come up with solutions that leave God Out. We could call it doing the legwork. I have to do the leg work. I haveと do this. Well, God helps with the legwork. God would like to help us with every burden that we have and there's just a tendency to not ask him. There's one of the great character defects that all of us have that sometimes isn't recognized as a character defect is self-sufficiency. I mean self-sufficiency is so contra to spirituality and yet it becomes something that we feel is good now it may be good in the material world but over in this world that we're trying to live in and to evolve in it's just a disaster and one of the problems with spirituality is that it works when you follow these steps and you work this have a sponsor and takes you along things get better and you feel much better about yourself you feel so much better you feel such better about the world and you really are grateful to AA for this new outlook that you have on life and it actually feels like you have been made stronger and that you have then returned to a place where you really don't need help as much as when you were brand new. Do you all relate to that? Do you see how subtle that is that you have the feeling wow, I'm really grateful to God for putting me in a place where I don't meet him anymore and I want to express my gratitude to God for doing that which is a very sneaky way of easing God out ego, easing God out and of course we know what happens within a short time the world collapses because we are now handling everything on our own and so self-sufficiency is just one of the tough things to fight off, which is why it's fun to have close advisors, sponsors that can tell us when we're getting self-sufficient. I think you're handling these things on your own too much. Let me see what I had extra here. Thatcher makes this point and I'll be curious in discussion later what some of you guys think about this he suggests that because the individual pursuit of this union with our higher power isn't pursued far enough we don't get the full relief from the pain of separation that we could have. And we come to the conclusion that seeking this is a lifetime job and that without AA, we're going to fall by the wayside and there's no such thing as an absolute perfect release from alcohol, even though Bill writes about it in the sixth step. And therefore, rather than being addicted to alcohol, we're addicted to AA, which is a step in the right direction, but it is still shy of being totally connected with God. I felt that. I felt this is my home and I was connected more to AA than to God. Now, there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not criticizing it. I did it for years. But I'm saying if I stay there, I'm going to rely on that for the rest of my life instead of trying to become fully dependent on a higher power. And when you look at the essence of the sixth step, it is to abandon all self-reliance in all areas to become dependent on your higher power. So if you kind of said, well what would the ideal program look like? You would desperately need AA and God when you got here and after 20 years you would need them even more because you will have turned over much more of your life until there's no area that you're managing. Now that's not a normal thing to be talking about. There's no area that I'm managing. When that concept comes up, you remember the line in the 12 and 12, I'd be the hole in the donut. I would have no territory left. I would not be, our ego and our life and our ideas constitute our kingdom. And that's where we live. We live in those ideas. and the idea of giving all them up to be guided by God is a little further than most of us even want to consider and so we tend to settle