Steps 10 and 12 – Part 5 – Mark – 2001

inventory is not about a victim, although every drunk I've ever met, male and female. Every drunk I have ever met, regardless of gender, I'll have you do a dual role. She was doing pretty good with this. Both the daughter and the victim. See, what does a victim need to be to exist? Needs to be victimized. And let me tell you my experience with that stage character. If you don't get rid of that stage character, you're going to continue to go through life making sure that stage character stays in place. And that stage character has a huge payoff. See? So let's hear what the victim said when he left. I'm alone. How could you do that? I'm nothing. I'm hollow. I'm dead. I might as well sit in my bed. I might as well sit in my bed and never leave the house again. See? See? You follow me? Yeah, I did so much. Give me a couple other things in the second column. For the same person? Yeah. We got some inventory here. See, here's the deal. I could take any one of you that's ever had a relationship. I could take any woman and any man and have you sitting in this chair. We'd be doing the same stuff. Right? The names and faces. What I'm trying to make you see of the tragedy of the ego. You see? This is not about love. That pain that she's feeling and she's crying right now, that's not about love. That's about an addictive, needy, clinging ego that gets its definition of who I am from this, quote, relationship. That's not about love. You see the difference? Right? Give me some more second column. I'm talking to the mic. I resent that he talked down to me and didn't appreciate my mind and my ideas. Okay. Did you hear that? So he's talking down to her and he doesn't appreciate her ideas, right? So, victim, tell me, how do you feel about that? I listen to him all the time. He never, ever, ever listened to me. I tried. What's the wife's reaction to this? I'm separate from you, if you think different. Okay. Good. How about the spiritual woman? How spiritual am I? Here's what she would say if she's real spiritual. Well, he's just spiritually sick and I understand that. And what would Zena be saying about now? You think you're so perfect. Look at yourself. You know, look in the mirror. Right. You know, you gained 20 pounds since we've been married. That's right. That's right. I was drunk. I was drunk when I married you and now I'm sober. I don't know why I married you in the first place. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go, girl. Go, girl. Right? See, and this is why we shoot ourselves in the head, not the foot. This is going on all day long behind, I'm going to leave you. All day long, she's shifted into one state or another. All day long, day in and day out. I mean, can you imagine? The spiritual woman gets up in the morning and she wants to do prayer and meditation because that's what she does. And the victim jumps in and says, no. You know, so then she calls her mother and the daughter steps in. Right. And then the wife's going to meetings and talking about he's leaving and he's doing this. And then every now and then Zena rears up and said, we're going to kill you. He's going to regret that. I mean, he, you know, somewhere in Zena says things like, he's tasted the waters of the Nile. Nothing else will ever quench that SOB's thirst. You know, you see. And, and then pretty soon the business woman is saying, this is great. That guy was a horrible money manager. Anyhow, you follow? And she goes in and out of this all day long, all day long in and out and in and out. And every single one of these will literally bring about another emotional response in her. You're up and down. I remember I cannot control my emotional nature. Gee. I wonder why. See, and here's what's cute. Let's go back to when they got married. Can you imagine what it looked like the first night they went to bed? There were 50 different characters in that bed. What are the odds? See, here's another piece. I could have brought up a sex goddess, right? And then the man, you got Romeo. I can assure you the wife's agenda and the sex goddess's agenda are completely different. You follow me? See the wife. The wife has never, ever committed adultery on her husband, but the sex goddess wouldn't admit it because they got different agendas. You understand what I'm saying? And when this husband comes home and says, I'm leaving, he basically is saying to every one of these, you no longer exist. If your sense of self is derived externally. You follow? This is, again, this is the purpose of inventory to identify this. Her third column is going to come from all these different characters. You follow? Give me a couple more in the second column. How long ago did this happen? What's today's date? Today's the 20... 28 days ago. 28 days ago. Okay. See, and the pain is real. Pain is real. I've almost died behind this stuff. I mean that. Couldn't sleep, couldn't... Maybe you can relate to this. It's one of the best diets I've ever experienced. Yeah, my pants fit great. You know, here. People are telling. You're looking great. You want to die inside, right? You know? See, and of course, if you're a macho man like me and Dave, it's cool for her to sit up here and cry. But I'm going to meetings trying to be this Rambo. Yeah, you know, it's just, it's not good. It's not good. You see, I'm conflicted. I got conflict going on. You know, see, give me some more second column. Well, biggie is I'm, I'm really angry that he didn't try to work on it. Try to work it out. Okay. You know, I'm okay. I did. I wanted to. Right. He didn't want to even try. Okay. So again, you see what we're putting down in the second column. He didn't want to work on it. He didn't. He didn't want to try. Right. So you develop the third column, self-esteem. I'll take the last piece. I'm going to show you how I write inventory. I wanted to work on it and he wouldn't try. Now, I'll tell you a little trap in inventory about third column because she obviously, is going through some pain behind this and emotion and crying and I, I've, I've fallen into this when I'm in that state, I write my third column from a position of low self-esteem and victim. I felt bad because he didn't want to work on it, but I want to tell you something about resentments. I have a resentment because I'm playing God and in my act of playing God, it didn't go the way I want and God doesn't have any low, low self-esteem. So what's really going on in her self-esteem. Here's what's going on. I like to use the words. I am, I am the wife. I'm willing to work on this. She's going to sit in judgment on him in the second column. Remember he didn't want to work on it. She did see I'm willing to stay in the marriage and work on it. Boom. You follow me? That's who the self-esteem is. Two sides to it. That's one. There's probably another one is I've made so many mistakes that I don't deserve to be in this marriage anymore. Probably both sides. Did you have both experience? Yeah, pretty much. Okay. Pride. Pride is how others see me. No one should see a man leave me. I leave men. No one should see a man leave me. You follow me? Ambitioned. Tell me what you want. And I want you to touch it. I want you to touch all of it. I mean, tell us what you want. I mean, in one word. What I want is joy. Okay. How I get it. That's another story. What do you want from him? From him? Unconditional love. Okay. Unconditional love. Did you hear that? She wants unconditional love. Ambition. What do I want? I want unconditional love. Security. What do you need to be okay? To be okay, really, I need to be okay. I need to be okay. I need to be okay. I need to be okay. I need to be okay. I need to unconditionally love myself because that's always killing me. I understand that. That's a moral and philosophical conviction, but that ain't what you're feeling right now. I want you to touch why you're sitting here crying in so much pain. What has your mind been telling you you need to be okay? You need him. You need him. I need someone like him. I need to be okay. Yes sir. I'm going to carry it a step further. I need a man to be okay. To be. To be okay. She has that belief system and place, where do you think all of her pain is coming from. You see, all my troubles are my own making. She has a belief system that she needs a man to be okay. So here's what it means. If she doesn't have a man in her life who's loving her unconditionally, unconditionally. She is never okay. That's how she goes through her life. Purpose of inventory is look at these insane belief systems that you are up against. Security. What did I need to be okay? I needed a man to be okay. You understand? See how that lays out? You see what she's up against? You see why we drink over this? Steps four through eight are designed to challenge all of these insane belief systems you have. And if you're not writing inventory like this, you can't see what those are. You follow? Sex relations. Deep-seated beliefs about men and women. What are some of your deep-seated beliefs? Well, wait a minute. Let's ask her committee their deep-seated beliefs. What are some of your beliefs about men? Victim? Am I a victim now? They take advantage of me all the time. They take, take, take. I give, give, give. They never, ever, ever. They never stay. Ladies, can't you feel that? Huh? Can't you feel that? Okay. Now, you're the wife. What are your deep-seated beliefs about men? To be in a loving relationship. Always be there for me. How about the spiritual women? I'm going to learn how to take care of myself so that I don't need a man in my life. That when I, when it happens, it's because I want it to happen. Okay. How about the spiritual women? I'm going to learn how to take care of myself so that I don't need a man in my life. How does Xena feel about men? Oh, yeah. I can do a lot better than you because you were sucked in bed. Yeah. And I suspect the money person feels the same way. Do you see what she's up against with this one piece of inventory? Minute by minute, day by day. Let me tell you something. She shifts in and out of these stage characters. They don't know. They don't know each other exists. Can you imagine? Have you ever had this happen? It's 5 a.m. in the morning and they wake you up. And they call a meeting. And they start talking. I had a lady say to me, meditation is just so hard in my mind. And they don't have a group leader when they start talking. They just, we want to talk to you, you know. And it goes on. And you shift in all day long. See, all day long. She gets up in the morning. She shifts in and out of these different characters and states of being all day long. And she has different emotes. One minute she wants to kill him, get an Uzi, blow him away. The next minute, the spiritual woman says, God bless you, go in peace. The next, the victim. I mean, it's just endless, right? Xena's in the middle of it all saying, oh, screw it. There's a 2 billion men out there. Who cares about him, you know? And she wonders why she's going crazy and feeling all this pain and feeling all this confusion. Feeling restless, irritable, discontent. Having trouble in personal relationships. You see why in AA they say in your first year to stay out of relationships, look what you're bringing in. Now couple this with a lot of unfinished amends. You see? You know, and again, imagine boy meets girl in AA. And just take that area of your life. See, you've got, what are the odds of the sex goddess and lover boy meeting at the same time in the bedroom? Non-existent. Non-existent, right? Lover boy is out, well, let's say one night, let's say Miss AA. She's out working with another woman. Doing spiritual work for God. See? And let's say that her husband's at home. And the lover boy is anxious. See? So she walks in the door. And she's just this little ray of light. And he's a ray of sexual energy. We're going to have a problem. You follow me? We're going to have a problem. What is the purpose of inventory? To be entirely rid of self. All these false states of being. To go through life, taking your being into your doing, but you're not your doing. You're not attached to this. You understand? I'm in the world to play the role that God has assigned, but I am not the role. You see the difference? You move. You flow. See? Anybody have any questions on this? You get a chance. You see what you're up against off one little piece of inventory here. See? This is very, very real. Now, here's how I write inventory that makes it easy. The first thing I like to do when I get to my third column is I like to ask myself this question. What stage characters are fighting for their life in this resentment? Well, the little wifey poop. The sex goddess. Probably income. The daughter, because mommy ain't going to be happy with this news. Right? And after all, what's the daughter need to be? I have to please my mother. I have to be the perfect daughter. You know, marry for, you know, however it lays out. And then I begin to write my third column. My third column is where I'm playing God. See? You get, you understand? You see how this lays out? You see what this poor girl has been up against? You see what this cause, you see why we drink. You see the tragedy of the ego behind this. Give him a hand. Thanks. I'm going to, I'm going to have Dave do one. And then we'll take a break and, oh, okay. We're out of time. We got to eat lunch now because dinner's going to be here at five. And if we don't eat until two, then you're not going to be hungry at five. We got lots of food to eat. So, here's the deal. You get an hour to eat lunch. And then we're going to come back. And we're going to jump back into theater. I do theater a little bit different than Mark. And I'll be talking about the same characters, but from a different perspective. If you want an opportunity to sit up in the hot seat, write some inventory over lunch. Bring me something. I don't care what it is. Any, as long as you're angry, we can work with it. And, and I'll show it to you from a different angle. And, and for the, for the big book lawyers, I will take you through. And I will teach you how to do this because this is what I do with, when I write, work with inventory with a new guy, particularly if he's very new, he only writes column one and two. He writes column one and two, and then he hands me the form. And then I talk about which area has been effective. And then I take him through a little mini theater of the lie so that he can see it, so he can experience it. Because it's really important to be able to identify those characters. That's your life. Remember the, the, the statement in, in, in 1011, it says we need to watch? Yeah. What are we watching for? Selfish, just stunning, so sick and afraid, right? Well, how does that express itself? The hamster on the wheel, the voices that come into our head. If you don't know what voices are there, you don't see the chatter of the thousand monkeys. You can't say, whoa, I'm off the beam because they're talking to you. You need to be able to recognize and say, Hey, wait a minute. That's Rambo. I know Rambo. If I see Rambo and boom, now you, now you've got an opportunity to stop, stop the process before you create the harm and have to go make amends for it. All right. So, uh, everybody go. We'll eat lunch and be back here at one o'clock. Ready to rock the unsung heroes of this weekend are the fellowship of the, the spirit committee, the guys that put this thing together. So let's all give them a round of applause. If you guys get an opportunity this weekend, uh, somewhere along the line, the people that were sitting back at that desk over there, were. The I, the ID tags and the, and the handouts that that's primarily the fellowship of the spirit committee, the people like, uh, Glenn and, and, uh, the, the vendors that sell stuff, they're busy while we're doing this weekend. So we're in here having a spiritual experience and oftentimes they're getting our lunch set up. They're walking in and out. So they don't get to hear the whole message. They're probably going to get the experience when they go back and listen to the tapes. Uh, that's selfless service. They're doing a, a, a deal for us. And so one of the things I try to do is I always try to go up and thank people when they're doing that. You know, my sponsor raised me that way, if you will, that whether it was a good message from the podium or a bad message from the podium, they gave me a gift. They came to give something to me. So I go up and I thank him, thank him for being there. So if you get an opportunity this weekend, uh, it would, I would highly suggest it when you do it, look them in the eye, look and see if you can see the spark, look to see if you can see the mirror and see if you can see the window into there. And, and they'll feel the presence. It doesn't matter what you say to them, they'll get the message that what they're doing meant something to you because you're getting something. It's a wonderful deal. Anyway, let's see if I can find some humor here. You know, everybody always says that inventory is fun, so we gotta, we gotta find some fun. Um, you know, there's the people that don't think you can have fun with inventory. Uh, how much, how much have we been laughing? I mean that. Last session that Mark did was, was hilarious. And what are we laughing at? We're not laughing at the event. We're laughing at, at ourselves because we all have those characters in our own head, you know? So let's get back in the state of humor. And, and, uh, to me, that's one of the way God's expresses himself. You know, we'll go back to that two year old kid, right? What else does watching two year old children do for you? Not only are they unconditional love and not only are they excited and joyful about everything, because everything is a new experience. When they find something that. Touches them and they get a reflection of love back. What's their reaction? Laughter. They laugh. It's ultimate joy. So when we're laughing, we're happy people in the big book tells us that we should be laughing. It's one of our principles of instruction. We should be having fun. That's what this deal is about. If you got sober, not to have fun, what are you sober for? You know, go out and help God and have an absolute blast when you're doing it. If I was up here being miserable, I'd be doing the wrong damn thing. I should be doing something else, but I'm up here having fun. Even. Even when we're dealing with painful subjects that hurt at the core. It's still fun. Because I'm facing and getting rid of that. That's what the four steps all about. So let's see. Number 21. You wake up in the bedroom and your underwear is in the bathroom and you fell asleep clothed. 22. The whole bar says hi when you come in. 23. Every night you're beginning to find your roommate's cat more and more attractive. Is that good for four-step or what? 24. Hi, Ossifer. I'm not under the affluence of alcohol. 25. I'm not drunk. You're just sober. 26. Roseanne looks good. 27. You don't realize you're your wife unless seen through the bottom of a glass. 28. That damned pink elephant followed me home again. Number 29. You have a reserved parking space at the liquor store. For those of you that have parking space gods, but I'm not going to go there. I don't judge. And 30. I'm as jober as a snudge. Theater of the lie. It's a lot of fun. And the thing to remember is it's deadly earnest. We make fun out of it. It's a wonderful tool. If you treat it as a tool. One of the warnings that I had meant to give to you, and I'm sorry it's too late now. I can't take the bullet out of the barrel. I normally start off step work with anybody I talk to about God's grace. And God's grace lasts only as long as ignorance. God's grace lasts only as long as ignorance. What does that mean? That means that you walked in here fat, dumb, and happy. You weren't thinking of what we were going to do to you. And we've reached in there and we've touched something. And once we touch that. The bullet's out of the barrel. You can't get it back. You can't go back to the ignorance. Why does AA ruin your drinking? Whether you knew you were alcoholic or not and you stumble into an AA meeting and they say, hey, by the way, you know, you're one of us. And you kind of go, oh, wow. You can't go back into the bar because we've destroyed your delusion. Now, you can go back in the bar, but you're not going to go back and you're happy. All right? The fun you had, the delusion of the fun you were having when you were drinking, it's gone forever. Same deal with this. We can show you truth up here and you'll see your truth. You'll recognize it. You'll nod your head and you'll say, yeah, that's me. And if you try to say, oh, but I don't want to do that now. I don't want to do that inventory. Guess what? We've stuck something inside you that's going to rot and it's going to fester and it's going to intensify your level of pain. So the easier, softer way in AA is the 12 steps. That is the easier, softer way. There is no easier, softer way that I know of. That's the easier, softer way. The hard way is trying to self-will and do it on your own. And everybody's experienced that. Everybody's experienced that. They've experienced that themselves. It's in this room if you're alcoholic. So what's the goal here? The goal is to face and get rid of it. I like to make an analogy of inventory of a sink, a drain, right? The big book tells us that God resides deep down within each and every one of us, but we're blocked. We're blocked off from the sunlight of the spirit. So we need to get what's blocking us. And in the drain is this big hairball called resentment, you know? So what do we do? We reach in there, grab the hairball, we face it, and we get rid of it, chuck it in the trash. It's gone. It's out of there. Then the trap is all full of grease. That's our fear. So we go in there and get rid of the fear. And the last thing that's blocking up our drain is the guilt of the harms we've done to others. And primarily the people that we hurt the most are the people that are closest to us, and so that's why we do sexual harms. But it's really a harms done to others inventory. Because what if there's somebody that I'm not angry about, I'm not afraid of them, and I didn't have sex with them, but I stole $1,000 from them, right? Where do they go? Well, they're not on the three inventories in the big book. That's a guess. I don't have to deal anything with that, you know? My own personal experience. I got really resentful. Can you imagine that, an alcoholic resentful? I got really resentful at my bank because they were, I don't remember, it's so important I don't even remember what they did to me, but they did something that was absolutely atrocious. So I'm going to show them, right? I storm into the bank and I said, I want all my money and I want it now. She's like, yes, sir. Okay. What's your account? And I give her the information. She says, well, I'll cut you a bank check. And I said, bank check? Here comes the ego, even more. Your bank checks aren't any good. I want cash, right? So she counts out the cash. Actually, it's a guy. He counts out the cash, all right? So he hands me the cash. And so I storm down to the bank that's down on the corner and give him the cash and fill out the deposit slip. And the guy says, well, what do you want to do with this extra $1,000? It's not on the deposit slip. And I said, oh, just give that to me. Boom, put it in my pocket. And I'm doing this sober, by the way. But it was in that dark period where I hadn't had my 10-year crash. All right? By the time my intuition comes to me that I've done something seriously wrong here and my life is in jeopardy because I'm thinking about drinking over this issue that I just ripped up somebody for $1,000, I go back to the bank, right? Now, would that fall under a resentment inventory? Only if I saw the anger at the bank. But if I haven't done that inventory, I wouldn't see that I stole $1,000 and that was my harm. I'm not afraid of that, of the bank, because I'm angry at the bank. I still wouldn't catch it on a fear inventory. And I didn't have sex with the guy, so it wouldn't come up on the sex inventory. What do I do with it? By the time I realize it, I go back to the bank. The guy that made the mistake and gave me the $1,000, guess what? He got terminated. Right? I panic. I bail out. Now, I'm ready to go make amends to this guy, but the manager tells me, this guy's fired, what's the issue? And needless to say, I hadn't written any inventory on it. It had caught me completely off guard. So I take off. And it was in the 80s when everything was shifting very quickly. And by the time I had done an inventory and had my spiritual awakening and was ready to go face this deal, the bank had changed hands two or three times. So now I'm going back into the bank to give them their $1,000 back. And the guy's saying, I can't. That's the bank before the bank before the bank. What do you want to, you know, give it to charity. What do you want me to do with it? I started doing these workshops as a way of making amends to put that $1,000 of God's money back out in the universe. Because I do them at a loss. So what's my point? My point is, there are things, there are harms that you'll do to others that won't fit into the, it's not a perfect system. We start with the basis of what's in the big book, and we take it to the next level. We always start with the three inventories of the big book, and you can always add more to it. But don't ever take anything away. Because then your ego will use it against you. Theater of the Lie isn't written in the big book. But it's a wonderful adaptation. It's a wonderful adaptation to what's in the big book. It takes you to the next level. It gives you another tool to work with. So what does that tool really get for you? The whole purpose of it, remember, is to face and get rid of. It's not to face it so you can learn how to deal with it and so you can play with Xena and Rambo and deal with these characters. That'll kill you, and your ego will do that to you. My ego, that's one of the biggest things that came out of this inventory with Mark for me. I recognize, I can do Theater of the Lie. I understand all these characters. So I thought I knew. I knew what to do with them once I saw them. And my ego turned it around and used it against me. And I saw in this inventory how blind I had been. My ego said, well, if you know this, this, this, and this, maybe he doesn't know this. So it did that. And I'm sitting out here saying, I know all these characters. I'm fine. If I see any of them, I know what I'll do. And meanwhile, I get bushwhacked from behind. So the whole point I'm trying to make to you is Theater of the Lie is fun. Learn the characters. But don't get confident in the fact that this is going to protect you for everything, because it's not. We're using this as a tool. It's just another tool that's in our toolbox, our spiritual toolbox. We're going to learn how to face and be rid of. One of the things I like to do with theater is to describe the characters because the important thing is to recognize the characters. And each person has different characters. Name your characters. Understand your characters. Because that's going to be the first. Remember the word watch? We're supposed to be watching in step 10 for selfishness, dishonesty, self-seeking, and fear. How does that come out? It comes out in our day as the hamster gets on the wheel. We've recognized all of a sudden we're restless and irritable, but we can't quite put our finger on it. If we can all of a sudden zero in on a character and say, who's been talking to me for the last 10 seconds? Boom. I know who that is. That's the banker, or that's the husband, or that's the child. Now I got something. If I'm seeing that character, one of the characters from the Theater of the Lie, by definition, I must be in column three. Ooh, there's some more power. All right. If I'm in column three, that must mean that there's column four coming, and column four, question four, is I must be afraid. So I don't have to go through the entire inventory process right there on the spot. If I'm current with my current characters that tend to affect me, as soon as I recognize, I can stop, slam on the brakes, pause. That's what the big book says, right? Pause and say, okay, just by definition that I'm seeing one of my characters, I must be afraid. If I've done a good fear inventory, when I'll talk about it later, you'll end up with something called your hit parade. That's what I carry that card in my wallet. If I see one of my characters today, I can slam on the brakes, I reach in my pocket, and I pull out my little fear card there. It's got my hit parade of fears. The fears that have been on every single inventory I've ever written are the same basic fears. Figure out which one of those it is, give it to God, and go right to page 68. Give the fear to God. What does God want me to be? Boom. God, help me to be this right now. And now I'm back on the spiritual beam. I didn't have to get all out of whack, off the beam, go through column three, get home, do my evening in review, see it, write out a four-column inventory, call somebody up, fifth step it, to end up in the exact same place. Hey, I got a fear, and do the fear tool. Give it to God. You can cut right to the chase. And I call that a fear tool. It's a wonderful deal. The ultimate goal we're looking for here is fear. What is the fear? We can't get there unless we understand the characters. Once you understand the characters, then you know what to watch for. And you get very careful. And some of the characters, some of the characters are subtle. And so what I'm going to do is talk about characters that Mark didn't go into in too detail. And there's some characters that came out of this inventory that I'd never seen before. And they changed my life, because now I know who to look for. And we always think of resentment in terms of anger. The root word of resentment is resentare, right? It means to re-feel. Well, I don't always re-feel anger. I can re-feel pleasure. You know, the first time you ever took a drink or the first time you ever hit on a pipe and you got that high, what were we doing? We were chasing that exact same experience for the rest of our drinking career. We were trying to have that resentment, that resentare, but it wasn't out of anger. We were looking for that high that we never got back to. Right? Same thing can happen in sobriety. I can go through and say, I'm not resentful, yet I keep experiencing an event that happened five years ago or 10 years ago or 15 years ago. You know? Oftentimes, you see this with grief. Somebody will have a very close loved one that died and they'll go through the grieving period and they'll think, I'm through that. And then three years later, all of a sudden, the memory of their dead father or something will come to them and they go right back into that grief that they thought they had worked their way through. You look at them and you say, you know, you're resentful. And they'll go, I'm not resentful. Now they are because now you said something to them. Now they're resentful at you for saying it to them. They don't realize the fact that they were re-feeling the grief from three years ago. And look what their ego has done for them. Right? Ego has pulled them out of this moment. And this moment is the only thing that exists. All right? It's kind of an interesting concept. And I don't know how to explain it to you any better than I'll do a theater and then I'll come back in and we'll talk about where the ego. Because it's not only important to understand who the characters are. It's important to know where the ego took you. Because by definition, you had to be out of the present moment. So you need to know, did the ego drag me into the past? Or did it drag me into the future? And I'll show you how to deal with that and figure it out. So let's get the game underway. I need somebody that's got a resentment and it's been willing to bring up columns one and two and then we'll have some fun with it. Debbie, what you got? Come on up. Give her a hand. That's not on. Is it? Okay. They'll turn it on. Have a seat. Okay. Give me, who's column one? I probably been doing too much thinking about this because it's probably God. But I... Go ahead. Bring it on. Column one is God? Yeah. Okay. What's column two? That he took my mother and my whole family fell apart and I wasn't there to prevent it. So you're upset. That your mother died? I'm upset. Yes, I'm upset that my mother died. It's funny that you mentioned about thought. I thought I was done with this. Right. Because my mom died about five years ago and I did work on this and I thought I was done with it but it's coming up again. Okay. So is it truly God that you're upset or is it your mother for dying on you? I don't know. Well, which do you think it is? Okay. From what we've talked about this whole weekend, what's your conception of God now? Would God take her mother? So could you be angry at God? Yes, it's possible to be angry at God but from your own experience, is that a delusion or not? Probably. Now, your mother, she died. There's some definite attachments there and I'm going to start with your mother and if you don't get the answers you're looking for, we can go back to God and we'll put God in column one. But let's start with your mother. Here is column one. In column two, she died. So mom dies. What's the first character that shows up in your head? Right? From Mark. If Mark was going to pull somebody out of the crowd, who would he have pulled up first? What is a... We've got to have a daughter. All right? Why don't you be the daughter? Just stand up. We don't have to move anyplace. So we've got a daughter. All right? No, she's not a Xena anymore. She's a daughter. Okay? I'll teach you to sit in the front. We have this daughter. All right? At first, the daughter is grief-stricken. Right? She says, Oh, my God. Mom's gone forever. Right? The first thing she's going to do is panic and say, Woe is me. I have lost something. So just about as quick as the daughter shows up, you end up with a victim. Because now her mother died on her. Right? So we need a victim. Why don't you be the victim? Okay? So you've got the mother and you've got the daughter. All right? Now, the whole concept is that she died on me. So in order for her to say that, she had to have a judgment. Right? So we need to have a judge. Michael, why don't you be the judge? All right? So the judge is judging the situation. Now, all of a sudden, you're the center of the universe and your mother has just died on you, daughter. The victim says, Yeah, she died on me. So let's take it to the judge to confirm this. Now, your ego is trying to build a delusion that this is okay to justify the feelings that you're feeling so that your behavior is okay for you to act out the way your ego wants you to act out. All right? Does that make sense? Okay. So you go to the judge. Well, the judge says, I need a jury of your peers. So we've got a judge and a jury. All right? And you're going to weigh the evidence. Did she die on you? Well, what are you upset about? Well, there's unfinished business here. And, you know, you start bouncing it back and forth. Does that make sense? That you're going to... It's not just... You don't just say, Okay, I'm judging my mother. You're not conscious of the judgment. But a verdict has to come in. Whether it's the judge or the jury, you get a verdict that comes in and she's guilty. Mom is guilty of harming me. And the victim says, Oh, yeah, absolutely. No question. All right? So now the victim is there. So what do they do? They sign an executioner. All right? You're going to try to get even at your mother. There's this anger in there and you want to strike out with all your being because you're in this such emotional pain. All right? So you have an executioner. If the mother was still alive, let's say there's a different resentment and the mother had done something to her that she ended up with a daughter and a victim and a judge and she judges the situation. Then the executioner is going to start figuring out a penalty. All right? He's going to weigh a penalty and say, This is the proper penalty to get even with mom for doing what she did. All right? So the executioner will try to do that. If it's too stiff a penalty and you're going to get caught in this deal, let's say you say, Well, the penalty is death. You know, you want to kill your mom. You can't kill your mom because you know you're going to go to jail. So then you hire a hitman and you're going to make her die a living death and you're going to take that and drag it out over a long period of time. You're going to lie and wait. The hitman will lie and wait and figure out a way to make her suffer. All right? But there's a problem here. There's a disconnect. Mom is dead. How am I going to make her suffer? Well, I'm going to make her memory suffer. My good thoughts of her, they're gone. And I'm just going to focus on every bad thing she's ever done to me with the hope that it's going to get to her on the other side of the spirit world. Does that make sense? All right? So we've got a judge. We've got a jury. We've got an executioner. We've got the victim. We've got the hitman. All right? There's another character and this is the character that came to me full force. It changed my life. You guys can go ahead and sit down. This is a really important thing for me. There's a banker. There's two kinds of bankers. I always knew there was a banker. If there's a financial thing, there's a guy with a little green brim on his hat, in my mind, he shows up and he's the guy and he says, wait a minute, what's in the bank account? And he gets together with the accountant and they do a quick tally and say, you don't have money for this. And so then they go to the judge with that and say, you don't have the money. And the accountant and the financial banker will convict you with that in the theater. But there's also an emotional banker. There's another guy there. And here's the key. Anytime anybody does something to us, there's a wrong, we sign out an IOU. Mom hurt me, so there's an IOU. She owes me this for this harm. Whatever the judge and the jury have determined the cost of her verdict is, that's the penalty. And guess what? The longer it takes her to pay, there's interest. That's why this stuff eats us alive and it grows and it grows and it grows and it grows. And it eats us from the inside out. Emmett Fox talks in a wonderful thing. He talks about a prison. It takes two to have a prison. It takes the prisoner and it takes the guard. Inside each and every one of us is this emotional banker. And the only way for her to get free of this deal is to cancel the IOU for her mother. But she doesn't even know she's written an IOU. And the longer this thing sits there, what she expressed, what she thought she got rid of it, she did. She thought she got rid of what the original value was. What she forgot about was the interest. What's come back up is this emotional interest that she hasn't been accumulating over time because she really didn't forgive. She thought she forgave. All right? The only way she can get out of jail is if she goes and lets her mother out of jail because she's the jailer. She's in emotional prison. She's got something to protect. It's these IOUs. If we're going to have true forgiveness, we have to do that with everybody that we've ever harmed or that has ever harmed us. Every one of the IOUs. If you want your IOUs to get canceled, you've got to cancel everybody else's IOU. If you don't understand the second step proposition, you're absolutely paralyzed from being able to do that because God isn't everything. God's everything except I want to keep this IOU over here. Guess what's going to kill you? What we haven't talked about is all of this stuff goes right back to drinking. Does this have something to do with whether you're going to drink again? Absolutely. There's no question. It has something to do with whether you're going to drink again. The point is for her is what is she afraid of? The emotional banker is afraid to let mom's IOU go because then she has to forgive the fact that mom died. She doesn't want to forgive the fact that mom died because she's got unfinished business with mom. She wants that. She wants something from her mother and now her mother's dead. So what is she going to do? Our problems are of her own making, right? The only way for her to get free is for her to go and let her mother out of that prison. Cancel those debts. The only way for her to do that is to figure out what is she afraid of? She's afraid of not getting whatever it is that she wanted from her mother. And that's already happened. She can't get it back. It's a done deal. As long as she still has that expectation, she stays in prison. Once she gets rid of that expectation, guess what? There's no more harm. When there's no more harm, guess who shows up on the scene? The little two-year-old. All she did was change. Her mom changed. Is her mother gone? I don't believe so. If she closes her mind and smells the right smells, guess what she smells and thinks of? Her mom. Her mom is with her in her heart. She is her mother. Part of her came from her mother. How can you separate that? Her mother didn't go anywhere. Her mother's right there. All she's choosing to focus on is the IOU that mom owns. She knows me when she's feeling this deal. Does that make sense? All right? It's a tough one to come straight out of the barrel with when we come back from lunch. You know? It's kind of a downer, but it's a really important one. I want to add something. Go back to the dais, playing God. She's up in the dais. If her arrangements would only stay put, if her mother would only die when she decrees, the show would be great. Everybody, including herself, her mother, and everyone. Do you see the, the depth of our selfishness? Any of you that's ever had anyone that was close to you die, look at the depth of the selfishness, how we play God. You follow? I know better than God when my mother should die. You follow? If my arrangements would only stay put, if only mom would die when I say so. And you've got to touch this part in you. Get away from the fact that if we have a mother and dies and it'll produce that. Understand the brutality of the selfishness. You understand what I just said? I want her alive and I got a whole list of selfish reasons. And I mask it in the mask of love, right? Five years later and she is still pissed off because the show didn't go the way she wanted and it didn't turn out. She, she made a statement. The family fell apart. Maybe it was supposed to fall apart. I'm not God. I don't know. I don't know how long I'm supposed to live or do you follow me? But she's up on the stage and you see how dug in she is to this. If the show, if only mom would die when I think, see drunks, when someone dies, we don't go into grieving for the loss of them. I hate to tell you this. We're grieving for a whole nother reason. And it's not love. There's a concept that we need to understand. Does anybody in this room get upset when a baby's born? You know? Most of us don't, we don't get this reaction of, oh my God, a child was born. Same yardstick, the exact same yardstick. Oh my God, he just died. It's a natural progression of life and we're digging our heels and going, oh, here it comes. Here it comes. It's part of this experience. And what are we doing? We're resisting change. The little two year old child, pure, unconditional love. Guess what? They're in a fray to death. Every book you ever read about it, children are not, they're not afraid of death. They think they're invincible because they have nothing to fear their unconditional love and they accept change. They're not resisting change. Death is just a part of the progression of life. The important thing is while you're on this physical journey, you're a spiritual being on a physical journey. Enjoy the heck out of this physical journey. Cause when this is done, you're back in what? What are you left with? The spiritual. All right. Here's a concept for things that make up a human being. All right. Human shell, right? There's my human body. This, this piece of me, there's my mind ever watch yourself think for me, it happens when I was in school doing math problems, you know, I'd see myself doing a math problem that I could do last week. And all of a sudden this week, I can't do the same math problem. And the voices start in my head. Well, you know how to do this. You did it last week. Why can't you remember what you did last week? And the hamster gets on the wheel, but I'm watching myself think, and I'm judging myself as I'm thinking, well, if there's something in my head, they can watch my mind working. It can't be part of my mind. Can it, there's a third piece. My, I am my physical body. I am my mind, but I'm also my ego because it's judging, right? Hamster on the wheel, third column theater, the lie stuff, right? So I got this third piece. It's my ego. There's a fourth piece, right? I don't know what your beliefs are, but I personally believe that my spirit is going to be everlasting. That's my own personal belief. And if that's contracts contradicts with what yours is. You know, God bless you, whatever you, whatever you believe in. So does my spirit fear time? No. Time has no meaning to my spirit. What does the program say? It says the only time you can be connected with God is in the now, right? We hear it name meetings all the time. Be in the moment. This is where you connect with God, a conscious contact. I have to be awake in order to be able to connect with God. When is the only time that time doesn't exist? The, this is. Act moment and then it's another moment and then another moment, another moment. But in this moment, while it's occurring, there's no time. Guess what? The only time that spirit exists is in the moment because there's doesn't need time. So it stays where it can. The only time you can connect to God is in the spirit, right? So you have to be in the moment to connect to the spirit, but there's a problem here. Your ego wants to control the mind. So the ego has to do what has to get you out of the moment. So it does it by one of two different. Directions, it drags you with resentment or it drags you with fear, right? Resent Tari refilling. If you sense that you're resentful, where did your ego drag you into the past? If you're fearful, where did your ego drag you into the future? So just if you're having a hard time with the concept of what we're talking about for the theater of the lie, all you have to do is recognize. Am I resentful? Or am I fearful? Now you can see which direction out of this present moment that your ego dragged you and don't judge it. All you have to do is look at it and say, wow, I'm fearful. Look at what my ego did. It dragged me into the future. And guess what? Just by you watching that and recognize it, your mind regained control and you're back in the moment. And now that you're in the moment, you can plug into God. Does that make sense? It's a little bit ethereal and it's not in the big book, but it works. It's been working for me. It's fantastic. Now the theater changes. Now I can see that when I see a character, I can look at the character and say, wow, what started this? What got me on the hamster on the wheel? What triggers a resentment? Column four, question four, right? Fear. The ego has one tool. It has fear to work with. If it can trigger an emotion of anger, it can take you into the past. And if it can't do that, where does it drag you? It just creates another fear and drags you into the future. All right? So if I'm resentful, it's something that's already occurred to me. I have experience with it. If it's something that hasn't occurred yet and I have no experience with it, it'll drag me in with just plain old fear. Drag me fear of the unknown. Take me into the future. Anything to get me out of the moment because the ego has to be in control of the mind. The mind has to be out of the moment. Right? That makes sense. So let's go back to her original deal. Is column one God, do you think, now that we've talked about this? No. Column one is mom. It's a real resentment. She's upset at her mother. Do you think her mother wanted to die? Let's look at column four just real quick. I mean, we're not there yet, but selfish. I don't want my mom to die. Self-seeking. What is she looking for? She's looking to finish the unfinished business she has with her mother. She's looking for control. She's looking for power in the scenario. All right? Where's the dishonesty? She's not in control. She's powerless. You know, her mom didn't want to die. She's saying in her mind, my mom died on me. No, it happened to her mother. Mom just died. That's whatever. That's her mother's ruler ended. That's the deal. She's in the realm of the spirit now. I don't think her mother said today, unless she did she commit suicide? Then her mother didn't choose to die. It happened. It was a deal. It's just part of the deal. God brought her home. All right? So there's a dishonesty. When I write inventory, I always ask myself the question, who am I lying to? First, she's lying to herself to think she's got control over who can live and who can die and when they can die. She's lying to herself to think that she's got power over her mother. She's lying to herself to think that she can make her mother do anything. That she can make her mother come back and make amends to her for dying on her. That it happened to her. And she's lying to God because she took a third step. And God is now the director, right? We're out there doing what he wants. That's a dishonesty. And what is she afraid of? She's afraid of not getting what she wants. She's afraid of being unloved. Right? Right? Right? Right? There's probably some love issues there that she never got with her mother. That she's feeling this emptiness and this empty hole. But what's the inside of our golf ball? Love. What she's looking for is inside of herself. She's looking for her mother's mirror to reflect her own love back at her. Right? The mother's mirror is still there. It's just not in a physical shell anymore. It's in her memories. It's in her smell. It's in the good thoughts that the emotional banker has created. It's in the honor of the person she trabalhar, and the way she creates women's lives. You walk along the beach lying down in the snow, and you see boys and girls and storms. You see, for some people, we're fighting for that money. Sometimes, what we're not all or nothing. We can broadcast it probably guessed. Sometimes, we're just trying to take it. And then you see tomorrow's events to come to us. But all of a sudden, you wake up, and I'm thinking, I see that country ahead of me. And I want that pick. I want it to lift higher. I want it to lift higher. But I tell them that's too much work. I don't want it looking up in keywords again. They have, wait a minute, Does anybody have a love relationship? Yeah, in the back. Now, knowing what you know, we're going to take a look at a... They're alive, right? Okay, we're going to take a look at somebody that's alive, and we're going to go through the characters, because there's something that we need to understand about characters that I haven't talked about. So, who's column one? Soon-to-be ex-wife. Soon-to-be ex-wife. Not yet. She doesn't even have a name anymore. The nameless soon-to-be ex-wife. Can you see what his ego did? If she has a name, then she's got a person, and she's got emotions. But if she's the soon-to-be ex-wife, it's almost like she's already trash. Kick her to the curb. Sorry, man. You're in the hot seat. What's column two? Calling the police on me. Not letting me be myself. Oh, you gave her a lot of power, huh? One of the things that I do when I get to column two, alcoholics love to hide dishonesty under a little teeny kernel of truth. All right? So, classic thing you'll see in column... Column two has to be the truth. And why does it have to be the truth? Because all of column three comes from column two. And all of column four comes from column three. So, if there's a lie in column two, then all of column three is a lie, and all of column four is a lie. All right? It's like the classic... My dad, he beat me. And I'm like, what, did he beat you every minute of every... He's in jail, right? Child abuse? Well, no. It's when he beat me. Well, how often was that? Well, he beat me three times when I was growing up. I'm like, oh. There's a difference here. Or my... Here's another classic one. A guy, and I always use this from the podium. My dad was never there for me. And I sat down with him for about five minutes, and I'm going, what do you mean? Your dad abandoned you as a child? Well, no. He was there. He's always been there. He's been a loving father. And we went, boom, boom. And we're going down to him. You know what it ended up being? Column one, dad. Column two, he's homosexual. He couldn't deal with the fact that his dad was gay. That's what he meant that his dad wasn't there for him. You know? Complete different inventory. If we'd gone with dad was never there for me, all we would have heard was the victim, victim, victim, victim. It would all have been a lie, and it would have been a waste of time. And his ego would have used that to justify the emotional banker who was holding on to this deal and collecting interest. All right? So, column two again. Who do we got? I was angry at her for the way she treated her daughter, well, our stepdaughter. Her daughter, my stepdaughter. Okay. That was about it for now. Okay. Let's start with number one. She called the police on me. True statement, right? She did call the police on me. Why do people call the police on each other? Never mind. I'm getting off track. Anyway. Anyway. So, she called the police on her. Who's the first person that shows up? This is a piece of cake. Rambo. She's, that bitch, I can't believe she did that to me, you know? And Rambo, he's ready to kill. There's no question he's ready to kill. All right? If Rambo kills, guess what? He's going to jail. No question. And he's not coming out of jail. All right? So, what does he do? He runs to the judge. He says, judge, your honor, she's really hurt me this time. So, we got a judge. All right? There's a jury. She's guilty because whatever offense he did, it didn't merit calling the police. I mean, he's done worse and she never called the cops. You know? By the way, what did you do? I said I was going to kill her. Oh! Stop laughing. Inventory's not fun. No dishonesty here, right? Yeah, but I didn't say it like that. Oh! But I didn't. I wouldn't have done it, right? So, your honor, I never would have done it. So, the jury convicts her. She finds, he finds something and he builds the delusion. The ego builds the delusion that she's guilty. So, he goes to the executioner. The executioner says, kill her. You said you're going to do it? Do it! Right? Rambo's standing over there going, yeah, let me, let me, let me. You know? Can't do that, right? We're going to jail. So, in his mind, what are we going to get? We're going to get a hit man. It's going to take his time. It may take you. It may take years. We'll start out by, that's it. That's the last straw. Kick her to the curb. She's out. We're going to make her suffer. Instead of giving her, what's the spiritual man, the A man, what's he supposed to be saying? Go with God, love you, have a nice day. A little conflict, right? Instead, he's going to make her suffer. The hit man is going to drag it out and if it drags it out, she's going to pay physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, any way to reclaim the debt and the interest that the emotional banker's got a hold of, all right? If you go to jail, what happens? You get a job? Yeah. That kind of has a bearing on your job, doesn't it? Yeah. So, it's kind of hard to make a living from jail, all right? Somewhere in the background, there's an employee that shows up there, all right? There's also the husband, you know? Here's an important concept. As alcoholics, when we're in a close personal relationship, and by the way, let me start out by saying, if you come to AA, Alcoholics Anonymous, to learn how to have a relationship in the rooms of AA, you came to the wrong place. It's my own experience. You can hear about how not to have a relationship, but it's very rare that somebody will be honest with you and tell you how to have a positive, healthy relationship in AA. All we hear is, problem, problem, problem, and everybody else cosigns it, because what the theater is alive with everybody. Their characters are jumping up and going down, yeah, my bitch did that to me, too. You're right. That's what goes on. I mean, that's really, and then we start gossiping and backstabbing and scumbagging. That's what goes on. Yeah, it's funny, but here's the deal. In a relationship, there's intimacy, in, to, me, see. We build these walls up. We don't let anybody see inside, and even if we let the wall down enough to let somebody look inside, we're hiding behind us is that little box that I've been talking about this whole weekend, that nobody's going to see what's going on in there. All right? So in this close personal relationship, he let the wall down, all right? So people, when you think about this concept, your theater can either be inside the wall or outside. You guys, most of you, I don't have a close intimate relationship with, so most of you are outside the wall. So if you hurt me, you're going to get a character that's outside the wall. The emotional guy that I'm talking about, the emotional banker, he's inside the wall. That's why he's so deceptive and it's hard to find him, because he's inside the wall. There's another character that's inside the wall, and that's the traitor. All right? He came up on my last inventory, was the traitor, and I finally saw this guy. If somebody's outside the wall and they hurt me, they may have found a chink in the wall to get through, but they were outside the wall. But if I've let the wall down and they come inside and they've got the right to come inside my wall and then they hurt me, then they're a traitor. They're Benedict Arnold. That's it. They're done. That's what she did. He's got this relationship. The wall is going up and down. He thought the wall was up. The wall was actually down. He says, I'm going to kill you. She comes immediately in there. I'm calling the police. Boom. She hits him inside the wall. There's hurt that we can do inside the wall that's painful. There's also something else. I describe it as crushing someone's spirit. If my wife does something to me just by accident, I get angry at her. Yeah, she hurt me. I don't think it was intentional, but if she does something intentional inside the wall with me, she crushes my spirit. That's not something that I can just give up. That may take me a week, two weeks, a month to get over before I start letting that wall come back down and let her back inside my wall. I just put it back up and I try to cement over all the little chinks in the holes. We can intentionally hurt the people we love because we know where the holes are in their armor. When the trader's alive, you better figure out that the trader's alive. This doesn't just happen in close personal relationships. It also happens in business world. Let's say you got somebody that's on your team. You're at equal level within the business world and they turn around and they backstab you. Guess who shows up? The trader. It's even worse if it's this way. If they're a boss and you're their underling and they're kind of coaching you along and they're your mentor, then you find out they backstabbed you. Here comes the trader full force. The trader has the power to kill you very quickly because out comes all the stuff that's in the box. All that harm that you've been holding onto, that you've been submarining, it starts sprouting leaks and if you can't get your hands on the leaks quick enough to hold it down, guess what? You're in deep, deep trouble. You're chewing on the barrel of a gun. You're drinking. I'll show them because there's one character we didn't talk about, King Alcohol. Anytime you're talking about theater, King Alcohol is always in the background going, fuck it, let's go drink. Always worked in the past. Make everybody go away. All the whole characters, let's go. For most of you that are long term sober, there's one character that's keeping that from happening. When I was 10 years sober, I owe my life to one of my characters, Hollywood. Hollywood. Hollywood has to look good. I am not about to go out and drink because what's that going to make me look like? I would never be able to show my face in A again. It's easier to kill myself. Just off yourself. Get into that. Same result. That's Hollywood. There's also the macho man who you can see. He's the guy that doesn't want to ... The macho man came screaming out five minutes into the workshop. He's crawling like a baby up here. Trust me, the macho man and Hollywood got together for about that fast. I had to immediately go and give the prayer to God. What does God want me to be? He wants me to be here. He wants me to be a messenger. All right? You thought you got off light, huh? I forgot about you? All right? We've got these characters inside the wall. What he doesn't see is one of the huge characters that's driving him right now, what's forcing him to say, my soon to be ex-wife. Who's saying that? Macho man. It's not the macho man. Macho man. Right? It's the traitor. It's the traitor. He's been hurt. He's been hurt. His spirit has been crushed. All right? She came to him and said, you know, honey, jeez, I'm really sorry I called the police on you. I really lost my mind. The traitor said, that's it. She's done. She's out of here. There is no forgiveness. Even if she comes and bows before the altar and swears she'll do whatever I want for the rest of her life, she's out. That's the traitor talking. Now their relationship, and I'm not going to judge their relationship, it may be where they're two incompatible people and they need to break up. I have no idea. I would need to hear a lot of fifth step and we'd have to be talking about what God's will is. And looking at sex ideals and relationship ideals and that kind of deal. But right now, this guy is being driven. He's being driven and he has to put her in a little box and push her out and not even look at her because there's so much pain. Because every time he even looks at it, it's an immediate line inside his wall and he's out of control. Because the traitor's doing the talking. Can you see how powerful this one is for him? The same hurt that he's got when he goes in there and says, you know what? I don't want to talk to you. I don't want to talk to you. I don't want to talk to you. I don't want to talk to you. I don't want to talk to you. I don't want to talk to you. I don't want to talk to you. Can you see how powerful this one is for him? The same hurt that he's got when he goes into another relationship. Let's say they get divorced five years from now and he falls in love with you, who's your husband, just left you. Right? And they go through this deal. All right. And they hook up. A boy meets a girl on A campus, right? Mad passionate love. They go through this whole deal. All right. One day he starts to lose his cool, doesn't catch the characters, doesn't do the tools. She calls the police on him, or she even threatens to do anything like that. Guess who comes awake? The traitor, right? You might as well just take her head off and put the ex-wife's head right on her body. Boom. All right? The reality of it is, my experience with doing inventory, you can have 300 resentments, and you know what? The average alcoholic has something between maybe 10 and 15 real resentments. If that guy does the same thing to me that that guy did and that guy did, I'm going to write it down as three separate resentments because it's three separate people, but it's the exact same resentment. And when we start looking at the forms, you'll see that I do inventory differently. I use the big book. We do column one, column two, and then the guy gives me the form. And I use, for a guy that's got a lot of resentments, he's new, I've got to get him some relief. He's in tremendous pain. I've got to get him some relief from that pain, and I'll get him through the steps. Make sense. I'm going to get him some amends, and then I'm going to pump him right back in inventory, and then we can take our time and look at this slowly when his hair's not on fire. You know? I've got to get the flames out. So I take this guy. He writes column one, column two, and then I basically do a little mini theater of the lie for column three. And I check off. I'm talking to him and saying, does this affect your self-esteem, your pocketbook, your ambition? And I lay the resentments along in columns, and then I turn the paper around and show it to him, and he can see that the exact same boxes are checked for all these different people. And then all of a sudden he goes, that's the same resentment, just with different people. And then he's got it. And then we go in and we start talking about column four, and I write out column four. I ask him, where's your selfishness? And we talk about it, and I write it for him. Because a lot of times, you'll be 12-stepping people, and they won't tell you that they can't read and write. And you can't figure out why they're afraid to do their inventory. You know? So it's just a little bit of a different angle, and I don't know how I got off on that tangent, but we'll be talking about that in a little bit. But you guys understand theater. You know, I didn't want to go into it. I wanted to go into it a little bit differently so you guys have some understanding, because it's fun to see the theater lies in the characters, but then our alcoholic egos want to play with it. And we want to say, oh, let's see where I can notice Rambo today. And you see it, your ego's going to kill you if you play with that. We are to face and get rid of this stuff. I'm trying to give you some understanding of how you can be hurt and what levels you can be hurt, whether they're inside the wall, whether they're outside the wall. Business people versus people that you're not really that close to. If you have that kind of understanding, the whole goal of this whole deal is watching. If you can see the traitor, man, what are you afraid of? You're afraid that your feelings were hurt at that level. You're afraid you're going to lose intimacy. You're afraid that you're unloved. Whatever the fear is, go right to the fear and get rid of it. The whole goal for this deal is to get to the fear tool. Anytime you're dealing with any kind of resentment, we have one goal in mind. Get to the fear. Column four, question four. All right? Thank you very much. I'm going to turn it back over. Let's take a 15-minute break. For me, doing one of these deals is to watch what happens after you guys turn into a spiritual body. The first day or so, you start hearing people talking, and they're talking about themselves and their jobs and, oh, I haven't seen you in so long. Then slowly but surely, you start hearing, that was kind of an interesting concept. And you hear some things bounce back and forth or, yeah, I need to rewrite inventory. Oh, they really touched me. I need to do this. I need to do that. And it's always in the future. I'm going to be doing this sometime down the road. Then you do theater of the lie. And I wish you guys had a camera up here and you could see a picture of what I see when I'm standing up here doing it. Because it's an entire room full of people going, you know. The mouths are open. The eyes are big. It's like deer in the headlights. Yeah. You know? And as I'm going through, you know, I always talk about using the eyes. The eyes are the window of the soul. And I look for shiny eyes. And some of the people that had shiny eyes, I noticed one in particular. I'm looking at her, and she had the deer in the headlights look, and then all of a sudden the face dropped. And the whole body language changed. And as I'm going deeper and deeper into theater, the shoulders rounded forward. She crossed her legs, folded her arms. And by the time she left, we went to take on the break. She headed through the room, and boom, she's heading for the door. So I went and I grabbed her and I said, hey, what's the deal here? And we started talking about the theater. And she said, well, I've done this work, and I've written about this. And I, you know, and the traitor was so alive and well. And while I'm talking to her about what's going on, the traitor happened to be in a relationship. And then not only was the traitor in the relationship, but the relationship has dissolved because the significant other, guess what? Ran off with the sponsee. Double layer traitor. I've seen this before in AA, and this is an absolute killer. And the reason I wanted to bring this up before I handed it off to Mark is because if there's a traitor at the AA level, it's like fifth step issues. If somebody breaks a fifth step and you hear it come back, your fifth step information coming back, part of the fifth step, and we're going to talk about this down the road, is if you've truly done your fifth step, you've given that stuff to God. It's God's. And remember the line in the back of the book, it says that your past is the greatest asset. Sometimes it's the only thing you've got left, right? If you've given it to God, it doesn't own you anymore. You know, I was talking with a guy earlier, and he started telling me about being molested by one of his neighbors, you know, and he's so free of that. If it helps somebody else, he could care less who hears about it, you know. But when that was going to the fifth step, he was holding on to it, I'm sure, when he got rid of it the first time. But now he gave it to God. If you haven't given it to God, the first time it boomeranged. Now you've got a traitor in AA. You're a double threat. Not only is this related, you can always get another relationship. You can get over that traitor. But the traitor within AA, now you have a trust issue within AA, and that's your lifeline, right? Most people think that AA is their lifeline. AA is a spiritual body. It's a human spiritual body. We are human fallibles. Remember the we? Let's bring it back to step one. Our we has to change. Our reliance has to be on God. It's some person within AA that did something, and they had to be asleep to do it. So how can I blame them? My ego is trying to take me to the bar. And I looked at her, and we started going through this conversation, and I looked at her and I said, you were closer to a drink than you could ever possibly imagine. And, you know, her eyes got big again, right? If we're in that state of the traitor, and the hamster's on the wheel, and we don't see it, all I need is, suddenly, or a strange mental blank spot, and you're drinking. And I don't care who you are. Because the only thing you have to protect you from the drink is your conscious contact with God. And if the traitor's in your life, guess what? You're in the past. Or you're in the future. And then you're past the future, past the future. Anything to keep you out of the moment. You're a walking dead man, I call it. And in her case, I looked at her and I said, you're a walking dead woman. You don't even see it. This stuff is life and death. Bring everything back to step one. This stuff does have something to do with whether we're going to drink again. All right? And the key is fear. The one tool your ego uses is fear. Fear in the future, or column four, question four, for resentment. It's still fear. It's just how your fear, your ego uses the fear against you. So the thing we need to get to is fear. I came at it this morning from the second step proposition exercise to try to get you to the fear. So you can get to page 68 and do what God, the fear tool and get that instruction under your belt. So you can get fear. You're free and get connected back to God. Now we're going to take it through the inventory process, which is just another direction to get to the exact same spot. What we're looking for is to get to fear. Because when we can get to fear and get rid of the fears, we get rid of the resentments, we can be back connected to God. Make sense? All right. With that, I'm going to turn it back over to Mark. He's going to take you through the fear inventory. Mark, alcoholic. You know, just to kind of recap before we get into the fear inventory, we looked at the idea that alcohol is but a symptom and that it's not the problem. And we identified the problem, which is selfishness, self-centeredness. Purpose of looking at inventory, the three different inventories, is manifestations of self, i.e. resentment, whereby I'm trying to play God and the world's not going according to the way that I need it to go for me to be okay. And understanding then that the problem is really not a craving, it's a need. It's a need. It's a need of the body, an obsession of the mind or a spirituality. The problem is my selfishness. And the important thing to understand about is if you're not doing a lot of work with inventory, that which will ultimately take you back to a drink is still in place. Hence, king alcohol rides on your shoulder. See? So these things are very, very important to look at, if you will. It's kind of like what Dave was saying about consider the idea that, you know, there's a part of you that's taking you back to a drink. That's going to take you back to a drink. And that's why we're going to go into inventory and we're going to write inventory. Now, keep in mind what we're attempting to share with you here this weekend. These are tools. See, I have no answers for anybody. I probably have a lot of questions. When I work with others, I take the responsibility of that out of my hands. I'm normally open with some meditation and I get guided as to providing direction. But just always keep that in mind. We're trying to give you some tools. You've got to decide how much of this thing you want to experience and nobody can do that for you. You have to decide. And I don't know as if it makes any difference to God where you're at with that. I don't know if it makes any difference to God if you get it together or not. But I reached a place where it sure made a difference to me. So, again, these are tools. That's all we're trying to share with you is some tools that we have found that were so effective in helping us with finally, realizing what's wrong with us, this selfishness. How do I get rid of this selfishness? So we've talked at length about resentments and then I want to talk about fear. How many of you have experienced fear today? How many of you are so asleep that you haven't? I actually have had days where I... I did not experience fear. The book says that you and I will outgrow it and that has been my experience. I have moments of time in which there's just peace with no fear. And for a guy who's the very fabric of his being was interwoven with fear, that is a peace that is something that I sought most of my life. So I want to talk a little bit about fear inventory, some of the different ways that I have come at the fear inventory. But in the big book, it's on page 67. About five lines up from the bottom, it says, this short word fear somehow touches every aspect of my life. It's great to take questions or statements like this and really ask yourself, if you want to get current again with your life, where am I at? Look at the things that, quote, comprise your life and maybe start asking yourself this, am I today, for example, do I have ongoing financial fears? Do I have fears about my physical health? Do I have fears around relationships? Do I have fears around maybe my career? Do I have fears around someone I care about who's maybe ill? And I mean, take the areas of your life and ask yourself this question, you know, do I have fear going on in some areas of my life? Is fear touching every area of my life? And again, it's important to see that because fear is a manifestation of self. Selfishness, see? If I'm in Dallas and want to get to New York, if I think I'm in Austin, I'll never get to New York. Meaning, you have got to know what the problem is before you can come up with a solution, before God can remove it. So that's the purpose of trying to identify is regardless of how long you're sober, whether you're new or 25 years, are there some areas of your life that fear is starting to touch? And if there are, it is in those areas in which you still have selfishness. Selfishness. Selfishness. Selfishness. Selfishness in place, see? And it goes on to talk about fear as an evil and corroding thread. Those are pretty powerful words, right? The very fabric of our existence is shot through with fear. Here's the problem if you're sitting here with a lot of fear going on in your life, because fear will set in motion trains of circumstance. Remember the limo? Right? Pulling up in front of your house? Hi, my name's fear and at the workplace, I'm going to drive your ass today. And what that will do, it will set in motion trains of circumstance, which is going to bring you misfortune. You're going to feel like you did not deserve the victim. See? But it says, but did not we ourselves set the ball rolling? Once again, this book is going to shine the light on me and say, Mark, you're responsible for your life. You're responsible for setting this ball rolling, this chains of circumstances. It talks about sometimes we think fear ought to be classed with, and stealing fear seems to cause more trouble. Now you're going to get some instructions. We need to review our fears thoroughly. Review them. That means write them down, take a look at them. We did some of that last night, right? We're going to put these fears on paper, even though we have no resentment in connection with those fears. Now keep in mind what fear is. It's a manifestation of self, right? And it says, why do I have these fears? And it says, isn't it? Because self-reliance failed me. See, if self-reliance worked, in whatever area right now you're experiencing fear in your life, if self-reliance worked, you wouldn't be experiencing the fear. You understand what I just said? So if that is the case, you are left with only one thing, ultimately, which is going to have to be God-reliance. Because self-reliance isn't getting rid of it. Self-reliance is not working in whatever area you're experiencing, but it's actually using the fear in. And it goes on to say, well, maybe there's a better way about dealing with these fears that we're talking about. Some of the ones we talked about today, for example. It says, because now we're on a different basis. See, by this point in time in the book, and in going through the steps, you're on page 68, you've finished a resentment inventory. You are not at the same level of consciousness that you were at when you started this work. So you're on a different footing, a different basis. You're not at the same level of consciousness going to go on the basis of trusting and relying upon God. Not trusting and relying upon self. Trusting and relying upon God. Okay.