The Noise of Alcoholism and the Still Small Voice – Sandy B.

Good evening, my name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic. How y'all doing? Never gave a talk off a bar stool before. I feel like I ought to start complaining. Um, I was out, for those of you that hate joggers, I'm going to make you feel good, I was outside jogging this morning and sprained my ankle. Yay! And I was hobbling back, and I'm very grateful to the people that loan me the crutches. See me after the meeting, and I might want to keep using them the rest of the night and maybe tomorrow, and I want to find out how to get them back. But I was hobbling back to the hotel, and people were driving by going, serves you right, serves you right. Anyway, I do want to thank you all for inviting us out here, and I always enjoy being with a big crowd like this, with all this sobriety and all this excitement, and there's just something about getting in the middle of these events and seeing the dynamics of Alcoholics Anonymous that is a never-ending wonder to me, and i'm very pleased and grateful to be here tonight. I did come into Alcoholics Anonymous on Pearl Harbor Day in 1964 in Manassas, Virginia and I haven't been drunk since my first meeting and I owe it all to not drinking. I'd like to get that out of the way. A lot of times we get into the steps and the principles of the program, we forget to mention the not drinking part. And there's somebody new here and they don't hear about it and wonder, you know, and they have a lot of trouble. So if you've been coming around a while and your program isn't working too well, check your drinking. I mean... I heard a long time ago that it's very difficult to have a spiritual awakening while you're throwing up. And the funny thing is that tonight, I don't know why, I was sort of wrestling around and trying to get comfortable up in the room and sitting around thinking of things to talk about other than a drunkologue, which I know how it turns out I end up in AA. Same damn story every time. this term, spiritual awakening, out of our 12th step, having had a spiritual awakening. And I thought that I would just share some of the thoughts I had about it and then see where that talk goes. And I'll tell you, if you could find some of them from one of the Marines that I used to fly with, that did most of my drinking in the Marine Corps, and if you could locate some of them I don't know if there's any in the Burge group over here but if you could find them and contact them and tell them that Sandy Beach was out here about to talk about spiritual awakening you would get some funny looks they would say well yeah he used to do that a lot that's why they locked him up and you know Well, I am surprised that I'm just sitting up here and thinking about that word. And just the idea of an awakening, I suppose it happens on a daily basis which gives us our whole daily program that, you know, the whole day just starts with that awakening and how different these days in sobriety have been than those old days when an awakening was sort of a fitful panic and you just wake up with a because you heard a loud gasp somewhere and it was you you know god i'm alive and i got to go out there again oh jesus where's the booze and then calm down and then the panic of that kind of an awakening as opposed to the ones that we can get accustomed to in our day at a day at the time program now are so different and there's other kind of awakenings it's a funny word as i think about it there's uh i remember the gradualness that of learning about our sexuality you remember that when we were teenagers and became aware there was that awakening of what is this there's something in me, and then all that mystery, and finally that came to be one of our great problem areas that we had to deal with, and are still dealing with, in our sobriety. It was an interesting awakening though, you know? It just came along, and there it was. Boy, this is, it was the process of growing up, and we were aware of a new power. And I think about my alcoholism as an awakening. the power of that drinking. For me, I was a primary alcoholic and primary alcoholics have different kind of alcoholic awakenings than the educational variety if I can steal from that book. We come to know our new higher power the first night that we drink if you know what I mean. Our drinking becomes unmanageable during the second drink. I sometimes say I drank socially about 10 or 15 minutes and then crossed the line into alcoholism that night others of us around the program apparently, and I have to believe you because you get up here and say this you didn't have that kind of a problem You at least claimed to some years of social-type drinking, where it was fun and alcohol was your friend. And then your filter broke or whatever the hell happened later on. And then you knew what it was to be powerless over alcohol. And so I suppose awakenings do happen in different forms and shapes to different people. And I think our literature would have us, or would show us that a spiritual awakening certainly has that dimension. When we think about Bill Wilson's rather sudden and spectacular spiritual awakening on a hospital bed and apparently a rush of light and possible audio effects and this huge event takes place in a very... Well, that doesn't happen to most of us. There's a much more gradual type of change that seems to take place. But when I think about this twelfth step and I think that having had a spiritual awakening, I can honestly say that I am convinced that that has happened to me. I wasn't convinced at the end of one or two years I had the type that, you know, you look back on and probably other people were aware that something was changing, that I honestly began to establish some contact with a higher power that was as powerful and much more powerful than my old vodka, which was certainly a higher Power. Boy, that thing was so great and so reliable that there's a great deal of similarity from my perspective. And anything I say is just my opinion between these things, between the relationship that I had with vodka and the relationship that I have with my higher power that I found here in AA. There's tremendous similarities. There is just an amazing comparison, except one was so destructive and this new one is so, I mean the one was so destructive and this New One is so constructive. But somewhere along the line I became aware that I was, for me, was able to rely on something beyond me. And that was a great mystery. At first I wasn't sure. You know, it's like, I wonder what's going on around here. You have an hour or two of coping with life a little bit better than you used to. And you go, well, that must have been an accident. I don't know, you know, that probably won't last. I'm an eternal pessimist. That'll go away. I'm sure that I'll remain frightened for the rest of my life. And it's funny how sobriety works and we just keep coming back to the meetings. and eventually I think I was sure that a higher power was available to me to meet any situation anytime I asked and I've thought a lot about how this happened why it happened what is you know what this program how this program enables this to happen to us and I think Bill wrote in the twelve and twelve the best way that I can describe it, that this particular thing is a gift, a spiritual awakening. And that we don't know when we're going to get it. It could come early, it could take a long time, it's hard to say. But it is a gifted gift and it seems to come to everybody who makes themselves ready to receive it. That there was the problem. There was the interesting analogy, if I were to draw an analogy to making myself ready to receive this particular gift, I would think about a mailbox. And if I had a house out in the rural countryside somewhere and wanted the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail to me, I understand that one requirement is to put up a mailbox, and then I have made myself ready to receive mail. Now, being a self-centered drunk, I might approach that situation by telling the postman to just drop it on the ground. I'll get the damn mailbox up later and never send me anything but bills anyway. Who the hell wants mail? And you know, and you guys are always late and you couldn't find it and so I wouldn't have the mailbox up and I wouldn'T get any mail because that's one of the deals is in order to be eligible to receive mail, you've got to have a place to put it. And I think that that was my attitude towards the higher power. I never saw any evidence that it was around. I never heard anything, any message from it. I never got any mail from my higher power, I never had anybody knocking. I heard other people talking about higher powers, but, you know, I said, I'm not sure that if I built the mailbox, anything would arrive and I think that's why I didn't work too hard in the early years in the program it was that doubt I never saw any evidence around and I realize now that there's a great analogy to that higher power when they talk in that 11th step about the prayer of st. Francis to make me a channel of thy peace and opening up a channel and they were sometimes refer to higher power as a still small voice, and how quiet one has to get in order to hear a still small voice. And I don't know about your alcoholism, but my alcoholism was noisy! I mean there were noises in there you wouldn't believe. There was what it was the normal stomach noises, you know, and all of those. But then there was the special perspiration noises that, you know when you sweat, even when it's 20 below zero, you remember that kind of perspiring? You could just feel that oozing out. Then there was an eternal buzzing in the ears, just, I don't know what that was. It was there all the time. I was amazed when it went away. I thought it was on this planet. Then there was the grinding of the teeth that were in there. Then there were the muscle spasms and the yippy jumps around and then the skin when it itched. It just crawled and it had a noise of its own. And then there were all the people yelling at you all the time. That was going on. Get up. And panic is noisy. When I'm terrified, I can hear it. I can feel it. I can here fear is just... I mean, the whole thing. And someone says, are you listening to the still small voice? And I say, what? I don't think it's possible to hear a still small voice in the condition that we bring ourselves into alcoholism for a long time afterwards I don' t know about you all but just stopping drinking didn' t get me unpanicked It was more terrifying because now you took away my secret weapon Now I was facing the world unarmed and it took a long time before I was ready to relinquish my grip of panic in order to listen. So I needed to rely on you all, and I think we do. We rely on the people who have gone before us so that we can just hold on to them and maybe relax, just take and release our death grip on life for just a second You just sort of see if we're going to fall off. I think I had that fear of falling off the world or something like that, you know, that God, if I ever let go, ifI ever completely relax, what would happen? There was this tremendous self-centered panic about life that led and contributed and was developed during the drinking years. And I look back now and see how this kind of all fell together and how the steps, one by one, were able to remove the debris. They were able cause those fists to unclench and they were able relax some of the muscles just a little bit so that the noise level dropped down. It's very difficult to listen when you have the perpetual thought. You know what I think the most commonly thought is amongst us? If you think of all the thoughts we could have, this is the one I think. Hey, what about me? That would be my guess as to the most commonly thought thought. And this is even when we're on a 12-step call. I mean, even when it's better to give than receive mode, I still think that's the most common thought thought and we're rendering to the best of our ability to share and so on down and then we go, God, I hope this gets over in the next hour or so. I'm getting tired, you know, and our own little thing starts surfacing and the true colors are starting to fly. And I suppose that's how I was born. Very self-centered. I think that's just what a baby is that just sits there and pounds on the high chair and says, I'm hungry. And then starts going, my pants are wet. And change them. And I've got to go to the bathroom. And we've got all these problems. And then we're 40 and we're still doing this. And they're going, God, he wet his pants again. And the bed is wet. And he's banging on his high chair. He wants his bottle. And then we go, as we get older, we just go, God, I guess they're not hearing me. I better yell louder. And I'll tell you what, this may sound ridiculous, but I really think this happens, that we're so self-centered, at least I am, and anything I say is just my opinion. We're so soft-centered we don't know it. have you ever gone to a group this is the same syndrome the baby syndrome have you never gone to a group and you take your problem and you lay it on the table finally you've heard that in AA go ahead you want to lay it out on the table with your group so you come in there and boy you got a problem I mean you got 12 bill collectors that are hounding you some of them with guns and you've just been told you've got 10 more days on the job you're getting laid off and you've got a serious financial problem. So you lay it on the table and you explain, you know, man, I've hocked everything on, I'm down ten more days and then these guys with the guns and they start around the table addressing your problem and they go, well, keep going to meetings and pray. And the next person said, yeah, the answer to your problem is spiritual growth. and so you go wait a minute let me stop the meeting here a minute I must not have explained my problem correctly I can tell from the answers I'm already getting I haven't really let me take another shot at that for you money money money is the topic tonight and I'd like to what we're talking about is good hard cash now let's go around again and people are going okay and the rest of the table finishes out with a unanimous precision spiritual growth and I'll tell you you just sit there and we go back and we say well I'll never do that again with that group and we go back and try and re-explain it and that's what I'm saying when we can't get the people to give us the answer we just keep explaining the problem keep demanding keep hammering out that the answer to that is money and nobody would agree with it how could you tell me the answer is spiritual growth or we may have a health problem or we're maybe having a relationship problem oh she left me what am I going to do pray pray and we go what about revenge Doesn't anybody? Where are you? Can we just, maybe we try to go to another group like we used to take geographic cures. You know, we can take geographic cues in sobriety. Just keep going until we get some other losers that'll agree with us. Start our own group. No literature allowed. We could call it the resentment group. You've got serenity, you're not welcome. And that's what I'm saying, this tremendous self-centeredness. Oh, I need an answer and I need it now. Well, that to me, as I'm describing whatever that is, is noisy. You know what I'm saying? When you just think about yourself all the time, you can't hear anything. It's just, yeah, listen, as soon as I get the money. As soon as i get revenge, I'll go in for spiritual growth. But I got a lot of crap I gotta deal with. Then I can put my feet up. And intellectualize with a philosophy and get serenity and some of those things. But I can't get that now, man. I'm in the middle of a mess. You don't think you can apply serenety to messes, do you? And I think we missed the point, you know. And it just seems so vital. And we just don't understand why they don't stand up for us. We don't know what they don' t understand. Alcohol understood. Boy, alcohol didn' t question, you knoW, this, it. And the funny thing was, alcohol didn't give us money or revenge. It was very similar to spiritual growth. It solved the problem by changing how we felt about it. Hey, I owe all these guys all that money. I think I'll get drunk. Screw them. You know That's what I care It's dumb to come in here We solved the financial problem With no money We just changed our attitude about it And they claim we can do that Spiritually That we can stop being so frightened about this problem that we're able to hold a job or look for one without being so nervous that nobody wants to hire us. You know, when you're desperate to get the job, people don't want to hire you. They go, yeah, this guy's a wreck. I don't mind him working in here. He needs the job so bad. This is awful. So you've got to go in and be calm. How do you get calm? That was the problem. And I didn't believe that this power was available to fix all these things. And I looked at my alcoholism, quite frankly, as a fixer. That was a good thing when they called the drugs. You remember, they'd give me a fix. That's a good word, because alcohol fixed things that I didn' t know how to fix because I didn''t learn how to grow up. I took an easier, softer way. I think, you know, the normal growing up process that most of us encounter involves a lot of pain, how to deal with rejection. Your first girlfriend runs away and you lose the big game and then you lose something else. You don't get the job you wanted and all these problems and we learn how to... Well, that happens and this is what it feels like and it's kind of painful but pretty soon we take that in stride and move on to the next one. But for some of us alcoholics, we discovered a painless way to grow up. Rejection? No problem. I'll just chug-a-lug this fifth. Then I won't feel the pain. And I wake up the next day and I haven't experienced anything out of that situation. I haven'T learned anything except how to avoid it. And I did a beautiful job with my alcoholism. Avoiding things. Never realized I was avoiding them. But it worked beautifully. As time went along, I found that alcohol could take care of some of the normal problems that people encounter. And I always like to talk about my first drink because I did become an alcoholic that night. And it was in college, so you can see I was a late starter. The reason I was the late starter, I had been into the Catholic Church at an early age, and my relationship with the Catholic church was like a lot of little kids. The church said, welcome, little boy, you're in trouble. That was the initial entree there, and I looked up with big round eyes and found out this was a serious game we're playing and involved a lot of heat later on. And this had me quite panic-stricken. I just went through life hearing the flames of purgatory. I could just hear them out there, oh boy. And the normal growing up things happened. There was an epidemic of impure thoughts in my neighborhood and they would come in my bedroom window and I would try and keep them out but they were too powerful they would overpower me and there would be another 10,000 years added on to the book and you couldn't tell anybody about that couldn't share that with anybody that was a secret and I started collecting a lot of secrets and I was worried that there were secret finder-outers in the world. Later on in the drinking years, I knew there were secret finders-outters. There were people who looked you right in the eye. So I started wearing sunglasses. A lot of us drunks wear sunglasses because they can't see what's behind there. As a matter of fact, I got so paranoid near the end I was afraid that the government had people out there looking for shells i felt like just a shell of a human being you know and i just figured if i ever made eye contact with someone and it was a government guy he looked in there and go there's no one in there get him off the streets and uh you know that oh god they're gonna find out that i'm grown up but there's nothing in here but a little baby who's terrified of being out here and unless he's got booze. Then he feels fine. Then it isn't. Everything's in proportion then. And then I felt like a grown-up when I had that drink. And that's what that first drink did. I was in this university and there was all these grown-ups around, other freshmen. And they had all those manners and they knew how to talk and they know how to divide up into groups. I still don't know how that works. Um, some people just intuitively know how to handle situations which is to baffle them. But some, you know, there's 50 strangers and you put them all in a room and you just say, here, have some soda and drinks and pretzels and mix. And if you come back about 15 minutes later, there'll be eight people over here having a nice conversation, only three over here and then 12 over here and five, five. How do they know where to go? I mean, I would end up being the one that's left. And I run over to the group of twelve and I'm, do I belong in there? Nobody, what do you want? No, I don't belong in here. And I could see the way they were looking. They didn't want me in there. There was that questioned look. What? What? Okay, I'll go over to the next group. And they didn't want me there either. Same look. So I checked them all and nobody wanted me. So I just stood around the wall and said, boy, this is a great university. And then I had a drink. And all the groups wanted me so that is power I could take and change all those groups with one drink change them from people who didn't even care about me to people who went hey get over here come over here tell jokes we love you I drank and you started smiling I drank And I had the power to change the world that I lived in from a very intimidating, frightening, confusing place to one where I knew all the rules, where I understood every little nuance of life just by drinking. So you don't think that was a higher power. God, that was so magic. It also solved all the other problems. It solves the fear. It solves sex problems. It solves money problems. that solved the inability to be creative. God, I'll never forget, you know, when I stopped drinking, I had read somewhere that Edgar Allan Poe wrote all of his stuff drunk. And I remember telling my sponsor, here's two Marines, and I'm discussing how Edgar Allan Поe could only be creative when he was drunk. And Bill said, we don't need no poems about ravens. in the Marine Corps. So I said, okay. But I had the feeling that all creativity took place under the influence. That that's the only time the brain would function and I would get these tremendous thoughts late at night and jump out of bed and write them down. Then you'd have to get drunk the next night to read them. And you never could bring them into the real world. They were only available late at night. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that alcohol was some power. That stuff, I mean, I didn't realize I had put that investment in this chemical, but I really had. I relied on it to have answers. It took care of the future. That's why we stocked up. Oh, I got my future taken care of. In the garage, in the basement, in the trunk of the car. I'm not going to get caught short. I'm nicht going to be out there without my future taking care of and there's a tremendous dependence on that. There is a faith, you know, like go ahead world, do your worst man. and I got a fifth in the trunk. But if you knew it wasn't there, we were terrified that something challenging might occur, that something we couldn't handle might occur. And life became terrifying without this power that I had faith in. And eventually, you know, we had to keep it in our pockets and in our briefcases. Keep it real close. And we come into Alcoholics Anonymous and they go, okay, no drinking. I go, you don't understand. You wouldn't, you couldn't, I mean, I needed to even think about walking out of my house and you're telling me no drinking. And you know, there's a very gradual weaning process. I don't know about you all, but I bet I'd been in the AA about six months when I realized I had a $50 bill hidden in a secret compartment in my wallet that I was dependent on. Because it was there just in case this program didn't work. You know what I'm talking about? It was there together with the intimate knowledge of the hours and location of package stores. But I wasn't, you know, powerless over alcohol. My life wasn't unmanageable. And there I was. You know, and I wonder how many of us have that. We sort of, oh, no booze anymore. But we have an emergency thing we really haven't discussed with anybody. You know, we've got a secret bank account or a hidden bottle somewhere or a plan, maybe an emergency plan. We don't have any of these things. We just have sort of I know how quick I could get a fix in case, just in case something came up that this program couldn't handle. You know something real frightening and then you know it would be a question of losing my job or having a drink for my family's sake. you know just to save them and it's so frightening to disengage completely from that chemical i mean that to me is what alcoholism was and it really wasn't occurring so much that dependence when i was drinking now you know the illness seems to occur when i'm not drinking that's a funny part of it and phil writes about that you know in the first step he talks about a double-edged sword The one is the compulsion, which sets in after I have the first drink when I was only going to have about three and I end up having 35. And that one is the chemical part that I look at. Where I pour it in and boy, it does something to my system that it doesn't do to other people's and it ends up with funny kind of livers and high blood pressure and convulsions and DTs and shakes and malnutrition and all the little fringe benefits of drinking that we run into. And that's what the medical profession seems to write about, and there's a great deal written about that. But that isn't the part of the illness that I feel powerless over. I feel powerlessness over alcohol when I'm not drinking. That's the part that we need each other and this program and a higher power and everything to deal with. it kind of reminds me if my brain were broken in its learning experience with fire and I don't know if any of you were fascinated with fire as a little kid but I think the average person growing up they get big enough to turn on a gas stove and they see the flame burning up there and they go damn is that real pretty and they stick their hand in it trying to play with it and pretty soon we get a big message that comes back and that is keep your damn hands out of the flames. It's sort of a permanent record of that little transaction that takes place. But if we had a distortion, if we could have such a thing as a flameaholic, we wouldn't have a complete learning experience that would take place. We would have something like this. Well, I stuck my hand in that flame and it burned this finger. So what did I learn? I learned that that flame burns this finger. What about this finger? What about the elbow? What about that flame? What about my nose? And I would have an obsession with flames, and I would be consumed with a resentment that flames are so pretty you can't play with them, And somewhere in the world there may be someone who knows how I would be able to do that. And I would have this abnormal interest, and I think that's what I had with alcohol. When I wasn't drinking, I couldn't stop thinking about drinking. It was just there. And the more I realized in my sobriety, there was no way I could get rid of it. There was no Way that I could stop thinking About Drinking. I mean, and yet they tell us when we come into AA that if you can't stop thinking about drinking, you're going to drink again. And if you drink again, you're gonna die. And I go, well, then, you know, you are going a long way around to say, I'm gonna die! And they go, yeah, that's what our first step is. The first step it's more serious than you thought. And I don't know about you but I came in and told my sponsor, You know, there's a compulsive honesty that sets in in the program. And when we commend initially, we're minimizing our drinking. I don't know, that's what I would do. I'd say, well, I didn't drink that much. And then I found out in Alcoholics Anonymous we have reverse snobbery. The further down you went, the more status you have. You know what I'm talking about? There's that, you know, you were really only arrested five times, but you say seven. Because then they listen to you when you discuss the topic at the close meeting. I was seven times arrested, let me talk about honesty. And we just, you know, so all of a sudden, oh, you want to really hear about it? And probably in the first month or somewhere, I said to my sponsor, let me tell you, I've been, you now, kind of minimizing my drinking. This is what really happened. And I started unloading about how sick and the malnutrition and losing 50 pounds and getting locked up in a mental institution and the DTs and all of these things. And when I got through, he said, yeah, if you keep on drinking, you're really going to get in trouble. And I think that's what the first step tells us, is no matter how bad we think it is, That's nothing compared to what it's going to be unless a miracle takes place. And I don't think there's any bones made about that. That that, to me, is the proper explanation of the situation. That unless a miracle takes place, you've got a very bad future. And you want to see it? Come on, I'll take you up and show you a wet brain. Oh, I don't want to see that. What are they trying to do, get me upset? No, we're trying to get you to let go. We're trying to get your attention and get you to declare an emergency. And I think that's what has to happen. That I have to end up declaring an emergency in each one of us. I think that's what has to happen because up until then I'm not going to go through an emergency procedure. You know, they're nice to know that these 12 steps are there and they certainly would be useful in an emergency. But if you don't have an emergency, they are academic discussion principles. Oh yes, inventories, very good. They're very good for the human soul. And if I had an emergency, I might get serious about them. And I think that's what happens in that first step, is we recognize that my illness, the one I have, the alcoholism that I brought in, is indeed a fatal illness and I'm about ready to declare an emergency. And the steps take on a new dimension. There is a sudden awareness that I'm interested in obtaining the results that are available here in AA. I think the experience might be an analogy to a jet pilot who were flying along and the plane caught on fire so he ejected and the chute stayed in the plane. And I'm sure his initial reaction might be that, you know, I think I've got a problem as I'm whistling along at 55,000 feet observing the world out there in some distance, you know, I've got a problem here. But as you go coasting along and you're a good rationalizer, you might start going, you know nothing's happened yet. I wonder if some of us are above the law of gravity. If I put my arms like this, look at this, I can go this way, and I can go that way. And you know, we can come into AA, and we can go, yeah, my drinking was bad, but it wasn't as bad as some of these people are talking about. I mean, a fatal illness? Fatal? You're talking about the drinking I did is fatal? I mean that means like I could die from it, and then we're just yapping away. Meeting after meeting, sort of rationalizing our situation, and in the meantime, we're coasting closer And you know, something different happens when you move down around 80 feet. The relative motion picks up. You're going, hey, I think we've got a serious problem on our hands here. and if we could we could just freeze everything at about 12 feet and just ask each one of us listen, we're conducting a survey how do you feel about God? this is the right time to ask and I don't know about you but my answer would have been well all my life I've been able to prove the non-existence oh boy I hope like hell I'm wrong and you know that's what the first step can do it can blow away all of our previous positions on that subject by creating the absolute need for the existence of a personal higher power. And we just go, what do I care what I used to think? I've got to be wrong or I'm going to splash. And now you've got an open mind. And that's what I'm so grateful for. It was a fatal illness that gave me an open mind, that allowed me to change my position on several major issues. And spiritual awakening was one of them. I no longer denied that they could exist. I acknowledged the need for this to happen to me. And if anybody is new out there, this is the process that I think you'll go through. And there'll be a lot of end runs and a lot of detours and a little bit of a lot, uh, shenanigans. But one of these days we're going to come face to face with our own illness. And we're gonna go, Jesus! This damn thing is serious! You know what? We're gonna see it. We're just gonna get a glimpse. We're going to go, I'm at 12 feet! Time out! Time out. Time out, time out, time out. I'm changing my mind on several major issues. Man, whoo! Give me those old 12 steps. Let me at them. Because now they take on a whole new meaning. This isn't some academic, this is a rescue rope. This is the answer to this. This is how miracles happen. This is Alcoholics Anonymous. We are driven in there with this fatal illness and we end up coming out the other side very grateful that we had the fatal illness in the first place. That's why so many people get up and say, I'm glad I'm an alcoholic, because it drove us to this spiritual awakening. It drove us through this place that many of us feel we never would have discovered had it not been for this desperately fatal illness. And so if you're new out there and you're sort of wrestling with the magnitude of your illness and so on down, and one of these days this will happen. And it's going to be a great day. It's going to be an awakening, an awareness of the reality of this illness and what it's going to take to stop it. It's gonna take a power so great that it can reach down and just grab you individually just before you hit those rocks. It's gunna pluck you out of mid-air and turn your whole life around and then you're going to have to explain it. And there's no other way to explain. Miracle! This was not a human power. This was something I could never have done. You've heard it, you've heard people after people get up here and try and explain the turnaround, the change. And what a process it is. And that's what the steps do. And I'm not going to go through them all, I'm going to stop in about five minutes. That's what they do. That's not what the Steps do. They allow us, process by process, to discover every area that we were wrong about. chapter 5 talks about that old ideas availed us nothing whenever I talk about old ideas I always have to talk about Charlie Bruton he's my old friend back there in Washington was in the AA for a bunch of years he passed on some years ago but he had some great sayings and whenever I mention old ideas I think of him one of his practical jokes at meetings a guy would come up to him and say hey Charlie the clock over there said 8.15 And the one over here says 8.30. What's wrong? He said, if those clocks both said the same time we wouldn't need but one clock. That was... now there's no hidden meaning in that, but that's what he would say. he summarized these old idea issue as well as I've ever heard it. And that was, he said that it isn't the things we don't know that kill us. It's knowing things that just ain't so. And, that's what I brought in here, was a whole bunch of information that was wrong. I said there was no higher power for me. I said you were all rotten. I say the world stunk. I said that there are no values. I said, there's no such thing as spiritual principles. This is dog-eat-dog world. And I wanted to hold on to those ideas. For some strange reason, I was reluctant to give them up. Why the hell would I want all that to be true? Think about it. If you're new and you're holding on to all these things, I don't want to be wrong about all this. And I go, why not? What the hell do you want all that for? to be true for. You're no good, your own family hates you, your mother hates you there is no God, you're gonna die next week bad death, nothing good's ever going to happen to you and I'm gonna hold on to this forever. You know why we hold onto that? Because it's painful to change. know, I think I'll suffer the pains of being wrong rather than the pains of change. And we go, well, that's a dumb position, but if you want, go ahead. And eventually the pain of being wrong gets too big and we cash in and take the risk and take to jump into this unknown area, into the spiritual principles. I'm going to finally cut the rope to that path and I'm going to walk with you people and see where I end up. And I think the surprise of your life is awaiting to find out who you really are and that voice when you make yourself ready to hear it through all of these processes of getting rid of character defects, cutting out all that noise until there comes the day when you finally sit down and you go, you know, I think I've got it quiet enough now. I wonder if I'm gonna hear anything. And you start listening and you get a glimpse And then you start going, you know, I think I'm on to something. It's so exciting, I can't believe that this is going to happen to me. And you know in the big book it writes about that. Deep down inside of every one of us is a fundamental idea of God. It's been there ever since we were a child. All we have to do is get in touch with it again. Be able to listen. Be ableto have our lives quiet down enough to hear what's there. And I'll tell you what you're going to hear. You're goingto hear joy. You'regoing to hear the whole joy of living. Your attitude is going to change. You're going to walk back in. You're gonna want to go out and carry this entire message to the next person. And you'll be on a 12-step call and whatever you're conveying, you'll have a new power. Do you ever think the power that you have as a recovered alcoholic to walk into a home that hasn't seen any hope in five years and you're there 10 minutes and the entire family's eyes are lighting up and are listening to every word you're saying because you're bringing hope where it's never been before simply by sharing and saying, I know exactly what's going on here. I know precisely where you're coming from and I know where to take you and I'm going to take you out of this hell because I've been in it and you can see I'm out and they grab hold and they've got hope and the power of your illness and the powerful power of this program is transmitted in that split second and then we come back and try and explain that. What is that power? What is it? and we're at loss for words. We try our best, but we know what it feels like, and we know how it feels. And we know that it looks like, and it's in this room tonight. Thank you very much.