Why Being Wrong Is the Most Freeing Thing That Can Happen – Sandy B.

Thank you. Thank you, Guy, and hi everybody. My name's Sandy Beach, and I'm an alcoholic. Can you hear me in the back? Okay. This microphone only goes to the tape. It doesn't go out here, so I've got to get there myself. I'm really honored to be asked over here, and Chris and Guy are pretty good friends of mine, And so for them, it doesn't seem like a big deal at all. I was thinking of just a different way of getting at our steps. And I decided to take the self-centered approach because not everyone in the room relates to that. I don't have to explain it to anyone what that is. Because if you look at it, But the steps are really designed to take away self-centeredness. And that is the root of our problems. And it's not just our problems, everybody is self-centred and as they grow up and mature which we don't do, they make a dent in being self- centred. But alcoholics found a shortcut to growing up, it's called drinking. we've solved all of the problems along the way by simply pouring alcohol down. And so when we get here, we're probably about 13 years old emotionally, and we got a long way to go, and our literature everywhere says self-centeredness is the root of our problems. And it really is. It's one of the most difficult things to make a dent in. and the reason is it's so powerfully ingrained in us it starts when we're really little i don't know exactly how old i had six kids and i can't remember exactly when it happened but somewhere a little after one year old something different happens up till that time the baby seemed to be just looking around taking it all in you know what i mean oh yeah over here over here and you'd go in their crib and you would hand them a bear. Then you'd come in take the bear away and give them a ball, oh a ball! And they just were like observing the show. And so far no problem, no self-centeredness. One day you give them the bear and you come over to take the bare away and you give him the ball and they say, mine! That's the new game in town up till then the world was two-dimensional there was all that stuff going on out there but now there's a third dimension me and we suddenly realize this isn't a drama that we're watching this is a drama that's happening to us the whole universe is happening to us that's when you're the center and you see things let's see I like that person because she adds to my world every time grandmother comes over she gives me two cookies so she gets a plus on the other hand this uncle smokes a cigar in my face all the time he takes away from my world so I start keeping track of what's what's fair and what isn't fair, and what adds to my little world and what takes away from my little word. And it's my job to make sure that I get as much as possible in my little world because nobody else is taking care of it. Nobody else even knows about it because they're so busy in their own little world. And then as we get older and we're out and we are walking around, I can remember being in my backyard and kind of taking it all in. And I looked over at the neighbor's house and I looked over here where the school was, and then I turned around and saw down the road to where the farms were. And then I looked here and saw the highway going into town. So I had all this vista all around me of all these other things. But guess what was at the center of it? Me. So I don't know how people couldn't end up self-centered where they feel wherever they are, they're the center of what's going on and I look at it as we live in our own little world that's one of my favorite ways to think about self-centeredness and we used to say that as an insult well you know her she lives in her own little world well so do you and so does everybody else and those worlds are just made of thoughts that's the only building material there is to build the world that you live in are all the collected thoughts that you put in there and the most important part of a thought is the adjective rotten scary no good unfair and see events that happen don't come with adjectives they just happen it It rains. The farmer goes, oh wonderful, it's raining. The golfer goes, geez, ruined my whole day. So the event itself just happens. And so we're the one who creates this world that we live in by our thinking. And most of us put together a rather unpleasant place to live, but at least it's ours. And we made it. And even though it's lousy, we're reluctant to change it. Even when people end up in jail, they go, what do you think about that? Well, maybe I'll write a book about jail someday so this isn't the worst experience in the world. And it's my rotten life but I did it. It gets so bad that we actually think that we exist in addition to the universe. And that was Chuck Chamberlain's big point, is that there's everything else and then there's me. And in our literature it talks about God being everything. God's everything AND in addition to everything, there's ME. And I'm being affected badly by everything. I'm not even part of my own family. alcoholics had that feeling that there's the family unit and then there's me. I'm not really part of it. I m over here. That s self-centeredness in the extreme, and we just stay in there and one of the nice things when you are self- centered is you're in charge. There's nobody in that world making you change it or making you do anything. When you go hide in your own little world. And so in order to feel comfortable anywhere, we run across alcohol. And boy does that change the ball game. That just changes everything. We suddenly seem to fit in. I had my three drinks and then all the people in the bar that looked so mean looked pretty cool. I like this place. I liked this new world. It's safe to come out of my world into this one. And that's why we loved alcohol so much. It was the only way we knew to get out of being self-centered, was to drink. And since it was that important to us, we were willing to pay any price. Whereas a non-alcoholic, this is not solving all their problems. It's giving them some happiness. They feel a little better than they did before. But this is not the secret of life like it was for us where we just, when we drank, it transformed the world that we lived in and our opinion of ourselves. And we became bigger and they became smaller and we became more powerful and they become less threatening. And it was a wonderful way to solve the problem of self-centeredness except when we sobered up, it was worse because of all the stuff that happened the night before. And it doesn't matter how hard you beat on this thing, you could try to go in there and get me out of that self-centered cage and I wasn't coming out. I probably never would have come out except for alcohol. Alcohol finally takes us down so low that we actually stick our hand out of that world and ask for help. That is the only way that ego got cracked, was by that hand coming out. And when you look at our literature and the history and everything, great spiritual writers have pointed this out, that the only way people crack an ego like that and can begin a spiritual journey is from hitting a bottom. It's the magic ingredient. So as it's happening, it doesn't look like much of a blessing. It's hard to picture the cop that is giving you a DWI as an angel from heaven who's about to change your whole life by forcing you into detox. And when you get into detox, it didn't look like the greatest thing that ever happened in your life. But for those of us that made it out of there into AA, we look back on it as that's the greatest thing that ever happened to me was getting that DWI or in my case, getting a grand mal seizure and spending six months in the nut ward. I did not see that as a big blessing. So you can see self-centeredness It gets a little bit of daylight coming in because you had to surrender. You had to just open it up enough so you could get help for your alcohol problem. You didn't open it any wider. All we want is to get sober. We'll continue to run our world. And that's the problem of self-centeredness. we give up little pieces of our territory very grudgingly. It's, I don't like turning over more of my world. If I turned it all over, as Bill writes in the third step in the 12 and 12, I'd become the hole in the donut. I would be a non-entity. I wouldn't be in charge of anything. And so it's in that spot that we find ourselves arriving at AA and beginning this journey through the 12 steps. And the first step that we encounter capitalizes on that very bottom that we hit. You see how down you are? You see How Down You Are? Well, you're really powerless. And they finally get us to say the word powerless. Yeah, yeah, okay, okay. But I'm only powerless over alcohol. Don't go messing with all the rest of that stuff. I'm going to admit that I am powerless over alcohol. And so our literature capitalizes on that, and I don't know how many pages it is, but they must spend about 50 pages on the first step. And they want to just hammer home how powerless we really are. In the beginning, we have a rough idea about how bad it is. And if you have a good sponsor, he'll show you that it's five times worse than you thought it was. And if he does that or if she does that, they just did a good job with the first step. They pointed out it's much worse than YouThought. I thought that I simply had to not put alcohol in my mouth and everything would be fine. I'd been locked up for six months. I lost my career as a pilot in the Marine Corps, and I'm smart. It didn't take me that long in that nut ward to go, you know, I think I better not drink anymore. That's what I think. I can see now that damn stuff really brought me down. I had a good education. I did well. I got six kids. Here I am. And that stuff just buried me. So, boy, I understand completely that I shouldn't drink. And in my opinion, that was sufficient to carry me through the rest of my life. I figured it was the same as finding out what food allergy you had that was getting you all screwed up and rashes and dry heaving and you can't hardly breathe. And finally they tell you, tomatoes is it. And you go, really? Yep, if you never eat another tomato, you'll never have any of those symptoms. And you goes, well, that's good enough for me. And we just don't eat any more tomatoes. We don't go to meetings with other people who can't eat tomatoes and asked them how they got through the tomato soup on the table tonight. Were you thinking about it? Was it tempting you? And none of that. We just went, forget it. I'm just not going to eat any more tomatoes. And life is fine because we accepted to the depth of our soul that we can't eat anymore tomatoes. And we accept to the depths of our souls that we cannot drink. And we're nowhere near home yet. That's why we have to explain the first step. That'll never keep you sober. How do you like that? It will never keep your sober, excepting to your very soul that you can't drink. Why do I say that? You read our literature and you find out we have no defense against a first drink. There's going to come a time when, in spite of all of this knowledge, acceptance, and all of that, we're going to sit there and say something like the guy in the big book. And then I just thought a little whiskey in the milk, remember that story, would be a good idea. Here's the guy, he's on a business deal, everything's going good, and he goes, you know what, I think I'll just have a little whiskey in this milk. And bam, he's off for a couple of years before he comes back. That is why we die of alcoholism. That's what kills us, is the fact that in spite of knowing to our very soul that if we drink it will probably kill us, We say to the bartender, can I have a beer please? That's why we need the 12 steps. Because of that insanity. And that is classic for every alcoholic. You listen to people who've gone back out and they will tell you stories very similar to that. They will just tell you, well, I was in AA and I was working the steps and it made me feel wonderful and I knew that it had turned me into a much better person and I just felt stronger than I used to be. And it didn't feel like I needed the program as bad as I used to. I wasn't in as bad shape. So I missed a couple meetings, but I still felt just as good as if I was going to meetings. Matter of fact, I missed a couple weeks worth of meetings and I still felt just as good. Now, how do you explain that to yourself? I feel just as good without meetings as I do with meetings. This is called the setup from the movie The Sting. Now you let him go two weeks and he feels just as good as when he goes to meetings. What conclusion do you draw? Probably don't need as many meetings as i used to. I am in a different shape than I used to be Blah, blah, blah. And then someone says, how about a little wine with dinner? And you go, well, a little line couldn't hurt. I was a vodka drinker. There's no way of little wine. And here we go. Here we go with all the evidence we have. We still get drunk again. So there's something that has to come in and fill that gap. There's something that has to come in and protect us at all times so that that insanity never wins and that something is a power greater than ourselves. And when we're new, we understand this powerlessness. They've led us through this first step. Yeah, okay, I see it, I See It. And your life's on the map. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, you're going to now approach this second step And we're going to have to start talking about a power greater than yourself. And you go, oh, that God thing? Well, you could call it that. We call it God. Yeah, I know, the God thing. You want me to get into the God things now. Well, let me explain myself. Have you all done this? Let me explain. I don't even want to hear the word God. It bothers me. I grew up in a rotten church. These religions have started more wars around the world. I hate them. I hate em all. I don' t want anything to do with God. And so if you have a good sponsor, they go, well, let's not deal with that yet. Why don't you just keep an open mind and we'll keep going to meetings? And you'll notice our literature is beautiful how we finesse the God issue for a while until the person starts seeing how happy people are around them or her and they keep talking about God. And then you go to a speaker meeting and somebody's up there and they're telling your story. Yeah, I was in the nut word for six months and I hated God. I grew up blah, blah, bla, blah. And my sponsor said, why don't you just keep an open mind? I said, oh, well, what the heck? Maybe I'll keep an opened mind. I don't know. So you could see there's just a little resistance was being dropped. And all of a sudden, I said well, the other people are praying. Maybe I will try kneeling down and saying a prayer. Hope nobody is looking. I don't want anybody to see me. I'm shutting the door. I don' t want my family looking in, but I'll just try this little thing. And I don''t know. I did it for a while and I started feeling better. I tried to tell myself it was a coincidence, but i couldn''t. And it kept growing inside of me. And so AA is just works a miracle on finessing us around being agnostic, atheists, non-believers, God haters, whatever it is. We're just suggesting, just put that on hold, keep an open mind and see what happens. And why don't we just move along with the steps? Now as soon as you start an open mind on spiritual matters, you have come 90% of the way. That's all it takes is just this little tiny open mind because before that it was closed don't want to hear it and all you're being asked to do is well would you be willing to just look around with an open okay I'll look around with a note and that's it it's brilliant it's absolutely brilliant I started looking around with an open mind next thing I'm in the middle of it and I said well did they brainwash me did they what did they do and in order to explain this I like to go to the very end in the twelve and twelve in the twelfth step and it has this wonderful description of this process and I'm paraphrasing but it says something like they're describing the spiritual awakening and there's a sentence in there that says we finally realized that we've had a spiritual awakening about which there's no doubt it's just emphasizing I really see the transformation that they're placing me and as we look back on the people behind us we know from experience an absolute certainty that the man who still hasn't got the spiritual angle and who still calls his home group his higher power will presently come to know and love God and call Him by name. And nobody told them to do it. Nobody said, starting next Thursday, you will stop using your group as your higher power and it'll be God. Nobody says a word about that. But we know that that process will happen because of our open mind. What got the mind open? Let's never forget what got the Mind open so you can't take credit for it the bottom alcohol opened our minds and made us stick up our hand with a white handkerchief in it i give up i give so that's where the credit goes is with the disease so anyway we start having an open mind and you can see the open mind is a process of coming to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. If you're sponsoring people who are still having a problem with that, you could take them back to the disease. Let's take a look and they do it right in this chapter of the agnostic which is our second step and Bill sets it up and I do every time I talk I always mentioned these lines. He says, if you, when you drink, you can't control the amount you drink. Okay, that's everybody. And if when you stop, you can't stay stopped. Okay. That's everybody that you're probably an alcoholic. Okay? All right. I'm in. So now we're all in, right? We're all in, all in. If that's the case, you're suffering from an illness that only a spiritual experience can fix. Are you sure? Does the American Medical Association agree with that? I'm suffering from an illness that only a spirit... Let me look in the directory of illnesses. Let's see, illnesses, only spiritual experience. Turns out there's no other way to survive alcoholism. Somehow I'm going to have to change my mind and Bill knows right then when we It was right then when we told them about the disease that requires a spiritual experience that we're fighting this with tooth and nail. I don't want to be boxed into a corner like that. And the next sentence, and you've all heard it. To live on a spiritual basis or to be doomed an alcoholic death are not easy alternatives to face. Door number one, die an alcoholic debt. Door number two, live on the spiritual basis. Which do you choose? And if you're a new alcoholic, you go, I'm thinking. I'm thinking. It looks like two equally rotten choices. Spiritual basis looks awful. I saw some spiritual people. They were having no fun. I just don't think that's a good choice. Do I get a phone call? Yes, you get a phone call before you decide. So I call my doctor and I go, how bad is an alcoholic death? Oh God. OK, I'll try the spiritual crap. Isn't that exciting how we get into? So we use the disease itself to keep the mind open to reconsider this power. came to believe that a power greater than ourselves the thing that helps us believe in this power is listening to other people or watching someone who comes in and goes faster than we do i remember doing that you know i came out of the night and i didn't want anything to do with this god thing i fought it for a year-and-a-half two years and i'd see a guy who come behind me and i remember looking at this one guy and i said if there's anybody worse off than me, it's him. I'd lay money, he will not make it. It's impossible for this guy. Look at him. It is impossible. Three months later he's giving a talk and everyone's listening and he sounds wonderful and he's glowing and he is talking about how God came into his life and blah, blah, and I'm sitting back there going, I don't know. I have no other I have no other way of explaining this. We've got no other way of explained it. You're stuck with the God thing. There's no way to explain how that guy got from here to there in three months. Impossible. And so what we have in AA is an endless supply of miracles. We have a disproportionate supply of miracle here in AA. We probably We have more miracles occur here than in any other society on planet earth. Why? Because we collected all the low bottoms here and they are the necessary ingredients so it's not a fair sample. We got them all, we went in the jails, the nut wards down on the street and all those places and that's where we gathered our society from. We didn't go on the upper echelons and get people who were doing real well. And since hitting bottom is a necessary step in having a spiritual awakening, that's why our sample is so high. That's why we see it so often here. And the fact that you can see it helps with coming to believe. Well, I didn't really believe it until I saw Harry. I didn't really believe it until I saw Mary. And now I just go, boy, something is happening here. That's why attendance at meetings is so big and speaker meetings also where you can hear the full story and then you realize, wow, that girl went to the same school I did and she has a, wow she has three kids, so do I. Well, she was worse off than I was. Look at her, she said, well, I want to be like her. And we have this program of attraction. We don't know what it is. But these people have something that we like, and we want to be like them. And that is also pushing us towards coming to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. So it's a process, but it isn't something you go home and think about. It's something when you come to AA you experience. Now if you kept a closed mind, you could see 50 miracles and it wouldn't make a dent you would just write them all off yeah that's a coincidence ah she's faking it she wasn't that bad off and I've seen it happen keep a closed mind if you want to go like this and prove that AAA doesn't work you can do it it will not get in there nothing will get in there and you'll be able to proudly announce down at the bar I tried AA for a year and it didn't work but you really didn't try it You went to the meetings, but you knew ahead of time you weren't going to let it in. You were just going to audit. Alcoholics Anonymous. And then you could report back to your family. I tried it. I know you wanted me to go to AA. You begged me to AA, I did. It doesn't work. Now get off my back and go back out there drinking. So the open mind is crucial. And if you're sponsoring somebody, you've got to stay on them in that first step until they have an open mind. Do not leave the first step. Keep going back to powerlessness, take their nose, rub it in there. Would you go over the nut ward again one time? Would you review what it was like in there? How long were you in there, oh I see, okay, okay. Until they go alright, alright, I can't possibly manage it and that's the surrender at the in-depth it's the only step we take a hundred percent now boy if you're sponsoring somebody you've got to get them so there's no doubt in their mind that they're powerless over this stuff that gives them the open mind and we can come up against this wonderful second step and in the middle of that step the big book is really good I use to both books, the 12 and 12 in the big book. And it's really good not just in the beginning there but as it moves on it quickly jumps to catapulted into fourth dimension of existence and that our Creator enters our hearts. The absolute certainty that our creator has entered our hearts and lives in a way that is indeed miraculous. He is starting to do for us what we couldn't do for ourselves. And then comes the wonderful question, all of a sudden out of the blue it says you're going to have to deal with this right now. God is everything or he's nothing. He either is or he isn't. What's your choice? Isn't that interesting? What's YOUR choice? This your choice this is a pretty crucial choice now prior to coming here i chose god's nothing and i got the results of that choice that's what my sponsor used to say to me he wanted to do a spiritual inventory i've been around a year and a half he said let me just check your spirituality i just want to do it quick down and dirty okay okay how much do you pray bill Well, prayer's a bunch of crap. I don't pray. Even at the Lord's Prayer at the meetings, I go, ma-ma-ma, ma, ma. I just don't believe in prayer. Prayer's out. He said, so prayer, zero. Right. Okay, how about do you go to church? No. Churches I don' like. I had a bad experience as a kid. Even when I'm in Europe, I don''t go look at the great cathedrals. screw them I don't want anything to do with churches okay no churches how about meditation meditation I got stuff to do I got all these kids we're freaking starving you want me to sit around going da da da no I don' have meditation is out okay out now do you ever read spiritual literature our libraries are filled with unbelievably wonderful books they can uplift you I like mafia books I like sport books, love books about Hitler. Hitler's my man. I just love to read about him and see him in the movies. The answer is no. So he goes, no, no no no. Okay, one more question. Okay, yeah. How's it going? What does it feel like to be inside of you? Oh, it's awful in here. It's awful. And then I shared how awful it was. And he said, okay, so that's the result of no spirituality. You're a scientist. You claim that you like intellectual scientific things. We just did an experiment. You existed for all these years with no spirituality You certainly are big enough person to conduct an experiment and try some spirituality and see if you get different results, right? you're in charge of the results. You could report back nothing happening, but you gotta admit you owe it to yourself to try some of this spiritual stuff and since I was in such horrible shape I got suckered into trying it. I'm gonna try reading the st. Francis prayer God Almighty I'm gonna try thinking about the serenity prayer I'm going to try doing this and I'm going to maybe get the real big book out and look in there for a few comforting readings and maybe I'll just see I don't think it's going to work but I'm willing to give it a try. And boy, what a change happens. I was willing to do the action even though I didn't believe in it. If anybody wanted to describe our steps to a new person, they are 12 actions that we don't believe and we're going to do them anyway. Why? Because there's nowhere else to go there's no alternative program you have a non-spiritual program out there where people are celebrating big roundups no this guy down the corner there claims he stayed sober on his own well but he never has part no he just sits there by himself and logs in his sobriety every year so there's now alternative program no there's know I'll turn huh all right and that's That's the noise, if you're a sponsor, you love that noise. That's a noise of an open mind beginning, alright, okay, alright. We know someone is about to do something against their better judgment. They're actually going to follow the ideas of someone else instead of their own and this This is when you really start having wonderful things happen. We are stepping out of the way temporarily, temporarily, I remember that one, just temporarily. I will allow you to kind of run my life temporarily until I get the hang of it and then I'll be taking it back. That was the arrangement that I had. And so he said well then now we're going to deal with the third step of turning your life, making a decision to turn your life over to God as you understand him. And there was tremendous resistance with this. What's going to happen to me? I already mentioned that Bill in the 12 and 12. I'll be no one. I turn my life over. My life's being run by my sponsor, my home group, God, whatever it is. Where do I fit in? what do I run you don't run anything right now your job is to evaluate the results that we're getting running it for you is that all right yeah every month we're gonna come by and check on the results all right the end of two months how's it going better or worse well maybe better maybe maybe better maybe this much better actually I'm so happy I can't stand it but I don't want to I don' t want to give him a big head he's liable to never turn it back to me and so I've made a beginning as you can see by allowing my sponsor to make a few directions in my life and then if I didn't like them I could run it by my home group my sponsor says I really he's wrong right right oh he's right okay Well, I just wanted to run it by the whole group, and I understand. I understand, and we begin to get an introduction into something that is one of the most powerful things we have in the program, and that is being wrong. Oh, boys, this is the best thing that can happen is to be wrong. Now, when you're new, it doesn't sound like good news, does it? Well, hate to tell you, Heidi, but you're wrong again. Right in front of the group, wrong again, And it feels bad. I didn't like being wrong. My sponsor cornered me one day and he said, don't you see? It's not what you say, it's this. And I went, oh yeah, all right, okay, you're right. He said, no, you are wrong. I said, No, it is the same thing, Bill. You are right, you Are right. I am going to hear you say you are wronk. And I don't know about you but the first time I actually got those words out, I am wrong. I felt like an earthquake had happened, that I actually admitted that I was wrong. I don't ever remember being wrong before. Ever. At least it wasn't in my memory where I walked up to somebody and said, you know something? I'm wrong. And we get in here and we find out this is the most freeing thing that can happen is to get rid of a wrong idea, an untruth. There was an old guy up in D.C. that said, it isn't the stuff you don't know that'll kill you, It's knowing things for sure that just ain't so. And we know a lot of things for sure that aren't true. But we think they are, and we live with those false truths inside of us. The world isn't fair. I'm no good. My parents gave me a rotten childhood. I hate my sister. I hate religions. I hate the United States. You just go on and on and on, and this is wrong and that's wrong, and it's all inside of me. And we've got to understand – Mona was talking at Jana today about this – that whatever we think up produces an emotion, it produces a feeling. When I tell myself that those people over there don't like me, I really feel it. It's the same as if they really didn't like me. It doesn't matter how they feel. If I say they don't like me, I suffer from it. I'm going, boy, I'm never going over to that side of the room. I am just going to talk to these people because they don�t like me. And you know what it feels like when you do that? You don't even want to go near people. You feel very inferior. And it's all because I thought that up and then had the feeling. And once you have the feeling, it's true. They could come up and tell me. Actually, we like you. It's too late. I have the feeling. You can tell me whatever you want, but I already know. I felt it. It is right here and I am not going to go against my feelings. They are in charge. My feelings are where the truth is. Oh boy, where did that come from? The truth comes from unlearning and we will get to that later on when we start doing inventories and spirituality so we make a lot of progress in having an open mind about turning our life over mainly because we're being convinced that if we stay in charge it's going to be a disaster if you have a good sponsor they'll keep pointing that out remember what happened when you were in charge don't you remember? Who got you in the nut ward? Who did this? Okay. And so this is just the beginning of, all right, maybe I'll try this turning my life over. But it doesn't get turned over here. We just make the decision in the third step. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God. So what it involved was having another open mind. That's all I've got to have to make a wonderful beginning on A.A.'s third step is to have an open mind about the idea. And again, for me it was hearing one speaker after another get up there and I could see them. You know they can't hide who they are. They can't their happiness. They can hide their enthusiasm. And it would be right in front of my eyes to watch and I'd go man this God thinks got some pretty good advertisers here I have to admit it that these people are really demonstrating something that I didn't think was possible so you see where the open mind is coming from it's coming from ourselves it's coming from watching other people and then finding out, oh, yeah, she just lost her sister last week. Well, she's still here helping people. Yeah, that's right. Well, how does she do that? Well, she's relying on God. I can't believe it. I just can't believe it, and we watch people go through, get fired, and be helping other people find a job. You know, what's that? things that we never dreamed were possible we see right in front of our eyes and that opens us more to the idea of turning our life over to a loving higher power so now we got to get down to the nitty gritty of how this is done I can make a decision to turn my life over but it is being held by my greasy little hands rather tightly. You managed with the help of a nut ward and several strong people to pry this one finger open, and I gave up drinking. I totally surrendered the idea of drinking. And now you want me to let go of everything else. Letting go doesn't sound like a big action verb, But it's the main action verb in all of Alcoholics Anonymous is letting go. Sounds like you could just go whoop and it would be all done. Just go whoo. They don't do that. You can say whoop, and you still got a grip. You still got to grip. Just let go of your financial worries. Okay. well yeah but but I got it I got I just can't let go of it I gotta go I so okay whether you won't let that one okay and you can see there's all these to let go your relationships oh no I got a control that will let go of your family I can't like oh that so we're gonna have to inventory where all the trouble is. And we are very good at inventorying. Everybody who came to AA is an expert at inventory, but not themselves. We keep very close track of people all around us and the news and the world and all that, and we inventory, boy, we inventory all night. Sometimes we can't even sleep because we're still inventorying. One more damn thing they did. I forgot about that. So we've got a list a mile long of the amends that are owed to us. And our sponsor says, I'm going to teach you a new spiritual principle. All of your problems were created by you. There's none of them that came from outside. They all were created by you, and you go, wow, that's horrible news. No, it's good news. That means that all of your problems can be removed without anybody else changing. That's pretty good news, isn't it? If it wasn't all caused by me, I would need many, many people to change before I could be happy and before these problems were gone. So it sounds like it's bad news, but it's wonderful news. All of my problems were caused by Me. Why would I cause problems for myself? Because we have a thing called character defects. They come from our ego and they come from the desire for sex, security, and a place in society. And these instinctual drives are absolutely necessary to survive as human beings. We need them to form societies, to reproduce and to feed ourselves and to achieve some sort of security so they're absolutely necessary. The problem is in self-centered alcoholics, self-centred in the extreme, the instinctual drives have become the controlling force and they are in charge of our lives and we are We have mistakenly fell for the idea that the only way to be happy is to meet these demands. If I feel insecure about money, I've got to get more money. If I'm insecure about sex, I'm going to get sex. If I am insecure about not being an important person, I have to be the president of the company because once I get there then this stuff will stop. Talk to people amongst us who have really succeeded and ask them if that stuff went away. And it didn't. Talk to the people who ended up with two or three million dollars. Did you go to bed every night being financially secure? No, I was worried that the market would take it all away, I never did blah blah blah. Talk to that handsomest guy there and he's got all these girlfriends, do you feel more secure about your sexuality? No, but I'm afraid one of them is going to run away. God damn, this supply stuff doesn't seem to be working. No matter how much you accumulate, it doesn't fix the problem, does it? No, because we cannot accumulate enough to keep up with the demands that we can keep creating. That's how powerful these instinctual drives are. And so we have to abandon that formula and come up with a spiritual answer, which is to reduce the demand so they don't bother us. And I went, are you sure? My sponsor, I remember the first time he told me that, he said, we can achieve financial security for you without any more money showing up. And I said, well, I'm not sure. And I thought, well technically that might be true. But I think it would be better if the money showed up Rather than feeling safe in God's arms with a zero bank account. I understood it was technically possible, but the money idea sounded better. But then I started realizing you really could be comfortable that day, in this present moment, with everything just the way it is. I spent my entire life about to be happy. I was this close a couple times. I was actually almost ready to admit, you know, I am happy. But it occurred to me that I wasn't totally happy because I could think of something else if I had. I'd be even happier. And so it started in grammar school. Boy, once I get out of grammar school, I'm going to be really happy. I see those kids in high school. They're really happy like, this freaking high school sucks. I guess once you get out of high school, you get into college, then you're really going to be happy. Look at those college kids, and then you get in college. Boy, this college doesn't work at all. Well, I guess when you get married, that's it. When you get marriage, you go, Jesus! That was better when I was single. What the hell is going on? I think if I had some kids, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Happy? Are you kidding? Who the hell sat down? Six kids. Jesus. Well, then what is going to make me? Well, I'll go fly jets and I'll be overseas and I'd be just, oh boy, it'll be the most wonderful thing in the world. And even that eventually wouldn't work. And we found that there was no way to pursue happiness. It just was never going to, you're never going to get there. You know why you can't get there? Because you already are there. We never stopped to take a look and see if we weren't really happy right now. Let's really take an inventory. Let's really look. And I would come to my sponsor and I'd go, Bill, Bill the sky is falling. The sky was always falling. Guess what's going to happen? The colonel looked at me funny and he'd go okay I hear that. But look you've got six months now. You're the treasurer of the group and you're going to speak Saturday night over at Annandale and people really like it they really think you're funny and they really enjoy it a lot of people been telling me that you're really quite a nice guy really I think things are probably pretty good and I would say well if you look at it that way maybe it is pretty good so I had just concluded it was terrible and I had a short conversation and suddenly it's really pretty good. I was wrong. He was right. It is pretty good, but I need help seeing it. I need to help seeing that's what I need. We need each other to help see what's really happening, to see how wonderful AA is, to how wonderful it is to see a new person sober up. And so we... Boy, my voice is just running out in time. So we have this wonderful four-step inventory and I'm not... In a meeting like this, we're not going to get the big book out and go through all the columns of how to inventory the sex security in society and the fears and the resentments in sex. When you get to this, if you're new, be sure to use both books and start with the 12 and 12. This is my own take, because the 12 and 12 explains where all these defects come from, that they come from these instinctual drives. And these instinctural drives were God-given. You did not create lust out of your being rotten. This just shows up for everyone. These things, they're just part of being a human being. So you can't even take credit for these things. Those of us that were guilty, oh my God, I'm just in there. And as Bill says, the guilty ones, they don't want to look and the prideful ones don't have any character defects so they don' t have to look. And that's why we need a sponsor to help us see what is it that is causing us to be in pain all the time? This is not an inventory about harm to other people yet. But this is an inventory of why am I so unhappy all the time? What is wrong with me? Well, we're going to get it all on paper because later on we're going to take all of this. We're going run it by someone else to verify, to see the third dimension of it. Then we're gonna take the whole package to God and if we can get willing enough he's gonna start lifting this stuff out. It's a very effortless problem. all that's required is letting go and it may take the rest of your life to let go because we just don't want to let go that much and I will get to that when we get to step six and we'll find out what the real problem is in letting go so we've gotten all up through taking a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. We haven't taken it, we're not going to do that tonight. We're just trying to see the big picture in terms of ending self-centeredness. And I'll just close with this that when you tell a self-centred person that self- centeredness is their problem and they finally see it, their first reaction is, I'm going to something about that. That's their first reaction. You're right, I am self-centered. I think I'll just fix that. Okay, how? How? How are you going to not be self-centred? Well, I'll just become unself-centered. What is that exactly? Well I'll think of other people once in a while. Yes, selfishly you'll probably go, you know what, I'm going to mow his lawn, he might loan me his car it's impossible for us to do anything from a self-centered position that doesn't have bad motives it just can't happen Bill writes we learned how to we don't know what kindness is but we understand the kind people seem to get ahead so we go what is kind well like if you offered to open the door for somebody that's kind yeah and it'll get you ahead yeah if you're opening the door in order to get ahead it's not kind it's acting like your kind I want people to think I'm kind hi hi you think I am kind yet good do I get something we don't know that being kind is its own reward so we're going to find all those things out as we move along and oh I didn't finish the The answer to how to become un-self-centered is to become God-centered, the only way out. There's no other freedom from that and the painful price of doing that is called humility and we have a whole step about that and we'll get there. I thank everybody for their attention, Guy thanks for inviting me over and that's it.