Spiritual Awakening – Sunlight of the Spirit Group Workshop – Part 2 of 3 – Tim M.

Thank you, good morning everyone. My name is Tim, I'm an alcoholic. Good to see some cameras on. It really helps to be able to see the faces of the people I'm talking to. So I'm a narcolic and all sorts of other things as well. And what I'm going to be talking that today, step 12. The first part, having had a spiritual awakening, well we've got some problems already, to talk about an awakening presupposes that before the awakening we're asleep. To understand what waking up means I've got to understand what being asleep Now obviously before I had a spiritual awakening, as I indeed have, as far as I can tell, there's no objective test for it so you're going to have to take my word for it on that one. It didn't appear that I was asleep. I felt very much awake for around 16 hours a day. certainly felt a lot of emotion, largely negative. Operating in the world before a spiritual awakening was like being a pincushion and the world was pins so whatever happened caused pain. I remember one admittedly trivial incident in 1993 when i just got sober i was in the sainsbury's on the uh on the finchley road um and i saw someone buying broccoli and i thought i can't afford to buy broccoli and I had a panic attack and left the supermarket I didn't have any resilience I mean that's a response to seeing someone buying a vegetable i didn't therefore certainly have resilience when it came to any genuine difficulties if you'd said to me are you asleep i would have said well obviously not the people who appear to be asleep are the happy ones they seem to be the ones who are missing the trick um i was convinced that the only people that saw things as they were were people that were suffering and that suffering was very important and that people that weren't suffering were stupid and weren't paying attention and so I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s and when Channel 4 on the television came into existence it was the sort of uh most modern or more modern of the two artsy channels it did other things as well so it had lots of artsy films um very grand noble films none of them were happy not one of them was happy good films apparently i was brought up to believe were films about unhappy people who don't really resolve their unhappiness. When I got to London when I was 18, I used to go to an independent film theatre. I usedto go to a couple, one Riverside Studios and the other one, the ICA on the mouth. And I remember going to an Emir Kusteritzer sequence of films for a whole weekend at the Riverside Studios and I also once signed up for a full sequence of all of the Ingmar Bergman films I don't know if you've ever seen an Emi Akustaritsa film or an Ingmar Bergman film but it's not very neither of them are a barrel of laughs there are a couple of early Ingmar Bergman comedies but you've got to squint very hard to find them funny and also speak Swedish, which is a disadvantage. Anyway, that's a digression. The point is that I associated being unhappy with intelligence, insight, and nobility. And I thought the rest of the world, people that just got on with things were somehow not quite human, not quite real, anesthetized. um mercifully all of in all of the above i was quite wrong all of that suffering was a nightmare and the point about nightmares is although the suffering is felt as real what is causing the nightmare isn't it isn't real in a fundamental eternal sense if things happen in the material world i'll grant that um an indian jesuit um paul catino says that material reality is around one percent of whole thing if you're in a theater and you're watching a play there are as it were real things going on in the play and there are real human beings playing the characters and the real human being playing the characters are feeling real emotions and the people in the audience are feeling emotions but no one would think that the cardboard apple on the table, on the stage is a real apple The real apple is eaten only by the audience member on their way home That's where the real apple is. It's not on the stage In a sense with the unhappiness that I used alcohol and other substances and other behaviours to anaesthetise In a sense, that unhappiness did reflect a genuine insight. And the genuine insight it reflected was this, that, I mean, this is the sort of famous complaint at the 14-year-old, is that the world is pointless and life is pointless and you can cite Marcus Aurelius and Kierkegaard and lots of people to support this. Very good. um it's right in a sense um trying to you see the mistake i made when i got sober i used the steps to learn how to behave well in the world and to operate well in accordance with the world systems in other words i learned to use the steps to scrub up well so I could get a job and study and work and progress. But it very soon became apparent, really within three or four years, that everything I achieved or everything I attained simply resulted in a further set of objectives being placed in front of me. I never got any. I don't know if any of you have ever climbed mountains. And I don't mean climbing mountains as in the sort of very energetic form of mountaineering one might see there in the Himalayas or the higher alps. But, you know, the general sort of what Americans would call hiking in difficult terrain. And I've gone up a few mountains in some of the desert and mountain states in America. And I'm not a climber. I'm just relatively fit. uh and i have had this experience again and again and again that you climb up a bit you think you're doing frightfully well and you think your four fifths of the way up and if you go around the next little peak you'll see the peak of the mountain itself and you get around the Next Little Peak and you discover you're one fifth of the way up or one eighth you can't believe how little terrain you have behind you and how much you have ahead and trying to achieve happiness in the material realm by uh well achieving anything in the interior realm is like being on a mountain where there is no ultimate peak wherever you get to there's always another one. And the promises behind the next one, their satisfaction lies. Now, this isn't the end of the horror. The end of a horror, and anyone who is over 50 will recognise this, ones energies start to wane to some extent. The objectives stretch away into the distance And you start to realize as friends around you age and die that the mechanism, the human mechanism is winding down. If you've looked after old people, you'll see the very slow deterioration over decades. The prognosis is not good for any of us. and the horror of happiness lying in the distant future in the material realm when one is increasingly decrepit and unable to achieve things that one could have achieved at a walk in one's 20s. This is not the horse to bet on. One very sad observation as well amongst people I've known who are materialists and these are good moral intelligent rational hard-working people outside the fellowship what i've seen again and again and this is very disturbing is you see a tragedy happening and you see the person not recovering from it and not being able to not having the resources and being essentially broken by it. And I've seen this again and again and again without a spiritual life, without the higher power. Very, very difficult. Things start very well. The sense of futility of a materialistic existence And I would add to that an individualistic existence. I think it's well documented. If anyone's read Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, the Greek myth of the gentleman who is condemned for eternity to pushing a stone, a rock, up to the top of a hill over the course of the day at great effort. And then at the end of the Day, the rock rolls down to the other side and he has to push it up again. And he's condemned to doing this for eternity. You've got Prometheus, who is condemned for eternity to having his liver plucked out by birds for his hubris in stealing fire from the gods. We're not the first people to spot this, and depressed 14-year-olds are not the first person to spot it. When I was in my early teenage years, i told an adult so-called adult in my family um that i was depressed and they said oh everyone is depressed but eventually you get married and you have children and you're so tired out by them you forget about your depression that was the philosophy uh busy busy busy busy busy to avoid seeing this and then that's the end of it achieving things in the material realm my observation in the small corner of western civilization so-called civilization i appear to be in is that people look up greatly to achievement and by achievement they mean doing better than someone else which means for every person who is achieving there must be one or more people who have failed the more people who have failing the greater the achievement so achievement is always at the cost of everyone else. C.S. Lewis talks about this in The Great Sin of Pride, the reason you want X, Y and Z is not because you want anything from it but it's so that the other fellow doesn't get it whether it's a relationship or an achievement or an attainment or a career or a job it's not the thing itself, you want someone else to be deprived of it so you can be topped off, you wants to beat them, competition um it will get better this there is a but i need to lay out the ground first so so stick with it um people say the most extraordinary things and they say them so often you think well they must be true because if they weren't true why would so many people say them particularly intelligent people. And one of the interesting things, there are two topics where well I'll give you a couple of other topics if we have for instance the topics of quantum fields or the topic of, oh I don't know thematic verbs in ancient Greek No one but an expert on either of those would dare pronounce anything on those topics. The two topics I observe people, and I include myself in this, having a terrible temptation to pronounce on without any investigation whatsoever or minimal investigation are theology and politics. and uh as a friend of mine says in fact the less i know about political issue the clearer my views can be which is very good you've read a tweet and now you have a view very good well done um you can read that's all we've proven the point of saying is i dismissed the idea that there was anything beyond the material realm on the basis of a very simple idea and the simple idea was this i do not see any evidence in the material realm for there being another realm let's say a realm of the spirit and i thought qed that's the end of that discussion i can dispense with that question forever that the the thousands of millennia of intelligent people who believe in that other realm notwithstanding i thought well i'm very smart and very clever i can't see i can' t see anything so there's nothing there in the same way that the russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin went into space said well i don't see god out here as if he was expecting to somehow so on the basis of entire ignorance and a false conclusion i've blocked myself off from anything which might save me and as i say my first phase of life was essentially being depressed and seeing futility all around me the second phase was thinking i must have been wrong so i'm going to make it in the material world i'll find a way of creating a material existence as an individual not as part of anything as an individua which will give me happiness and satisfaction of course in the big book it says any life based on self-will can hardly be a success uh any life based on what i think i want will fail and that is the materialistic and individualistic you see the problem with the i want is that it's got i in it and it's got want in it um individualism and materialism to go back to my false conclusion about the other realm if you have two realms um let's say the two realms are france and germany and you're in france and you say, does Germany exist? And you look around the village square you're in, in I don't know, let's name a little French town, La Mastre, Pontrieu. And you look around and you see, I don' t see any evidence of Germany here. Well, why would you? You're in a small village square in La Mestre or Pontrieux. The false assumption was that if there is another realm it will constantly be proclaiming itself in the terms of this realm why would it if it is a different realm it is different it's going to operate in accordance with different rules it's under no obligation whatsoever to take on the rules of this round and proclaim itself in the same way that if you're in a kitchen and someone says I propose that there is a dining room you cannot see the dining room from the kitchen, they're different rooms, and so well I can't see a dining room here from the kitchens therefore it does not exist, that was the level of logic that I was using if you've ever been in an industrial kitchen you'll notice there's an awful lot of work there's a lot of fuss why would a kitchen exist were it not for the existence of a dining room there'd be no point why is it even here the apparent futility of the material realm I've learnt through doing the steps ironically through doing something as banal as doing the footsteps the futility, the apparent futility of the physical realm comes from my assumption that there is no other realm what if this realm the material world is there to serve the higher realm not itself the kitchen does not serve itself the purpose of the kitchen is to deliver up meals to the other realm and then the people that work in the kitchen go to the other realm at that's where they eat the meals they've been preparing in the material realm things start to fall into place uh the other false conclusion that i drew as a teenager and the young in my early 20s i was going to say adult but i wasn't an adult i was a child in an adult's body um and this is straight from bill's story where he says he had trouble believing in god because He looked around at the wars and the chicanery and all of the other things, and he wondered if religion had done any good, frankly. If the devil seemed the boss universal, I think is the line from the big book. And so, and this is a very, very common argument. It's presented so commonly that people have stopped even trying to attack it because it's so pervasive. Look at the world. If there is a God, how could there possibly be a God when you look at the cruelty, apparent cruelty of the material world and the apparent cruelty of mankind? To extend the analogy of the kitchen room, the kitchen and the dining room. If the kitchen is a mess, you cannot conclude that there is no dining room, there is no one in the dining room. The person in the dining room doesn't care and the person in the dining is not in charge. What if the person in the dining room delegated various tasks to the people the kitchen and the reason the kitchen is in a mess is because the people in the kitchen haven't been listening to the person in the dining room. Suddenly we have an explanation, certainly for the human suffering. C.S. Lewis again, you could do a lot worse than to set yourself the project of reading every word that C. S. Lewis wrote several times before it seems then he lists i think in the book the problem of pain so i have the problem of pain of the weight of glory one of the two he lists a number of human virtues and said if everybody on the planet displayed these virtues humanity's problems would be solved in 10 years quite right uh so to infer the non-existence of god from the bad behavior of people is a false conclusion, I've decided. Now, the position I've got to the spiritual awakening is waking up to the existence of a separate realm, waking up the existence or a higher power, an ultimate authority in that realm other people now if you want to come through the higher power as the group or nature or anything like that or aa as a whole or heaven forbid alan on as a whole that would be that will be some higher anyway if you won't do that that's absolutely fine or if your higher power is your cat or your grandfather that's there and it's working very very good i'd rather see someone have a higher power of the cat than not have a high priority um i'm talking about my what i've come to after a number of decades in here waking up to the existence of another realm waking up to the assistance of a higher power in that realm waking up to the idea that higher power cares specifically about me as well you know along with everyone else not me individually but me simply because i'm part of a massive humanity this is what enables me to live at peace firstly with my flawed what will be my eternally flawed human nature. I don't really have any guilt or shame about it, that I'm full of flaws anyway. They're there and they need to be dealt with, but they're not a source of guilt or fame. It enables me to live in a world where a lot of people are very upset most of the time and very few people propose solutions. it's if if that were all i was surrounded with if that were all that were available to me i would no longer be i wouldn't i couldn't have studied um uh when i was a teenager i actually i'm not going to go into the detail but i was suicidal and i acted on those thoughts, sometimes in front of other people. And I would use those thoughts against people as well. I weaponised that. In a sense, there's an American, one Czech Republic, or what was to become the Czech Republic, but now American rabbi called Manus Friedman, who says when teenagers say I didn't ask to be born, they're absolutely right. Don't contradict them. They didn't are. Of course they didn't. But they were. Therefore someone did or something did. And maybe existence is for that, not for oneself. The desire to kill myself actually had a shred of sanity. The horror of being who I was in the world I was in, that self, what is self? Eckhart Tolle says self is mind-made false images of who we really are. Mind-made false images of who you really are. The impulse to do away with that self is in a sense quite right, the mistake is to do a way with the physical form in order to get rid of that false self. One doesn't have to do away With oneself physically or leave the physical plane in order To do away with that false self how does one do away with it the steps and what the steps do this is this is how one is brought to the higher reality um when i got to step four i was in the most frightful tangled mess of me and the world and all my feelings and all my thoughts and everything was bundled up together like a bucket of sick what step four started to do was to pull things apart and it started by looking at the specific causes of upset in my life and the first distinction it made was between other people and me in the step four resentment inventory the second column uh what did sally do my first draft would be something like sally offended me well no no no that bundles up the action she took and the effect on me these are two separate things um the second column turns out turns out to be sally glared at me from across the room that was her action how did i then feel as a result of that is separate i started to be able to separate your action and its effect on me in the same way that in step eight i say what was my action on what was that effect on the other person how did they feel in response to that how did their life change detrimentally in response for that this separation starts to take place and then in the third column another separation takes place I mentioned earlier that my sense was that I was a pincushion and the world was pins. In the third column it says right we've got our list of people against whom we have grievances and we now know what they what they did factually concretely simply clearly what the bugger did that has upset us and then in the third column it says before you you uh start to think that they've affected you we're going to change the language slightly these didn't affect me They affected my, then you've got seven words or phrases, pride, self-esteem, personal relations, sex relations, ambitions, security and pocketbooks. Which means that these upsetting behaviours of other people never affected me. They affected one of these, one or more of these seven areas of self. if the area of self goes or i'm detached from it i can be unaffected and i remember the first time i mentioned this the other day so that's why i suppose it's in the top of my mind i used to go to a gloomy meeting on a monday 30 years ago and uh it was though all the people in the room were greywashed and doug would walk in like a sort of technicolor creature and people would glare at him and he would share very very cheerfully about how affected the program was and how well his life was going and people shoot daggers at him with their looks and he was completely unaffected by it because he was detached from those seven areas of self one those seven areas of self they don't go completely they still remain so i it doesn't matter how well i work the program i will have a reputation amongst my fellows as as indeed will all of us reputation does not go material circumstances do not go objectives do not go other people will continue to treat us in certain ways personal relations finances will remain a factor forever but what happens is i've become increasingly though not permanently increasingly detached from them but to detach from them you've got to know what they are and that's what the third column starts to do uh what are all of my ambitions because they're what are causing the problem what are All of My Demands for How Others Should Behave What Image of Myself Am I holding it in my mind, that I insist be upheld in other people's minds. To cut a long story short, what I recognised in step four was that it was possible to live in the world and be unaffected by what is going on by looking at the ways in which I am affected and recoiling with horror at that way of thinking, that way of believing that way of living um going back to the question of how the steps bring about the spiritual awakening the steps a to no all of the steps have a very significant role to play each one has its own contribution in step five i'd had lots of sometimes people say you know love is the answer to everything and maybe but one has to define what love is um i'm sure there are people that had never been told by anyone they got to aa that they were loved i think everybody without exception who comes to aa has been treated well by one or more people other one orもう people have acted in the benefit of that person at some point and that is love i think it's untrue to say that anyone can go i don't think one can exist on the planet without love having been shown in some form whether or not one realizes it or recognizes it as that is different but people have been trying uh to express love in various ways or express my value to try to counteract my depression anxiety all those other things um but the first moment i genuinely sensed that there was something worthwhile about me and about potentially my life was in step five, where I read out the material on around seven pieces of paper. And I said to Doug at the end of that, because I'd heard it in a meeting, I thought it sounded very fashionable. and so i asked him do i have any character assets we've been talking about my character defects do we have do i Have any character asset should we examine those and he said oh you have one i said what is that he said a willingness to change there we go that was all i was going to get uh and and just a footnote for why it's absolutely deadly to try to look at assets and defects in the same exercise in step five. The defects I came up with myself so they are mine to admit any virtues I had were given by God they are not mine to own as though I've created them myself. To equate defects and assets is to equate two things from different orders of reality i did not make myself all that is good in me was a gift from god to treat that gift as my own virtue and to polish it is absolutely deadly denying where it's coming the antidote was in step five when doug continued to treat me well after he knew everything about me than he had before i'd done the step five that in one single exercise which took it right in an hour or two certainly no more than that followed by pizza that did more and more effectively than the aggregate of human effort to help me in the 21 years preceding that point. What did I have to do? I had to admit my wrongs. Steps eight and nine, the combination of forgiveness and amends again detached me from the suffering. I remember when I completed the last last amend, I felt properly alive for the first time ever. I hadn't realised that I hadn't felt alive. I had the feeling I could go anywhere and do anything and nothing could harm me, even if my body were harmed or my circumstances were harmed, that I would be right uh when you wake up in the morning and once you've properly woken up if you've been having bad dreams it is first of all self-evident that you are awake it is also self- evident that what you were dreaming was unreal and you do not get there you don't wake up logically as it were You don't say from within the dream, I shall analyze the dream I'm having and recognize that I am dreaming, that it's all folly and somehow think my way to being awake. You cannot do that from within The Dream. If you ever try to think within a dream, you are in those states where you have a tiny amount of agency over what is going on in The Dream, you cannot escape The Dream all you can do is rearrange things within it but you discover the dream you've got is far more powerful than you that your agency within that dream is limited uh you must wake up but you do not wake yourself up you discover yourself waking up and so i didn't wake up by saying i shall wake up i woke up by taking the actions specifically the actions of There are some sort of thinking steps and some writing steps, but then there are some action steps. Step five is an action step. Step nine is an actions step. And I mean, 11 is an actual step in that we're praying, meditating to God. But I mean action in the sense of connecting with other people. in step five i connected through uh the admission of wrongs which the other person recognized also in themselves step nine is through the admissionof wrongs this is the extraordinary thing that my sense of self-worth um did not come from saying how what a jolly good fellow i was It came from admitting wrongs. And in being the person who admits the wrongs, I separate myself from the wrongS and realize I am not those wrongS. Those were things I did, not things that I was. Very important. So it's the admission of wrongS in five, the admission of wrongs to the people you wronged in step nine and then in step 12 someone says here are all the things i've been doing wrong and then you say well i've done those things wrong as well it's all it's through the admission of wrongness it's not by sort of bulking ourselves up and getting spiritually hench it's it it's through recognizing the horror of the self one has constructed that is the basis on which real connection takes place and in making that connection in that moment of connection the self is destroyed i don't know if you've ever been at meetings where there are people who are in their first few weeks of sobriety and once the alcohol clears out of the system um a couple of weeks later someone will say something and the newcomer will burst out laughing and then everyone else bursts out laughing. And in that moment, that newcomer's self has been destroyed. The ego has been destroyed. There's cynical laughter and cruel laughter, but the laughter you get in AA meetings is a different type of laughter. You see newcomers who are serene and say things of enormous sense at times. It's because the self has been temporarily knocked out and when that happens the little bubble which was enclosing the person and holding back the great tides of eternity is burst and eternity rushes in now the bubble gets reformed people like their bubbles that's what i think what we're condemned this is the sisyphan curse has been condemned to re try to reform an identity in the world to to build ourselves back up having been shown a glimpse of eternity we'll say well i'll improve that by building my own little bubble of self and that you start to laugh at it and it needs constant work but the point the point is that uh through these actions of aa self is destroyed And when self is destroyed, eternity rushes in and you realize your equality and identity with other people. And there's a curious thing. Most newcomers one talks to are frightened. I shouldn't laugh, but frightened of losing their identity. if they do the program and yet if you've heard step fives or discover that every step five is essentially the same the thing that you're frightened of losing is the thing which is identical to the thingthat everyone else is frightened of using there's nothing individual there and then you you get well or weller and that's when you discover who you really are that that's where the individual nature starts to shine out and there's a curious paradox in waking up is that you discover that you're fundamentally the same as other people except you have your own particular role to play in the same way that the cells in a body each a pancreatic cell has a different set of functions than a cell in in the heart muscle or the pleura or the eustachian tubes or whatever each cell is doing a different thing they have great similarities but they each have a particular role play they each have a particular place in the body they must find they must be in the place therein and so the extraordinary thing in finding the oneness in an aa meeting which is really working very well is that far from eliminating your individuality it finds a place for it in the hole, in the same way that each jigsaw puzzle piece, although unique, no two jigs or puzzle pieces are precisely the same, each has a place in the whole. When the whole is produced, the individual pieces appear to disappear. One thing I've noticed, I think this is a very significant point about meetings. I think there are important things that can be done with online gatherings like this one, because we're people who are in different physical places, we couldn't go to the same place. But most of us will be living in places where we can do physical meetings as well. as well and one can do both these days I do far more meetings per week than I did five years ago it's because I'm doing the same number of physical meetings plus I'm doing a whole load of online meetings which I tuck in here and there but the physical meeting is not to be dismissed just because we have the online variants and that the we've got the material realm and the realm of the spirit there's this uh sense of unity with other people a sense of a a realm which has greater reality which lies beyond the material nuts and bolts of um cells and atoms and quantum fields but in reaching that other realm the material does not disappear it's repurposed it's placed in the context of a greater whole uh the play which is going on in the theater is not the ultimate reality the ultimate reality lies outside the theater but there's no point in a theater unless there is something going on on the stage so the play that is going on on stage is not it's not redundant just because you discover there is a theater beyond it doesn't mean you stop the play. The play goes on, but it now has a greater purpose. So the material world continues to have a purpose. But it is not for itself, it's not its own purpose. My material life is not its only purpose. The reason I say that is because it's all very well, it's quite right in a sense saying in A Course in Miracles that it is not bodies that connect it is minds that connect but minds need bodies to help the connection and so one of the reasons I go to physical meetings is because I need that connection my sponsor sent me a article an article about the neurological effects the effects on the physical brain of people being in physical meetings versus online meetings with radical differences in how it affected brain patterns and so on. And what I've noticed in the last few years is I never again want to go to an AA meeting where everyone is facing the same way. i like meetings where it's in the round where you can see everyone's faces when you're sharing and not just the person sitting at the front but the whole room i went to a meeting on friday which was in a ring and the meeting itself was well it was it was what it was okay but you could see all the faces you could say the human beings and I was going to a meeting on a Friday where you're facing the front and you can't see any of the other people it's like being in a room on your own I think AA works and there are other things that are like this as well but I think AAA works because we come together and admit what is wrong there we go that is it it is not by virtue or piety that we wake up is by the admission of wrong and then having a good old laugh at it not then continuing to analyze and pour over it for months and years and um as mary oliver says you do not have to crawl on your knees in the desert a hundred miles repenting that is not recovery You admit it and then you move on. When I phone my friend James in Bristol, I've made the mistake on occasion in the past of calling him up and trotting out some tale of woe about the terrible things that are happening in my life. And I'll explain very carefully just to make sure he understands quite how rotten the situation is. And he'll say, well, there we have it. Anything else going on? There's no discussion, nothing to discuss. Step six and seven in the big book, as you'll know if you have read it or even by hearsay, if you haven't is two paragraphs and um uh sometimes people have the idea that the people that wrote the big book were were either stupid or lazy and forgot or weren't intelligent enough to put in lots of more useful material about six and seven and i i think they a right to make it two paragraphs. Once you've recounted the full litany of horrors in steps four and five, what is there to say but this has to go? If there's any equivocation at this point, you missed something. The problem lies in how you've done the earlier steps to look at your step five and not say this has to go what could i don't know i would not know what to say to someone that that was not entirely willing at that point um the waking up business uh i think the ultimate thing i've woken up to is god is permanently available which means that although there are places one can go to feel particularly connected with god one can connect with god anywhere and uh there was if people are aware of i think they're called the ladybird books in the 1950s which were little children's books which introduced aspects of the world to children in a in a simple way um and there was a parody series uh of ladybird books in the last few years and one of them was the uh something like the ladybird book of meditation or ladybirdbook of mindfulness and there's a little skit in there about sally and um sally was very disappointed to discover that her yoga center had opened up at the end of her road in chiswick she was hoping that her boyfriend would pay for her to go on a yoga retreat in thailand um uh i've known people in aa who uh refuse to find god in wolfhamstone or in streatham and insist on going to the jungles of costa rica at enormous expense which goes into someone else's pocket to have um you know a micro dose of ayahuasca administered by someone who is a as they put it a bona fide shaman qualified shaman is the other one as though there's some sort of national publicly funded institute of shamans or well as long as you can fair enough if that works for you and you don't have a problem with chemicals then maybe you know try a chemical um but if you can't find god on the bus you won't find him anywhere else uh if god feels absent i'm the one who has absented myself god hasn't gone in uh wake wakey wakey but be still and know that i'm god very simple line from one of the psalms um i'd intended to talk about the second part of step 12 um i'm going to suggest to jason that we split step 12 into three this being the first one on carrying a message and then one on um uh whatever the third part it's facts and things principles in all our affairs also no one is obliged to come to the other two you can bugger off and go and do something else like that um but i'm gonna stop there jason and invite people to ask questions if they should have any um you can ask a question in the chat you can raise your hand if you want to raise your hands if you can keep the question fairly brief this is being recorded if you don't want to be recorded uh what you can do you can put the question in the chat and then it can be addressed there so uh first question up jason yeah hi tim thanks for for the share that was a great um share um my question is um uh there's one it's not a step 12 question so i hope you don't mind um there's a step nine um i've been in recovery for quite a long time and there's once step nine that i've just have not been able to make i've made i've made many attempts to make it um but i haven't been able to find the person what do you do and how do you deal with the baggage that's left inside you're not making that particular amends okay very good question uh everyone has a list of unfindable people they can be unfindable because you have the name but they've just disappeared off the planet you just can't find them um sometimes one doesn't have a name to go on even or one has only a first name so everyone has these but also it's very important to remember that for every person you can remember harming there are half a dozen you have no recollection of who you have so the fact that one's crossed off every name off the list doesn't mean that one has rectified all the harm what one has done is done one's utmost the line in the big book is we don't get over drinking until we have done our utmost to straighten out the past uh so this is a a very good example of how do you know what's god's will um for you and how do you know what is god's job to do so what's god's business what's my business my business is whatever is possible for me to do if it is not possible for me to it is mine to do therefore i need not feel guilty for uh not having done it um so one treats oneself as having been forgiven by god not because one has done the amends but because god is forgiving god's forgiveness is not conditional on my doing step nine because that would give me power over god that would mean that i'm pulling the handle which activates god's forgiveness and god is saying well i'd love to forgive you but i can't because you're the one that's really in charge that's not that that's i don't think that sound uh what is the case though is uh i'm given the means to make amends and it is then my job to do so and tom weston talks about this he says uh it is that it is as though you're being invited to the heavenly feast and you knock on the door and you say can i come in and god says oh absolutely but but before before you do um uh go and clean up your mess and you saying can i comment and have some of the hors d'oeuvres i won't eat the whole meal but i'll have some hors d´oeuvrage and then i'll go out and then I'll make some amends and then i'll be back and god says no you can't come in at all until you've made all of your amends then you can come in completely and i think that's how it works when i've done my when when i get to a point where i think there there's nothing else i can reasonably do i start to feel the forgiveness that has been there already the point about god being outside i hope this isn't too theological But the point about God being outside space and time is that forgiveness existed before I was born and before I did the things which required forgiveness. So for me not to forgive myself is to say that my judgment of what I've done wrong is more valuable than God's. So God may have forgiven me, but I hold myself to higher standards than God does. And I don't think that goes down terribly well with the higher power. My friend of mine in Canada says sometimes when you resist God, God says, well, you have it your way then. And you have It your way until you don't want to have It Your way. So you do your best and then you let it go. So what I think is helpful in terms of alternative amends is you can write a letter as if to the person. You read it out to an older AA member, someone who is sensible, who has a spiritual life, who believes in God, who understands the notion of doing this. um and then you keep the letter and once a year you go down the list of people you can't find and you say right is there anything i can do and i found people at 28 years sober 29 years sober that i periodically looked for and been unable to find but new leads arise new ways of creating chains of people one of the person one of the people I had to go through a chain of four people to get to them so I met someone who was I knew was connected to a circle and I gradually wormed my way in and when I found them that their name was different and they lived in the Pyrenees I mean there was no way I could have found them without frankly divine intervention it was extraordinary how that happened the same with the other one as well um so you do your best you put it away and then you come back uh there's a question here in the oh dear yes see why you want this to be anonymous um question in the chat uh if i could please ask this question anonymously could you please share what you've seen or your experience of people being able to get off antidepressants because they've had a spiritual awakening as a result of working on steps. Yes, that's an outside issue. I'm not qualified to speak to that question directly. And that's all I'm going to say on that. There we go. Sorry about that. There we have it. There are no other hands up. There are no other questions in the chat uh is there anything else people want to ask jason yeah um if it's okay i've got a i've quite a few questions but i'll take another one that's all right um so the question is um i heard you talk at the broken elevator today about absolute surrender um i just suggest if anyone hasn't heard that talk it's quite quite a good talk so it's a personal question and obviously you don't have to answer the personal part of it but the question i have for you is um um you were talking about um get life like deals you a lot of difficult stuff so um could you maybe tell us how you've dealt with a very difficult situation you don't need to tell what what it was but just how you dealt with it thanks tim thank you i'm going to bundle the answer in with the um the actually that question in the chat about antidepressants but not to talk about antipressants but to talk about the fact that sometimes people insist that all of the addictive behaviour has to stop before any progress can be made at all and maybe for some people that's the case. In my case there were behaviours non-chemical behaviours which persisted into recovery when I was given an adequate substitute by taking the steps and getting super involved in AA, the crutches that I was leaning on in terms of those behaviours and compulsions and activities struck me as repulsive and redundant. So So AA, I think, allows for a range of different approaches to getting well. Some people take a very brutal path and go utterly cold turkey on everything, including all of the behaviours. Other people, and I'm in the second camp, there were some things which had to go straight away. fine fair enough but there were other things which by god it was slow embarrassingly embarrassingly slow um and i think god is very good in allowing people unsatisfactory compromises uh in concept nine bill w says that most progress is achieved by a sequence of unsatisfactory compromises you don't get the very good thing straight away you inch towards it bit by bit by bits so you know it's not ideal if someone wants to have a spiritual awakening and is working say in a very very aggressive sales job which requires a little bit of bending of the truth that is not ideal maybe they should go and work in the soup kitchen i don't know but god seems to enable people to have spiritual awakenings and then when the person is 10 15 20 25 years sober changes get made in other parts of their life uh the re when i said god is very good is that i'm given a new place to move into before i have to fully let go of the old one um sometimes however uh the rug is pulled out from under you in the sense of um sudden and dramatic reversals of fortune the big book word for a reversal of fortune is vicissitude and it talks i think on page 42 about the chaps belief and trust in god and saying no later vicissitudes has shaped them uh there have been several occasions partly through sometimes through an internal collapse sometimes through a catastrophe where a whole area of your life is simply taken from you whether it's and it's been a career it's being people it's been physical health i was very very ill uh a couple of times when i was around seven or eight years sober and it was it was touch and go at one point um so sometimes you know the great shark comes along and bites a huge chunk out of your life um the answer every single time i'm this is terribly boring the answer is go to meetings go to all of your usual meetings talk to your sponsor do the steps do your prayer and meditation in the morning do all the things you would normally have done if the disaster hadn't happened and eventually a path opens up um there's a principle in physics that nature abhors a vacuum which means if a vacuum is created something will be sucked in to fill it I think the important thing to do it's very tempting when the shark comes along and bites a big chunk out of your life to say I'm going to fix this myself now and to rush in trying to fill the gap disaster if you wait if and I've experienced this several times if you're patient and it requires you have to keep your nerve if you're patient uh it's as though your eyes are accustomed to the darkness and you can start to see your way through uh and ultimately what the book enjoins me the book alcoholics anonymous enjoins us to do is to trust god and the only way to do that is to trust, which means to stop wittering to myself in my mind about what I think is going on. God's never asked my opinion on anything. I'm asked not to come up with views but to simply trust and there is a almost, I think, universal sense that people are offended at the idea that their life has no purpose in that if someone feels their life has no purposes this is a very upsetting and depressing thing. This suggests that there must be a purpose in the same way that if we weren't built for food we wouldn't be hungry therefore the existence of hunger shows that we're creatures who must be capable at least of having the hunger satisfied. This means purpose must be possible. Similarly, fairness. People in all cultures are greatly offended by things which are unfair. They may disagree about what constitutes unfairness, but people have a visceral response to unfairness. Even if it's in their own benefit, sometimes when something is in your benefit and it is unfair, you feel terrible. What you would rather forego the good you've been given in favour of the fairness which would allow everyone to have an equal share. You put these two together, fairness and purpose, what this means is that the very keen sense of offence one feels when these two are confounded means that there must be a purpose and there must be fairness which means that uh not only is purpose possible but is necessary otherwise things wouldn't be fair so i'm not it's not that you know out of a thousand people all found all the thousand people are shooting for purpose but only two will find it all of them must have a purpose which means whatever is happening whatever disaster or catastrophe happens there is an ultimate purpose which can be served by it not to say that it happened in order that greater purpose be served but the greater purpose will use whatever happens to a greater end and i'm seeing that happen in my own lifeline and i're not going to go into details but out of a particular tragedy a very curious result is is arising um elaine thanks jim i'm helena my alcoholic great talk as always um just on step 12 you didn't touch on this but i just i'd be interested in your take on it on in one of my home groups not the we're both involved in um there's a newcomer i'm i'm trying to carry the message to who who keeps drinking but then comes back and asks for a spot to begin do you have a take on that if if somebody if you're trying to help somebody and they drink and they come back to you again and again you know i i know the book says that if someone is an interest in working with you you you know in step 12 in working without this we let them go and let them see they can't do it on their own but you know do you have any approach you take to that yeah very good question you one could do a whole hour maybe that's what the next hour will be on that precise question um what i pay attention to because it depends unfortunately as with most things in sponsorship it depends on the person and the precise situation no two situations are the same um but what i pay attention to is what i feel in my body uh the body never lies and i pick things up unconsciously which then express themselves in bodily reactions and sometimes you have people who've had slips and they call and you have a long talk and it's you you just feel totally relaxed and you feel it's really helpful other people you see the number call and your whole body tenses up and now what that means and why the body is tensing up is another question but very often if my body tenses when i see the phone ring or halfway through the conversation it takes a turn and my body tenses it's very often the case i'm not the right person to be helping you um the second point is if i'm repeating myself i'm wasting my time now by repeating myself often things do need to be said a couple of times and there is such a thing as a valuable reminder so uh you know we're reminded daily to turn our wills and lives over to god and ask god to direct our thinking absolutely fine um but when you feel that you've had this con this particular conversation several times before and you're repeating it almost as a punishment you know that something is amiss and uh one of the best principles i've heard is you're sponsoring someone and it keeps and they keep relapsing it doesn't matter why it's not working the fact it's not working uh means that they should be asking someone else for help because continuing to work with you may be the thing which is blocking them from finding the person that it ultimately works with um so that's all i'm going to say on that and jason i'm gonna have to hop off in a moment so should we should we close up for today