The Broken Receiver and the Access to Grace – Bob

My name is Bob Darrell and I am an alcoholic. You could see the lack of power still was my dilemma. Through the grace of a very loving God who I didn't believe in, who I found is crazy about me and has no taste, the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, good sponsorship, and a commitment to this way of life, if I haven't had a drink or any mind or emotion-altering substances since Halloween 1978, and for that, I owe you my life. You know, the thing with the program is that this was a spirituality meeting. Every meeting is a spirituality meet. It's a spirituality meting at Alcoholics Anonymous. As a dear friend of mine says, there's two sides to the program, the spiritual side and the outside. And it's really to label one meeting spiritual as opposed. So the rest of the meetings will be selfish and decrepit, I think. I want to talk about something that is dear to my heart because an experience that I've had in Alcoholics Anonymous that if I didn't have it and try to maintain it, I probably would have died probably by my own hands years ago. And that's this coming to believe and connect and actualize a relationship with a power greater than myself. I want you to know that I was the guy who came in and out of AA for a number of years, And every time I heard someone talk about God, it was like a steel door would slam in my head. And I didn't understand that I had a lot of prejudices in this area and a lot of fears, almost a sense that if there really was a God, I was in a lot of trouble because I grew up with these funny prejudices and I don't know their prejudices and i work with a lot of guys that have prejudices about god that they don't even know that are prejudiced because you don't think it's a prejudice because it's just the way it is you don'T get that it'S a judgment that might be a little screwy that you DON'T even know where you got it but i had a bunch of those and one of them was a view of god well first of all he existed to judge me he could see in the dark which was not good that'S not good for a guy like me. He could read my mind, I was told. And I, oh man, I'm always thinking stuff I'm not supposed to be thinking. And somewhere along the line, I threw, I surrendered to this, to an idea of prejudice that there can't be a God. Because if there is, to me, it looked like a lose-lose situation because I was never going to be good enough. I was never goingto be the guy I need to be. And so it's easier to reject the whole thing. And that is, I think, is part of my nature. I did that with people a lot of my life. I came into Alcoholics Onus and did it with a lotof you for a number of years. I would just get this thing in my head that I would imagine you don't like me or if you really knew about me, you wouldn't accept me, so I'd beat you to it. So I'd reject you first. Right? And I kind of did that with God because my fear was I'm not going to measure up. On page 44, it talks about a condition that brought me to the table in Alcoholics Anonymous. It's really one of the best descriptions of alcoholism. It says if when you honestly want to, you find you cannot quit entirely honestly want to like not like the other 13 15 times this time i really mean it quit entirely what do they mean by entirely they don't really mean entirely do they i mean that's fanatical they don'T mean everything i can quit alcohol for long periods of time just like dr bob if you keep me medicated or if you give me an alternative but what i can't do is I can't quit entirely. And that's a painful thing to face. And the second thing, it says, or if when drinking you have little control over the amount you take, and that's always been true for me. I always, no matter what my intentions are, as far as how far I'm going to go getting drunk, the minute I start drinking, I move the line. You know, it just keeps moving. Because that's what alcohol does to me. It just, every drink of alcohol I've ever taken has given me the single one reaction. It's made me feel like I'd like to have another one of those. I mean, every Drink I've Ever Taken's done that. So I have little control over the amount you take. The book says if that be the case, if you're in this trap you can't spring, where you can'T stay away from it and every time you pick it up, You burn your life to the ground even though you don't mean to. If you're in this trap, the book says you may be suffering from an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer. Well, that's not good news for a guy like me who has all the prejudices I have about God. I remember sitting in an institution up in Maine. Just last year I got to go back there and visit some of those places. And I was sitting in this institution and listening to an AA speaker talk. And by this time, I had been around Alcoholics Anonymous. I'd been in and out of AA meetings for five, six years probably by this time. And I've heard a lot of AA speakers, been to a lot AA meetings. But this was the first guy I ever heard in AlcoholicsAnonymous that I started to connect with. and he was part of a trustees group from Thomaston State Penitentiary in Maine and he they brought him and a couple other guys from the prison, this group of trustees that were on good behavior with guards to this Mother Seton Hospital where I'm in the alcoholism treatment deal there and they bring this guy in and there's a speaker 10 minute speaker and then there's this guy and I'm sitting there looking at this guy and listening to him, and he's the first person in Alcoholics Anonymous I ever started to connect with. And he had really long hair and a long beard and tattoos. Tattoos were not big back in those days. You had to be an outlaw motorcycle guy or a gangster to have tattoos. And this guy was a big guy, probably 300 pounds. I think he killed a cop. He was a tough outlaw motorcycler guy. The kind of guy if you're secretly weak and pathetic and trying to pretend like you're not and you're tough, the kind of guy you want to drink with because he'll watch your back. I mean, this is the kind of guy I'd like to drink with and he's a man's kind of man. The kind of guide nothing would bother. This guy couldn't possibly be afraid of anything. He started talking about his drinking and his emotions and he started saying things that just I connected with. He started talk about coming to after maybe beating pistol weapon some guy the night before, coming to in a fetal position like a terrified little kid, shaking at the memory of what he did. And I'm sitting there going, whoa. I mean, I understand I feel like that all the time because I'm weak and pathetic, but you, you feel like that? You? And I think, Oh, my God. And he started to talk about himself. And I'll tell you, I'm ready to sign up for AA. I'm connecting with this guy. And then he talks about going to AA, working the steps, and finding God. And the minute he started talking about his relationship with God, it was like a steel door slammed in my head. And I remember sitting there thinking, oh, what have they done to him? Oh, not him. Oh, no, not this guy? Oh, I know what he's, oh, he's become one of them. I had a running partner that became one of them. You know, you drink too much wine, you do a little bit too much drugs, your brain turns to a loaf of wet bread and you end up as sunbeam for Jesus at the airport giving out flowers. I know. I understand the dynamic. And little did I know that there would come a time when I would be inside, I would be so stuck and so hopeless that all my prejudices wouldn't even mean anything anymore. I'd be willing to come to the table with something I fought against and threw away for years. The book, Bill says something funny in the book. There's a line in here it says to be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis he says for us are not always easy alternatives to face now i think that's a it's a bizarre line but it's true now we're talking door number one alcoholic death there's the i've watched people die of alcoholism. I know guys that have died of it. I can't imagine a worse way to die. I know there's not a way to die where you have more shame and self-loathing. By the time alcoholism finally kills you, and it's a long, tedious process for most of us, you've wished you were dead for a long time. By the time it finally kills you you've been in hell already. The death is just finally stepping over the threshold. You've already been there. By the time it finally kills you, you hate yourself. Everyone you've ever loved wants nothing to do with you and they're going to be glad you're dead. As my mother, when I was a year sober and my first approach to making amends to them, she broke down with tears in her eyes because she loved me to have to tell me that she used to wish I was dead. And I did that to her. How do you take a mother's love and do that? Did an angel get its wings? And I did that. So we have alcoholic death, worst death there is, or to live on a spiritual basis. And Bill says, guys like me, that's not always easy alternatives to face. It's like you come to meetings and people want to tell you about the steps and we're going to do God and all this stuff. You start thinking, what? how bad could that alcoholic death be anyway, really? I mean, you know. And if you, when my mother died of a terminal illness, lung cancer, and it was a very brutal, brutal deal, and I got to talk to a lot of doctors back then about terminal illnesses. Do you know, if you went to a hospice where people who have been pronounced terminal and they're dying of cancer and there's no hope for them through human means and you were to say to them we got a deal here that if you'll just change your lifestyle a little bit do a few things there's over 4 million of us that have not that were terminal that don't have to die this disease I'm telling you they beg you to tell them what to do and they do it I go in on a weekly basis For the last 28 years, I've gone into places where people are dying of alcoholism every week. And you lay out this simple kit of spiritual tools at their feet, and most of the time they kick it away because they can't make this choice. And it's ludicrous, but it's true. There's something about alcoholism that it's almost as if, I imagine sometimes like it has a life of its own and it wants you dead. That's why there seems to be a resistance in a lot of us that well up in anything that's going to take us closer to God or freer from our disease. Almost like the alcoholism will make you nuts not to go there. Look at how many times some of us try to write four steps and can't pick up that 5,000-pound pen or go wash... Oh, I used to wash my car rather than write anything. Just... What is that? It's crazy. The book says after a while we had to face the fact that we must find a spiritual basis of life or else. And isn't it strange? I just think it's strange that I and a lot of us fight this whole idea of a spiritual experience or a spiritual awakening. And yet, in reality, spend my whole life seeking that. I don't know about you guys. I drank alcohol because it vitalized my spirit. It gave me an awakening. A guy who was locked up in himself, depressed, I can't fit, I ain't doing too good, could walk into a bar or party and have five drinks and get connected. I could come out and play. I could be a part of. I could feel plugged in. It really was a spiritual experience. Putting aside all my prejudices about religion and spirituality, the truth always has been that when I, in my early days of alcoholism, no matter how sick my spirit is, five shots of tequila would vitalize it. Not at the end, not the last couple years. But for years it did that for me, especially in the years when the hook is set and the obsession is put into place. So I've got a deal here. I've Got to Come to the Table. I don't want to come to the table. Earlier in the book there's a place where it says that it talks about before we ever come to believe in God or even that AA will work. It says we will come to believe in the hopelessness and futility of our life as we've been living it. And I believed that before I ever believed AA would work for me, before I ever really started to believe in a power greater than myself. I believed in that and isn't it it's i think spiritual growth it's a funny thing it doesn't come from education and i i really know that i had a dear friend who uh died a few years ago with a lot of years of sobriety he was a catholic priest who had studied and taught theology at the vatican and he's and was a drunk doing that for years and he said it wasn't until he came into aa that he started to really connect with God and it really wasn't from educating himself more in spiritual things because he was at the top of the food chain as far as education and intellectual knowledge about God. It came from throwing some of that stuff out. Spiritual growth always comes from subtraction. It never comes from addition. Never. And that's really my story and the subtraction was that I got to the place where I believed in the hopelessness and futility. My best thoughts and ideas had failed me, and I'm dying here, and I've tried everything else. There's a saying in AA that Alcoholics Anonymous is the last house on the block. I think within AA, sometimes God is the last house of the block also. It says on page 45, it talks about something that's very interesting. It says lack of power. That was our dilemma. Not lack of religion. Not even lack of faith. I've known some men that have tremendous faith in God that have died of alcoholism, drank themselves to death. i've had the fortune or privilege to have sponsored uh several members of clergy i've watched a guy drink himself to death that prayed more in one day than most of us will in a week who knew more about god and scripture in the bible than most of us ever would. And he died with more faith than probably intellectually. And he could give you tremendous arguments to prove the existence of God, but he could not connect with the power, with God's grace. And He died, He called me right before He died and He was weeping because He couldn't understand why a guy who has served God his whole life couldn't get what these bums in AA were getting, right? But it's not lack of faith. It's lack of power. I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. And in the summertime, there are times when it'll get up over 115 degrees. And if you were to come there and visit me during that time of the year, I could take you in my car and we could drive out to Lake Mead, which is one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the western United States. And I could show you the lake and you'd know that the lake was there and then take you about 15, 20 miles away and drop you off at the middle of the desert with a map on how to get to Lake Mead. And I'm telling you that if you don't follow the directions on that map you will wander around that desert and die of thirst knowing that water's there, knowing. And that seems to be the problem. is that I have to access this power. And that's the dilemma. If I don't, I'm going to die. I struggled. I remember when Frank died, who was a priest, that just blew my mind. You know, because at the time I was sober a little while, and I understood and believed with everything in me that I was only sober through God's grace. And I knew that. I knew it. And yet what was so baffling to me is why would, you know, you'd think if that's true, a man of the cloth would have a leg up on the rest of us, right? And then at other times I've watched, I had my own experience. I came to in a jail cell up in Maine, and I was up there on a geographic. I didn't know it was a geographic, I thought it was just crossing state lines to avoid incarceration, but people at AA will educate you about this stuff, and I had one friend left in the world, this guy, Chris Morgan, who I've tried to find and keep trying to find him. He's on my eight-step list, never been able to find Him. And Chris was a great guy, and he helped me out, put me up on his couch and got me a job. And I come to in this jail cell, and I don't know why I'm there, and I'm sick and I need a drink, and Iím shaken. I want to jump out of my skin, and they take me into a room, and the detective tells me Iím there because I took a Hutton knife and opened up Chris's chest the night before. And I'm sitting there in that detective's office, and I feel these emotions like I'm going to start screaming, and if I start, I'll never stop. And I push those feelings down and hardened up in the way that some of us can. They took me back to my cell, and I fell down on that concrete floor and just came apart and started sobbing and I did something that was out of character for me in that moment of hopelessness and weakness I begged God to please never let me drink that stuff again and I got drunk the day I got out so if you've had those experiences and then you see a guy like Frank himself to death, who was such a good man. It's scary. And I didn't understand. And yet I'm sober by this time longer than I've ever been sober in my whole life since I started drinking at 12 years old. And I feel pretty good about it. And one night I was watching a movie and it was an old movie B, old B movie from World War II and And all of a sudden, I connected the dots. I understood what had happened to me. And the movie is about the South Pacific. And in the South Pacific during World War II, there were so many islands that the United States did not have enough troops to station garrisons on every island. So what they did is that they would often parachute in a guy whose job was to be an observer. and he would set up a base camp and through radio he would keep in contact with the U.S. fleet and watch for Japanese troop movements and ships and this story is about a guy who did that but on landing on the island the radio got screwed up and so he's setting up his camp and he's trying to get the fleet and he gets this weird kind of static and stuff and he can't get nothing he's completely cut off and so he goes about the business of surveying the island and building his camp and then one day he's coming up over this sand dune and there's the whole Japanese fleet and they're coming towards his island and he panics and he runs back to the camp and he's hitting the radio and screwing with it trying to get the fleet in because now it's desperate and he can't get nothing and he remembers he thinks wait, wait a minute there was a manual somewhere And he starts digging through this duffel bag. In the bottom of the duffer bag, he pulls out this manual. And he start reading the manual and it starts describing the symptoms of the radio, the weird static and all the stuff that's going on. And then it gives him some tests to try and some things to do. And it leads him into finding this tube that's been knocked loose and resetting it and all of a sudden, there's the fleet. There it is. And the reason he couldn't get the juice or couldn't get the power from the message, the deal from the fleet was not because he was a bad guy or he played with his knobs too much or none of that stuff. It was just simply that he had a broken receiver. And I started to get, that's it. That's the deal. God has always loved me. God is crazy about me. God exists to give me his grace. But I've got a broken receiver, and I can't receive it. And I think that's why people will die of alcoholism knowing, with absolute faith, knowing God's there. But they can't access the grace because they're blocked from it. And a couple little things. On page 46, it talks about two things that are necessary in order to begin to connect with this power. In the middle of the page, it says, We found that as soon as we were able to, first, lay aside prejudice. And with a lot of the guys I sponsor, I try to talk to them. We try to even sometimes get them to write down, what are your prejudices? What are your ideas, your opinions, your judgments, your notions about God? Especially look, let's look for the ones that at times may make him, his love and grace give you a sense of that you're not worthy of it or you can't access it. And I'll tell you what one of mine was, and I think a lot of us have this, and it's unconscious. That's the problem with most prejudices. I don't get that they're prejudices, it's just an unconscious stance that I take towards things. And one of mine was this idea that God would only help me and love me when I'm good. That in my very worst day when I've just done something I can't stand myself for, that God wouldn't help be there for me because I've rendered myself unworthy of His grace. when I've just gone into a restaurant because I haven't eaten all day and I'm really hungry and I am nuts and the waitress doesn't wait on me quickly enough and I knock the sugar thing off the counter and read and start yelling at her and storm out of there and then I am sitting in my car and I want to go out in the garden and eat worms because I have become the guy that I can't stand I've become the guy I can't stand. If I don't have a God that I can access, even at my very worst, I got a problem because that's when I need his power. That's when i need him the most. And so that's a deadly, deadly prejudice. And so many of us have that and many, many more. So this is the first thing we have to do is lay aside prejudice. These prejudgments that I have about God, these opinions. And the second thing it says, and express even a willingness to believe. It doesn't say we have to believe, it asks for an expression of a willingness. And it says if we do those two things, it says we'll commence to get results, even though it's impossible for any of us to fully define or comprehend that power which is God. i sort of thought that i had to understand god before i could approach him and that's not the case at all matter of fact my desire to understand and figure god out was a very self-oriented thing the reason i want to understand God is just the same reason i wanna understand the boss at a new job because if you understand the way he thinks you're gonna get a little leverage there You're going to get a little more control. You're gonna feed self a little. Me, what about? It's gonna do me, me, me, me, me. Like maybe if I could understand God enough, I could, I could tailor my prayers in such a way to get the, the Bentley and the new house. You know what I mean? Just, but you have to make him see that this is what's necessary. And just kind of understand him so he can lay that down. Book said, don't even try. A friend of mine says that if God's small enough for me to understand him, he's not big enough for you to help me. And I believe that's true. So if I can just express a willingness. And what the old-timers in AA told me to do was stuff that didn't make any sense to me. I'm living in this halfway house because I'm a homeless guy. And they told me that I must get down physically, get down on my knees every morning and every night and turn my consciousness towards whatever's running the universe And to know that I needed help from that, and I knew that. I knew by this time, after seven and a half years of relapsing, I know that i don't have what it takes to stay sober. I know a lot, but i know that. And so i would go in the bathroom at the halfway house, because i don' t believe in God, so i'm embarrassed to do this. So i lock the door. i push the throw rug up against the crack underneath the door like as if i'm afraid somebody's going to peek under there to see me pray or something like i'm nuts right i'm whacked and i get down on my knees and i say okay whatever's there i'm scared and i need some help and i don't i don' t i need your help to stay sober and at the end of the day i would just simply get down in there on my knees and I'd thank whatever that was. And some funny things started happening to me from the moment of this expression of willingness. And I didn't understand that the physical demonstrations are so powerful. And you know, in Alcoholics Anonymous we often talk about change of attitude. And i didn't know what that meant for a long time. Pilots talk about attitude. It's the angle of approach. And if you've got a bad attitude in an airplane, you're going to land in the mall, right? You're going hit the side of a mountain. So you must adjust your attitude, your angle of approach. And what the problem with me and God is not God, it's my angle of approach. And from the moment I started to take actions against my natural inclinations, what I started to do was I was changing my angle of approach so I was starting to access this grace, this power amazing stuff started happening to me from the moment I did that I was living in this halfway house I got one roommate that's shooting heroin and another one that's smoking pot like I'm on thin ice here out of nowhere a guy came to me and offered me a job with room and board living in a treatment center for teenagers being the house manager I'm telling you this job was divinely crafted for me it did not give me a lot of money because a lot of money I would have ended up in a saloon telling everybody how smart I was it was just enough money to start chipping away at some amends having money to put in the basket maybe get a pack of cigarettes but it gave me, put me in a position to think of others. I could get to two meetings a day when I lived there. It was perfect for me. Perfect. And it got me out of a very dangerous, and I didn't look for that job. It just came to me. I had other things happen to me like that. Like I used to, I would go through these really awful mood swings in early sobriety. Unexplicable stuff because I don't understand myself to know why I go from one minute feeling like I'm on top of the world to the next minute into this abyss and I had dozens and dozens of experiences like that where I'd go to some meeting and there'd be a stranger there talking about what's going on with me and he's got my answer I remember one time coming I just I was so frazzled at work I went to a noon meeting and I'm nuts and I I'm ready I'm gonna go back after the noon meeting and quit my job because they've been disrespecting me and taking advantage of me. And it just, it just really, it's been bad. And I go to a meeting and there's a stranger there talking about something that went on with him and the job. And all of a sudden it was like, oh my God, I don't have to quit my Job. I got to make amends to my boss for being an idiot. That would never have occurred to me naturally. Never. And I started to experience the hand of something working in my life. I mean, who's the choreographer behind all that? And I started to come to believe in something I suspect the only way a guy like me could really by what started to happen to me. Over in London to this day there's parts of London that the streets are lit by gas streetlights rather than electric. And years ago, before they had the electric starters and before they were all gridded and automatic, there was a guy whose job it was at dusk was to go up and down the streets of London. He had a key to turn the gas on in the long pole with a flame on the end to light the deal. And he was called a lamplighter. And you could climb up to the top of the highest building in London and look out over the city. And no matter how hard you looked, you couldn't see where the lamplights were. was, but you could always see where he'd been by the lights. And I could sit in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous at three years sober, two and a half, I don't know. I couldn't see where God was really, but boy, can I see where He'd been? I mean, I could see whereHe'd been. And even more closely and more distinctly than seeing where He had been in my life, man, I was doing a lot of 12-step work. I was going into the hospitals and institutions. I could see the hand of God and some of these new people that came in six, eight months after me. I saw the deadness of the eyes. I thought, I saw, I met the hopelessness. I met the guys that would never see their kids again because of the restraining orders. I met the guys that were so far in debt that they're not going to live long enough to get themselves out i met the homeless guys and years later they're buying their first home and the guy's got his kids and i mean in tremendous transformations and i came to believe i guess the only way that i could i had to see it had to be up close and personal i some people have an ability that someone they respect will tell them you need to believe in this and they just go oh okay. Or it says it in a book and they go, oh, okay. But I'm not that guy. I'm a skeptic. I'm an over, I'm A Deep Thinker. There's a lot of deep thinkers in Alcoholics Anonymous. If you're a deep thinker, you should not own a gun. I mean, deep thinkers have a hard time in Alcoholic Anonymous and I'ma deep thinkers. And God came to me the only way that he could and he started working in my life there's a friend of mine uh jim jim amy sober 40 probably 45 years now lives in pacific palisades he's a dear dear man told me a story once that motivated me to go to florence to try to find the statue he was talking about and i found it but i couldn't see it because you had there was a almost a week waiting list to get in this one museum but he told this story that just lit me up. And he said he was walking around this very famous museum in Florence and looking at this exhibit of sculptures from the sculptor Donatelli, and DonatellI does a lot of spiritual sculptures. And He said he walked into this room and there was a life-size statue of the Mary Magdalene, and he said when he looked at it, it took his breath away and he had to sit down. And the more he looked at, he started weeping because it's different. This statue of this depiction of Mary Magdalene is different than anything he's ever seen. Usually you see Mary Magdalen with the flowing robes, the long hair, and she's very pretty. But he said this was not like that. This was a woman who was etched with pain and hopelessness. A woman who looked like she'd been turning nickel and dime tricks on the back alleys of Jerusalem for years. And there was a deadness and a hopelessness about her and yet through that shone a spark as she stood there with her hand out as if saying, this could be for me? For me? Oh man, I knew it. Jim's telling that story and I'm weeping because I know exactly what that feels like as you start to approach God and realize he's working in your life. Sometimes early sobriety, which is I'd be driving down the street and I'd just start crying because something has happened to me. Something that I know what I am that I don't feel like I deserve. I ain't giving it up, but I know I never felt worthy of it. And there's a line in our book that says God does not make hard terms with those who seek him. And from the moment of approach of changing my angle of approach and attitude, this thing started coming into my life. But I had a lot of work to do in Alcoholics Anonymous. And, you know, on page 55 there's two paragraphs that have become two of my more favorite paragraphs of the book because it's really a vision of exactly what happens to every single one of us that works these steps and devotes ourselves to this primary purpose of helping others do the same. It's a vision of exactly where, exactly how, and exactly when we will find and access this power which is God. And that's really the purpose of Alcoholics Anonymous. It says in our book our main purpose is to help you find a power greater than yourself which will solve your problem. that i think the great single most great promise of all of a is is stated and read in every meeting most people don't even hear it it's in step 12 having had a spiritual awakening as the the meaning single most only as the result of these steps i think that's the the that's the deal we're here something must wake up inside of me or else i don't have the power to live in this world. Sobriety is too depressing. It feels like I'm doing time. I can't do this. I can not change my life. I cannot will myself into being a guy that is having a good time sober. I don't know how to. I cant. I have tried therapy. I've tried everything. I can't. Something must wake up within me or I am toast. Page 55 it says actually we were fooling ourselves for deep down, deep down in every man, woman and child is the fundamental idea of God. And me? I used to hear guys like Chamberlain and some of the old timers in AA talk about the God within. I usedと hear people saying that they would commune with God. They would listen to the still small voice of God within them through meditation. early sobriety i haven't worked the steps yet so i try to go in to connect with god i don't find god i find a pack of crazy people i find legion i find just just nut stuff going i can't even be alone in in an apartment without the tv on because when it gets quiet out here it gets crazy in here. If there's a God inside of me, boy, it's news to me. And I think if that's God, those voices sound more like Satan to me, I don't know, crazy. But it explains why I can't just go in and connect. It says because it may be obscured, this power may be obscured, which is blocked by three things. By calamity. I like calamity, I like the edge, you know what I mean? There's excitement on the edge. I go to an amusement park, I'm right at the roller coaster, you won't get me on the merry-go-round, I want calamity! I want excitement! I've always misinterpreted excitement for happiness. It's crazy! And I think serenity is the feeling you get when you just about died. I think that's serenity, right? If you're identifying with me, you need AA badly. I'm telling you, badly. If you don't know what calamity is, imagine... You want to hear the voice of calamity? Imagine that a surgeon could surgically implant a microphone into your brain on a bad day, hooked up to speakers, and we get to hear what you think for one day, we would hear calamity. The second thing it says it's blocking me is pomp. It's that I'm so defended and opinionated and judgmental. I'm such a person I'm just so full of myself that I am like a glass of water that there's no room for anything else. It's just me and my judgments and my perception and my view of life and me, me, be, me. me i'm just there you know god could be inside of me with a megaphone in between the pump and the calamity i ain't get he there's nothing he ain't getting through there's too much of me between me and god just like the loneliness that i felt every time i got sober because there's Too Much of Me Between Me and You and Too Much Of Me Between me and God and then the third thing it says is worship of other things that's a hard thing for me to see because i don't know what they're talking about really and i was a year and a half two years sober and i'm i had an experience that would change my whole perception of of what this was about for me i i was ending a my first sober relationship and in my experience i don'T think there'S a more self-involved person on the planet than an alcoholic ending a relationship. I mean, oh man. You can go up to a person like that and say, I just came from the doctor and I have terminal cancer and two weeks to live. And he'll go, you know what else she said, man? Oh, it's funny, but that's the way we are. I'm at this AA meeting one night and I'm nuts. I can't hear anything in the meeting, it's like music in a doctor's office. Cause I'm in my head thinking of when I see her, I'll say this and then she'll say that. And then I'll hit her with this and she'll be properly ashamed of herself and beg me back. You know? So I'm crazy, right? Plus she's a member of AA and she's not in this meeting, which means that some hideous forces implanted a spring in the back of my neck connected to the meeting room door. Every time the door opens, I go, oh, not her. Okay. So God could be trying to talk to me through the people in AA, and I ain't getting it. I mean, I'm just blocked, right? The meeting's over, andI end up going to coffee with some people, and it ends up me and this guy from Glendale who was visiting, who was sober about 28 years, and I started to tell him, now he's got a captured audience since he rode there in my car. So I'm telling him about this relationship for 20 or 30 minutes until his eyes have glazed over and he sits there very kindly and he's listening to me and nodding and just like A's do and when I'm done, man, he said some things that just rocked me. First of all, he says to me, he says, you ever thought about the first commandment? And I said, ah, no, I'm not into that. I'm just into AA. He said, yeah, he says, I know. He says, man, you and I are a lot alike. He says guys like us can't get past the thou shalt not. He said the first commandment is thou, I am the Lord thy God. Thou shall not have false gods before me. He said I think the Ten Commandments were originally written as statements of spiritual cause and effect. That somehow as they got translated through the different languages, the Greek and the Aramaic and the Greek, Latin, et cetera, etetera, somehow they got an authoritarian spin put on him he said i don't think they were that way originally he said it is my experience that god loves you no matter what you do he loves you and loves you that you can put anything you want between you and god and he still loves you the problem is you've just put something between youandgod and he said when you worship something It doesn't mean to bow down to. It means to obsessively turn your consciousness towards. He said, you want to know what you worship in your life? Make a pie graph of everything you've been thinking of and the thing that dominates the pie is obviously the thing you've Been Obsessively Turning Your Consciousness Towards. When he said that, I could picture this pie graph with a little sliver for work and a little silver for A and the rest of it was her. and i knew instantly why i felt such desolation and why i was stuck in my head and i was disconnected from you and disconnected from god because i'm the guy who did that and i did it because of a lack of power and i look i think that a relationship will give me the power to validate myself and give me some emotional security, a sense of connectedness. I'll be a part of this. And I'm seeking and I'm at the helm of my ship and I keep putting these things between me and God. And I wish I could tell you from that moment on I haven't done that, but I have two, man. And I keep doing it. Matter of fact, if there's anybody here that never does that, would you help me please? because i keep doing it and sometimes i put just being right about something you know what i mean that thing you just you don't want to let go because not until they see or money i put money in that spot a lot of times and why is why would a guy like me be worried about money because money can give you an illusion of power and control and validation and security. But it's an illusion. You know why it's an illusion? Because I know, I finally, God spoke to me and gave me the amount of money necessary that you need. You know what it is? Just enough so you don't have to trust him anymore. You know where that dollar amount is? Five dollars more than you will ever have. Because no matter how much you have, it'll not be enough. It's always more and more and more because money is not power it's an illusion of power real power the book says there is one only one who has all power that one is god may you find him now or at least before you drink again and so i'm looking for that's why i worship these that's how i make these things so important to me because i i'm i don't have any power and i think i'm going to get power from this stuff the book goes on to say a couple things it says it says we finally saw that faith in some kind of God was a part of our makeup just as much as the feeling we have for a friend sometimes we had to search fearlessly but he was there the only other place in AA that I know of that uses those two words together is in the fourth step fearless and searching moral inventory and oddly enough It is not until the fifth step promises on page 75 that it says, it doesn't say it after step three. It's not until you've cleaned away some of the stuff, some of The Pump, from all your judgments on your resentment list, some ofthe calamity that you'll see very clearly on your fear list that you create based on self-reliance reliance and some of the things you worship that will appear both on all three lists and also sex how often we make that a big deal in our lives our relationships it is not until after step five that some of us seem to really start to connect it says at that point we'll feel the nearness of our creator why god's always been there but now what's happened is i've moved out just enough of me that i can start to feel the presence of god because i'm getting i'm jettisoning the things that are blocking me through this process of four through seven and they're actually sometimes it's not actualized until step nine until i actually face the people and make amends and i'm starting to connect and what what happens the funny thing in the steps is the steps are not designed to make amends to God. So I'm closer to God, the steps are designed to remove the stuff between me and you. And what happens is when that happens, God shows up. There is no view. See, I'm one of those kind of guys that wanted I thought maybe me and God will be good. And I can still think you're all idiots. Right? And it never works that way. You want to measure your distance from God measure your distance from the people around you. Right, because they're God's kids. And when I separate me from you, I'm separating me from the God within you. And I'm really separating myself from God when I separate myself from you. So we had to search fearlessly. He was there but he was as much a fact as we were if we found the great reality deep down within us. What a tremendous term for God. Capital letters the great reality in chapter five it really read at every meeting and they tell they talk about the place you'll find god i didn't realize it was a place it says there is one who has all power that one is god may you find him in the place most of us never visit now right and that's the great reality god is present he is the presence and i miss it and i'm disconnected from it because i'm up here thinking about it trying to figure it what is it what does that mean analyze it because I want control the great reality deep down within us in the book says finally it says in the last analysis after I've looked everywhere else, and the last analysis that is only there that he may be found was so with us. That is definitely my experience. You know, I came to Alcoholics Anonymous in the last analysis after I'd tried religion and treatment and medications and therapists and some of the great...I really identify with the guy last night. I was in therapy with Albert Ellis because my dad was so politically connected. He used to send me up to New York to the Institute for Rational and Motive Therapy. I was in therapy with a contemporary of Fritz Perls. I tried everything on the radar to fix me. I'm telling you, everything. The end result is I'm standing on a bridge trying to take my own life because I am stuck in a trap I can't spring. I can not jump start the party. Alcohol is no longer a spiritual experience and I cannot live without it because there is a desolation and a depression about my abstinence and I'm stuck. And so after everything else, I try AA. And then in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, my first four years of sobriety was crazy. I didn't stay sober, but I suffered periodically from untreated alcoholism. And I'm going to 15 and 20 meetings a week. I'm a GSR. I'm an DCM. I'm intergroup. I'm doing hospital and institutions. I'm gone on 12-step calls. I'm trying to outrun my alcoholism. But as Chamberlain said one time, he said, the alcoholic always gets to a point where you can no longer put anything between you and you. And then the shyness, you can't outrun it anymore. There you are. And that ain't no good. Because it's never been good, really. And there it is. And a little over four years of sobriety, I started following the process in this book and I started to finally connect with something as I cleared away the things that kept me in the driver's seat. As I started to dismantle my will in this fourth step which is really my judgments and all the other crap I started to connect with this power greater than myself and my life has never been the same since I'm no longer the guy that has to outrun his alcoholism and yet I still go to a lot of meetings I probably go to seven a week I suppose, sometimes more sometimes maybe six, sometimes eight I don't know I have several commitments in AA and I do that because I like the vitalization of helping others and doing service I've connected those dots that's the good dope here right before I went back through the steps I'll tell you this story I was working for a man who was trying to redeem me as an employer, as an employee and you've got to understand by the time I worked the steps again I'd gone through nine jobs in a little over four years. That's a whole that'll show you where I'm at. And it's never my fault. I can't help it. I just keep ending up working for idiots. You know I just you can see through that right? You know the truth right? So this guy's trying to redeem me, and he gives me a set of motivational tapes. Not AA. It's a set OF tapes by a guy named Earl Nightingale called Lead the Field. And it's supposed to kind of, he's trying to help me become a better, less self-centered employee. And Earl tells a story in there. And when I heard this story, man, I got it. And the story supposedly, Earl says, is true. And I've done a little research, and I think it is true to some degree. I've heard different versions of it, but the details are not important as what the experience of hearing it. Earl told this story about a guy in South Africa who had inherited a ranch and it was a nice ranch. And the kind of ranch that would have put his family in good stead for generations, they could have made a nice living for themselves. But the problem was that this guy inherited this ranch at a time when the diamond boom was beginning in South Africa when there were people who were becoming Bill Gates' mega Rockefeller rich overnight. And the more he heard the stories of their striking it rich, the more dissatisfied he became with what he had. And after a while, he was so obsessed with this, he sold his ranch and he took the money and invested it into equipment, and he went out into the bush obsessed with finding diamonds. And he never did. And one account says that he died out there broke, bitter, and alone. Another account says he threw himself into the ocean and committed suicide. But we know for one thing, he didn't come to a good end. And it came to pass that this ranch he had sold to these developers, One day they're moving around some rocks and stuff, and they found these unusual-looking big rocks. And they didn't know what they were, and they took them to a guy, and they find out they were uncut diamonds, and the raw. And they discovered that this ranch was the largest diamond deposit ever recorded in South Africa. These guys became like two of the richest men in the world overnight. And now they have to hire all these people and develop these mines. and they're going to cut the diamonds and market them and ship them for distribution all over the world. They're talking one day and the one guy says, the other guy says well we need to name our company now. And the other guys says yeah he says hey let's name it after that poor SOB we bought this place from. The guy says yeah what was his name? He says it was De Beers wasn't it? And I'm listening to this story and I'm thinking I'm that idiot. I come into Alcoholics. I look everywhere else for power and validation and security. And jobs, went through nine of them. And relationships, went through a few of those. And being a GSR and a DCM and an area officer and doing H&I work and trying to get a lot of sponsees. I'm looking for security, validation, and power everywhere else. And in the last analysis, after I'm at the point where I can't outrun my self-obsessed depressions anymore and the loneliness, I started to take this journey to uncover, as Chuck would say, discover and discard the things that have been blocking me from God and ultimately from you because it's a package. I think what Einstein said is true, that the great illusion of mankind is that there's more than one of us here, that if I want to get closer to God... I must clear away the stuff between me and you that really is the aspects of me playing God with you. The judgments, the separation, so that I can claim my place. And this is something I have struggled with because I don't know about you guys, but I can completely dismantle the judgment machine that is self and surrender it ultimately and within no time at all it grows back like a bad tumor. And I'll be the guy who's in charge again. And you know how you know when you're in charge? You just start seeing the people that need straightened out around you. And I look out over you today and you all look like you're doing pretty good. Now, if I look at you too closely, I'll start noticing a couple of you need straightening out. But I want to thank you for allowing me to be here and thank you for my life in Alcoholics Anonymous. Thanks. Thank you.