The Difference Between Asking and Humbly Asking – Sandy B.

One more, all right. Well, good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Saturday morning live group of Alcoholics Anonymous. I was here last week. Where was everybody else? Boy, did I get a lot of phone calls about being a wimp. But I guess there was a good meeting here. Anyway, I do want to extend a very special welcome to everybody here this morning. If you're new to Saturday morning live group, we hope you get something out of it and hope that you enjoy it. And if you're new to AA, you're just arriving in this fellowship of ours, why everybody in the room wants to extend a greeting to you and let you know that we all know exactly how you feel. Everybody here went through that just arriving feeling where you... You get here and you go, I don't know about this stuff. And I think they made a mistake. They meant to get the other drunk, and I don't belong here, and I'm very uncomfortable, and I'm fearful, and I don't like it, or I can't fit in, or, you know, how long does it take before I'm out of here? All of those feelings that are associated with being new, and all we can tell you to do is just disregard those and keep coming back because there's a lot of wonderful things in store for you here in AA. Unbelievable things that are going to happen as you stick around all the winners that are here. And on the other side of the coin, there's nothing but trouble if we go back out and try to engage Mr. Alcohol again. It's just terrible things. Whatever's happened so far, there's a lot more just waiting out there because alcoholism doesn't get better. It just gets worse. It's a journey down. So, please, if you're new to AA, please come back. Please stick around in spite of what your better judgment may be telling you and see what turns out here. It's customary to start with our preamble. Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strengths, and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees for AA membership. We're self-supporting for our own contributions. AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization, or institution. It does not wish to engage in any controversy. It neither endorses nor opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety. And you'll hear this read at just about every meeting that you attend. And it serves as a real good reminder to all of us exactly what AA is, what we're doing here this morning. And, um... by last count, at 250 other AA meetings every single day in the Washington, D.C. area. So that's a lot of people, a lot of groups that are doing what we're doing here. And basically, what happens is we're able to do something as a group that we wouldn't be able to do on our own. I don't understand that, but you put us all together in one room. These are alcoholics, and we're all screwed up on our own out there. You put us all together in one room. These are alcoholics, and we're all screwed up on our own out there. You put us all together in one room. These are alcoholics, and we're all screwed up on our own out there. You put us all together in one room. These are alcoholics, and we're all screwed up on our own out there. And instead of having a bigger mess, we have this miracle known as AA, where somehow one drunk is able to help the next one, and then we all win. But when you become part of a group that's succeeding, you succeed along with it. But we're all going to be fine. But when you become part of a group that's succeeding, you succeed along with it. It's just a wonderful paradox of Alcoholics Anonymous. It's just a wonderful paradox of Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, we have a few announcements to get out of the way. Now, we have a few announcements to get out of the way. One, we have... Thanks, Charlie. haven't been here before, let me explain this meeting is a little bit different than most of our AA meetings in that it's run in a classroom setting, whereas the vast majority of our meetings are speaker meetings or discussion meetings. But we do have four or five meetings just like this one, where a person who's been in AA for a while will come and go through the steps for the entire period of time. I think all the other meetings do it three steps at a time, and then each month they go back and start over again, whereas this meeting we go through one at a time, one step every Saturday morning, so that takes 12 weeks. And then we have one week on the traditions of AA and then two weeks on the history of AA, which is a lot of fun how this whole deal got started. And then we just start back through. So that's what we do here, and we hope if you're new that you find this useful. Today we're talking about step seven, which has a lot to do with humility, and we'll get to that in a minute. But since there's always new people here, I like to take five or six minutes to just review the setting in which this seventh step comes, and that is it's part of this 12-step program known as Alcoholics Anonymous. And if anybody asks you what AA is, it's the 12 steps. That's what AA is. That is exactly what individual members of Alcoholics Anonymous do in order to stay sober and happy. And that's, you got to do both. You can't just do one. You got to, it's impossible to stay over the long haul sober and miserable. That's what you do when you just stop drinking. You walk around, drinking, and you're, you can feel it. And if that's all that could happen, it would be hard for anybody to stay sober. So what happens in AA with these 12 steps, we actually get happy with not drinking. And that, to an alcoholic, probably sounds impossible. When you first arrive here, that you would wake up on a Saturday and just go, yeah, I won't be drinking tonight. Oh boy, I can hardly wait to be out tonight and not be drinking. I mean, that seems impossible. But unless that happens, how in the world are we ever going to stay sober? It'll always be a sacrifice. We're always walking around, poor me. I think all the other people are drinking and I'm not. So this is what the steps do. They enable us to be absolutely sober. And that's why we do them. Because that's the only way to have a happy life if you're an alcoholic is to get rid of this problem with thinking that you need alcohol. It's always on your mind. And so these 12 steps are designed exactly to do that. And I like to think of them as a game plan for living. That's what they are. This is the plan. In case you were in school and you didn't attend class the day they gave you the game plan, you're going to have to do it. And that's what they are. This is the plan. In case you didn't attend class the day they gave you the game plan, you're going to have to do it. There's a lot of them and it's really difficult, but I have no problem with that. And even though it's called The Great Life, it's also called The MIDDLE LINE Game Plan. The school game plan is the same as the experiment. They gave life 101. This is the deal. This is how it works. That's why we have a whole chapter on it. This is what life is all about. And this is how you get through it and have a wonderful time. And it's all contained in these 12 little steps. But it's not an intellectual game plan. It's a spiritual game plan. And this is something that most of us were not familiar with. And so it's ... there's a lot of things associated with a spiritual game plan that's different from the game plans you've been given. game plan that's different from the game plans you've been using. Somebody gives you a game plan for the football game. You look at it. Oh, yeah, I get the ball. I go over here. He stops that guy. That opens this hole. So I can see how the plan works. A spiritual game plan, you will not be able to see how it works. You will read the 12 steps, and they will make no sense whatsoever. I'm going to tell you that ahead of time. You're going to have all your problems, and someone is going to say, these steps are the solution to your problem. Oh, really? Then you read them, and they're not going to look like the solution to your problem. I'll tell you that ahead of time, because spiritual solutions don't look like they should work. AA doesn't look like it should work. You ever try to explain AA to your friends? What do you do there? We go down to the basement, and we go and have a topic. We all talk, and then we go home. Wonderful. You want to come? You could not explain AA. You could not explain AA to anyone. They would have to experience it. They would have to come and have it happen to them. And the same thing with these 12 steps. They just don't look like they're going to work. First, drinking didn't look like it should work. Did it? Did it look like when you held up that first glass of booze, and someone told you, what's your problem? You're afraid to ask someone to dance, and you don't know how to dance? Just drink this. There is courage in here, and there are 12 Arthur Murray lessons, all in this glass. Now, did it look like that was in there? Tell me, really. Did you spell it? Did it smell like there was dancing lessons in there? So you, if you never took a drink, you could still be doubting this to this day. Oh, yeah, they told me that when I was 18. Dancing lessons in a glass. Ha ha, funniest story I ever heard. But what happened when you drank it? Ba-boom! You remember that? You're out there, man. You just intuitively knew how to handle situations that used to baffle you. It was the wonderful promises of vodka. So what we're saying is, we're telling you up ahead of time. Don't be, if you're new, don't try to go, I'm going to get this. Huh, it doesn't make sense. It won't. So that's not it. This is the point. This is a package of instruction. This is what to do. You don't analyze it. You don't study it. You don't learn it. You do it. And then when you do it, the results come in. You get happy, serene, sober, and all these things. So that's what this is. It's entirely different from anything else most of us have seen. It is a plan. Clancy talks about this, my buddy on the West Coast, that these 12 steps are a series of actions that we take that we don't believe. And then after we take them, then you believe in them. So we have to do it on faith. And we do it on the faith that we get by having other drunks who tell their story. And then we go, I'm the same as that gal, or I'm the same as that guy. And he says that he did this. And that's why he's happy now. And I can see that he's happy. We have all these AA meetings and they're huge show and tell operations and people stand up and they've got 90 days or 11 years. And you get to look at what 11 years of sobriety, you get to see the results of working these steps. So it's really not that big a leap of faith. So we get attracted into trying the AA program. It's a program of attraction. You don't explain it to anyone because you never could. You just say, if you want what we have, this is how you get there. And so with that basis, then we can start into the steps. So there's no need to be so light and so on down and they're attracted to people who have achieved some sort of spiritual contentment. But we have the extra bonus that they don't have. We have alcohol. waiting for us in case we don't decide to try it. And it's out here waiting. If you're new, maybe we haven't told you this, but around every AA meeting in the grass, where the grass is about this high, are half pints of vodka, hundreds, thousands of them. And they just circle AA meetings, waiting for somebody to come out and go, the hell with this crap, I'm out of here. And then one of them jumps up so you can see the bottle. And you go, my God, I'm quitting AA, and there's a bottle up here. It must be God's will for me to drink. And you go over there, and what this alcohol is for is to motivate you to try AA. That's what alcohol is for. Oh, you don't want to try it yet? Come on over here. What about now? Are we reaching you intellectually yet? And this is the advantage that alcoholics have, that the non-alcoholics, they don't have any, the feeding up stuff on the other side, if they decide not to try to do something about their spiritual side, it will just start getting real bad, and you get sort of a midlife crisis. There's no meaning in my life, and all that. And you can stay with that no meaning all the way to the grave, and just sort of be in sort of spiritual no-man's land, and breathe your last breath, and your last thought is, I wonder what that is. What the hell is going on down here? You know what I mean? And you leave this planet without a clue. Now, we have this advantage of alcohol. This alcohol is out there going to hit us over the head with a hammer unless we try these 12 steps. And so that's the bonus that alcoholics have. The first step, and this is interesting, that if you look at spiritual programs, they're so similar throughout the world, and one thing that just about all of them have is the idea of surrendering as a way of getting in. I mean, it just seems like human beings go out, and they're just on their own, and they're trying to do everything by themselves, and then all of a sudden you get to a point where, man, everything's too much for me. Everything is too much for me. And there's this feeling that I'm not going to make it, or I just don't feel like, you know, all of a sudden we've come up against something. And in alcoholism, we call it hitting our bottom. And it is a realization that things are out of control. And our first step talks about that. It says we're powerless over alcohol, and our lives then become unmanageable. And we always talk about this step, no matter which step we're talking about, on this particular Saturday morning, because this is the doorway. This is how you get into this whole deal. And if you don't, if you don't come through here, none of the rest of it will make any sense. So the first step is the only step that has to be done 100%. The rest of them are goals that we're shooting for. But the first step has to be done 100%. We must 100% admit that we're powerless over alcohol. If you admit that you're almost powerless over alcohol, or you're almost as bad as these other people, or you have a brand of alcoholism that's slightly different, then some of the others, yours is sort of the non-Skid Row variety. You know what I'm talking about? Even if you drank until you were 100, you'd never go to Skid Row. You know, you see what I'm saying? You have a problem, but it's not like some of these other folks in here. Now you never share that, because you don't want to hurt their feelings. You know, so you just sit around, yes, I'm an alcoholic, but in your mind, you are different. And Lancey again talks about that. Every alcoholic loser that he works with in the Midnight Mission out in California, they all have the exact same thought. And this is why it's impossible to reach them, and they die of alcoholism. And the thought is, my case is different. That's what'll kill us. If we think that your case is slightly different than everyone else, then that's like a death warrant. Because that's what kills us. That means if you're slightly different, then you need a slightly different program than everyone else. You need a slightly different answer. You may not really need a sponsor. You'd like a friend, but you don't really need a sponsor. You know what I'm saying? And you're writing your own plan as you're going along. You're coming up with your own program. You're editing everything that somebody tells you. And so you end up with what I like to call the almost syndrome. You're almost an alcoholic, and you almost need the program, and you almost need a sponsor, you almost need to do the steps, you almost need to pray, you almost need a higher power, and you almost get sober. This close to almost getting sober. Now let me tell you something. Almost getting sober is like almost having a parachute. You know, I almost took one for this flight. You're out there falling, talking to the other guy. You know, I almost got a parachute. Like, what the hell difference does that make? Almost is valueless in the world of the world. And so this first step has to be the 100% I am absolutely powerless over alcohol. And when we say we're powerless, we mean when you're not drinking, you're powerless. Most of the time we think about the fact that when you drink, you get all screwed up. Well, that's a problem, but it's not a very big problem. That's like an allergy problem. Every time you eat bananas, you get all screwed up. That's a problem until you find out what the allergy is. But once you find out what it is, and the doctor says, well, I'm doing some tests here, and all that stuff where you break out and you throw up and you have all that, it's all from bananas. All you have to do is not eat bananas and everything will be fine. So you see how simple that problem is? All you have to do is not eat bananas. And they go, hey, wonderful. And for the rest of their lives, they just go around, they don't eat bananas. They say, do you want a banana split? It's a very simple problem. They don't get together with other people who can't eat bananas and have little meetings. Ah, a guy offered me a banana cream pie today. I almost took it. It's like, hey. It's a zero problem. So that's why we say if your only problem is whenever you drink, you get all screwed up, you don't need AA or anything. You just don't drink, and you'll be happy. Well, I don't see too many of us like that in here. When someone says, just don't drink and you'll be happy, we go, wrong. Why do we say that? Well, it turns out that our problem, yes, we had problems when we drank, but we had a bigger problem when we didn't drink. Because if you recall, what happens when you don't drink? You permanently stay sober. Day after day after day. And I don't know about you, but the reason I went to a bar was to take care of a problem that I had. And that problem was sobriety. I called the bartender over, and I'd never said these words, but this is what was going on. I'm sober again. Can we fix that, please? I can't stand it. If I stay sober another damn hour, I'm going to go crazy. I need relief from sobriety. And that's why I drank. To take care of a problem that was there when I had no alcohol in my system. So for us alcoholics, alcoholism has to do with a problem that exists when there's no alcohol in the system. A lot of doctors miss that. They're always studying what happens when we pour a quart of booze into a human being. The same thing would happen if we poured it into a non-alcoholic. They'd get all liver damage and puke and have all kinds of terrible things happen. It's just that they don't subject themselves to the amount of alcohol that you and I pour it in. And the reason they don't subject themselves to that much alcohol is alcohol doesn't solve their sobriety problem. They don't get a fix when they drink. They just mess around with it. It's not important in their lives like it is to us. Alcohol was the answer. Alcohol's not the answer to non-alcoholics. They have a very casual relationship with it. They screw around with alcohol like you wouldn't believe. They just tip it and let it sit there. Sometimes they walk off and leave a drink just sitting there. You know what I'm saying? I sit around people like that and have a lunch and I'm just I start getting antsy. They're just farting around with a drink they paid three bucks for. After a while you just drink the goddamn thing. What do you do with that freaking thing? What do you order that thing for? You think it's milk? I mean... And to them it was just the same thing as milk. It's just... For us it was an entirely different relationship. And so that's why we're powerless over it. We're powerless over the first drink. Our mind relentlessly tells us time for a drink. Time for a drink. Anxiety's building. Time for a drink. You're not going to be able to think clearly unless you have that drink. Your whole survival depends on you having alcohol around just to handle emergencies. You're going to need this. You better keep some money in your wallet. You better... Well, the package stores are closing. You better stock up. What the hell was stocking up? You know what I mean? Hey, something could happen where I'm going to need my friend. You see what I'm talking about? Our problem exists with no alcohol in our system. That's what alcoholism is. It is a mental obsession to constantly be thinking about this. And that's why we're powerless. On your own and on my own, with just my own resources, I will always take that first drink. That's what my history tells me. So that's what makes me powerless over alcohol. There's no way on my own I can go through the rest of my life without drinking. So I have to surrender to that fact. And that's what we mean in the first step. Once you say you're powerless, you have started a spiritual program. Because if you take a closer look at the word powerless, what does it say? It says, my problem is not ignorance. My problem is not that I don't understand. My problem is I'm powerless over taking the first drink. So if you rephrase that, I could say this is exactly what the first step says. It says, unless there's a higher power, I'm screwed. That's what the first step says. I'm powerless over alcohol. Which means unless the higher power shows up in this equation, there's no way out. That's what powerless means. I am powerless. So my job and the whole rest of the AAA program is, where do you get a power? Where do I get a power that can take care of this powerless situation? And that's what we're doing today. That's what we're talking about. And the whole AAA program has to do with how to get in touch with a power that will come in to our lives and set us free from alcohol and free from a lot of other things. So having done that, we then come to believe in a power. We make a decision that a top priority in our lives every single day has to be staying close to this power. In the beginning, we stay close to this power by going to meetings. We have the power of the meeting. We don't know what this power is. There is no AAA God. There's no definition of this power. We just have these principles that show you how to get in touch with a power. After you get in touch, you can explain it to yourself. You may explain your higher power as a God that you were taught about when you were growing up. Or you may just enjoy the wonderful results of this higher power and call it the Spirit of the Universe or whatever gave us AA or whatever you want. That's up to you to explain what this is that comes into your life. But there will be no doubt in your mind that something happens when you try this, much as it happens when you go to meetings and when your sponsor's around. You just feel more. All of a sudden, things aren't overpowering you at the end of the meeting. The world looks different after you leave the meeting than it did before you left, before you came to the meeting. The world is still the same. It's just that you are more now. And when you walk out, it's you and your higher power. It's you and the power of that meeting. And when you take a look at the world from that vantage point, it's very comfortable. Because it's not just you. That was our problem all along. It was just me against the world. And the way I answered it, it was me and alcohol against the world. And then it was a fair fight. You know what I mean? Then we had the resources to deal with this. And I didn't have fear blocking me down. I was able to function as a human being. So it's obvious that human beings need more than just themselves. That's the message of all of this. We were on a search to solve this spiritual problem. And we solved it with alcohol. We were on the right path that we needed something more than just ourselves. But we came up with vodka as our higher power. And it turned out to be a bad choice to have higher powers. Even though it was the correct analysis of the problem. We got the wrong higher power. So we come in here and we start down this path. And as I said, we talk about making decisions, turn our life over. And then we find out what is the deal about finding a higher power. And we find out we don't have to go anywhere. It's already here. It's already inside of us. Bill writes in the big book, the fundamental idea of God or of a higher power is born inside of us just like the fundamental idea of a friend. So it already exists inside of us. The problem is it is blocked. It is blocked off from us having access to it. And it's blocked off by a thing called character defects, whatever you want to call them. These are the ego-driven part of ourselves that comes flowing out of our instinctual drives that we talk about in the fourth step. And so we have all these things that are in our inventory, all these things that could be blocking us from this power. And we call them character defects. For lack of a better word, sins, character defects, blockages, shortcomings, as the seventh step calls them. The whole gist of sobriety, all the way up into prayer and meditation, is to open the channel further to this power. Getting more things out of the way. The entire program is conscious contact in the eleventh step. Spiritual awakening in the twelfth step. All of that simply means an open channel. Simply means no longer am I blocked off from this power that comes in that enables me to see the world in a very comfortable fashion. Remember being cut off in a bar? Those were the death words, right? You are cut off! Well, you could have said, I'm blocking your channel. And it's the same thing. No more will there flow into you the power to enable you to be joyful. No more drinks will be flowing to you. And so, when you get cut off, it's the same thing in our character defects can choke off this power that's inside of us. So it's there, this higher power, it's always been with us. It's always there in full force. But since we were able to block it, it caused us, honestly, totally honestly, to conclude there was no such thing. I never saw any evidence of a higher power. No, never saw one around here. And you could have a lie detector on you and you would register telling the truth. So it wasn't there. But it doesn't mean that it really wasn't there. It simply means it was blocked out. And that all we have to do is take action that will get things out of the way and we're on our way. So we talked about in the last week, and then we inventoried these things and talked about with another human being all these blockages, character defects in Step 4 and 5. And then we talked last week, or two weeks ago, about Step 6. We're entirely ready to have God remove these defects of character. And we talked about how difficult it was to get willing to get these removed because we like some of them. We like lust. We like gossip. We like greed. We like envy. We like anger. Sometimes we like being angry. It makes me feel superior to other people. It gives me a real burst. Those jerks out there. Grrrr. You know, it's like there's a certain number of these things that I like and I'd like to tone them down. But I don't want to get rid of them. Totally. And the sixth step is we're entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. So my ego stepped in and said well, let's get rid of some of that. And then we learned the lesson that there's no help available to get rid of some. It's very... It'd be like getting down on your knees at night and saying a prayer that went God, make me be semi-honest. Let me just rip off people half as often as I'm doing now. You see what I mean? I don't think those would work too well because it'd be like calling your sponsor and saying I'm thinking of having a drink. And what's going to happen? He's going to come over and stop it. Because he's a power greater than you are and he's going to come in and insist on absolute sobriety. So we found out in the sixth step, one of our dilemmas is the only help that's available is perfect help. And that seems a little extreme. And so we had to wrestle with that in the sixth step. And then we get to the seventh step, humbly ask him to remove our shortcomings. Shortest step in the book. The truest number of words, easiest ones to conceptually understand. We've got some sort of a higher power, whatever your definition of a higher power is. You've made a list of all the shortcomings, you've gotten willing to the best of your ability to have these character defects removed. And now all I have to do is humbly ask. And so I can remember the first time that I said humbly ask. And my sponsor says, the heart of this step now is to understand the difference between just asking and humbly asking. Suppose our assignment this morning was write a paper on the difference between just regular asking and humbly asking. I think this would create a problem. As you sit there with the pencil. Let's see. The essential difference between asking, regular old asking, and humbly asking. I'd be looking over at other people's papers, you know, to see if I could get some kind of a clue here as to what that might be. And Bill writes about that. He says, humility has not had a big time of it in our society. You don't see beer ads. Drink Miller Lite. Get humble. You know what I mean? You don't see heroes on all the shows. Just a humble little guy walking around with the lead in the show. You know what I'm saying? Humility is just not being promoted. Well, Bill goes on to write, no, it's not being promoted because mankind is convinced that through their own efforts, they will be able to make this a better planet. That eventually we'll have scientific breakthroughs. Once we have these scientific breakthroughs, we'll be able to create so much food and wealth and prosperity that there'll be enough for everyone and that'll take care of all the problems on the planet. And that's what man's pride is telling him. And so we pursue this. And that's where we're geared up. We're off to... There are certain demands that we have inside of ourselves and we go racing off to fill those demands. And that's the way we see things from an egocentric point of view. Spiritual programs, the spirituality is saying, well, there's a flip side to that. Why do you want to go meet all those demands? Well, I want to meet all those demands so that I could have contentment. Well, the spiritual program says, what if we could get rid of the demands? And I remember the first time I heard that. Get rid of the demands? Yeah, what if we could get rid of your demand to have a Cadillac? Then not having a Cadillac would make you just as happy as having a Cadillac. Oh, I don't know about that. I don't know about that. I don't think I like that solution. I don't think I like that. Oh, really? Well, let's look back at the solution to the problem of your desire to drink. When you had a desire to drink, your answer before was, go get 8,000 gallons of booze. And then you could always meet your desire to drink. You just keep pouring it in whenever you had a desire to drink. The program came in and said, no, we're going to work on the flip side of that. We're going to show you a path you can follow so your desire to drink will go away. And it did that. And you found wonderful freedom. You found contentment and peace of mind. Bill talked about the fact that prior to working a spiritual program, we only knew three things. Excitement, depression, or anxiety. That's it. You're either in one of those three stages, which is why I sought excitement. Because when the action was going, if the party was going, I wasn't depressed or anxious. You know what I'm talking about? As soon as it ended, I went back to depression or anxiety. I never had a glimpse of what peace of mind was. Where you just sort of sit on a park bench and smile. You know what I'm saying? People who can do that are on drugs. I don't care what you're talking about because I've gone over when no one's looking to a park bench and sat there and there wasn't any fun. Did any of you ever do that? You said, what? Just go sit in the park and enjoy life. So I go sit in the park. I'm anxious. I'm worried somebody's looking. I'm worried I don't have enough money. I mean all that shit's going on in my head and I'm sitting there and the birds are flying by. I'm worried they're going to crap on me. You know. So I had no glimpse of this because I was coming from that perspective of constantly inventorying what was missing in my life and how am I going to get it and where do I have a date tomorrow and am I going to be getting this. You've got to keep track of everything because you're in charge and coming in here is total surrender to all of that. We're going to try and eliminate all those demands on you. So this whole thing about having things removed was entirely foreign to me. So we get back to this thing about humility. We said now we're describing mankind and all of that and we're going to vent stuff and blah blah blah. And Bill writes, Mankind's pride is saying we can get it done. Look up in the dictionary under humility and it says a total absence of pride. And I remember the first time I saw that I went a total absence of pride? Like zero pride? I'd be walking around with no pride. I'd have no pride in my work, no pride in this, no pride in that. I mean that sounds communistic. That was my first thought. I know what they're trying to do. I was in the Marine Corps at the time. A few proud men and all that. No pride. And I said, geez if we had no pride, we'd have no Marine Corps and the communists would take over the country. That's how ingrained I was into thinking pride. It was the heart of my ego was pride. And you know when they talk about the seven deadly sins, pride leads the list and it's not by accident that pride leads the list. I'm I've even been to AA groups. Maybe you've been there too. Where they've listed all the character defects. Back in the old days when they'd get a member of the group to hand paint them on a big piece of wood. You'd go around to some of the old groups. Mark my word they're going to have things like 70 character defects on there and you won't see pride on there. You'll see false pride. False pride is like the pride other people have. As opposed to my pride which is good pride. You see what I'm talking about? Even within the program where pride had a PR man that's up there trying to get him in to still be good. Must be some dimension of pride that is good. And I hung on to that. By the time I was six or seven years then I was still in my mind wrestling with there must be some god damn role for pride somewhere. Well I'll tell you what the role for pride. Pride is a wonderful power to get things done if you're not going to use a higher power. You know what I'm saying? Because pride is your own higher power. Pride says I don't need a higher power. So if you're trying to work a spiritual program it's the most dangerous thing to have. Because people think why don't you go rely on your higher power. And pride goes you don't need a higher power. You don't need any of that. And so it works. It's totally against us. In trying to grow spiritually. Pride is always running in closing your twelve and twelve. Oh you don't need to read that. Just rely on me. Where's your self worth? Where's the old that wonderful thing I always thought the greatest drinking song if I was still drinking my philosophy would be I did it my way. That great song I did it my way. Doesn't that sound good? I did it my way. Didn't rely on anybody. I'm in jail. I'm going to die soon. But I got here. You know what I mean. It's like you didn't see me chickening out and asking for help anywhere along in life. I just screwed up all by myself. And there's something wonderful about that. We think that when we die people are going to write folk songs about him. He went to jail and he never asked for help and what a hero. And he was wonderful and he hung in there and that's the way we see the world seeing us. And then we die and they write a song. What an asshole. All he had to do was raise his hand and we would have saved him and given him the kingdom of heaven. But he said screw you. I'm going to just be me. Yeah well you are. So we know that. We revel in admiring the ego. But it's killing us alcoholics and we have to do something. So humility is an awareness of the nothingness of ourselves and the totality of a higher power. And the problem with the 7th step. The essence of the problem. The real difference between humbly asking and regularly asking. I remember the first time I was trying to I said well I'm going to ask to get these removed. And I'm going up in my bedroom. Shut the door so nobody will see me. I said what are you doing? I'm asking to get these things removed. I didn't know how to explain that to anybody because I wasn't sure what was going on. So I got up in the room and I said humbly. So I guess I should be sort of humble while I'm asking. What the hell is humble? And I remember seeing a movie I think it was Big Crosby and somebody going my way and there was a nun in it. And throughout the entire movie she was humble. I remember her face. It had a look on it. So I figured get your list of what you're trying to get rid of. And get in front of the mirror and get humble. God? No. God? No. And that was humble. I didn't know what the hell humble was. I had no idea what humble was. And I'm sure a lot of you don't either. And that's why you're laughing along with this. What the hell is all this? It's getting rid of self centeredness is what humility is. It is getting rid of the perspective that we have as a self centered person. Self centeredness would be like a pair of binoculars that have been in the ocean that had frozen on the close up zoom. And that's where self centered person is. The first thing you have to do is become a horseshoe. We're just going to change you. There's certain steps you go through in order to become a horseshoe. And you're out of here. Alright. So they grab one, stick it in the fire until it gets red hot. Put it on the anvil. Blam. Blam. Punch holes in the hot water. Back in the fire. The smoke is coming up. Finally they hold it and go, now there's a horseshoe. And are you ready to get out of here and get on the horse and go? And they're all looking and it's disgusting. Well, maybe it ain't that bad up here on the shelf. There are a lot of second thoughts about whether I want to do something about my life. And so humility, the difference between asking and humbly asking is it is fully explained what's involved if you ask. Yeah, it's a process like that horseshoe just went through. Now do you still want to ask? And if we still want to ask fully understanding what's involved, then we're coming closer to this humbly asking. That I am yeah, I understand exactly what the whole deal is and I still want to do it. We're out of time. We've got a great way to wrap this up with the Lord's Prayer. For anybody who would care to join in. Father, for heaven, thy will be done. Thy will be done. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen. Keep coming back. It works if you work it.