Step 2 and the Debate in the Agnostic’s Mind – Sandy B.

Oh, that's a friend. Good evening, everybody. My name's Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic. How are you all doing? That introduction was a little more accurate than Fred realizes. Before I came to AA, it was a woman. But when I had a spiritual awakening, it went all the way. I had 13 promises I was amazed before I was halfway through When you stand at the turning point, you never know what's going to happen. Drum roll. I better watch out, they'll turn me back. Okay. Anyway, I am thrilled to be here tonight and I can tell from the atmosphere in this room this has been a monumental convention that you've been having and I regret deeply that I'm just getting here to participate in the last tail end of this. It's just, I can sense how great it was, and I wish I could have gotten off work sooner, but it's a thrill to be here tonight. I've seen already, just walking down the aisle to get in here, a bunch of friends that I haven't seen in a long time, and this has been incredibly rewarding already. I came into Alcoholics Anonymous a little over 25 years ago, and I haven't been drunk since my first meeting, and I owe it all to not drinking. I like to get that point across, especially to John H., that we don't have a specific step or a slogan about that. Don't drink. It's sort of implied in a lot of our literature, but it's never specifically addressed. And if you're a conniving, rationalizing alcoholic, you can claim no one ever told you directly that... And so I'd like to make that point, if any of you are new and you haven't heard this directly, if you have been having problems and you notice you're getting drunk a lot, check your drinking. Check your drinking, I think that you will find a direct correlation between that and getting drunk. but that isn't you know not drinking is kind of like not breathing I mean it's absolutely essential to staying alive for us alcoholics but if all there was to sobriety was not drinking I probably would have quit a long time ago so I think that the miracle of Alcoholics Anonymous at least in this drunk's life has been not just not drinking but getting happy with not drinking and to me that's the miracle you know I could hold my teeth and clench my teeth and walk around and people would say to me what are you doing? and I'd say I'm not drinking and they'd say it shows and you could see the blood vessels on my neck getting ready to pop and you could see the tension and the resentment and the anxiety. And there I was not drinking and you couldn't not drink and do anything else at the same time. It took total focus to not drink. And that type of sobriety is just not going to last. And I really believe the person who told me early on, if you're an AA and you're not happy, you're doing it wrong. You're just flat doing it wrong. There is a joy of living that is one of our promises. I mean, this is a guarantee if we follow this path. And that is why it is possible to accumulate day at a time the amounts of sobriety that we have. Forty-six years, that's so wonderful to see here. It's because there's been a fundamental change deep down inside of each one of us that enables us to look out at the world through new eyes and see a happy, joyful place to live. And as long as we maintain this contact with the program in our higher power, that's how the world looks. In spite of the fact that it's going up and down and you're losing money, we're gaining money, the relationship ends, it starts, you're this and that. And all the ups and downs of life go rolling by and there is a fundamental perspective from inside of this sober place that all is well and all is going to continue to be well. People are wonderful and there's a marvelous world to live in. Now, that's not the way I saw the world before I got to AA. I saw the world like so many people growing up as a very intimidating place, full of anxiety. I had the same feelings that I suppose most young people have when you're young and then become a teenager and you're looking around and I don't know about you all, but my memories of a teenager are something like I spent a lot of time wondering what the hell was going on. I mean, I'd look around and go, what's going on around here? Does anybody know what's gone on around her? And I didn't want to tell anybody that I didn' t know what was going on. Because then they'd know I didn''t know what wa s going on, and they looked like they knew what was g oing on. And so I was collecting information about what was goi ng on. I think this is sort of, you know, who am I? What's the world all about? And what are women all about, and what's sex all about and what is growing up and What is the job? Where am I supposed to go? How do I behave? How do i react? And this is it. And I got a lot of information and I got it sort of second hand. I got from other people, I read certain books, I was taught certain things, learned a lot in bathroom walls. Boy, I picked up a lot tremendous amount of information about what was going on, was shared. and of course you'd read that and you'd go God I didn't know that that's staggering that's really what's going on but you couldn't ask anybody because then you'd know you don't know what's going on and you couldn'T have that happen so you just internalized a tremendous amount of ideas and perspectives and that was my view of the world from deep inside of me and I looked out there with all this information that I had collected by the age of 16, 17, 18. And while I conceded that I may have had some fun and I had some friends and I said this, there was a deep-seated feeling that this was a very frightening place to be and the longer you stayed alive, the worse it was going to get. That that was sort of my fundamental outlook on the world. Other people seem to have a much happier outlook. And I remember we do this a lot, comparing our insides to the outsides of other people. And I just felt that anxious apartness that Bill writes about in the 12 and 12. There was that sense of being part of something but being separate from it at the same time. And I spent a great deal of time concerned about this. How am I going to work through this? And my friends at this point in time had started drinking. It was a natural thing to do by the time you were 16, 17, 18. But I was holding out. I was hold out for, I belonged to a church at that time who taught something about a place called purgatory. And if you did certain things, you racked up lots of years there and I was keeping a mental calculation. And man, it just, I couldn't help myself. There was just sinning, sinning and sinning going on on a steady basis. Out in our neighborhood, I come from Connecticut and back in the 40s, I think we made the papers. There was this epidemic of impure thoughts that went through that area. Everybody under 16 was racking up thousands of years every night just in purgatory. so I had by my calculation a quarter of a million years probably to do and there was some ground rule in this church that if you didn't drink until you were 21 you got a bonus I forget what it was but it was a lot of years out of there so I was not drinking in order to do that well there came a time when I got to the university where I was entered as a freshman. I got there and I felt totally intimidated by all the people who came from around the country. They just all seemed to understand. They all knew how to dance. They were so sophisticated. I felt like sort of a country bumpkin or something, just not knowing, didn't have as much money as other people had. All of those wonderful feelings. And there came an evening, I'd been there about three months when this group was put together. and I always remember this and I hate those kind of events they're much better today but I've never liked them it's called get to know each other night and you take 50 strangers you put them in a room and you say mix hi, hi, high, high and you go around and you mix and I just would walk into this mixing situation and freeze I would just go God I hate this I don't know anybody here and now I've got to start from ground zero. And I'd start over here and these group of ten people were already talking like they already knew each other. And I would go over there and they would look at me and I could tell I didn't belong there. And I went over to this place and peering in and there were two people and they seemed to be really talking and obviously didn't want to be interrupted. They would go up here and there was three and circle the entire room and I didn' t belong anywhere. It was like odd man out. Now, this group, not that one, not a one. Was there anybody who looked up and gave me any sort of encouragement to come in or join in or anything? It was almost like a hostile look, like, what are you looking at? What are you staring at us for? What do you want here? And I had that feeling, you know, start perspiring, and I'm in with 50 mean people who just are ganging up and so on down. And I knew I had to stay there, and it just was getting worse and worse. And I decided, the hell with purgatory. I'm probably not going to get out of there anyway. That was probably a crazy deal. And my roommates had told me about alcohol, and they said, boy, you ought to drink. What do you mean you're not drinking yet? This stuff is wonderful. It makes you feel great. And I said, well, I sure like to feel great. So I got a glass of whiskey and soda, whatever it was, and drank it down and stood there waiting to feel good. I didn't feel great, and nothing happened. I remember just tapping my foot and sort of looking at my watch and going, man. So I called that guy over. I said let me have another one of those things that don't seem to be working here and poured that down. I'm standing there waiting, waiting. I don't feel anything. So I've got a third one. I said, give me another one of those things. And didn't like the taste, but I was taking everybody's word for it. Said, you're going to feel good if you drink this. And I was standing there waiting to feel Good, and I was sort of over on the side talking with this bartender. And while I was consuming that third drink, the miracle occurred. The 50 mean guys who had been in the room earlier left. And they were replaced by 50 of the nicest guys I have ever seen. I don't remember feeling any different. I just turned around and saw loving going on out there. There was people, they were all looking at me going, please join our group. Come over and talk to us. And I remember just going, hey man, you'll have to wait your turn. and I'm going to start over here and coming around. I remember just going, boy, are these people lucky. I'm about to join them, and just went out there, and everybody was, I'll tell you, it was wonderful, telling jokes, telling stories in new people's names. How do you do? Yes, sir. You talk about intuitively knowing how to handle situations that used to baffle you. It just was wonderful. And I've been drinking for ten minutes. I'm drinking for 10 minutes, and I found that the world I lived in changed 180 degrees. And I think back on it, and to this day, I believe that's what makes me an alcoholic. Alcohol had the power to change the world that I lived in from a very intimidating, frightening, anxiety-filled world into the world that I had heard about where people were fundamentally good, where people were fundamentally trusting, where there was a degree of harmony and camaraderie, where there Was this sort of a brotherly love. That's what I saw in the world when I drank. And so alcohol has a very, very powerful effect on me. And I agree with Clancy when he says it isn't so much what alcohol does to us, throwing up, dry heaves, high blood pressure, convulsions, DTs, arrests, teeth knocked out, divorces, jobs, and all of that. But that really isn't what makes us alcoholics. it's what alcohol does for me that's the thing that has to be understood in order to get inside of us alcoholics that explains why we are willing to have our teeth knocked out and puke every morning and go to jail and suffer all this because to the non-alcoholic whose entire world is not changed by alcohol it appears absolute insanity that we go day after day puking our way through life, just insanity unless they knew what was going on inside. So as I look back on it, I really believe that in a strange way my real problem wasn't alcohol. My real problem was sobriety. every time I was sober I could not stand it I wanted some way to get un-sober and the way I got un-tober was through drinking that was it was an answer to a fundamental problem that existed there before I took my first drink I just couldn't deal with the world as it was I had filled my head with ideas that were availing me nothing I had no real relationship with a higher power I was faced with the standard problem that human beings are faced with namely growing up and it overpowered me I was somehow not dealing with this I had a very poor perspective on it and alcohol came along and gave me an instant answer to becoming a grown-up I was able to move from way back here all the way up here without going through the pain of growing up So I could just chemically get the perspective of a person with peace of mind. I could chemically Get the perspective Of a person who was in harmony with the world. Alcohol had this wonderful power. And so I literally turned my life over to alcohol on that night. I think I, without knowing it, made a promise That I would always have this friend with me. And if I did, all would be well. I think I knew that after drinking for 10 minutes, that as long as I had alcohol with me or nearby, all would be well. That I had nothing to fear about the future, about today. You talk about a powerful influence on a human being, that's what 15 minutes of drinking did. Now as my life went on, I had all these various problems with alcohol, throwing up, getting in fights, almost didn't graduate from school, somehow made it, came out, It was back in the Korean thing. Everybody had to join the military. A bunch of guys were drinking beer. They all said, let's go join the Marine Corps. And I said, okay. He went down. Wow, was that a surprise. Boy, I showed up down at Quantico with my golf clubs. Seersucker jacket, white bucks. Hi! Man, you wouldn't believe where they told me to put those golf clubs. So after the rude awakening of what the Marine Corps was and shave all your head, hey, you, bam, and here we started and I started in on this thing and it was not my cup of tea. I knew I'd made a horrible mistake. These guys were crazy. I mean, they just loved. If you could make it worse, then they would be happy. You know what I'm talking about? Hey, tomorrow night it's going to be 20 below. Tonight it's only 10 below. Let's sleep out tomorrow night. You know, that kind of a... So I knew I was in the wrong crowd. This was not my thing. And fortunately, during the training, we went through boot camp and then we went to the officer's school for six months. And during that, they had movies about all the various careers that people can have and they had on the screen pilots. Now I saw some people I could identify with. They weren't out jigging in the snow. They were at the bar in this movie. And they were talking like this with their hands, and they were flying and having a drink and flying. And this was not a dumb alcoholic, so I had my hand up. And I'd never been in an airplane in my life, but I knew that I was a born pilot. And somehow I got accepted into flight school and I got married and my bride and I went off to Pensacola, Florida to go through naval aviation training. And I got airsick on the DC-3 flying down. And I get airsicked for about the first six flights in the old SNJ out of Corey Field in Pensacala. My flight instructor said, One more time and you're out of here. You know, I'm just barfing all over the thing. But eventually that all calmed down and I ended up going on and getting my wings and flew for the Marine Corps for about 11, 12 years and was in fighter squadrons and having a career, very exciting, overseas. Yay, boy, you know, on the outside. This guy is really moving along and six kids, family, you now, all around. All of a sudden I didn't even have a damn table or chair at the table anymore. You know, I'm looking in there and getting crowded out by this mob that's in there. And I've got my friend and we're drinking and, you know, it's just one big party and we are going along. But, you now, this disease was beginning to really work. It was starting on the inside. and where in those early years the world would become so intimidating and I'd have a drink and it would fix all that. Now the drinking wasn't quite fixing all that some of it was penetrating some of It was starting to get way down inside and even when I had alcohol in my system things weren't fundamentally all right and I had to drink more and I was trying to find other ways what can I do And I knew that something bad was going to happen. I had that feeling of impending doom. You're moving along in a career and so on down, but you know on the inside there's a day of reckoning coming. You don't know what it is, but you can feel it. It's just building in there. And there came a time when I started getting in airplanes. Always up until then when I'd get in an airplane, I could leave all my troubles on the ground, turn on that afterburner. or bam, you'd be up there and just totally living in the now. And there came a time when that wasn't possible. My problems were going supersonic with me. They were just still, I'm worried. Oh, I don't know if I will. You know, I couldn't remember what lie I told the commanding officer. Did I tell him I was over here or there? All of the past is catching up. I'm panic-stricken about the next physical. They're going to find all this high blood pressure and I'm starting to notice a little trembling in the hands and they're probably going to discover that. How many of these secrets can I keep? And it just kept building and building. And soon I developed a basic distrust of the pilot of the plane I was in, which was me. There was that knowledge that this guy is an accident waiting to happen. I mean, he's starting to lose it. He's ten seconds behind the plane instead of being up with it And that's very dangerous to be in that shape. And there came times when I started having heart palpitations, loss of vision. I'd be getting dizzy and perspiring. And it was withdrawals from alcohol. I've run into other pilots since then who were fighter pilots, the Air Force and so on. And they had the answer to this. I'm a stupid pilot. They were taking booze up with them. And that was calming down all this withdrawal stuff that I was having. But I was kind of stupid and didn't realize that. And I was up there letting this alcohol wear off, and it was a really dangerous situation. And eventually it got so bad that I almost ejected one time because I thought I was going to pass out. And I saw a flight surgeon, and that was about the end of it. When they heard my story about flying around with one hand on the ejection seat, on the theory that when I pass out I'll fall forward and fire the seat. and they said that wasn't in the handbook anywhere. But when you think about it, us alcoholics are breaking new ground all the time. Those test pilots at Chance Vaught never dreamed that a guy would be faced with alcoholic withdrawals while flying the Crusader, and therefore they didn't have a procedure where you would... When you passed out, you would eject yourself. So I thought I was coming up with something creative. So the next guy who came along would have an answer. Anyway, that was the end of that. They decided I couldn't fly anymore. The diagnosis down in Pensacola after watching me for two weeks, they said, well, he's got trembling hands, high blood pressure, perspiring, his eyes are all bloodshot, he reeks of alcohol. And there was no alcoholism in the Navy at that time, and so my diagnosis by the psychiatrist was a childhood fear of flying. And so, bam. And that's how my whole case was written up. This man never should have become a pilot. We found some evidence in his childhood. He fell out of his high chair and has a subconscious fear of heights. We never should've let him fly for these last 12 years. and so now they had to find something for a washed up shaking over the hill pilot to do and I'll be damned if I didn't get orders to become an air traffic controller that's what I did in my last year of drinking was to bring planes in in the bad weather when they couldn't see the runway. And this is how you bring planes in when you're seeing two planes and two runways. like one white line, it just comes right in. Anyway, there was nothing bad happened. I was really grateful to no accidents or anything like that. I ended up being the officer in charge, so everybody else did the controlling. And my last overseas tour, my big job was trying to find our unit you know anybody who was in that unit remembers it just go here comes the captain he's gonna go right by us again I'd be on my but during that year I became a daily drinker drinking around the clock vodka just trying to hold in there malnutrition lost about 50 pounds just you know the end is coming and it came in 1964 back at a career school in Quantico I had a seizure, one of those things where you bite your tongue and all that right in class. And that sent me up to Bethesda Naval Hospital. And after a couple days of observation, I went to the DTs, the straitjacket, and got locked up in the nut ward, stayed there for six months. Just locked in there while they figured out what's wrong. It's a mystery. What is wrong with this guy? He had DTs convulsions and all of those Things. And I went To psychiatrists. We had psychiatrists in there all the time and all these other nuts that were in there. Just all kinds of depressants, manic depressive, suicide, neurotic, you name it, psychotic, just a whole bunch. And I'll tell you something about all those people that were locked up in there, there was four drunks and the rest of them were all, you know. They looked down on the drunks. They looked DOWN on the DRUNKS. and so I figured that where I had gone after all these years to write home to my parents I was now low man in the nut ward which was the position and it was awful I laugh about it now but it was a nightmare it was just a sheer nightmare to be in there and try to explain this to your friends what's happening what's wrong I don't know I'm in here And somehow in the midst of all of this, Alcoholics Anonymous got a hold of a head psychiatrist, Bethesda Naval Hospital, in late 1964 and said, we'd like to get AA in there. You've got some alcoholics. And he said, OK. And a corpsman came into the nut ward and said all drunks fall in. Right face. And he marches to an AA meeting. And that's how I found AlcoholicsAnonymous. Now, I didn't believe in it. And a few months later, when I got out of there, I started drinking again for a period of a week or two. And then I called AA on my own. And on Pearl Harbor Day in 1964, great big guys who are still my sponsor showed up at my front door. A huge Marine with a crew cut and just mean, mean-looking guy. He was like a captain out of the recon battalion. for a couple of years he was in explosive ordinance demolition he said it was the best job in the world for practicing alcoholic because nobody was looking over your shoulder while you were working and he came into my house and he just said hi my name is Bill this is 12 step call I talk, you listen. Ah! That was a very fundamental, basic relationship right there. It was like I was Fido and he was the master. You know what I mean? Get in the car, sit there. Okay, don't talk. Go to the meeting, you sit in the front row. If I want an opinion out of you, I'll give you one. Just boom. Just boom, me. he's just a mean guy just mean but he scared the hell out of me I didn't dare drink around him I'll tell you that and he was always there so I never could drink and after a while I had a whole bunch of sobriety we just went to a meeting every night there wasn't any questions asked I'll pick you up tomorrow night 8 o'clock drive off and you knew if you drank or didn't show up you would get hurt there was very little finesse in his approach to Alcoholics Anonymous but it kept us sober and here it is 25 years later and I just tell you that the things that have happened in AlcoholicsAnonymous have been just wonderful and I can't thank my God and my wonderful fellowship all the home groups and people that I've been associated with that have inspired me, given me their example. It's just been marvelous. I know we have some new people here tonight. I'm just going to share a couple of things that I think were turning points as I came along in my sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous. And I suppose the most important one comes centered around the second step. I think that was one of the most importan phenomenon that I went through. And this is a step that I like to call the debate step. This is the biggie. You come in and you admit you're powerless over alcohol and your life's unmanageable, and you go, oh yes, my life's non-manageble, I'm powerless over alcoholic. Then you come to the second step and say something about this higher power, this God came to believe that a power greater than ourselves. I don't want to believe in a higher power. I may be powerless over alchohol, but I don' t want anything to do with God, I don''t want anything do with that. And we start the wonderful debate that goes on in the chapter of the agnostic and then the second step that's written in the 12 and 12. And this debate is raging on and it's a conflict between my old ideas that I brought in here and if you're new, you've got a whole bunch of old ideas about God and you come in here and now somebody's telling you that it would be a good idea to come to believe in God and now you've gotta debate going on in your head. You're going, damn, I don't think I can do that. No, that's not going to fit up here. I don't want to do that. That would be a mistake. I can tell you right now. I can buy all the rest of this stuff, but I can't be buying that damn God stuff. Can we go to a meeting where they're not talking about God? I don' t want to hear about the God part of AA. I like to leave the God Part out. I heard it said best one time in a meeting. Somebody just raised their hand in frustration and said, Enough about God. What about me? And it was just that... So you all know if you're either in the debate or when you went through it, that I wish they'd stop talking about God because it ain't setting well in here. And there's a real debate going on and maybe if I can share with you our transition in my crazy little mind between the first and second step, maybe it will help you understand how you could resolve this debate because unless you win this debate in the right fashion, you will have terrible sobriety, if any. This is a very crucial step. I mean, this debate that's going to go on in our heads. And so the way I would imagine this, if you can understand the first step where we talk about being powerless over alcohol, then you have come a long way towards becoming spiritual, whether you realize it or not. Because when you've said that you're powerless over alcoholic, you have said, whether you intended to or not, that the only thing that can save you is a higher power. Because powerless doesn't mean ignorance. You can't learn your way out of powerless. You can'T do anything out of powerless. You are powerless. Left to your own devices, you are going to go back to drinking. On your own, you're not going to make it. Unless there is a high power, there's no antidote to powerlessness. So the first step sets you up. And so you say, well, okay, maybe that might be true, but I just, geez, I can't believe in this and so on down. And so I'll tell you my own thoughts about the AA higher power, the AA God. And you're going to come in here and you're going to find out that AA doesn't try to prove to you the existence of God at all. Rather, we try to absolutely convince you of the need for one. There's a great deal of difference between that's what a spiritual program is compared to a religious program. We're not claiming the existence of anything, we're claiming the absolute need for a higher power by explaining to you what powerlessness really is. So let me take you on a journey of powerlessness, and let me help you take the second step if you're sitting out here tonight. I want you to imagine that you're my pigeon, and I'm going to give you an indoctrination to our first step. So I'm gonna take you up with me in my little jet airplane. I'm taking you up to 50,000 feet so that you can get a wonderful perspective of the world. And I'm just gonna give you a little demonstration about powerlessness. So we're up at 50, 000. I'm talking to you on the intercom, and i'm saying, you okay back there? Oh yeah, I'm okay back here. I said, well, don't get worried. I'm just going to open the cockpit now so you can sense the pressurization change. They want you to experience all of the things. And you go, okay, okay. So we opened that up. And then without any warning whatsoever, I rolled the plane upside down, pushed some negative Gs, and you go out. And you don't have a parachute. and i'm saying okay can you hear me all right and we're still talking on the radio and you've got your little headset on and you're going yes i said are you getting a feeling of powerlessness do you understand are you sensing powerlessness even yeah yeah yeah you're up there you know but it takes a long time to fall from 50 000 feet It would take minutes to fall from 50,000 feet. You assume that I'm going to fly the plane back and get you or something, and you're just falling. If you're a real cool guy, you're going, well, I'm like a skydiver. I'll hold my hands out. That's great at 30,000 foot, and that's really funny at 20,000 feets, and that' s really funny at 10,000, but around 8,000 feet, you start seeing the parking lot down there. And it is picking up speed. As a matter of fact, you can see you can see a truck down there that looks like it has your name on it. And things are coming fast and you are getting a feeling of what powerlessness is really all about. And about eight feet from that truck, a big hand comes down from the sky and stops you about eight feet form the truck and a voice just comes from out of the heavens and it says, excuse me, we're conducting a survey. Do you believe in God? Now you're ready to take the second step. You don't have any more idea about God than you did up at 50,000 feet. But you've decided something. you've decided you've got nothing to lose by reconsidering your position on the issue nobody's going to say you're looking bad, chickening out backing away from your convictions your ego isn't even on the line, you're going to hit the truck what the hell have you got to lose I said, no, I don't believe in God, but I'm willing to change my mind. That's it. That's how it works. That's the debate works. Barry Bill talks about it. It's just incredibly funny. After we end up changing our mind, we look back, you know, sobriety is just filled with these funny, funny things. If you go back and look at the area of literature, look how many times Bill uses the word stupid in the literature. We were especially stupid about this, and we were especially stoopid about that. And you know, that's what it was. We had these old ideas and they were stupid. But they were ours. And we just didn't want to let them go. Even though they were stupid. And so we hold on to this position. I don't want a higher power. No, there can't be one. But then when we understand powerlessness and we understand the absolute necessity to reconsider this position we're up against the second step that we came to believe. and Bill has that wonderful chapter to the agnostic and if you haven't read that chapter it's in the big book I remember I tell you this story about the chapter of the aggnostic my sponsor gave me a big book and he said read this book everything you need to know first time I see it God damn it I'm going to give you a quiz test all that he knew I wasn't going to read that I wasn'T interested in any of this stuff when I saw the steps on the wall I looked at them I saw they had nothing to do with me there was nothing I had a million problems so I needed a $2,000 loan. That's what I needed and that was not in the steps anywhere so I didn't need to be messing with them. I had first things first. On the other hand I knew he might haunt me if I didn' t read the big book and so I got the book home and I took it and I put it in my pocket and then I took all the pages and crumpled them all up like this got a magic marker went wow next to this thing got that book all messed up got a coffee cup got some stains put them on the you know cigarette let it burn out on a couple pages when you look at that book you say boy this guy is really put it on the shelf and if he came by I could show him the book well when I was flipping through it I saw the chapter of the agnostic I didn't read it I just saw it I didn' t have to read it I knew what was in there because some of us know without exploring what's in there we just know we're smarter than others and i knew that this was the chapter that the agnostics used to stay sober and the rest of the people use the rest of big book and all this god stuff and the steps and all that so i knew eventually i'd be going into that chapter and that would probably be where i would be hanging out a lot but i hadn't read it so if any of you were new and you've gotten the book and you flipped through and you said a chapter you wonder what's in it I'm going to tell you I can tell you in three words what that chapter says change your mind that's what the chapter says to the agnostic become a former agnóstic that's basically what it says And Bill has a wonderful humor in that chapter. And it reminds me, and I'll talk about this sometime back up in Washington. There was a wonderful radio program. Most of you people remember Jack Benny. He had that great humor. He was renowned as the world's greatest cheapskate and theoretically one of the funniest programs he ever had was an evening that you heard him walking down a hallway, just a footstep, boom, boom. And all of a sudden you heard a voice. And the voice said, stick them up. and Benny went yeeps and the stick up man said your money or your life and then started this long period of silence it just went on and on and on and the studio audience started laughing and there's just silence just on and on finally the stickup man said well and Benny said I'm thinking and he was caught on the horns of a dilemma and to us it's a humorous dilemma it's absolutely preposterous that a human being would be standing there going your money or your life and you're going let me see my money or my life my money or my wife and we laugh and we go ho ho ho that would never happen to me and there's the story of the young alcoholic he was up in front of the judge and the judge said young man I pick you up been drunk in public 15 times this year, I'm finally going to have to come down hard. It's either a year in jail or a 1AA meeting. And he stood there. And he stood there and he stood there and the judge said, well, he said, I am drinking. So we've got to get inside this guy's head. How could he be thinking? What the hell is he thinking about? A year in jail and 1 a.m. He went to get in his head. Do you know what he's doing in his Head? He's thinking back. And he drinks in a bar. And he's there all the time. And he has a bunch of buddies who drink in bars. And they get in trouble. And they raise hell. And once in a while, guys go to jail. Once in a While, guys go AA. And the guys that go to Jail come back. so he's crying on the horns of the dilemma and he stands out there and there he is and so we have a similar one you go up to 12 and 12 and you see this wonderful Jack Benny dilemma that Bill writes about in the second step and it says something I'm paraphrasing slightly to live on a spiritual basis or to be doomed to an alcoholic death is not always an easy alternative to face and so here we are you're new and you're at the first crossroads after you surrender and these crossroads are going to come along and this is the biggie don't want to make a wrong turn here you've been going down a road and all of a sudden here it is alcoholic death spiritual life and you go Jesus you talk about you talk about two crappy choices wow How bad is an alcoholic death? That's what our old ideas tell us about a spiritual life. When we have any idea what it is, in kicking and screaming, we get pushed down that road only to avoid going down that one. And look what it gets us. Look what it gets us. Down the road we go, and we start finding out what our fundamental nature is. We start finding how beautiful the world is. And if you're new, let me tell you what I think happens. You get handed a present when you start down that road. It's the most beautiful present you will ever receive. And that present is you. And we have some steps, and it's like the wrapping paper. on the present and each one of these steps will enable you to unwrap some of the garbage that's surrounding this present and throw it away and as you move along through these steps you're getting closer and closer to seeing what's in store for you you're Getting Closer and Closer to Taking a Look at the Real You and we start stripping away the old ideas stripping the way the garbage stripping it away and it's painful and it's hard and it takes a lot of willingness but the people that went there before you are telling you that it's going to be worth it. And suddenly you start seeing that part of you that you only dreamed existed. Oh, we knew it was there. It was driving us crazy. It was the part that didn't want us to be the way we were. It's the part that told us to commit suicide. It'sthe part that wouldn't let us sleep at night. It'sthepartthat made us cry. It'sthepartthat couldn't stand the waywe were living. And our answer to that was to try and kill that part of ourselves. Talk about insanity. The only way I can get peace of mind is to kill my conscience. If I could only kill the good in me, I could live peacefully. And AA inexorably unwraps this package, strips you of all of your false identity, all of those old ideas, And miraculously, something beautiful comes out. And if you knew, you've already started to see this. You're only scared the hell out of you because you didn't think you were that kind of a person. But you've been sober about three months. And you're sitting at a meeting, same old self-centered guy, tough guy. And a new guy comes in. He's been there sober about four hours. He's over trying to get a cup of coffee and the damn cup is shaking so bad he can't get any coffee in it. and all of a sudden without any volition on your part your heart leaps out it just goes right over to that guy and you just go God damn I hope he makes it and he sits down and you learn his name is Fred and you almost go over to him after the meeting but you don't and you go home that night and you're just like God I hope that guy makes it next week and then you're sitting there going I hope He makes it next week this jerk hopes He makes It next week what am I going soft that was happening to me but you can't shake it it's there you are experiencing genuine concern for your fellow man and you come back next week and you're in there and you are disappointed and you really hurt and you feel bad and you wish you had gone over and said something to him and you wished you had given him his phone number about ten minutes after the meeting starts he comes in he is late but he is sober and he is coming in he doesn't even go to the coffee pot because he knows he can't handle that yet and he sits down and you're joyful you don't even know the guy and you are joyful he is there he made it alright man I am pulling for you well what is that what is this cheering for that guy what isthat that's what is going to get unwrapped that's just the surface of the present that gets unwraped because as we experience this program we start unraveling And we start getting inside, and we find that way down in there is the fundamental child of God, as Chuck C. called us all. And there it is. It's just that's it. We aren't anything else. When we take away all these other identities and suddenly realize this is it. This is the big ball game. This is our ultimate answer. This is how everything fits together. this is a wonderful gift that is given to each one of us is to come into contact direct contact with a beautiful spirituality that's lurking just below the surface in every single human being and the longer you're around here the more you can look at a new person and see right in there and you start crying because you know what a beautiful person has just arrived and they don't know it yet and then you get to watch them unwrap that present and if that isn't something to devote your life to, I don't know what is. Thank you very much. Thank you.