Washington Society Ghosts and the AA Traditions – Sandy B.

Hi, everybody. My name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic. How are you all doing? I want to thank the committee for inviting us here. I love coming to Texas AEA. It's always full of energy, a lot of excitement about staying sober in Texas. And so I just love coming here. and Sue and I are going to do a little sightseeing tomorrow I've been to Austin two or three times before but she hadn't seen it so we're going to do a little bit of looking around downtown at the university and the capitol etc and take back some good memories of Austin when we go back to Tampa my sobriety date is December 7th 1964 and And my home group is the Saturday Night Fever Group in Tampa, Florida. So if you come down to Tampa, you be sure and go to that group. It's a speaker meeting and we just have a lot of energy and a lot of fun. So we'd love to see you there. this August I'm going to go up to Washington to my sponsor's 40th anniversary and I'm really looking forward to it because you know when you get to be 40 years that's officially an old timer and so it's just been wonderful because I've had the same sponsor for 38 and a half years and it's been a wonderful continuity of passing the message on and then the people that brought it to him and we just can trace it back so many years and that's what AA is all about and I just love the photograph on the cover of your brochure for the conference, the schedule to just see that picture of Bill sitting at a picnic table and the people probably none of the people there maybe but they're probably not still alive and they were the ones. Without them, we wouldn't be here. So it's just, I love the history. I'm looking forward to going into the archive room. I spend a lot of time in those, any convention I go to and if you're new, you ought to go in there. Just let this stuff sink in as to what a miracle Alcoholics Anonymous is and how lucky we are that it's here. When I was over a couple years I remember having this dream. A lot of people have drunk dreams. I never had a drunk dream, but I had real scary dreams. And this was the dream that I had. I was in my car and I was going over to the Falls Church Virginia group to give a talk. Back when I got sober, probably 80 or 90 percent of the meetings were speaker meetings. And so you had to talk a lot just to fill up the agenda of all the meetings. they had two speakers at every meeting so everybody talked I would say a minimum of 10 times a year and most people were around 20, so you're out there giving talks and talks and thoughts so I'm on my way, I'd been there before it was summertime so the 8.30 meeting it was still light so I could see my way along and I'm just driving on out to the Falls Church meeting thinking about what I'm going to say and I get there and there's no cars in the parking lot. None. And I go, God, I must have come on the wrong night. You know what I mean? So then I checked and I went no, it's Tuesday night. This is the night. This is tonight. I had my little calendar with me. So I said to myself, what is this? The place was locked up tight. And I said, you know what they did? They moved to another church and they didn't tell me but not to worry by some miracle I was like five minutes early so I could go to a pay phone and I'll call the inner group and ask them where they moved so I went to the pay phone and I called up the operator and I said would you please connect me with the Northern Virginia inner group of Alcoholics Anonymous she said just a minute And she came back and said, there's no such listing. And I said, what do you mean there's no such listening? It's right on Bird Drive or whatever it was. She said, There's no listing. I said well let's just look under AA, Alcoholics Anonymous. And she said, There's No Listing for Alcoholics Anonymous, There is No Such Thing as Alcoholics Anonymous! And I woke up thinking that while I was drunk, I dreamed up Alcoholics Anonymous. And going to all those meetings, but it was just a blackout. There was no such thing as AA. And I was one frightened guy when I got out of that bed and I went and looked for the Washington area directory and there it was. There were a lot of meetings and I felt a lot better about it, but it's just scary to think that something like that could happen, you know, that you wouldn't have this. And, you know,, you go, well, could that ever happen? You know, like if AA had 20,000 members all around the country, I mean, could it have disappeared off the planet? And there's a story, you've probably heard this story, but once upon a time there were six guys and they were in a bar and they're all in their 20s and they came from pretty good families they were doing well business wise five of them were married three of them had kids you would call them upstanding citizens in the community and they had what you would say a bright future ahead of them lots of talent, lots of energy but they were all hopeless alcoholics and they spent a lot of time in the bars just drinking and talking about how they're going to lose all this that in spite of the blessings that they had they were going to loose it and so every time they'd get together they'd start talking about this situation that they were in and how they were gonna loose it and so they would go off and try to stay sober individually and they'd come back and report a big failure well I lasted 10 days and then I just got drunk as heck and they sat around one night and they said I wonder if we could keep each other sober and they said you know that sounds like a great idea it caught on so they had a drink to that we got this great idea that we could keep each other sober whereas we couldn't keep ourselves sober so they sat there thinking about what to do and they decided what they needed was a pledge if they had a real good pledge so they Sat down and started writing out this pledge and I obtained a copy of it and I brought it here tonight And it says, And then they signed their names to this. And their names were William K. Mitchell, George Steers, Archibald Campbell, John Hoss, David Anderson, and James McCurley. And they got real excited about this. They said, we have now formed a society. It was building momentum as they sat there with this pledge all written out. They said, we've now formed a society and we need like a constitution and a president. So they took a vote and elected Mitchell the president. So they had this little thing going and they said, this is what we're going to do. This all happened all in the organization meeting. I said, what we are going to doing is we are getting together once a week and we're just going to talk about how our drinking ruined our lives and how we're now staying sober. There won't be any talk allowed about anything else other than that. And we will not be connected with any religion, we won't get connected with politics. The only thing that'll ever be allowed when we get together is talking about our sobriety and our drinking. And they just felt wonderful about this thing and they all left and stayed sober until the meeting a week later And they got there and they said, isn't this amazing? And they said well we ought to name our great organization so that we can start out and get other members. They decided that it was essential to go into bars or anywhere they could go and use moral suasion to talk other people with drinking problems to join them. So they sat down and they felt that this was such a wondrous society that they had started, that they ought to name it after somebody famous like George Washington. And so they came up with the name Washington Society. And so they went off and they just went out and went to bars and they tried to get people who were well-known, like a judge or a top lawyer or a politician, and then they could tell others, well, the judge is in here, you ought to join too. We have this wonderful thing, it's growing faster than you can imagine. And this thing started taking off. It took off so much that on their first anniversary in the city of Baltimore, they had a parade of all the people that had joined and they had 7,000 people in the parade. 7, 000 in one year. You know, AA had one year had about 11. 7,000 people. So then amongst themselves, they got people who were free to travel and they made them be the president of the New York chapter and sent this guy up to New York and then over to Pennsylvania and then Maryland, Virginia. And this thing caught on like wildfire. And people were getting sober all over the place. And on their fourth anniversary, they had a young lawyer from Illinois come address the society to tell them what a marvelous job they were doing and this lawyer's name was Abraham Lincoln. And in the Lincoln speeches you will see this speech that he gave and told them what good they're doing for the country and how happy he was to be speaking at an event like this. And the organization started in 1840 And when it reached its peak in around 1847, it had around 400,000 members, which is a bigger percentage of the population then than AA is now. It reached out a bigger percent of the United States. And at the end of the decade, before 1850 came along, it was gone. It had disappeared off the face of the earth. So much so that when Bill Wilson was writing the traditions in the late 40s and he was coming up with the growing pains and the problems that an organization or society like AA could have, Someone said to him, well, Bill, I'm sure you've checked the Washingtonian Society and saw what happened to them. And he had never heard of it. That's the lasting legacy of an organization that got that big. And what it did, it got involved in outside issues. Once you get a certain critical mass, It's very tempting to get involved in noble causes. And there were some wonderful noble causes, and one of them was temperance and the other one was the abolition of slavery. And they just decided to put the forces of this organization behind those causes and it directed the attention and energy of the organization away from its primary purpose. and of course we all know what will happen when you get away from your primary purpose it collapses and so we are so lucky to have put in place the safeguards that has kept AA together and every time I see that story I just go, we are so lucky that this all turned out the way it is I don't know how I got off on that tangent but it just was something that I felt like talking about. I hope it was instructive. Very briefly, my story is like everybody else's. Everybody could tell their story in about a minute and a half. I started drinking, my life got all screwed up, I almost died, and I got to AA. And it's been fine. I'm waiting for the day when somebody gets up here and says, well, I drank for a couple of years, never really got drunk, never really gotten in any trouble, but I could see that this was leading me in a direction I didn't want to go. So I came to AA before I got into any trouble. Maybe there's somebody like that. I just haven't heard their story yet. I'd want to smell their breath also. Anyway, I grew up in Connecticut. The only two things out of my childhood that were significant... You know, you always try to find stuff in your childhood that caused your alcoholism. so then you go to a shrink for 20 years and talk about them and stay drunk and then you finally come to AA they tell you forget about your childhood let's stay in the now okay but I was brought up in the Catholic Church and I think somewhere around 9 I had what I call a spiritual awakening now my sister was sitting right near me in the catholic church and she saw everything different the night that she just loved it. She still loves it and it's just happy and she's got 25 years, 26 years in AA now. But anyway, I was sitting there and I had taken everything they said literally. I mean when those nuns came and they went you're going to go to hell and rot in hell I just went yeah that's right. I mean it was you know and I just would stay up at night going oh God I hope I live forever I don't want to die but anyway I was sitting on the front row in church and in this particular church I went to they had a crucifix that must have been 20 feet high hanging from the ceiling by a big golden chain and my eyes were focused on it and I just kept looking and looking and then it was almost like the heavens opened up And God said, just to me, would you like to know the true reality of that cross? Yeah, I would. Well, here it comes. Do you see what God did to his only son that he loved? Guess what he's going to do to you? And that was my own personal awakening as I sat there and saw the reality, beyond the reality of the nuns and everything. And I fell over in a faint, and they carried me out. So I said it was bad food I had for breakfast, and you know, I never talked about it, never told anybody. But I had that in the back of my head all the time. That was going on. And then I think when I was 10 or the same year, 9 or somewhere, they had a polio epidemic and I got polio and my right arm and right leg were totally paralyzed and when the epidemics, it's not so much about the polio but it was when an epidemic comes, it can be traumatic because a doctor just comes in and goes to my parents, whisper, whisper. whisper and then they faint with their eyeballs going like that. And then all of a sudden I'm in the doctor's car and they take me to the hospital and then nobody can come in. You know what I mean? You're in quarantine. So it felt like at any time you could suddenly be taken out of this system that you're in and locked away somewhere. So don't ever trust anything. That was sort of what I got out of that. So I had this real comfortable perspective inside of me. And, you know, the Sister Kenny treatment worked on me and I got back the use of my leg and arms and the only thing was some muscles atrophied in the back of my right arm. Other than that, everything came back. So, I was very, very lucky. But that experience just left me with this don't trust anything because you could be gone tomorrow and they'll just take you for no reason not tell you why and all that anyway so but I had to pretend that everything was fine because that's what everybody else was doing and so I would anybody say how you doing fine fine and guys would talk about things but we never talked about that you know something wrong because that would mean you didn't know everything and you weren't cool. So I never, practically until I got to AA did I ever share, you know, I'm frightened about this. I'm worried about that. I just couldn't say those words. I didn't drink until I went to college. I was a good athlete and a good student. I Was trying to get high grades and went through a little prep school in New Haven and it fed right into Yale University. And I got there and all these people were from all over the country and they were real smart and I just was so uncomfortable there and my roommates are going you ought to be drinking having a time here no I don't want to do that yet but there came a night when I finally decided to drink have a few drinks and see what would happen and when I drank just two or three drinks it was as if I could finally be in touch with me because the anxiety and these fear and all these oppressive thoughts would prevent me from being spontaneous with strangers. So I couldn't meet people, I couldn' t mix, it was just impossible. And with three drinks I could suddenly get access to all of my computer files. You know what I'm saying? It wasn't shut down by fear. I was me and I could just go out and boy, I could talk to anybody and they liked me and I felt like it changed the whole world that I lived in. I never felt alcohol changed me, it just changed you. And you became nice and wonderful and I just could hardly wait to be with you and I was comfortable and you weren't mean anymore. It was just wonderful what you did. And so that night I felt as if I had discovered the secret of life, and I'd only been drinking about 20 minutes. And so drinking went up to the most important thing in my life. And you know, that was amazing. And then, so I drank many, many drinks to celebrate all these things and got sick. And the next morning I was dying. You remember that when the beds are spinning in your head and you're throwing up and all that. I sat there the next morning around 10 o'clock just in agony and this thought came into my head and the thought was, well are you going to drink again tonight? That was the question that was coming to me and I sat There and I just answered it like that and I said yes I am because this suffering is a small price to pay for what I got last night. As far as I'm concerned it could be twice as bad as this, and I would still go back. That's how important drinking was, the effects of alcohol, close to a spiritual awakening, close to like, my God, this power transforms me in the world. I love the world when I'm drinking. I just love it. And up until then, I was very uncomfortable here. I just was convinced I was on the wrong planet or something. I just don't belong here, I don't fit in. Now I do. Now I have found the magic energy to allow me to be a comfortable citizen and to enjoy the life like other people are talking about it. So I was willing to pay any price. And if it was one of these movies where the devil is talking to me, he'd go, okay, would you give up your high braids? I'd go yes. Would you giveup athletics? Yes. Would you give up your friends and your family? Yes, yes, yes. Would you go to jail, get your teeth knocked out? Yes, yeah, yeah. In other words, there was nothing... You know, it's like I just signed a deal for the future. Now, I didn't know I was doing that. I thought I was just having a party. I had no idea. And the rest of the guys who aren't alcoholic, they look just like me. They're getting drunk. We're partying. We're joining fraternities. We're doing all that. But they weren't having spiritual awakenings when they drank. And when they get too hungover, they'd knock off for a couple of weeks. Oh, the hell with that stuff. I don't know what to knock off for a cup of coffee. For a couple weeks. I couldn't imagine it. Why would you not drink? My God. So I barely graduated and ended up joining the Marine Corps where the Korean War draft was still on and got in there, became a platoon leader, saw a movie about pilots, a training movie. It was very attractive. I'd never been in an airplane, but these guys were happy. And they weren't running around in the mud. They were in the bar, and they were talking with their hands, and there were some blondes standing over on the side. It looked like, so I asked this major, what's this pilus? Oh, you don't want that pilus. You don't have to sign up for three more years. I'll sign up for three mehr years. Something told me I wanted to do that so I signed up, finished the infantry training, got my orders to Pensacola, Florida, got married, met this wonderful woman up in Connecticut and we go off for this wonderful life together as a marine pilot. Got on an airplane out of New York, the old DC-3, United Airlines, went through Atlanta. Everything went through Atlanta to get anywhere. Got air sick on the DC-4. DC-5, DC-6, DC3 flying from Pensacola. This motion sickness, you know, oh God, I'm just as sick as a dog. And then when I got in the first six flights in the old SNJ I'm air sick, all over the plane have to clean it up when I get back and my instructor's going I don't think so but that finally went away and then I found out this was right up my alley I was very good at it once I got over that it was just like oh boy this is the greatest so I got good grades I got through all of the training it took a year and a half finally down in Kingsville, Texas pinned on our wings and went off to El Toro, California and then on to the Far East and I was in the hot shot fighter squadron over there we had the fastest planes for a while in the Far Eastern the squadron drank as a union it was the greatest thing in the world we got through all the flying during the day and then we all showed up at the officers club and we had our own table with a model of the plane in the middle and the colonel's up at the front. And you just ordered rounds. It was just, you know, waiters would come with 20 drinks and then the colonels would go, another round! You know, and it was fast enough so that I was going, this is a good pace that's going on. And I just was in heaven. It was like, man, everybody drink just like I do. this is a wonderful party and we got in trouble we did all these things and that went on for about nine months I tell this story because it just shows you how different I was or alcoholics are than people who are partying and drinking heavily anyway we were getting ready to go aboard a carrier and you practice out in the field before you do that And so I was out in the end of the runway with the maintenance officer and the guys working the paddles and the mirror. And the maintenance officers, a major who was a big Irish guy, and I loved him. And he's talking about when he gets promoted to lieutenant colonel and gets his own squadron, that's what he wants. And he just – and I'm just going, what a great commanding officer this guy would be. He's just perfect. And he'd just go on and on and yeah. It won't be too many more years, and I'll get there. And he said, I'm going to get nothing but the best pilots in the world in that squadron. He said, odd one, you in that squadron. He pointed at me, and of course I felt like a million dollars. And then he said... But I wouldn't let you drink. And I couldn't understand what he was saying. I mean, here we all are. We all get drunk every day. We all do that. And I look back now, and in the middle of all that drinking, everybody getting drunk every night, he could see I was a horse of a different color. I wasn't just partying, I was drinking with a vengeance. I was, you know what I mean? There was something that told him, this guy is out there somewhere. And that was my first time I ever heard anybody say anything about my drinking. And of course I dismissed it. I just said, oh, he must have been kidding. I must have misunderstood. and then as the years unfolded it became apparent that he was absolutely right because as the year's went by and there wasn't that many years because I drank for a total of 13 years is it? and no maybe it was 14 years and so as I progressed I got promoted and we had six children and I had all different assignments And finally, I was in a photo squadron at Cherry Point, North Carolina during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And I was flying planes and was now experiencing withdrawals from alcohol while flying because you didn't drink for 12 hours. So that would trigger withdrawals. I'm getting at the stage where you're going to have to start becoming a daily drinker. but how can you become a daily drinker if you can't drink for 12 hours before you get in the airplane and I talked to some Air Force guys after I got in AA and they said you drink in the plane that's what you do you won't go through withdrawal and I went hmm I could have drank for another year if I had thought of that But I kept doing the 12 hours, or sometimes only six when we got in late. But I would not drink, trying to sober up before I got in the plane. And I was having these terrible physical symptoms with withdrawal. I'd lose my peripheral vision. Then I couldn't see the instruments. Then I'm breathing, you know, like can't catch my breath. My heart is racing. I feel like I'm going to pass out. and so there was these crazy things going on and on one flight I remember going what do you do if you pass out? I mean, you know the handbook for the crusader does not have a paragraph if you're experiencing alcoholic withdrawal by now these are the recommended procedures you're not supposed to have a problem like that but I'm sure if we went around this room no matter what the profession you were having problems that they never thought anybody would ever have while they were doing your job and so on one occasion I remember being oh my god, this is the end of the thing I've been given this thing I'm going to pass out I'll die and then I went no I won't And I grabbed ahold of the ejection seat, and my theory was if I hold it tight enough, like a death grip, if I fall forward, boom, it'll fire the seat. I'll go out, the plane will crash, the chute opens automatically, and I'll float down to Earth. And I'll tell them there was an engine fire and I had to go. And in the middle of that panic, there was a simultaneous feeling of superiority. You know what I'm talking about? They almost had me, but I figured my way out of this one. Do you remember that feeling of being down at the bottom and the top at the same time? So I finally went and told the doctor what was going on, and then and I was examined for two weeks down in Pensacola by all the doctors, and there was no alcoholism. It was not a disease. You couldn't have it. You had to be diagnosed with something else. So at the end of the two weeks, you know, I had high blood pressure. I'm confused. I don't know where I am. My hands are shaking. Flammy sweat all over me. I reek of alcohol all the time, and they're going, well, what do you think, doctor? You know, they're all talking about it. And so the psychiatrists were the ones that had to, nobody else could find anything. So the psychiatrist said, well, I think it's a childhood fear of flying. It's just caught up with him now after 13 years of flying and so I knew that wasn't true but I had no way of fighting that. I had nothing, I couldn't fight anything anymore And so I just went, okay. So they said, you're no longer a pilot. We've got to get you a new occupational specialty because I was a career officer. So I wait about three months. I get orders to become an air traffic controller. So I go to Glencoe, Georgia and make it through air traffic control school, which is not an easy school and my last year of drinking I was the officer in charge of an air traffic control unit in Japan and fortunately the senior enlisted man in the outfit saw me check in and they just went whoa, captain, welcome good to have you here here's your chair there's your coffee cup here's the tent don't you personally go near the radar do not talk to any planes and we'll cover for you so I was just an alcoholic drinking I mean I was trying to show up for work and I became a daily drinker I didn't even go to happy hour and hang around with my buddies I don't know where I was the lone ranger inside my head I knew I was dying, I lost 50 pounds I couldn't eat I'm just surviving and somehow made it back to the States to a career school and had a grand mal seizure just about bit my tongue off and then I went to the hospital and they're trying to find out what caused the seizure and it took about five days for the DTs to set in and I saw all the CIA moving the walls in my room and they were trying to break me I don't know, it was just awful So I evidently went screaming down the hall, and they captured me and put me in a straitjacket and locked me up in the nut ward for six months. And so that was my story. And in that nut ward, some AA guys talked to head psychiatrists and said, you know, there are some alcoholics in there, and we ought to bring an AA meeting. All right, I'm not sure we have any, but no, no,no. So I got to AA that way. Corman, all drunks fall in right face and we went down the elevator these guys told their stories they're very exciting but it wasn't for me it was like could I get your phone number if I ever run into a guy with a drinking pump so I thought it was great but I still didn't connect me and eventually they let me be an outpatient so now I'm at home at night and weekends and then I started drinking a little bit one beer here and one beer there and then I brought vodka back into the nut ward and I knew they were going to catch me. They said if I ever had a drink, my career was over. So on Pearl Harbor Day, there was a Sunday, I called AA on the outside at home and they said, yeah, we have a guy who's only one other Marine in AA down at Quantico, my sponsor. And so they called him and he came over to my house and knocked on the door. God, he filled the door frame. He was so big. He was an infantry guy. He was in explosive ordnance disposal. And he used to say it was a great job for an alcoholic because there's nobody looking over your shoulder while you're smoking. And so he came in and just took over. Boom! Get in the car. We're going to a meeting. It's like we're going to go to a meeting every night for 10 years or something. Total immersion. I mean, we went every night. It was just amazing. And the meetings were sometimes an hour away. There weren't that many meetings. You'd drive, so you had a meeting in the car, and we're talking and talking. I remember the first New Year's Eve. I've been sober about three weeks, and he and his wife came over, and we had like a party with no alcohol at our house and played games and all that, and I had a good time. I couldn't believe it. I mean, I didn't admit it. But inside, I was going, you're actually having fun. I said, yeah, but don't let it show. Or they'll have you, you know. Anyway, a lot of things happened. My Marine Corps career, I got passed over for major, so after 14 years, I was let out and had six kids and I've got to feed him, and I go, oh, a million resentments. Just little tests to help you grow in sobriety. You know, had a couple divorces. Those were hard. A couple of health problems, financial problems. Oh, God. You know when you have six kids and you're paying payments all over the place and you are not good at making money because I am trying to be a salesman. I'm trying to do all these things when I got bounced out of the Marine Corps. So it was 18 years in AA before I made more money than I owed every month. So when new guys come up to talk to me about financial problems, I always say, have you got 18 years yet? Well, when you do, come on back and I'll listen to you. But I was just, you know, whining and all this kind of stuff. But throughout all of that, the program is taking over and my sponsor is taking me down for the last ten minutes or so. For those of you that are new, I just want to tell you what I think spirituality is. What are we talking about when we say spirituality in AA? it's clearly not what i was used to in a church where they go okay we're going to explain this church to you are you ready yes i'm ready okay i got my notepad and go all right god was born 4 000 years ago and here's a book here's his picture this is what he said and just wherever whichever religion you're in you know buddhism or christianity or whatever it is there is a god and there is clear set of things that he said And when they get through explaining it all, they go, there. Now, do you believe that? You know, and you go, yeah, you know, I'm convinced by what you said. So let's jump in with both feet and this will be what we can be attracted to. But AA is a spiritual program. It's not a religion. So there isn't any AA God. If there's a thousand people here tonight, there could be a thousand different higher powers in this room. So it's just a spiritual programme. So what the devil, how does a spiritual program work? Well, my favorite way of explaining it, to those of you that are new, comes out of the chapter to the agnostic. I always like to talk about this little chapter a little bit because it was the most helpful place for me to understand spirituality. And what a place to find it, right? The chapter to agnestic. When my sponsor gave me the big book, I remember glancing through it. I didn't really read it because I didn t see where that was relevant. I knew what I needed. I needed money! Then we'll talk about principles and, you know, I gotta get some dough before I'm even, I can free my mind up long enough to do that. But I did remember going by the chapter the agnostic you know thumbing through that and I without reading it you know some of us know without reading what's in there it was the chapter where the agnostics they sober whatever is in there as opposed to the steps and all the stuff that the other people are using so I knew I would end up in the chapter the Agnostic when I got there and of course eventually I got reading everything and incorporating into my life and the The chapter of the agnostic can be summed up in three words. Change your mind. That's what it says if you're an agnóstic. Become a former agnestic. That's What It's Suggesting. Now, why would I want to do that? What burning bush are they going to put in front of me to help me convert? You follow what I'm saying? Because this is how my mind works. What is going to win me over? Well, listen to this. We're going to get you spiritual. So my sponsor started out with this. He said, let me just ask you some questions, Andy. And I went, okay. He said、Do you pray a lot? I said、No, I don't, Bill. I don' t like prayer. No, I do' n't pray at all. No. I don''t know if I ever will, but no, I d'on' t. I don' l'ike. I dON' t pray. He said،Okay, do you like go to church and do religion? No, no, Phil, I tried that a long time ago. I don't even drive by churches. I'm not interested in that stuff at all. I don' t know. Put me down as a definite no for church. He said, well, do you read a lot of spiritual readings as a way of getting through your day? Spiritual readings, Bill? No. I read the sports page the funnies the spiritual readings put me down as no, never he said I don't suppose there's any meditation no Bill no meditation and then he asked me the spiritual question he said so how's it going? And I went, awful. He said, I just want to make that point. I just wanted to make sure it was going awful. So could we put down on this little paper they were keeping here that your way sucks. we're closing in on spirituality folks because now we're ready to get into this chapter of the agnostic and it says in there in the first paragraph if when you drink you have little control over the amount you drink and if when you try and stop you can't stop or stay stopped all of us then you're probably an alcoholic okay, I'm with you so far and here comes the sentence if that be the case then you are suffering from an illness that only a spiritual experience can conquer and I went what? what was that? you're suffering from an illness that only a spiritual experienced can conquer and I'm saying to myself how many of these illnesses are there? I didn't hear about these from any doctors. Oh, I'm sorry, I can't treat you. You're suffering from an illness that only a spiritual experience will provide. I never heard of one of those illnesses but there it was. You're suffered from an illness that only the spiritual experience and I said to Bill, Bill, I don't believe in spiritual experiences. He said, you're screwed. That was it. We don't have anything else. It's over. I said, well, what am I going to do? He said you could change your mind. Change my mind, yeah. Oh man, that's going to be hard, Bill. And then we went down to the next paragraph. Guess what it says in there? Bill already knew that even with all this evidence, it was going to be hard for us to change our mind. And it says in there, to be doomed an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not easy alternatives to face. That's what it said. So here you are. You're the brand new alcoholic. We bring you up on stage and we just go, this is where you are. This is the total reality of your life. You've got to choose one of those two doors, die an alcoholic death, live on a spiritual basis. And guess what? There isn't any response. Whoa, she's dying an alcoholic. Live on a Spiritual Basis. Boy, talk about two crappy choices. You know, we just, we feel like calling a doctor and go, how bad is an alcoholic death anyway? I know. I know that going through that door over there isn't going to be any fun. So what is AA doing? What is AA Doing? See, a religion tries to convince you of the existence of God. And what AA does, it convinces you of the need for God. Once you understand you desperately need God, he's going to show up. It's that simple. He's just been waiting for you to get that desperate. He's been waiting for you to get broken down where you just go, okay, I'll go through that door. I'll do it. I'll walk through the door. And then later on it says, the whole purpose of this book is to enable you to find a power greater than yourself that will solve your problems. Now, it doesn't say we're going to teach you how to solve your problem. We're going teach you to how to find the power greater that yourself that would solve your own problem. So the secret to all of this spirituality is given up. That's all it is. It's just given up This is... Sue, I have a clean handkerchief. She always worries that I'd bring a dirty handkercheap up. This is getting spiritual in AA. You just take it out and you just... I give up. I give over. Could somebody... unconditional would someone please show me how to live and you will have the greatest life you can imagine you will be set out on a journey that is beyond your wildest dreams because you're going to be put in touch with yourself And you're going to find out from the prayer of St. Francis, you're gonna find out about this becoming a channel of the peace of this great higher power. And you'RE gonna find parts of yourself that you never knew existed. You may get in touch with it early on. Maybe you've been sober about three months, two months, and you're at a meeting and you see a brand new guy or gal come in. And you were just there eight weeks ago and you can just watch it. I know exactly how that guy feels. And he goes over to get some coffee and he gets it about half full and then spilling and all that. He puts a cup down, has no coffee that night and gets over to the table and stays there. Doesn't say anything. At the end of the meeting you almost go over and shake his hand but you're so new you've thought about it but you didn't quite do it. and then he goes and leaves and now you're back to your life with all your self-centered problems and you're at work and you find yourself wondering how he's doing wonder how that guy's doing I wonder how he is doing and you go I hope he shows up next week at the meeting and this is in spite of all your problems you are going I hope He shows up and you get to the meeting and he's not there and part of you is disappointed. You go, oh, I was hoping he'd be here and about five minutes into the meeting here he comes with his sponsor he's still sober he goes over to the coffee place shaking less gets a half a cup gets it back to the table he sits down and you find yourself saying inside just to yourself Yay! What is that? What is that? You're just going, yay, for some guy? Yay? Like you really care? Is this who you are? You know what it is? That's who you aren't. That's what's been trapped inside of you with this disease, this self-centered disease of alcoholism. And these steps are nothing more than removing the obstacles. We call them character defects. Just get them out of the way so that this wonderful spiritual energy that's been there all along can start flowing and it flows out from us. We don't need anything. You know, the prayer of St. Francis, make me a channel of thy peace. I used to think the peace would be coming in, but it isn't. The channel is peace goes out so that I can comfort people that need it, that I kan understand people that need to be understood. There's an infinite supply of love inside of you that's been wanting to get out since the day you were born and we somehow got trapped in there with this disease and self-centeredness and run around beating ourselves up. I'm a not caring person. I'm not this and I'm not that. And Alcoholics Anonymous opens the door to your true nature so that you can experience the wonder and joy of achieving the top that you can achieve in Alcoholics Anonymous. We have different levels in AA and the highest level that you can achieve is servant. You start out big shot, and then you work your way all the way up to servant. And you understand big shot is very difficult to get through the world. Big! I mean, everybody's blocking you. And, you want to become small. You want to become like of myself, I'm nothing. God is everything. I'm just an instrument. I am just a servant. And when Chuck Chamberlain used to talk to me, I remember hearing his tapes and then I remember asking him one night, Chuck, you don't really believe what you say to people. And he said, yes. I said, you said that it's not my job to take care of me, that that's God's job. Are you sure? And he says, that's right. It's not your job to do God's work. You do that, you will be totally taken care of. And I just went, Wow, that is so wonderful to realize that we don't have to figure anything out. We just have to be guided. We just Have to stay in touch. We have a daily reprieve contingent on our spiritual condition. We just HaVe to stay In touch with the signal. So the top priority for me is to try and stay undisturbed because the signal will break down the second I get disturbed. And so that is a 10th step thing out of the 12 and 12. And I really find that that is the spiritual axiom that I spend a lot of time on. That when I get upset over something, I stop and try, do not proceed in this condition. Get undisturbed and then continue. And this has stood me in good stead for quite a while. I want to say to the new people, God bless you. you are in the right place with all this wonderful energy just keep your handkerchief up stay surrendered and you'll be a winner thank you all very much