The Four Absolutes: Honesty, Purity, Unselfishness, Love — How Akron Took Inventory Before the Steps Existed – Paul K.

Morning. I have said this before, and I'd like to share it with you again this morning. I think the people who get up on Sunday mornings, scurry around, and get to an AA meeting are very special people. And so I think you're just a better class of alcoholics. Thanks. I am quite taken up with this facility. My family for some generations have been ironmongers and steelmakers. And as I look around and see these cranes and so on, I feel a sort of a spiritual affinity for the place. And this could be a great moment in the history of American industry. I'll tell you, this is the first time that an iron foundry has ever had a number of sober alcoholics in it. I think I have never seen the first one, so at least you're putting it here. Before I get into my dog and pony show here, I would like to thank all of you trusted servants and my hosts and committee people that first have invited me down here. And secondly, I have thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated the camaraderie and the hospitality that you have extended. And you are indeed a beautiful, wonderful, warm group of people. And it's kind of a highlight in my AA experience. Sometimes we get to these conventions and they get so damn big that you're not quite sure where you are. But here I've had the opportunity to see a few friends from other parts of the state and to meet some of you people. And believe me, I will leave here reinforced with a new vigor and a new interest. And for these things, I thank you very much. And particularly you people out there, you very special people who have come here this morning. Now, I have a little ritual that I go through about an hour before every time that I have an opportunity to speak at one of these conferences. I call my wife and we have the same routine, but we do it every time as though we'd never done it before. And she says, how's the convention? And I say, it's great. And she says, what are you going to talk about? And I say, hell, I don't know. I'm kind of interested in hearing what I am to say. And so we go through that routine. And she says, how were the speakers? And I said, they were great. And this time, I mean, they were great. Thursday evening, we heard Tom, a very, very knowledgeable, certainly well posted. And he gave us a real inside view of what the alcoholic is and can be. And he certainly, he talked to us from the heart. And along came Woody, who's a student of the big book, and who pointed out certain things in the big book to our benefit and profit that we could meditate on. And it was a very, very nice talk. And along came Helen Louise, our ambassador of love from Los Angeles. And we soaked up some of that fine philosophy. And my dear and good friends, Tom and Nancy Ryle from New York, who stand up here and open up their hearts and minds and let you inside. And you heard and listened to a alcoholic family that got well through the powerful influence of love. And you heard Tom, or John, and he speaks a foreign language called Brooklynese. Uh, but you understand everything he says, because he talks from the heart. And he is and gives you what a real alcoholic went through. And as we go on with this convention, and we come down to two dots, I'm standing here. All I can tell you is that it seems that there has been a spiritual momentum that has been growing through this conference. And I feel it. And I want to tell you this morning, me to you and you to me. And I would like to share this morning some things, perhaps, that have come to my consciousness as I have listened to the various speakers and as I have shared with you. And some of them are very personal, but I want you to please understand that what I say is coming from the heart. Looking at that 50 years of hope down there, and I don't know anything about numerology, but it seems to me that we have a magic number called 12. Steps. Traditions. Concepts. Promises. And with these 12 magic numbers, we have been brought from a point in time to these 50 years, which I now think we have another number, which is a magic number. The magic number 50. And I believe that in these past five, perhaps even 10 years, that the good Lord has seen fit to keep me around. As I go back in time, and I look at these events and the people and the places in time, including my own position, that I think I can see the hand of God in everything that happened down the way. Everything down the way. I was told many years ago that if we want to know whether or not we have been in God's grace, or his will to look backwards, and if we have been in his grace and will, we will see this. And so with your indulgence, I would like to tell you, that my name is Paul Keebler, and I'm an alcoholic. And I am enjoying 43 years of sobriety in this beautiful fellowship. Now, that may not impress you, and impresses the hell out of me. Don't tell me I don't deserve it. I've worked my buns off to keep these 43 years. But I have an admission to make. My wife isn't impressed. And the reason she isn't impressed, she has 45 years. My God never marry a woman, who has been in a long, longer than you have. There just ain't no future in it. She even knows what I'm thinking about before I do it. She never pulls rank on me, your seniority, but she's cute. She manipulates me. And I really never catch up with it until it's after the fact. That's the thing that makes me angry. I guess she kind of handles me a little bit like the bus driver over in Mississippi that was picking up these kids, taking them to an integrated school. He got about halfway there and the black kids and the white kids were fighting. Stop the bus. He said, all you kids off the bus. The white kids over here and the black kids over here. He said, I want you kids to understand that the government has passed the law. We're none of us white. We're none of us black. We're all the same color. And he said, I want you white kids to yell loud and clear. I am not white. I am not white. I am not white. I am not white. I am not white. I am not white. I am not white. I am not white. I am green. And they did. He said, I want you black kids to yell loud and clear. I am not black. I am green. And they did. He said, all right. All you green kids get on the bus. I want the dark green ones in the back. And I think that's what goes on in my house. I'm the dark green one. But I don't think I'd have it any other way. This lady's an invalid. Has been for some years. She's immobile. And I repeat this because I think it's an object lesson, perhaps for me at least. And in spite of her incapacity and she's immobile, she does an awfully lot of good old-fashioned fourth and fifth step work. And we kind of run a treatment center of our own. The kids are away. I never know who the hell is there. I go around looking in the bedrooms to see. I don't see what's going on. But it's amazing to see how beautifully we can communicate when we communicate through the language of the heart. And I have seen people come out to our home and stay there for a few weeks. And obviously it helps us a lot, but that's not the prime reason. I just love to see this lady work with people. She just, she's beautiful. At the present time, we have a little girl who's living with us that is in terrible straits. She's a polio victim, suffering post-polio syndrome. She's vulnerable. She really is totally, almost totally disability. And she's a professional clown. And she is a joy. She's a real joy. And I sit and listen to those two. And every time I do, here's this wife of mine who's incapacitated and here's this lovely little girl who is also physically handicapped. But their spiritual health, and the love that they've exchanged and shared with them, is just a thing of beauty. Just a thing of beauty. And it's amazing to see the healing power of love. Amazing. And I'm so grateful for From my home, because it is an AA home. When I say it's an AA home, I say it this way. A marriage of 35 years with four beautiful youngsters and 88 years of sobriety ain't bad, is it? Well, we have, of course, to be grateful to those who went before us, to those pioneers, the real pioneers. Those people who, with their honesty and integrity and humility to be teachable, put into motion this act of love which is going on and on and on and on. And I'd like to tell you a little bit about that this morning. And let me qualify by saying this. The things that I have to talk to you this morning are not of my own discovery. They are things that I learned at Bob Smith's knee and the people in Akron that I learned at Bob Smith's knee and the people in Akron that I learned at Bob Smith's knee that I want to carry on and to carry on so that you too can take this information and this message to those who are not here this morning. And because if you don't, there's thousands that are going to die. And we have been given the gift of saving lives as well as of carrying the message of sobriety. And I'll tell you, it's an obligation, I think. And we do have this. We do have this talent. We do have these talents. And if I was going to tell you about my recovery and as it was in those days, I would like to have you, if you will, in your mind's eye, take this trip with me. And let me see if I can't set it, this stage. Of course, last night you saw the visual audio thing that was just so beautifully put and it reached us. And I'd give anything if I could do the same. I'd do the same thing here. But let me, if you will, if I was in Akron or Cleveland the 9th, in back of me there would be a big placard. And the placard would say, but for the grace of God. And in the front there would be four more placards. The four absolutes of honesty, unselfishness, purity, and love. And my little friend who read the original manuscript, these were the spiritual concepts and forces that were embodied. I and the STEP program, even before we had the 12, there were six. The six steps and the four absolutes. And these steps came from that beautiful fellowship of the Oxford Fellowship, of which they believed that no one in the world could not be changed until we each changed ourselves. And they had this system of public admission, inventory, and catharsis, adjustment of personal relationships, and prayer and meditation, that you could address. You could address any mental aberration or problem with spiritual concepts. And these beautiful people nursed us and brought us into being. And after the historical meeting between Bob and Bill in Akron, which you're all familiar with, they went back to the Oxford Fellowship. To do what? To get well grounded in these spiritual concepts. Many experiments had gone before AA. The Oxford Fellowship movement, rather, had fallen on its face, because they got involved in politics. The Washingtonians, you may remember, you scholars, they had over 100,000 people at one time enjoying sobriety, working with each other. But they couldn't handle it. They had no spiritual concepts. And so here was this fledgling little cadre of people who were nurturing at this source of these spiritual concepts. And it was all laid out in Henry T. Williams' home in Akron. At one time, there were 60 people meeting there. And our people, our early, these pioneers, lapped us up and digested it and internalized it. And Henry T. Williams and the Oxford people said, look, you people should go by yourselves. Bill Wilson recognized that it is share with another. But sharing with another alcoholic isn't enough. We have to have the spiritual concepts in order to maintain and to improve these spiritual concepts and these spiritual forces. And so the Oxford people said, we will support you morally in every other way. And so this fledgling Alcoholics Anonymous was born in Akron and has been carried on and on and on and on. Now, I think if I'm going to share this experience with you, I better tell you who. I am. Maybe I ought to tell you who I am not. The people in my group in St. Louis refer to me as Killer Keebler. And some of the new people consider my fundamentalism to be to the right of Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun. And I guess that I am controversial. And I think the first point of controversy is this, that I believe that while we share this fundamental primary problem of alcoholism, that we also share the opportunity to understand what these forces are, these spiritual concepts, not by cafeteria style, but by the guidance that was so effective that our pioneers, the real pioneers, implemented and made it possible for you and I to be here tonight. And that's what I want to talk about. I believe that these people, certainly at the direction and the intercession and the hand of God as I look, back, you can see it every foot of the way. And I think when Bill Wilson stood in the Mayfar and saw those telephones there in the cocktail lounge up there, that the hand of God was there too. And I think that I kind of, I wanted to see how this thing really worked. I went over there and stood in the same spot. Telephones were there and I could hear the girls giggling in the glasses and so on. All I can tell you is a damn good thing it was Bill Wilson and not me. And so that telephone call, after six, seven tries, went to Henrietta Seiberling, who went to Ann, who went to Ann. Now if you look back and we talk about the hand of God, Nick the Greek wouldn't give you 50,000 to one that this happened. We wouldn't go to the racetrack with those kind of odds. But it did happen. And Bill and Bob got together. And where did they go? Over to the Oxford people to reinforce and to put into motion this new, this new approach. Alcoholics working with one another, sharing with one another, but a new method of applying and implementing spiritual concepts to this problem. To this problem that had been going on for centuries. For centuries. They tell me, you Bible people, that the first alcoholic of record was Noah. They said he got drunk and God called him to task for getting drunk and Noah said he didn't know the strength of the grapes. And I guess he put the first denial system in we've been working on ever since. And it seems like down through the centuries alcoholics were written off. We were the butts of the, the jokes. We were not considered to be even fit for human society. And there was no way that we could be ever put back into the business of living successfully. And so we were just plain written off until this happened. And I think it's a beautiful thing that we have here. And certainly all of us I know are grateful for these early pioneers. Now I think that perhaps I'm one of the most fortunate people in AA. And let me explain that if you will. I came in shortly after this thing had been implemented, this fellowship had demonstrated the efficacy that this thing really worked. And so I had an exhibit A to see these people in their homes, in their offices, at the meetings. They walked the walkway. and talked to her. And so I didn't have to speculate on whether this was just a new idea or another idea. I had it in front of me. There was no way that I could rationalize that this thing didn't work. It was there. And how I came to get there, I think, is probably typically of the stories of most all of you here. I was raised in a little German town over in Missouri. I'm not all bad. I was born in Tennessee. And in this community, German community, the work ethic, the morals, the people who lived there were highly principled. It was a methelon community. Yes. Yes. Yes. All I can tell you is that ostentation and what you had didn't mean a damn thing as who you were. And you were measured by your contribution to your family, to your community, to God and your fellow man. And I was raised in this kind of environment and atmosphere. And I had no problems with that. It was a beautiful community. I was raised in an affluent home. We had a lot of love and respect. In fact, we had one thing, one bone of contention that I think perhaps put me on the road to perhaps even being here today. My mother was a Southern Belle, had been raised in a very sheltered environment, had come from a very deeply religious home. They were theologians and ministers and educators, and she just lived in an unreal world. She thought everything was beautiful. She would never accept the fact that I was an alcoholic. She said I'd fallen in with evil companions. And the trick was to stay in God's grace. If the minister ran away with the organist, he had fallen from grace. That's all that happened there. But I didn't understand grace. But I did know that she was a beautiful woman, but I didn't have too much respect for her, let's say, street knowledge. My father was not anti-religious. He was just non-religious. And he had an amused contempt for my mother and her religious activities. And when I was a little older, he came to me and he said, Paul, you're headed for trouble. And he said, your mother and your grandmother and so on are going to make a preacher out of you. He said, stay away from them. Stay away from that church, they'll get you in trouble. And he said, I want to tell you what life's all about. It's just real simple. He said, You've become a spiritualist. You've become a spiritualist. You've become a spiritualist. You've become a sportsman, a gentleman. You believe in God. Give the other fellow a break. And he said, let the women have the churches. They do the praying. They're the givers of life. They're the spiritual leaders. He said, we provide and protect. And he said, you'll do that and you'll be all right. Made sense to me. I didn't know anything about believing in God. I knew there was a creator, but the sportsman and gentleman, that was the deal. And so from there, I began to believe in God. And from that moment on, in all of my waking hours, I spent in planning and training to be a professional athlete. The sports heroes of the day were my gods, and that's all I thought about, and that's all I cared about. And I threw myself into this activity on and on and on, all through elementary, prep school, college. Modesty aside, the record says that I could do it all. And I had come to the attention of some professional coaches. I'd had some national attention. And I sort of enjoyed being a kid about Tom. Now, before the days of radio and television, things were sold by word of mouth. And I found that this reputation of mine had a little commercial value. And I did some clothes modeling, and I did some modeling, photographic work, advertising agencies, and one of the automobile manufacturers gave me a high-performance car to also fill out this special position of mine. So I tooled around Tom as kind of a special kid around Tom. That didn't bother me too much, but it did do this for me. With all these perks and this reputation, I did have an opportunity to choose a university, a school of my choice. The fraternity of my choice, and so on. And I could go on with the story. And so I landed on the campus at this university in this high-performance car, a pork pie hat, plus six stickers, a coon skin coat, and a ukulele. Joe College. Joe College. I immediately got ahold of my coaches and fraternities, and we worked out my curricula. They established the fact that certain classes I would go to and certain classes I wouldn't. That's the reason I'm a Ph.D. today, poor helpless drunk. But I threw myself into this activity, and it was great. I just loved it. Now, I'm going to use a term I don't understand, but they call it peer pressure. And in this fraternity, like AA and other clubs, I had an older classmate who was my sponsor. And he came to me and he said, Paul, he said, we've got the jocks like you. And I said, well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't like you. And we've got some scholars, but we all have to be socially adept. And so we're going to launch you on your social career. There's a prom. You get your full dress on. You get a corsage and take this girl and go to the prom. I passed the inspection line, and I went to the prom. And they were doing a dance that you think last night was great. You should have seen this. It was like scrimmage in Notre Dame. It was called a Charleston. Kind of dating some of you. But anyway. I got in this Charleston business, and I'm cutting a rug, as the cat says in those days. Someone during that evening introduced me to something called Mastika. Now this is during Prohibition, and Mastika was bathtub gin with some anise in it. So it cut the juniper so you could drink it without vomiting. Good stuff, you know. So I got drinking this Mastika. And my feet got loose, my head got loose, and I started really moving around. And I was doing pretty good. And the next thing I know, the prom was over, and I was in this automobile, and we were off and running. And the next thing you know, I had lost my virginity. I blew the whole thing that night. My abstinence, my social standing, and my virginity was all gone over the hill. And I was in the car. I was in the car. I was in the car. Now if you've got any doubts about my athletic ability, this was pulled off in the rumble seat of a Ford Roadster. She was an athlete, too. I repeat this nonsense because it brought me to a point in my social life, I suppose you'd call it. It was very perfectioning. It was quite confusing. The next morning, I got up with a hell of a hangover. I'd never had one before. And I was moaning around a little bit. And I was to my dismay. And my... As I say, I was perplexed. I didn't understand it. I thought surely that I would be taken up in the discipline room and have my fanny beaked. No one said a word. And as a matter of fact, I was patted on the back. I was now a man about town. I'd been to a prom. I'd gotten drunk. I'd lost... I had sexual intercourse, I thought, anyhow. And so now I was a citizen. I was quite a guy. And I couldn't reconcile this. I couldn't reconcile this. I was not my lifestyle. I had been raised in a little different thing. Straight arrow. I expected to be reprimanded or somebody was going to take some umbrage, but no one did. And I came face to face with this double standard, which even today is difficult for me to swallow. And as time went on, I began to take a look at my fraternity brothers and the coaches and all the things that went on in school. And I became quite disenchanted. And to make a long story short, I don't think the booze did so much for me at the prom. As a matter of fact, these people who were at the prom were loose. They were having fun. And I liked that. And the more I thought about them, the more I thought I'd want to join them. Exotic, beautiful people. They were having fun. I had never had fun. I didn't know people had fun. All I knew was... they said, you know what? I'm not going to join you. Just go in there and get your damn brains beat out. And how many fingers do I hold up? Rub it off. You know, I could go on. I've been handled like a piece of meat. And were these beautiful people having fun. Boy, that was for me. And if they'd have been yippies, I'd have grabbed them. I'd have gone with them for sure, if they'd have had hippies or whatever they are in those days. So I became attracted to them. In the ineligible collision course. . . . My family, my family, the coaches, my fraternity brothers, papers and evct. What the hell is going on? It's real simple. You people have encroached and restrained me and I don't like you anymore, and I like those beautiful people, that's where I'm going. I don't want to have fun. And then, these Dutch families, they don't subsidize these high-rollers and high-livers and so they say, that's fine, you just go to work. So I did. I was delighted to. When I left school, I made god�shition. No. Come on, kid. Just turn my back and let's go to work. Nope. walked away. Now, I will have to admit, through my family's influence, I joined this very, very wonderful company. It was a large international company. And in those days, they were picking up trap athletes and doing something with them. They thought they could. And within a few months, they found out that I was in this company for keeps. This was my business career. I wasn't in there for fun. So I got into company training. I was also hanging down at my job. I went back to school at night, and I was learning how to drink. And I was doing it all to the best of my ability, giving it the full treatment. Sometimes I didn't even go to bed. I took a shower and went to work and bragged about being a macho guy. You know, give them a day's work, drink all night, raise hell. Okay. So that was my training. My training regimen had certainly changed. However, in this company, I was company. I don't know what there is about us, but we gravitate towards the people who drink. And there were some people in middle management that drank, that found out that I could drink, and I could also move a golf ball. I played some competitive golf, and so they took me under their wing. And so I learned how to play golf on the company's time and how to drink on the company's time and have other people pay for it. And that's a pretty good deal. And I began to move through this company, but also, I was very, very serious about my business career. Now, as time went on, they piled more and more responsibilities on me, and I began to come to the attention of some of the top people in the company. And we were going through that awful period, if you'll remember, the industrial complex was put into being, and the war clouds were gathering, and we became the arsenal of democracy, and it was a mess. And I had been assigned some operations that I really didn't have the qualifications to run, but I took them on. And they also sent me to Washington and the War Production Authority. One of the amazing things about this job, I was holding down three jobs and trying to do my best, and it wasn't too bad. But along with this thing was something called acute clearance. This meant that I had access to certain companies and records. And that I should never discuss what I was doing with anyone. And it was kind of, I was privy to a lot of information, sub-rosa information. I was to treat this confidentially. And I construed this to be that I reported to the President of the United States only. And so, I ran this thing into the ground. I traveled, and I flew, and I got on trains, and I used this newfound capacity to its best. I don't know why, but I... I could get drunker on a train in any place in the world. I never could get off the trains. I'd leave Washington, and by the time I got to New York, I'd be drunk and go to Boston. But all of this time, I was cutting my ties with my family, with my friends, my social friends, all of my sports activities, and so on. I was moving over into the occupation of learning how to drive. I was moving over into the occupation of learning how to drink and how to handle it. It was bothering the hell out of me. I would attend the meetings, and I would find that I couldn't pick up the plans or specifications. If they handed me a cup of coffee... I never took a cup of coffee. I couldn't hold it in the pot. I was now reached that point where in the morning, I found out that I had to get three or four splits of India Pale ale down to cover my dehydration before I could take a drink. And then I began to space my booze out during the day. So that I could function. And I think I could say that I was at that point. And probably many of you people here in this room could be at that same level. I'm going to use the term functional alcoholic. Functional alcoholic. My whole life was built around booze, but I was able to hold a job, and I was able to carry on in a modest way, if not a successful way. Enough to... to get by, and it was certainly an awful hard way to go. I got a call from my boss, the guy that ran my company in Chicago, and he said, I want to meet you over at Manhattan. We want to have breakfast, and I went over to see him, and I said, hi, I'm glad to see you, and I have some things I want to talk about. He said, I don't want to hear it. I said, what do you want to talk about? He said, I want to talk about you. And he said, I got some news for you, and I said, what's that? And he said, you know, I don't work for you, you work for me. And I said, well, what the hell brings this on? And he said, you know, you were down here in the East for three years. You've never tested my judgment. You've never asked my advice. He said, I find out about you sideways. He said, you operate in a vacuum. He said, the other day the board had a meeting, and we had a very fine job. Everybody approved you. It's a job but me, and I turned you down. I said, you're a hell of a friend. He said, I'm not your friend. You don't have any friends. I said, what do you mean? He said, you have acquaintances. He said, you don't have any friends. He said, in this company we have a team. We work together. We share together. We get things done on that basis. He said, you're a loner. He said, we can't build on you. And I said, well, what the hell would you have me do? And he said, well. He said, you're a loner. You ought to be married. You ought to have some children. You ought to have a mortgage. You ought to need your job. He said, the way it is, we need you instead of you needing us. And we ain't going to have it. I said, it's just real fine. If my work isn't satisfactory, you don't own me. And the Keebler syndrome screwed up, so I walked out. Now, this guy had made an impression on me. No question about that. But I wasn't sure. So I went to see. I went to see my spiritual advisor, a bartender by the name of Sparky. And I said, Sparky, can you imagine that idiot telling me these things? He said, he's right. I said, what? He said, he's right. And I said, well, I don't know who'd want to marry me. I don't want to marry anybody. And he said, no problem. You'll be over here tomorrow night. He said, I want to introduce you to a girl from Europe. She's a jet setter. He said, you'll love her. Now, as a measure of my insanity, and I still don't believe this, but I met this exotic creature, and one week later, we were married. Now, I'm not sure that this marriage was made in heaven, but I better tell you how it was made. She married me to get second papers to keep from being deported. And I married her for her mortgages for kids. Now, we put this beautiful thing together, and it fell into place. Now, all alcoholics have a little kind of thing. Cunning, I guess. But when I was in Washington, I knew about some unofficial embargoes, people needing some very heavy tonnages of pipe and refinery materials south of the border. I knew some of these people. I went down to Texas, and I made an orange-linked deal with some plants down there. And I began to underwrite some very heavy tonnages of refinery and piping materials and drilling materials. And in a matter of weeks, and I'm not embellishing this at all, I was making more money. I was making more money in a month than I'd ever made in any good year in my life. And it just kept coming in. Hell, I didn't know what to do with it. I'd never been educated to handle money. I was raised in the manufacturing business. So I decided to spend it. I went up to Connecticut, and I bought a country estate up there with a personal check. I remember going into an automobile dealer. I bought three luxury cars with a personal check. They thought I was with the Mafia or something. Went down to the yacht club. I bought a nice cruiser. I joined all the athletic clubs and country clubs and opened my office down in Manhattan. And I think society would say that I was operating as an up-and-coming young man. And I guess I was. This income kept coming in and in. And a very peculiar thing began to happen to me. I began to attract some very unwholesome people. They began coming to me, and they had schemes. How to beat somebody out of something. How to acquire a plant without putting... You know, I could go on and on. I didn't like these people. As a matter of fact, the more I saw them, the more I was disenchanted. I went through almost the same thing. I saw a double standard in industry, and I didn't like that either. I just couldn't find any place that I'd fit. And I stopped going up to Connecticut, because when I went up there, the place was full of idiots speaking foreign languages, and I didn't like that either. And I didn't know what the hell to do. And I began to stake out a career in drinking now. Three in the morning, I spaced my drinks till noon. And then, sometimes I was now getting lost a day or two or three at a time. That was damn hard to find. I got a call from the FBI. Went up to Connecticut and found out my wife had been under surveillance, and she was a spy. And that blew my mind. And I called the lawyers together, and I said, Look, liquidate everything, give me so much, and blow my syndrome again, walk away. Without any compunctions at all, I started on what all of you have tried, the geographical tour. I started out drinking in the better clubs and hotels, and I don't have to tell you what happened in the descending spiral. Towards the last, I was trying to find out how much mileage I could get out of a buck, and I was drinking things I normally wouldn't drink. And I was beginning to pay the price for it. And all of a sudden came in that we've all had this thing, this anxiety, this impending doom. I knew something was wrong. I couldn't put my finger on it, and I didn't know there was any future. There was no past. And I was getting very, very discouraged, and I was sick. I'm not going to tell you too much about those last two or three years. The last six months I drank, I don't remember too much about. I knew that I was constantly drinking. I was constantly drinking. I was constantly on the move. I was now on the street. And I finally found a haven underneath the bridge, the railroad tracks. And I became a member of the establishment. And the specialty of the house was purple death. This was the bottom of the wineries of that pulp. It was just, you could keep it down. It was very dry, and it had enough alcohol in it to keep your skin on. Now I was drinking medicinally. I was now at that point. In time, I think all of us can say, a hopeless, chronic, unmanageable alcoholic. I had been picked up at times and screened. I had been picked up at times and taken before the magistrates. I'd been picked up at times, and I knew something about that something was very, very wrong. And I knew damn well there was nothing I could do about it, or anybody else. I remember talking to this little Hungarian psychiatrist. He said, you know what? You know what? I was a psychiatrist one day, and she told me about how you manage your affairs. And as she outlined what she thought I ought to be doing with my affairs, and I said, if I had to live like you, I'd rather be drunk. Now that was the kind of decision of my values. And so I walked out on that. Now as I stayed in this environment, and I always drank at the end of the bar because now I was getting paranoid. I looked over everybody that came in. Very carefully, I wasn't quite sure who the hell they were, and they may be looking for me. I don't know why. And then came the day when the awful truth fell on me. I knew if I stayed there any longer, I was going to die. And I knew if I left, I was going to die. And I think at this point, and I'm going to use a term which I know nothing about except to tell you that it was a feeling. I believe in divine intervention. And a decision is a decision. And a decision is a decision. And a decision is a decision. And a decision was made for me. And I found myself moving up the street, 10 below zero, no coat, no tie, no nothing. And I had no way of logically knowing where I was going or any decision. But I put one foot in front of the other. And I got to this hotel. And I went in. And I think the assistant manager knew me, or knew of me. And I found myself in a room. Now imagine, I hadn't been out on my linens for weeks and no money, you know. And there I was. Now here again I want to go back to Nick the Greek. Two of the boys had been in Detroit, were on their way to Akron, had stopped in this town. And they were visiting the assistant manager of another hotel who was an in-law and friends of the place that I was in. Think of these odds. And so he said to the boys, I got to run me over in the hotel. I think you ought to go over and see him. And they said, we don't do things like that. We don't hustle business. He said, go see this guy, he's in trouble. And I'll just say briefly and to the point, in several hours, I guess, in walked a couple of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed guys. Just beautiful. He looked at me and they said, it looks to us like you're in trouble. I said, hell, in trouble. I'm dying. And they said, well, we too were like you. Now briefly, I'll tell you a story. And to the point, I'm going to say this. Those fellows were there on what we call technically a 12-step call, but it was an act of love. And I think as I stand here today that I was loved in the sobriety. They didn't talk down to me. They weren't in a righteous position. They didn't criticize. They said, listen, we want you to know that you are not hopeless. We too were like you. We were like you. We were like you. We were like you. And they began to look inside of me, and I looked inside of them, and they began to share their experiences. Now this may be controversial, but I will say this. I don't think there's any confrontation or any other psychological or any other system of getting through denial like an act of love. I trusted these people instinctively and intuitively. I knew they spoke the truth because they knew something about booze. And as we began to talk and share. And I began to share. They kept using the word alcoholic, alcoholism. And I said, fellas, it sounds great, but I'm not like you. They said, why not? And I said, I'm a drunk and I'm nuts. And they said, that's right, that's right. But your experience is like ours and we're alcoholics. And I said, what the hell's the difference between an alcoholic and a drunk? And they said, you are one of those people. Predispose, whatever it may be. We don't know and don't care. Except over a period of time in your drinking experiences, you will find that you have done irreparable damage to yourself physically, physically. This is the root cause of the compulsion. The compulsion takes over your sanity, your will, and you can't function. Totally insane. And I said, my goodness, how's that? They said, did you go to your high school counselor and tell him you wanted to be a rummy and a drunk? I said, of course not. They said. Did you want to go with a company and your family and embarrass your country? And so I said, no. And they said, why did you do that? I said, I don't know. And they said, that's right. You are an alcoholic. And every time I hear that word, I get back to that beautiful experience that our friend Roland, when he went to see Dr. Young, that beautiful, beautiful man, who looked at this youngster and said, medical science can't help you. Psychiatry can't help you. You are in need of equating yourself with oneness. You have to find a path to a higher understanding. You are in need of a religious experience. A religious experience. And that's what the boys were telling me. I was in need of a religious or a spiritual experience because my personality was such that I could not function. The compulsion took over my sanity. And I was a dead, stinking fish. And when I look back at my track record, everything I tried to bring into fruition had fallen on its butt. Why? Because I did not have the... I just could not bring anything through to fruition. That boo somehow didn't get in the way. And even if I wasn't drinking, I was so damn unhappy that I wished I was dead. So how could we function under those conditions? And I said, well, what do you want me to do? I'll do anything you say. They said, come with us. And when they said, come with us, they said this. We will take your warts and all. We will take you unconditionally. We will give you our love, we'll give you our sharing, and we will show you the benefits of this thing that we call the power of love, healing and love. They didn't say, are you a mason? They didn't say, how much money have you got? They didn't say anything. They said, come with us. And so I did. Now, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about something that we don't hear too much about today, I guess. But I'm a great believer in this. And they told me for the next four months, and they filled me full of sauerkraut juice and tomato juice and a little peral to hide and some rye whiskey. And it's pretty effective. And at the end of four months, I had been sober. During this time, they had taken me to their homes. I had seen them in their offices. I had been acquainted with the rest of the family. It was a family disease in those days. They have Al-Anon. Everybody went to the meetings, dogs, cats, everybody. We had a domestic problem. We'd send two or three couples over to your house. They'd fix it like that. Make no mistake. It was effective. And I had the advantage of seeing these people. They were all in action. They not only talked the talk, but walked the walk. And they were examples, exhibit A. And I loved them. It's ascending spiral again. And I went to Paul Stanley, who was our fourth man. And Paul was beautiful. A beautiful man. And Paul really, I think, brought the spiritual concepts to most of us out of the Oxford Fellowship. And I went to Paul and I said, Gee, Paul, I ain't going to make this. And he said, why not? And I said, well, you and Bob Smith and Gene and Dotson and all you people are so damn smart. You quote from the King James Bible and the Sermon on the Mount and William James and you know all the buzzwords and so on. I'm just an illiterate engineer. I'm a tramp athlete. I don't belong in here with you intelligentsias. And he said, well, he said, I don't think you have a thing to worry about. You don't have to unlearn anything. And I said, do you think it'll work? He said, absolutely. Absolutely. I'm going to, being controversial, I'm going to shoot one at you. I'm very proud of our intellectuals in AA. And I'm damn sick and tired of having them denigrate themselves and make apologetic references to their education and their professions. The only real snobbery I ever found in AA, came from Skid Row people. Do you believe that? So I talked to Paul about it and he said, you don't have to unlearn anything, but you have to be willing and open-minded. And he said, I'm going to sponsor you. And sponsor means this. We don't have any experts. We have no one that has all the answers except this, that you will accept the steps verbatim. Well, I don't want you to bring any preconceived ideas into this thing. You will do it exactly as it's said. And that's it. And if you will do that, you will get well. And he said, I will share with you my experience and understanding of each one of these steps. And what we're going to do is take a series of spiritual experiences, a journey to regeneration and spiritual awakening. And this is all within the third to the ninth step. Put all your other preconceived ideas and all your prejudices out the window. This is the objectives. And this is what we'll do. And I said, fine. He said, well, we begin with the third step. I said, I read it. He said, oh, you did? I said, yeah. He said, well, we're going to take the third step, and I want to discuss the spiritual context of that step with you. And two hours later, I had an understanding of what the third step was all about. And he said, tonight you'll take it on your knees in front of the group. I said, don't make me do it. Don't do anything like that. That's crazy. He said, it's real simple. We will have a demonstration of your humility and your sincerity, or you can go out there and try it some more. I said, I'll do it. And so I did. And I turned my will and my life over to the care of God with the understanding that the decision was what I was doing, with the understanding that I didn't know who God was. I didn't know what my life was. My will was or his will. But the decision that I made was simply this, that I would immediately go into the fourth and the fifth step and carry on the rest of the program. And under Paul's advice, he said that if I would make this decision and remove the barriers between God and my fellow man, that ultimately when I got to the eleventh step, that I would know something about God and his will for me and the power of his will. And I said, Paul, how in the heck? I don't understand these things. He said, that's good. You just do it. And if you do it, through the experience of doing it, you will find the result that you're after. So I took a four-step inventory, not like we have it in Bill Wilson's book. We use the four absolutes of honesty, unselfishness, purity, and love. And I made a list of all my family, my domestic, my social, my business, the whole dynamics. And he said, you put down the things that are on your conscience or you're ashamed of, the things you did. And more so the things that you should have done that you didn't do. And I was amazed to find that my transgressions were really in the things I should have done and didn't do. And alongside every one of these things, we identified the shortcoming and defect, which was a counterproductive to the absolutes. Honesty. If it isn't honest, it's dishonest. Loving, hate, envy. Lie. Deceit. Self-deceit. All of these things had to be removed so that I could be in harmony with God and his will. Now, I'll be very candid with you. As I went through this spiritual exercise, I found that there were things happening to me that I did not understand. I couldn't put a name on it. I didn't even know the buzzwords. But all I can tell you is this, that after I took the third step and the fourth, the fifth step, and as I was moving along, I found myself becoming a member of the group. I was now sharing with them, and they were sharing with me, this beautiful thing in fellowship called love. The power of love. The healing of love. I was no longer having nightmares. At one time, I was so tense, I couldn't buy a newspaper without a fistfight. It was just almost unbelievable. Now, I was beginning to find, that I was somehow building up this self-esteem that I was completely in lack of. And my self-centeredness was going down, and my self-esteem was coming up. And it was a beautiful experience. And so I got through the fifth step by admitting these wrongs to another human being, and I surrendered these wrongs to God for his forgiveness. And the fifth step isn't a confession. It's a catharsis. And he said, well, immediately follow it up with the sixth and seventh step. In those days, you didn't sit around and say, well, I've got to wait until the Spirit moves me. Your sponsor was the Spirit, and he moved you. And thank God for that. And I got down to the sixth and seventh step, and I said, my God, Paul, look at this. How in the hell can I ever handle things like this? He said, you can't. And he said, of all of the things in AA that people get in trouble with is trying to deal with their shortcomings and defects from their own viewpoint. He said, the last thing we want you to do is buy a book on how-to. He said, the more you get into how-to, the more your own self-centeredness builds up. And he said, you're worse off than you were before. He said, all of us have these addictions. He said, all of us have these problems. Stay away from how-to. He said, you can buy a book. He said, you can buy a book. Buy a book on how to make a million dollars, win friends, influence people. Buy a book on how to make love standing up in a hammock if you want to. And so I did what he told me. And he said, I want to tell you something. He said, God didn't rescue you from the ocean to let you drown in the bathtub. And he said, you surrendered your wrongs in the fifth step to God for his forgiveness, and you got it. He demonstrated his love for you because you're sober. That's it. That's a gift. You didn't bring it with you. And he was right. And he said, now you're beginning to function and you're a part of something. I said, that's right. He said, why wouldn't you take your shortcomings and defects and give it to God? Surrender the whole thing and then go about the business of reconstruction. He said, there will be no spiritual regeneration, no spiritual awakening until we have gone through the restitution and amends. And I took that fourth step and I listed those people and believe it or not, I had 37 institution, people, places, things on that list. 37. I heard people say, oh, I already hurt myself. I don't know what the hell they were doing, but I know where I was. Almost two years, more than a year and a half, and I went through this beautiful experience of making amends and restitution. And I did a lot of praying before I went into the church. And I did a lot of praying before I went into the church. And I began to see these people. It was amazing. I think I was received in kind almost every place I went. And what was happening? My conscience was beginning to clear. I began to feel a new confidence, I suppose you'd say, a new assurance. I was becoming a human being. And my self-esteem was now really going up. I had established a relationship with the power of God. I was becoming more and more greater than myself. A God of love. The absolute of love. God exists in the absolute. He is love. And I was learning something about love. And the kind of love that I was learning about was unselfish, was pure intentions, and it certainly was honest. It wasn't the kind of love that I thought at one time was love. And I'm sorry to say I expressed it this way. I thought love was a 400-horsepower blonde, a case of love. I thought love was a piece of scotch in a rainy week. And I found out it wasn't anything like that. It was a many-splendored thing. Beautiful. And when I completed this thing, I can tell you I stood 10 feet tall. I don't think anything that they've ever given to me in my life would... I can't even articulate, I can't even measure this kind of feeling. Like going over the bridge of troubled waters. I have established a relationship with a power greater than myself. This beautiful thing that Carl Jung had told Roland, a pathway to a higher understanding. Equate your problem with oneness. And Paul Stanley told me this, and I have never forgotten it. He said, Paul, with all the people that I have ever fooled with or worked with in AA, including myself, all alcoholics have an overwhelming, overriding, deep-seated need and a desire for union with God, and they don't know it. All my life I've been hunting. The new girl, the new job, the new car, the new something. And when I got there, there wasn't there. But now there was there. God was there. And I found out that he hadn't moved, I had. So I wanted to find out what I knew I could find out about his will for me. And I was moved in then to this thing that I call today the plan for daily living. And here again the absolutes came into play. The tenth step. I was doing real well. I was back now in the mainstream of living. I was working. I'd met this young lady that we were married to. Everything was beautiful. But I had violated one of the absolutes. And it was just simply this. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I thought you did anything for anybody a day or night and so on. And I was pulled in 14 different directions. I had confused action with activity. And I had left myself out. And I came home one night and I said, Kay, something's the hell's wrong. She said, there sure is. And I said, what do you think it is? She said, why don't we get back into AA? I said, my God. I've paid my dues. I've run around sponsoring people. I've run all over the... He said, that isn't what we're doing. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about the 10th, the 11th, and the 12th. It's interwoven and linked together so that it becomes a daily thing. We're not living in the past. You don't want to be a new man with a past. You want to be a new man with a new life. And it begins with the 10th step. We take our daily inventory. And when I looked at the opportunities I had during that day to practice these principles, hell, I wasn't practicing any principles. I was driving my car like an idiot. I was raising hell with the people at the plant. I couldn't get along with everybody. I wanted somebody to do everything the way I wanted. And at first I was impressing my will. And I was getting in turn hostility and anger and so on. I was sober. I was still going to the meetings. But my relationship with that higher power was pretty ragged. And when I began to take a look at the opportunities I had, I realized that I had passed up when I had a chance to do something for somebody just because it was a good thing to do. I didn't have to be rewarded. And as I began to get back to these principles, what happened? There was a quality to my sobriety again. There was also this feeling of intuitive feeling that you had with this higher power, that you were in tune and in harmony with his will. And I believe that God, that truth and beauty belong to God. And when we use it, we are using his will. And I think Taylor Caldwell said it better for me than anyone I ever heard. She said the greatest gift of love that God ever gave man was a free will. And all my life I had not used my will properly. And what I was finding out now was that I could use my will properly beginning in the third step. You can't love and hate at the same time. You can't be selfish and unselfish. You can't be selfish and unselfish at the same time. And so if I would pursue honesty, I would find the truth. When I stopped pursuing honesty, what happened? Falsity overtakes me. The dark side of my nature opens up and welcomes in no shortcomings and defects. But when we are in harmony with God and his will, he removes them. And so I think standing here today, that in my prayers and meditation, that if I... If I can know and be willing to stay in harmony with God and his will, it means to me that I accept that God knows the proportion between material and spirituality as far as I'm concerned. And that if I practice these principles, the stability that's there, the healing is there. My worth, my self-esteem, I am in harmony with his will. What a beautiful thing this is. Just listen. Just think of this. I came to AA, I couldn't find my butt with both hands in back of me. I had no religious orientation, no philosophical orientation. These beautiful people put me in touch with all of these beautiful forces. What a beautiful thing it is. Now I would like to close with this little prayer. He used it in the beginning and I use it for my meditation. I use it for my daily prayers. To me, it's sort of the epitome and the essence of all of the things I've been trying to talk about this morning so clumsily. And it's our serenity prayer. And not the two stanzas, but the five stanzas. And let me offer it to you this way. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change. Courage to change the things that I can. And the wisdom to know the difference. Living one moment at a time. Enjoying one day at a time. Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace. Trusting he will take this world as it is, not as I would have it. And if I surrender to his will, he will make all things right. That I may be reasonably happy in his life and possibly forever in the next. Thank you very much. Before the presentation, Paul and Bob have a little deal that they've worked out. I know he's referred to the four absolute alludes a lot in his talk this morning. And he's also spoken from personal experience of the history of our great fellowship. And he recited the entire serenity prayer for us as his closing remarks. Bob has agreed to a Paul Keebler special. He has two other tapes in addition to his sharing. This morning, the other two will have to be mailed to you, but he'll arrange to have that with you on the four absolutes and the history and the entire serenity prayer in this morning's sharing session for $10. So you can see Bob over there. He'll take care of you. Paul, on behalf of myself, certainly, and everybody here, I want to present you with this. And thank you for being our friend. Thank you.