Tom P. at the Blackstone early 1960s

No greater compliment that you can pay a man than to say that he's a wonderful A.A. Everybody that knows him loves him. It's my privilege to introduce to you at this time, Tom Powers. My name is Tom Powers and I'm an alcoholic. The things that this program gives a person are many. But it's important among the many to pick out the first things, and particularly the most reliable things. Because some of the things that I'm going to talk about Some of the programs that this programme gives to a man or a woman are marginal. They're great, but they're marginal. some of the things are great and they're not marginal they're basic and I think it's tremendously important to sort these things out and it's very easy to do so because the program spells it out these aren't my ideas I'm talking off the card now you hear people come in here and say well I got sober I got my health back that's great and I don't want to sell health short. But it's marginal. Some people come in here and don't get their health back, or you may get it back and lose it again. Some people come here and they say, well, I got sober and, gee, four years went by and I'm rich again, or I'm loaded. And that's fine. It's nice to have some money in your pocket again. But it's marginal. It's a byproduct. It is very nice. I love a book as well as the next guy, but one must be very careful to recognize that this is not basic in AA. It's one of the lovely byproducts. There are some things that are even closer to the core that are still marginal, like serenity. Serenity is a very nice thing to have if you've been at war with yourself for 15 or 20 years. It's a little touch of paradise, it's a foretaste of what lies ahead, but it's marginal. The mark of the marginal thing is it comes and goes. It's nice, but you can't rely on it, and if you do rely on it, you may be let down. And if you're not careful, you might run around saying you haven't got the program. Nonsense! You can be broke and sick and upset as hell and still be on the program. The program specifically offers not wealth, not health, not serenity, but sanity. That isn't marginal. That's root, basic, and that you can count on. And if your health happens to desert you, and if your money happens to go, and if you happen to be all loused up mentally and emotionally in every other way, if you're on this program, the sanity is still there. And you won't run. You won't lie. And you won' t drink. That's sanity. Because an alcoholic who drinks is nuts. These are basics. And an alcoholic who doesn't drink one day at a time is sane, I don't care what the rest of his state is like. I think it's terribly important to hang on to the core of this program because the winds of life still blow. After you're sober And after you're sober a long time, you can hit a spot in your life that'll make you look back to your drinking days and wonder if it was ever this rough. But this program gives a man or a woman something that never deserts them, that doesn't flow with the winds because it's connected with the eternal sanity, the ability to stand up and live one day at a time like a man, like a woman, like a human being and to take the blows of life and they come to all of us without acting unworthily and for an alcoholic that means without taking that first drink. It's amazing what an alcoholic can take in the way of blows from life and not drink. The beauty of this fellowship is that it's a mirror of sanity held up to you. Look into it and see people around you upheld by this program, going through their lives sanely, a little more each day. Sweet, sweet sanity. I was a sucker for alcohol when it came my way in life I was the complete setup for it I see that looking back I did not see it at the time a peculiar thing happens in AA when the power of this program begins to work on a person and it begins to transform the person. What is involved here is a very ancient thing in the human scene. Maybe you think this is modern. It's not at all. It's the regenerative power of God entering the human picture, and it beings to transformthe person in the first step as given in the great book, which is our traditional book in the West, the New Testament. The first step is healing, healing of the mind, sanity. And sanity is a peculiar thing. There are two miracles in the sanity that comes. The first is a quick miracle, the removal of the devilish and ghastly and god-awful symptom of murderous, deadly, corrupting, killing, drinking. This is removed miraculously and it has to be or there would be no story. We have to have this quick miracle or all of us would go out under some such circumstances as Stephen Foster went out and so many hundreds and thousands and millions have gone out. The great first miracle of AA is the removal of this murderous symptom of compulsive drinking. The second miracle is a slow one. It is the miracle of returning sanity. Who can say what full sanity would be like? All of us have tasted enough of it, even if we've only been in the program a couple of months. Sometimes the taste of it then is in some ways more striking than it ever is afterward because it is in such sharp contrast with the insanity. I mean, one time, there's one period, there is this devilish condition described so well in the thing that was written to you, which we've all been involved in. And then just a few months later, this influx of harmony, of something that's holding the life together. It's a terrific thing for the person experiencing it, and it's a horrific thing for those watching it. Sometimes you can hardly believe it that the physical change in the person is sometimes so striking. But this is a long process, and no one is in AA very long without realizing that although the first miracle was perfectly real, the second miracle, for all its vividness, is slow, and its a lifetime job. because with full sanity would lead us to a place where the resentments are gone completely. Who of us can say that they are? Where the capacity to love and understand another human being was adequate in every case. Who can say that it is? We're moving toward a much greater thing than appears at first and so the second miracle of returning sanity has to be slow because it leads to a fulfillment that many of us are hardly capable of imagining at first it's so good and the way lies through life and life on earth is often tough with all its beauty and the shining of God's grace and glory through it all This is a tough pilgrimage and has always been said to be tough. And without the anesthetic, sometimes it's even tougher than it was before. I began to drink because I needed an anesthetic. Life was painful to me, not physically painful, but psychically painful. I found the human race hard to bear. And I never said so to myself. I might have been nearer health if I had admitted it. But as I grew up, I was more and more appalled at what surrounded me. The people. There's a tremendous change as a person grows up. I think we adults are apt to think that life was always just like this, only different. I was physically shorter before. No, no, no. A person is in very different states at different times of life. And growing up and becoming an adult is a painful process at best. And I found it very painful. I thought I knew I was supposed to get along with people and I was opposed to love them. I couldn't do that. But I couldn'T even like them very much. They were all in kind of odd shapes. It never occurred to me I was in an odd shape, too. And as I grew up, I noticed that they cheated a lot and gossiped a lot. So did I. But the whole thing was just an uneasy bit. And then there was a thing called responsibility. I didn't like it. And the result was that when I was 18 or 19 years old, I was always kind of holding myself like this, trying to go along from day to day. I was nervous, strung up, uneasy, fearful, shy, all well covered over with a gabby exterior so that nobody would notice. The gabby and smiling exterior was a big part of the burden. And again, I would have been closer to help if I didn't keep it so covered up. I think this situation, if it runs its normal course, brings a person through to manhood, womanhood. All right. If the difficulty is endured, it acts like a tempering mechanism. The people I know who have grown up normally seem to have gone through such things as this and endured the difficulty, and out of the difficulty have grown some muscle. Not only physically, but mentally, emotionally, personally. But before the heat could really temper me very much, I found the cure for the heat. I wasn't looking for it this was a wholly unexpected discovery but nonetheless delightful for its unexpectedness I found that when I had some alcohol in my system I was no longer uneasy I was not I was now longer shy I was know longer fearful And as the alcohol was ingested, if it was put in just right, not only did I change, but people changed. People began to look good to me. I find it hard to pay tribute to what alcohol meant to me when it entered my life. This was not a sudden thing. I drank over a period of years, and I was sloppy at it at first, no good. But after I learned how to do it, after I learn how to get it in without throwing it up right away, it did something for me which I would say was not trivial. This was an important thing, what booze did for me. And I'm not talking about having a good time. That was all right. It did that, and I valued a good time. I was afraid of people, but particularly women. My God, they scared me to death. And the booze thawed me out so that I could go to a party and have a good time instead of standing there rigid. It was very good there. In that way, I got thawing out enough finally to marry one of them. But the thing that really drew me in was not that. The thing that drew me in was the discovery that I could, by ingesting this substance every day, produce in myself a state which to me was preferable to normal. I don't know about the rest of you drunks, but I think drunkenness is a byproduct of alcoholism. I think it's a nasty accident associated with it. I was never looking for drunkeness. Who wants to stagger around and slop their speech and drool? That's no good. I was looking for a state and believe me I found it I found it every day a state where the cares of the world rolled off not dreamy either I mean they were just out here where they belong where I could deal with them and a state where far from staggering my step was very light I thought and I it wasn't a complete illusion I think it was I got into a state with booze that just put me up where I wanted to be. Not perfect, but so much better than normal. And I cultivated this. I sought it out. I associated myself with other practitioners of the art. I humbled myself to learn from them. and I became an adept at it through long practice. And after I had been drinking five or six years, I was a guy who every day took a lot of board. I was most careful not to be sloppy with it. When I got home at night, I would let the bars down and slop a little bit but nothing big. And I went to bed stoned to the ears every night of my life. But that's legitimate. That's just in lieu of sleeping pills, which I learned to take later. And for a long time, I would say that on balance, it worked out swell. Sure, I got in a little trouble once in a while. I got took drunk when I shouldn't have, but mainly it was very good. And if anybody had suggested to me that this way lies trouble, I would have felt pity for the man. Not contempt, pity for anyone so benighted as to set up an alarm about a thing like this. The onset of alcoholism is different with different ones of us. Some of us get into it suddenly. I didn't. I got into it very gradually over a period of years. and with the sanity, the degree of the relative degree of sanity that has come to me in AA which brightens not only the present and illuminates the future to the extent one has to deal with it, it lightens up the past and I can see looking back in the onset of this disease that it was entirely inevitable. A very big thing was moving here and I was being drawn on by something of major importance to me, so that when the red lights started flashing and the real trouble began to pop up, I began to develop the feature that seems to me universal in this disease. I'm not going to talk about we alcoholics because maybe some of you don't want to get under my tent, my particular peculiarities, but I must say that this seems to be to be a universal. I began to develop the capacity earnestly, successfully, to deceive myself. I swear I think I see this in every alcoholic I know who has shared his story with me, but I'll just tell you about this alcoholic. As the trouble began to pop up, As I began to have episodes that intruded themselves and said powers were in trouble, I beganto talk back. There's a peculiar thing in every human being. It is his capacity to deal with the truth. It is the truth in him. I think it's tremendously undervalued. Somebody says this room is painted jet black. Something says no, no. There's something inside that is responding to every situation, great and small, and scanning it for truth. Yes, no, yes, no. And as the alcoholic goes along, the truth thing begins saying, hey, Powers, you know, trouble. And Powers begins to hoodwink. The truth begins to talk back to this little flickering flame that sits in the midst of the consciousness and tries to radio to him what the true situation is. Now, God knows in the case of an advancing alcoholic, the truth has a great ally in circumstances because things begin to happen that are first inconvenient and then kind of messy and then eventually quite ugly. And on each occasion, the truth grabs a hold of the circumstance and points it out and says, Hey, look! During this stage, how many of you have done the same thing? The earnest lying begins. I'm sitting in the Cleveland Rapid Transit one morning, and it's joggling around. I'm going to work, and there's a little saliva running down the corner of my mouth, and my eyes are bugging out. And all of a sudden, the Truth says, powers, does it occur to you that this is no longer a novelty? We are sick like this every morning now. And the liar says, oh yes, but we're so high strung. We'd be sicker if we didn't take this lovely anesthetic. There begins a very serious process with oneself. It's one thing to deceive the other citizens. Lord, I did that routinely. Pad the expense account. You know, what the heck? This is just living. But to deceive oneself, I think, lies very close to the heart of this disease. It did with me, so that by the time this process had really begun to fulfill itself and the amount of intake went up and up and my period of being able to endure it physically was drawing to a close, I had already reached the point as a liar, as a sincere liar, as a desperately earnest liar, as a man keenly concerned to keep himself deceived. Because if that structure of lying was rent, no more drinking, you know? The threat of losing this stuff as a prop in life is a big one. So that by the time I got into deep trouble, I somehow was able to do what so many of us are able to doing in the teeth of really calamitous events to bull ahead, taking my daily portion, which by that time was up to about a jug a day. Not to get drunk on. I got drunk weekends. Just living drinking. an alcoholic drinks the way another man eats quite literally it is food food for the body the cells want it cut it off sometime and see I never regarded craving as crazy I don't think craving is insane at all I think it's quite sane When the metabolism has been so jazzed around that the very structure of the body is demanding this, it isn't an intellectual thing, it isn' t an emotional thing, the whole carcass says, for God's sake, give me this stuff. That' s craving and it' s sane in its way. Very sick, but not nuts. The nutty bit we' ll come to later. I tried to knock it off once in 1939 when I moved down to New York. I saw the truth got in a lick, and I really saw this thing was getting me. And I tried the quit, and found I couldn't. It was my first experience with tackling the craving head-on, and I was shocked at the power of it. I took three days off from work and tried to utilize those three days to stop drinking, and I found I could not. Late in the afternoon each day, I went down and had some booze because I couldn't endure not to have the booze. So I had that experience. But still outwardly, I was a going concern. I was on the job, working hard, falling upstairs. Every time something terrible happened, it turned out good. and then suddenly I went from that phase of already addiction without any of the products of addiction into the state of real, ugly, grade-A alcoholism. I had some convulsions one day in the summer of 1940, and when I came out of them, I was off my rocker, and they shoved me in an automobile heavily loaded with dope and rushed me up to the bug house. And when I came to the next day in the bug house, I made the discovery that I was not in the drying out part of the bug house, I was in the Bug part of The Bug House. And although they, they become a great thing when you get into this stage of the authorities, they, in quotes, they decided I was nuts I would still not call this the nutty part of the disease it is true I was shattered nervously and emotionally and I was racked up very bad mentally I wept every hour on the hour and a few things like that and I'm not going to lie I was God-almightly impressed with what had happened to me and this is the first of a class of events which I think are terrifically important for every alcoholic to recognize. I think this disease runs its course not only in my case but every case I ever heard of in this way and that is by a series of level areas where the drinking just goes on and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it punctuated by crises. Now, the crisis may vary as to detail. I mean, some person may rack up an automobile, somebody else may throw the little woman through the sash, somebody else winds up in the bug house. Whatever it is, it has the quality of interrupting the even downhill trend of this thing and knocking a person out of their ordinary course and what it does is paralyze the liar. Dad, I was... I got in that bug house and they were taking me back and forth between the flowing tubs and the bed with my leather vest all strapped up. And I would try to peep back about how that this was all right and it didn't go at all. I couldn't tell myself a lie. I couldn'T get around the fact that I was in a hell of a mess, period. period. And this is a terrifically important spot in the disease, because such spots are not frequent. If you catch an alcoholic while the liar is in good eclat, if he's in good functioning order, no matter what the rest of the circumstances are, you might as well save your breath. But if you can catch him in one of these crises, in oneof these shocked periods, when the liar is temporarily down and out, there's a chance for a recovery. Everything depends, however, on the alcoholic in this stage coming in contact with someone who has real knowledge. This to me is a technical term. I don't mean somebody who has studied this thing in school, valuable as that may be. I don't mean someone who has a degree in medicine or philosophy on the subject, valuable as that is in its way. By real knowledge, I mean someone who knows from living experience what the disease is and what the way out is. And that kind of knowledge is not hanging around on every tree, and you don't always just happen to bump into it. And this first trip in the bug house, although I really think the way was open, I'm guessing. I think I might have snapped at it. I didn't run into it. And the result is that after three or four weeks I got all filled up with vitamins and sunshine and tender loving care. That's what they give you in the bug house. Lo, the poor idiot gets tender lovingcare. And under the influence of all this I was overtaken by the alcoholic's worst enemy, health. my health began to return and in direct proportion as the health returned the liar revived so they let me out of that place after ten weeks they said we still don't know what you are We don't know whether you are an alcoholic who is behaving nuttily or a nut who drinks. But they said, unless you wish to visit us again, we suggest that you never touch the stuff under any circumstances. And I left there determined not to. because although the liar had revived, the experience was still pretty vivid. You hear a lot of gags about the bug house and it's good for laughs afterward, but in present time, it ain't funny. There wasn't anything even faintly funny about it and the memory of hearing my compatriots shrieking in the night and my doing a little shriecing with them was still very vivid, you know? People think, oh, if you're off your rocker, you don't remember anything. My foot, you can remember three times as well as normal. Some of this stuff gets etched pretty deep. And I left that bug house. I thought, uh-uh, never again for Brother Powers. I will take the gentleman's advice. I'll stay off the stuff. And two weeks later, I walked into a saloon on Madison Avenue after work and had one drink. And now, this I want to say very seriously to you. This, in my opinion, is the real insanity. The mental obsession, not the craving. God, how can a man or a woman help craving? But here's a person thoroughly dried out, hasn't had a drop for 12 weeks, under no pressure, no compulsion whatsoever, in full possession of his intellectual plants, such as it is, with the memory of all of this thing quite intact and he calmly walks in and takes a drink. I submit to you that that is nuts in the true sense of the word. I think the real insanity is the peculiar state of mind that will enable an alcoholic in the teeth of whatsoever kind of pressures To the contrary, to walk in and take that one drink. It may be two weeks after drying out. It may быть six weeks. God help us, it may be 15 years. Here is the real insanity. Here, if you please, is the devil in hell. Here, look out for this because it lurks there all the time. and if it were not for the incredible thing that we all enjoy, this peculiar protection, sooner or later it would trip each one of us back and drag us down to the kind of death you heard described here tonight. I drank again obsessively, with the obsessive notion that somehow it might be all right. It developed very rapidly. I had one drink a day for six weeks just to show that I'm not an alcoholic and then proceeded to drink normally for me back to a quart a day. And a year later, I'm nuts again. I'm back in the bug house again. And this time I was treated with a form of treatment that I am not going to take the trouble to describe. but the second shock treatment I got metrazole shock and I will just say that it's lively they gave me three metrazone shocks a week for four weeks and when they got through with me I don't know what it did for me in any other way but it did something for me spiritually it gave me a little humility and when the man came around and said we've treated you now for your buggy problem shall we talk about your alcoholic problem I really was unable to lie I was wide open I said please sir yes let's do and this time I had a stroke of good fortune I was talking to a man who himself did not have real knowledge but he knew where real knowledge was and he sent me to it. This guy introduced me to Alcoholics Anonymous. I tried to talk him out of it. I tried to tell him what a smart fellow I was because I really believed I was and he was kind enough to bomb me out of that with the reminder that I had been under scrutiny in the head department now twice in the last year and this couldn't be so smart And I objected strenuously when he described AA to the God bit. I really did, I was quite sincere. I did want help, but I said to him, I don't see how I can go for this Jesus bit that these people are talking about or sawdust trail or whatever their angle is, this God bit and I said, after all, I've had a good education and maybe I'm not smart, but I am educated and I really couldn't entertain these superstitions, you know. God, it's amazing how far gone you can be in arrogance and pseudo-intellectuality and that kind of slop that our age goes for in such a big way and still have the power, the immense power of this program cut through that kind OF stuff. I went to my first meeting desperately needing help, but all encrusted with notions like that. You know, that God is a superstition and religion is pie in the sky and all of this yickety-yack that smart people go through. Earnestly believing in it, thinking that this is my world outlook, all of that ridiculous jazz, and yet it's a death warrant if a person takes it seriously. I regard it as a mark of the immense virtue of this program virtue in the old sense of sap of living power that it would punch through to a little guy like me sitting out there and cut through my defenses and somehow get to where there's a thread of a heart beating here and convince me that I'm in touch with something real it did just that I was reached in that first meeting by the power of this program. And although my story is a history of failure in AA for a long time, I must tell you, I think that if I had not encountered AA when I did, I wouldn't have lasted. I think this disease would have got me very quick because when I went, I blew. I went clear out of my head. I had it in a very acute form, and I think this program literally saved me from the beginning, although I had an episode of relapse. The first year, the first 50 weeks in AA for me were a typical storybook recovery. I came in, I liked it, I came to meetings. I went to a lot of meetings as soon as they would let me, which was pretty soon because AA had gone from 700 to 2,000 that year and there was a lot or 12-step work to do. I went out saving souls and I loved it. I was very excited and thrilled with what was going on. And the recovery was fast. and wonderful. I mean, obviously within weeks the sanity was returning. A sweet thing, sanity is. The mind began to come into focus in a way it hadn't been for a long time. They jazzed up and goofed up emotions, began to get under some control under the gentle teaching and help of the Brethren. My home life was in better shape than it had ever been. My relationships in business were good. It is possible, however, to take this program and twist it. Many of the recoveries take the course I've just described and they are never interrupted. They just proceed on and on to deeper degrees of sanity, and they reach a point of real spiritual awakening. And this is the majority experience. There are a few of us who are so far gone, I will speak only for myself, but I think some of this is involved in many of the cases, who do not value what is coming to them, who do not see the nature of this gift even when it is in their lap. I took this growth in AA as an indication that I'm a smart guy. I got all renewed in the smart guy department. And I took my sobriety after six or eight months as an implication that a smart alcoholic could do it without this God business. I begin to take the parts of the program I liked and to leave out the parts I didn't like and this is a progressive development and it progresses to the point where the part of the program that the guy doesn't like is the sobriety part I think I'm very lucky to be in this program I don't know how the chances are doled out. We're dealing with an inscrutable thing here. We're doing this for the sake of God. We're not dealing with the grace of God, let's face it. And the creature can never hope to scrutinize and with his little intellect take in the Creator. And there's no way of figuring these things out. But I think we can see that gifts in life are of different orders of value. Some are greater than others, and I can conceive a few greater gifts than the gift of renewed life to a man who is on the brink of losing it in the worst way, not just losing life in the body so that this husk falls off. We call that death. That isn't what death is called in the Bible. Death is when the person has lost hold of his humanity. And that's the kind of death we're fooling with. It certainly was the kind of death I have tasted, and it's hideous. And when a person dealing in these terms, dealing in These Realities has encountered a thing which picks him up and restores him, and then has the arrogance to boot it, you can only figure that there have to be consequences from that kind of a thing. No man can judge another man in this area. I don't even presume to judge myself. I just know that of the errors I have made in my life, I regard this as by all odds the greatest false turning I ever made. I walked off the AA program not under any compulsion but under again the insane obsessive idea which could only flourish in the mind of a person who was cheating on the AA program, who really had edged his way off the AA problem, that I'll drink again and if it doesn't work, I'll come back to AA and I'll be all right. Ah, God, how tricky it is. How tricky it ist. I remember my old priest, my old Anglican priest, Father Holtz, shaking his head and saying, how the devil must laugh that such stupid lies are bought as truth. With this in my mind, deliberately, under no pressure, I drank. And six weeks later, when it had become a hell again and a nightmare and I was ready for release, I came back to Alcoholics Anonymous and I did not get my release because I was drunk the next day and I began to go to lots of meetings and I continued to be drunk. I got back into Alcoholics Anonymous, not just into the meeting place because there's a difference. I had my membership renewed. I became a member of this fellowship again four years later, seven more nuthouses. My time is short. Those four years were very dark. I could no longer drink very well. Seven or eight drinks and I was out of my mind. It was in this period that I entered the other phase of addiction that some of us get into. I began to take drugs, and I began to take drug desperately. I would never think of beginning to drink without a bottle and a pocket full of Nembutol. And as I went on, it was not only Nembutal, I took Sequinol, Eprol, Amitol, you name it, anything that would change consciousness, anything which would purchase a few hours of oblivion, I would take. And then because this kind of stuff weighs very heavily on the body and soul and because the person coming out of a sedative jag is in such a state of depression that you can hardly conceive it, you can barely drag yourself around, I then got into the phase of learning how to manipulate this with the stimulants, benzadrine, strychnine, things of that kind. And I have no way of telling you what my life was like in that period because I just knew quite consciously what was happening to me. I knew what addiction was, I knew where it led, and I didn't seem to be able to do anything about it. there was one thread of sanity left to me that ran through the whole thing and it saved me there was engraved in my mind in such a way that nothing could shake it out a realization more than a belief that there was an answer to this problem here in Alcoholics Anonymous and I kept coming back to AlcoholicsAnonymous Not out of the goodness of my heart. Not out of, God, out of what? Out of sheer naked desperation and a desire to live. I came back hating it. Can you possibly imagine what it's like to come to Alcoholics Anonymous and not be a member? Week after week, month after month, sitting here wondering what the hell is wrong with me? Why can't I get it? This, and resentments, oh my God. Resentments are the most ghastly bar to understanding this program. And yet a person going through this failure phase is inevitably plagued to beat hell with resentments. I can remember sitting in meetings listening to speakers hating their guts thinking, Oh, what a pest you are. If you would only get drunk, full of the most ghastly ill will, and yet coming back because I had to, because the truth was stronger than the liar and the truth said come back, you fool. These people have got something. That to me is the core and guts of Alcoholics Anonymous. These People Have Got Something. Indeed they have. And though, although to the end, and the end was bitter for me, I quarreled with the terms and argued with the steps and tried my best to throw the steps out that referred to God in the end. This merciful disease, just before it squeezed the life out of me, squeezed the arrogance out ofme. And I came to in a hospital after five days of DTs one time, sweating but perfectly clear in the mind without a shred of defense left and I saw quite coolly without any emotion but very clearly that this program is just plain true and that's why it works that it has the power of the truth behind it and if you have any quarrels about the higher power get a hold of that word truth that's the first thing that's told a man or a woman in this program before there's any talk of slogans before there is any talk of twelve steps it is recommended that one address oneself to the truth or more briefly you've got to be honest with yourself I saw that the power of this thing stems from the truth and not from any mental abstraction or some notions of truth that people have but from a depth of the truth again going back to the sacred tradition we all inherit when almighty God walked the earth in the body of a man he didn't say I'm a truthful person he said I am the truth and it's off that it's from that source and that root that this experience we share comes I think it makes very little difference what a person's religious convictions may be in the beginning. I think it makes all the difference in the world how a man or a woman dresses with regard to the truth. I think sincerity and truth-facing are at the root of this, and if there is the slightest disposition to deal sincerely with the truth, I don't care what the obstacles are. I don't care how beat a person is. I don' t care how crazy they are. I don'' t care what their state of body and mind is. I' ve seen enough in my time in A.A., in myself and in others, not only to believe but to know that the power that runs this universe stands ready at any time to reach down and pull one out of this disease turn him about and set him on the road to recovery.