Three and a Half Years of Sponsoring Myself and I Never Got Past Step Four — Jim P.

All right, let's go ahead and start. We're going to start on Bill's story, and that's page one.
And I want you to remember that the first two chapters is to convince us of one thing.
The first two chapters is to convince us what is the problem, step one.
And now that we've read Silkworth to explain the problem from the medical perspective,
now we're going to have a textbook example of a person who is afflicted with the very conditions
the doctor describes in the doctor's opinion.
The purpose being that hopefully I can identify, you can identify, we can identify with Bill's experience.
As we go through Bill's story, we'll see where Bill exhibits the obsession of the mind,
then where he exhibits the physical allergy,
and we'll also see the progression of alcoholism and where it leads.
And through pages one through eight, let's see if we can relate to Bill's drinking experience at all.
Bill's story.
War fever ran high in the New England town to which we were new young officers
from Plattsburgh were assigned, and we were flattered
when the first citizens took us to their home, making us feel heroic.
There was love, applause, war, moments sublined with intervals hilarious.
I was part of life at last, and in the midst of the excitement, I discovered liquor.
I forgot the strong warnings and the prejudice of my people, his family, concerning drink.
In time we sailed for over there, that was England.
I was very lonely and again turned to alcohol.
And then...
He went to a Winchester Cathedral in England, and if you've ever seen it, it is a magnificent place.
And outside it, I've got a friend who sends out a daily talk down in South Florida, a guy named Tom.
And I got a picture of him recently where he was over there visiting, and he's standing next to this tombstone.
And it says, here lies a Hampshire grenadier who caught his death drinking cold small beer.
A good soldier.
But never forgot whether he died by musket or by pot.
And Bill says, it's an ominous warning which I failed to heed.
And, you know, there over there, Bill's feeling great.
He's in a leadership position.
He's an officer.
And he figured that when he got back home, he was going to be a leader.
He was going to be on top of the world.
And so he took a...
I'll pay you.
I took a night law course and obtained an appointment as an investigator for a surety company.
The drive for success was on.
I would prove to the world I was important.
I would prove to the world I was important.
Now, is that an ego statement?
That's an ego.
My work took me about Wall Street, and little by little, I've been interested in the market.
Many people lost money, but some became very rich.
Why not I?
So I studied economics and business as well as law.
Potential alcoholic that I was...
What?
What?
He was 22 years old.
Potential alcoholic that I was, I nearly failed my law course.
At one of the finals, I was too drunk to think or write.
Though my drinking was not yet continuous, not yet continuous, it disturbed my wife.
We had long talks where I would still her foreboding by telling her that men of genius conceive their best projects when drunk.
Yeah, right.
The most majestic construction of philosophy.
Thoughts were so derived by people being intoxicated.
Yeah, that really helped Lois a lot.
You know, Lois spent five years trying to help Bill get sober and stay sober.
And Lois couldn't do it.
Fought the emotional appeal.
Couldn't do it.
She couldn't do it.
I don't know how many of you know how important it is.
I'm in this.
I'm in South Alabama right now.
I know you all know how important it is when you write in the family Bible.
You know, you write births, you write deaths, you write marriages, things like that.
But if you write a solemn pledge never to drink again in the family Bible and put your hand on that Bible,
I know that religious people say, that's it.
He will never drink again.
Bill did that twice.
Bill did that twice.
And that's...
That's somebody who I would think was an alcoholic.
By the time I completed the course, I knew that the law was not for me.
He never was a lawyer.
He completed and got a law degree.
And he wrote like a lawyer in this book.
He did not write like an eighth grade school teacher, which I'd like to tell you that's as far as I ever got.
I really don't like to tell you that.
I just tell you that's as far as I ever got.
So some of these words, like I did a minute ago, I have to just...
Go with what I know, not what's there, because I can't read quite as good as Bill can write.
But after he got a law degree, he thought it wasn't for him.
He really thought Wall Street was the way to do it.
And business and financial leaders were his heroes.
Out of the allury of drink and speculation, I commenced to forge the weapon that one day would turn in its flight like a boomerang
and all but cut me to ribbons.
Living modestly, my wife and I saved $1,000.
It went into certain securities.
Then cheap, rather unpopular, I rightly imagined they would someday have a great rise.
I failed to persuade my broker friends to send me out looking over factories and management,
but my wife and I decided to go anyway.
I had developed a theory that most people lost money in stocks through ignorance of market,
and I discovered many more reasons later on.
So we gave up our position and we rode off on a motorcycle.
I don't know if you've ever seen pictures of the little sidecar in the tent that Bill and Lois drove around.
These different factories.
And he would go and he would meet the factory workers and he would go drink with them.
And he would find out what we now call insider information.
And that's why when they talk about in the book, they talk about stockbroker.
Bill was a stockbroker.
He was not a stockbroker.
He was a stock speculator, which is an entirely different thing.
A stockbroker is somebody else.
And a stock speculator is somebody who gets inside information, goes and tries to buy up the stock,
waiting for this.
Take over to happen or waiting for something else to happen that's going to improve the stock.
And that's what Bill was doing.
By the way, that's against the law now.
Apparently it wasn't back when he was doing it.
They drove around.
They had a lot of success.
Remember, he was still a potential alcoholic.
We covered this on page three.
We covered the whole eastern United States.
We covered the whole eastern United States.
In a year and at the end of it, my reports to Wall Street procured me a position there
and the use of a large expense account.
The exercise of an option brought in more money,
leaving a profit of $7,000 for that year.
For the next few years, fortune threw money and applause my way.
I had arrived.
My judgment and ideas were followed by many to the tune of paper millions.
The great boom of the late 20s was seething,
and swelling.
Drink was taking an important and exhilarating part of my life.
There was loud talk in the jazz places uptown.
Everybody spent in thousands and chattered in millions.
Scoffers could scoff and be damned.
I made a host of fair-weather friends.
Fair-weather friends.
You might want to underline that,
because they're not there when you quit drinking.
My drinking assumed more serious proportions.
This is where he's starting to get the progression.
My drinking assumed more serious proportions.
Continuing all day and almost every night.
The remonstrances of my friends terminated in a row,
and I became a lone wolf.
He isolated and drank.
He didn't have any friends,
because every time he got drunk, he got in a fight,
and he just ran all his friends off.
So he became what they call a lone wolf drinker.
And there's many of us out there.
We isolate, and we're not hurting anybody, we say.
And there's a statistic.
There's a statistic somewhere, and I don't know where it is,
that every time that I say I don't hurt anybody but myself,
the average people that we hurt are 25.
Our family and our friends, co-workers,
people we run into, police officers, things like that.
So when I'm telling myself I'm drinking,
I'm just hurting myself, that's a lie.
There are 25, approximately 25 other people.
With me, there are more than 25,
but that's about the average.
Okay, he's drinking every night.
He's a lone wolf drinker.
There are many unhappy scenes in our sumptuous apartment.
There have been no real infidelity for loyalty to my wife,
helped at times by extreme drunkenness,
kept me out of those scrapes.
Okay, Bill says there was no real infidelity.
And Bill writes a book called As Bill Sees It.
Lois writes a book as Lois remembers it,
and he writes a book called As Bill Sees It.
and they don't actually correspond on that infidelity between the two books.
But that's as far as I'm going to go with talking about that.
In 1929, he contracted gall fever.
He went to the country.
My wife, to applaud while I started out to overtake Walter Hagen, a great golfer,
liquor caught up with me much faster than I came up behind Walter.
I began to be jittery in the morning, golf-permitted drinking every day and every night.
And it was fun to cram around at the exclusive course which had inspired such awe in me as a lad.
I acquired an impeccable coat of tan, one sees upon the well-to-do.
The local banker watched me whirl fat checks in and out of the till with amused skepticism.
All right, now, he's drinking an awful lot, but he's having the time of his life.
He's making a ton of money, and he's having the time of his life.
Until this next paragraph.
Abruptly, in October of 1929, hell broke loose on the New York Stock Exchange.
After one of those days of inferno, I waddled from a hotel bar to a brokerage office.
It was 8 o'clock, five hours after the market closed.
The ticker still clattered.
I was staring at an inch of tape which bore the inscription XYZ32.
It had been at 52 that morning.
I was finished, and so were many of his friends.
The papers reported men were jumping to their deaths from the towers of the high finance.
And I said,
That disgusted Bill.
He would not jump.
He went back to the bar instead of jumping.
My friends had dropped seven million since 10 o'clock that morning.
So what?
Tomorrow was another day.
As I drank, the old fierce determination to win came back.
Now, everybody's millions of dollars of paper money had just been lost by these people.
And he's back at the bar saying,
So what?
Tomorrow's another day.
I'm just going to drink, and I'm going to get more determined than ever.
And so he did a geographic change.
The next morning, I telephoned a friend in Montreal.
He had plenty of money left, and I thought I'd better go to Canada.
I wonder why he wanted to get out of New York
when hundreds of his friends had invested millions of their dollars in his stock little ideas.
By the following spring, we were living in our custom style.
I felt like Napoleon returning to Evelyn.
No St. Helena for me.
But drinking caught up with me again, and my generous friend had to let me go.
This time, we stayed broke.
We went to live.
I lived with my parents.
I found a job, then lost it as a result of a brawl with a taxi driver.
Mercifully, no one could guess that I was to have no real employment for the next five years,
or hardly draw a sober breath.
My wife began to work in a department store, coming home exhausted to find me drunk,
and I became an unwelcome hanger-on at the brokerage places.
Liquor ceased to be a luxury.
These crossed the line.
It became an insult.
It was a necessity.
Bathtub gin, remember the time, right about then, it was a prohibition,
so bathtub gin was around two bottles a day, and off of three got to be a routine.
Three bottles of gin a day seems like an awful lot of alcohol to be drinking at me.
But I guess Bill could handle it.
Sometimes he'd make a small deal and net a few hundred dollars,
and he'd pay his bills at the bars of delicatesses.
And this went on endlessly, and I began to waken very early in the morning,
shaking violently.
You know, a tumbler full of gin followed by a half a dozen bottles of beer would be required if I were to eat breakfast.
Now, you know, you wake up and you're going to eat breakfast,
and you're going to have to have a tumbler of gin and half a six-pack,
or a six-pack.
I'm thinking that you've got a problem.
I'm thinking you've got a problem.
I still thought I could control the situation.
There were periods of surprise.
There were periods of sobriety, which renewed my wife's hope.
He would stop every now and then.
He would drink until he couldn't drink anymore.
He would stop for a short period of time.
And then the next paragraph, it says,
gradually things got worse.
The house was taken over by the mortgage holder.
My mother-in-law died.
My wife and my father-in-law became ill.
All right?
Then I got a prophecy in business opportunities.
Stocks were at their lower point of 1932,
and I had somehow managed to form a group to buy.
I was to share generously in the profits.
Then I went on a prodigious bender,
and the chance vanished.
And he has it all set up.
He has all these people ready to invest in him.
They're believing in him again,
and he gets drunk.
And the chance to make all this money vanishes.
And it says,
I woke up.
I've got, in my little notes, came to.
This had to be stopped.
I saw I could not so much as take one drink.
I was through forever.
Before then, I'd written lots of sweet promises.
But my wife happily observed that this time I meant business.
And so did I.
And you can write next to that,
self-will avails us nothing.
Because that's exactly what he's saying.
By myself, I am going to stop doing this.
He's wrote those promises in the Bible.
Lois is believing.
She wanted to believe so bad.
You know?
He probably wasn't lying at that time,
at that exact moment.
At that exact moment.
At that exact moment.
And shortly afterward, I came home drunk.
You know?
There had been no fight.
Where had been his high resolve?
I simply didn't know.
It didn't even come to mind.
Somebody had pushed a drink my way,
and I had taken it.
Was I crazy?
I began to wonder,
for such an appalling lack of perspective
seemed near being just that.
Renewing my resolve, I tried again.
For some time past,
confidence began to be replaced by cocksuredness.
I could laugh at the gin mills.
Now I had what it takes.
One day, I walked into a cafe to telephone somebody.
In no time, I was beating on the bar,
asking myself how it happened.
As the whiskey rose to my head,
I told myself I would manage better the next time.
But I might as well get good and drunk then.
And I did.
So, you know, he walks into this part.
He's got no interest in alcohol.
He's laughing cockily at the gin mills.
And he walks in there,
and in no time at all,
he's beating at the bar,
saying,
What the hell happened?
You know?
The remorse...
This is a great paragraph here,
because it talks about a bottom.
It talks about a bottom,
and you would think this is it.
The remorse, horror, and hopelessness
of the next morning are unforgettable.
I'll read that again.
The remorse, horror, and hopelessness
of the next morning are unforgettable.
The courage to do battle was not there.
My brain raced uncontrollably,
and there was a terrible sense of impending calamity.
I hardly dared cross the street,
lest I collapse and be run down by an early morning truck,
for it was scarcely daylight.
An all-night place supplied me
with a dozen glasses of ale.
My writhing nerves were stilled at last.
A morning paper told me the market had gone to hell.
Well, so had I.
The market would recover, but I wouldn't.
That was a hard thought.
Should I kill myself?
No, not now.
Then a mental fog settled down.
Mental fog is described as depression.
And so he got depressed.
At the beginning of that paragraph,
remorse, horror, and hopelessness
were unforgettable.
By the end of that paragraph,
gin would fix that.
So two bottles and off to oblivion.
You know, so in the same paragraph,
he has hit a bottom.
And by the end of the paragraph,
he is drinking again.
And he goes on to say that
the mind and the body are marvelous mechanisms
for mind endured this agony two more years.
Morning, noon, and night,
he drank for two more years.
After swearing off,
after laughing at the gin mills,
after knowing that he was never going to drink again
based on self-will,
he spent another two years drinking.
Sometimes I stole from my wife's cylinder purse
when the morning terror and madness were on me.
Again, I swayed dizzily before the open window
or the medicine cabinet
where there was cursing myself
for a weakling,
for being a weakling.
He was chicken to throw himself out a window.
That's why he was cursing.
And he was too chicken to take the poison
that was in the medicine cabinet
to just commit suicide quickly.
He was killing himself slowly.
And many people do.
Many people do.
There were flights from the city to the country,
geographical change and back,
as my wife and I sought escape.
Then came the night when the physical and mental torture
was so hellish,
I feared I would burst through my window,
sash and all.
Somehow I managed to drag my mattress
to the lower floor
lest I suddenly leap.
Now, here's something real important.
Because it's in both Bill's story
and Dr. Bob's story.
It's called Dual Addiction.
We have a singleness of purpose
in Alcoholics Anonymous.
And we have stayed and survived
because of that singleness of purpose.
But don't let anybody tell you
that both our co-founders weren't dual addicted.
Because it says right there,
a doctor came with a heavy sedative.
The next day found me drinking
both gin and sedative.
This combination soon landed me on the rocks.
Okay?
Dr. Bob, if you read his book,
he talks about drinking
and then to steady his nerves in the morning
to do his proctology operation,
he had to take sedatives.
If I ever have to have an operation,
I want that doctor not to be jittery.
You know what I mean?
There's a part of me
that does not want anybody
with a sharp interest to be jittery around.
And that's the region right there.
People feared for my sanity.
So did I.
I could eat little or nothing when drinking.
And I was 40 pounds underweight.
We see so many people
come into Alcoholics Anonymous,
and they're just skin and bones.
And what it is,
is the body stops wanting to metabolize
food that we eat.
We might eat,
but our body doesn't want to metabolize it.
It wants to metabolize the sugar
that's in the alcohol.
And it's become so good at doing that
that the body would rather drink than eat.
And that's why we see so many people
when they first come in
looking horribly thin.
And we're the only group of people
that the worse you look like when you come in,
the more we love you.
Because you're probably right at that point.
You're probably right at that jumping off point
if you look miserable when you come in.
It's keeping you in.
That's what we need to do.
We need to keep you in.
And that's what we're trying to do.
Because I want to say
that his brother-in-law is a physician
and through his kindness
and that of his mother,
he was placed in a nationally known hospital
for the mental and physical rehabilitation
of alcoholics.
It's Towns Hospital.
Under the so-called Belladonna treatment.
Belladonna comes from the Angel Treatment
Angel Trumpet Plant.
And that's what they used to give alcoholics
to taper them off.
It's similar to methadone
being given to a heroin addict.
It tapers them down
to where they can then get off the methadone.
Well, that's what they thought back in 1934.
They thought that Belladonna
and all these other things that they were trying
would clear his brain.
Under the so-called Belladonna treatment,
my brain cleared.
Hydrotherapy and mild exercise helped much.
Best of all,
I met a kind doctor who explained that
though certainly selfish and foolish,
he's telling Bill
he's certainly selfish and foolish.
He had been seriously ill,
both bodily and mentally.
Bodily, the allergy.
Mentally, the obsession.
It relieved me to somewhat learn
that in alcoholics,
the will is amazingly weakened
when it comes to combating liquor.
It's going to tell us later on in the book
that it's going to go away.
You know, we're trying to fight liquor
when we first come in here.
We are trying not to drink one day at a time.
But in doing these steps in order,
in applying these principles in our life,
we'll read in about page 84 or 87,
somewhere up there,
where the thought of drinking has just been removed.
It just goes away.
Alright?
It relieved me to somewhat learn
that alcoholics will...
Oh, no.
My incredible behavior
in the face of a desperate desire to stop
was explained.
Understanding myself now,
I fared forth in high hope.
For three or four months,
the goose hung high.
He was sober.
He went to town regularly
and even made a little money.
Surely this was the answer.
Self-knowledge.
We started off a minute ago, self-will.
Now it's self-knowledge.
I can cure myself.
I can sponsor myself through this program.
I drank for three and a half years,
sponsored myself.
So, self-knowledge gains us nothing.
But it was not.
For the frightful day came
when I drank once more.
One drink.
The curve of my declining moral and bodily health
fell off like a ski jump.
After a time, I returned to the hospital.
This was the finish.
The curtain, it seemed to me.
My weary and despairing wife was informed
that it would all end in heart failure
during delirious tremors
or I would develop a wet brain,
perhaps within a year.
Psychosis.
She would soon have to give me over
to the undertaker or the asylum.
I don't know how many of y'all
have ever been to an asylum.
I don't know how many of you
ever have seen a person
who has a wet brain.
But let me tell you something.
It's a really sad sight.
The best I can describe it is
in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,
Jack Nicholson winds up having
a frontal lobotomy.
And he just walks around,
not knowing he's even walking around.
That's what a wet brain looks like.
And it's horrible.
They did not need to tell me.
I knew and almost welcomed the idea.
It was a devastating blow.
We're going to the top of page eight.
To my pride,
I who had thought so well of myself
and my abilities and my capacity
to surmount obstacles
was cornered at last.
Now I was to plunge into the dark,
joining the endless procession
of sots who had gone on before me.
I thought of my poor wife.
There had been much happiness after all.
What would I not give to make amends?
But that was over now.
No words.
And here it is.
And this is really, you know,
when you read this,
if you can't associate with it,
you might not be done.
No words can tell of the loneliness
and despair I found
in that bitter morass of self-pity.
Quicksand stretched all around me
in all directions.
I had met my match.
I had been overwhelmed.
Alcohol was my master.
My 109 master.
Because it was for me.
Now, this is his second visit.
And once he got sobered up,
you know, it says,
trembling I stepped from the hospital
a broken man.
Fear sobered me for a bit.
Fear sobered him for a bit.
It didn't keep him sober.
He was afraid to get drunk
because he knew he was going
to get the wet brain.
But that only lasted
a short period of time.
Because then came the insidious insanity
of that first drink.
And that's what we're going to learn
about step two,
is the insanity before the first drink.
What we're thinking before
we take that first drink.
An armistice day, 1934,
I was off again.
Everyone became resigned
to the certainty that I would
have to be shut up somewhere
or would stumble along
to a miserable end.
How dark it is before the dawn.
How true that statement is.
How dark it is before the dawn.
In reality, that was the beginning
of his last debacle.
I was soon to be catapulted,
that's a promise there,
into what I like to call
the fourth dimension of existence.
I was to know happiness, peace,
and usefulness in a way of life
that is incredibly more wonderful
as time passes.
Now, up to this point,
I hope everyone in this room
has been able to say,
okay, yeah, I've felt that.
I've felt that way more than once.
Because if you can't relate
to what's going on in Bill's story,
it's going to be hard to relate
to anything else coming up.
So if you haven't had the despair,
if you haven't had the loneliness,
if you haven't had the heartaches,
and I'm looking around here
and I'm telling to myself,
yep, everybody here has been there,
you know,
what are we going to do about it?
Up to this point,
I'm going to stop and go to some of my notes
and just go over some of the things
we've gone up to page eight.
On page one it talks about Bill drinks
when times are good and when times are bad.
On page two it says,
drinking was not yet continuous,
he was a potential alcoholic.
That was in 1921.
In 1921.
He was a potential alcoholic.
Okay.
He becomes an inside trader,
a visionary.
On page three,
starts with more serious proportions,
continuing all day and night,
hard drinking,
and that's in 1926.
That's the progression started for him.
Things start to go bad for Bill,
social problems,
marital problems,
and the onset of withdrawal symptoms,
the jitteriness in the morning.
On page four,
he talks about his determination.
You know?
And then the progression
where the job problems,
the financial problems,
he loses his jobs,
and it just boomerangs on him.
Throw a little history piece out here.
Bill Wilson was the first person
to actually carve and make a boomerang
in the United States of America.
He did it out of the basin.
He was the headboard
of one of the old beds at his house,
and he tried many times to make a boomerang,
and eventually one day
he was able to make it work
and come all the way back around
and it almost killed his grandfather.
But that's why he used the word boomerang,
and I just thought the little history
wouldn't hurt there.
On page five,
he's in full alcoholism.
He's crossed the line.
No longer a potential alcoholic,
no longer a hard drinking.
In page five, it says,
read the doctor's opinion.
Bottom of page five,
he realizes he can't drink safely.
I was through forever.
This time he means business.
This time he's using willpower.
In 1930, in Lois's diary,
she's been trying for five years
to help him get over his drinking problem,
and he wants to know
where has been his high resolve.
He can't explain it to himself why he drinks.
I couldn't explain it to myself
why I picked up that drink that last time.
There was just no reason at all
other than I looked back
and I realized I had not done anything
for my recovery.
I had not done anything in this program.
I had stopped drinking for nine months.
I had gone to meetings every day.
I had prayed every day.
I had not done one step.
I was lying to people in the room
by telling them I had a sponsor.
I was sponsoring myself.
They'd ask me what step I was on.
I was always on step four.
It didn't matter what month it was.
I was still on step four.
You know,
I was a liar, a cheater, and a thief,
and I picked up a drink
because I didn't ever do anything for my problem.
And my problem wasn't alcohol.
It'll tell me later on
the problem centers in my mind.
It's already said it once.
My problem centers in my mind.
You know, he's grinding away with his resolve.
He doesn't understand the nature of his illness yet.
And then on his way home,
he's on his own.
He's powerless.
He has an obsession.
And then he's off to the races again.
Bottom of page six,
they talk about weak-willed.
Like I said a minute ago,
you know,
alcoholics and drug addicts
are not weak-willed people.
We will move mountains to get that drink
when we want that drink.
You know,
when somebody says,
well, it's a bad storm out tonight.
I'm not going to a meeting.
I always laugh and say,
did you ever go drinking in a bad storm?
People will say,
yeah, I drove drunk in a bad storm.
So, you know,
why wouldn't you go to a meeting
and try to help somebody?
Because just being in a meeting
sometimes will help somebody.
I can attest to the fact that
just being in a meeting
is doing 12-step work.
Not everybody sponsors people.
But being in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous
is an actual form of 12-step work.
Making the coffee is service work.
But sitting in the chair
day after day,
week after week,
staying sober,
working this program,
going to meetings,
and being there
when that newcomer comes in
the first day,
and then he comes in
the second day
and you're still there.
And he comes in
the third day
and you're still there.
And he's looking at you
and he's not saying anything,
but he's like,
man, that person is here every day.
They must be as sick as me.
And then you've got Margaret over here
with 45 years sitting here today.
And, you know,
she's here at a meeting.
She's doing 12-step work.
So, you know,
that's part of it.
But, you know,
so we are not weak-willed.
We will do what we can
to get our drink.
He's trying to escape.
He's not jumping
because he wants to.
He has to know
how bad it's getting
because he's thinking about jumping.
That's why he moves to bed downstairs.
Now, he's gone to Page 7.
He's in Towns Hospital.
He does the Belladonna treatment.
And it says
that he really didn't
get his bottom
until we read that part
where the doctor came over
with a heavy sedative.
And the next day,
he found me drinking
both gin and sedative.
And that combination
soon landed me on the rocks.
Now, that talks about his bottom
right there.
In Step 1,
Silkworth is given...
Silkworth tells Bill the problem.
That's Step 1.
Next you will get
Heilladipine times.
He fills up the bottle
and uses it to
keep怎么
in your front gullet.
Now, there's a trick
to this
for a long time.
Dip a ton of
ynenol
mon
to
your
month trip, I bought a half gallon of whiskey and I was off to the races because I still
had that obsession. Once I put that first drink in me, I don't know what's going to
happen. The bottom of page seven, Bill feels that self-knowledge is enough. Man, self-knowledge
will kill you. Then at Bill's bottom, every alcoholic understands the feeling of pitiful
and incomprehensible demoralization. Bill has taken step one right there. He is hopeless.
He wants to stop, but he doesn't know how. There are people who say relapse is part of
the program. It's not.
We ought to cut some of them a slack. I do because I was a chronic relapser for three
and a half years. I had not hit my bottom until that morning when I knew that it was
over for me. Bob, after Bill talked with him for those hours, Bob relapsed. He didn't stay
sober at their first meeting. It was not until June 10th that he had his last drink.
In the middle of page eight, we just described insanity. Less insane or less whole. It's going
to come up in page 38, 40, 92, and 150. Dr. Sickler calls it obsession. Bill calls it
the insanity. They mean the same thing. My insanity, my obsession, was the thought that
I could pick up a bottle after nine months and take a drink. I'm a chronic alcoholic.
There's no way I could take a drink.
So Bill's going to keep referring to it as insanity, and then it'll tell us that finally
insanity will return on page 85. I think we're going to do that.
There are certain things that I have to do.
The first thing I had to do is I had to let go of the thought that self-will or self-knowledge
could help me in any way. I saw the emotional peel. That couldn't keep me sober. Human power,
fear couldn't keep me sober. Nothing in my life and nothing of this world could keep
me sober. We're going to find out what I do to keep sober and stay sober here in a few
minutes. Or maybe we won't find that out now. We might find that out next week.
I usually stop right about here, but I'm not because I'm ahead of myself. I'm going to
go on to wherever he comes over.
Near the end of the bleak November I sat drinking in my kitchen. With certain satisfaction I
reflected there was enough gin concealed about my house to carry me through the night and
the next day. He had hidden enough gin around his house to carry him through a couple days.
My wife was at work.
I wondered whether I dare hide a full bottle of gin near the head of our bed.
I would need it before daylight.
My musings were interrupted by the telephone.
The cheery voice of an old-school friend asked if he might come over.
He was sober, and this was somebody who Bill drank with for years.
They drank so much one time they took a plane trip.
They landed in a little airplane at the grand opening of an airport up in, I think, Rochester
or somewhere up there.
They were both plastered.
They landed the plane safely on this runway with the mayor and the whole town there.
They all came running over to give them great hugs and welcome to be the first airplane
to land.
Bill and Ebby just tumbled out of the plane onto the ground drunk, and there were a lot
of apologies.
Everything had to be made after that, but Ebby was a real drunk, and I told you last
week in the history that he had driven a car into somebody's house, and he was getting
ready to be sentenced to jail when Rowan Hazard, who had come back from Dr. Young and had been
given the word that every now and then people with chronic alcoholism have recovered by
a spiritual remedy.
He had joined the Oxford group, and another man was in the Oxford group, which was the
predecessor to the Alkaloid group.
He had been in the Oxford group for a long time.
He was an alcoholic's anonymous named Shep, and they went before the judge.
I think the judge was Shep's uncle or something, and they asked if Ebby could please put in
their care and the Oxford group's care, and the judge said yes, and Ebby got sober.
Now, Ebby's learned from the Oxford group that one of the ways that he's got to stay
sober is he's got to carry the message of sobriety to somebody else, and so he thinks
about Bill, and he calls him up, and he says, you know, can I come over?
It was years since I could remember his coming to New York in that condition, sober.
I was amazed.
Rumor had it he'd been committed for alcoholic insanity.
I wonder how he had escaped.
He thought he was already in the same asylum.
Of course, he'd have dinner, and then I could drink openly with him.
Unmindful of his welfare, I thought only of recapturing the spirit of other days.
He wanted some joy again.
There was no joy in Bill's life now.
I thought only of recapturing the spirit.
There was that time that we had chartered an airplane to complete a JAG.
His coming was an oasis in this dreary desert of futility.
That airplane was a trip when you read some of the history.
The very thing, an oasis.
Drinkers are like that.
He thought he had a drinking buddy coming over, somebody who drank like him, you know.
And the door opened, and he stood there, fresh skinned.
And glowing.
There was something about his eyes.
He was inexplicit.
He was different.
He was really different.
And what had happened.
Now, that paragraph right there means so much.
Because Ebi hasn't said a word.
Ebi hasn't said one word yet to Bill.
And Bill sees there's something different about him.
He sees this fresh skin.
There was something about his eyes.
He was really different.
What?
What happened?
He pushed a drink across the table.
Ebi refused it.
Disappointed but curious, I wondered what had gotten into this fellow.
It wasn't himself.
Come on, what's this all about, I queried.
He looked straight at me, simply but smilingly.
He said, I've got religion.
Okay?
And that's what Ebi said.
Because that's what the Oxford group was.
It was a religious program.
And Bill said, I was a gas.
So, that was it.
Last summer, an alcoholic crackpot.
Now, I suspected a little crackpot.
I suspected a little crackpot about religion.
He had that starry-eyed look.
Yes, the old boy was on fire, all right.
Bless his heart.
Let him rant.
Besides, my gin would last longer than his preaching.
And it did.
But he did no ranting.
Ebi did no ranting.
In a matter-of-fact way, he told how two men had appeared in court
persuading the judge to suspend his commitment.
That told him of this simple religious idea.
Step three.
And a practical program of action, which became steps four through nine for us.
That was two months ago, and the result was self-evident.
It worked.
He'd come to pass his experience on to me.
And if I cared to have it, I was shocked but interested.
Certainly, I was interested.
I had to be, for I was hopeless.
And skipping down, Ebi's talking about, you know, through the next paragraph,
about the preachers telling him he's got to listen, and he just didn't want to hear it.
But he goes on to say,
I had always believed in a power greater than myself.
I had often pondered these things.
I was not an atheist.
Few people really are.
That means blind faith in the strange propositions of the universe originated,
in a cipher, and aimlessly rushes nowhere.
My intellectual heroes, the chemists, the astronomers, even the evolutionists,
suggested vast laws and forces at work.
Despite contrary indications, I had little doubt that mighty purpose and rhythm underlay all.
How could be there so much precise and immutable law and no intelligence?
I simply had to believe in the spirit of the universe who knew neither time nor limitation.
But that was as far as I had gone.
So, I want to stop there, because I'm going to pick up from there next week.
Now, so far, what Bill has talked about, and what Dr. Silkworth has talked about,
is a two-fold illness.
An obsession of the mind and an allergy of the body.
Now, we're going to find out, maybe next week.
That it's really a three-fold illness.
Okay?
And all the way through the doctor's opinion, in the first four chapters of the big book,
as well as the 12 and 12, it only talks about a two-fold illness.
A seemingly hopeless state of mind and body, mental and physical, allergy physical, obsession mental.
It's when we come to chapter 5.
Alright?
And I'm going to jump ahead.
You don't need to.
On chapter 5, on page 64.
And let me just read what it says.
It says...
And it's talking about resentment.
From it stems all forms of spiritual disease.
For we have not only...
For we have been not only mentally and spiritually ill.
No.
For we have been not only mentally and physically ill,
but we have been spiritually...
When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically.
So, we have to remember that it's a two-fold illness to a point.
And that's what they're trying to...
That's what Bill's trying to teach us and the First 100 is trying to teach us.
The obsession and the allergy.
But what it's going to show us, once we get up there,
once we get into how it works,
once we get into step four,
it's going to tell us that when the spiritual malady is overcome,
we'll straighten out physically and mentally.
And you really...
I really had to get that part of the program.
Before I could really get well,
before I could recover,
I had to get well spiritually.
And that was hard for me because I had no religious upbringing.
I didn't have a God of somebody else's understanding.
And next week, because we're going to go faster,
than I have these past few weeks,
we should be in week Gnostics by next week,
where it gives me the opportunity.
Bill will have the opportunity given to him shortly when he stops drinking,
to choose a God of my own conception.
That nobody, nobody in Alcoholics Anonymous ever said,
I have to believe in Buddha, Allah, Muhammad, Jesus, whoever.
Nobody ever said that to me.
They said, you can't do this on your own and we can't do it for you.
You've got to find a power greater than yourself.
And we'll pick up with that next week.
And this is an AA meeting.
I almost forgot.
Margaret would have hit me.
So we're going to pass the basket.
And if you've got a dollar, put it in.
If you don't, there's a basket going around right there.
Thank you.
So we're going to get all the way to page 60.
And we're still going to only be talking about this.
And we're still going to only be talking about this.
And we're still going to only be talking about this.
We're still going to only be talking about the problem and the solution.
Okay?
We're going to be talking about this problem and the solution,
steps one and step two, all the way through the first 60 pages.
At page 60, we're going to make a decision.
We're going to be asked to make a decision.
And then chapters 5, 6, and 7 is what we call the program of recovery.
All right?
So why don't we go ahead and we'll close this meeting.