The Smart Guy Syndrome – D. and Chris S. – Big Book Workshop – Austin, TX – Part 7 of 10 – Bob D,Tom I

And you sought help and direction, not only from God, but from the people in AA and your sponsor every day. Maybe you were diligent in carrying the message and servicing Alcoholics Anonymous. And you believed in your primary purpose and acted like you believed it. And maybe now you're 10 years sober and you do about half as much meetings, about half as much of any service, and you're not sponsored anymore because you've become the smart guy. You're the smart guys. Smart people don't have to listen. You only listen to the smartest person in the room, which is you. And your actions. And if your actions are doing that over the years, I should terrify you. Because alcoholics, I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of men and women who have relapsed with double-digit sobriety. Do you know something? I've never run into one yet that a week before they picked up the first drink imagined that they were going to pick up the third drink and burn their lives in the ground. None of Because you wouldn't think of it as ecstasy. If you kind of had a sense that, oh my God, if I don't call my spouse, I'm going to be drunk in two days, you would call your sponsor. But you don't know. It broadsides you. It broadside you so quick and you don t know because you're judging yourself on how you feel or if your actions have been compromising your own spiritual foundation now for maybe years and you don't even know it. Because you feel alright. You're getting your own way or you've deluded yourself into that the problem's over, you're good now. And I'd really take heed to this. I've watched I've I've I've walked a lot of people really nice men and women with children and husbands and wives, drink again, some of them don't make it back. And I believe that if I had the same illness as you have, what could happen to you could happen to me. So I don't want to ever get too far out of this deal, this maintenance of the three areas of trust in God. I must maintain my ability to trust God, which involves a lot of cleaning house. I have to sweep it, get rid of the fears and jettison the fears, and the resentments, and things that keep me in the driver's seat, and all this self-gratification crap that I put between me and God so that I can trust Him and ultimately carry out my primary purpose. So it always comes down to trust God, clean If you don't feel really good about yourself, look for those three areas if not all or more than one of them. Are you weak in trusting God, cleaning houses? If you're worrying a lot, you're not trusting God. If you are obsessed with a problem, if you're, um, if your not helping others, you know, it's a good little mini check me out how I'm doing. You're not trusting God. If you're obsessed with a problem, if you're not helping others, you know, it's a good little mini check me out how I'm doing. We have to continue with this stuff. God's grace is fluid and not permanent. And it's often like, in general, I was in a retreat one time out in the country, and I was trying to call people. And there was no phone service right where the retreat was. Now you had to kind of, it was the weirdest thing. You had to go up on this hill and still, you had because walk around until you got the signal, right? And then you become single, and then you've lost your heart, so now you need to lose it all, so you gotta walk on. It's like you're a prospecting for a signal, right? And I think because of our chronic condition, God's grace has worked out with us. If you're in the beginning, I'm not going to be losing. Because I know, I know. You know, these people, I've met them all. A lot of times they say, There's some men who feel so spiritual, you've got to pet the tambourine, I'm telling you. And they're always saying, you know what, he's not a bad guy. You just get your folks so decrepit and pathetic. And it comes with all those length of ties. And I think it's supposed to. See, if I could connect and say, connect, and I would stop growing. That would stop thriving towards the light. And to stop loving it starts off by saying, stop. We seek to improve our conscious context. It's like a diabetic seeks to improve his blood sugar level. Because he can have a perfect day, And tomorrow it starts to deteriorate, so I have to continually be seeking to improve my conscious contact. I've got to be constantly looking for the signal and moving around. Anything I've gotta move around in my life that's blocking a signal. If I can't get the signal on my cell phone and I realize, well, I'm on the other side of a building, I gotta get away from it, but I gotta get the thing that's between me and the grace out of the way so I can pick up the table. Step 11, of all the steps in AA when I was new was kind of the only one that seemed to appeal to me. It's funny how if you got the ego I got the ego will gravitate to anything self-grandizing. And Step 11, to me, was appealing. It was appealing because I grew up with meditation. I did a lot of this stuff as a kid in my late teens and early 20s. I had a mantra with TM. We went to TM. TM was here. If you wanted to take a day off, people at TM would try to probably looked out on the rest of the world and didn't know how to medicate. And I went to yoga, I went into divine-like motion with the ability to see knowledge. I did breathing exercises. I did chanting with SPI . I did a lot of stuff, and it was all kind of cool because those who didn't take that stuff, we had a sense of love, spiritual superiority to those church people and those everyday people. And if you're secretly not enough, you've got to be more than just a whole to be equal. You know what I'm saying? It's always coming from the heart. So I liked the idea of metastatic eating, and I was used to it. Oh, back when I was a kid, my mother would take me in yoga class first of all. In yoga class or meditation class, you had a really high probability of scoring some very good marijuana. And in the yoga class, we had a very high probability getting rain. So I just, I warmed up to the whole, there's nothing made that didn't read about those things. You know, I've heard in the big books, and I get to the bottom of 885, there's plus special and step 11, and you can tell that because there's a palace that says step 11. And I start reading it with a sort of an insistence that, you know, this is going to be cool. I don't hear about many people talking about meditation. You know, there's a part of me that thinks that I'm going to get into this stuff again and I'm really going to try to rise above the people in alcoholism. You know what I mean? There are people in AA that don't have bonkers. There are People in AA who don't know how to do the breathing exercises. There's people in A.A. that don' t know how to scrape the visual purple and see the light. There's all kinds of stuff here. It depends on how you're going to be a leader here, I can tell. Well, I thought reading this is step 11 to check for our meditation. We should be trying this matter of prayer better than we are. It's going to constantly work if we have the proper attitude and work at it. It would be easy to be vague about this matter, yet we believe we can make some definite, valuable suggestions. Okay, play it on me. I'm ready. When we retire at night, we constructively review our day. were we resentful, selfish, dishonest, or afraid to owe an apology? Having said something to ourselves was kind of a distress. I was reading this stuff going, where did that step 11, that step 10 go? I didn't know if this was a misprint or maybe... I know Bill has a habit to reiterate stuff because he's like, he thinks we're slow or something. I don't know, he had to take it over and over again a couple times in the book There's so many stories that it wants to perform, so it's telling us about step 11. It wants to reuse them to get better. I don't understand it, but there's so much more. And then you read further down the page. I'm looking. I'm working for the meditation. I'm watching for something, you know. And I read down the pages. It says on awakening, we think about the 24 hours ahead. We consider our plans for the day. Yeah, yeah. okay, you're in prayer. We ask God to direct us. We came here as a prayer. The devil went further down. We asked God for inspiration. We asked especially from freedom from self-will. We asked ourselves whatever others will be helped. Okay, I see prayer, but I don't see anything here. It looks like meditation. And I do what all egocentric smart people do. We don't follow directions that we don't agree with. So I never did what it says on page 86 and 87 for a long time, an embarrassing long time. And I did what a lot of us do, and it was very popular. If you went to meetings, you would glean different things to do. I had these three-day books I would read every day. One was a 24-hour day book, day by day and one day at a time. I read those, and there's a little passage in them. I started reading the 11-spot prayer in the 12-spots fall, but it's a great prayer, the version of the St. Francis Paramecchian channel of my faith. I found a later version, a different version that says make me an instrument. I kind of liked that one for some reason better, and I used it for quite a while. I started exploring different things. I went back to breathing exercises, and I did that for a while. I went to serve elephants. I did almost a year of A Course in Miracles. I went back to SPI, and then chanted with the Buddhists again. I started listening to meditation tapes and robbers and put on some Robbie Shankar, you know, that will get your mind still and at one with the music. We do a lot of that stuff. I was starting to learn churches. I went to, there was a church very popular called Unity. There was another one, Religious Science. I went there for a while. I went through, there's a Baptist church in Las Vegas. The minister was a professed recovering alcoholic drug addict. Went to this thing for a little while. So I got to the church in my childhood, took all the symptoms and looked at it with a new light and it was very cool and it would not be here. Sorry to tell you that wasn't serious. Well, we tried a lot of different things. I found a little stanza almost like a poem that I use to this day and it's very censoring, it's I'm the place where God shines through Him and I are one, not two I need not worry fret or plan, He wants me where and as I am and if I be relaxed and free, He'll carry out His plan through me I use that some to this day. It's a very cool deal, Tom. Well, I'm getting in the 20-year neighborhood close around there, and I have a guy who I sponsor who comes up to me one day and is very serious. He wants specific direction on what to do in the morning in meditation. Well, there's so many things over the years. I don't know what to tell you." And they're all good. One of the facts on all of page 87 is that it'd be quick to see where religious people are right. They can use the book they have to offer in addition to, but not in substitution for. See, everything I was doing would've been a nice supplement to page 86 to 87, but I wasn't doing page 86 to 87. So the guy asked me what do I do? And he's one time I went to tell him because all these things are great, but none of them are a home run. It's not one of them that's definitive. And I don't want to throw 20 things in my ass. So I said to him what they teach is sponsor school. And you know I was like sponsor school? Sponsor school is how you and he comes to you, and he asks a question, and I was told he didn't even want to answer. You know, answer A and say, uh, just go pray about it. If your father says just go play about it, what are you really saying? I don't have a clue. I got nothing here. I got nothin'. Just go pray about it." Or, I gave him the answer B, which is when a guy that you don't know would say, just go do what it says in the book. whole bunch of stuff to read, and he just naturally finds the answer. Who knows? Well, I think a few words from the book. Well, it's knucklehead, without prejudice, without preconceived notions, he just started doing what it says on page 86 at night, and on awakening what it said in the morning all the way to the end of each chapter. And in no time at all, he seemed to be doing a lot better than I was. I don't like that. that's not a good deal. And so I thought, I thought maybe I'll do this, and I started doing it. And what started happening to me very slowly because it's not, these are not quick dynamic places, actually it's the keel of changes and transformations. They're slow incremental shifting. And slowly I started to be more at peace. I guess I wasn't burning up as much energy and wearing myself out, running the universe as much because what the interaction of these exercises or these actions are designed to do is to bring me more into this self-code of carrying out the decision I made in step three So that I'm one with and not one apart from. So I'm in harmonious harmony with everything in the universe rather than the producer of confusion. So that i'm one with God and I'm hurrying to play God. So that I'm not in conflict with you. As we just said, stop fighting everything and everybody. About this same time as I'm starting to do this. I found a passage in the 12 Sessons, 12 Traditions and 7 Lessons where I read this and all of a sudden everything on page 86 makes sense. It says there is a direct linkage among self-examination, meditation, and prayer taken separately. And that's what I've been trying to do in my first many years of surviving as if these were still separate deals. Take it's not that these practices can bring much relief and benefits, but when they are logically related in a worldly way, the revolt is an unshakable foundation for life. Now and then we may be granted a glimpse of the ultimate reality which is God's kingdom, and we will be comforted and explored, but our own destiny in that realm will be secure for so long as We try, however falteringly, to find and do the will of our Creator. See, I'm seeking relief by separating these processes where actually they're designed to be interrelated and woven together. Self-examination is a part of Step 11. And for a long time, I thought that this paragraph on the top, It's not exactly perfect. That has to be right now, continue, right on the spot, as you go along. And that's kind of one of the beauties of this nightly exam, an eight-month examination. You see, there's so many of us get so caught up in our own lives and we fill our plates up. I mean, we fill them up. right on the spot as you go along. And that's kind of one of the beauties of this nightly exam, an eight-month examination is that so many of us get so caught up in our own lives and we fill our plates up. I mean, we fill them up and stuff happens and you just roll over it. You know, go to the next thing. And what happens is if you do that, then you don't check it and catch it. It starts to build up. What starts to be built up? The resurgence of self. The inclination in all of us to play God. And I'll start getting sicker and sicker. If you're a brother, if you go to New York City, often they'll be doing construction on the facades of these 70, 80-story buildings. And if you notice what they do for the most part is underneath where they're working, they put a series of nets. Because if you drop a hammer from 50 stories, this is a serious deal. What if it's a street? Street! And then you'll see something on the first two floors. There's a series or scaffolding with an additional net to catch the stuff that gets through the first net. And this is designed to catch, at the end of the day, the stuff I was too wrapped up in myself to catch. It's like it's a backup, right? Because if I don't catch it, it starts to, the resurgence itself comes, and I start to get sick, but I don' t know that I'm sick. I've never met an alcoholic yet on his way to relapse and thinks he's on his way to relapse or thinks that he is spiritually sick, it doesn't look that way to us. What it looks like is that there's a lot of people around you that are real idiots and you should straighten them out. But you're humble enough that you're not going to. You're just going to, by your body language, let them know how out of line they are. So, if I don't do this, I start to get weird. About the same time, in the same little year period, one of the sponsees that I had founded a dictionary from, I think it was 1913. Since then, I've collected them. I got them from 1895 up to 1936 now. And we looked up the definition of the word meditation in this 1913 dictionary, and it blew my mind. I realized as I'm reading the definition that the definition of the Word Meditation changed in the English language in the 1960s. And I should have known that I was there as a little kid when the Beatles came over and the Maharishi and guys like Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley and J. Christian Murdy and Timothy Leary and Ron Dawson, these guys were bringing Eastern spiritual techniques into Western culture, and the definition of the word meditation changed. But in Bill Wilson's time, in that area when he was forming his language skills from about the end of the 1800s, from about 1895 to probably before, right prior to rewriting the big book, 1939 let's say, the definition of the word meditation was different. And in this 1913 dictionary it talked more about, almost like it was a contemplative exercise. And the example it gave was beautiful. And when I read the example it was just connected with such clarity. It said that a general will meditate a war. And I went back to the book With that in mind, with a picture in my mind of a general getting ready for a war or a battle, and it says in the middle of 86, it says on awakening, let us think about the 24 hours ahead we consider our plans for the day. Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking you to be divorced from self-pity, dishonest, or self-seeking motives. Under these conditions, we can employ our mental faculties with assurance For after all God gave his brains to use, our thought life, our hearty, will be placed on a much higher plane when our thinking is cleared of wrong motives. And I get it. The general had walked his army the night before as we're supposed to do on a retired night. And he looked for the liabilities. He looked for handicaps. He noticed that some of the horses were lame and couldn't come into today's battle. He noticed how some of the cannons were warped, some of them were wounded. And in the morning, he doesn't call God in as we're instructed to do to look to divorce our marks from our liabilities. He brings his officers and he says, take these wounded men back to the hospital. The police wounded these lame horses out of the deal. Get ready, we can't take these warped cannons. They're not going to last today's battle. And he clears his army of liabilities, and thus it becomes more effective. Now my battle is not with an unseen adversary, except in a sense it might be. It's with the adversary itself. This part of me that just continually tries to squirm into dominance, this ego. the part that wants to play God. Only my goal today is not to win the battle. My goal is to try to stay as close to living or carrying out of the decision in step three as I possibly can to make my life better, my business and to try and help God's kids. That's my goal. That's the battle I fight and my resistance to doing that This is the deal that's on my plate every single day. And I think that this is very much similar to what was necessary for a sailor to navigate the ocean. If you were to go down here to Galveston, say, and you went down to the harbor, if you were going to rent or buy the absolute best sailboat you could get, Money's no object here. You need the best. And you went to the nautical library, and you were diligent doing the first nine steps of navigation, and you plotted an impeccable course to the island of Roatan. And you set out from Galveston Harbor head on for Roatan Every single day, the winds and the tides and the currents are going to move you off course. Every single day, the clamoring of self. Every single days, the self-centered fear. Every single today, life itself is going to blow you off course. And every single day a sailor who's willing to be legit and not fool himself or delude himself about values will take an honest reckoning of where he is. Whether it's with a sextant a compass, or in our case with step 10 and 11, especially 11. And then compare it to his destination, the island of Roatan, in our cases, in essence, it's the decision we made in step 3. So that I can realign my course, I make amends where necessary, anything that blocks me from getting back on course to the island or in my case to living a life of self abandonment and service so that I can be God's go-to guide for this day. And every single day, no matter how perfectly I realign myself, because of the chronic feature of the ocean I swim in, I will be blown back off course. It don't mean you're a bad guy. It don' t mean you have a bad program. It's just the way it is. And every day, the responsibility rests on me to take an honest reckoning of where I am and realign my course. And the reason it rests on us and rests on we, is nobody else will take it. I often thought we could start a company where for a fee we'll go make amends for you. For a fee we'll pray for you for a few days. No, you don't have to pray. We'll pay $10,000 a month. You don't even have to make another amends the rest of your life and you don' t even have to pray and you can just sit and think about yourself it will be wonderful. Unfortunately You know, we probably have some papers. But nobody else can do this for us. The burden of it is on us. One other thing. On page, the bottom of 86, it says, starts to talk about something that reaffirms something that we talked about. We started talking, the books start talking about it on page 85. the great reality deep down within us in step 10 it says by now we have entered the realm of the spirit so there's some kind of connectivity going on something's happening here and now we're starting to get God consciousness and it happens intermittently through inspiration and it says here we ask God for inspiration an intuitive thought or decision, we relax. We take it easy. We don't struggle. We are often surprised how the right answers come after we've tried this for a while. In Step 11 in 12 Steps and 12 Traditions, it makes a tremendous statement here. I'll tell you something. It's almost like a promise. And it says, we discover that we do receive guidance for our lives just to the extent that we stop taking demands upon God to give it to us on order and on our terms. So we relax and take it easy and let it come to you. You are now in the flow of grace. Let it come to you. You don't have to swim against the current to try to get it. It's coming. It's going down the river to you just hang out. Now, that's not easy on some of us to get here in sort of a type A personality. I want patience. I want it now. I mean, we're that kind of people. I've been that way most of my life. It seems like I live with an edge within me. But as of urgency, I seem like I bought the clock alive. I existed in life often with a sense that I was late even when I'm going to be early. Like I was in a hurry all the time. And the book says stop, relax. And if you can relax and not do anything, you'd be surprised at what comes down the river of life to you. You'd be surprised that the stuff you've been fighting to acquire just seems to show up from time to time. Not on your terms, and not in your time, but grace gives as grace gives. You can't run the ship. If you start trying to dictate to God, you immediately lost the connection. It's our job to hang out. It's almost, I picture it as if this is an amazing play. And this is a part that I have to play. And the real part of the play is to enjoy the show. Not to direct the show, not to critique the show but to enjoythe show. And when you get self out of life, life is funny. I'm telling you. You watch people that are spiritual. One of the things that happens is they laugh a lot. They keep the joke. This is some silly shit, man. I'm tellin' ya. But self-centeredness prevents all humor. And the word humor and the word humility all come from the same root word and also the word human. And that's humus, earth. When I am grounded, when my feet are firmly planted on earth and my head is in the clouds with God and I am free for the most part of the bondage of self, there's stuff funny. I am not trying to be anything other than what I am. There's nothing to protect. The seriousness that is part and parcel of self-centeredness seems to go away. and this intuition starts to become a part of us you can't manipulate it, it doesn't work to serve self, that's the problem and you can say to yourself you can go into deep meditation and then play the stock work it doesn' t work that way you can' t do that but you know what is so magical when you're sponsoring people I've had this experience, I guess, hundreds, maybe 500 times. When I'm talking to some guy, I don't really know what to say to him, and the words just come out. Something works through me. And I'll tell you, every time I've ever had that experience, it's amazing. Because it's like being right in the middle of the presence of God as He works through you to help this And I've had stuff come out of me. I found myself many, many times talking to some newcomer or sometimes over a long time is in trouble. And I'm saying things to him and he's never seen them. Oh my gosh! And right this is true! This is amazing! I'm going to need this someday, I think. I mean, no, really! It's just very cool! It's very cool. And that's the intuition. But there's a warning in here in the sense that we might not presume to be inspired of all kinds, but if we do, we'll pay for that presumption and all sorts of absurd actions and ideas. See, what does self want to do? Self doesn't want to align your will with God. It wants to criticize that God's come through stances, and now it's coming your way is really what it is. And we delude ourselves with this psychotic, wistful thing. It's not really God's will. But I can imagine it could be. I mean, it could. Until I believe it. The first time I did this, that I caught sober, I was fairly new and it was, I just started dating this girl and my sponsor saw what was happening and he said to me, he said, all the time in 32 years, has ever been the arbiter of anything like this. He said, you need to stay away from her. She's very sick. And I said, Dick? We're all sick here. Oh my God! I said Dick! Listen, he's got will for me. I said, you can't go to these places where we can send some entertainment to all these others. And I said to him, hey listen to me. What do you mean? I was like, whispers while I was close. He drank whispers when I was drunk. See? Right! It's a pathetic thing. And I'm drunk. God is drinking. This is Christmas. This is divine order. And what was I doing is I'm trying to imagine that God's sitting there in my will. And the cloth is us in here, that we could never pray for our own will. I have a friend, and I'll say this and turn it back to Chris. I have friends who used to say that he thought that one of the most important words in the 12 steps was the word only, instead of 11. But we say we pray only for knowledge of His will for us in the power to pray. Now, anything less than that undoes the decision in step three. When I was a kid in school, the nuns told me about the second commandment. And they cried that it meant that I couldn't cuss. They'd say, I shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. I couldn'T swear. But I don't think that's what that means. I think subjectively the vainest use of God's name would be to pray for my will. Can you imagine a greater vanity than that? Here's the creator of the universe. He's been running the universe very effectively for billions of years, but Bob's here now. Is there anything bigger than instructing God? so we pray only for knowledge of his will for us my dear friend Clay Modges used to say there are three types of prayers and they're all good any time you turn your consciousness towards God it's a good thing there's the help me prayer the one that every alcoholic even the atheist alcoholics say as far as whether and then there is the give me prayer the serenity prayer is actually a give me pray God grant me to pray. I'm contesting God for something specific. And I've said the best and ultimate prayer is the one I try to use quite often. And that's simply, use me. I'm reporting for service without prejudice or opinion. One of the questions that trips me up when I do the nightly review is, was I kind and loving towards all? See, I have a tendency to be very kind and loving towards the ones that deserve it. But it doesn't say that, it says all. If I could really do what Chuck's neighbor used to talk about and that's, he used to say, the first time I heard it, I thought he misspoke. He said, we help God's kids do what they want to do because we want to doing it. And I thought, well, what if they want to do something they like? Well, by the moment I say that I'm back playing God again, deciding what's right and what's wrong. He used to say, we help God's kids do what they want to do because we want to help them. We want to give them what they need. We want them to do it. Prejudice. Service. Love and service without prejudice or opinion. It's selfless, agave love. Not, I don't just love and cry to the people who deserve it. It's across the board. It's lucky it's the same way that all God's kids are none of us are. The book says God's either everything, which means He's every one of you or else He's nothing. And every day I get this voice, Chris, what do you think about this? That's a sign from God to tell the truth here. Step 11 is one of the steps that I really adore, and like Bob, I think I was a spiritual speaker from a young age. I can remember age 15, 17, something like that, starting to go out and get spiritual books. I read a lot of Alan Watts and Carlos Castaneda, you know, a lot of the types of things that were basically spiritual in their nature but a little hipper than like religious stuff. And again, I think I was seeking something to comfort myself. I truly think that I was looking to fill a void with this, but I was spiritually undisciplined and spiritually immature. I was expecting to gain spirituality through the intellectual I read it. I didn't want to do anything, you know. When a book came to a place where it would say something like, well, now, you open up a notebook and write down 25 things, how am I going to do that book? You know, I wasn't much interested in the particular practice. I also didn't have any consistency with any of it. But when I look back on it, I was searching for a comfort, a fulfillment, you know, within my spiritual nature. And, you Know, I briefly touched on some really amazing spiritual experiences. Unfortunately, many of them were chemically induced. You know, I remember when the grain alcohol and the LSD would work just right. You know? I could see God, you now. But, you know, that type of stuff is, it never, I could never hold on to any of it. And it had its own self-destructive qualities kind of built in. So when I met the Alcoholics Anonymous, one of the things that was happening around my area were they were passing out a lot of books. You know, Spermidon and Mount, Alan Watts, A Little Less Travel. There was a lot in these books in circulation in the early television meetings that I was going to. And I picked up on those. I've always been a reader. But again, there's something that's necessary, I think, to really grow, and that's discipline, consistency, and, you know, practice. And those were three things I just wasn't, I just didn't have the ability to deal with. You know, I moved on to something else before I could apply it. So I come into AA, and I'm confronted with the 11th step. And, you know, the 11st step really is about fitting myself to be a deuce. The whole step process is about fitting me to be your deuce, training, you now, taking me through a spiritual experience to a spiritual awakening so that I can then help others with my experience It wasn't what I was used to. I was just a very, very self-serving spiritual menus, more or less. So, you know, I had to come to terms with that. Now, I've done a lot of this work. When I first showed up today and I was reading a whole lot of faith books, and, you Know, somewhere around year three or five or something, And I found that I couldn't really read fiction anymore. I ended up getting involved with literature that would add a little bit of value to my spiritual growth, and I stuck with that. And where I can, where I see this applicability, I really try to engage in some of the practices and make them work. But I don't, I can't really claim success with any of that outside literature. I really can't. I can claim understanding, but I can' t really claim, uh, success. What I can claims some success with is this, the Step 11 work because I've remained consistent with it. I've become disciplined at it and I try to apply it not only, you know, for my own maintenance, let's help other people understand this and make this a part of their recovery methodology. I don't know that spiritual growth can really happen without prayer meditation. I don' t really know that it can. You look at any of the enlightened masters, you look at anybody who's really got it together spiritually and there are going to be these processes in place somewhere they should are. So is it important, is step 11 important for us, for our sobriety? I believe it's essential for our continued continued recovery. I do. And I also think that when we get involved in a lot of other things we need to get involved with those other things, as well as, not instead of. There's a great poem that Sam Shoemaker wrote one time, and I don't know how many people are familiar with it, but it was called I Stand by the Door. And it basically talks about somebody who is getting involved in the spiritual practices, but they're close enough to the door to be able to reach out and help other people who are in trouble. They're not so far into the spiritual disciplines, so far into the room that they're backed away from their ability to help anybody. Sometimes people become so heavenly, they're no earthly good. And it seems that people orbit themselves right out of alcoholics and out of a sense of different things and if they really are alcoholics their world blows up. There was a guy in an early meeting, probably the first two three years I was going to meetings spiritual Ray, he was called. And this guy read a spiritual book a day. He had a big smile on his face and nothing fazed him. Everything was positive and he was grateful for everything. I mean, we were all looking up to this guy like, you know, what book did I read, Ray? What book did I read? Well, you know, he orbited himself out of alcohol and sex because he was basically looking at the people in AA and not being very serious about his ass. You know, I would be spending my time with more Latin people, and he did. And when I was on the 12-step call about four years later, I thought he was a different person altogether. I've got to tell you, he was bummed out right then. You know? So I think the discipline and I think consistency is incredibly important. It was kind of fun. We had an ask it basket. And so, I think what we're going to do with Bob is we can answer some of these questions. And again, I will state for the record that we will be handling Bill Wilson and Bob Smith to answer these. Don't hold us accountable. Okay. Describe your speech also. I'm not going to read one, but I feel bad. Describe your experience with the New York Law Office. I am going to abstain from that for very long. In fact, it also says, is calling another alcoholic out as intensive work with others? This may be quite a question. I think intensive work Work with others is what's described in the chapter, Working with Others. I think it best works with alcoholics because the things that we do, the activities that we participate in to help someone get and stay sober and put them on the path to recovery. And I think the phone is a useful tool in that process. I think it's the only tool you are using out of the toolkit in the telephone. I don't think that that's really appropriate, but we can make use of the tools that allow us to communicate with each other. I definitely was thinking yes to that. My question is... I'll do it myself. So my new commission, the office, is actually going to keep him away from each other. How often do you write in before you're needed and how do you know when it's necessary to do so? Well, I think it's, I don't, I have a sponsor, not only sponsored, I got a handful of go-to guys. I just went and did a little piece of inventory work with my friend Sandy a couple weeks ago. And I'll do, I don't get into the semantic battle in AA of whether you just do the first right steps and never join it up again, you only do 10 and 11, or whether you go back and you're due massive through the steps again. I just know something, that I am going to have to take in-depth inventory from time the time because I leak. I suppose that if I could be diligent enough with 10 and 11 every day, I wouldn't leak. But I mean, Bill talks about chapter 5 when he says no one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. So I don't have a lot of time schedule. I know people that do a yearly thing. That's mind. I don't want my recovery to be a regimented so much process as an experiential process. And one of the things that's happened to me over the years is when you spend over three decades almost daily confronting or watching for the resurgence itself, the odd thing is I tell you, you'll never see your ego eyeball to eyeball just like you've never seen God eyeball to eyeball. You'll see the manifestations of God in your life continually. You feel God's presence from time to time, or you'll have a consciousness of his presence from time to time intermittently, but you'll ever actually eyeball to eyeball see God. You will see his hand, You'll see the results of his presence. And so would ego. But if you do inventory work over the years, you start to get what ego looks like as it manifests itself in your life and you become more and more familiar with it. And so I can start... I always check stuff with other people but I'll tell you I've got a pretty good spot in it in myself. when I start to worry a lot about stuff when I start to be very judgmental when I am not easily forgiving and tolerant of others and I hold on to their imperfections and I want to tell a whole lot of people about it those are little signs that when I'm starting noticing what's wrong with others and the imperfections in people or the universe or life itself. When I start experiencing separation or conflict between me and you, and me and life itself, and you ask me a question, when's the last time you felt some kind of conscious contact? And I don't have a good answer. That's an indication of a blockage. And it's time to do some inventory. There was a guy from Vegas years ago who, he passed away, he was so funny, he was a great guy, attorney, and he said one time in a meeting of 10 Step 10 people were talking about how they run it out their feelings every day. Oh, they talk about all kinds of crazy stuff in this discussion meeting. And God just said, oh, I hear what you're saying. He said, yes, that's alright. I don't have to do any of that. He said all I've got to do is just look around me at work, grocery store traffic, and AA, and my family. Just look around and if I see a lot of people that are really screwed up, I'm probably in a lot of trouble. And if I look around and I see people who are just like me, struggling from the pains of growing up and doing the best they can, he says I'm usually in pretty good shape. And I'll tell you something, that's really true. My sickness inside me is often evidenced in my perception of life and my perception of you. Because as I experience being sick, my perception is tainted with And so it's time to start cleaning house. How many spasms did you have when you first started spasming? One. I'm sorry, I wouldn't say I had a whole lot of years. Here is my experience with my first guy. And believe it or not, this guy is still alive today. Okay, the first guy I started sponsoring when I had about eight months. I tell the guys that are working with me before they get to start sponsoring, don't worry. They're always worried. Don't worry, you'll still forget that you work with me, but let's just get it over with. Just move forward. But this individual one is still live. He's a great A&A member. That's going to be a great podcast, believe it or not. My skill sets for sponsoring were not that good. If you want to learn something though, teach it. That is so the best way. And as I started sponsoring, I got better every time. And this may be, this question really may be alluding to how many sponsors one should have. There's been periods of time when I've had over 50. I probably have about 20 guys right now all in good standing. The way I sponsor is I really try to stay as closely aligned with the chance of working with others as I can. And the reason I do that is because there was a period of time in my life that I said yes to everybody that asked me, and I allowed them to set the schedule of their recovery process. And those were both huge mistakes. Today I qualify someone. You know, I help them see the truth about their alcoholism. And then I do what it says in the book after working with others. I let them read the book. When they've read the book, they come back to me and we talk about the future of this project. And I ask them, are you willing to go to any length? They've read that book so they now know what any length looks like. Has anybody ever asked you if you're willing to go to anything length? You don't know what that means but you just said yes anyway because you think that's the answer everybody is expecting. we need to give the people who are working with the dignity of understanding what any length looks like. And so that's kind of what I did today. And I gotta tell you, that clears out, you know, that type of sponsorship is like a self-cleaning oven. It burns off all the grudge. You know, only people that are really serious are going to be messing with things. That's basically my strength. I'm looking at this question, and I just realized that Chris divided the questions into the ones he would take and the ones I would take. And in taking this question I just realize that I've got the ones you didn't want. That's how it all works. It says can we handle the truth or does the truth handle us? You're getting me here with my questions. I don't even know what that really means. I don' t need to know what it is. What? Uh, yeah, oh, eh, jeez. Man. I dunno, I'll dig it up. I'll just dig it out. Okay. If in both states we become alcoholics, crushed by a self-imposed crisis, Is the self-imposed crisis a crisis of self, or is it a crisis that we became alcoholics? It couldn't stop. Alcoholism doesn't come in bottles, and it doesn't comes in drinking. It comes in people. When did you become an alcoholic? If you guys in junior high school sit down for the first time with a bottle of whiskey and start drinking, and the one can't stop, and the other one was able to drink socially, then the guy that couldn't stop... When did he become alcoholic? The moment he touched the alcohol. Was he already alcoholic, waiting for the alcohol? If he would have started, if he would've had the same experience two years before, would he have had the reaction? Five years before. So when did he become an alcoholic? I'm not a nature guy. I'm either with conflicts or controversy between nature versus nurture. I think I was born with at least the propensity and inclination to alcoholism. I was like a free, dry alcoholic waiting for alcohol. If that wasn't true, then my sister should be an alcoholic and she's not. If that weren't true that anybody who drank abusively in a drinking fraternity would end up an alcoholic, But the reality is there's a lot of people that drink abusively and get really, really drunk for a period of time in college and just realize, well I can't do this anymore and stop. And they're not alcoholic. So, I don't...I mean, I think it isn't consciousness. I wouldn't... I don' t think in terms of crisis or self, but I think... I understand what you're saying. I think that's probably right. I would word it a little differently, but I think that's worse to me. The problem is within me. And if you're an alcoholic with a chronic illness, you're in the business, whether you want to be or not, of creating self-imposed crisis. It looks like we must avoid the deliberate manufacture of misery. Well now what am I going to do? Work plus work is stopping the production of conflict. Work plus me, I don't work. I mean, I do. Right? But it's better to put your peer-insessed inventories in a three-column format like The Resentment or it doesn't matter. My experience on this is The Resented Inventory, I guess what they're alluding to is a three column, but it's not really a three-column inventory. It's really a four column. If you get the fourth column, you've really missed a large part of what the whole receptor inventory is asking you to do. I believe that the sex inventory needs to be in the format where you review the relationship, You answer the nine questions and you develop the sex idea. And the fear inventory is, the way I do it, and there's many different ways to do this, but the way that I do is there's basically two columns and then some questions that you need to answer and some prayers. If you follow the book Alcoholics Anonymous with these inventories, you're going to be placed in good stead. I've seen a lot of inventories out there where they put, you know, check marks and, you know, there's, they have the only selection, but with farm animals involved. I mean, you don't, so that's, I think there's an economy to the inventory process in the book, Alcoris Malmas, and it gets it done. We always want to be adding some shiny clones to the car, and it doesn't really need it. If we answer the questions honestly, and we're painstaking about it, we're thorough to the questions that the Facebook answers, whether you use a big piece of paper or a small piece of papers or whatever, I think we get this job done. I couldn't agree more. I just thought, don't add nothing. More is not, sometimes more is not better. I've seen some, there's some extrapolations of AA and other 12-step programs where they make the writing process of the inventory just like, God you, I think it's the 4-step guys that just make me want to get drunk. I mean, we have, I love this term economy. There is a spiritual economy in our fourth step. So you go through it and if you ask yourself, did I realize everything that it said to realize? Did I write everything that's said to write? Did I see everything it said the see? Did I pray everything it says to pray? Did I ask for everything it's, just ask yourself. Just go through with it. And I do all the coolest things in the book. So, when listening to a pit stop, do you jot down the reader's defense of character and suggest names for amends? No, I don't do the defense. I don' t really suggest names for amens, but I tell the guys I said, you know, every name on here is on your eight-step list, and for no other reason except that there is, that name wouldn't be there if there wasn't some kind of separation between you and the other person. I can admit, this is not about right or wrong. It's the egos in the right and wrong business. This is about mending separation between me. Some of us will make ourselves judge and miserable for years. You're not going to make amends to some of them because they were more wrong than I was. But you just kept yourself hostage. Your ego is gotcha. It's gotcha! The ego is in the right and wrong business. The spirit only yearns for connectivity. And we just mend the separation between... And I've made a lot of amends where if you were to ask me, come on Bob, let's do it at least. Were you wrong here? No? But there's separation and I don't want the separation. So I will go and humble myself and say, you know, I've make a mistake here in our relationship. And I feel this distance with this and I would like to do something, whatever I can do just to make it right. You know? I'd tell them all the names go on your eight step list. I don't know. Let's go ahead and do it. Is there a danger in setting so much time on steps six because if not, why is it eight steps? Eight and nine. But two of each other once they're in this party, they're not going to handle it as we make amends. That's a good question. My first experience through this test was, remember I was being exposed to the 12-in-12s. That really was the basis of my platform to move through these tests. And I don't know about the 12 info meters around here but they had one week on step 6, one week on step 7 and then you moved on to step 9. And when you're looking in my consciousness, if you move to steps three and seven, uh, you know, in one sitting the way it's laid out in the book, I'll go as an optimist. So what I decided to do was work on my character defects after I did my first step. Bob talked about the whack-a-mole. You know, the whack a mole game. Where it's, you want to be sure your characters don't hop up while you're working on another one. If you were in charge of the removal, uh, the identification and removal of your character, wouldn't you have done a better job now? So that can definitely be an exercise in utility. I don't think it's a bad idea for us to recognize these things, but to try to fight them all in similar kind of combat is not really the best way to go. You know, you don't want to be whacking the mole too much because you could go blind. You know, that's really, that is a cool way of going about it. What those might have hurt is how do I know when to keep pushing for a relationship, and how do i know when back off and give them time? For instance, my kids. Spiritual ashes are spiritual ashes. When just the idea, just the concept of pushing That's a pushing for a relationship, which is self-serving. This is not about that. This is about taking consistent, persistent, loving action. There is a principle in the universe that is hard on us but isn't as capable. And that principle is, is that you cannot continue to hate or resent or fight with someone who is consistently and persistently loving and on your side. Eventually in time, it will wear you out. The problem is, most alcoholics that are self-centered, there's no attention span. I want to make the big gesture of your meds, and then I want to parade balloons and trumpets and bands. And often you hurt somebody's family members, and sometimes it's years and years of diligent, loving actions to overcome the damage that everyone used to do. Just to rub his hands together and say You rub away the wreckage of your past with good, loving words. With good words. I had to tell you a little story. There was a gal in my home group and she got sober. And she had these two little babies that were, I think, like a year and two years old. And they were maligned babies. She had fallen in love. She had a one-child and fallen in Love with this black guy who was a cop. and they got married, they had these kids, and he was a good guy. But the fact that he was an alcoholic, a crack addict, and a crack dealer was not good for his image as a policeman, I'll tell you. And eventually it could not, the Americans were violent with her insanity and they had a divorce. Well, when she hooked up with him, her father was a bigot. I mean an over-the-top, like a Ku Klux Klan kind of guy. And when she started dating him, he just started cutting her out and cussing her. And when they had those kids, he would have nothing to do with those kids. He'd have nothing TO DO WITH THEM. Every time he tried to contact him, he'd call her and the kids' names. She'd call him names. He was brutal. He was a very mean-spirited guy. When you get sober, if you've got this resentment towards your dad, and it's the kind of resentment that about 50% of AA would agree with, that you've gotta be a jerk. But her sponsor who I was very close to, her sponsor believed in the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous these spiritual actions. And her sponsor believed she could disregard her father's actions entirely. She had to put out of her mind what he had done and looked at what she had done, and she had to start acting like a good daughter in spite of his rejected and adamancy and anger and meanness. And he was a jerk, man. He would call him up and he'd call her a name hang up on her. She'd send him letters and he wouldn't respond. One time he sent me pictures of the kids and he drew, like, bizarre things on them and made them just degrading and sent them back. It was really mean-spirited stuff. Well, she didn't do this, like five or ten times. She did this weekly, sending him pictures and cards and trying to call for over four years in the face of his meanness and rejection and amnesty. And it came to my home group. It was a Friday night meeting. She came there with a letter after over four year's of this. And there were some of us in the room that had been through this with her. I was part of the spiritual advisor and her sponsor at the time. She started reading it to her in the evening, and it was unbelievable. It was from her father, and he said in a letter that he said that he was ashamed of himself for all the years of his adamancy. And he talked about not trying to justify it, but he just talked about some things that had happened to him as a child that had set him up for that kind of prejudice and that kindof anger. because hurt people hurt people. He said in the letter that he can't believe that she kept contacting him. And then he said something, when she read this I started to cry and I left the room and about half the room was crying. He said it in the matter that he knew he didn't deserve to have her and those kids in his life and if he'd give them another chance that he'd spend the rest of his life trying to make it right for her. And I say, I'm looking around my home group and everybody's tearing up because we've been through this with her. And I'm driving home that night and I remember driving in the car thinking to myself, My God, look what just happened here. Her man's changed him. Her man changed him! you you you Well, I'll start if you want, and you can wrap this up. Okay, we'll do about 20 minutes. Okay. All right. Okay, we're going to move on to step 12. It's a very, very important step and we want to make sure that we recover it. Practical experience shows if not equal so much as your immunity from drinking as intensive work with other alcoholics. That's a very, very important sentence. How many in here think immunity from drink would be a good idea? Oh yeah. The practical experience of the first 100 or so convinced them that the more active they were working with other people, the higher the probability that they would stay sober. So this is important. This is really, really important. If you think sponsorship or commitments or developing a service ethic is optional, you know, you could be in big trouble. There are a lot of people who will say something like, well, you know what? I don't really think...