The Dependency of Living in Two Different Worlds – Sandy B.

Thank You Mike and good evening everybody my name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic how y'all doing is this the P is there a PA system or you do my voice care to carry I'm it okay this is for Earl and then the rest okay I hadn't heard that line in a long time I remember that I'm writing this letter very slowly because I know you can't read fast when you come home you won't recognize the house we moved there's something wrong with the appliances in the new house we put all the laundry in the washing machine pull the chain and we haven't seen it since I remember the whole letter and mike just remembers the first line so your sister got engaged she got a lovely engagement ring with three stones missing i'll probably remember the whole letter before the uh evening's over anyway my name is sandy beach i'm an alcoholic and i'm happy to be here and great to see the club being so successful and useful in the community and i know what a very important place this is to a lot of people who are probably here tonight where you know that things just aren't quite right that there's a place you can go and find other alcoholics and you can share and you just have a feeling and you're not alone anymore, and that you start really realizing that this is a we program. We all succeed together. None of us can make it on our own, and it's just a pleasure to be part of this great organization known as Alcoholics Anonymous. I came in in Quantico, Virginia area in 1964 and went to my early meetings down in that area, Manassas. We'd drive up here to the Alexandria area. We always came up on Thursday nights from Quantico and went into Columbia Pike. I mean, that was how far you drove to go to a meeting. That was the closest meeting on Thursdays to Quantico. So it was a lot of traveling in those early years, which my sponsor delighted in. He just loved to see the suffering that I went through in those early, he just loved it. Get in the car and drive an hour to the meeting and then be at the meeting for an hour and then drive back. And I didn't realize in those earlier days or early months that I was getting a tremendous foundation for later on. It was just the repetitive go to a meeting, go to another meeting. You know what I mean? It was like when does this stop? And it was just laying the groundwork for a lot of changes and a lot of great things that have happened inside of me over the years as a result of Alcoholics Anonymous. And, of course, I'm very grateful now for my sponsor and for all the things that happened back then. I just want to talk a little bit about my drinking, and then I've got a lot OFAA stories I feel like talking about tonight. I'll tell somebody else's inventory and, you know, that kind of stuff. But for the benefit of new people, I think it's important to just share a little bit about drinking so that you don't think that we're just visiting lecturers or something who have no personal experience with all of the things that you're going through if you're new. yeah my if you're new to aa because um there's a lot of you that i haven't met but if you are new to aaa i know one thing i i'm glad i didn't live here last year before you got here because without i'll just take a wild guess i bet it was awful that's just a yes people don't get here on a roll you know what i mean I mean, it was just, boy, my life is really going good. I think I'll just go to AA and get that added to my resume and I can probably get a better job. So people come here because things aren't going very well and you're not welcome anywhere else. So here we are. Drinking for me was literally a higher power. When I look back on it, that's what it was. It was my secret weapon against the world. It was how I hung in there. And I didn't start drinking until I was 19, which was very old. And by today's standards, we've got people in the program with five years' sobriety by the time they're 19, but I didn'T start until Iwas 19. I was in college. I was trying to get good grades and be an athlete and all these things, but Ididn't fit in well. i was like a loner and you know people made me nervous and everything made me nervous and i just felt ill at ease and one night at my roommates are saying come on everybody's drinking you got to start drinking you're in college i mean you know you can sophisticate no no not gonna have any of that stuff i don't need it in my life and all that well there came a time when i wanted to feel comfortable i was just just too many things were going on and in a social situation where there's a lot of people in this room and i was supposed to meet them and i couldn't go up and talk to them and it just felt terrible and they all were mean looking do you ever see that that the world is just filled with people who glare at you and you just you try you want to go over and be friendly but they're all just going huh huh you know and just jesus i don't think i'll go over there now i'll come back later and go over There they'll maybe they'll be in better moods or whatever and so i ordered a drink at this thing it was like right here you just walk back over and i said let me have a something in soda i don't know if i had whiskey or scotch or whatever drank it right down and waited for what my roommates told me you're going to feel wonderful no i didn't feel anything so i went immediately back got another one and poured that down waiting to feel beautiful i didn' t feel wonderful so i got a third drink I said, I'll give it one more try, three, and then to hell with it. This stuff doesn't work. And I was sort of just drinking that, and nothing happened to me. But to this day, I can tell you that all those people that had been there when I started the first drink, they left. And they were replaced by 50 of the greatest people you have ever seen. Everybody was smiling. they were all they were looking at me like please come over and be my friend I've wanted to meet you all in my life and you know, I just looked at this world and it was just so friendly and everything and then I was different inside of me all of a sudden was this, you'll just have to wait your turn, I'll start over here and then I'll go over there and I'll tell these guys a joke and then I'll show those guys this and that. And I just had the beginning of the 14 Promises of Whiskey, and that one was you will intuitively know how to handle situations that used to baffle you. And, of course, that's... I could act totally extemporaneously. You know, it was just I had a great freedom to be myself, and I was in a world where everybody was just wonderful. That's where alcohol took me. It took me out of this other world, and it took me into this world of friendly, loving people. Now if you drank too much, you got in fights and you went to jail. So somewhere in the middle was this wonderful world, and that's the reason I drank until I got to AA. Every time I got sober, the world went back the way it was. And so I had to endure the other hard world all day long until I could go back to the good world in the evening when you could start drinking. So I just lived in two worlds. There was the sober world, and you had to stay there. It was very painful, and I hated it. It was just a, ugh. But that's where you got your drinking money. You endured that so that you'd look at the clock. You remember that clock? God, I remember thatclock. In those later years when the withdrawals would start in and you really needed a drink, it was not only were you uncomfortable being around people sober, but now the physical stuff. And I can remember this later on in the Marine Corps, and it would be happy hour or not happy hour. You could get off work at 4.30 and then go to the bar. It was a happy hour every day as far as I was concerned. And I would look at the clock, and it Would be quarter after four. And I'd go 15 minutes, and I'm out of here. But if you look at The Clock, you just keep looking at it, God damn thing won't move. days that so it was quarter after four and i remember saying don't look at the clock it'll take forever to get to 4 30. get busy with something and so i got some papers out i think i was working on some um court-martial and i had some papers and i said i'm going to just totally study this whole case and take my mind off of what time it is so i went work work work work work work and look back up and it's 16 after you know what i mean only only one minute went by to work work busy busy busy and that's because i needed a drink real bad and the clocks just slowed down when it was that and uh then i jump in my car drive over to the officers club go up to the bar bartender would come over and he'd say the usual and i would say go ahead and wait on him I'm not in a hurry that was that was my you know because I didn't want anybody to think I have a drinking problem so I'd always and then he'd wait on that guy and I'd say oh I'll have a triple scotch on the rocks boom and get that down and then I as soon as that drink hit I would wonder what it was I was so upset about when I came in there you know it just came over me it just went peace it just took a while I went down the legs and did all these things but the last thing that alcohol just came over my head and just said peace be with you you know and then i would stand there just going you know when i walked in here i was just so and now i don't remember what it was that was even bothering me it's the wonderful freedom from all of life's problems that alcohol could cause inside of me it did something inside of me to make the problems disappear. They weren't figured out. I never discussed any of them. They just weren't up in my head torturing me. They just were sort of lifted away. The reason I go into detail about that is that's what is promised in AA by working this program, is we can get access to a power that can just lift these things that are tormenting us in our minds away. And very often, when we get talking about that in AA, we get a lot of skeptical reactions from people. You're saying if I do these stupid steps that the things that are torturing my head will just be removed magically? And we go, yeah, that's right. Oh, I don't think that could happen. well that's what happened when we were drinking and all we have to do is think back on that that's exactly what happened the alcohol took us away from those problems it just lifted us away and we had freedom from them as long as we had the alcohol in us as long we had that power inside at least that's why I'm here that's how it did for me so my plan was why couldn't we drink during working hours you'd have a better worker You'd have a guy who's free of all those problems. But the Marine Corps was not buying into that, drinking during the working day. Anyway, I was a pilot in the Marine Corp, and I got my drinking money flying airplanes, and it was exciting, and i had a lot of fun, but i was mostly an alcoholic. And that's what my story is all about, was externally you could see, gee, looks like this guy's doing all right, but inside he's about to crash and burn. And so we're great pretenders, you know, externally. You have to carry that out. You have the power to do it. You have got to pretend that everything's all right. That's one of the great prices that alcoholics have to pay. This is the one disease that kills people and you have to pretend that nothing's wrong while you have it. I don't know any other disease. If you get cancer, you don't go around pretending you don' t have it and if you have whatever high fever and you're throwing up you don't pretend that you're healthy you just tell everybody I'm dying but alcoholism you have to pretend that nothing's wrong or somebody's going to suggest you stop drinking and that you know would be because they don't understand so we better not ever let those people know that this stuff is bothering us because that'll give them the doorway in and therefore you're dying inside and when people say how you doing you go all right hey great remember that just trying to pretend that everything was fine so they wouldn't get in your face and come in there especially people close to us who wanted to save us and we thought they were meddling and just simply trying to help us because they could see that we were dying and we just pretended, no, no I'm fine. I don't need help. I do not need anything. Everything is cool. Just throwing up a little blood whoa, whoa, no problem. Some spaghetti I had and all that but we had to keep people away so it is, isn't it ironic that you have to pretend that you feel fine even though you are dying inside because that's the only way to keep the game going and I knew they would come after my drinking and that was my life So anyway, there came a time when I was getting withdrawal symptoms in airplanes and I was scaring the hell out of myself and probably other people. And the doctors thought that something ought to be done. And so I was sent down. And this was the dark ages of alcoholism. And at least in the military, they had no alcohol programs. They had no diagnosis of alcoholismo. Nobody ever went to the hospital because of alcohol. You went in for depression or whatever, but you didn't have alcohol. And so when they examined me, they found I had high blood pressure. I was sweating all the time. I smelled of alcohol. This was down on the paper. Patient smells of alcohol, you know, like, wow, I wonder what this is all about. hands trembling, all these things that were happening in airplanes, bloodshot eyes, confusion, couldn't count backwards from 100 by 7s, couldn't remember his name all the time, mind problems, etc., etc. And so they looked at me for two weeks, just studied me, and all the medical doctors couldn't find anything, so they left it up for the psychiatrist. They said, this must be a psychiatric problem. And the psychiatrist, my diagnosis, and I still have the paperwork, was childhood fear of flying. That was what was causing all these things that were happening to me. So they told me I couldn't fly anymore. And I was sent back up, and they said, just keep them out of airplanes, and everything will be all right. and so I was waiting and that hurt because that was my whole identity fighter pilot and this and that and now I'm not going to be that and two months later I got my orders for my new career as an air traffic controller so that's what I did somehow I made it through air traffic control school which is a very hard school and now I'm working planes in bad weather when they can't see the runway. So my life is no longer in jeopardy. And if you cover up one eye, you only see one runway. I'm only kidding, only kidding. The truth is that I was sent overseas my last year of drinking and I was the officer in charge of an air traffic control unit in Japan and the men in the squadron took one look at me and they just said, Captain, come on down to the unit whenever you want. Hang around, leave your bike over here, play horseshoes. Stay the hell away from that radar. we don't want you involved because i was you know just daily drinking now i didn't have any of this yet it's no drinking 24 hours before you fly or 12 hours whatever it was and so i was just became a daily drinker and that was my last year drinking and um i just was maintenance drinking i was trying to not shake i was trying to just hold it felt like i was going to just come on glued i mean And I was losing weight. I had malnutrition. And I just trembled all the time and sweating. So my job was to just try to show up every day and all that. And it was, you know, it was just a year of terror. I mean, just I can remember little things. We got paid in cash in those days. And payday, I needed payday so that I could buy booze. I mean this was very important. You know, like I'm out of money. I was out of many. and i need a drink so if i can go get paid i can go buy booze it's that simple so i get in the pay line and i'm getting closer and i can feel how shaky i'm get now in order to get paid you have to put your id card up there and then sign your signature in a little teeny line and it matched your id guard and i knew my hand was shaking too much to sign so it would come up and all of a sudden they'd go yes sir and I'd go and I check my hand and I go no way and I say I don't need any money and I walk away and then I go borrow some money so that I could buy some booze so that I could get back in line to get the money to pay it back to the guy you know what I'm saying I mean this is that's alcoholism I mean those those are bizarre problems and non-alcoholics watching this would go would you run that by me again let's see you're in the line and you say I don't need any money so you go borrow some money to get some boo so you can get back in line to get the money to get something but everybody in this room goes right I know that story you know and you just sort of pat yourself on the back well I just solved that problem I was always coming up solving problems I haven't told this one in years but this also occurred in that tour overseas I had been out God this is a terrible story been out drinking I guess and went racing around and obviously had stepped in several banjo ditches And if you remember what those are over there, they just sort of send everything down the banjo ditches that go through our sewer pipes. And I'd just gotten all over my shoes and I slept in my shoes. And no, I came home and I just took them off. I just didn't untie them. I took them away. I took him off and left him on the... And I woke up the next day around noon and the package store closed at one o'clock for inventory every Saturday afternoon for like four hours. and I was totally out of booze and the shakes are coming and I got maybe 15 minutes to get to the package store before it closes so I'm putting the clothes on and I'm looking at the watch you know, you've got 9 minutes to go you remember how everything was like a goddamn emergency this is an Alfred Hitchcock thing that's going on on the edge of my bed it's just, Jesus am I going to make it or not so I get the shoes and I try to put them on and the knots have dried and shrunk and so the the leather in the shoelace has and it won't come undone you know and it's four minutes and and i got a fork and i'm working on this thing you know it's just you know hyperventilating and all these things going with these get one done and then the other and i get over there and it'S and the guy's just locking it up and i go could you please there. I've company coming, you know, that whole story. Open it up and give me a quart of vodka, you know? And he said, all right. And he opened the thing up and I come back and I get the quarter and I drink and then I'm sitting there. Now I'm grown up again, right? The alcohol goes down and it's like, all Right. You know, and I started going, this is unacceptable. I remember I was taking my own inventory. This is unacceptable! You're a grown man, you're 33 years old, You're captain of the Marine Corps. You have six kids. You're sitting on the edge of the goddamn bed with a knife, and you're going... Your hands are shaking. You have to do something. I remember this. You must do something, and I sat there, and I had this little grin on my face like, right, and I got up, went over to the PX, and bought a pair of loafers. It just kind of went, well, what's the next problem? You know, just bong. We tackle these problems head on, just right in there. I still remember that, and I'm sure everybody here has had one of these alcoholic solutions where you just come up and do it. Anyway, I did end up after that final year of drinking with a seizure. And that's what got me going. And I was sent to Bethesda to see what caused the seizure. And while I was in Bethesда, I had DTs. You know what I mean? I just started freaking out. I was hallucinating. I saw all these things and I was writing down all these things that were happening to me. It was like Mission Impossible. The walls were moving and they were, The hospital was conspiring against me, and it was unbelievable the stuff that was going on and scared everybody around me. So I was put in a straitjacket, and then I was up in the nut ward, and I was left there for six months just locked up with crazy people. And in that environment, AA came in, and they brought a meeting into Bethesda, and I think it still meets up there on Tuesdays, and that's how I got to AA. a corpsman came into the nut ward after i've been there locked up about four months and he said all drunks fall in right face we get in the elevator and we go down to an aaa meeting so that was aa and that introduced me to aaa when i was let out as an outpatient i drank for a couple of weeks smuggling booze back and forth into the not ward and i knew i was going to get caught so i thought i'd join the real aaa out here and i called inner group and they sent this sponsor over this huge marine he's still my sponsor and i tell this story because it's such a wonderful story last august was his 30th anniversary his name is bill t um he's in this area he's down at quia harbor but it was his thirtieth anniversary in aa so i decided to take him out to dinner to celebrate and we went to dinner in a german restaurant right outside the marine base of quantico and the german restaurant used to be the house i lived in when he 12-stepped me you know what i mean that's transformed it into a restaurant and so we're sitting at a table that's about as far well maybe 10 feet further than that is the front door that he came through and uh he said about halfway through the dinner he said you know it's a long way from that door to this table and uh and it really was a lot of things happened between the time he came to that through that door and um you know 29 years later and that's what i want to talk about now is you know all of us got here through the various things i did not think of that corpsman when he came into the nut ward and said all drunks fall in i mean i felt that this was a wise guy what the hell of a way to talk to me and all that i did not see him as a messenger from my higher power who was coming to rescue me from the hell i was in and was going to take me to a wonderful world and probably none of you saw the person that intervened maybe it was a cop who pulled you over from drunk driving and sent you and then a judge sent you to aa and you did not see those people as happy messengers from your god who was sending you on this wonderful thing you probably tell why they pick on me of all the drunk drivers out there tonight you know what i mean so I look back on that, and it's the beginning of a spiritual education. And what I think the lesson is in all of these events is when we start moving into the spiritual realm, things aren't what they look like. And that's one of the first ones, is when you get sent to AA, your mind tells you I can't believe it I'm being sent into this dumb thing and you say if you're typical this is the last straw I mean how bad can it get I've been in jail 50 times now I'm going one step lower I'm goin' to AA I mean you know how bad how bad can it get you know when is my luck gonna change And so AA is just about the worst thing that could happen. And it turns out it was the best thing that could ever happen in our lives. And so it looked like the worst things. And it looked this corpsman was another pain in my side, another thorn. And it wasn't. And this begins, and we get a lot of lessons. If you're new, you've got to pay attention to these lessons and start remembering that as you move along this journey of sobriety things are never going to look like what people say they are so listen to what they say and stop listening to your own assessment of the situation because your brain will tell you all the way along this wonderful journey that you're going don't go any further that's what your brain will tell us as they say well now we want you to go to a meeting every night. Now we're going to start doing the steps. Now it's time to make amends. And inside you'll be going, no, it's not the time to make amens. I don't want to do any of that. I don' t want to take a search and fear upon. It'll probably get me so upset I'll get drunk. Don't do any o f this stuff that these people are doing. No such thing as a higher power. I d' n't want any of this shit. I mean, this is what's going on in your head. And the problem is nothing here can be explained. We can share, but none of it can be explained because we're not this is not an intellectual program it's a spiritual program and so i can put it on the board i can say this is what your sobriety will look like these are the steps you're going to take and these arethe rewards you're gonna get and you can look at that and it will not make any sense whatsoever to you at all because it's not an intellectual problem solving thing it is a series of steps that you can't see the results of and it doesn't make sense that it's going to work to you the only way it becomes visible so that all of a sudden you'll go whoa i can see that now is after you do it so it's one of these things where you have to do it in order to see it you haveto experience it inorder to seeit it won't make sense ahead of time meetings don't makesense do they really they make sense to you did you Can you intellectually understand why when you went to an AA meeting and you walked in and sat down with 20 other people and the topic was resentment and you all talked for five minutes, you held hands, said the Lord's Prayer, and you went home and you feel a lot better? Why? Do you like the topic of resentment? Did you like it? Did you not like the person standing next to you? No, I don't even remember who it was. Well then, why do you feel so much better afterwards? words. Who knows? We just know that it works. You try it, you experience it, and it works, and then you believe in it. So I'm one of these guys who sort of follows the thought that Clancy threw out that the 12 steps are a series of actions that we take that we don't believe in. You don't believe in them ahead of time. You take other people's words. So What is AA? It's a big show-and-tell operation. If you're new, we parade up here and at discussion meetings all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds with all kinds amounts of sobriety. And we go, tonight we'll listen to Helen. She's a woman. She has nine years of sobrietty. Would you like to see what a woman with nine years of sobretty looks and sounds like there? And then you get to look at somebody who's been working the steps for nine years and they tell you where they were and where they are now, and then they say, if you want what we have, this is how you get there. So we stop comparing programs and we compare results. That's what we talk about in AA because a lot of times people come in here and they're smarter than the average person, and that's either street smarts or college smarts, but in both cases, a lot OF people who arrive here feel superior to some of the other less fortunates in the world. And they feel that no one can tell them anything about themselves. They are the leading expert on Fred or the leading expert on Mary, and they'll nod like this, but they're not going to be talking about anything because they know, and They can talk stuff, they can talk up a storm. Drunks can talk, God, can we talk. We just talk about anything. And you're used to out-talking people and you're at the bar and somebody brings up religion, somebody bringsup politics, and you let them have it and they're like, oh my God. And you come into AA and everybody beats you in discussions. Everybody wins. Dumb-looking guys win and smart-looking boys win and smart looking guys win real young kids come up and go bippity-bip-bop, get you what's happening in here well I'll tell you what's happening, nobody's talking theory anymore, they're just talking results, so you get through with all your and the guy said, well that's very interesting but I just never listen to people wearing a wristband sorry everything you say sounds wonderful but doesn't look like it's working so instead of listening to everything that you're capable of saying we only look at the results of your life and so you get through all talking all this stuff and then somebody just says yes that's very interesting, but I understand your family won't speak to you. Why should we follow your plan for living? It sounds wonderful, but you are not a very good advertisement for your own knowledge. I understand the sheriff's looking for you. You know what I'm talking about? Are those borrowed clothes? I see your chauffeur has your car again tonight. Okay, temporarily out of money. I see the trust officer didn't send the payment this month from the estate. So the problem is you get in here and you start talking results. I mean, what do we talk about? We get up there and we just go, okay, somebody, what are you want to say tonight? somebody i got 30 days you know you see what they're saying is that i got 30 days somebody raised their hand i got nine months doesn't say i went to yale sit down how much time you got you know what i mean and so we talk results in here no more theory nothing just results and so when When we talk about the steps, we talk about the results of this. And that's what I like to talk about. What are some of the results that have happened to me as a result of doing these steps that I didn't believe in? And the results are everything you told me would happen has really happened. In order for any of this to happen, oh, there's the clock. In order for any of this to happen, there's one major event that has to occur along the way. And it's a very difficult part of the program. You have to have the capacity to change your mind time after time after times. Because you arrive here with a whole bunch of ideas that you put together. and I arrived here with a whole bunch of ideas that I put together and those ideas sound solid and I remember coming here and I thought things through and I picked up stuff growing and I put the idea and I got to put together my plan for living and everybody here had to put together some kind of a this is how you respond to the world around you and that's your plan and people say why don't you get rid of that plan and you go because it's mine I mean, if I got rid of this plan, I'd have no plan. And they'd go, that would be better than your plan. You see? No plan would be better than you. That's not your plan, and I'm, well, what do you mean? Let me tell you, I don't want to hear your plan I can see your plan I can say the results of your plan So based on the results we get willing and it's very painful to get rid of your old ideas but that's what sobriety consists of if there's anything all the way through, all the years you're in Alcoholics Anonymous all you're going to do is find another old idea to get rid of you're gonna find another old idea to get rid off and there's an old guy named Charlie Bruton I just was quoting him, I hadn't thought of him in years He lived in this area and he was a great philosopher. And he used to say, it isn't the things that you don't know that kill you. It's knowing things for sure that just ain't so. And that's what I brought here and that's what I think everybody else brings here. We bring in ideas that we know for sure that turn out to be wrong. and we have a whole step about that and when you're wrong promptly admit it when you are wrong promptly admit well in the beginning I don't know about you it's very difficult to be wrong I found it terrifying to be wrong and I have this one little thing with my sponsor I finally agreed with him we've been arguing about something and finally I said okay okay you're right And you know what he said? He said, no, you're wrong. Hey, it's the same thing. And he said, well, say it. You know, it was a lot easier to say, you are right, than to say... And I remember going, okay, I'll say it, I'm wrong. He said I couldn't hear you. Well, wrong, wrong. finally I had to go oh, I'm wrong and it was very hard to do that but that's what's necessary that's where all inventories are about that's all the rest of this is what else do I have in my head that I am clinging to that's wrong because that's the world that each one of us lives in is up here what your ideas are saying If your mind says there's no higher power, that's it. Then you're going to live in a world with no higher power and it's going to be very frightening. And it's just you. You're the only one. You have to try to stay sober on your own. You're going to have this and that. We have a whole chapter of that in the chapter of the agnostic in the big book. When I first saw that chapter, I thought it was the chapter where agnostics stayed sober. They just studied that chapter, and it showed you how to stay sober as an agnostic. After I read it, I realized that's not what the chapter says. The chapter in three words says, change your mind. That's what the character says. Become a former agnóstic. You're like a guy, you know, so why should you do this? Does AA convince you that there's a higher power? AA does not try to convince anybody of the existence of God. There's nowhere in AA that we try to convince anybody and prove the existence of God, but I'll tell you what we specialize in is convincing you of the need for God. The absolute need. Suppose, for example, that you were, maybe as a teenager, you had a job. Somebody got you a job in a parachute packing factory. And you went in there and you saw parachute inspector number nine was drinking. and Parachute Inspector Number 11 was a drug addict, and you saw some of the games they played as parachute packers, you know, pulling strings and doing all that. And you saw that a lot of these parachutes were put together in a very unsafe fashion, and so you decided that you did not believe in parachutes. I mean, that's just where you were. Suppose 20 years later somebody threw you out of an airplane with a parachute on. and on the way down somebody said why don't you pull the rip cord he says I don't believe in these things somebody might say well you know this would be a hell of a good spot to change your mind and just just pull the rip cord just for the hell of it just pull the god damn thing what do you got to lose for christ's sake just pull the goddamn thing okay so you don't believe in a higher power and you're gonna hit you're going to die unless a higher power comes along and enters your life you don' t have to believe just pull a ripcord pull the higher power ripcords and see what happens i mean if you don´t you´re gonna hit So it isn't that we convince you that, okay, God, walk out here and do a few autographs. We just show you the fatal nature of the disease of alcoholism and explain, unless a higher power shows up like a parachute, you hit. So why don't you take a long shot on a higher powerful before you hit? And that's how we get an open mind about a higher superpower. and so it's not a very spiritual process it's sort of a survival thing you just go maybe I'll change my mind I'm not going to look bad under these conditions changing my mind I'm about to hiss so that's it now once you do that once you understand that when you have a closed mind and you have these convictions that you're holding on to that's the weight that's burying you And when we let go, we let Go of our grasp on all those other ideas, only then can all these wonderful things come in. And that there's a lot of great things in store for you. There is a whole new perspective on the world. See, from where we are when we come into Alcoholics Anonymous, we're being totally honest when we say, from where I am, the world looks awful. And that's the truth. But it's not the truth that the world is awful. It's only from where you're looking at it, it's awful. The real world is wonderful. So we just have to get you a different view. And there's a wonderful book from Chuck Chamberlain, A New Pair of Glasses. And to me, that's what sobriety has been. Somebody finally came up and said, My God, are you trying to look at the world through those glasses? They don't match your eyes at all. That's the wrong thing. The lenses are all... Come here, come here, come here to those things. And they get the exact ones. You ever get a brand new pair of lenses and then you walk out? The first time I had contact lenses I just went out and I just said, wow! And you see everything as it really is. Not how you think it is. And to me that's the greatest gift. And you start getting a glimpse of it early on. And I'll tell you the first glimpse that you get of a reality that you never saw before. A lot of this reality has to do about how you feel about yourself and what you think about yourself and who you are. And tell me if this has happened, those of you that have been in maybe three months, somewhere's in there and you're just still struggling along and you don't have your self-esteem is still a little low and you still sort of struggling along and tell me if this hasn't happened where and you are just selfish and you just you know you are out for your own thing and you know and you were at a discussion meeting and in comes a guy in his second day and you're over at the table he's late for the meeting and he goes over to the coffee pot he doesn't know anybody probably just was sent here by something you can see because you were just there three months ago you know exactly what that look is it's panic and I don't want to be here and you know it and you see him over there getting coffee and his hand is shaking so he puts the coffee down he decides not to get the coffee and then he comes over and sits at the desk and he's looking at his watch and he says this and he does that And you relate to him. There was this sort of a secret connection that you just know what he's feeling. But you're not there yet so that after the meeting you run up and you say, hi, can I... You sort of hang back, but you think about him during the week. And you say I wonder if that guy is going to be back. And then all of a sudden you find out and you're going you know I really hope he's back. I wonder what the hell was his name? i hope this time when he's back i'm going to go up and say hello to him you know i'm gonna so you're thinking about somebody else other than yourself you're just thinking about this guy you come to the meeting the next week and he's not there you don't remember his names they can't even ask anybody if he's all right this and that 10 minutes into the meeting here he comes and he is looking better than he was he clearly stayed sober for the whole week and he goes over and he gets a cup of coffee and this time he has got some coffee in the cup And he's coming over, and he's sitting down, and inside you're going, Yay! It's sort of secret. You don't want anybody to see this, but you're Going, Yay! Now suddenly you're sitting there cheering for somebody else. Now who the hell is this with all the problems that you've got? You're sitting here cheering for someone else? That's not normal for you. So who is this that's cheering? well I'm going to tell you who that is that's the real you that is who you really are all the rest of this stuff that's not true we're getting AA starts going in and they find this part of you and they start bringing it out and you're going to find out you are a remarkably wonderful person you are a remarkably wonderful person all this other stuff it's just wrapping see we arrive here all wrapped in garbage and we assume we're garbage and sobriety consists of unwrapping and we find that that's just the wrapping paper and inside, once we get that stripped away you are a tremendously magnificent human being with all the capability to pass this message on to the next alcoholic with great dignity to convey sobriete to assume responsibility in society to have people be attracted to you they see something in you that they admire and like you've always gone out trying to get that you don't even try to get that anymore it just gets exposed it just comes out and you find that people want to be your friend you don' t have to go out and make friends people wantto be your friends they just get attracted to you you're there you're just available and all of a sudden you start changing your mind about a lot of things and that to me is what sobriety is is this great personal transformation where you get rid of the false identity that you arrived here with and you find out your true nature your true identity and how important you are as an individual to the success of all of the sobriete of everybody in this room we're all interdependent I can't get along without you you can't get along without me and we are equals we're when we come to love each other and as we love each another we love ourselves and eventually we love the higher power that gave us this whole deal and to me this is where it's at there's nothing bigger than what happens to us in these meetings all the rest of that stuff is where we go practice these principles but this is the source of your happiness and joy and love for the rest of your life. So enjoy it and thanks for having me over here tonight.