Step 6 and the Perfect Help Available – Sandy B.

Well, good afternoon everybody and welcome to the December 2008 Men's Spiritual Weekend Far Corners. I wanted to start out with a comment about you. this conference of this spiritual weekend is not advertised locally we don't tell the people in Tampa that we have this and we don'T put any flyers out it's all word of mouth it's all just somebody telling somebody and somebody telling somebody somehow you hear about it and as you saw we have two people from overseas we've I've got two from Alaska and about six from California, Georgia, Oklahoma. So somehow you all got assembled here. And I find that very exciting, and you will find it as you get talking to each other because you have that in common, that something told you to do this for yourself. Now, it could be that you're fairly new and you want to see what something like this is like. It could be that you are just trying to refresh your program a little bit. But it also could be that you are becoming a seeker. And a seeper in the spiritual world is someone who decides to put a great priority on connecting with the God of their understanding and putting it ahead of a lot of almost everything else in an attempt to see what you can actually accomplish in this lifetime. And as people choose to do that, you serve as an example to others in your area because they will sense something different about you. They will see a different aura or a different energy or a different light. They will hear answers out of your mouth that inspire them to ask you more questions about it. And I like to think of that as beacons. It's my favorite word for seekers in AA. My example, of course, was Chuck Chamberlain. And the guys from California know exactly what I'm talking about. That when you were around him, you just knew he knew something that you didn't know and that he had something and it inspires others to, what is that and how do I get it and so on down? And beacons are as necessary in AA and in the spiritual world as lighthouses were years ago when ships were trying to navigate on the oceans. And as airport beacoms, Mike knows about that, and transponders today, they serve as a navigational reference point. And if there's anything we need in the spiritual world, there are more of these navigational preference points. And you may find that you're being called on to be one of those even though you didn't want to volunteer. that circumstances have caused something to happen in your life where you're no longer satisfied with the level that you've been maintaining for however many years. And so this first lecture, when we get to it, is going to be directed at exactly that, what that means and so on down. But before we get to that, we have just a simple little exercise. They put paper cups in front of everybody. And all we're asking you to do is to take a little piece of paper and on that paper write, and you're going to tear it up as soon as you write it, so don't worry about anything you're gonna write. What is the heaviest problem that is weighing on you now? In other words, you already know the answer. It's been weighing there for a while. And simply write it down, look at it and tear it up and put it in the cup. Whatever it is. and we'll just take a minute and allow everyone to do that. Done, done, done. The front is a lot faster. That's why they're sitting in front. Okay, is everybody pretty well finished? Anybody who hasn't finished? Okay, what we're going to do, and this is all just symbolic so you can see what it's like. Chris is going to come up here with a trash bag. and we'll just start with the front row and what you want to do is simply take the paper cup with this heavy problem in it and walk up to the bag and hold it over the bag and just let go and if you're having a hard time walking Chris can walk back to you, okay? And so that what we're really doing is just letting go just take that cup and just hold it over the bag and let go of it. There we go. Okay, start with the front row here. Just come up, drop it in. But as you drop it, just let go of it, don't push it in, don't do anything except let go of it There we go That was a heavy one there okay guys walk back a little bit there they go Thank you. We're actually going to take the cups and reassemble the pieces of paper and identify each person and send it home to your home group. Yeah. All right, we're getting very close. Dick, you better get rid of that one. Oh, there we are. We're down to the last row. Okay, and tie it up. Tie it up together. Now, let me have that and we'll... Can I get mine back? Yeah. Okay. Now, we've got to get rid of this, so we're going to ask Amy to dump this in the trash. Can you get it? There you go. Now, Amy's not a weightlifter, as you can see. And yet with one hand, she's able to hold the 55 of the heaviest problems that you guys brought here. And they weigh heavily on us and they're made out of air. They're made of water. They're not made out-of-thought. That's exactly what is weighing so heavily on us as we deal with these things. And that whole exercise was just to demonstrate one of our sentences in the big book, it must be there five times, our problems, we think, are of our own making. And the way you make a heavy problem that is weighing heavily on you is to think it that it's heavy, categorize it as it's heavy, and it will start feeling very heavy. And you will actually be tired carrying that problem around. I'm reminded of a nightclub show where the hypnotist asked for a volunteer, called the person up on the stage, hypnotized them, and then informed them that the pencil sitting on the table weighed 600 pounds and asked them to try and pick it up. Some of you have probably seen something like that. And they can struggle with both hands and try to pick that pencil up, And they can't, because they've been told in a hypnotized fashion that it weighs 600 pounds. And when the hypnotist snaps his hand, his fingers, they can pick it up as light as a feather. And it lost all the weight, and all the wait of it is gone. which leads me to the topic of our first lecture, back to the basics of awakening because certainly the hypnotist snapping the fingers is waking the person up to the fact that the pencil doesn't weigh 600 pounds. And if you look at our program, if we wanted to look at it in terms of is there one result that the 12 steps are designed to achieve, it would be called the awakening. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps. So the whole point of doing the 12 Steps is to have this awakening. So the question is, if awakening is the answer, What was the problem that awakening fixes? You work backwards and you should be able to come up with the answer. If I told you that the solution was rat poison, you might be ableto make a brilliant guess that the problem is people had a lot of rats. Or if I said the solution is bug spray, please guess what the problemis. You might say, somebody has a lot of bugs. But here I'm saying the solution is awakening. What's the problem that it fixes? Not an easy question, is it? Well, it's obvious. It's sleeping. We're all asleep. Is that it? We have to be awakened like Snow White or something? Do you think that's it? That you're asleep? And everything that you're experiencing isn't real and you're going to be awakened and free from all of that. What if that was true? Well, the best I could come up with using our literature is the root of our problems. Self-centeredness, we think, is the route of our problem. So instead of saying we're in the dream state, I'll say we're in a self-centered trance. Because of our self- centeredness, we have created a heavy world. We have created a series of problems that are weighing heavily on us because we're the center. and as the center as we look around how could you not be at the center you're a little kid and you go out and you're analyzing everything you go in the middle of a mall and you look around there's this and there's Sears and there is that and then there is this over here and from where you are standing you are in the center of the mall and you are out in the school yard and you looking around there is the football field there is baseball there And you're in the center. No matter where you go, you're the center of it. I mean, you couldn't help but conclude, using your own little mind, that you're the center, much as the early scientists concluded that the earth was the center of the solar system. The main reason they concluded that was because they lived there. and what else would be the center except where I am and all the kings and pharaohs and all of them they agreed with that they said you're damn right this is the center because I'm here and then when these astronomers started checking things a little more closely and found out that the sun was the center there was hell to pay great hell First of all, we'd have to change all our maps. We'd have to change all our thinking. And it would be a great blow to the ego to realize the center is out there. We're just one of these things orbiting around it. And so it is for us to become un-self centered, which happens in awakening. And my, as I said, Chuck Chamberlain was my greatest teacher, Bill Wilson and all of what he wrote and said. And Chuck, in the new pair of glasses or in a lot of his talks, he always made one statement that he did time after time after time. And the statement was there's only one problem that exists for mankind, and it includes all problems. And that problem is conscious separation from God, from others, and from ourselves. And the solution to that, which includes all solutions, is conscious contact. Conscious contact is synonymous with awakening. So he laid it out. And it's interesting to, I use that and I go and I'll bring it up at a discussion meeting and I will go, why don't we try this? Forget all those other problems. They don't even exist. There is only one. And that is conscious separation from your higher power. Why don't we approach discussion about whatever's going on with that perspective? And that lasts about a minute. And somebody goes, well, my problem is I don't have enough money. And my problem isn't my wife left me. And my health isn't too good. And my problems is I'm getting tired. My problem is this and my problem was that. and we go, I thought we just agreed that there's only one problem. You see, if we agreed that there's a problem, then we'd never work on any other solution except conscious contact or awakening and improving the contact. Oh God, I'm worried about money. I have to work on improving my conscious contact. Oh my goodness, I have this problem. I have to work on improving my conscious contact. It doesn't come naturally. It just doesn't feel like that would be the most productive thing to do. And so when I sponsor people now, it's just because I started doing this about four or five years ago, I tell them right up front you're going to have a spiritual awakening. That's why I'm here is to show you how to havea spiritual awakening and And when you have that, you're going to see everything differently. And a lot of the problems you have today, you won't even remember. That's quite a statement. That's quiet a mouthful to put on the table right off the bat. That these steps we're going take are designed for you to have this. Now by putting that out up front, it happens every time. And part of the wonder of the spiritual awakening is the realization that it's going to occur. And as you trigger that, there's something inside of us that gets very excited about that. There's something outside of us. There's a side of us that really connects with the possibility of that happening. And one of the ways I like to point it out is by making this observation that if you went back about 50 years in AA and you went to any small city and certainly every small town or every town, there was only one AA meeting a week. One meeting a weak. And you go, how the hell do you stay sober on one meeting a week? Well, number one, you really look forward to the meeting. That is a very popular meeting. Man, boy, two more days I'll be at the meeting, two more, so that meeting is really cool. The second thing you might do is find another guy who goes to that meeting and halfway through the week have a cup of coffee with him so you can both go, well, three days and we'll be at the meeting. But mostly you prayed like hell. You just kept praying. God, help me to get to the meeting, God, get me through this, God, God ,God, God . . . And then you finally got to the meetiing and went yay, yay, and it felt wonderful, you were at the meeting and you shared. And then you started through the week again praying like hell. So now we'll fast forward to today. It's a different picture. It's rare there's only one meeting a week. In most of our metropolitan areas, there's hundreds of meetings. There's meetings at 6 in the morning, noon meetings, 5 o'clock in the afternoon meetings, 7 o'clock meetings, 8.30 meetings, midnight meetings, women's meetings, men's meetings gay meetings, pilots meetings, doctors meetings, dual addicted meetings discussion meetings there's everything there's conferences, weekends, conventions dances, clubs pamphlets on everything there isn't one subject that hasn't been covered in the pamphlets. There is such an enormous support system, you don't have to pray at all. Now just think about that. There's such an anonymous support system you don' t have to pay at all now I'm not saying you don''t pray but it's possible to maintain sort of a halfway, semi-decent level of sobriety by just taking advantage of the support system, relying on the inspiration of others. And that is an interesting condition. And it's up to each individual to not allow themselves to just rely on the support system, to go beyond that. And that's exactly what we're talking about. Now, in preparation for the second lecture, which is contemplative AA, which I chose because I knew everybody's ego would like that. Oh, contemplative, I like that, reminds me of Plato and all of that. So I'm certainly in the right place. I'm certainly glad that that's going to take place. So in looking to get some ideas about that, I ran across a paper on the Internet, which you're going to get copies of at the end of this lecture. I just didn't want everybody reading it. And it's by a Dr. Dasher, Elliot Dasher. The name of the paper is Contemplation and Addiction and it turns out he's a really brilliant guy. He's got all kinds of papers on various subjects and he decided to confront the other doctors with a different way of looking at addiction, all addictions, instead of the physical, the craving and the obsession and the psychological and so on down. He decided to advance the idea that all addictions are attempts to reunite with our original nature through an erroneous path, alcohol, drugs, sex, you name it. And he makes the case, and he uses as an example Roland Hazard's visit to Dr. Carl Jung. When Dr. Jung said to him, I can't help you any further, but I have seen people with your obsessive, addictive alcoholism make it by seeking a spiritual solution to that. And then in his letter later to Bill Wilson, which Dr. Natcher references, he points out that in Dr. Young's estimation, alcoholism is really a manifestation of a low-level thirst for spiritual union. that the heart of the problem is that we miss God, don't realize that that's what we miss and we're trying to fix it on these alternate paths. It could be greed. If I get enough money, I will once again have that united feeling of being connected to God which we remember from when we first arrived here in that wonderful connected state. And then as we grow up and start looking around and we become the center, we learn all these other ideas and we're all told by those that came before us, these are the rules of life. And no one explains that the problem you're having is that you are getting separated from your creator and you are becoming self-centered. And it's just you out there. And every one of us is told by our fathers something like, Son, sit down. Let me explain life to you. It's your life. No one else is going to do your life for you. It's up to you to understand life and to make something out of yourself. And if you make something out of yourself, then you might end up with something that will make you happy and you'll be married and you have some kids and you study hard and you get high grades and then you can get a good job. And they explain the whole thing, which is a very advanced course in self-centeredness. You, you, you. You have to do it. You're the one. You're it. You're... And so we just go, okay, me, me. Well, there's 6.7 billion other people who are trying to accomplish the same goal and we get in each other's way because you're getting some of what I need in order to accomplish this. And so we were at loggerheads with one another because we're all self-centered and we're the lucky ones. we fail to such a degree that we actually became open-minded to the idea that all of our ideas might be wrong and that seeking God would fix it all. And so as he wrote his paper, he's suggesting no matter what the addiction is, seeking God will fix it because that's what the addiction was trying to fix. When I encountered alcohol, something inside of me said, this is it. I didn't know what it was, but it told me if I follow this hard enough, it'll fix that core problem inside ofme, which I didn' t realize was conscious separation from my own creator. And that problem cannot be fixed. When you get married and now you have some kids, oh boy, now I'm complete. And then you check inside and you go, no, I'm not. It's still there. It is still there, whatever it is. We don't know what it is yet, but it's still here. And it's been nagging me ever since I was little. and so he suggests that this would be another way for doctors to look at all addictions all addinctions are erroneous spiritual searches where somebody got the idea that making a lot of money could fix this core problem someone said enough sex will fix that enough power if i could just be president. That will go away. And so we go after it with the assumption that if you do it hard enough, eventually you will get there. And we pursued it into the gates of insanity and death. That's the commitment we had to the false search. And boy, we went down. And no matter how hard we got up, when we came out, I said, well, more. I missed the target a little bit. This time I'll drink warm vodka, but eventually I will get there. And so we just made that terrible detour down a path that we thought was going to take us somewhere. And so, we're back to his paper and he makes the same connection and observation that I just made with, we have a support system that is so strong that you don't have to pray. You don't hardly have to pray, and he suggested that early AA, in the beginners, they had to completely seek God to a degree that we don't have to do today, and He suggests, I'm not saying I agree with Him, that we transfer our addiction to alcohol, and we become addicted to AA. And that AA is the new search. And that AA, attending meetings or whatever it is, will eventually give us that union with God. And what it does, it gets us a little more comfortable, but we still haven't achieved the union. And that's what our program tells us once we get past the tenth step or into the tenth steppe, where it says we've entered the world of the Spirit. It suggests what these, the ground rules are of the world and the spirit. This is out of the big book. And it comes right after the promises. I'm sure most of you already know this, but I'm just going to review it. And the last promise is we suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we couldn't do for ourselves. That is probably as good a definition of a spiritual awakening as you'll ever see. We suddenly realize as an individual that there really is a God and something is happening between me and that God and it's real. And Bill says as a result of that moment, we've entered the world of the Spirit because we're now connected to this force in a way that we weren't before. Up until then, it was a theory. We went to a church, they told us there was a God, and here's who the God is, blah, blah blah, and there really is a god. Or we didn't go to church, but we came to AA and we had a sponsor and he told us about his higher power. He told him, look at the results I got. And we saw him be serene in terrible moments. We saw him happy all the time. And we all said that same thing. I want what he has. And he says, well, then I'm going to show you how to get what I have. And when you suddenly realize that God is doing for you something, then you have it. You now have what he, what you saw in him and that you want. And so it says in there, well, if we're in the world of the spirit, how does that, what are the new rules of the world? The spirit, what other new rules out of the 10th step? The rules are so simple. We ignore them. Nothing could be that simple. Chuck I remember him saying, I want you to understand something. For the last 22 years, I just get up every day and get guided by God. The whole discussion. That's it. There's the plan. That's all. That's what we're going to do. Any questions? And we go, oh my God, that's for him. He's some guru or something. I've got a lot of freaking problems. I haven't got time to sit around and wait for God to guide me. For God's sake, I've got to make some money. They're looking for me. That's fine for later, but I'm not going to do that. All right, so let's look. What does the 10th step say? Right after it says we've entered the world of the Spirit. He said whenever we get upset, we're frightened, we'RE agitated, whatever it is, we ask God at once to remove them. Okay, there it is. Any questions? And we go, oh, that's cool. But I've Got a Lot of Problems and I've GOT to... I've got to. Wait a minute. The whole plan was if any of those things happen, we ask God wants to remove them. Yeah, that's cool. But I'll tell you, I've Gotts a situation and it's like you just go goodbye. It's very similar to Chuck saying there's only one problem that includes all problems. That's cool, Chuck, but I got a lot of problems. in other words there's a tendency to dismiss the whole 10th step ask god it wants to remove them imagine the how boring discussion meetings would be all the way around the room well my wife's leaving me but i ask god and wants to remove that and i feel good and the next person well i'm going through bankruptcy it has me panicking but i asked god it once to remove it and he did Everybody was repeating the same solution. No creativity on the part of anyone. So what do we hear instead? What I like to do, do you ever hear that right? What I Like to Do is Go Running. What I Like to Do Is Go Home and Read a Book and Watch TV. What I LIKE to Do, What ILike to Do. what I like to do, and so we've come up with alternate plans for letting go and letting God. It's just human nature. After all, who knows me better than me? We're back to self-centered, and that I really should be able to think up something to tailor made for my problems. and so when I think of back to the basics of awakening I try to imagine looking at the steps as they lead to awakening instead of leading to not drinking or leading to sobriety which is a more traditional way to do it and if you'll do that in your own thinking and reviewing the steps of the program, it will all fall in. It will allfall into place that the steps are designed to uncreate the world that you created, to dismantle it, in effect to take away the dream state, to takeaway the self-centered trance. Self-centeredness has many components, probably a hundred thousand. And the steps one by one dismantle all of the ideas that we put together in order to survive in a place where we're the center of it. And God is something that we're seeking. and at the I remember the first time I saw self-centered as the root of my problems maybe you did the same thing I went you know something but now that I got an open mind I said I think you're right I never would have admitted that before but now I'm in the crowd where it's okay to be wrong once in a while other guys are owning up to the fact that maybe they were self-centred well maybe I'll join in and say, yeah, yeah. I see that now. I really am self-centered. And I'm going to fix that. I'm gonna go home tonight and do something about being self- centered. Really? What are you going to do? Well, I'm gunna... I'm going to become un-self-centered. Oh, really? What the hell is that? I don't know, but it sounds like the only possible answer to self-centeredness. So how do you become unself- centered? You become God-centered, the only way out, just like went from earth-centered to sun-centered and the second it did, all the mathematical formulas balanced. Everything was in its place. Everything was right. Everything was at peace. There was nothing in friction with anything because that is the true center. And the same thing when we awaken to being God-centered and then look around, the whole place looks different. The problems, again in our tenth step in the big book, are removed. They no longer exist. They aren't solved. They just aren't there. And I've noticed maybe over the last ten years that the people I sponsor, when they have a problem, I ask them to come over and we're going to talk about the problem. and my job is to convince them that they don't have a problem that they saw the situation incorrectly and I got that idea early on with my sponsor when I would run to him you know how when you're new the sky is always falling and I'd call him up sky's falling, sky's fallen alright come on over and then I'm going to get fired and then the Marine Corps is going to do it and then my wife and then he'd go well, okay, yeah, I see what you're talking about. But you know, you've got six months sobriety now and you've made a lot of new friends. Matter of fact, you're the coffee maker now in the group that people are counting on you to go there. And we're scheduled to talk, you and I, in a week. That's pretty exciting. We're going to be going over there. And then he starts on this long, rattly story. And when he gets through, I go, well if you look at it that way it's not so bad where the hell did my problem go he just chose to look at it differently and I actually was joking around and I said maybe we ought to have in our home group a committee of three elders who get to determine whether a person has a problem or not and at the end of the group meeting we have the those of you with a problem come on up and talk to our old-timers and you do your best to convince them of the problem now gentlemen this is it and then you go and you lay out your best case that you have a problem and then the three of them huddle. Sorry, son, that doesn't qualify as a problem. You mean I don't have a problem? No. Okay. You see what I'm saying? Suppose he just went, oh, okay. Then what the hell would you carry around? What would you worry about? What would you gnash your teeth over? They just stole your act. They just took away something that you created. We all drive ourselves crazy trying to solve problems that we created. Nothing to work on, Fred? Let me do a little thinking. I know you think life is good, but why don't you and I sit down and think about it? Did you ever go in your room and think about things? Yeah, now that I think about that, my business isn't doing that damn good. It may look good today, but I've been thinking about it. There's a lot of shit that could happen. Economy's kind of going like this. And if you work on that for about an hour, you almost need a drink and you never left the room, Nothing happened to you. You just thought about things. And this is how we create problems. And we create them because we're the center. And the center is what we would call the dream state. That's what I like to think of it, and that's what awakening fixes. It suddenly is revealed that you're not the center, And you'll notice our literature talks that way all the time. More will be revealed. It will be unveiled. It's not that it's explained, it just gets revealed what the true picture is and then it's just not... So the basics of awakening is the basics of becoming God-centered. And the steps, as you look at them that way, They're all designed to dismantle. First of all, we have to give up. And then we have to acknowledge that we can't get it done by ourselves. So that takes us out of the driver's seat. And then мы decide to give this whole new spiritual thing we're going to abandon the path we were on and go down this thing called a spiritual path. Why are we going to do that? Because we see other people doing it and they look happy. The spiritual path or the beacons in your home group, they're the ones that you can hardly wait for them to talk at the discussion meeting. Oh, please, oh, please. Please, I hope Harry talks tonight. Come on, Harry. Please, please." And then when he talks, you just go, yeah, yeah. Now, it isn't that you intellectually agree with him. It's more down here. You go, yeah, that is the path. Because we all have inside of us a memory of our true home, our true nature and our true connection with God. It's there. Bill calls it, it's a fundamental part of us. Remember that discussion about God? We were fooling ourselves for the idea of God is deep down inside of us. It's always been there like the idea of a friend. That is what we're trying to recapture, only we don't know it and we go off on all these different tangents. So then we get into the inventory stuff. We're inventorying everything that is creating the problems in our world. Resentments and fears. Here it is. It's just we're listing, listing all of these things so that we can dismantle them and have God remove this, take this away, take that away. So all spiritual growth is done by getting rid of things, not by getting anything. We don't need to get anything because it's already there. It already exists inside of us, our true spiritual nature. It's like a gold bar waiting for us to discover it. And as Bill says, we get glimpses. We get a glimpse of the ultimate reality. The ultimate reality is your true nature. It is connecting with the fact that you're a child of God and nothing more. You are a spiritual being having a human experience. And somehow we forgot that and we think we're a human experienced and we're in charge of everything and this is it and there is no God, why isn't there a God? I didn't put one in my world. I put myself in. There's not room for a God if I'm the center. And so we end up with the very common denominator of all alcoholics, loneliness. It's very lonely when you're the only one there. And so awakening, I thought up a Hollywood movie just to make this point and show you how difficult it is to awaken, which would be to go from self-centered to God-centered. So you'll have to bear with me in this movie. somebody falls asleep and is having nightmares and they can't wake him up. He's stuck there in a permanent nightmare state of having things come through his mind and screaming at him and all that. I was locked up in a place like that for quite a while and there were a lot of guys doing that running around and looking out and I felt superior just being a drunk in there you know what i mean my only problem is drinking i didn't realize i was crazier than they were and so in this plot they call on you as his best friend to rescue him if anybody can talk him out of this dream you can but first we have to get you into the dream so that you can talk to him and they invent some kind of a serum where they can dissolve you into an injection needle and you get injected into his brain and you're in the dream with him. And he sees you and he goes, Oh Fred, I'm glad that you're here to talk to you. You know all this stuff that you are seeing and you are scared? Yeah, yeah, see it all around here. It's not real. It's a dream. None of this is real. And I'm here to take you out of it. The trouble is, you're not going to be able to talk him out of it because it's too real. And we can't believe that there's another world called the spiritual world until we get a glimpse of it or until we see someone else who has seen it. And only then do we become willing, as Bill said, we become as willing as the dying can be to actually think we could be totally wrong about everything. Isn't that a hell of a thing to do? Grown man, smart person, having the thought that you could be wrong about anything and be wronged about everything? it's a scary thought but I find it quite exciting that wouldn't it be great if everything I thought was true isn't true I'm not a piece of crap the world doesn't suck people aren't rotten life does make sense there really is a God and I can live there imagine what it would be like if you forgave every bad thing that ever happened in your life every unfair thing every unkind word everything when you were little when you're in grammar school when you are in high school they did this they did that the government the IRS politicians, you name it. It's a long list of things that didn't go right for us. What would it feel like if we gave a blanket pardon to every single one of those things? I would suggest to you that you would suddenly be light as a feather, that you Would practically feel like you're floating, you would be akin to a spirit. There would be nothing left. You'd go, well, who the hell would I be? I am my problems. That's what I think about. When I'm bored, I go back to the people that screwed me over in grammar school just to make sure that I still got them in my inventory. and I don't know if you're aware of it but if you don't go back and breathe life into these various problems that are yours they could dissolve permanently and so it's like a guy spinning those plates you remember those things and they gotta you gotta keep them going so every so often you gotta go back and think about that girl that left you in college for your best friend and breathe breathe life into it Yeah, oh God, I remember how it hurt. Oh God, I could kill that guy. And just sort of and then put it back on a shelf but now it'll last. It'll still be there when you come back and we spend an amazing amount of time running, reviewing, breathing life into those problems because that's the real us. I am the totality of all these incidents that I judged. Imagine letting it all go let it go unattended it's been said that the whole AA program can be reduced to two words let go that's what it says back here simply allow everything to be as it is anytime you have any thought or feeling that something should be different than it is get rid of it no that's ok with me. No, that's fine. That's fine Can you imagine doing that? You would be totally in the present moment like we are now just enjoying each other here far away from everything else and slowly our true nature the truth about ourselves and God would be revealed, and we'd suddenly see it in all its glory. And that's all we ever wanted in the first place. That's the only point of us being here, is to solve that one. All the rest of it is sick, because until we have this happen, we're going to be restless, irritable, and discontent. We're going to be, keep wondering why I can't quite get it all. And later on or tomorrow Amy will scotch tape up some holograms on the wall and they're simply training aids to show what an awakening looks like where you stand there and you're looking at a certain picture but you know there's a much deeper picture there. That this isn't what you're trying to see. Just like we know there is a greater reality than the one we are seeing now. And if we pursue it through seeking, it will be revealed. And when you see a hologram, when it booms, it's quite a pleasant feeling. yo and then you go that damn thing was there all along i've been up here 15 times and the son of a now i walk up boing it comes and i tell the story when i first time ever heard of one of these my son had one in baltimore thanksgiving and everybody's looking at it in the hallway kids everybody and they all saw it But me, I don't know why. And so I went there and I said, I'm the oldest, I'm his grandfather. What the hell's the deal here? And so during the meal, I would excuse myself to go to the bathroom, but I wasn't going to the bath room. I was going back to that goddamn hologram. And I'm staring at it a little this way and cross my eyes. I'm doing all that. I actually left and went home and I never saw it. and only later did I get a there was a calendar with some of these and after the longest time one day I would stand there and it just went oink and there it was so I thought about writing a book called Hologram Viewing for Dummies and I thought a lot about this and I think that the only instructions you can give about seeing a hologram is this. Stand there till you see it. That's the full instructions. Stand there until you can see it Those that scoff about prayer haven't prayed enough. You've been praying an hour a day for a month? Well, pray two hours a day. You follow what I'm saying? In other words, it's there and you stare at it until you see it. And then it becomes real. This seeking, you haven't seen it yet? Keep seeking. It hasn't been revealed yet? Keep seeking! Stop getting diverted away from what Chuck said. There's only one problem, conscious separation. There's Only One Problem. You're not seeing it yet. You're Not Seeing the Truth Yet. It's real easy to get diverted from that. It can't be that simple. That's what my mind says. It cannot be that simply that I simply seek until I see it. I simply continue this until it gets revealed. And after a lot of years, as I told Steve the last time I was out there, I now see what Chuck was talking about. And I love it. It's absolutely wonderful. There's another dimension to a lot of things. And that's what our literature is telling us that. Right after the 10th step, it said, now we want to go further. You remember that? We're coming up on the 11th step. Now we wantto go further." What does it say right off the bat? It's an individual adventure. The group doesn't seek together. You do. Well, what do we do about that? Oh, our libraries are full of books. Talk to your minister, your rabbi. Talk to spiritual advisors. Seek. Seek where you're seeking takes you. It suddenly isn't a we program anymore. This is an individual adventure between you and God. I don't know. It could be yoga, whatever it something will. You'll be going by a bulletin board and you'll see something. And, you know, I ought to try that now. How many times have we done that? Nah. It's like God's knocking on the door. Here, I'll give you a hint. Knock, knock, knock and you look over there. I'll probably be the only guy in the class. Nah, I'm not going to do that. Next time you have one of those, do it. Next time something says, next time one of those books back there, take it. Follow it. See where it takes you. So what we're talking about is transferring everything to God. I think I talked about this at the noon meeting today. If we really were, it was necessary in the beginning to depend on God. Remember how necessary it was in the begining? geez, I've got to have a drink. Please help me, please help me. And then one of the things that happens with spirituality is it works. One of the most dangerous parts of spirituality, it works and it gives you the feeling that you're much stronger than you used to be and you aren't. This is God doing the work. He is making life easier. You aren't more capable. you're taking advantage of relying on God and the way is made easy but it feels like you've gotten stronger and you can handle things on your own now and we end up becoming less dependent on God and more dependent again on ourselves and we're in for a fall not necessarily back to drinking but we're suddenly going to be having a hard time and so if there's anything that is progressive about spirituality It is becoming more dependent on God. So at the end of 10 years, if you're this dependent, at the End of 20 years, you ought to be twice as dependent. Where do we see this? Step 6 and 7, we just keep turning more things over to God. More, more. We're entirely ready to have God remove this, God remove that. And then we now are nothing more, as Chuck said, than an instrument of God. There's no more us. I just get up every day and God moves me around, puts me in different places. And we get rid of the illusion that we're in control of our lives, which we aren't. I heard a speaker one time say that if that whole wall was a mural of your life and been painted beautifully and there's a little baby over here and here you are and grandma's going, here you Are playing athletics and here You Are and here you are, and here you are. Your role in the creation of that whole mural is the brush. It was being painted by the master. You weren't doing the painting. You were just the instrument that allowed this whole thing to evolve. And I remember when I heard that, I said, well, I had something to say about my life. I made decisions. I did this and I did that. I don't think that's true, that I don' t have anything to say about that. And the question was asked me, and you can try asking yourself this, what could you have done to have gotten to AA two years sooner? Anybody think they could have done it? We had to hit the freaking bottom that we hit. Do you follow what I'm saying? So you couldn't have done anything to get here sooner. Well, what could you have done to get higher grades in college? Well, I could have studied hard, but you didn't. I know, but I... No, I was a fuck-off. I was the screw-off if I liked drinking. I couldn't have gotten higher grades. Oh, that's right. That's right what could you have done to not have that terrible girlfriend in high school well I could have asked her no you couldn't have and you start realizing there wasn't anything you could have done to have a different past and that gets rid of a lot of guilt it just that's your story that's the one and stories are all epic stories. There has to be the struggle and the goom all the way to the bottom and then coming back. Sons, we leave home because we're going to find something better. We leave God controlling our lives because we can do a better job because I'm self-centered and I'm off to prove and then we go, can I come home? And our journey back is the great, that's what's happening now. We've made the turn and we're coming back home and it's all been arranged and there's God with his arms open and he said let me handle all your problems for you how about that in our big book it talks about walking hand in hand with the spirit of the universe. My only job is to grab that hand. God will do all the rest, and I'll get no credit. I like credit. So maybe I'll let God help me part of the time, and I'll take over on certain other parts. And those are the parts that get screwed up royally, and then I run back and take his hand again. And so you can see this, what's being offered is the most beautiful thing in the world, to be what St. Francis called make me an instrument, make me a channel of thy peace. And the way we get there is by dying. What dies? The self-centered world. How does it die? By awakening. That's the process. And so all we're doing is putting into words, different words, what's already in our literature. It's simply another way of looking at stuff that we've looked at in a traditional way. That's why I chose back to the basics of awakening because I never saw awakening follow the basics. Whenever you hear they go, let's go back to The Basics. generally you go well what is that I rarely hear someone say you know awakening there's a lot of other things you know what I mean we're just going to read the big book and get that 12 and 12 the hell out of here alright we're getting close to dinner time there's a couple of points And one of them is that the only help that's available is perfect help. We can't ask God to help us to become more honest than we are now. We're either going to become totally honest or we're going to do it on our own. And the story that I use, and Bill remembers this from Washington, D.C., and Bill Hatch is the guy that gave me this story. It's from C.S. Lewis, and it's the little boy with the toothache. Some of you have heard this. A 12-year-old kid, he's on the baseball team, the biggest game of the season, and the coach is going, okay, you guys are all set where we can beat these guys tomorrow. The only thing you have to do is get eight hours sleep. So tell your mother you need the eight hours. So he goes home and he tells his mother, I've got to get eight hours sleep. I want to eat dinner now. He's been sleeping about three and a half hours and he wakes up with the beginning of a little toothache. And he feels it in there, that little tingling, tingling. And he knows if he calls his mother she'll give him two aspirin and he'll be right back to sleep. But he doesn't call his mother. Instead he decides to wait and see if it will go away by itself. and the more he breathes on it, ooh, it's still there, I don't know, and he's agonizing. Why don't I call her? No, let's wait. It could go away by itself. And he waits an hour and a half and then he calls her. She gives him the aspirin and he goes back to sleep and then the next day, because he's not rested, he makes an error and the team doesn't win. So they say, well, what's wrong with that kid? Why didn't he get the two aspirin and go back to bed? He goes back asleep. We have this same problem in AA. You have it in your spiritual life. And the answer is that he knew his mother very well, and he knew, yes, she would give him the two aspirin, but she wouldn't stop there. She would also schedule him for a dental appointment to go see exactly what was wrong with the tooth. And he also knew his dentist, and his dentist wouldn't just look at that tooth. He would say, well, you're here. And then he would write down every problem there was and you would have a series of appointments until you had perfect teeth. He didn't want perfect teeth, he wanted two aspirin. And we want two aspirins worth of God's help. God just covered this little bit. But don't meddle in all the rest of this stuff. the problem is you can only get perfect help. And that's what step six is all about, perfection. Suddenly perfection in the 12 and 12 rears its head and Bill says we have to raise our eyes towards perfection. Big book, progress, not perfection. 12 and12, progress towards perfection, The absolutes have snuck their way back in. Phil wrote in a letter, he said, I snuck the absolutes back in in the 12 and 12 and step 6. And so I'll finish with this, with perfection. There's no way that you and I can achieve perfection. So we'll settle that right up front. However, there's perfect help available. Perfect help available We totally became ready to have God remove the drinking problem And as he says in step 6 and the 12 and 12 We were granted a perfect release So we already know perfection on a case-by-case basis is available so the only thing stand what is perfection total unity with god that that's we're talking about with perfection the only things standing between me and perfection is my resistance to it isn't that funny i don't want it There would be no role for me. I would be a servant, end of story. My business card, Sandy Beach, servant. Look at yours, president of the pension company, servant, what the hell is that? I want to be something and it's the wanting to be, what do I want to keep i want to keep the world i created and i don't want to have it completely eliminated and only live in god's world and so that's our choice but we can't say it can't be done once we understand step six we can no longer say i can't possibly get to that level Anyone could get to that level if they were willing to let go. And I'll close with this. About five years ago, I started thinking about the Dalai Lama and other awakened people that I've listened to. And all of a sudden, my little brain said, why don't you become like the Dalais Lama? Do you want to imagine the backlash I got from myself? Who the hell do you think you are? It was a blah, blah, bla. You can't do that. Who do you Think you are anyone in this room could become the Dalai Lama There's nothing different about an awakened person than us We just choose not to do it We say it can't be done. We go, Chuck, you're wrong. There's a lot more problems than being separated. I don't think so. And so I said to myself, why don't you try to do that? And I don' t know if I ever get there. But things have changed more in the last three or four years than the other 39. that's all i'll tell you why i just said hey go for it what did i do i moved seeking to the absolute top of the list it's my favorite thing to do i can hardly wait to get another new idea and to just look at this oh yeah maybe i can get this it's the most exciting thing that i have ever run into gets done but this is the top this is the top of the list and I'm suggesting that some of you here are close to making that decision it would be the biggest favor you could ever do for yourself is to take awakening and move it up to the to the top of your list remember when you took up running and you became obsessed with I'm going to run, run, and run forever. Then you go golf, and I golf, golf, golf, take seeking and put it up at that level and see what happens. Okay, we're at the end of the time and we don't wrap it up with anything other than see you at dinner. And thanks for your attention. I'll see you back here later. Oh, and the papers, Amy has the papers.