The Power to Access the Power – Scott L.

And I'd like to open with a few more. I'd like to first thank Sal, who I know did a lot of work here, and Bart, who could not attend because of his father's ill health. I would like to have a few moments of silence, and if you would, send some love to Bart and to his dad. Let's have a few moments of silence. Amen. I'd like to open with a quotation from the noted American philosopher Hank Williams, Sr., who once said, there are a lot of good ideas in a pint, not so many in a court that was my experience right oh man um a couple of kind of interesting points here page 61 and we we flip around the book a little bit here there's a very powerful concept here that that for me falls under the step one section b my life's unmanageable i don't get to run it just past halfway down the page 61 says is he not a victim of the delusion that he can rest That means to take by force. That he can wrest satisfaction and happiness out of this world if he only manages well. That says I'm so nuts that I still think occasionally if I get what I want, it'll make me happy. Isn't that crazy? Can you think of anything crazier than that? Clearly not true. Play with me. I didn't fly in from Nashville to talk to you. I came to talk with you, okay? Play withme. So we're going to do examples here. Who, when you were a kid, wanted a bike? You were certain if you could get a bike, you'd be happy, and you got a bike. Anybody? Thanks. Okay. Are you happy? No. No, okay. That didn't work. Let's try something else. Who wanted him or her? Sure if you're going to be happy and you got them, come on, admit it. Okay, now you could be sitting next to them. I won't ask the other question. I'll give you a little break there. Makes it pretty good. Who's sure if you get rid of him or Her that you... Yeah, okay. So I've got to look at the great truth, okay? One more thing I know for sure it's wrong. Getting what I want won't make me happy. It never did. My problem was that I had happy and pleasure confused. Pleasure is on the physical plane. There's something out there that if I can acquire it will bring me that pleasure for a limited period of time. Happiness is on the spiritual plane. It's in here, and it's a side effect of having a healthy relationship with God and with all of you, and that's in part what these 12 steps are about. I want to talk a little bit. We don't seem to have a definition of alcoholism or alcoholic. You can argue with the definition, but you can't argue with a description. On page 44, here's the one they got me with. If when you honestly want to, you find you cannot quit entirely, Like, for example, in the back of a police car. A lot of people really honestly want to in the back of the police car, I'm told. Yeah. Or if when drinking you have little control over the amount you take. Did you ever get drunk accidentally? Have you ever drunk by mistake? Like you maybe caught it from the guy in the next barstool, maybe he was contagious and you sort of got it from him. Shamelessly over-served. Yeah, over-served by an irresponsible bartender. Something like that, possibly, yeah. See, I didn't think that should count because I didn' t mean to do it. And here I am with this characteristic. Or, it doesn' t say and, or, either of those. If you honestly want to and can' t quit entirely, or if when drinking you have little control of the amount, if you get drunk by accident, you are probably alcoholic, I am probably alcoholic. So those are the two characteristics we talk about most often in alcoholism. there's a third characteristic that's only mentioned once but it was one of the earmarked ones for me and it's on page 23 and i don't think we talk about it enough and it describes me fully in one sentence paragraph in the middle of the page it says once in a while he may tell the truth once in awhile maybe right i don t spread the truth around too thick i m saving it for emergencies i uh jack nicholson has a great line in the movie as good as it gets he says i ll always give you some version of the truth right tell me one of our boys didn't write that oh yeah so so there it is i mean that's just very simply what happens and uh so you're going to hear me over the course of the weekend use the the phrase the short form of the step on page 58 and the top of 59 we have what i call the short forma the step the the cliff notes and i want to read to you the first step the way i saw it when i first read these steps we admitted we were powerless over alcohol therefore our lives have become unmanageable on close examination i have discovered that the word therefore does not appear in step one i took it upon myself a number of years ago to look up in a dictionary punctuation and i found that a hyphen or a dash is strangely enough not shorthand for the word therefor but it actually connects two separate thoughts the reason i was confused was that on the june the 27th 1984 the day of my most recent drink the fact that I was powerless over alcohol, that my life was crashing down around my ears. Those facts were related. On August 1st, 2008, I am powerless over alcohol. My life is unmanageable. I'm not playing with you. That's one of the most powerful concepts I ever got. I have actually, to be honest with you, read this book more than once. I cannot find a place in the book that says congratulations. Having now achieved this lofty spiritual level, your life is now manageable. The keys are in it. The tank's full. load up. Go get them, Stanley. Can somebody shout out the page number for me on that? I can't find it either. I cannot find it. Now, I'm not playing with you. See, what's happened here is that I have fired me as general manager of my own life based on my performance. A good manager would have fired мне decades ago, right? And part of what I did this morning is I invited God in to run it. Not give me some help, but run it and whatever he's got in mind suits me just fine i signed on i do find a couple of places and we maybe get one of them tonight where it promises me sanity but i don't find where i get to manage it anymore and those are very different concepts and that's just how it is for me but it's so important a lady friend of mine in my home group one time and she wasn't trying to make a big heavy point she was laying her heart on the table it's the only time it's ever happened to me when she said this line i came up out of my chair She said, I'm having trouble getting a grip on letting go. Isn't that it? Isn't dat just exactly right? Boy, that's how it was to me. And by the way, if you're new and it looks to you like the steps are designed to punish you, welcome to AA. That's how they look to us, and we were wrong about that, and you are too. What the steps actually did was they brought me relief. They don't look like it, but that's what they did. And then as my sponsor insisted I not settle for relief but get all the way to recovery, they also brought me a change of spirit and a change of heart. So I have to admit the truth in the first step. I am powerless over alcohol. I can't drink and I can not drink. And my life is unmanageable and I don't want to run it anymore. I have enjoyed all I can stand. I don' t want what I want anymore. I was getting what I wanted when I qualified to sit here with you. There's serious doubt as to how much more I could survive of what I want. I want what God wants me to have. I don't know what it is. I know how to get it. It's by following these directions and by trying to walk the spiritual path today, and as that happens, it unfolds for me. It's not like I do it. It's like it happens to me. I want to talk a little bit about the word obsession. I got a phone call from a young man I was sponsoring, and he said, listen, I'm tired of hearing about that woman. You're obsessing about her. He said, I'm not obsessing about her. I just think about her all the time. I stand corrected. I got to get out of the business of thinking that there's something out there that's going to bring this happiness thing to me because it isn't going to happen. You want to talk about one a little bit more? I'm ready to go too. Are you? You want us to start it? Okay. Go for it. We just make this up. We don't know what we're doing. We make it up at the breaks. I'm Bob, an alcoholic. Hey, Bob. I'm in a trap. I cannot spring. I have this allergic reaction to alcohol that every time I go to get high, I can't stop and I burn my life to the ground even when I don't want to and I swear to myself I won't go too far. And then when I get rendered abstinent by a detox or running out of money or getting arrested, I swear To Myself I'll never touch that stuff again and i always always go back to it and i don't have the ability to change either one of those two dynamics and i've tried and i think most of us have i mean i threw every drug in the mix i worked out i did macrobiotics also i could maybe drink and not get so wacky i went to therapy i was hypnotized i reparented my inner child i primal screamed i got on a train and came up to New York to the Rational Emotive Institute. I went to Gestalt therapy. I did all of this trying to fix me so that I would be the kind of guy that was comfortable enough sober, and I failed. I couldn't find the power to jumpstart a party that couldn't be jumpstarted, to control and enjoy my drinking, or to change me and manage me inside enough that I was okay enough sober that I didn't have to go back to that madness. And I was literally stuck. And on the bottom of page 44, it talks a lot about me. And I explored so many things. Before I ever got sober, I mean, I tried Buddhism. I tried all kinds of stuff. But it says if a mere code of morals or a better philosophy of life were sufficient to overcome alcoholism many of us would have recovered long ago but we found that the need that such codes and philosophies did not save us no matter how much we tried we could wish to be moral we could Wish to be philosophically comforted in fact we could will these things with all our might but the needed power wasn't there our human resources as marshaled by the will were not sufficient they failed utterly anybody ever get sober and really tried to be good anybody did that jared notice how you kind of after a while you kind of out good yourself i mean it's like it's Like a slingshot almost you know all right I'm good I'm really good now I'm so good I'M SO GOOD THAT I'M SUPERIOR TO THE PEOPLE THAT AREN'T GOOD I'M REALLY GOOD AND THEN I RUN OUT OF POWER AND some of the worst most degrading runs i've ever been on have been after large huge app periods of abstinence willfully there's a principle in the universe for every action there's an opposite and equal reaction if i put willpower into that i give it torque to go the other way Right. Did you get that? Did you get that right? And it goes, it says, and here's the, here's the problem. And it's, it sounds so simple, but it's really the whole crux of the matter. Lack of power. That was our dilemma. Now here's a point in Alcoholics Anonymous where we lose a lot of people because they misinterpret this as being lack of religion or even lack of faith and it's not i've had the occasion to sponsor four men of the cloth over the years two of them are sober doing all right two of em are dead and the one guy uh god he was such a nice guy and i'm not talking about a i'm that talking about like a guy with a lot of deviancy these were good good men And this guy, Frank, he called me up about a week before they found him dead and he'd been back to drinking and he was weeping into the phone because he could not comprehend why a guy who's dedicated his whole life to God could beg God not to ever let him drink again. and he was drunk again, and there were bums in AA that were staying sober seemingly effortlessly. And he didn't get it. And I didn't getting it either. It blew my mind. When I found out he died, he had literally drank himself to death. I couldn't believe it because here's a guy who prayed probably more in one day than I did in a week, who read spiritual literature every single day of his life for years. And he died of alcoholism, and here I am, a bum, who's staying sober, and I'm getting a good life. But Frank's dilemma was not lack of religion. It wasn't even lack of faith. It was lack of power. And he couldn't get it. I live in a city where in July and August, especially in August, there are days where in Las Vegas it'll get to be 120. The Chamber of Commerce will tell you it's a dry heat. Yeah, so is hell. It's hot. I mean, it's hot, and if I were to take you in my car outside of Las Vegas, there's a huge freshwater lake called Lake Mead, one of the biggest ones in the western United states and i take you there drive you right up to the edge of the lake let you get out dip your hand in the water drink some of the water and then stick you back in my car drive you about 20 miles out into the desert drop you off give you a map showing you on the map where i'm dropping you off showing you where lake mead is you can wander around that desert and die of thirst if you don't follow the directions and get to that water and you will die of thirsty with absolute faith that the waters there. And Frank knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that God was there. The problem was his not a lack of faith. He could not access the power. He died knowing it was there, and I think alcoholics die of alcoholism every day like starving men at a banquet. The food's there, but they can't get at it. The power, they know the power's there. They can't gets at it matter fact i'll tell you something that i i believe this everything in me i think in the history of human race alcoholics anonymous is the first process that's come down the pike that's designed specifically to connect people who are damaged spiritually to a power greater than themselves that they live in a world that other people seem to be able to connect with so easily and there's something wrong with us we have a malady of our spirit and it goes on later in the book to explain that and i started to get it the problem is i got too much of me between me and god right and the ego the self is a funny thing it will take scripture it'll take the traditions it'll take the steps it'll takethe knowledge of god and use it to its own self-grandizement in order to feel superior to other people the ego doesn't care you know the christians a lot of some christians will tell you the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince you he wasn't there the greatest trip my ego ever pulls on me on a regular basis is to convince me it's not there that's not ego that guy is a jerk it's not ego he doesn't have a good program right lack of power not lack of religion that's the dilemma we had to find a power by which we could live and it had to be a power greater than ourselves obviously obviously but where and how redefine that power well that's exactly what this book is about its main object is to enable you to find a power greater than yourself, which will solve your problem. Page 46, it's a simplistic but realistic and dynamic approach to step two. It says something in the middle of page 46 that is so simple, it hardly seems like it's enough until you try it and it really is the essence of step step two it says yes we have agnostic temperament had these thoughts and experiences well just one on a couple two paragraphs to talk about our doubts our prejudices our fears of god and everybody got that we all got that to some even guys like clergy have old ideas about god the problem is that the ego tells you your ideas are right have you ever had it you ever had a judgment in the middle of the judgment think you know that might not be right not me the things I know or so I just know are so the adamancy is in the ego the spirit is free the ego is like that so let us make haste the book says to reassure you he found as soon as we were able to do two things. The first thing, it sounds so simple, and yet it's so difficult. The first think it says is to lay aside prejudice. Well, I tell you, I carried prejudices into Alcoholics Anonymous for years that I didn't even know that I had them because my prejudices don't seem like prejudice. It just seems like, well, that's the way it is. It's my emotional reaction to life. It's old ideas that are so entrenched in me, I believe them. Not only do I believe him, there's no room for argument. That's just the way it is. And I will position and conduct myself towards life and towards God and towards you based on those ideas. And I don't even know I'm doing it. So it doesn't say we have to, that they're wrong, these prejudices. It doesn't even say we have to give them up completely. Can I lay them aside? Can I get humble enough to almost be like a child that knows nothing? Can I come to the table with God with no preconceived notions, no judgments, no opinions, right or wrong, nothing, a clean, childlike state? Can I do that? it's very hard if you're like me and i sit with the guys i sponsor and i ask them uh just have i have two guys doing this right now that are brand new what are your prejudice and i want you to sit and think about and we talk about a little bit and i'll tell you one common one and it seems to be in every one of us to some degree and you might verbalize it differently to yourself, but it's that sense, that unconscious feeling that I really don't measure up to God's help. That feeling of unworthiness, that sense that if there was 5 billion people on the planet and God was going to help 4,499,4 99,999. He's going to leave a few out. I know what group I'm going to be in. Right? You know, in the pit of your stomach, when you're alone in the middle of the night, you know what Group you're in. And so consequently, I can't turn towards the light because I can'T believe it would be there for me. i can't turn towards it scott and i and linda and a bunch of other uh aas and alanods were over in europe uh last summer and we want we went to uh different cities and one of the places we went to was florence and i i was kind of there on this mission i there's a statue that i'd heard about that the year before i was over and looked and i went in the wrong museums i didn't find and It's a statue by the sculptor Donatelli, and it's called the Magdalena. It's the statue of Mary Magdalene. A friend of mine from L.A. had seen it and told me about it. I really wanted to see it. So we do this research. We find out it's at the Opera Museum right behind the Domo, and we get there, and I get a little over-fixated on stuff. I get something in my crosshairs. I'm going after it. So there's a whole bunch of us show up. within two minutes i've lost everybody else in the group because i'm zipping through this museum on a mission to find this statue of magdalena of mary magdalene and i i going up these stairs and i shoot into this one room there's a huge crucifix on the wall life size what yeah but it's a big full big cross for the thing with christ life's life size six foot probably of christ on the cross i turn and there's the statue of mary magdalene and it just it almost stopped my heart it's unlike any depiction of mery magdaline you'd ever see uh most of them you you see with the very pretty woman with the wrong reddish brown hair and the flowing robes and she's gorgeous this is not like that this is a statue of a woman who's scarred she suffers from now malnutrition she's wearing rags she has an expression of of shame and self-loathing and hopelessness on her face as if she'd been turning nickel and dime tricks on the back alleys of jerusalem for years her teeth have been kicked out and you can see the broken stubs of her teeth where somebody kick them out. And she's standing there and she's not praying. There's a hesitancy in her hands as if she's afraid to go like this, like she doesn't deserve to go like this. And She's almost bringing her hands together and her head is cocked and She's looking up at something and I don't know what She's lookig up at at first. And I look over and She' s looking up at the crucifix. And Shes has an expression on Her face that is saying this could be for me for me and i'm looking at her with her kicked out teeth and her hopelessness and i am weeping because she has captured my soul next thing i know scott and lyndon a bunch of other people are standing around we are all weeping scott weeps at dog food commercials i mean i can try reading the menu i really can't and we're all crying right we're always around staring around crying and this is a public museum where there's tourists from all countries are coming through here and they're like looking at these old americans that are standing around weeping looking at a statue of what looks like an ugly woman yeah but they don't see what we see yeah they don' t see what we see they see a statue of an ugly women we see ourselves I have some pictures of that if it doesn't do the statue justice anybody else to look at it during the break and that is a prejudice that is of it was so expressive for me of how my soul reached out I'm gonna tell that in a couple of And then it's that this could be for me, somebody as unworthy as I am, someone who's done the things that I have done. It could be from me. I got it. Excuse me. So we must lay aside our prejudice. What if you're wrong? Are you willing to be wrong? I tell you something. If you're one of those kind of people that can't be wrong, you're going to have a hard time with recovery. what if you're wrong about everything? What if you are wrong about you and what you are worth? What if your wrong about how bad you are or how good you are? What if ur wrong about God? What if u r wrong about life? What if y ur wrong abo ut everything? What if U r wrong abot ur childhood? What if Y ur wrong bout the people U ve been in relationships with? What if You r wrong bouts everything? Are you humble enough to entertain the fact that once again, and I say once again because, you know, you've caught yourself. Your perception could be wrong again. Can you be humble enough to get that I could be, maybe I'm even wrong about this stuff that, God, if I was wrong about what a piece of crap I am. See, my ego doesn't even want to be wrong about that. it will defend that it defends everything so if I can lay aside these prejudices then the second thing it says you're still on 46 yeah 46 lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to believe in a power greater than myself if I could do those two things the book promises me I will commence which means I will begin and I will move into getting results even though it's impossible for any of us to understand, fully define or comprehend that power which is God. So how do you express a willingness? Well, take actions that you don't believe in. I think there's a universal experience in Alcoholics Anonymous. I've never found an exception to this yet. I've ever met a newcomer yet that came to AA in the middle of the hopelessness and despair and self-loathing of another bottom, looks at the 12 steps and went, oh yeah, that would work. I've never met anybody, but I don't know where, I've seen a couple Alvinons that, yeah, that worked for him, but I've not seen anybody that's done that. I've ever met an alcoholic that came today and looked at the steps and thought that would, matter of fact, we have a common experience common experience is that we don't even get that it works until after we do it. Then we all say the same thing. Oh, I should have done that years ago. Then the ego grabs onto it. Then we feel smugly superior to the people that don't do it, right? If I can express even a willingness, and the old timers had me do two things. They had me start praying on my knees in the morning. I didn't want to. Matter of fact, I did it but I kind of tried to talk this guy out of it I had a pretty good case built I'd heard people in AA talk about they don't pray on their knees, they pray laying in bed one guy prays sitting on the crapper another guy prayes driving a car I said those guys don't pray sitting on their needs, how come I do and he says well not everybody has to, just people with egos like yours if you're new don't even engage with the old timers Just do what they say because they got some kind of spiritual jujitsu, you know. You can't win. You can'T win. So I started – I was living in this men's halfway house and I'm in a room with bunk beds, all these guys. Now, I'm not going to get on my knees in front of a bunch of guys in a halfway house. I know it – I've been to jail too much. You don't do that. I mean, you just – that ain't happening. So I go in the bathroom, lock the door, take the throw rug, throw it up under the crack of the door so nobody can peek under the door and see me pray and get down on my knees. And I feel like a hypocrite. Went and told the guy. I said, you know, I feel Like a hypocrit because I don't really believe in God. He says, you've been a hypocrate all your life. What the heck's the difference? And he went to explain it to me. He says your whole life you've Been a flake. You said one thing, did something else. Just do it. And then eventually they started getting me into the steps where I would start clearing away the things that would help me to access the power. But what I was engaging in, I didn't know about it, and Scott talks about this sometimes, is what you could call a working hypothesis. People in AA are telling me something, something I don't really believe because it is outside my experience. What they're telling me is behind the very veil and fabric of the universe, there is a power source that is absolutely crazy about me. And that if I will just reach into the veil to access that power, it will change my life. And to reach in goes through here. It's a journey inside. But I don't believe it. and it doesn't matter I started to take the actions and some amazing things started to happen in my life and I started to experience an endless series of coincidences funny funny stuff would happen to me you know like I'd be I remember in my first year or so of sobriety crazy stuff I'd be sinking into a depression and my phone would ring and there'd be some guy in AA wants to talk to me who had him call right at that moment, right? Who had him calling? I was at work one morning, and I'm ready to quit my job. I went to work, and my boss disrespected me. That's what he did. And I'm enraged, man. You can't talk to me that way. And I've got a job, and you can't do that to me. And I, and i'm, i'm ready to quit my job and i i'm working harder there than anybody else nobody appreciates me I'm insane, I want to punch him but he was a boxing commissioner and I didn't an ex-boxing golden gloves guys, I'm not going to punch Him you know I didn' t take my lunch hour that day and I just had this compelling idea to go to a noon meeting instead of eating lunch and I got in my car and I rushed across town and I walked into a meeting I normally don't go to and I'm sitting in the meeting and I'll tell you I'm no in that meeting more than five minutes and there's a stranger in there who's talking about an incident that happened with his boss and he was going to quit his job and his sponsor turned his head around and he realized he had to go make amends to his boss. And I'm sitting there and I'm going, oh my God. See, he pulled me up for not, for screwing up at work and I don't take criticism very well. and my ego was hurt and I wanted to retaliate and I heard this guy talking about himself and because he's not trying to tell me I'm wrong, I'm just listening to him and the light went on and I thought oh my god that's exactly what happened today and I went back to work that afternoon and I made amends to my boss and I didn't have to quit my job who made him say that then who put the compulsion in me to go to that meeting, who brought us together which by what I consider divine appointment and I don't know how many dozens of instances have to happen like that before a guy who's even a skeptic like me starts to it's more than believe it's like you're overwhelmed by the reality in your life that something's going on here we were over in um i was just over in london uh last month with uh one of my sponsees we're doing some a stuff and we're walking around hyde park down near buckingham palace and there's the streets are lit down there with gas street lights and there'S and the sides of the of the poles there are these little doors that are now welded shut but years ago before the technology was in place there was a guy whose job it was is to come up and down the streets of london and he'd open those little doors on the side of the poles and he's reaching with a key and he turned the gas on and then he'd reach up with a pole with a flame on the end and light it and at twilight you could go up to the top of the highest building in londona no matter how hard you looked you could not see where that guy was but you could see where he'd been and i could sit in a meeting of alcoholics anonymous at two years sober i truth be told i couldn't see where god was but i could see where he'd been not only in my life but in the lives of the new people that i i had the privilege of helping and giving rides to meetings and i got to why i got to see them in detox when they were more dead than alive and i get to see him two years later when the restraining orders have come off and they got their kids back. I got to see the homeless guys, the guys that were living in the bushes. Did you hear he's buying a house? Remember the guy that had the mental illness? Remember the guide? Remember the man? The guy that was so wacky and depressed, you knew he not only should be on medication, probably going to be on meditation all his life. Did you know he's not taking anything? Do you see him with those three guys he sponsors? Did you see the light in his eyes? Did you hearing him laughing? After the meeting, kidding the guys he sponsors. And I started to see the hand of God. You know, the ego and the spirit are in competition with and conflict with each other, they're almost diametrically opposed and connected in some sort of weird tug of war. You know I have never seen my ego directly but I see its work and I've never seen God directly but I see his work I read a lot and there's some authors I've read every book they've ever written I've not read all of them I've met them but I'll tell you something I feel like I know them because I have studied their creation and in Alcoholics Anonymous we study very diligently the enemy self-centeredness and all the manifestations of self and we open ourselves up very lovingly and openingly to God, I see the manifestations of God in my life continually. And every once in a while, I really get a strong glimpse of it when I'm not looking intentionally. I'll tell you a little story. This happened to me probably 15 years ago. I was with a bunch of people in AA and we were at this mall. And in the middle of the mall, there's a kiosk and they're selling these framed pictures weird looking pictures look like rorschach pictures to me kind of weird looking and the one person says oh my god come on you got to see these i went over and i'm looking at these a whole bunch of different ones i'm looking at them that's just weird looking stuff to me he says don't you see it i said no i don't see nothing he says that's a ship do you see it popping right out of the pic oh i don'T SEE NO SHIP he says THAT'S PLANETS IT'S THE SOLAR SYSTEM YOU SEE THAT oh man i don' t know what you're talking about i felt it almost felt like when your newcomer and people are telling you oh god's gonna solve all your problem you go yeah i don''t know you know come on Oh, come on. Yeah, God and the tooth fairy, I bet, you know. Because I can't see it. And they said, just look. They're telling you these are holographic pictures. Look, you'll see it all of a sudden. It will just pop right out at you in three dimensions. And I'm looking. So I'm kind of a determined guy. I want to see what I'm not seeing, so I'm really looking. And all I'm getting is like a headache. I'm just, you Know, I'm Looking, trying to Look. If I'd done it long enough, I think I'd end up with a headache and hemorrhoids probably. Really, look, I can't. And the harder I look, the less I see it. And this guy says, he says, just relax. Just relax. Be still and know that I am God. And there was a moment when I was looking at one of these pictures and all of a sudden, bam! And it was like, whoa! Oh, my God. Did you see that? And I think God's sometimes like that. The problem is, is if I believe the pictures, if I believed that the guy's kidding me and it's not really there, I won't be able to see the picture. Or if I look through an act of will because I want power significance, I won' t see the p icture. I can't approach God. That's why spiritual growth is always, it's never from education and it' s never from addition. it's always from subtraction it's almost as a result of letting go letting go of the things that stand between me and God let me do it for a minute I'd like to get 55 go ahead yeah okay page 55 just do it really fast page 55 page 55 is a vision of what will happen to me and what I'll find as a result of steps four through nine. Middle of the page, second full paragraph says actually fooling ourselves for deep down in every man, woman, and child is the fundamental idea of God. Deep down in me? And that's almost hard to believe when you're new because how could something so powerful and good be inside something that is so weak and bad. But then old timers kept saying that. They used to even talk, I mean, I watched Chuck Chamberlain after a meeting one time some guy said, how do you find God? And Chuck was poking him in the chest saying he's not lost, he's right in there. When I go inside me I don't run into God, I run into craziness. I run Into a pack of nut cases just chattering non-stop. I run In to legion and the reason is that it says in the next sentence it says because this this portal this thing inside me this to the divine this piece of the divine this is obscured it's blocked by three things by calamity we all know calamity you want to know what calamity sounds like imagine a doctor could surgically implant a microphone into your brain on a bad day through loudspeakers we get to hear what you're thinking we'd hear the voice of calamity i mean when you think about it god could have to if he had a megaphone you might not hear him and then the second thing is pomp is that i get so full of what i believe is right my pumps another word for ego i just puff up on myself i get so full of myself and and the last thing is worship of other things i that was a hard one to see. When I was about a year and a half sober, I went through an experience that really was an epiphany for me. I was ending my first sober relationship. Now, I don't think there's a person on the planet more narcissistically self-involved than an alcoholic ending a relationship. You can go up to a person like that and say, you know, I just came from the doctor. I have terminal cancer, two weeks to live. And he'll go, do you know what else she said? I mean, you know because you just get it right it's just right here on you man you can't get it off and and i i am wacko man i am just nuts and i'm in this meeting and i can't hear nothing because i'm thinking about what if i see her i'll say this and then she'll say that and i'll say this then i'll hit her with that and she'll realize how wrong she'd been be properly ashamed of herself and beg for me to come back so if if god's trying to talk to me through the people in the meeting, nothing's getting through because the big show's on the inside. And because she's a member of AA and she's not in the meeting, some hideous force has planted a spring in the back of my neck connected to the meeting room door that every time the door opens, I'm going to go, hey, no. So I'm not getting a lot out of this meeting. Actually, by the end of the meeting I'm worse. I think the subject was gratitude or something So I end up in a coffee shop with a guy who got hostage because he's riding with me. He's got 28 years or 20-some years of sobriety. He's from California. And I'm telling him about this relationship for 20 or 30 minutes until his eyes have glazed over. And he's a very kind man. He's listening to me, nodding his head. When I was done, he said some things that blew my mind. He said, kid, you ever thought about the first commandment? And I said, oh, no, I'm not really into that. I'm just into AA. And he says, yeah, I know. He says, you and I are a lot alike. He says guys like us, we can't get past the thou shalt not. He said, but in my experience, the Ten Commandments were originally written as statements of spiritual cause and effect when they were translated out of the Aramaic through the Greek and then the Latin. By the time they got to English, they had an authoritarian spin put on them. He says, but I don't think that's what the point is. He said, the first commandment is, I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have false gods before me. He said it is my experience that God loves you absolutely. There's nothing you can do that will make him stop loving you. You can put anything you want between you and God and he'll still love you. The problem is you just put something between you and God. You just block the light. He said, when you worship something, it doesn't mean to bow down to. It means simply to obsessively turn your consciousness towards. He says, you want to know what you worship? Very simple. At the end of your day, make a pie graph of everything you've been thinking of and the thing that owns the pie would obviously be the thing you're obsessively turning your consciousness toward. When he said that I pictured this pie graph with a little sliver for aid a little silver for work and the rest of the pie graph was her. And all of a sudden I knew exactly why I was so desolate, why my spirit was disconnected and depressed because I put that right on me and it was right between me and God. And why would I do that? Because everything I've ever put in between me and god has always been something that gave me an illusion of power like a relationship the power to validate myself and make myself whole the illusion if i'm loved the right way i will be okay or money you know money's a great illusion of power i need just enough money so i no longer have to trust god and how much is that that's about a dollar more than you'll ever have that's right and real quickly the book goes on to talk about this we find this down deep down within us and then it says we only we only find it in the last analysis it is only there that it may be found that means after i've looked everywhere else i came into alcoholics anonymous in 1978 my first four years of sobriety i dabbled with the steps i wrote two inventories but it wasn't until i was four years sober that i understood how to put the process exactly in the book in my life and i stayed sober literally by 12 step work my first four years and i'll tell you something that'll keep you sober won't make you happy but it'll keep you sober and i i went to two hospital institution meetings a week i did it all and and i'm screwed up and i'M FIGHTING DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY I'M I WENT THROUGH NINE JOBS IN FOUR YEARS THAT TELLS YOU A LOT ABOUT MY SPIRITUAL CONDITION RIGHT THERE AND EVERY DAY I GO TO A MEETING AT LEAST I WAS GOING TO TWO MEETINGS A DAY AND EVERY day I went to a meeting at Alcoholics Anonymous and I'd hear them read something they read at every meeting. And here are the steps we took, which are suggested as a program recovery. You know, I need a motorcycle. Here are the steps we take, which is suggested as program recovery cover. I need a better girlfriend. Here the steps. We took what you're suggest is a program recover. I needed a better job. Here the step switcher we took suggests is a programming cover any more sponsees I need to be DCM, I need to be conference chairman, I need to go to more meetings. Here are the steps we took which are suggested as a program recovery and I got to the point Chamberlain said where you get to that place you can no longer put anything between you and you. Scott? I just love the way you tell that stuff, thanks. I'm going to tell a story on my, I flew for the Air Force for five years and we were in New Zealand and we We did an eight-hour leg back to America and Samoa. We took on fuel, took off out of Samoa, gone to Honolulu, and there's nothing but water in between. And halfway across, we got into the new fuel and it had water in it. At our altitude, it's minus 50 centigrade. And the water freezes in the fuel lines and jet engines about so big do what we call compressor stall. And it shakes the whole airplane, terrifies everybody on board. And we get about 90 passengers on this beast. And we can't maintain altitude. When we get down into warmer air, we can run the engines, But we don't have gas to make hickam at this altitude, and we already can't go back. Jet engines are much more efficient at a higher altitude. So we climb back up, and мы can't get the engines running. We come back down. Worst thing you do for gas mileage in a jet is this, and that's what we're doing. And for four hours that afternoon, we thought we were putting a 300,000-pound airplane into the Pacific Ocean. That's not what we filed for. It's not What the paperwork said. And I told God if he would get me out of this one, I would quit smoking. I'm just warming up. You know I am. Quit drinking. Quit visiting ladies I wasn't married to. Go back to church. Might build some churches. I don't leave anything in the bag on this one. And I'm telling you, four hours is a long time to think you're going to die today because the numbers say we're not even going to get close. And we get closer and closer, and we approach, and what we finally decide is if we can make high station for a forced landing. If any pilots in here know what I'm talking about. If we can get to a high station für a forced landings, we can at least crash on dry land so our bodies can be sent home for burial because, you see, you don't put 300,000-pound airplanes down into the ocean and live. That isn't done. And many of us have thought we were going to die in the next few moments. We've looked down gun barrels. We've laid down bikes. We've been in car wrecks. You know, we've done a lot of that stuff. Four hours is a long time. We turned Fonda Hickam at 9,000 feet. We put it down on the end of the runway and taxied it in and shot him down. They dipped the tanks like you dip your crankcase. See how much oil you got? We had insufficient fuel left on that plane to start four engines and taxi to the runway. We did not have that much left. I could have walked carrying what we had left in buckets. I didn't even go to the quarters. I went straight to the officer's club, the stag bar, the crazy section in the back. I put my bags on either side of the bar stool. I said, Mai Tai, the big one, pack of smokes. And I look at it through these eyes that you've given me, and this is what I see. In those days, those times that I prayed, you know, I had the standard pre-AA prayer. See if you recognize any of these. God help, please help me pass this test I didn't study for. Anybody? Now, this one can be done for either gender. Please don't let her be pregnant. And the one that I used to do on the prayer rug, you remember the prayer mug? It's that half moon of carpet they put around the commode for you to kneel on. I was invaded by one of our boys, you know His knees were all torn up from that Terezi So we ought to And so I'm in there in the prayer rug And I'm bringing it up Right? And I would pray what I call the pre-AA prayer We're going to do it together now Come on Alright, play with me I'm going to say You're going into the first line You're gonna do the second line Are you ready? God get me out of this I'll never do it again Which is alcoholic for amen right that's right sal so those are that's the kind of print and when i look i'm back on that airplane now we just just were saved and i look at it in those days those few times that i prayed i was trying to make him my god and what you've taught me here is how to make me his man. I found that God's very difficult to train. I try to lie, big fella take a knee. Here are your instructions for the day I'm stealing your line I know you've been running the universe for several billion years but Scott's here now and I think you've missed some fairly important points and I'd like if you would just, you might want to make some notes here. And when I go to God with a shopping list. That is exactly what I'm trying to do is train God. See, I had it backwards about who's supposed to be in charge. I'm not real quick. And I want to tell a story. I was put in treatment on June 28th of 1984, which was my 41st birthday. My AA and sobriety date are the same. My belly button are the thing. And, uh, I was not happy. I had a senior business partner who said you're going to treatment right now or you're fired. He was a communicator. You know, he could just make it clear for you. You see how a man like that might become a senior partner. I could be able to just crystallize it in your mind for you, and he put me in treatment for a problem I didn't have, and He wanted me to overcorrect, and that's not why I stayed. That's how I got there, and I didnít believe I needed to be there. I also didnít sleep the first three nights I was in treatment. I couldnít afford my addictions, and Iím laying there the fourth night, and I know I ainít going to sleep again. Itís lights out at 11. Iíve got to stay in that bunk until like 6.30 or 7 in the morning, short potty breaks but that's it I got to be there, the lights are out, some of you may recall if you're not drinking and you ain't sleeping, it stays dark a long time and man it goes on and on and I'm laying there and I am going to describe what happened to me, not what I did but what happened to me and Iam laying there and I saw my life like you might see a series of short movies Not if you've had a near-death experience I want to hear about. I'm fascinated by those. One of my mentors had three of them. But this was over a long period of time that I saw my life. And I've always given myself credit for my intentions. I may be the best intended person you'll ever meet. I have some magnificent intentions. And my favorite one, I used to do close-up magic. And it was one of these days I'm going to get a clown suit. When I'm on the road, instead of running the bars and chasing the women and getting screwed up, I'm going to put on the clown suit and take my magic kit into a children's hospital and do a show. And I think you would admit, take a pretty great guy. I haven't done it yet, by the way. Take a really, really great guy in one of these days. You know, that's what an intention looks like. Our third step talks about a decision. This, for me, is the difference between an intention and a decision An intention is followed by more intentions. A decision is followed my action. That's the difference. That's the difference. And this night, I'm laying there in that bunk, and I cannot see my intentions. All I can see are my actions. It's not a pretty story. I got to the place where I began to think about the single worst thing I've ever done. I have one that stands alone. I'd always been able to stop it before, you know. Three jacks will do that. Six-pack, I know how to turn that off. Not laying in a bunk in a treatment center, I don't. And I reached what for me was bottom. I know guys in prison serving long sentences because of alcoholism that are planning to drink. They are not at bottom. I have been in plenty of kinds of trouble myself. I have puked blood, not just once. None of that was bottom. For me, bottom is not on the physical. I don't see the definition in the literature, so I'm going to give you my experience with it. Bottom ain't on the fiscal plane. Bottom's in here. Bottom is when I hate my guts and I'm so repulsed by me and what I've done that I would pay anything for relief from that. for me that was bottom and that's when i reached it and at that point this part of me screamed this did not happen up here this part OF ME screamed and i cannot explain that to you to a god i don't think i believed in and it was god forgive me it was like that but it was in here and what i'm going to tell you now all happened in the next second suddenly there was this magnificent light shining just on me on my bed it was it was illuminating the room but it was shining on me there was a physical sensation similar to the one when they take the dentist finishes taking x-rays of your teeth and they pick that protective blanket up off of you that lead line thing something very heavy there was something heavy laying on my body all the way i'm laying on my back and it's laying all over me and i'm not aware of it until in that instant this thing flies off of me and I feel so light physically that I believe I'm going to float off the bed. That's what it feels like with my eyes closed. I can look around and see that room in better detail than I can see this one right now. Can't explain any of that. That is what happened. And, and I knew in that moment that there was a God, that God has the power to forgive me. And I am forgiven. I used to say he forgave me then. AndI want to, I hope I don't offend anybody i may but i hope i don't i don'T KNOW THAT GOD FORGAVE ME THEN I DON'T KNOW THAT HE EVER JUDGED ME I KNOW THAT I RECEIVED THE FORGIVENESS THEN I DONT SPEAK FOR GOD AND I'M NOT COMFORTABLE AROUND PEOPLE THAT DO BUT I KNOW I REceived THE FORGIVENESS IN THAT MOMENT AND I LAY THERE IN THE PRESENCE OF INFINITE LOVE AND IT FELT SO GOOD IT ALMOST HURT AND I CAN'T EXPLAIN THAT EITHER BEHIND ME AND I AM LAYING ON MY BACK BEHINDS ME THERE WAS A PARTITION and it looked kind of like a stucco wall, went up about six or eight feet, and it was the width maybe five or six feet on either side of me. And there were different colors of glass stuck in it at intervals and different shapes, and the light was coming through them and over it. And he was right there. And I've come to believe that that wall was there because somebody as sick as me can only stand so much love. And I say it felt so good it hurt. And I think if there had been any more, it might have damaged me, and I can't explain that either, but that's what I believe. and I lay there in the presence of an infinite love. And I think I took the first three steps in that moment. And I don't know how long I lay There in the Master's Presence. I've talked to other people who've had experiences similar to this one, and they all agree when I say this. What we call time does not exist in that presence. I see some other people nodding. I'd love to talk about it. And I was there a couple of seconds or a couple hours. I do not know. I'm not aware of anything else that passed between us but there was a great healing that happened for me there and after that I must have slept because the next morning I woke up and that was the first time I'd had that experience in several days, I'd just been laying there all night the other nights and I wokeup wanting to be one of his guys and that Was my first experience my first spiritual experience a lot of people feel like they've been robbed because they didn't have one of those this is page 12 Bill's story bottom of the page but soon the sense of his presence had been blotted out by worldly clamors mostly those within myself i can't tell you what bill wilson meant by that but that reminds me of the truth for me and that's that i do not believe that that experience alone would have kept me sober 24 years i don't believe it that was just a cornerstone for a last gasper like me i think i was close to death and nobody knew it i sure didn't that was a beginning for me the rest of this has been absolutely necessary. For the balance of the time that I have the microphone for this weekend, the perspective I'm going to take is how I take someone through the steps. It's either going to be that or how I was taken, which is the same. If I sound like I'm telling you what to do, I am not. This is the only way I know how to present it. So this is how I take. If your sponsor disagrees with me, your sponsor is right and I'm wrong in your case. I believe God bless his sponsorship. You can't use anything I say to argue with your sponsor and i mean that i mean that with all my heart um and what i do is i get up to page 60 and uh begin with a that we were alcoholic could not manage our own lives two part okay are you an alcoholic the characteristics we found are that that once you start drinking you have little control knows you get drunk accidentally or you quit forever and mean it and don't stay quit and the third one of course is you have occasional minor problem staying tight with the truth, like always. So I want to hear examples on that. Tell me about when you got drunk the night before or you had something important to do. I used to get drunk the day before going to fly acrobatics in a high-performance airplane. The Thunderbirds flew one of the planes that I flew for seven years, and we did almost everything they did. I'm going to pull five to seven and a half Gs tomorrow morning, started at 730. I don't plan to get drank the night beforehand. I plan to have one or two beers and hang out with the boys for a couple hours, right? And I start drinking, and you know the story. And I'm doing those acrobatics of those god-awful hangovers day after day after day. I want to hear how you got drunk by mistake. I wantto hear about when you puked your guts out and quit forever and meant it or she quit you or she left you or he caught you or you were sat in the back of the police car or the judge said. I wanto know. Tell me about it. And I think for a new guy, the longer he talks on this, the better it is because he needs it. What he's doing is setting his own cornerstone. All right, now I want to hear about your life's unmanageable. A parole officer said what? Divorce will be final when? Fired from what? I mean, talk to me. I want To Hear What Happens When You Manage Your Life. Let's talk about it. Let's just talk about It. And I say the longer we go with this, the better. And then B, that probably no human power could have relieved our alcoholism. Well, who tried? Cops, courts, wife. Oh, forgive me. I forgot where I was. Wives, siblings, psychologists, psychiatrists, high school counselor. Who tried? Let's talk about that. And I'll tell you, I can't relieve your alcoholism with that history that you just gave me. Is it logical to deduce that no human power is going to be able in the future to relieve your alcoholism? Is that true for you? And at this point, I want to go to something I think is one of the most powerful concepts we have. This is page 12 in Bill's story. And I try to see this scene. Here's Ebi Thatcher. He's got 90 days sober in the Oxford groups. He's talking to Bill Wilson who's drinking. I'm sure Bill wasn't argumentative as a drunk. Yeah, right. Good chance on that, right? And I can see Ebby mentally throwing up his hands and saying, why don't you choose your own conception of God? I can just hear him saying it that way. What a powerful concept. What an invitation. Why don't You choose Your own conception Of God? The concept is so important that they tell us again on page 93 the exact same thing, about four lines down in 93 in the chapter, working with others, stress the spiritual feature freely. if the man be agnostic or atheist make it emphatic he does not have to agree with your conception of god he can choose any conception he likes provided it makes sense to him twice we've invited you to choose your own conception so i want you to do now as i wantyou to lay down what they told you and i don't care who they are or how qualified they claim to be we're putting that away we're also putting away not forgetting it but we're laying it aside for now we're going to lay aside also what you believe in what you think you believe because you may not even understand would you believe let's put that away and let's ask you to choose a concept we're going to make notes i want single words and short phrases what characteristics did you like god to have not what do you think what would you like him to have so let's so we start talking he says okay i need one that's forgiving i say okay i'm going to makes suggestions if you like my suggestions take them if you don't don't take them and i say forgiving was insufficient for me i'm too guilty for that i needed a god that was eager to forgive let's say powerful i say yeah i gotta have one that's all powerful more powerful than i am bill wilson worked real hard not to use the same words over and over most of you know about step six and seven all that part of what bob read on page 45 in nine lines the word power appears six times not lack of religion not lackofintelligence not lack of knowledge, lack of power. Okay? So I got to have a powerful God. How about one that's gentle? How about one loving? How about one with a sense of humor? I want a God that laughs. Don't you? I mean, look at the duck-billed platypus. Did that work for you? Huh? If not, look around the room. How about creative? Huh ? How about a God that's on my side? A God who wants what's best for me and by the way, he knows what it is and I clearly don't. How about one whose will is a good deal i got here terrified there might be a god well mama why grandma died well it was god's will well sounds dangerous to me and in addition to which i've been told that if i'm even thinking it i'm going to hell and i'm not only thinking it right i mean so i got some things that need to change here say and then i tell them what what bob mentioned before is i'm not going to ask you to believe this all my life religious people say believe this wow we'll just believe it wow they can't tell me and i can't tells you here's a gift from my home group i can tell you what faith is faith is hope with a track record i can ask you to hope this is true why don't you hope this true guilty as you are why don t you hope that this god is eager to forgive you has the power to take over and make it work is gentle loving has a sense of humor is creative, is on your side, who wants the best for you and knows what it is. Why don't you hope that's true for a while? And we're going to do what the scientists call a working hypothesis and that means we have reason to believe something may be true. We are now going to apply it on cases and just see what happens. I didn't ask you to believe it, I asked you to put it on the road. How do you think you'd conduct yourself if you believed that? Well let's conduct you that way for a While and just See What Happens. and the reason we have to believe this may be true is we have bracketed my concept of god and my program is working or at least you think so or you wouldn't ask me to sponsor you it's one of the most powerful concepts i think in the book bob you want to tell them about the rat okay I was a relapser for seven years. And, you know, oddly enough, my last drunk was not my worst one. I had some prior to that that were horrific. I mean, just – and I think a lot of us function off this delusion that there's some sort of ultimate bottom, that when I hit the ultimate bottom it'll be so horrendous and so horrific that I'll be catapulted into sobriety. Never drink again. And it never happened. And yet after I got sober, something had changed in me and I was taking actions that I never took before. I wasn't arguing with the people at AA when they said do something, I just did it and my life was starting to change. And in the book, it talks about getting to 152. It says we get to a place where we can't imagine life either with alcohol or without it. I am in a trap I can't spring. It calls it the jumping off place. It says that no loneliness such as few do and will wish for the end. In 1978, I tried to take my own life. I try to take my own life for a couple reasons. One is a doctor and a detox had screwed me up. He told me that I was in my 20s. He said I was young enough and healthy enough that maybe I could go on like this for five or ten more years. And I'm on a bridge with a bottle of Richard's Wild Irish Rose because I'm telling you, that ain't going to happen. I'd rather be dead. And I're on the bridge not because of the shameful things I did and i had a wealth of that i'm on the bridge because i'm stuck i don't understand what's happened to me but i can't jump start the party and i know it is over i know i've wrung every ounce of fun out of it and now i drink in abject misery and self-pity and yet i can'T live without it either because abstinence is a bleak long great tunnel that feels like i'm doing time and i'm stuck and i tried to kill myself and i couldn't i because i'm a coward i i was afraid it might hurt i guess and uh you know when you think they used to call alcoholics anonymous the last house on the block when drinking is awful and not drinking is off when you can't kill yourself there's not much left except aa really it really is the last House on the Block And a guy gave me, you know, people in AA, I came off the street. So people in AAA were very kind to me, and they gave me clothes to wear. One guy gaveme a box of old books he'd read because he heard me say I liked to read. And I was reading a book one day, and it wasn't a recovery book, not a self-help book, not a psychology book. It was just a novel. And I came across this part of the book that blew my mind. And all of a sudden, I knew exactly what had happened to me. And it's a very similar thing to what William James talks about. In the book, there was a section where these scientists were doing experiments on the human brain. And they found that in the human plane, there is a section called the – it had a Latin name, but they kept referring to it as the pleasure center. It's the part of the brain that allows me to experience the high from alcohol and drugs. and they took these laboratory rats and they put two tiny wire filaments into the pleasure center of the rat's brain and then they would pass a mild barely detectable electric stimulus through those wires and it would stimulate the pleasure centre of the rats brain so the rat would get high so what they did is they hooked up the juice to a pedal in the rats cage and the rat learned he could hit the pedal and get high so you know what happened and the rat just laid on the damn pedal. I mean, he don't do nothing else. He just hits that pedal, man. He don't drink water. He don'T eat. He don' t have sex. He don''t do nothing. He just parties. Hits that pedal. And he hits the pedal until he dies, usually of dehydration because he's not even stopping to drink water Now, I've told that story probably a thousand times in Alcoholics Online.