The Experiment of the Four Zeros – Sandy B.

Thank you. The old knees are getting sore, so if I can sit, it really helps. Hi everybody, my name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic. How y'all doing? this has been a wonderful week and you all have treated Sue and I with such grace and warmth that I don't think we'll ever forget it it's just been absolutely delightful I've enjoyed all the speakers in the workshops it's really been quality really quality you can tell that But everybody who is participating has experienced the point of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is to be reborn with a personality change that causes an entire new way of looking at everything. And in that sense, we are so lucky. And I think about Alcoholics Anonymous, and where it is now, I guess 140 countries and three and a half million miracles have taken place. Maybe 150,000 AA groups all over the world. and as I think about AA and I think about my life I'm going to just tell you this is really amazing but I'm gonna try and talk about both at the same time by telling you this that when I was one a guy named Roland Hazard was on his way to Switzerland to see Carl Young who sent him to the Oxford group so that when I was two, he went and got Ebi Thatcher and brought him to Alcoholics Anonymous. And when I Was Three, Ebi went and caught Bill Wilson and brought them into the Oxford group. And when i was four, Bill went out to see Dr. Bob and when I was five they had started Alcoholics Anonymous and when i was eight they had written the big book AlcoholicsAnonymous so I'm sitting there in second grade I'm totally unaware of all of these of all these events that are going to have the biggest impact on my life more than anything else and when I was 18 I had my first drink at Yale University and on that very year there was a botanist named Jelnik who did the first comprehensive study on alcoholism sponsored by Yale University and I've often wondered if I'm in there anywhere as he observed the downside. You remember the Jelnik curve? And he probably saw people like me and saw them on their way down. And a couple years later, AA held its first international convention and they adopted their traditions and I was just on the verge of being expelled from the university. And so what I'm trying to say is that all of this has taken place in my lifetime. I mean, this is an amazing phenomenon to have something like this and when I was born there was no hope for alcoholics. They just went into insane asylums or died or were put in prisons or whatever. But there was absolutely no place for the suffering alcoholic to go. And I think the other thing that I forgot to mention when I was 10, this is a landmark, was when Rockefeller held that black tie dinner in New York. and legitimized Alcoholics Anonymous, took away the stigma and essentially stuck himself way out. A lot of people ridiculed him, but he essentially said, and all the papers covered it, that this is a legitimate organization and you should be grateful if you have one in your community because it is going to do wonderful things. And his secretary, Willard Richardson, wrote about that, that when he just observed this in the first four years, he saw that this was one of the most precious things, and he'd been involved in all kinds of charitable works and looking for wonderful things to support, and he saw this. He saw Alcoholics Anonymous and what it was all about. And I was just thinking about how wonderful AA is. And I'm thinking if they could find a spiritual filter for Google Earth so that you could put that on and then just zoom anywhere you want and spiritual energy would show up. And I think they would find, if they were studying it, that there was these pockets all over that were kind of hard to explain because this spiritual blossoming would take place just for an hour. And then it would just fade away. But it would be back the following week at exactly the same time. And they would see this big burst. And in that pocket of spiritual energy would be all kinds of different sparkles and different bursts of energy. And it reminded me of the wildflowers of Crested Butte when we took that tour. And everywhere you looked, there was this incredible beauty. And I think that would show up on that Google Earth if they could go around. And I think it would be amazing that they would just look in all these countries and they would see this amazing burst of spiritual energy and wonder, what is that? You know, and they'd go find out a little bit about a program called Alcoholics Anonymous. That's how I feel about AA. It is clearly God-given. And I just thought, you know, when we talk about a higher power, we can only surmise. There's no way of understanding. Most of the time when we're talking about God, it's through stories. And that's why I was talking about the egg yesterday. And throughout history, that's been the only way to talk about a higher powers but through a story or a parable or something. And certainly the AA history is just filled with these. The humans wanting to go in one direction and the spiritual force, no, we're not going to have paid missionaries. We're not gonna have a chain of drunk tanks. As a matter of fact, we'RE NOT GONNA HAVE ANY MONEY AT ALL. I'M GONNA KEEP YOU GUYS BROKE FOR YEARS. I mean, look at Bill. You know, here he is getting the AA started and getting evicted from the townhouse in Brooklyn. And then the AA people loaning him a car. He'd stay in the summer camp. He'd say over here and all the time he's dreaming of the big donation from Rockefeller. And it didn't turn out that way. But the energy that we all put in to advancing this wonderful society or fellowship pays off. And it comes out in so many unique ways. Who would have dreamed up this conference? I mean, I'm sure the first year you had a certain amount of the things you have now. And then every year you added something and people came up with ideas. And then you end up with almost a masterpiece. piece. I've been to 600 of these conferences, and this has to be up in the top ten, just the way it's organized. And that just, and I'm sure that all the people on the committee will agree that God had a lot to do with that. In the middle of your arguing and this and that. Then it turned out a different way, and when it did, you went, wow, that's better than mine. So anyway, I just wanted to tell you how amazing it was to be here for both of us. And I'll tell you a little bit about my story, and then I like to talk about the fellowship because it's so much fun to do that. So very briefly, I grew up in, obviously in the early 30s in New Haven, Connecticut. Just before I forget, I've got six children, two girls are in AA, my boys all, I had seats reserved for them and they went to college, they got into drugs, alcohol, trouble. I just went, man, right, they're taking after their father. And then each one of them in his own way said, well, enough of that. I think I'll just straighten out and become a good citizen. And part of me was happy, but part of me was very, very let down. But my daughters, two of them, made up for the three boys in spades and upholding the family tradition, and they're members of AA. I also have 15 grandchildren, and they're all over the United States, and whenever I travel, I try to visit them, and they're very excited about Alcoholics Anonymous. They come to a conference if I happen to be in that town. So anyway, I grew up there, and And my parents were a product of the Depression, and so they had to work very hard. They supported my sister and I, did a wonderful job. I never felt like I belonged. I don't know where that came from. My mother was Catholic. I went to the Catholic Church. My sister sat next to me in the Catholic church. And to this day, she loves it and considers it the most friendly place she ever went. She just thought the nuns were cute. The Latin was cute. Purgatory was cute. Everything was cute and she got nothing but comfort and peace from the entire presentation. I, on the other hand, made up a different story about what they were telling to me and it scared me to death. I was terrified to be in there. And they just knew they were getting me. I never wanted to die because the punishment was going to be so severe and so not much comfort. And I was about eight years old. And sometimes you have these spiritual insights and I was sitting in the front pew staring at the crucifix, which was about 20 feet tall hanging from the ceiling. You could not miss it. And it was as if it spoke to me and it said, little boy, do you see this? Well, yes. Well, this is what God did to his only son that he loved. and guess what he's going to do to you. I think I fainted and fell out of the pew and they carried me out of church. So I found it obviously very conflicted inside of myself, but at an early age I learned one thing. Don't talk to people about anything. So I spent the rest of my life explaining everything to me. On my own. And so that's where all of my old ideas came from that became so frightening and disorienting and all of that was just I made them all up and I stuck to them. Once you lock in an idea, you're not going to change it or you'll look weak. Even if it's obvious you're wrong. It was something about I know I'm in jail but I got here. You see what I mean? I did this. but I did well in school and I ended up in a little prep school and I was a good athlete I had very high grades and it was a pipeline right into Yale I got down there and all these people came from around the United States and they were all rich and smart and they all knew what was going on and I knew I didn't belong there and I know that sometime during that freshman year the dean was going to call out about a thousand freshmen And he was going to announce on the old campus, gentlemen, we have an imposter in our midst. And there he is. And they were going to finally expose me for what I was and get me out of there. Well, it didn't happen. And I was very nervous at all times. I just couldn't fit in anywhere. But I hadn't had a drink yet. And my roommates are telling me, geez, you're 18 years old. You ought to be having drinks. This is what college is for, to make you feel good. And I've talked about this in every time I give a talk, that I went to a social event and I was supposed to meet these other 28 guys, and I couldn't. I'd walk up to a group, and with their eyes, I don't know if you're aware of this, but people can communicate things to you with their ears. With their eyes. And as I approached each group, they looked at me and made it very clear they did not want to know me and would appreciate it if I would go somewhere else. But that group didn't want to know me, and I never met anyone. And I was about to leave, which is what you do when you can't handle the situation. Look at the pressure I was under. And there was a bar there, and so I decided to have a drink, even though I was going to try and stay away from that stuff. And I had two and a half, and I was on that third one, and I had the feeling it wasn't working. So I put it down, I was just ready to leave and I looked back at the guys and everyone in the room was looking at me and their eyes were saying, I'd give anything to be your friend. I couldn't believe what had happened. The world that I lived in was so wonderful. I mean, these people were wonderful. I was so excited I started running over to the first group. And on my way over, I had the feeling they were right. They would be lucky to know me. God bless it. And I just intuitively knew how to handle everything, social, you know, conversation. And as the evening went on, I realized that alcohol had removed all these barriers to me and my creativity. I could now be me. I'd never been me before. I was always hiding in there somewhere, and I thought to myself, you should have started drinking at grammar school. This is amazing. So alcohol didn't change me, but it changed the world that I lived in. And all of a sudden, I loved this world. I loved the world. Oh, I just talked about it, but It went away when I got up in the morning, and I was back in the old world, the scary world. So I could hardly wait for the day to get over so that I could go down and enter the technicolor world. And very soon, the priority became drinking. And my grades started to get bad. I didn't seem to care too much about studying anymore. I gave up on making the track team. And I started getting in fights. I went to jail a few times. and it was obvious that a lot of trouble was coming. But as far as I was concerned, all of that trouble was a small price to pay for what I got out of drinking. And that's why I'm an alcoholic. Because a non-alcoholic wouldn't tolerate all that trouble because they weren't getting what I was getting. I thought it was easily worth the price because I was being transported into a wonderful world where I just thought it Was marvelous. In a way, it really was the equivalent of a spiritual experience. It was the transformation of my own reality into something marvelous. And it all took place inside of me without anything out there changing at all, which is what spirituality is. We get absolutely happy with the situation and the situation never changed. We just are suddenly comfortable in our own skin and comfortable because we're near a higher power. It is the power that does the work. In any event, the Korean War was going on, and they were drafting everybody. So a group of us had some beers and went down to join the Marine Corps. And I did not know what was in store for me. I took my golf clubs. It was a strange, and I did not understand what they were talking about when they told me where to put them. What? And so there was the boot camp thing for ten weeks, and then, but you know, as ridiculous and severe as it was, Part of me also liked it because I was being disciplined. There was something good happening to me that I would never do on my own. And I got out of there and it took six months to become a platoon leader. And during the course of that training, I saw a movie about pilots, a training movie. And that caught my eye. I had never been in a plane, but these guys looked cool. They had the scarves, they were talking with their hands at the bar. And then they showed some of the planes and the carriers. And I just went, God, boy, that's great. So I asked this major, I want to sign up for that. And he said, no, you'd have to sign it for three more years. No, no. I'll do it. So I signed up. I passed the test. I had met this woman from Connecticut who was to become the mother of our six children. And we hit it off, got married. And I'm off to Pensacola to become naval aviator number 4,000 or whatever. now I got air sick on the civilian plane going down to Atlanta and then I got air sick going to Pensacola and then air sick in the old SNJ and things were not looking good for this hot shot aviator but it turned out it was motion sickness and it did go away and then i became great at it, i would be number 2 or number 3 and it was a wonderful 18 months going through all that training and formation and gunnery and the carrier and everything. And finally, down in Corpus Christi, Texas, I got my wings and went off to the Fleet Marine Force. Spent a short five months in El Toro in California and lived on Balboa Island and man, life was great. Now I got me orders to a fighter squadron in Japan and the war is over. And so the main job was to fly high-performance planes and drink. And I just loved it. I loved the squadron. I loved the idea of being part of a unit. We all drank together with the colonel there, and then we had our table, and you flew hard, and you just did whatever was asked of you, but then when it was over, however long the day was, then you went and you partied just as hard as you worked, and it was all done as a unit, and we all were getting drunk. We're doing this. We'redoing that. And I just felt like I was the same as everybody else, that this was just marvelous. And about eight months into it, we were getting ready to go aboard the carrier and we were practicing field carrier landings. And I was out in the end of the runway with one of my heroes, the maintenance officer, a big red-headed Irishman named Major Newport. And I Just listened to everything he said, you know. He was great. And he started talking about, you know, Sandy, in about two years I'll be eligible to be a lieutenant colonel and I can get my own squadron. He started talking About how happy he'd be to have his own fighter squadron and how he'd give nothing but the best pilots. And then he said, I want you. Well, I mean, you're a young lieutenant and this guy, I Want You. I just felt like a million dollars. And then He said, But I wouldn't let you drink. And I was shocked. I just, why would he say that? I mean, he gets drunk right with me. What is this? And it wasn't until I got to AA and I learned about alcoholism that I learned that even in a crowd of really big drinkers, my drinking scared them. You know what I mean? There was an intensity. There was something that you can spot that isn't casual you know what I mean or situational see these guys when we went back to the states they went back to what's normal drinking back in the states I just kept right on and so you know we got transferred around I was a forward air controller flight instructor and a photo pilot during the Cuban Missile Crisis and during that time we had six children and I got promoted to first lieutenant I got promoting to captain so on the outside you could say look at this guy He's doing pretty good. He's got the big family. He's flying these planes, blah, blah. Must be nice to be that guy. Well, you would have made a bad trade if you had decided you wanted to trade places with me because it was about to end. All of the finality of alcoholism was taking place inside of me and everything was starting to close in and I was starting to get very apprehensive about flying with me because I was having withdrawal symptoms, because I didn't drink for 12 hours. I would lose vision. My heart was racing. I would get up there and just feel like I'm going to pass out. And it was just awful. And I kept that up for about a year and didn't crash anything or have any accidents. But there were close calls that I knew about I took a crusader off of Cherry Point one day and you had to put the wing down real fast and I hit the engine master switch shut the engine off about 10 feet off the ground went, oh my god and turned it back on and there was this boom and it relit and later I talked to the maintenance officer you know how you want to find out something so you ask hypothetically let me record it hey Walt Hypothetically, if you shut off the engine master and turned it right back on, what are the odds of it relighting? And he said, it won't. You know, so I just went, oh. You know like zero. So anyway, I was frightening myself to death. I was very sick. And I finally went to the doctor. We had no alcohol programs in the Navy. at that time, and so everything was left up to the psychiatrist. And the doctor agreed I had a terrible problem. They sent me down to Pensacola for two weeks to be studied by the doctors. And they studied me. There was every kind of a doctor. I remember they had an old A.D. Sky Raider and they put a chair in like the ones you're sitting on, bolted it in, and then had all these wires. And they went into me, and I'm in the chair, and they're doing the planes, doing all that, and they've got a doctor sitting there watching all the stuff like they're going to diagnose alcoholism in an A.D. Anyway, at the end of the time, they couldn't find anything wrong, so they left it up to the psychiatrist and he wrote a long report on how I was experiencing a childhood fear of flying that showed up after 12 years of flying. It just appeared from nowhere. and I was told I would never fly again. Well, that just about killed me because that's who I was and it took about three months. I was a career officer and I got a new specialty and I became an air traffic controller and that was my job until I ended up in AA. I made it through the school. I'm shaken even worse. I went overseas for a whole year. I checked into the unit, and the senior enlisted men who are the backbone of every military, the C-7 came up, welcome, Captain, good to have you here, et cetera, etetera. And he said, sir, here's your tent, there's your coffee, you know, blah, blah. Sir, we'd really appreciate it if you personally would never go near the radar or talk to an airplane. and I knew what he meant that I could barely get to work and so that's all I did now I could drink around the clock and during that year I lost 50 pounds I had malnutrition I couldn't eat solid food so I drank soup and I'd have vodka and soup and it was terrible I stopped hanging out with my buddies wouldn't even go to happy hour with the guys I was just lost inside of myself. I was trying to survive. I survived all the way through that tour and back to Quantico, Virginia, which is how I ended up in Washington, D.C., going to a career school. In the school, I had a grand mal seizure. I just about bit my tongue in half. They took me up to Bethesda Naval Hospital. I had malnutrition. I was really sick. Alcohol poisoning, all of those things. And I got up there, and they don't have a clue what the problem is. So I'm in a regular hospital room, and they're studying what could have caused the seizure. And it took about five days without alcohol for my system to absolutely freak out with the DTs, the delirium treatments. And I saw these horrible things. The CIA was trying to break me mentally with memory tests, and and they were moving the walls of the room and changing everything, trying to drive me crazy. And I guess in the middle of one of those, I went screaming down the hallway, and they captured me and put me in a straitjacket and locked me up in the mental ward for six months. So that was the treatment that was available in 1964. forward. And nothing was helping me in there. The psychiatrist would talk about the childhood and the rest of the people who were in the mental ward were very upset with the three alcoholics because they didn't think we had a legitimate mental illness. And I remember them sort of going, why are you guys even here? You could tell they were looking down on us and I remember thinking where I had arrived Yale class of 53 all the way to low man in the nut ward it was not very reassuring as far as my own life was concerned but AA talked their way in and brought a meeting in and it was a speaker meeting and I didn't connect fully but I thought it was exciting And if I ran into an alcoholic, I would certainly send him to these guys because they were great. And not long after that, I was an outpatient while they were going to give me new orders so I could go home at night and weekends. And when I did, after about three weekends, I just decided to have a beer and then the beer led to this and that. Now I've got a quart of vodka in the parking lot at the nut ward and I know they're looking at me. I know they're going to nail me because they told me if I had another drink, I'd lose my career. And so I decided to call AA on my own. And on Pearl Harbor Day of 1964, I made the phone call. It got forwarded to somebody at their home and they got the only other Marine down in Quantico who was in AA, Another captain, and he came to my house, and he's my sponsor to this day. I've had the same sponsor for almost 42 years. And he knocked on the door. I went there, and it seemed like he filled the door frame. He was a big infantry guy. His specialty was explosive ordnance disposal. And he used to say it was the perfect job for an alcoholic because nobody's looking over your shoulder while you're working. And so he came in and I was, you know, I got some alcohol to stay down between the time I called and he got there and I didn't really want AA anymore. But he wasn't having any of that. And it was get in the car, we're going to the Manassas group and that was my first meeting. And it Was a group anniversary. they had massive food spread turkey and ham and baked beans and all this stuff which I couldn't even go near you know now I'm sober five hours and it's a group anniversary and it was followed by a square dance with fiddles they had their country fiddler champions out there members of AA and they're playing the fiddlers And this thing's going on until around 11 at night. And now I'm sober nine hours, which is... And I was trying to make a break for it. I kept going out on the porch of this old wooden building. And it was December 7th, so it was cold, it was rainy, and there was no street lights. It was in a remote park. And I tried to run away, but I didn't know where to run. and this hand came on my shoulder and it turned out it was an Al-Anon lady who named Betsy Lynch God bless her and she and her husband were at the meeting and she saw how troubled I was and she just put her hand on my shoulder and I turned around it was like there was an angel there and she said it's going to be alright and I felt it in my heart I just went back in. That woman, she just said it's going to be all right. And there was something about her eyes. And I just Went Back In and Sat Down. Now, I felt terrible, but I believed her that it was going to be all Right. And I haven't had a drink since. And it's just wonderful. Now, life doesn't go the way you want it to. I went to a meeting every night for two years. I really did well at this new job that I had, which was a pretty good one. It was with a team of senior officers that went around the country and the world putting on a presentation about the future of the Marine Corps. It was like an eight-hour show, traveled overseas. It was a pretty good job. And the colonel and the general were giving me good high fitness reports. And it came time for my sponsor and I to be eligible to be promoted to major. Now you only get two shots at it and then you're out. and neither one of us made it the first year. So now the second year, I'm trying even harder. I'm just working hard because your career is over if you don't make it. And the following year, he made it and I didn't. And I don't know why, but I thought that that was unfair. I don' t know, you know, some of us are just weak. But I thought, having gone to a meeting every night for two years, did everything that I was asked to. Prayed to this new loving God. Spoke at meetings, made coffee, did everything they asked and what did I get? My family of eight is now thrown out in the streets. That's what this new living God did. And so I had a high class resentment. And I learned early on that if you want to keep your resentment don't tell anybody about it. Just sit home and cook it up. Just keep reviewing it in your head. How unfair this is. Let me go through that one more time. How unfair. Oh. And about three months after I was given this dastardly event, I read a little story in the Washington Post, and it's one paragraph. Marine Corps instruction team from Quantico, Virginia, killed in plane crash going to Denver to put on one of those shows. And if I had had my way, and had turned out the way it should have, I would have been on the plane. And so I remember going, wow, wow. That changes it. I'm just kind of saying that. And then I remembered that God was watching me read that. And, of course, I felt like, where can I hide? And you can't hide from God, you know. I'm ducking around. Well, if he just told me that was going to happen, I wouldn't have been so upset. Anyway, I went on from there to several jobs. I was trying selling, and I was broke. I hate to tell some of you new people this, but we were broke probably up until I had 15 years in the program. So if you want to talk to me about money problems, you better have at least 16 years. Up until then, I won't have any sympathy for you. But, you know, it was fun. It was right on the edge. You know what I mean? The car battery dies, so you've got to wait three days for payday so that you can go get a new battery and that type of stuff and the electricity off for one day, back on. And you're sponsoring new people, telling them, if you want what I have. I'm amazed any of them stuck around, you know what I mean? And eventually I got, you know, through a Marine Corps connection, oddly enough, I got an interview with a small government agency that regulated credit unions in this country. And it was headed at the time by a retired Marine general, and this general counsel was a Marine colonel retired, and they were looking for a congressional liaison, Somebody to be an expert on credit unions and an expert on Congress. Neither of which I am, but I got the interview. So I'm talking to this guy and telling him, oh yeah, you know, Marine officers, we can do anything. I could learn this job in a month. And at the end of the interview he said, by the way, why did you leave the Marine Corps? And I went, oh man. And I said, I got thrown out for drinking. I drank so much, I ruined everything and I just was thrown out. And I've been in AA for 10 years and it's the most wonderful thing. It just transforms you and I know I can do this job. He said, okay, we'll let you know. And about two months later, the personnel officer calls me up and said, you want the job? And I got it and it involved writing and speeches and testimonies. It turned out I was great at it. And I had a 23-year career with those people, 10 with the government agency and 13 with the trade association. And it was just wonderful. But after I'd been there about two years, I became very close friends with that general counsel, the retired Marine colonel. And I was down at his house one time and he said, did you ever wonder why I hired you? You didn't know anything about... Congress or credit unions, except you had a loan. And I said, yes, sir, to tell you the truth, I really did. He said, I just wondered what it would be like to work with someone that honest. Now, isn't that amazing? And so if you're on a job interview, I'm not telling you what to do, but I'll tell you what happened to me. I just said, i was thrown out for drinking. and I think he just went geez he's obviously not making that story up so anyway off I go and then I retired about 10 years ago went down to Tampa, Florida and it's just wonderful sponsor lots of guys and go to conferences and meetings And it's really a great life. And I'm most grateful for it. What happens to us to make it so great? Now, let's not mince any words. The only thing that makes it great is God. There's no non-God way of doing this thing. I mean, there just isn't. And of course, when we're new, we just don't like to hear that. So I'll try to share with you how my sponsor led this former Catholic, if not an atheist, certainly an agnostic. I did not want to hear any of this stuff. You know what I mean? I'll go to the meetings, I'll make the coffee, but don't start talking all that other stuff. And so he's leading me along and I think eventually I did say the Lord's Prayer after about two years. just to make everybody else feel comfortable but I was having a very hard time understanding the AA God and what it was all about because nobody seemed to know you know what I mean there wasn't anybody explaining it it seemed like you might have one and somebody over there had a different one and this guy had one it was very confusing about how you got spiritual in Alcoholics Anonymous us. And so he had two things that he did to me. So if you're new, I'll just do these and see if they help you tonight. I think I had about two and a half years and he said, this is what I want to do. I want to sit down. It's only going to take about 10 minutes. And would you be willing to be brutally honest with me? And I said, sure, Bill. He said, I just want to take a spiritual inventory of you and what's going on inside of you. I said, okay, fine. Okay, how often do you pray? I said Bill, praying is stupid. I think it's the most ludicrous thing in the world. I don't pray. I have no intention of praying. Put me down for a zero prayer. he said okay zero praying fine we're not going to criticize you that's it just zero that's all that's everything okay how about spiritual readings they have these various books that help people understand spirituality they have new age books they have all kinds of wonderful authors who have thought about that How about that? Bill, I don't even go near that section in the bookstore. I don' t want anything to do with that. I like murders, mysteries, sports, history, spiritual reading, out, out. Okay, we'll put down zero. How about meditation? Do you ever sit back and just contemplate the universe and all of them? No, Bill, don't do that. This is like a Ouija board. I mean, this is ridiculous. I said, no, I don't do that. Well, how often do you go to church? I don' t go to church. When I was a little kid, it's the most stupid thing in the world. I don''t visit cathedrals when I go to England. So it's 400 years old. Who cares? I'm not going in there. No, I don't want anything to do with churches. So he says, zero, zero, zero, zero. Yeah. Okay, one more question. How's it going? What does it feel like to be inside of you? I say, it's awful in here. It's awful in here! Okay, so we're doing a little spiritual experiment. We've now run a little lab test on zero praying, zero meditation, zero church and zero spiritual reading and And what are we writing down? Are the results of that? What we're suggesting is you try something else and see what kind of results you get. They said, let me help you with that decision. Okay. And then I thought, here comes the pitch about God. He's going to finally tell me who this God is. He's got to have some ancient writings. He's gonna have all kinds of stories and all of that. He never talked about God. He didn't talk about it at all. He said, the way I'm going to explain spirituality to you is to explain the disease of alcoholism to you. And I'm gonna go to the chapter that you will probably enjoy the most because it's called The Chapter to the Agnostic. I said, yeah, I haven't read it, but that's my chapter. I know that. And I assumed, you know how you know without reading what's in there? and I knew that that's the chapter where the agnostics go, and they don't do the program. They do whatever is in that chapter. And I didn't know that what the chapter said was, change your mind, become a former agnostic. But anyway. He said, now, we're all going to agree on the terms of the disease, and it's outlined right here, and I just want to make sure you agree with this assessment. And this is right out of the first paragraph. asking, you know, if when you drink you have little control over the amount you drink. That's you. I say, yep. Okay, yep, that's me. And if when You stop, You can't stay stopped. Yep, that' s me. Then You're an alcoholic. Oh, okay. And then He reads the next sentence. If that be the case, You're suffering from an illness that only a spiritual experience can conquer. Would You like Me to repeat that. You have an illness that only a spiritual experience can conquer. And I went, Bill, I don't believe in spiritual experiences. He said, well, you're screwed. There's no other answer. And I'm going, what am I going to do? I'm gonna do something that is probably the most difficult thing an alcoholic ever does. You're gonna change your mind. I remember just going, I don't think so. I don'T think we're gonna be doing that. So he went on to read the next paragraph which is a very comedy line. It reminds me of Jack Benny and it's It simply says, here's where you are, Sandy. Here's where você está se você estiver novo. To be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not easy alternatives to face. So I said, yeah, you're right. I remember just going, let's see. So if you're new, I just developed this little comedy routine. I mean, the way we'll take care of this is you will imagine that it's a quiz program. And you're up on stage and I'm the emcee. And I'm going, Larry, come on up, come one up. See these two doors back here, Larry? Yeah. What's the first one say? Dying alcoholic death. I don't know. Larry, that's door number one. now what's this other one say live on a spiritual basis okay Larry that's door number two Larry circumstances have placed you so that you have to choose one of those doors so which one are you going to choose Larry and Larry if you're like all the rest of us you go like this whoa Whoa. Oh. Oh, two crappy choices. Oh! Oh. Do I get a phone call? Yes, you get a phone call. Hello, Dr. Seymour. Yeah, it's Larry. Yeah. Hi, how you doing? Listen, I got a hypothetical question. How bad is an alcoholic? Okay, door number two. And then we say, congratulations, Larry, you just became spiritual. And you did. You decided that circumstances have forced you into making a choice that you never would have made and that you don't believe in. There's no way you can believe in the steps ahead of time. I mean, I remember when my sponsor told me that everything you need is in these steps And I had all these problems, you know, when you're new and all the family and all the pressure and this and that. Everything is there. Now I'm serious. So I'm, you Know, I'm okay. I'm in. I'm going home. I'm gonna finally read this stuff. And I'm reading and reading and reading and, You know, and you're foggy and it's hard to get it clear anyway. And I am back and I'm back. And finally I said, Bill, which one is the money step? because that was it. I mean, the thing I needed was money. And he said, no, there's no money step. I said, what is there? He said, you're going to have to take them to find out. They only become visible after you do them. And so we all end up taking actions that we do not believe in because there's nothing else to do. You can procrastinate. you can try your own way, you can do whatever you want. But eventually it becomes so uncomfortable on the inside that we take these actions and then our job is to simply report back in the experiment where the four zeros gave these results. Now what are these 12 steps? What kind of results are you getting? And as you all know, you just suddenly find you're a little more comfortable, You find your family is straightening out, much to your surprise. You're finding all kinds of things that are going on. And eventually we have a magic moment which is at the end of the promises where it says we suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. And that, of course, is a spiritual awakening. That's what an awakening is, an awareness, a personal awareness. Not the awareness that you saw somebody else transform, but that you can now say that you have experienced the closeness of your own creator in a very special way and it is your experience and it's that experience that is the counter to the four zeros. What results from the four zeroes and what are the results from The Steps and there it is. It happens in your own spiritual lab inside your own head and your soul and you suddenly realize it's not a theory, it's real. And it happens. And now we're on our way and we move along the spiritual path and Chuck Chamberlain has that wonderful book The New Pair of Glasses and he's long passed away but his retreat that he did was typed up and that's what that book is about. And that's what he said spirituality is. It is like being given a new pair of glasses. And when you put them on, the world is unbelievably different and you're different. The whole energy is reversed like in the prayer of St. Francis. Instead of needing, we want to give. And that was the problem all along. We didn't need anything. We needed to allow all of our love out, and it's better to understand, and just reverse the energy flow. And this happens. But here's the problem, and I'm going to close with this because we're running out of time. Somewhere around maybe two years, somewhere in there, something significant, it could happen sooner, it could happened later, but this happens, and it would be almost like on your second anniversary you come up And in addition to the medallion, you get these glasses. And we go, Mary, from now on, put these on and tell us what the world looks like. So you take off the old glasses, which we call the life sucks glasses. And we put these up. And it's unbelievable how wonderful it is. And here comes the hard part. And we say, Mary, we have a suggestion. We suggest you throw away those old glasses. Just get rid of them. Guess who's wearing them again about a month later? Put off the new pair of glasses and picked up those old ones and put them back on and everything looks bad again. And this seems to be the dilemma of spirituality. is that we are struggling against our ego and our heart on which pair of glasses to put on. And if we didn't have the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, all of us would have put on the old glasses and wandered off into the desert, never to be heard from again. And when Carl Young wrote back to Bill Wilson, when Bill wrote him to thank him for helping to start AA, then Dr. Young wrote him back and said, Oh, I'm so glad to hear about Alcoholics Anonymous. I always thought that the alcoholics were thirsting after God and that the only answer for them was God. So I'm så glad this all worked out. Then in the next paragraph is the fascinating observation by this man who studied human beings and was very spiritual himself. And he studied human being for a long, long time. And this is what he said. He said every human being has to contend with the power of evil. We would call it character defects. And evil always wins. That's not a very encouraging sentence, is it? And then he said, with one exception, a person who has had a spiritual awakening and is in a society that enables that person to maintain that spiritual awakening. So I submit to you that you and I have been given much more than we realize. We've been given the keys to the kingdom. and the society to help us maintain it. This, on the one hand, we have to do the work ourselves, but on the other hand, it's a we program. So we must always feel that we're part of something rather than trying to be something. And that's the great joy of AA, is just being one more drunk, putting the meeting together, putting the conference together, and reaping the rewards that very few people see. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you.