The High Correlation Between Silence and Spiritual Growth – Ken D.

Good evening. My name is Ken. I'm an alcoholic. Real happy to be here. In planning on coming here al had given me a flyer and it says spirituality and i thought you know he should have maybe condensed that to like the history of the world or something you know like you know giving me a chance to uh deal with something that i have a chance of talking about but you know i i had absolutely i had some general thoughts in that area but i i was praying this afternoon that that god would give me some insight and he did he gave me john tonight and uh and uh in john's talk there was there were several things that actually give me something to hang my hat on and i appreciate the uh the compliment from brian about being a leader in aa but those folks usually get drunk and uh you're better off just to be on an oar you know i did that when i was drinking somehow when I was drinking, no one ever told me this, but when I was drinking I had it in my head that if you weren't the lead dog the view was always the same. But I certainly didn't want that to be my story in sobriety. And last year when I was here Al laid a label on me, Yoda, which I thank him for. And I said, who is Yoda? He says, oh, in the Star Wars trilogies it's a very spiritual guy. So somehow that got back to my area and I got to see a picture of Yoda. It's a guy who looks like a rodent. He has these pointy ears and he's green and he's 800 years old. And so thanks, Al. Thanks for pitching in and putting me with such good company. But I was listening to John talk and always enjoy his talks. But you know, this is an unbelievable disease that we all suffer from, alcoholism. I was sitting there thinking as he was speaking it's the only disease that i know of in the history of mankind where the diseased person is adamantly opposed to early detection you know it's like if you had cancer or heart trouble you'd want to know as quickly as possible so that you could start taking some action in that area. But if you suffer from alcoholism, you really don't like people interfering with you by telling you what you're suffering from. And it's an amazing thing that as you hear longer, you realize that the nature of the disease and of our illness, as our textbook talks about, the big book, is spiritually driven. We have a spiritual malady and when the spiritual maladay is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically. in that regardless of how people introduce themselves at the podium, sometimes it's and this and this and this what they're really saying is they're suffering from being selfish and self-centered. Amen. You take those two away, if you could get over those two we could go home and we'd all be winners. That's just the way it is. Alcoholics are trying to escape from a reality they're not in. And they're willing to go to any length to do it. You know, that's just the way they act, you know. And I understand that because I am one. And I was really lucky because when I arrived in Alcoholics Anonymous, I was thrown in with people who had that spiritual concept very much in their lives. That was something they practiced all the time. And what I realized is I had been given a parochial education, and then I was tossed out of parochia school when I was in the fourth grade for behavior. And I'm the youngest of seven kids, and I'm the only one who didn't finish that school. It broke my mom's heart because my dad was dead, and all the other kids had graduated from there. Now to tell you how old I was at the time is you wore knickers to school. And you wore knickers the first seven years, and you didn't get to wear long pants until you were in the eighth grade. And that's how you knew who the eighth graders were. And I never got to the eighth grade, and so I came to Alcoholics synonymous with a child's concept of god and an adult attitude towards life and uh and i think that's true of most people now that i've had a chance to interact with people i think that's true it seems to be my observation that almost everybody says at some point they kind of put that aside and went on to raise their havoc and then when they got to alcoholics anonymous they were reintroduced to to the experience of god which many of them had had before but for some reason were able to put aside. One of the things that I did simply because I found peace in it was I read two or three pages of the big book every day. It's not to study it, it's not to understand the words, it is just to read it. And the reason I do that is because when I am reading it,it seems to put me in a place that I wouldn't be in if I weren't reading and one of the things I remember reading over and over and over again until finally it made sense to me was in Bill's story Bill talked about being in World War I and being at the Winchester Cathedral and he said for the first time in his life he wanted and needed God and he humbly asked that God come to him and he says I had the experience of God right then and there and then he came back after the war and went his merry way as an alcoholic losing all contact with that experience and then he goes on to say later on that he was basically distracted from God by worldly clamors is the words he used, I hope we never change the words in the big book, by worldly clamors, now if you're a heavy hitter like me you have to get a dictionary and look up what's a clamor. You know, I figured something maybe you need penicillin for and something he brought back from the war. And the word clamor in the dictionary says a continuous noise. A continuous noise is a clamour. And he said the clamour I was distracted from, the worldly clamours I was attracted from were mostly within myself. and therein starts the journey if you reach a point in recovery where you come to the realization that you and i in and of ourselves don't have the power to do this thing and that we're being distracted constantly by worldly clamors most of which we carry within ourselves then we can start to turn the volume down there's a high correlation in spiritual growth between silence and growth you cannot speed up and become spiritual you must slow down and you must get used to being silent which is very difficult be still and know that i am god which for an alcoholic is almost a death defying act you know you know and and simon and garfunkel wrote a song called the sound of silence and i always thought that seemed to be paradoxical the sound of silence and several years ago i read a prayer i don't even know where it came from but it was written by a mystic anonymously and the prayer went like this you cannot catch hold of it nor can you let go of it. In not being able to get it, you get it. When you are speaking, it is silent. When you're silent, when you are silent, it speaks. And the reality of that is that it led me to read again and again in the big book the fundamental lines that down deep in each one of us is the fundamental idea of God. however we perceive that and that fundamental idea of god when you go inside becomes known in the big book as the great reality up until the fact that you are living in the great reality we're living in delusion delusion is like second nature to an alcoholic we live in it so much that we don't notice it until somebody with reality interrupts it you know reality is like a drive-by you know you know it's uh what was that oh that was reality no let me go back to it it's a drive by it's it's not part of us it hasn't been internalized and you know i like to go out and look at all kinds of things spiritually i'm kind of like a spiritual fanatic i go i shouldn't say fanatic but i enjoy looking at things spiritually I go on silent retreats where I haven't talked for a weekend. And I liked it so much, I went to 10 days. Liked that so much I went the 30 days. And it's an amazing thing that when you're silent and you know no one's expecting you to talk, your mind can go to sleep. And when your mind goes to sleep, it's the first step towards getting away from delusion. Because the delusion is always that you have to be doing something. And you know, if you look around, you realize that none of us are really doing anything and yet everything's getting done. And in our textbook, no matter where I go, no matter what I read, it brings me back to the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous because all of spirituality is covered in there in two basic areas. In the one area, it says, see to it that your relationship with him is right and great events will come to pass for you and countless others. this is the great fact for us and then in another area it says either god is everything or god is nothing and to me god has got to be an experience i go to meetings and i hear some well-meaning people say well i came i came to and i came if you stop there you're probably going to get drunk because god is an experience and you don't get to experience god until you do the things that They're incorporated in the big book, and that is the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. And as you take each step, it introduced me, and that's what I can only share about my experience, it introduced more and more to the realities of life, something I had hitherto been able to get away from. I heard John in his story tonight talk about his brother and himself not being able to stop in suicide. I never contemplated suicide. It was never part of my deal, but I hear people more and more talk at meetings about suicide, and in talking with them, it seems to come down to the fact that the pain in which they are living is so intense that they cannot see themselves moving on and living a regular life, and that if they die, somehow they'll escape the pain and these things that seem insurmountable to them will work out. Well, I have a suggestion to you. Alcoholics Anonymous through the 12 steps enable you to commit suicide on purpose, to die on purpose and yet accomplish all those things. The pain is released. You get to live in reality and you get to life happy, joyous and free. And what's more important is you hang out to see the results. It's a real upside. But you have to take the actions. You have to takethe actions. And in taking the actions, what happens is life goes from being awful, A-W-F-U-L, to being awfulled, A W E F U L. And you get to see that there's so much going on. and i get to see life in terms that i could never see him in before because the context in which everything was kept by me was how it impacted me i never thought in terms of how it affected anybody else i figured well you know they're secondary players or else they're not players at all this is really about how i feel and if you go through life looking at how you feel in every scenario, you'll never get to be of service to God. Number one. And number two is you'll never get the experience of God. You'll never feel the consciousness. You notice in our text, it repeats that verbiage over and over again. The consciousness of God as I became conscious of his presence, the consciousness of this, the righteousness of that. The spiritual life is not a theory it has to be lived and you know you get to see it in and this stuff has to be practical it has to be something that sustains me on a daily basis otherwise it just becomes theory and to sustain me on a daily basis means I have to be involved which John said with going to meetings inside the word spiritual is the word ritual and if you want to grow spiritually keep doing the ritual and the ritual is to be involved with other people it's to go to meetings it's to make yourself available it's to do those things that hitherto for I couldn't do of my own I was just powerless lack of power that was my dilemma you know I needed a psychic change all these words should sound familiar this is not new material it's written very clearly there in the big book it's amazing how times people say well what does God want of me well let me throw you off the track here it says God wants me to be happy joyous and free you know which part of that is really overwhelming you you know is it is it the happy the joyous or the free you know and are these words that are you know we'll look them up in the dictionary you know they're very very tricky words you know. And that's the way the big book I heard Mel's talk today and how the simplicity I can't understand how these two guys these two bozos back in the 30 were able to put together something that is as much alive today as it was when they put it together and how the technology has changed these guys had to talk to one another today there's you know the telephone and everybody seems to own a car phone and internet and you know like we're in television when people can communicate in all kinds of ways but the story is still the same and that it's one drunk helping another drunk and somebody going to make the call whenever whenever anybody is reaching out we want the hand of aa to be there and the reality of all of that is the great reality god wants us to be practical he wants usto walk with our head in the clouds with him but our feet firmly planted on the ground because that's where the action is and you know this stuff is not that complex and you get to see it in human dramas. There's a youngster out in our area and he's just turned 33 and he is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease and up until a few weeks ago he was going up on a regular basis to the Pacific Group and I won't go into in detail what it takes for him to be put into a car and moved but he would go up there every single Wednesday night And when he celebrated his AA birthday about a month or so ago, a bunch of those folks came down to his birthday. And he has a meeting at his house because he can't go out. And he's in probably the last days of this thing. And when you go to his house and he shares laying down on this bed where he can barely talk, He says things like, I have to be very careful that I'm not selfish and self-centered because in my present condition, I can demand a lot of people. I haveと be very carefuу of what I say to people because they seem to take it more intensely than when I used to just talk to them. And the other day, his dad, who is not in the program, called me and he has been transferred to the hospice in san diego and his dad calls me his sponsor because i like him soon i lost a son and i went to the hospital and i said i'm going to go to the hospice and god has a has a great sense of humor sometimes because that lad is in the same room that my son died in and i went and i visited with him And all he's talking about is the steps are sustaining me right now. As I move towards whatever this reality is, this great reality, I am being sustained by the countless numbers of meetings I went to and by the four or five or six folks who were always in his room visiting him. And he said, I'm not alone in this thing. You would think I'm alone. And that I really didn't get a bad hand here. i got a good hand because i got the support that i needed throughout the whole deal and his dad who's not in the program is just overwhelmed with the fact that people who know his son from drinking too much and then stopping go through all these hoops he said i don't understand it he said they're here in the morning they're hearing all night long he said they basically have replaced me and in a way they have because he's the dad looking at what he perceives to be a little boy in crisis and what he has is a sober member of alcoholics anonymous going through another great reality and in the process of doing that he's getting to use all of the tools that have been presented to them here in AA. And you know, I hear folks talk about the concept of God, you know like my concept, your concept. It's always been the concepts that have put each other, one another at throats. Don't worry about the concept of god. Worry about the nature of god and the nature of god is good. It is loving, caring, understanding. Wary about the nature of god don't get caught up in the concept of god that's like a warlike thing and and don't worry about a lot of the stuff that people worry about which john said you know the simplicity of this you know this book was put together and this program was put Together somehow by two guys who left to their own devices probably couldn't write a prescription you know but as a result of something that happened you know as the book says something happens with alcoholics there's always something happening you know and uh and that's the way that's the arena in which we operate and something happened with this book and in putting this book together these guys were in layman's terms able to put together a step-by-step program that allowed selfish and self-centered people time to buy time and sobriety until they were ready to do other things you know the 11 steps thought through prayer and meditation try to have a conscious contact with god you've got to turn the speed down and turn the volume down it has to get quieter and quieter and quiet because in silence comes the clearest communication you're not caught up in the words what what do you think that means and what do i think that means and your perception of that and what's my in silence and that's why we have a program of action when someone comes to your home for no profit or motive that's about as spiritual as it gets they're there because they want to be there because i want to give some help somebody gets to a meeting early and makes coffee it's because that's what they want to do they've learned to make commitments in life that take them away from being so intently under a microscope themselves that they finally get a chance to catch a breath you know and and i've been fortunate enough right from the get-go to see this in real life see active people pockets of enthusiasm people who do the right thing because for the first time they realize that's where the home run is the home running is in doing for somebody else you know it's about i heard the dalai lama he was out in l.a uh... about two weeks ago and they taped some of his talk and they put it on the public network and he said in Tibet the word practice means to take to heart and I feel that's what we do here we practice these principles in all our affairs we take them to heart they become a part of us until eventually we can't get caught up in some of this other stuff because if we do it's detrimental to us and our well-being immediately and we feel it. It's like, uh-uh, that's not the right direction. That's not the right thing. And kids seem to have this down. I always, you know, I love kids because they have the best dancers. And I always remember being with a kid in an elevator and he was scratching his head and I said, why are you scratching your head? And he said, because I'm the only one who knows it itches. You know? And that's about as concise as you can be, you know? and down in our area where some of you were last uh god i say last year now because that's the way it seems to me but almost now five years ago for the international and dick and people were out there uh there's a there's place there called seaport village and they fly kites there and there was a kid flying a kite one day and his kite was above the clouds which get to be very low there and i walked by him and i said to him how do you know your kite's still there and he looked at me and he said because i can feel the pull of it mister and you see that's what happens here we can feel the pull of it i can feel the pull of it when i'm heading in the right direction doing to the best of my ability what i feel god wants me to do right at that moment, I feel the pull of that. And when I don't do that, God knows I feel the pull that. When you hear longer and longer, what happens is the pull comes quicker. It's like a Dirty Harry movie. You can, oh, okay, better back away from this. You have that so intently involved with you and and and silence is really the deal and i see that repetitively over and over and over again uh i was reading about two three weeks ago the last talk that bob smith gave and it was a very brief concise talk and on the back of it it talked about a plaque that he has on his desk in which he said quietness of the heart i mean a perpetual humility is quietness of the heart. Quietness. You have to be quiet. There are so many worldly clamors today that Alcoholics Anonymous is once again at a turning point. This internet thing and things that are going on, there's a lot of distractions. You can be so distracted from life that you won't even know you lived it when it's over. And it's coming off the roll like toilet paper. you know in the beginning it looks pretty good but those sheets start coming faster and faster and the spin gets quicker and quicker and you realize someday you're not going to have too many sheets and the situation can get very dramatic you know like and and and what happens and what happened is when i see a youngster like this young man mike or anybody going through what he's going through and i see the same thing in the eyes of the people who are coming in because the folks who are coming in have to die to who they are. They have to be reborn in the program. They haveと be reborn в their own spiritual well-being and they have то die to кто они есть. And when people start to die, you notice something about them that's very astute and that is the confusion starts to go away. Life gets simpler and simpler. As you're dying, you're not worried about Christmas cards. You know, you're not worried about presence. You're not afraid of the world. You're never worried about how you're going to dress going to this event or whether you have that particular article in your stockpile of things. You know? It just gets real, real simple. And we have a slogan that says that. Keep it simple. I mean, where did these bozos come up with this stuff? You know. Bill, what do you think? I don't know. Simple. Let's keep it simple, let's just keep it simply. Who knows? half of the stuff that went on i'm sure was like throwaway lines so what are you doing i don't know you know let's turn it over you know we don't we don' t know what we do know there and what i've been fortunate enough to see in an ongoing way is the fact that that this whole deal this whole idea is about getting quiet and getting focused and getting into action. And no matter how many years you're here, not to start to pedal away from this thing. There's a lot of folks who have a lot of years, but I don't see them at meetings either, John, unfortunately. There comes a time when it seems like the worldly clamors are so overwhelming that you have to go do other things. And people, two or three people had stopped me about their groups outside and were talking about how they're not as active as they used to be. And that, in part, to me, is the fault of the old-timers, not the newcomers. Because our job as the folks who were first on the beachhead is to kind of let the beachheads become attractive to those folks who come next. And like in our area, we play volleyball every Saturday and Sunday. I don't care if you're 10 years sober or 20 years sober or we have people with one leg down there playing volleyball so anybody can play volleyball in the sand or you can come down just watch but it's a place to go where you know this will be okay you know i can get through this and for newcomers it's great because they get a chance to come and have a place zu hang out where they're not threatened down there on diamond street there's a couple of people here used to play volleyball there so good to see you and uh And the reality of that life is that we've got to, it seems to me, as the older members, we've gotta make this thing more and more active and yet stay within the framework of the steps and the traditions. And what the newcomer's coming in is just a fact in some cases that nobody gives them any direction. It's kind of like a parent letting a child do as they please and then eventually the child doesn't know what he's supposed to do. And an AA is like, hey, let's get started, let'S do these things. And I sponsor some guys now who, they're great because I sponsor two or three guys who are Hell's Angels. And their deal is right now is if they don't want to do that, Ken, maybe I should go over and talk to them, you know? No, no, no. You don't have to. Why don't you let Fred Michael speak for this guy? I don't think he's getting the spiritual message, you know what I mean? Let's just tap him on the shoulder and get his attention, you know? And you don't need to. You don' t have to do that and the nice part about that is is that this thing works its way out i and i am uh and like when i get to spend time with uh with brian and al and the folks who are who are coming along doing this stuff it's real exciting to me i am more excited about being sober today than i've been my entire life because i see so many great things happening i see more and more people going to be exposed to this thing i see More and more People who are going to come in who are going to have a millennium sobriety you know like yeah when'd you come i came in right before the millennium what prompted you to come i don't know i just came you know and and the deal is is that it's about enjoying it you know that's i think that was the message of of uh john tonight it's about having some fun with this thing and seeing how everything works out i've been fortunate enough now to be 25 i'm over 29 years sober but i'm 25 years sober in the same place so i've i've gotten to see the beginning of stories the middle of stories and the end of stories where when you're moving around you don't get that you know i've seen guys and gals who divorced who were never going to talk to each other again and now they're like semi-dating you know like it's a it's an amazing thing. If you stay in one spot, you see miracles that you do. You see kids that come in. We have a youngster who's coming to our meeting who's a year sober and he's 13 years old. And he says, I didn't have much rope left. And so... And those are the kind of things that you don't get to see if you're not where they're at. and fortunately when I'm at the meetings I get to hear people share about all this kind of stuff and it comes to me that most of what we're worried about is the wrong thing and I won't speak for you but I'll speak for me in that area and that I have to allow time, more and more time today than I ever did before to be still because the world is speeding up the capability of getting lost in your own life you know it's very possible now to have your life live you rather than you live it and the reason being is because the technology is taking us further and further away from who we really are until eventually you'll never have to go out of the house you'll be able what are your groceries on the internet and do some of these things today that routinely we do by human contact and one of the things is in meditation i talk to guys about meditation and alcoholics anonymous has helped me in so many areas because it's it's told me the difference between things i don't want to do and things i can't do you know and it's helped me distinguish between an incident and a crisis not everything is a crisis and i've gotten used to not scratching stuff that doesn't itch you know i kind of getting good at that now you know if it does an itch i just don't scratch it you know there's a there'sa lot of times you you know you don't have to swing at every pitch you can let some go by i just never realized that you know and and i talk to guys about meditation because that's the only way i know of getting quiet and i actually have people tell me i can't do that when in fact they're saying i won't do that the same people who tell me that will play three golf three times a week or they'll be on the internet five six hours a day learning how to use it but you can't get those folks to slow down and say well you know maybe you should try some of this because you know what for what reason just because it keep you sober you know i mean if you're reading the book i'm reading it says that people fail in this thing because they fail to enlarge their spiritual life and you come in and you get the biggest gift first you get the home run first you gets sobriety and you think well that's a big one now can't wait to see the size of the rest of them well after that you got to start making some yourself you got the big one you got big ticket in and so it's a matter of like coming here and being active and meeting with people and seeing some people I haven't seen in a while and getting to see some people who used to come to meetings out in our area and in getting to visit with John. And the last time John and I were together was a couple of years ago in Missouri, and Dr. Barb's son was there. And he's up in years too, and he's the last physical person alive who was physically there when Bob and Bill met. And he said, when I leave the scene, I can't wait to hear the stories they make up. He said, because they're making those stories up now. He said I've got to correct people and say, no this was how do you know i was there oh okay if you want to introduce fact that you know i'm always at a disadvantage when people are talking factually you know but that's just the way it is and and and the scenario here is is that we have a few key players left and then after that it's going to be the strength of those people the mel's and other people who did interact with bill I never met Bill. In fact, I always felt that I missed something because I lived in New York and I got sober in 70 and he was very sickly then. He wasn't living in New Yorke. I mean, he wasn't live in our area and he just wasn't doing meetings and he died in 71 and just to tell you where I was at that time I called my sponsor because I was six months sober and I said this is something and I finally found something that worked, and now the owner died. You know? And I thought it was a scenario where they broke his anonymity in the New York papers, and I thought, well, that's it. The owner died, they're probably, you know, this is it. And he said, well go to the meetings, they're going to try to keep them open for a while. You know what I mean? So... so you can see i i lived a good part of my life out where the buses don't run you know i just uh you know i was uh i was just out there and and today in sobriety you know i i was on uh i was one uh silent retreat and uh when i got home i wasn't home but a short time when i realized nonsense talking i was engaged in ritual talking i call it ritual you're just how are you fine how are your husband okay and and that so much of it was unnecessary you know i was thinking maybe i should just get a flash card i'm fine everything's okay i'm on my way to work you know like uh and cut down a lot of the chatter because i noticed that when i wasn't talking and i wasn'T being held accountable to respond my mind got a chance to do something that had a lot of difficulty in doing and that is just sitting dead in the water and when you sit dead in the water you begin to realize things that i never knew before and that IS when one thought ends with me there's a gap before the next thought starts i always thought they tailgated one another like this you know and and really all meditation is is extending that gap getting a little bit more space between them and it's not that complicated if you practice it just like everything else allow time for it in the course of a day i have a planning book and i put it in just like an appointment you know i schedule it in like it's a business appointment twice throughout the day in the evening and in the morning for 15 minutes and it's like at that time i don't do anything else and it'S not that complicated like anything else you'll get good at it as you do it practice practice practice there's no substitute for practice whether it's in the program of alcoholics anonymous or it's in the practice of meditation and after a while you realize that this is a good shot and that life can be very very enjoyable i'm not saying get out there to the point where you have no earthly good i'm saying becoming so aware of how important this is that you get to enjoy it all the time and not just sporadically you know like that reality just isn't a drive-by what was that that was more reality you just you know snooze you lose you know it goes by and and i miss so much of it and i was married to a woman who was so totally in reality that I don't understand how she stayed with me any amount of time at all because she was well-grounded in reality. She used to say things like, there's somebody outside. And I would say, that's where they belong, outside. That's why there isn't outside. When they come inside, wake me. They're not supposed to be inside. They're supposed to being outside. You know, and no wonder she would look at me sometimes like, you know, the hamster's dead but the wheel is still turning. You know like, she would just give me that look. And she would try to bring me to reality but I remember one time she said to me, she woke me up and she said I had a terrible dream I said what did you dream? She said I dreamt that you drove me out and left me in the desert and I said okay let me go back to sleep and I promise to pick you up first thing in the morning so she was in one place and I was in another place and probably the ultimate story of that was I came home one day on the subway and all of New York was in a panic because the stock market had just had its biggest down day and I came through the door and I had a couple of shooters and she said what are you doing I said I gotta have a couple of shooters right away she said why I said the stock market had it's biggest down day and she let me finish that drink and then she looked at me like that reality check again and she says we don't own any stock you know and that would kind of like splash you a little bit with cold water and it was always tough to talk to her if she was going to be that factual you know like there was actually no place to go you know i said well if that's the position you're taking you know like and that's why the book says you know in one of the stories we marry the finest people we marry the finest women and there's a story in the big book in the back one of my favorites it's called he who loses his life and in that story it's it talks about love being the most powerful force in the world and it also says that that love is the synthesis of all the aa program that's what it is it's based on love and that there are only two sins against love and the first is to interfere in the growth of another human being and the second sin is to interfere in your own growth and it's very easy to interfere with your own growth if you've developed clamors that keep you busy all the time you know we're at a point now i'm at a point in life where i have to back away from a lot of stuff that is technology addictive i don't own a car phone i have nothing against car phones if you own one terrific i don'T own one when i'm in my car i want to be in my car i donT have a computer i'M not worried about what's going on on yahoo yet i know they're very practical i have one at work i just don't want to spend five or six hours at home on one you know i don't want people like you know like be able to email me while i'm in the head you know i i don' t want that i want to be able to do certain things in my life where they're uninterrupted you know where where i have a moment to be totally recollected and if i don''t have that moments what those moments then what happens is my day turns into can become very chaotic And so I need that time. And, you know, I'm at a point now where I demand that time, and I demand it by not participating in things which put me in a scenario where I don't have a choice. And I say to people, you Know, if it means doing that, then I just as soon not do it. Life is just too important to me today. And when I left Mike the other day, I mean, just where he's at, he said, Well, I'll see you tomorrow. And I said, No, I've gone off to this deal, and I won't be back until Monday. and I said so I'll see you then and he said well you know give me a hug he said I may not be able to wait that long and I have been there when people are dying and one of the great things that comes out of that is the clarity which which they they see life at that point because for the first time for most people the delusion is totally gone and you know i've never seen a hearse with a u-haul attached you know and and it becomes painfully apparent at that time that you can spend a lot of time doing a lot things that in the end don't mean anything and i used to hang out with this guy who's a carmelite monk who goes on these retreats and he'd say you know ken most people are really concerned about the first 7,500 years of their lives but then you die and what are you going to do with the rest of your life? And say wow yeah. And these guys are always recruiting you when you go on these retreats. These monks are always recruited. That's why they're all old you know. I think the average age must be 112 you know and the last one I was on the guy was eating soup and they don't allow the monks to sit with you at the same table every night they keep moving them around because they don' t want them to get used to people and now these are not the silent retreats, these are just regular retreats a lot of which we go on as AA groups and this guy looked at me and he said well are you enjoying yourself? I said yeah he says do you see yourself doing this full time? and he was slurping his soup and I was slurfing my soup and I looked at him and I said you know brother there's something I really enjoy and you don't have it here and he took a spoonful of soup and he put it down and he says I know he said I've been here since 1933 and the amazing thing is it doesn't matter which side of this deal you're on if if you're conscious of the deal you get to live the deal and and i keep remembering in in our text where it talks about on an ongoing basis about we have to with newcomers present them with a kit of the spiritual tools and place them at their feet. And if they want to use them, fine, but don't force it on because you may miss an opportunity later on. And the bottom line here is that AA is today more inclusive than it's ever been before. It's about letting people come in who have a problem with alcohol who now know that this thing will work for them if they're willing to do certain things. And if they're not willing to do those things, then they're just going to continually have to deal with the disease itself instead of dealing with the life that's here. I get to live a life today that I could not have drawn up. And I go back to another thing that Bill said in his story. He said it was after the incident in the cathedral. It was now whatever number of years later when he when he was writing the book i had to be at least 12 or 15 years i would presume between his return from the war and writing this book and he said for the first time because he was asking god to come into his life again he understood the real significance of what took place at winchester cathedral the real significance and you know that's been my experience too the longer i'm here i get to see the real significance of things that happened before i have some context for them but it's not until i'm hiero while and i have a chance to grow spiritually that i really get to say the real significant of why they happen and there's a lot of things now i break down into three categories they're either known unknown or unknowable and there is a lot of stuff that i just throw in that unknowble deal because it seems that as i've gotten older and i talked to young people now young people used to be people in their 20s then it got to be 30s then he got to before these now it's getting into 50s it's like you know who are these young people you know like where are you and and uh and the bottom line is is that i get to see with more and more clarity the simplicity of the life i get to live i don't have to worry about most of the stuff that folks are worried about you know at work we're going through a big upheaval because there's a new company that took us over and the other day i called the chief executive officer which people were like so some guy who's my boss came in and he said you call the ceo on his private number why would you do that and i said it's the best way to reach him you know like you know I tried reaching him another way. It didn't work, and he gave me this number, and he said, call if you ever need me. So I called because I needed him, and he kind of looked like... I thought of my wife for a moment, you know? He had to look like... Can't argue with that. It's the best way to reach him, you now? And what makes good sense to me today sometimes, you know, doesn't always click with the players, but it clicks with me, and that's who I have to live with, And I just don't want to play the dance of distraction anymore. And I've learned to cut through a lot of stuff that used to take me a lot of time to get to the bottom line. Now I want to start out with the bottomline. I want find out more and more about the reality in which I'm living and the reality in which you and I are interacting rather than go through all these hoops. And I get dizzy going through hoops, I mean sometimes you can become so good with word communication that you can talk for hours and the only way you could say less is if you talk longer and you know i don't want to do that you know I figure it's like if you can't do it in about 15 20 minutes if i don'T understand where you're at then chances are you're lying and uh and at work sometimes that they look at me still with that look and all i could see is my i've gone you know they're in there and she's moved close to me her and my husband-in-law bought a house not that far from me i know god has a good sense of humor and i tell her that god may love her but he's ecstatic about me because I went through this stuff. I don't want to run over because you guys had a meeting before this meeting, and I don'T want to take any more time because I really don't have anything else to say. I've said it all. And the bottom line for me is simply this. I have this moment. It's the only moment I have. I'll never have another one like it. I'll never have an opportunity to do in this moment what I have the opportunity to do right now and I prayed to God on a daily basis to allow me to do whatever I'm supposed to do and if perchance I don't hear it correctly and do it incorrectly I pray to God in a daily basis to give me the insight to correct the error I made and not to be in anybody's way and not be in my own way and maybe tonight when you guys guys, tuck yourselves in. At the end of the day, keep this kid Mike in your prayers. And the reality is that we all get to the same place eventually and we don't have any idea when we might get there. And it's not about getting there. It's what you do on the way. And I sponsored a guy who was the softest human being I could ever have encountered. And he used to come in and out of my home, and when he came in and out of my house, he always used to say namaste, Ken. And he was from India. And namaste means the god in me sees the god in you generally. And in fact, when Gandhi was assassinated and he was shot by this assassin, that's the last thing, the last living word he said. He said namaste to the person who shot him. I can still see the god and you. And I thank you guys on a daily basis for allowing me to be here and for seeing the God in me long before I got a glimpse of it. God bless you. Namaste. Thank you.