Step 11 and the Plan for the Day That Leaves No Room for a Relapse – Tim M.

okay thank you uh to set the tone for the meeting i will read an extract from a vision for you page 164 our book is meant to be suggestive only we realize we know only a little god will constantly disclose more to you and to us ask him in your morning meditation what you can do each day for the man who is still sick. The answers will come if your own house is in order, but obviously you cannot transmit something you haven't got. See to it that your relationship with him is right and great events will come to pass for you and countless others. This is the great fact for us. And the topic of tonight's meeting is working step 11 with a sponsee and Tim will share anything between 30 and 45 minutes on the topic after which the floor will be open for questions rather than the typical sharing and with that i want to hand over to tim tim alcoholic very glad to be here thank you oh thank you for for listening um i was i'll just be talking to myself step 11 i think is is tricky for all sorts of reasons um i knew someone around oh 28 years ago in aa who was who's very good he was about eight years sober at the time and he's very spiritual and did all sorts of remarkable spiritual things and went on retreats and whenever he shared it was always about that you know the spiritual path and all of these wonderful things he was doing and and books and courses and enlightenment and all that sort of stuff but he drifted away from AA which he sort of saw as a starting point for the spiritual journey and he as it were graduated and poor old thing end up and ends up in the drink and I think that did for him so he had some other medical conditions which weren't helped by the drinking um and that's not an unusual that's an unusual story um uh people who are sober longer than me have said that in aa we lose as many people out of the top uh you know if not into career and romance and money and materialism uh into spiritual paths and religion and i i have seen that happen uh and it is wonderful until of course you have a little drink uh and then then you know so much for the chanting at that point or whatever else you're doing so there's a great difficulty there because it's very attractive all of that sort of stuff and i find it very attractive and i've gone a long way in the direction of religion spirituality spirituality but in my case the cart very easily comes before the horse and I can forget what it's about and at the other end of the scale as well when you've got you know there's very good sponsors who want to do everything they do want to doing everything right they want to do the program right and they have a problem they say right I'm going to i'm gonna up my prayer and meditation and again the danger can be can be that one amplifies the self-absorption the absorb absorption with one's own spiritual path now of course step 11 is a bit of a damp squib really compared to you know gurus and retreats goa and nepal or whatever these destinations are there was a wonderful um it was i i think you know those fake ladybird books like children that there were those children's books introducing children to various aspects of the world or ladybirdbooks and they they've done a number of parody ones in the last few years and one of them was the ladybird book of meditation and there was a picture and it was always sort of fake 1970s illustrations remember the sort of style of illustrations of children's books in the 1970s um um and it Was I won't get the caption right but it was something like uh Susie was very upset to discover a Buddhist center opening around the corner in Chiswick when she hoped her boyfriend was going to pay for a trip to thailand for her and the thing is about step 11 as it was written in the and the big book and there's a bit of aa history there so it can't aa comes for better or for worse from a form of so-called first century christianity which is non-doctrinal but very definitely christian so non-doctrinal in that you know if you're an whether you're a sort of high anglican or an episcopalian they weren't too bothered i think they they raised their eyebrows a little bit at catholics but um uh but but the point was is to have a direct relationship with god to get direct guidance so it was not about exalted emotional states or uh or states of consciousness it was about getting direct concrete clear guidance about what to do and so step 11 is very disappointing if you're on a spiritual path because it says praying only only for knowledge of god's will for us and the power to carry that out um and so when directing and also the other thing about uh so at one end of the scale you've got these very very keen sponsees that that want to uh invest a lot in their their spiritual life and then you've people at the other end ofthe scale um uh that that you know wouldn't know the higher power if it stood up in their soup and don't really care for any of that woo-woo stuff they there's a rather poor scorn on it um and being a bit of a chameleon I flip myself between those two extremes um uh so one minute very attractive and the other minute rather sort of off put by it all and so at the other end of the extreme other end to the scale you've got responses who don't want anything to do with spirituality in the ordinary sense of the word in the language and they're not interested in meditation in its current meaning and i think the antidote for for both categories and therefore for everyone in between is simply to stick very very closely to the wording so sort to improve our conscious contact with god now i'll come to the word improve that because people make great play of it um uh improve our conscious contact with god praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out now it talks in step 10 about having entered the world of the spirit and it talks on step 12 about having a spiritual awakening and the the the the uh the most important fact of our lives is is that it's consciousness of the presence of god and all that sort of stuff uh and as i said i think in an earlier earlier week um consciousness conscious contact with god i don't think or it can be conscious contact with a being sometimes people sense a being but it doesn't need to be that it means contact in my consciousness so when I'm aware either of the knowledge of God's will for me but I'm suddenly clear about what I need to do in a situation and it just comes as a bolt from the blue or when i feel sufficient resources to do that i literally have conscious contact with god um or at least with the commodities that come from god so this can all be pitched in a way which is palatable to people that have a problem with with god and religion and spirituality it's very very practical it's it's about the the business end of the relationship with god uh about what what god wants me to do today bob d is very good on all of this if you can catch i i can't i don't know which talk but i've heard him say it on a number of occasions about the um about the dangers of going too far into the other spiritual paths and saying when he gets off track he remembers he has to do that other stuff in addition to not say that i'm not i'm not saying don't do it if you want to go and do whatever religious or spiritual things and knock yourself out but one does it in addition to step 11 in the book not instead of and it comes under the heading of there are many useful books also um suggestions about these may be obtained from one's priest minister or rabbi um and be quick to see where our religious people are right and there are points in the big book where it does point you towards you know go and find go and rejoin your local religious or spiritual community but i think that's absolutely right that the core of it is this knowledge of god's will for me and the power to carry that out so what do i do with sponsees well first of all i explain all that which is the the premise behind it and all the other stuff which does alter your consciousness and raise your consciousness and establish a sense of safety and identity in god or purpose in god or value in god is all very very good um but i've got a friend in bristol i won't say his name because um well i shouldn't really that's why um but he sticks very very closely to this notion and he's sober a very long time uh very closely into this notion of god being good orderly direction it's a very british way of looking at i think good orderly direction um and it's a chap in somerset i know he's sort of 45 50 years sober who's he's very similar very very practical doesn't talk about god at all but my friend in bristol reports him as saying whenever he sees this chap in Somerset his car is always full of newcomers and i think that's the best demonstration of spirituality is people are on the phone the whole time my friend Melody when I was new whenever you said Melody can we go for a coffee she said well now I'm meeting a newcomer outside Ponce Street I'm eating a newcomor outside the world NPR she's always who is meeting a new comer most spiritual thing you can do I think is meet or talking to a newcomers so um uh step 11 in the book is is very much about So if the substance of the day is step 12, so higher consciousness, service within AA, service outside AA, step 11 is the means. So as soon as someone has committed to the programme, however, in whatever rudimentary way I give them, I've got a little little note that I give and say this is what a daily programme looks like. And it includes it includes step 11, basically the instructions from page 86 to 88. So they're doing this right from the beginning. I get them to get a little coterie of pals together. I direct them towards some particular people who I sponsor, who I know are a safe pair of hands for this and say what you want to do is you want to run through your day, your previous 24 hours with someone, do a review if they want you to send it, you send the review. so you do a review and you talk it through with someone else let the corrective measures from flow into the plan for the next day do a plan forthe day run it past a grown-up um um and to run it passed someone who is going to be actively feeding back and interfering with it um uh it's no good having someone's just going to say oh yes marvelous to everything when it's not because people don't they i'm i didn't know how to live i had no clue dumb one dumb idea after another someone described history as one damn thing after another that's what my plans for the day looked like one damn things after another so i needed people to say that's a really really bad idea so i encourage people to find a group of because what what you don't want with your responsees is for them to become dependent on you or to see you as some kind of sole authority there's a tradition in AA friend of mine in New York was it I'm sure I've told this story I've got limited numbers so it's like a merry-go-round all the horses come around again eventually uh do you just have to sit and watch it for long enough um friend in New Yorke was at a meeting and the secretary um didn't show up or the chair didn't show up the person who's going to be taking the meeting is sober and said you know steve can you take the can you tape the meeting tonight he said i'll just check with my sponsor and he went over the road and went over and asked his sponsor if he could do this if this was allowed and and the sponsor gave him a sort of papal blessing um and then he went and took the meeting it's all i it's very established strife tim we've kind of lost you i think everybody else lost him yeah just as he was describing the chair disappearing as well this is a unique situation we should now ask our sponsors what to do yeah I think he's lost connection oh uh okay yeah see he's disappeared maybe he'll rejoin hopefully right where did i lose you april blesser papal blessing april blessing so he gave me his paper luckily i've got two internet connections so we're good um eventually anyway the point is uh what you don't want is to become like the sole source the only person they're talking to they've got to be talking to a whole bunch of people and getting to know a bunch of people often they you know you give them a half a dozen people to talk to they discover they like them more and immediately switch to them as sponsors this is good if there's someone better they should be with that person you don t hug everyone to yourself um this is also great for your own sponsees because it gives them an opportunity to be trained on people without having like the full responsibility so people get used to what the practice looks like without you know formally having these as permanent sponsee and it shares the work around the group really because if you're sober a long time you're just going to get asked a lot um so i get people to work with them evening review and their morning planning for the day which must be integrated so the corrective measures need to flow into the next morning's planning i get them to run through that with some people um find the people it works well with and then um come to me with any headlines every day um what what i'm discovering at the moment I sort of stopped doing this for a while, but I think it's the best thing. Well, I may change my mind, but i think the best Thing with anyone in the first few months is to be calling you daily And it doesn't need to be a protracted conversation What I get people to do is to call daily with whatever step work they've completed in the last 24 hours Or call daily and call daily With whatever particular instruction i've given someone recently Which works very well what's your biggest internal problem of the last 24 hours? What's your biggest external problem of the last 24 hours and that's very helpful because it means you can feed them solutions right from the beginning uh because this is that you know the spiritual life is not a theory we have to live it some people will come to you to do a sort of academic run through the program but they want everyone to stay out of their lives and their lives are a catastrophe uh and what you don't want is to sort of wait while these you know catastrophes are unfurling around them like wondering why they're so crazy when it's because no one is addressing the crap that's going on so i find that everything if i'm doing that what you know what's the biggest drama internal drama external drama the last 24 hours which you process already talked to a couple of people about so by the time it's processed with a couple of people you get a much cleaner version than the kind of raw sewage which you know comes out of people when the situation is completely fresh if you can have fresh raw sewages I'm not sure that's an appropriate metaphor but anyway um you get the point by the time they've talked to a couple of people it's clearer already and then you can really provide helpful direction they know what's happened they they've worked they figured figured out at least the basics so you're integrating the program with their life right from the beginning but you're not the sole authority there's a whole group of people if you've got five people telling them you're crazy you're approaching that you know this is not helping then they'll believe it if it's one person it's them against you and I've had a lot of them against me against the sponsee in the past when that does not happen but there'sa whole group ofpeople they're talking to who have got their heads screwed on They don't think that it's one person against them. It's the power of the group, but it works through there being, you know, lots of one to one interactions regarding the content of the evening and the morning routines. If people want to do their readings and their breathing and the chanting and all that, I'm not going to disturb any of that. But the morning has to contain the plan for the day. And I get people at the beginning to do pretty strict plans for the date. And I think this is so important, particularly the ones who are slippery in terms of the not drinking bit of the programme, because very often what people will do is leave huge chunks of time in which the thought spontaneously then occurs to them to drink. And of course, it isn't spontaneously occurring. It's specifically left a four hour gap between work and having to be home in order to or I'll just figure something out in the moment, knowing subconsciously that when they get to that, oh, I feel like a drink now. and then they go and drink um I need my schedule when I was new was nailed down for me so that I knew at every moment of the day exactly where I was supposed to be and there wasn't I couldn't have squeezed you couldn't have squeezed uh you couldn'T have squeezed a cigarette paper in between the various appointments in my schedule uh let alone a full-blown relapse and my first sponsor Doug said that the worst thing for an alcoholic is unstructured free time so I get people with a morning meditation to focus very much on a solid plan for the day and sometimes I've reviewed these and that people write the most extraordinary things I can't tell you all the wonderful things because in case the person's listening to this tape but people can make a meal out of ordinary everyday things i'll just leave it at that like stuff which would take you or me eight minutes four minutes two minutes there's like a whole hour set aside you know um so the the plans are very revealing about what's actually going on for them the other thing about the daily call which so in the morning by the time they get to you uh hopefully they've done a nice early morning meeting, there are lots of 7am, 6.30, 6, 630, 7am meetings around, particularly in continental Europe, if you're in the UK, you can get to 8am meetings in Europe, which is 7am in the UK. So hopefully they by the time they speak to you at around nine o'clock, they've been to a meeting, they gone through their review from the night before, they have done a plan for the day, they've run it past a couple of people then you can really add value as a sponsor on the top of all of that also the other thing i find with this daily calling people are this this is like this is kind of dog psychology thing um people are much more vulnerable in the morning in that i don't mean in terms of woundable i mean they're kind of not with it enough to conceal what's going on by the time they got to the evening they've been performing for 12 hours and they're these you perfect representations of what someone should be in the morning people are just aren't with it enough to cover their tracks and listen to what people say and how they say it's super revealing it's not what they it's the things they inadvertently say it'S THE LANGUAGE IT'S THE LANGUAGE THEY USE WHICH REVEALS WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON AND THAT PROVIDES THE MATERIAL FOR the conversation most of the time um i mean what one thing which i've i've had in it isn't one particular person if they're listening yeah if you're listening and you recognize yourself you're not the only one it's not all about you so what was a very common uh topic is about discipline with the program and it does indeed in step 11 talk about god will discipline us but when when I've noticed when people say I need more discipline the problem is a lack of enthusiasm because when you're enthusiastic about something you don't need discipline and it's just like the drinking I didn't need disciplined to drink every day because I was enthusiastic about it so so someone you know and I get I think someone says it about once a week I need to be more disciplined about this and of course that won't work absolutely won't work because if you if you could muster the discipline you would have done it already it's not about discipline when people don't realize they're going to reveal anything by saying I've no idea because it's an aside and it looks like it looks like it's the right thing to say so listen I try to listen very very careful I read between the lines in those conversations. With the evening review, you go to meetings, we talk about doing their step 10s and they do this long, long rehash of a step four. And I think we talked about this last week and I don't really I don'T really do that. What I'm looking for after the evening interview is corrective measures for tomorrow. there's no point in analyzing things for the sake of analyzing it the point is to figure out uh what i need to believe think and do differently tomorrow that's what the key is so where it says were we resentful it doesn't say what were we resentmentful about but almost everyone i know does an evening review this is in the past you know almost well 28 29 years almost everyone thinks it's write lots of things about all the people that bother you no no no were you resentful in other words were you indulging that character defect ditto with fear doesn't say what are you frightened about were you frightened in other words were YOU indulging the fear and then you've got a completely different question because the real question then is isn't that interesting you know I'll ask myself isn't that interesting how attracted I am to finding fault with other people or things in the world and it's always because I feel guilty or awkward or ashamed or embarrassed or inadequate in myself which is why I'm looking for someone else whose fault it is more than mine so the real question with resentment and fear is what's my investment that is giving rise to this it's never about the content the so-called content is that is the blank screen onto which all of that stuff is being projected now sometimes you need to do a little bit of you know um uh detailed work on the content but the the danger is believing that if you get rid of the content somehow the the resentment will go away and it won't because the next day if the reason why you're resentful which is internal which has got to do with an internal state of mind if that isn't resolved you'll simply find something else the next date and the two the two things which I find sort of persistent when people do these reviews um is uh either the same thing coming up day after day after day after date on the review or it looks like a different thing but it's the same thing wearing a different hat you know say one person it will always be people in authority who are trying to belittle them or not giving them enough credit for instance and every day it's a new example and it looks like can I read you my inventory and of course there's no new information there and so So. That's why I think the focus must be getting the corrected measures on the table and the review the following day is how diligent were you in implementing those corrected measures? For instance, if it's fear, you know, how diligently did you recite memorized prayers about God's protection? How many times did you recite Psalm 91 today? Well, I didn't. So I just sat in fear. You see, that's the problem then. It's not about the thing you're frightened of. It's the indulgence of it. so that the focus i i take with people on the review is very different to what most people do it's not that other people are doing it wrong this is just what i do so so it's all about it's all about corrected measures and i think the corrected measures business business and the sane and sound ideal so at the end of eight and nine do a sane and sand ideal uh for each problematical area which represents the ideals to which will towards which we're willing to grow and then on a daily basis there are corrected measures for the more minute adjustments and I think this is the engine of change unless I've got a vision for what I should be I can't move towards it so it sounds like it's step 10 but it's not because it's it's the nightly it's the night they review now then if the corrective measures aren't being implemented you get to the really interesting question which is about willingness why isn't the willingness to do this what's going on and that's when you really get to call getting too involved in the so-called content of the psychological stuff the resentments the fears the aversions the attractions getting too absorbed in the content to that you can end up never asking the real question about willingness to change your entire point of view about everything um so that's the mistake I've made getting super involved in the detail and then finding you're you're just it's like chasing it's Like a dog chasing its tail and you and the sponsor together form one sort of unholy dog chasing his tail you're constantly trying to to get them to do the program but they're every day they come up with another you know wheelbarrow full of material and you're constantly pro you're bailing out this wheelbarow every day and the next day they go and fill it up again and bring to you all the things they filled the wheelbarows with now if you don't get past the content content you can you can stay stuck in that for a long time and i think that's probably classed as an al-anon slip to do that to not and of course uh when you try and go people love you addressing the content people hate getting behind it and looking at questions of real questions of willingness to live the corrective measures and that's how you know you're getting close to the truth is when the real resistance comes up um and the funny thing was there was someone I was sponsoring a few years ago and this is actually this isn't one person that was like several people where they they're people sober a long time they phone up say can I read my inventory to you can I read it to you and if I said no they were so disappointed I said now let's talk about something else and they didn't want to do that they wanted to it was like there was some it's like that sort of in one of the religions i'm told people will gain absolution and then see themselves having license to sin again because they've been they've done the penance and it's like as a sponsor you can become the person that they they come to very sort of guiltily to reveal all the bad stuff they've gone or thought in order to then clear the decks to go and do it again and so i've got be terribly careful not to be not to become part of that system so i've become part of the problem my sponsor talks about the the crocodile tears of sincere sincerity insincere sincerity and it's the same sometimes with slippers you get this people that relapse on repeatedly on alcohol although the question is are they relapsing or did they did they ever really stop forever um the the issue is this sort of cycle and it talks about the cycle in the doctor's opinion emerging remorseful and then they call you and they set them going again and then over weeks or months they drift and then THEY DRINK AGAIN and then it's the well-known stages stages of the spree and you're just it's like the stations of the cross you're just one of the stops on this endless cycle so um i i'm very very alert now to being part of one of those cycles where the time in aa is the necessary penance to go back and slip again um because then if you give a and this is the thing if you gave aa a really good go and you slip it's not your fault if you slip so you don't have to feel guilty about it because aa clearly didn't work so some of the slippiest people are some of the best at doing the program when they come back and this dynamic works similarly with people with lots of very very high drama uh that there are there's a well there's a cycle of the drama escalates and escalates and then they come to you and you process it and they're cleaned out and everything's fine and then it all builds from scratch again and again it's exactly the same as with the people who are repeatedly drinking and so the way to get at those is to be looking at the uh this is why the daily calling and if someone is presenting with systemic problems so the daily cooling i get people to call daily in their first few when they're doing doing the steps for the first time when they come back off a relapse or if they're presenting systemic problems. So sort of generalized depression or anxiety or something like that after several years in AA and they've done the program you know six times seven times nine times and they're in a bad way and what's so interesting is that it that the sticking point is always the implementation of the corrective measures it's always where the problem lies I one example um uh is and this is again not one particular the person it's lots of people i've seen over the years where this if the solution is step 12 and really engaging in step 12 uh and the problem is this relentless return into self-obsession and old mental patterns of victimhood and blame and self-pity and self indulgence and all those i speak from experience in my first 16 years were not pretty um but the solution is step 12 and if you just tell people and they totally buy that you spend a week you know preparing for that launch into step 12 unless it's then monitored daily it just drifts away and what's so interesting when I get people on a thing where they they call every day with what their step 12 stuff is you find out very quickly that even a week later the enthusiasm has waned for the step 12 staff and corners are being cut straight away and you can hold people to what they agreed they were doing just by looking at it on a daily basis and then eventually it's like it's holding a plant in new soil and you kind of have to what the plant wants to do is pull up its roots and run away and it's Like you're holding the plant there until the roots take and then the roots taken in the five but there is a period where and I this was done with me where you need to be held to it and I do it daily other my sponsor when my sponsor was doing it was doing it weekly just because of his schedule so I prefer five minutes I'd rather have five minutes a day than one hour a week but it's this this daily cycle it's being part of that daily cycle where people get to reveal what's not working have corrective measures and implement them I think that's the powerhouse of the whole thing and without someone else uh intimately on the inside of that process it tends not to people who are some people are self like self-basting chickens they're absolutely fine that they're up and running other people will have a tendency to close back in on themselves and go back into the old patterns and it's with those people that i find it most useful to do that daily daily business with so that's all i got on step 11 so I'll hand it back to you, Alistair, to see if there are any questions from our dazed onlookers. Thank you very much, Tim. The meeting is now open for questions for Tim, which can be done by the raised hand function in Zoom. Or you can message me through the chat function and I will ask Tim directly. And if all else fails, please wave your hand at the camera and I Will try to get you. and we normally try to close on the hour but it's very informal so we may run past and with that i'll open it up for questions harry hey everyone i'm marion alcoholic thanks tim uh this could be a bit of a sprawling one apologies so um we talked a little bit about so about i'd say less than half of my sponsees have even said they're even willing to do it just what it says in the book um they'll always tag things on and turn it into mindfulness meditation all sorts of stuff and like you said so my approach is okay well you can do whatever you like how you know in addition as long as you're you're giving the core stuff here a fair go so the question is really about but all of them say it's about the point what's the point of step 11 it says it's About Improving Our Conscious Contact With God so how do you know if what you're doing is improving your conscious contact with god because actually most really i don't think this is unfair people will say well it's maybe with mindfulness meditation for example in my case it gave me a better ability to see my thoughts as distinct things that were separate from me so that's one material benefit you know most of the time it's it makes me feel better i have a bliss out um and i feel floaty um and that's how they evaluate it as being a good sort of step 11 thing but none of them have been like as part of my step 11 i did an it course you know to make me more useful at work or you know so how do you evaluate whether something's improving your conscious concept of god what's a lot of questions i've written some of them down um so now what's the point is an intro i think that needs to be covered first um you see i'm i'm gonna go against everything i said and start quoting a course in miracles here so you know there we go um but there's a section of course in miracle which is one of the more practical ones you know how some of those sections about lilies are not necessarily super obvious how you apply them but there's a section called rules for decision um what the basic gist is this uh you can't make any decision without a guide now the guide is either your ego or it's the or it'S the higher power so you get to pick one if you don't actively pick the higher power because the ego is always there and the ego always answers first you will be following your ego. You can't not make decisions because you have to live, you have to have a day so you're going to be making decisions. The only question is where are you going to get the decisions from? So what's the point of step 11 is to seek direction from your higher power rather than from your ego. Why would you want to do that? Because the ego can only bring fear, frustration, disappointment and despair. That's fear, frustration, disappointment and despair because the purpose of the ego is to establish for me a separate identity in the material world as exhibited by the material form that we appear to inhabit it and then to make that identity and form special in some way and if you look at the material world it's notoriously difficult to make a name for yourself on a planet with eight billion people and it's notoriously difficult to achieve any sort of permanence for yourself when you are made 90% of water on a plan where water evaporates at room temperature. People are very squashable and evaporatable it's uh and the ego certainly so the ego's plans are all about trying to secure some kind of eternal value from a place which is endlessly dangerous and mutable whether it's materially or in terms of reputation and things like that so so that it's got to be understood in step three that the ego-based life i'm not making this up this is directly from the book A life run on self-will can hardly be a success. There we go. Is he not a victim of the delusion that he can wrest happiness and satisfaction from this world if he only manages well? So it's based on the idea, hopefully the idea is bought, that you're on a hiding to nothing with the ego. So the smart money is to go with the higher power. And once that idea is understood, then you've got a basis for explaining what is step 11. And step 11 is the process by which you actively, deliberately, consciously, manually override your ego and go straight to the boss. You kind of want to be a Karen. Sorry, I shouldn't say Karen with Karen W here, but you know that the dreadful meme in America of the Karen who says, I want to see the manager. You want to be a Karen here. You want to be like Karen. You want to see the manager. You want to see the boss. You don't want to palm yourself, you don't want to fob yourself off with your ego. You want to go straight to the boss, get the good stuff from behind the counter. So that's the point of step 11 is to insist, is to develop, is to take your sense of entitlement and say I'm entitled to the best possible guidance for my life in order to make the best possible decisions to have the best possible outcome which is peace I'm entitled to that give it to me and that's super helpful because it's taking what looks like a character defect which is belligerence and entitlement and turning them into virtues so you're fighting not against something but for what is your inheritance which is a much better life Bob Olson Bob Olson is an AA speaker from Colorado I want to say Inglewood Colorado is that a place in anyway I think he's from there on those on the sites it will say you know so and so from so andso because there are lots of Bob this is and Bob that so Bob Olson from from from Colorado um or maybe Littleton I don't know anyway he's very good on this he says if you honestly want to seek your higher powers will and you take the actions of asking you better bet your bottom dollar that what comes down the tubes to you is more likely to be God's will than if you just run on automatic and any I think any experience of step 11 will prove this that even if you don't get the knowledge during the day you're more sensitized to ideas which are not ordinarily your own stuff that other people say is just going to bother you more it gets in like it it it wears away the varnish um how do you know it's worked uh there are two ways Well, actually, there are three ways. The first thought there are four ways the list is growing as we speak. So the first way is to listen to the tone of the voice. so if the toe if if the action indicated through the step 11 process is about fear um resentment guilt shame bracket sin would be the traditional word for shame sense of there being something wrong with you in addition to having done something wrong fear resentment guilt shame attraction and aversion those are the six you want to look out for if it's to do with those uh then you might want to be suspicious uh the i i behaved very badly on one particular protracted occasion about 11 years ago and I wasn't rather than telling my sponsor that there was dirty work afoot and when I finally revealed the situation which I'm not going to go into here when I finally revealed the content of the situation to my sponsor I said I'm now kind of stuffed because I don't know whether to like you're saying I should go to God but I've been going to God throughout this whole thing and I genuinely thought I was doing the right thing he said did you pray for the good of all and I suddenly realized no and that's a really good test so on one hand is it based on fear resentment guilt shame attraction or aversion or is it is itbased on acting for the good of all which is dovetails beautifully with tradition one and unity and common welfare and when I think of all of my little sort of emotional jags which have resulted in behavior which I thought was justified often in the service structure I've been absolute ogre um when I apply that test retrospectively was I acting out of one of those six or was I acting for the good of all oh there was i always had an angle i was i always had a man when i was behaving badly so i think it's a terribly good test is looking at what the tone of it is is it is it does it come from a place of goodness or does it come up from a person one of the other ones you can always compare it to the principles of the program that says the second thing uh does it accord you know does it accord with the principle in the big book if so which page is it on which principle which line give us the quotation very helpful particularly if you take um chapters uh eight and nine as guides to interacting with other people and you extract the principles from there and test your proposed course of action against those seven eight and mine actually chapter seven eight and nine that's really helpful you run it past a grown-up now don't run it past seven grown-ups because you won't get a quorum probably and then it then you just end up picking the one that you are going to do anyway so have a couple of super trusted grown-ops to push these things past that's three things how do you tell if it's God's will fourth thing is is you have to try it out and see if works or not and if it's not if it doesn't work you admit it promptly um and you find out pretty quickly usually so i think that combination of looking at the tone of the voice behind it but like the intent behind it comparing its principle um running it past a grown-up and uh you know try it out see what happens and you get a pretty good view there emotional state so transcendental states are not necessarily a good sign that you've actually contacted that you're in contact with god's will um very often um god's world comes in the form of a very uncomfortable awareness of where one is going wrong like super uncomfortable it is not it's different than guilt and shame which are kind of self-indulgent um um morasses that one can swim around in and a kind of attractive in some way that it's just this annoying awareness that one's got it wrong and one needs to do it differently that's the best test is oh my god i've got this wrong for seven years what i really ought to be doing is speaking in single sentences as opposed to you know james joyce novels for instance yeah so um anyway i think that's i hope that's covered your questions harry can i just respond by quickly because i i find it quite interesting that so in the in the step sorry in the big book step 11 in the 12 and 12 step 11 even in the appendix to spiritual not once does it say this is going to feel good it says we you know we asked to be you know save us from self-pity but it doesn't ever now i feel pretty good a lot of the time but it doesn't say you know you are really going to be floating here it never really seems to give me that sense at all so absolutely yeah Seamus hello everyone um thank you Tim lots of food for thought there um I want to go back to ground that you covered in the first five ten minutes um about alternative belief systems um can you work with the grain of that or or not i haven't had too much trouble with um people having uh religious beliefs um i can think of one guy who um thought he was born again and that kind of gave him a free pass on um most what you might what you want to call the spiritual side of the program um and it was the kind of born-again church where god wants his people to be prosperous so it comes with comes with goodies so you could sort of go to church and pray for goodies and that maybe brings me to the the bigger points the the nub of the question which is um the kind of new age belief that you can manifest things um and attract things through the power of positive thinking uh i find this is very widespread uh in in aa um one has alluded to um in meetings and it's not just a new age thing it has its roots in in the power positive thinking um which appears to have deep roots in american culture you know the idea that if you want to achieve something you have to vision it positively and then you will kind of like um get it now i can see how negative thinking will attract negative things and i think the spirit of that is in is in step 11 you know what you said about resentment dishonesty fear and um and selfishness but it's never been clear to me that the converse is true that one can um somehow um conjure into existence um positive goodies by thinking more positively about them how does one deal with that um another question i once went to a sponsor um i i said to him a friend of mine was going through some sort difficult time and i saidto my sponsor what should i do and my sponsor said hide just hide um and that was very good advice in fact um the individual in question is now sort of a famous uh editor and journalist and columnist so um so everything turned out well in the end um but anyway um the yes i i find all that stuff a bit disagreeable really to put it mildly however however there's a little bit of emmet fox which touches on things like that um uh much certainly um what's his name norman vincent peel and i think there's more my experience i've used both extensively and i Think there is more good than ill in both But it's I think it's a very banal and ridiculous application of that principle to turn it into, you know, sort of Ferraris and swimming pools and promotions. um i'm absolutely convinced that my life is chiefly limited by my limited perception of it and to have those limitations lifted by envisioning a much more expansive interesting life i think is absolutely the solution but i think it must be applied to um uh more abstract commodities like uh kindness and diligence and interest and curiosity and all those sort of virtues that um you know I find it very easy to write myself off as a sort of bag of character defects bumbling through the world like the castle in howl's moving castle you know it works but it's not elegant um but actually that the the i think the only i've held myself back by not by not visualizing that i could be different that i would be a more expansive a kinder and a more useful person um uh that it what your question reminds me of a lot of what anthony de mello writes about taking perfectly sound spiritual principles and making a complete mockery of them by running them through the materialistic framework so there's there's uh a wonderful Anthony de Mello story about ants and their conception of God and how some very learned ants argue about they all agree that uh when we go to the other realm when the ants go tothe higher realm that they're going to that they're going to have a uh that if they've lost their sting during their life the sting will be restored but the question is whether they have two stings or three or something like that so that the the theological framework is limited by the fact that their ants my conception of god is limited so they can only imagine god as an ant but bigger than that and i think it's the same So if you've got a materialistic framework and you grab hold of spiritual principles without sufficient training and dismantling of the materialistic structure, you'll simply redeploy. You'll simply recreate yourself using that. You'll assimilate like the Borg. You can assimilate the so-called spirituality into your existing framework. whereas of course if you get rid of that framework and then you adopt the spirituality you're getting a clean a clean version of it um i had a sponsor i don't think he'll mind me saying this but he's he's rather sort of amusing about the whole thing and he did the whole manifesting thing for a couple of years and i sort of left him alone with it didn't really ask me anything about it just did it and he came to me after a couple years he said it was a whole load of bullshit isn't it so yes he's but he had to go through it and try it and realize that it's all sort of ridiculous i think he was trying to manifest a career and it just didn't happen um so i don't get i don'T get too involved in it because if people are very bought into it there's nothing you can nothing you Can say or do but i just gently point them towards pages 60 60 um and 61 and that seems to send them running for the hills or they just never talk about it to me again so i don't know if that answers your question at all thanks tim anyone else have a question for tim i've also dropped in the link to a google drive where you can find the recordings from these previous meetings I just say one more thing about that. It's true, the manifesting thing is true with other things. Is people at liberty to do whatever they want, but one's got to recognise what the programme says. And on 87, it talks very clearly about not praying for selfish ends and you can only pray if other people will be helped. so you can point out you said well you do what you want but you be aware that it is the opposite of what the aa program is suggesting and you get to pick but don't think that just because what you're doing comes under a spiritual or religious heading it's necessarily compatible with the with the program that's a point that i think is worth making to people can i just ask one more quick one so you just uh you've just fired something up for me so i think a lot of the confusion or or the difference in approach to step 11 whether you stick very close to the big book or you go totally off piece and stuff is down to a sort of idea that well the program is what you choose it to be so where are you at with that so you're quite big bookie but it's not our job to convince anyone that's the case right you can you can take it or you can do something else is that where you're at oh i'm gonna say something so awful no one will talk to me again after this unfortunately unfortunately the program was devised by specific people at a specific time in a specific context with a specific purpose and unfortunately they established that as being the aa program uh they wrote it and they were pretty clear they were unclear about certain things it's as alan g says that it's clear up to a point it's clearly clear what it it's clear about but it's silent on many things and leaves a lot of things to people's own discretion like the exact form of step five does not tell you how to do it gives you general principles other things it's super super super specific but in as far as they've written it down that is what they agreed one way or another I was a bit it was a messy process but essentially it reflects what they believe the program was um and the program came before the fellowship and came before the book now if someone does something else that may work better but it's not the aa program it's a kind of version it's their own version of it and that's that's not a bad thing but it is i don't think you can you can say this is the aa program when it's when it' s radically now people have their own takes on things their own versions of things everyone does the big book slightly differently so there's obviously huge amounts of variation within that but things which are radically different I'll give you an example one if I may uh there was a woman in in in or why it's a woman it's irrelevant it could have been a man um in Al-Anon many years ago who said uh who read off the the wall the the steps on the wall step five the exact nature of our wrongs well those are the wrongs that were done to me so in my step five I told someone else all the terrible things that have ever been done to me and that was step five now that's she's done a step but it's not alan on step five is there a step five it may be better than alan on set five but it's not alanon step five so i'm i'm skeptical about uh relabeling things the aa steps when when they're when they are not and that's why i'm kind of big bookie really and the reason why i am big bookies because it actually is not doctrinal it's just because it's what I found to have worked better than anything else and if I if something else worked better I would be doing it and you'd have a different speaker this evening so that's what i've got on that thanks tim uh claire hi there i'm sorry i think i guess we're running out of time so a question would be is there any would you see that there being any risk of the course of miracles sort of unraveling the 12-step program in a way uh when a person can go very far into the course and at what point must you put down the course yeah good question listen to ken wapnick about this he's absolutely brilliant and completely scathing actually in in if you think I'm scathing, listen to Ken Wapnick talk about the Course in Miracles students about how disconcerting it is when you're out for dinner with Course in Miracles. Students may try and pray to the Holy Spirit or to Jesus as to whether to have the chicken entree or the beef. And of course, from the from the Course of Miracles perspective, you know, God is unaware of the existence of the material world. So to ask God whether you should have chicken or beef is neither here nor there. And what he's very clear about, and this is brilliant. This is just brilliant because it applies to all spiritual paths, is make a distinction between the metaphysical and the physical. These are different realms. So whatever metaphysical understanding you have, don't they inform each other? The two realms inform each another, but do not get them confused. so when you say well nothing is real it's all an illusion everything is a projection of the ego mind yes it is but you still but still brush your teeth have a dental hygienist get a pension you know be nice to other people even though it's only their ego that's affected you still get to try and be nice them you know six days out of seven so not to mix the two levels so if you don't mix the three levels you keep the aa program first and you go to a shed load of meetings and look out for new people and ask them if they've stopped shaking yet then I think you're minimizing the risk that you'll disappear so far up yourself that no one ever sees you again thanks Tim um and with that I think um I'll hand the meeting back to you and ask you to uh close with the serenity prayer as opposed to a prayer from A Course in Miracles absolutely so do you help me close with the serenity prayer god grant me the serene things i cannot change the courage to change things like that and the wisdom to know the difference thank you tim thanks tim thank you next week bye-bye good to see you all yeah good to say you have a meeting starting now it's what do you have a meeting starting now uh well it's not a meeting it's a kind of gathering but uh yeah we sort of start about 50 quarter past 20 past yeah okay i was just wondering actually i was wondering every week there is something afterwards i know i didn't know if it was a meeting or but it's an illegal gathering you say yeah yeah it's like an illegal rave we okay i'll let you get on with this and then we ask for corrective measures yeah all right god bless see you see you shakers bye bye 20 past alistair yeah yeah is that all right see you then all right see you in a bit oh i've got to stop recording Thank you.