The Spiritual Mailbox and the Gift of the Real You – Sandy B.

Well, good evening everybody. My name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic. How are you all doing? Thank you. Well, I'm delighted to be here tonight and I'm always glad to be at an AA meeting just celebrating this sobriety and this incredible organization known as Alcoholics Anonymous. And I apologize, but I've got a Normally, I like to hang around after I finish talking, but I'm going to catch an airplane at 9.50. So if you see me saying half of the Lord's Prayer and going out that door, you'll understand why. It's just an unfortunate commitment that I have tomorrow morning and just kind of mess things up or I'd be staying here. One of my boys lives up here and it would be a pleasure to just spend the whole weekend. I get this thing to stay up. I would like to talk to anybody who is new to AA. I always like to talked to those of you that are just getting started in this organization. And I remember what that felt like, there's sort of a little bit of confusion. It wasn't your idea to come here in the first place. Not too many people came here on their own. You don't see many stories of people sitting around their house and they said, You know, I was sitting around my house one night and I got thinking, you know, if I keep drinking, I could run into trouble. I think I'll go to A.A. early before it gets real bad, you Know, and get in there. You don't ever hear stories like that. I mean, it was never our idea to come here. We come here because of bosses. You know they call us in. Joe, you got a minute? I'd like you to meet your replacement. or the doctor tells us doesn't want to say our health is that bad but if he was us he wouldn't buy any long playing records and then he goes into an explanation of what liver damage really is or the family is going on a vacation and you aren't you may have seen that whatever the reason is it's generally somebody else's idea that we come here to Alcoholics Anonymous. And most of us didn't know much about AA. I thought it was a government agency. I really did. I thought the FBI or something, and you join this thing and they assigned an agent to watch you. And if you ever drank, you disappeared forever. You know what I mean? It was one of those things because I knew that they disappeared forever when they went to AA. There's an old story about this young guy because another way we get here is through the judges nowadays and this young man had appeared in front of the judge um and the judge said fred i hate to do this uh because you know i know your family and i like you and everything but you've been arrested for being drunk in public about 15 times this year and they're really getting on my back i mean they're wondering you know what am i going to do something about you. So here's the deal. You get one year in jail or one AA meeting. And he stood there and scratched his head and thought about it, and he's just thinking, and the people in the courtroom are just going, how could a guy be standing there? I mean, what's the problem making his mind up? And of course, in order to understand the young man's dilemma would have to get inside of his head. And if he got inside of His head, we'd find out that He was a bar drinker, and down at the bar there was all kinds of drinkers. And from time to time, some of them would go to jail. And from Time to Time, some would go AA. The difference was the guys who went to jail came back. So he didn't know what was involved when they told him he'd go to one AA meeting because you just disappeared off the planet when you went there. And that's why I had no idea what this was. And I don't think that when we get sent to AA, we see it as a messenger from heaven. When that cop pulls us over for drunk driving, great big cop, it's hard to imagine him as sort of a messenger from our higher power who's been assigned to come down and take us out of hell and set us free it looks like somebody interfering with our live at that time we have a big resentment you know look at this guy all those other drunk drivers out there and they're driving around nobody resting them and they had to pick on me and that's the way it was with me only I went to my first AA meeting and that is funny because all of us sometimes think that when we're sent to AA, or we end up here, that it's a step down. I know I did. And I was in a nut ward when I was sent to AAA. And I felt, boy, you know, it's bad enough being in a Nut Ward, but now I've been sent to Alcoholics Anonymous, you know? I was having enough of a problem explaining the Nut Ward to my parents, but how am I ever going to explain Alcoholics Anonymous? And I was in this, it was a Navy Bethesda nut ward. And I Was In There Because At That Time In The Navy They Had No Treatment For Alcoholics. And So Alcoholics Were Dumped In With All The Rest Of The People. And We Were Just Treated By Psychiatrists And Sort Of In With All The Nuts. And The Funny Thing About The Nut Ward, The Other People Looked Down At The Alcoholics You Know What I Mean? I said, what are you doing in here? You know, it doesn't look like you even had a real illness. And so I remember having that feeling that where I had arrived at age 33 after having graduated from Yale University, getting in the Marine Corps and being a jet fighter pilot, I had skyrocketed to low man in the nut ward. And that was where the rest of the people that were locked up in there didn't think much of you. And I remembered that feeling, God, how bad can it get? And I was in there because I had reached the end of the line as far as drinking was concerned. It had started out as just a social thing you do in college and it ended up becoming an absolute master of my life. And in a literal sense, just as we do in our third step, I had turned my will and my life over to the care of vodka. And that was where it was. I didn't intend to do that. I didn' t mean to do that. I didn''t start out to do any of that, but that's how it ended up. It was something about it that was different for me than it was for non-alcoholics, even though we all started drinking at roughly the same time. And you know, one of my favorite speakers is Clancy Eye from out in California, and He talks about a lot of the same things that I like to talk about. What makes us alcoholics is not so much what alcohol does to us. We get lost when we focus on that. A lot of times we try to understand alcoholism and we look and we just go, look at that guy, he's throwing up and when he drinks he can't stop and he has liver damage and he haves all these things and look what alcohol is doing to him and that's what makes him an alcoholic And that has really nothing to do with it, because if we could get a non-alcoholic to sit still long enough and pour enough booze in them, they would have all those things happen. They would get liver damage and get sick and so on down. It's just that the average person will not do that. I mean, you've seen social drinkers. I go to lunch with them all the time, and I still go nuts being around them. I mean, I'll order a guy, you know, the guy will order a drink with the business luncheon and the drink will come and he'll pick it up and he will just start to take a sip and then he'll say, you now what's interesting, what's going on up in the car? You know, put the drink back down. He hasn't even spent there ten minutes, he hasn't had the sip yet and he's just starting to get it up there. And I'll tell you another thing, the Redskins are doing good this year and I'm going, break the goddamn thing! What are you doing, you're just sitting there and screwing around with it. That is real alcohol abuse. Alcohol did things for us that it doesn't do for the non-alcoholics. It answered questions. It changed the world that I lived in. See, the world without alcohol was a very intimidating place. I didn't have answers. I didn'T fit in well. And I didn' t understand why other people thought life was wonderful. I didn''t understand love. I didn ''t understand spirituality. I just felt like an outsider on life itself and on the human race. And alcohol fixed that. Alcohol was not a problem. It was an answer to a problem." changed and transported me much as the alice in wonderland did to a different world it was wonderful to be in that world and the main thing that had changed was you you know they talk about alcohol changes you no it doesn't change me it changes you i walk into a bar and i see you know sober and i say a bunch of people there oh there they are the same old you know intimidating type people i have three drinks and they turn into the most wonderful people you have ever seen they're all smiling at me they want me to come over and tell jokes sandy come over and see me you know it's just wow power of alcohol to change the world that i live in into this remarkably happy place filled with people that are just delighted i don't know about you but sometimes you know i can go into a strange town we really are emotional some of of us drunks you know and I go into a strange town just sitting in a bar have about three drinks the bartender comes over I'm sobbing tears are coming down he says what's the matter what's the matter I said I've just never seen such beautiful people in my whole life I've been I've overcome by the magnificence of the patrons of this bar that are sitting around here the most beautiful human beings I've ever seen I like to buy them all around a drink you know And I'm sure some of you have experienced this transformation, this spiritual awakening on the third drink where suddenly you're in touch with this very spirit of the universe and all of the goodness and love that is in mankind that is so invisible when you're sober. And about four drinks later, I'm beating the crap out of some of these beautiful people. But at that moment, there is a vision, There is just a clarity of what life is and what it's all about, and alcohol just does that for me. That's what made me an alcoholic. It answered things. Sure, there was other problems that it caused, but it answered more problems than anything else did, and it was my secret weapon. It was my answer. It was My Higher Power. And I talked, you know, I started drinking when I went to college, And I had a roommate who lives down in Dallas, Texas named Roy. And he and I started drinking together. And I thought we were sort of similar. And now all these years have gone by. And sometimes I go to Dallas and I speak at AA meetings and Roy comes. And he's not an alcoholic, but he loves what AA did for me, his buddy. And it made me get my life back together and everything is wonderful. And so he loves to come and tell AA how happy he is. And so, he's sort of an honorary member down there. And I remember talking to him about 10, 12 years ago. and I said, Roy, you and I started out drinking together and I thought we were drinking a lot and everything but clearly we're different. And I said if you now, you're 50 years old or whatever it is, if you look back how would you describe alcohol? What would you say if you were to ask what it's meant in your life? Tell me some of the things that you think about when you think of alcohol. So he thought about it a little bit and the first thing that he said he said, you know what it does? It makes food taste much better. And I remember saying to myself, makes food taste better. I mean, you could have guessed all day. You never would have heard me saying it makes food tastes better when I'm describing alcohol. And I was thinking to myself is that going down or coming up? Makes food taste better. It's just... What kind of a reason is that? I mean it's the strangest thing to say about alcohol and then he went on to say at the end of the day comes home and sometimes he'll go in mix himself a little drink and have that and then go take a shower and it's sort of a transition from work and then seeing the family and then sometimes two or three times a year there'll be big social events like a party and it just seems to enhance people getting together and talking and that was his whole description of alcohol and he never once did he say alcohol that's the secret of life he didn't say that but that's what I would have said I would've said yeah that's what alcohol is, alcohol is where you go in order to get courage it's where you going in order to get faith it's were you going to order to knowledge it's we're you going order to make a decision it is step one in all of life have a drink that was how you live you know what I mean here comes a letter in the mail oh the sheriff wants to see you you got to do this by Tuesday morning what's the first thing you do when you get something like that have a drink then you will intuitively know how to handle situations they used to baffle you step one have a Drink I never ever remember having a problem where I said to myself Now, here's a problem I won't be drinking over. It was the all-in-one answer to everything. Whatever it was, step one was have a drink. And then I could go from there. You know, some years ago we talked about non-alcoholics. They don't really understand what it's like to be an alcoholic. So some of us invented a game. I don't know if you've heard about it. We never did market it, but I'll tell you about it anyway. It's like a Parker Brothers game. It's called So You Want to Be an Alcoholic? As for people who are never going to make the grade, they're just never going... They're going to hang in there and throw up every day for four years just to qualify. It's Like Monopoly. It's one of those board games. You roll the dice, you go around, you have all these little things that happen, you know, DWI or whatever. You're fired five times in two weeks. All these little things, but the culmination is when you take a chance. Remember the take a chance in the Monopoly game and you draw the card? And there it is. And it says, you will accompany these two gentlemen out the door and do whatever they say. And so you go out the door and they blindfold you. They put you in a cab. They put you on an airplane. You're blindfolded into some city somewhere, up the elevator into a hotel room, still blindfold and they take all your clothes except your underwear. You're in the hotel room and they've run up about a $650 bill on the room. And they take the blindfold off and they leave you $3.75 and they say, your job, if you choose to accept this mission, you have to be in New York City tomorrow morning in a new business suit for the most important job interview of your entire life. And in order to make it a little more realistic, we're going to ask you to take these two thumbtacks and punch them into the palm of your hands and leave them there at all times and pretend nothing's wrong. Just so you can sort of get the flavor of what you normally feel like. Ready? Get set? Go! Now an alcoholic, this would be easy. You know why? Because we left them $3.75 to get a drink, because all you have to do to get from that city to New York in a business suit and beat the $665 room charge is get a drink, and you'll be out of there, and you'll show up. I don't know how it'll happen, but you'll have the suit, you'll be there, you go, hi, and they'll just be going. It's like Houdini, but this is the type things that I think all of us have encountered. We have just things that we never thought we were going to be challenged with, because alcohol had a way of taking us to places and things that we never intended on doing. Alcohol was a very powerful thing. Drinking a bottle of alcohol to me was like checking a book out of the library. You know, you check an adventure novel out, You can hold the cover up and you can look at it. Hey, this looks like an exciting book. But you don't know until you take it home and read it. And then you find out, wow, this book takes you in a submarine. You go to Germany. You're over here. You're Over There. Same thing with a bottle of vodka. You're down at the store. You hold it up to the light. You're looking at it and you're going, I wonder what's in store for me tonight. I'll take it Home and find out. so we take that thing home and you know and you just don't know sometimes there's go to jail whiskey sometimes there is traveling whiskey I mean you go home you are out in the garage having about your twelfth drink and the next thing your wife gets a phone call from Wiggins, Mississippi the next day send me money how did you go from the garage to Wiggings I don't knows the guy had a flat tire I went out to help him. He thought we ought to go in the chicken feed business and I went with him. Or it's just drink the vodka and lose your teeth. Boom! A big fist shows up. And you're over at the dentist's office. I don't know, it's out in the garage drinking my tea and bam, I got hit. So you almost feel like going back to the guy that sells you this stuff and go look, last week I got the bottle in here and I ended up with a big blonde. what box did that come out of I don't want the jail one I want the blonde one if you could that's the one I want to buy but we didn't know so we were really willing to turn our lives over to the care of vodka whatever your drink was and the reason I was willing to do that is anything was better than where I was That's why this disease of alcoholism is a little bit different than a lot of people think it is. A lot of People think that our problem is whenever we drink, we get all screwed up. That's the normal way that people think about alcoholism. Well, yeah, every time he drinks, he gets all screwed up. If that was our problem, we would not need to be here tonight. If your problem is whenever you drink, you get all screwed up, then you got it made because you're not going to need to go to meetings. You're not gonna need AA. You don't need anything because you have a different problem than most of us. You have a problem that is very similar to somebody who's allergic to strawberries and you don't know what it is, but there's something that happens that causes your skin to all get screwed up and you're breathing and you throw it up and you go to a specialist and they say, good luck, we've done some tests. Your problem is strawberries. All you have to do is never eat any more strawberries and you will never have those problems again. And that person on their own never has any more strawberry. They go into the ice cream store and they said, how about a strawberry ice cream? Nope. All by themselves. They just go, nope, no, no thanks. They don't get with other people who can't eat strawberries and get little meetings and groups and inner groups and all of that and sit around and talk about, well, why do you think you can't eats strawberries? Well, I don't know. My mother probably dropped me in a strawberry patch when I was little. and I feel like an adult child of a strawberry. And so on down. So we don't have any of that. Why? Because their only problem is when they eat strawberries, they get all screwed up. Our problem is not that when we drink, we get all screwing up. If that was our problem, just think what good news it would be. He would go to the doctor. Doctor, what is the problem? Your problem is whenever you drink, you get all screwed up. Do you see that guy celebrating, hearing that news, walking out going, God, I'm so happy to know that. My problem is whenever I drink, I get all screwing up. All I have to do is not drink. I think I'll go out and celebrate. There's no joy in Mudville when somebody says no drinking. Well, why isn't it the same? Why aren't we just as happy as the person with the stroke, because that's not our problem. You know what happens if you don't drink? You're sober all the time. How does that sound? Those of you that are brand new, hey, good news, you're going to be sober all of the time! You're going to be sober on New Year's Eve, you'll be sober at the Steelers games, you will be sober on your birthday, you are going to sober on Saturday night. As a matter of fact, you gonna feel like you do now forever that's what WC field said he said the person who doesn't drink when they get out of bed in the morning that's as good as they're going to feel all day so isn't it funny that our problem is sobriety that was mine every time I was sober it was awful and alcohol is how you get un-sober. Alcohol takes care of that little problem called sobriety, which means I don't know what's going on. It means people, everybody around me is mean. It means I don' t fit in. It mean s I'm nervous. It means I can't make a decision. It means I got a lot of resentments. It means life is unfair. It means I do not see all these other things that people are talking about. I don't see love. I don't see brotherly love. I don' t see that. I did when I was drinking. I could see it clear as a bell. But when I was sober, I couldn' t see it. I didn' t seem... I just thought it was a rumor when you were talking about a higher power. God would come into your lives and you'd have this wonderful feeling. I never had any of that. I didn't get in there. I felt like I had it when I wa s drinking. It didn' d come in. I din' t see any of tha. It was just me. And that' s the wonderful painful process of becoming isolated and self-centered as this disease of alcoholism progresses. And it just takes us right into that self-centered jail cell of isolation. And that's when we're lucky to get to Alcoholics Anonymous. And everything looks, you know, you could put a lie detector on an alcoholic and ask him questions. Is alcohol your problem? And they would say, no, it's not. And the needle wouldn't move, as Clancy said, because from where we're sitting, we're telling the truth. This is how we see it. And we see all these other problems. It's them. You know, it'S my boss. It'S my childhood. It' s my neighborhood. It this country it's around you name it there's a million things from where we see it and that's the problem it's always going to look like that unless something spectacular happens and that something spectacular that happens in alcoholics anonymous is in our 12th step and it's called a spiritual awakening because what happens is we are given a new vision Chuck Chamberlain wrote the book, A New Pair of Glasses. We are just literally given a new view of the world. It's the same world, we just can now see it for what it really is. It's very similar to what drinking did. It gave us a new vision. Boy, there was something, you know, remember how you'd walk into the bar and three drinks, you go, that's more like it. Well, what's more likely? The way things look now. So in order to have a happy sobriety, things have to look different. And when they look different, we don't need a drink. The funny thing, this is a spiritual program. And the spiritual programs work entirely different than other types of problem solving. So we come here with this terrible alcohol problem. And most of us are just obsessed with thinking about this alcohol problem, what caused it? How am I going to do this? What's going to happen to me? I mean, we spend literally 24 hours a day thinking about ourselves and what's going on. It's too hot in this room. It's Too Crowded. Well, I'm getting a little antsy. Well, you've got to go to the bathroom. Well, we're just constantly just inventorying every little thing about ourselves to just keep track of everything and how uptight or I'm Getting Relaxed or I'M Going Over Here. It's just amazing the constant concern with ourselves. And it's a terrible prison to be in. you just there's no freedom from that type of perspective and that thinking and one of the things we're obsessed with is alcohol well i got a drink in the car and then i can go out and get that if i get nervous i got money here okay and i know where i'm i'm covered for tomorrow and then wednesday i can go get this drink and okay i guess i'm safe for the rest of the week okay i can sit back and relax i mean we're just around thinking about and then we're going we're in here we're gonna we're an alcoholic we're to learn something about alcoholism we're We're obsessed with, how did I become an alcoholic? What does it mean to be an alcoholic, and I'll tell you why we're trying to figure out why we became alcoholics, because in traditional problem solving, if we can figure out why we became Alcoholics, we'll be able to drink again, because then you'll figure it out, and that's why we are constantly trying to Figure It Out, and we're reading everything. Most people explore every alternative before they come to Alcoholics Anonymous. You're sitting around, you see a newspaper. I'll tell you, it's funny. If I ran a health food store, I'd just run ads in local papers about every couple months I'd write a little story that said, up in Canada last month, it was noticed that alcoholic rats showed less of a tendency to be alcoholic if they were on a diet of powdered carrots. And then you start seeing all these people coming in. You got powdered carrots in here? Because maybe if I eat enough of that, I'll be able to drink normally. And of course, when we say drink normally, we don't mean what a lot of people think when we mean drink normally We mean drink 25 drinks a day and have nothing bad happen. That would be normal drinking for us. so anyway we're obsessed with what is the problem how to analyze it figure it out and then solve it well let me tell you if you're new coming into alcoholics now that isn't what happens because this is not a figure out program um we talk a lot about the problem before we get here and a little bit after we get hier and then all we talk about is the solution we just keep talking about the 12 steps we're talking about this higher power we just keep talking about a solution and we get forced into the solution i mean you just you get a sponsor you get into this thing there's just no way to not keep going this is a we program we become part of a group and then when the group succeeds all of its members succeed and so it's very important that we get in the middle of alcoholics anonymous and stay there nobody has a slip until you get on the edge as long as we're in the Middle we're all moving forward we all succeed that's a real paradox because aa consists of losers and you'd think if you took 25 losers and put them all in a little group you'd have a meltdown or something you know what i mean it's just but instead we have 25 winners it turns out that the dynamics we have the ability to help each other and we nourish each otherand we allsucceed and it's a wonderful experience to become part of something rather than trying to be something all by ourselves. And as we come in here, we find that we go, well, let's discuss why I became an alcoholic. Nobody wants to tell us that. It's like they're going to save that for later. No, no, we don't want to talk about that. Just talk about being powerless. Just understand that you're powerless over alcohol. That's all you have to understand. And then we start working on this program. And I was pushed in. I had a big Marine Corps guy who was my sponsor. he came to my house, said, hi, my name is Bill. This is a 12-step call. I talk, you listen. There's a very fundamental relationship between the... And he was a great big guy and I just stayed sober out of fear of sponsor. I just knew that something bad would happen if I ever had a drink. And so we just went to meetings all the time. And then pretty soon we're talking about this spiritual program and what that meant. And what it means, if you are new, is that you aren't going to figure out problems anymore. You're just not going to figure them out. Instead, you're going to say, oh, that's a problem. I'm just powerless over that. I've tried every damn thing again. There's nothing I can do about that.I'm powerless. I'll just go to a meeting and I'm gonna do these steps. I'm going to work on this. I am going to take an inventory. I will do this. I'm going to admit to somebody else. I'm gonna try prayer. I'm gunna try meditation. I'm just gunna try these steps. And then we do that and guess what? The next time we turn around and our mind goes back well what about that problem? And the problem has been removed. It never gets figured out. It just goes boom. Now the way you're gunna notice this is you're gonna be in AA for three or four months you're going to be sitting around your house one day and you're gunga go almost like with a jolt you're guunga say to yourself Jesus I forgot to worry about drinking last week. You know what I mean? And it's almost like, I better go write that down. Don't forget to worry about drinking. I mean, it's just such a part of us we can't believe that we forgot to worry About Drinking last week, that it wasn't haunting us, that the idea of a drink and I'm sacrificed, it was just gone. You got so busy in these stupid meetings you forgot to worry about Drinking. Well, let me tell you what forgetting to worry about drinking is. It is a world-class miracle, only we diagnose it as some coincidence. This is spirituality at its maximum. That is precisely what spirituality does. That is the power of spirituality, is to take the most serious life-threatening problem you've ever had and make it disappear one day at a time one day at a we have that in our tenth step it talks about what we really have in alcoholics anonymous is a daily reprieve contingent on our spiritual condition as long as we devote all our energies to the solution the problems will stay in perspective they will stay off to the side they're like channel 5 reruns You know, the old TV programs from 35 years ago, they're all on tape somewhere. Well, all those old ideas about drinking are in my head and they could be turned on real easy. All I have to do is stop going to meetings, stop the spiritual work that we all do, and those ideas will return. And all of a sudden they'll just be going, it's not fair that you can't drink. Look at all those other people having fun drinking. Look at the beer ads. All of a suddenly the beer adds will be there. I don't even see them now. I couldn't tell you what a beer ad says. They just don't connect anymore. So it's an amazing program, and it all centers, those of you that are new, on powerlessness. That's what makes a spiritual program work, is to admit that we're powerless. And that's our first step. Powerless means that you can't learn your way out of this. It means no human power can solve this alcohol dilemma. It means if you are an alcoholic and you're very, very bright and you decide you want to become the world's expert on alcoholism, you can go to Rutgers University where you can get a Ph.D. in alcoholism. And if you're a practicing alcoholic, you'd probably make it through there. We have incredible willpower. I mean, God, do we have willpower? It has nothing to do with willpower, and we'd make it though Rutgers university and now we'd go over to the leading expert on alchoholism in this country to ask him a few questions about the disease and would be informed by his wife, you'll have to ask him later. He's passed out on the floor right now. But when he sobers up, he'll be able to tell you everything there is to know about alcoholism. And all of that knowledge will be of no avail because it doesn't say that we're ignorant about alcohol. It said we're powerless over it. We have no defense against the first drink. Knowing exactly what's going to happen. I mean, some of us have been through that drill so many times. We've been into jails, into nut warts, and we just know the drill. And we come out and we get sober. We get back in the big bed. Our family's talking to us again. Down at work they're saying good things about us. Maybe they're going to promote us. And we understand all of this. And we walk and we're talking to our friends and you go, You know, if I have one drink, this is gone. If I take one drink I'll lose the job. That family will be gone. I'll be back in jail. Bartender, can I have a beer? Now, let me tell you, if I drink this, it's gone. It's all gone. While we're explaining our entire situation, we're having a drink. That's being powerless over alcohol. It looks like insanity. And in a way, it is. It is a person with all their faculties still takes that first drink. See, that's the danger. We're powerless over alchohol when we're sober. It has nothing to do with being powerless when we'RE drinking. we're powerless over when we're sober and that's why knowledge won't help us and that is why the spiritual program has been the most magnificent answer that has ever hit this world it just started in 1935 that isn't that long ago that two guys from Vermont got together in Akron, Ohio and now look at this we are in over 100 countries 50,000 groups of Alcoholics Anonymous 2 million miracles walking around enjoying life sharing families coming back together employers getting good work out of people and a definite impact has been made on the world because of those two guys who happen to stumble across a bunch of answers in this in a series of coincidences that's just too hard to write off as coincidences whenever if you study the history of alcoholics anonymous it's just too much that this just coincidentally fell together. There's too many things that could have gone wrong, and it just had to be something that wanted to have this power make itself available to the hopeless so they could be let out of jail. Because AA doesn't open the doors of heaven and let us in, it opens the doors of hell and lets us out. That's what happens when we come in here? And I was talking about what I think happens in the program. Here's my five-minute Sandy Beach, what I Think Happens, What I Think Spirituality Is. I think we come in and we finally admit we're powerless. Each one of us in our own way. We just have to surrender. And it's generally circumstances rather than intellect that makes us come to this conclusion. Are we powerless? And AA does not in any fashion try to convince you of the existence of God. That's what a religion does. Early days, Bill Wilson and the early AA members learned that that wasn't their job, to go out and try and convince people of the existence of any higher power. What they specialized and what we specialize in today is the following. We convince you of the need for one. Convince you of the absolute need. And that's basically what our first step is saying. He said, unless there's a higher power, your future is very bad. And that's what powerless means. Amen. There it is. And if I had my way, here's how we'd take our second step in Alcoholics Anonymous. I used to fly jets in the Marine Corps and I would just get you and be in about your third month or so. I'd say, it's time for the second step. Now that you've admitted you're powerless we want to give you a demonstration of what this is coming to believe that a power greater than yourselves can restore you to sanity and we'd go up to about 50 000 feet and you're sitting in the back seat now with the canopy open roll the plane upside down pull some negative g's and you'd fall out and i have a little radio so i could talk to you as you're free falling and i'd say you're getting the idea of powerless out there you know and you probably think hey he's got a string he's going to pull me back in or something and there wouldn't be anything we just talk about powerlessness as you experience 40,000 30,000 you know maybe one of these cool skydiving type persons you'd be going oh hey this is funny till you get down around 3,000 feet when relative motion takes over and you start seeing the parking lot outside here getting bigger and bigger real fast and you see a truck down there with your name on it I mean suddenly it's like this ain't funny anymore and right about then about eight feet from the truck a big hand comes down from the sky and just go at the last second and a voice says excuse me sir we're conducting a survey do you believe in god now you see we think that our answer might be a little different under those conditions than in an intellectual discussion at the bar. Under those conditions, we'd probably say, no, but I'm willing to reconsider. And that's what the disease of alcoholism does. It gets us to reconsider, so it's out of absolute desperation that we become willing to consider to reconsider the idea of a higher power, whatever it may mean to us. And for many of us, we had old ideas, we had to get rid of them. That isn't what we meant by it. We're saying, whatever it is that's going to save us from hitting that truck is what I'd like to know better. And then we find out we don't have to go to Tibet, we don'T have to search anywhere to find this higher power, this higher Power right inside of us. Bill writes in the big book the fundamental idea of a God has been born inside of each man and woman just like the fundamental Idea of a friend. It's just a question of getting in touch with this and it turns out that our self-centeredness, our character defects have trapped the flow of this Power. And so all that the program consists of, the entire AA program, is removing the blockages of this flow. Consider a self-centered prison, and each one of these character defects has made it airtight. And we built that self-centered prison out of fear, and we felt safe in there, but we were totally isolated from the world, nothing could get in, nothing could go out. We couldn't even experience the love of our family. We called it harassment. They're always calling me up. They're always hassling me. It never felt like love, no flow of a higher power. From our perspective, there was no God. There was no love. There was nothing. None of it was there. So we honestly were telling the truth when we said, I don't see any of that. And the problem was none of it could flow through the jail cell that we had built for ourselves. So sobriety is an amazing quality. It consists of not getting anything but getting rid of things. Everything in a spiritual program is a paradox, and it seems to work backwards. In order to win, you have to surrender. And in order to gain all these things, we have to get rid of things. Sobriety is like a balloon ride. In order for people to get a better view in a balloon, you know what they do? They throw stuff overboard, and then the balloon goes up higher. And Chuck Chamberlain talks about that. Uncovered, discovered, discard. All throughout sobriety, we're inventorying, what else can I throw away? What other thing is holding this down? What other things have I tied to the ground so that I can't go up? And then I bitch about the view. You know what I mean? I've been sober two years, everything's the same as it was. Well, you probably tied yourself to that level. And you just don't want to throw away some other character defect. So all of sobriety just consists of getting rid of things. What else can I get rid of? What other stupid idea am I clinging on to? Bill writes that word, you know, if you look through our literature, he uses that word a lot. It's not complex Freudian, needs psychological analysis or anything like that. He'll just write a little sentence in there, we're especially stupid in that area. Yeah, I do throw up every morning. I think it's a psychological disorder. No, it's just stupid to throw up very often. Every morning, I mean, why are you doing that? And we have a lot of ideas and these ideas were collected. That's us. A lot of us think our ideas are us, and we assemble this package, and we call it me. You know what I mean? That's just me. Throw up every morning. That's me. It's going to be that way forever. That's me. We look at this stuff, and that's what chapter 5 talks about. Old ideas availed us nothing. We're going to get rid of those old ideas. We're going to replace them with the ideas of this program. And so getting access to new ideas is done by getting rid of ideas. Old ideas avail us nothing. I don't know where, I collected ideas from everywhere. We collect them when we're little and one kid will come over, hey did you know? You go, no I didn't know that. Wow that's amazing. I got a lot of ideas off of bathroom walls very interesting things you'd read about in there you know boy i didn't know that that makes the world a real threatening place and of course since we didn't share with anybody we never discussed any of these things with anybody we just you know had all these ideas and those ideas will stay our ideas forever and if they torment you today they'll torment you 20 years from now it's perpetual motion to have those old ideas and we come in here and that's what inventorying is all the steps are designed so that we can get rid of stupid ideas and when they go and the character defects associated with them go the channel gets open it's just like the alcohol thing was we just open it up so that a new vision will come in we call it intuition when we say we will intuitively know how to handle situations. We mean that. We mean that if you follow this, your thinking will go to a different level. You will be inspired to see insights in how to get along with people, how to be comfortable, how to have peace of mind. All of these will just come as gifts. The whole program is a gift. The Spiritual Awakening in the 12th Step, Bill Wright said, this was a gift Our job is to make ourselves available to receive this gift. See, this gift was being delivered to us all along. It just, we couldn't receive it. We had not tuned our receiver in. It was like if we live out in the country and you want to get mail, you got to put a mailbox up. There's a certain size, you know, it has to be on a post, a little flag up when you've got mail to be picked up. Those are the rules for receiving mail. An alcoholic might go out there and say, hey, just throw it on the lawn. I can't go through of trouble building one of those things. I'm busy drinking vodka right now. Just throw the mail on the lawn. They never get any mail, and what would he say? Nobody ever writes to me. Nobody ever rights to me, and it's how it would look from his or her perspective on they never got a letter, and all they didn't do was to do the one requirement that was necessary in order for the mail to be delivered so we have had gifts we've had just as much wonderful things was being delivered to us during all these years that we had no mail spiritual mailbox out there and everything was sent back said return to sender and we figured we weren't getting anything none of it was coming and all we were was stupid we refused to build a mailbox. We refused to make ourselves eligible because we thought we could do it on our own. Our ego said, the rest of the people can get mail. I'll write to myself. You know what I mean? I can do this without a higher power. There's some wonderful ego that says someone who gets through life without a high power is better than someone who uses a higher part of their life. That's that old ego. It's incredibly stupid because we can't possibly have what happens to us when this higher power comes in our lives. It is, if I was able to have everything that I wanted come true or work the steps and try and turn my life over to a higher power, I would come out on the short end of the stick if I could have the power to just wish everything true. Because all the wonderful things that I found out in AA that have happened to me here, I wouldn't have known about to ask for it. I would never have known about this. Never. I would have been going, give me another yacht, give me Another Yacht, another blonde, another blonde. Then you would read about me committing suicide on my yacht and then you'd say, what's the matter with that guy? Because all of those things, I didn't know how, what was there. I couldn't have the vision that we have by taking these steps. So if you're new, let me just tell you, you are in for the greatest surprise of your life because what happens in AA, you're going to be given a gift. Boy, am I going to have to run fast. you're going to be given a gift a very precious gift and your job is going to be to unwrap it and that gift is you and you're coming in here you're probably coming out of the garbage pile like the rest of us and all you see when you look at you is a pile of garbage that's because you've never unwrapped it and you've been living in the gutter and you have been living with as low as you can get yourself and you don't and you can't live up to your values and all of those things and you have a feeling that you're nobody and AA and this program and these steps are going to tell you boy, you in for a surprise if you think you're somebody if you don't think you know buddy we're just going to get that wrapping off and we're going to start showing you the brilliant incredibly wonderful person that's right below the surface and it's going to star shining and a lot of times other people will see it before you do and they'll come up to you and they go Mary what's going on they'll start seeing it in your eyes They'll start seeing this something new is starting to glow. That's the real you. That's The Tragedy of Alcoholism, that it kills the most beautiful part in ourselves and AA unwraps it and it just forces us on this spiritual journey so that year after year after years we see a better vision of who each one of us is. And what a great story. To those of you that are new, I can hardly wait to see this unwrapping and see the magnificent of the human being inside of you that will get totally open for view here in this program. Thanks for having me up here, and keep up the good work up here in Pittsburgh. Thank you very much.