Step 11 — Prayer and Meditation – Joe C. – 1998 – Session 34

Now, the next to the last paragraph on page 85. Much has already been said about receiving strength, inspiration, and direction, not suggestion, from Him who has all knowledge and power. If we've carefully followed directions, not suggestions, we've begun to sense the flow of His Spirit into us. To some extent, we've become God-conscious. We've begun to develop this vital sixth sense, but we must go further, and that means more action. In other words, what's happened to us in these steps of 3 through 10, we've removed enough self-will that we're now becoming God-conscious. And by now, we're beginning to receive some directions from God. Now, if the book says that God has all power and all direction, and I believe He does, the book says so. And it says God dwells within each of us, and I believe He does, the book says so. Then it really stands to reason that you and I have within ourselves all the knowledge and all the power that we could ever need to handle any situation which comes up in the future. It's called a sixth sense of direction. I've got five senses. Everything I know on a conscious level, I learn from those. I can see, and I can hear, and I can smell, and I can taste, and I can touch. But what little bit I've learned? Two of my five senses of direction is just a small amount of knowledge. But if God has all knowledge and all power, if I can tap into Him, then I can handle any situation in the future with God's help, whatever it might be. It's long been known we do that. You develop the sixth sense of direction through prayer and meditation. Most of us, we get here, we... I didn't know anything about meditation. I thought meditation is when you tried to clear your mind of all thought. Well, I've never been able to do that. When I wake up in the morning, that sucker turns on and it will not clear out. I thought maybe it was chanting, listening to soft music. That's probably some forms of meditation, but I knew nothing about any of it. I knew very little about prayer, even raised in church. I only knew two prayers. One went like this. Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. And if I die before I wake, I'm not into that prayer anymore. That's dealing with death, and I don't want nothing to do with that. The other prayer that I used, and I bet you used it too, went like this. God, if you get me out of this damn mess, I swear I'll never do this again. Now I'm going to have to develop a life of prayer and meditation. It would seem to be impossible, wouldn't it? Bill Wilson is faced with the job of teaching people who are spiritually bankrupt how to pray and meditate, and Bill Wilson don't know how to do it either. Thank God he didn't. Because if he had really been knowledgeable, he would have written in such a manner that I could never have understood it. But he didn't know enough about it to be able to do that. What he did do is what he's done all the way through the book. He gives us some definite, valuable suggestions. And he said if we will use those in our lives today, we will develop our own life. That's the life of prayer and meditation. He couldn't tell us how to pray and meditate, but he could tell us how to develop our own. He starts for just a few moments over on page 86. He tells us what to do when we go to bed at night. Here it is now in step 11. He said when we retire at night, we constructively review our day. Were we resentful, selfish, dishonest, or afraid? I believe that's step 4 again, isn't it? Do we owe an apology? That must be steps 8 and 9 again. Have we kept something to ourselves? What should we discuss with another person at once? I believe that's step 5 again. Were we kind and loving toward all? What could we have done better? Were we thinking of ourselves most of the time? Or were we thinking what we could do for others? Or what we could pack into the stream of life? But we must be careful not to drift into worry, remorse, or morbid reflection. For that would diminish our usefulness to others. After making our review, we ask God's forgiveness and inquire what corrective measures must be taken or should be taken. There are steps 6 and 7. And we'll go through them again. So, what the book is really suggesting is when we go to bed at night, we sit down and take another little inventory. Step 10 was during the day when we're disturbed. Step 11 is before we go to bed at night. We made up a little sheet here you could use, you can use anything you want to. The main thing is do we inventory or not? One side of the sheet we took the basic character defects, selfish, self-seeking, dishonest, frightened, and inconsideration. We took all the other defects in the 12 and 12, which are the offshoots of those first four, put them on the left-hand side of the sheet, and called them the personality characteristics of a self-willed person. We tried to find the opposite and put them on the right-hand side of the sheet, called that the personality characteristics of a God-willed person. Now, all we're trying to do is get from the left-hand side of the sheet to the right-hand side. And I can sit down at night with this little sheet and run down through it, making a few check marks. That shows me where I've been that day, shows me what I need to continue to work on. Never do I find myself on either side of the sheet. The check marks change locations from time to time, but I'm beginning to notice that I'm marking more of them on the right than I am on the left. And slowly over a period of time, we continue to become a different human being. Now, I've learned one thing about my sobriety. I am going to inventory. I've got one of two choices. I can put it off and put it off and put it off and put it off until I'm so sick that I'm almost drunk, and then I start trying to dig myself out from under that mess. Or I can take just a few minutes each day, and by doing it a few minutes each day, I keep myself in reasonably good condition, and I'm in much less chance of drinking. I find that it takes less energy to do it on a daily basis than it does to wait until I'm almost drunk and then start trying to dig myself out from under it. A very definite, valuable suggestion. Okay. The next paragraph tells you, tells us what to do in the morning when we get up. On awakening, let's think about the 24 hours ahead. We consider our plans for the day before we begin. We ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorce and self-pity, dishonest, or self-seeking motives. Under these conditions, we can employ our mental faculties with assurance, for after all, God gave us brains to use. Our thought life will be placed on a much higher plane when our thinking is cleared of wrong motives. Most of us get up in the morning. First thing we do is go to the bathroom. One guy told me the first thing he did was get on a treadmill. I said, man, you've got a better bladder than I've got. I go to the bathroom first. Then we head for the kitchen, and we get a cup of coffee and maybe a little food, and we feed the body. We get the body taken care of. We go back to the bathroom again, and you ladies fix your hair, and we men fix our beards or faces or whatever. When we get that part of us done, we go to the closet, and we begin to pick out the clothes that's going to cover the body during the day. We've got to make sure they match now. We've got to make sure they match. They're the right color. We spend lots of time on our clothes. After we get the body all taken care of, we feed the cat or the dog. We start out the door. We lock the door behind us. We don't want anybody to steal our junk. We go out to the car. We check the air in the tires. We check the fuel in the fuel tank. We turn the switch on, start the motor, and we take off down the road. But what did we do about our minds that morning? We took care of all the material things, including our body. What did we do about our minds? Our minds are going to run the whole show all day. Did we check the air there? Did we check the fuel level there? Did we feed the mind a little bit? Did we feed the mind a little bit? If we would take, five to ten minutes in the morning to ask God to direct our thinking throughout the day, ask God to give us the right thought and action before we even start thinking about today, then chances are our thoughts about today are going to be in better shape. If we spent five minutes in the morning there, coupled with five minutes in the evening when we go to bed, there's no telling what we could do with our minds. If we spent as much time on our minds as we do on our bodies, my God, we could become anything, couldn't we? If you spent five in the morning and five in the evening, you've still got 23 hours and 50 minutes to screw the thing up. It only takes a little bit of time. Very definite, valuable suggestion. In thinking about our day, we may face indecision. We may not be able to determine which course to take. Here we ask God for inspiration, intuitive thought or a decision. We relax and take it easy. We don't struggle. This is a form of meditation for busy people. We alcoholics don't have time to lay down on the floor and listen to soft music. We don't have time for chanting and all that stuff. We're busy people. The book says when you face indecision, you can't decide what to do. Recognize you don't have the answer. Turn to God. And ask God for the right thought or decision. Don't struggle. Relax and take it easy. I think what it means is get your mind off on something else. And the way I get my mind off on something else is I go start mowing the grass, painting the house or washing the dishes. And quite often my mind goes back to that subject and I've got information I didn't have before. It says, why don't you call Bill? Maybe he'll know. And I call Bill and Bill's got the answer. They used to say, my, wasn't it lucky I called Bill. No. This is a form of tapping into the sixth sense of direction. And if you practice at it, practice at it, practice at it, practice at it, it gets to where it becomes a common thing to do. It's amazing how this stuff works. Very simple suggestions. Page 87, first full paragraph down there toward the middle of the page, tells us how to pray. See, we usually conclude the period of meditation with a prayer that we be shown all through the day what our next step is to be, that we be given whatever we need to take care of such problems. We ask especially for freedom from self-will and we're careful to make no requests for ourselves only. We may ask for ourselves, however, if others will be helped. We're careful never to pray for our own selfish ends. Many of us have wasted a lot of time doing that and it doesn't work. You can easily see why. As I said, I used to use God. Like an errand boy, send him out to get this done, get that done. It didn't work. He never did come back with nothing. But I learned through doing that to start praying only for the knowledge of his will for me and the power to carry that out. And today I can't think of anything that would be better than to have God's will done in my life only. It would be a whole lot better than anything that I could ever dream of. Because as I said here today, I am in places today in many, many areas of my life that you can't get to other than by prayer. By God's grace. It cannot be done. You know, I was practicing this thing around and one day I was listening to the radio and I heard a song that I heard all my life. And it talks about having a plane of inspiration. And I heard this song all my life. It's called In the Garden. Maybe you all know that song. And it came to me. I said, well, that's a song about prayer and meditation, isn't it? In the morning while the dew is still on the roses. That's about prayer and meditation. And I didn't know that. It just came to me. And I can read these things. And I can see. I can see these things today. And I know what they mean. I mean, I really do know what they mean. I don't know where that came from either. It certainly wasn't anything for me. I think it's God working in my life. I believe that. They said to me, pray only for knowledge of His will and the power to carry that out. I said, how in the hell is He going to know what I want? And they said, He don't care what you want. They said, He's interested in what you need. And He knows more about what you need than you know yourself. And that's turned out to be exactly true. If I had written a list of things that I thought I needed when I first came to AA, if I had said, God, give me these things and I will be satisfied for the rest of my life, I would have cheated myself. God has given me things far, far, far beyond my dreams could possibly be when I first came to AA. Absolutely amazing. The things that take place in our life by simply, simply trying to follow God's will. People who have been self-will like us, who have literally destroyed ourselves on self-will. We don't need to be telling God what we want. God knows what we need. And if we do His will, He's going to see that we get it. Who could ever dream years and years ago, we could be sitting in this room today doing what we're doing. A week ago, we were... We were in Reykjavik, Iceland, a place I'd wanted to visit all my life. And by golly, I got to tour Iceland. Hell, I'm 69 years old now before I got to do it, but I finally got to do it. I couldn't have done that if I'd been drinking. A year or two ago, I got to go through the channel under the English channel. I read something in a magazine when I was a kid about nine years old. It said sooner or later, the English and the French would build that thing. I said then, if they ever build it, I'm going to go through it. Finally, finally, I got to go through the channel and ride that damn channel train doing 200 miles an hour. 60 years, I dreamed that dream. Finally got to do it. Oh, yeah, God knows what we need. He's not interested in what we want. Page 87. If our circumstance... Go ahead, John. We ask our wives or friends to join us in morning meditation. About 15 years ago, we were sitting in my living room, my wife over there in her chair and me in mine, and I'm reading my prayer and meditation. And she's reading her prayer and meditation stuff. And she looked over and said, Joe, would you... Oh, she said, honey. That's what she said. And I said, I'm not ready for that this morning. She said, oh, you old silly thing. She said, I want you to read this for me and tell me what it says. I said, well, I can do that. So I read that for her, and I told her what it said, and I told her a lot more than she wanted to know about it. And the next morning, she said, would you read this and tell me what this says? And I did. We discussed that a little bit. And that kind of set up a little deal in our house of praying together and sharing together. We hadn't done that before. And I've heard all my life, those people that pray together stay together. Joe, how long has it been since you and Phyllis have had a divorce? It's been 21 years. And I'd have never thought about that. She'd come up with that. Bottom of page 87. As we go through the day, we pause when agitated or doubtful and ask for the right thought or action. We constantly remind ourselves we're no longer running the show. Humbly saying ourselves many times each day, thy will be done. We are then in much less danger of excitement, fear, anger, worry, self-pity, or foolish decisions. We become much more efficient. We do not tire so easily. For we're not burning up energy foolishly, did we? We were trying to arrange life to suit ourselves. It works. It really does. That's the full paragraph right there. We alcoholics are undisciplined, so we let God discipline us in the simple way we just outlined. If you'll follow these definite and valuable suggestions on page 86, 87, you will develop your own life of prayer and meditation. You'll make your conscious contact. You'll be able to tap into that sixth sense of direction. And it's amazing the things that we can learn by doing that.