Why Step 10 Is Adjusting the Steering Wheel, Not Visiting the Garage – Tim M.

thank you uh to set the tone for the meeting i will read an extract from chapter one bill's story page third pages 13 and 14 um i i was to test my new my thinking by the by the new god consciousness within common sense would thus become uncommon sense i wasto sit quietly when in doubt asking only for direction and strength to meet my problems as he would have me never was I to pray for myself except as my request bore on my usefulness to others then only might I expect to receive but that would be in great measure my friend promised when these things were done I would enter upon a new relationship with my creator that I would have the elements of a way of living which answered all my problems belief in the power of God plus enough willingness honesty and humility to establish and maintain a new order of things by the essential requirements. And the topic of tonight's meeting is working step 10 with a sponsee, and Tim will share anything between 30 and 45 minutes on the topic, after which the floor will be opened for questions rather than the typical sharing. And with that, I will now hand over to Tim. Thank you, everyone. Can you hear me, Alistair? good thanks so step 10 is slightly problematical because if you look at uh page 59 or the wall scrolls you've got 10 continue to take personal inventory and when we were when we wrong promptly admitted it and you've Got the 12 and 12 which has got its own take on step 12 on step 10 rather which I'm not going to go into and then you've got what happens in in AA in general um you'll usually hear people sharing well I did a step 10 last night and what they did is they did a very sort of long written analysis of some emotional turmoil that's what it usually means um like a mini step four or something at night and uh I think it's important I've said it before, it's important to remember with any of the steps that this little summary on page 59 is just that. It's simply an aid memoir for what the step contains. It's not a set of instructions for how to do the step. And as someone rightly said, that if you do the steps off the wall, if you did the program off the world, you'll have an off the board program. So if you try to do and people do that, they try to define what a step is just looking at that. So that's all I need. I don't need anything else. So you get these complex analyses of shortcomings versus defects of character. And people are saying this is the people are just going on what it says in step six and seven on the wall or on page 59. and there's no other information available so we've just got to divine it from the words and of course that won't do it's it's like if you've got a recipe book and in in the recipe book it says it's got sort of page 17 quiche lorraine uh page 18 black forest gato you might have something of an idea of what the recipe is but that falls very far short of knowing how to make a quiche lorraine or a black forest gâteau and you wouldn't want to try and make up the recipe based on your sort of general knowledge of what a quuche lorrain from Tesco's is like well particularly the quiche Lorraine from Tescos let alone the black forest gateau don't get me going on British versions of French cooking but anyway that's possibly a digression although not necessarily so um uh what does step 10 mean in practice well i it's very clear that well first of all if you've done a step four that's not it for inventory for the rest of your life we're going to have to do something and as far as actual instructions in the book for step 10 are concerned they're actually contained in step 10 proper we'll call it pages 84 to 85 and then there is an implementation of the idea of step 10 continue to take personal inventory and so-called nightly review when we retire at night on page 86 and then is the principle of step 12 which says we practice these principles which principles the above principles in the preceding 11 steps in all our affairs in other words we continue to practice all of the steps as and when needed when the situation arises so whatever tools are available you use them as needed so the question you know if one does an in-depth inventory either of one's whole life on a particular area or either on your whole life or on a particular area uh you know are you doing another step four are you doing step 10 i think the answer is yes you're doing step 10 in the form of using the step 4 instructions as your method of doing it but the step you're actually practicing is step 10 but it's employing step 4 methods so you've really got three ways of doing inventory in aa there's page 84 to 85 which i'll come to there's the step 11 review and there's the um the step four method and uh i don't know about your sponsees but mine occasionally have a tiny little tendency to be a little bit self-absorbed um and i have a teeny little tendency to be a Little bit self absorbed at times so i have to be very careful with inventory that it doesn't become socially acceptable form of self-obsession so the first principle I introduce with people is yes you're going to need to continue to take inventory but what we want to do it's like if you've got a bacterial infection they first of all give you the standard antibiotic and if that doesn't work they'll escalate to a more potent one and if you really if you're really struggling they'll go to the special cupboard and get the very very special antibiotic which they don't want to release you know uh and have create uh resistant bacteria so that it's under very controlled conditions that they will administer certain bacteria and i think certain antibiotics and so i think it's the same with the continuing to take personal inventory i think one should adopt the step 10 practice per the big book very very frequently the nightly review with a lightness of touch but we'll come to that when we do step 11 and the step four style inventory either resentment inventory the uh page 67 questions the fear inventory the sex inventory and the construction of a sane at sane and sound ideal only infrequently so it's in that sort of ascending order of severity so not immediately to leap to doing a daily step four i've met people who've done that drives them completely mad every day sit down do half an hour of very complex written analysis and they find themselves writing the same things over and over andover so sometimes you have to deprogram people from that uh obsessive compulsive sort of nitpicking at oneself um and it's like these uh you know people sometimes obsessive-compulsive disorder i'm told can manifest it in in sort of scratching the same piece of skin again and again and again until it becomes uh sort of red and raw maybe claire can enlighten us on whether that's an accurate portrayal of that particular symptom not because she suffers it from herself i think she may have some professional insight into that but you know what i mean i think inventory can become like that so you need to let people off the hook really in a sense And then let's go to 84. So what does it actually say? This thought brings us to step 10, which suggests we can take we continue to take personal inventory and continue to set right any new mistakes as we go along. So this is giving us a general guide to what step 10 is about. And if you want an image, you're adjusting the steering wheel so you're not getting out of the car. You're not taking the car to the garage every five minutes. You're adjusting the steering wheel as you go along. But that's not an actual instruction. It's just a sort of concept of what the step involves. We vigorously commence this way of living as we cleaned up the past. So to me, this is the point at which we start to clean up the fast is in step four. So I give people the principles of 10, 11 and 12 as soon as they start step four, In other words, as soon as they take step three, their life goes on two tracks is the overall arc of four through nine. And then there's the daily arc of 10, 11 and 12. We've entered the world of the spirit where our next function is to grow in understanding and effectiveness. Now, that's, again, just a general description of what we're undertaking here. This is not an overnight matter. It should continue for a lifetime. uh so again this is step 10 sometimes people say i've completed the steps and i'm i think complete the first nine steps but i'm not sure you can complete um the last three uh i acquaintance of mine in aa many years ago talked about how she was sober a fair amount i was 13 14 years very involved in intergroup and she said how she'd got to the end of the steps with her sponsor and they got a little cake and they put a candle on the cake and они lit the candle and they blew it out i don't know what significance this had and said to mark the fact that we completed the steps and within about two years we never saw her again so she she so completed them she left a a and you don't want to do that you don'T want to think you've completed the steps with or without a candle um you know i'm afraid you're sort of rather locked into this um this is why in step three you get people to think very carefully before they take step three uh i i do you want to doing this for the rest of your life and now you only have to swallow it a day at a time. It's like with laundry or, you know, do you commit to doing laundry for the rest of your life? Do you commit To brushing your teeth for the rest of my life? Yes, but you don't have to pre brush your teeth of the next 60 years, you just have to commit to the daily actions. Now here, it actually begins to get into instruction. So continue to watch for selfishness, dishonesty, resentment and fear. now these are the only four that it asks us to look for but very clearly uh the spirit of this is to be looking out for any defective character it can't possibly be their intention um to uh simply watch for these but you know if you've got a problem i don't know with sort of punching people in the face or something well don't worry about that it's not on the list of four so you can do that you can go to to don't quick save even exists anymore but you can goes to little and punch people in queue if you want because that's all right it's is not on the list so you're fine we must have none of that legalism so everything falls under those What I get people to look for is to consider resentment in this context to be any upset, any emotional upset or negative reaction to the present or the past, fancied or real. So a lot of people get very upset about things which aren't really there. Now that the upset is real. Well, I said I told the story before I said Jonathan once about something, but it's my lived experience he said yes but that doesn't mean it's real so uh you watch out for any form of upset about the past or the present that's resentment any form of offset about the future that's fear dishonesty you've got uh i think four basic types of dishonesty concealment distortion fabrication and uh uh underhand behavior scheming so and those four are quite distinct so the first three are about representations of the truth you're either concealing the truth to yourself or to others you're distorting it or you're making up something which isn't there the fourth one is to do with honest dealings i think and this comes under various headings that there can be active scheming and plotting to get one over on someone else but also manipulation falls under this category now the difficulty here is is with politeness so politeness is a form of deceit and manipulation uh so when you say you know i'd be terribly pleased if if you could find a moment to do dot dot dot it's it's not strictly honest it's a manipulative way or i'd be so grateful if you did so and so it's manipulation but it's socially acceptable one which is part of the culture that to exhibit edit so etiquette and politeness require a certain amount of effectively manipulation deception about your true intent and your true feelings about a situation we're not talking about that we're talking about um something which crosses the line in terms of manipulation or scheming or deception of another person and selfishness is a very very big bag indeed which hold which contains everything else so every other defective character is essentially a form of selfishness putting self putting oneself in formal ahead of someone else the two things I would add to this list which are I mean they are comprised within it one way or another but particular mental habits to watch out for um are fantasy and nostalgia you can slot them in usually whether you slot them under dishonesty or selfishness it doesn't really matter but i find it can be very helpful to keep a particular eye out for those and to also recognize that that these come in sometimes unrecognized forms so um um say fear can come in the form of fretting and worrying and brooding um uh what else uh selfishness can come in the form of all of the plots and schemes to fix change and control another person plan scheme plot fix change control um resentment can come in the format of grumbling and and moaning and griping and criticizing and judging all those things so really one must be watching out for the full range of everything one is capable of now the question is there's an important principle here to convey um i've had sponsees object understandably to steps 10 and 11 particularly the review part of 10 and11 or Or 10 or 11, rather the nightly review. So I'm a bit tired this evening. I'm slightly all over the place. People object to those steps on the basis that, well, we're being hard on ourselves and very, very hard on our selves. And one of my people will say one of My Character Defects is beating myself up. And another one is perfectionism. And I'm just I'm not going to do this because it's just beating myself up and it's just being perfectionistic. If your arm was broken, you wouldn't say, well, I'm not I don't want to seek perfect restoration of the motor function in my left arm. because that's just being perfectionistic so I shall put up with a broken arm uh one wouldn't do that and also one wouldn'T if you went to doctors and you had a uh um yeah you had an x-ray done the the uh doctor said well you've got a fracture of the I don't know the the distal epiphysis of your ulna you wouldn't say you're being really hard on me you're beating me up no the doctor's just diagnosed what's wrong with you do you want to get it fixed or don't you now and this is relevant here when you're watching you are the watcher you are not the thing that you're watching you're looking for these characteristics cropping up where in your belief your your beliefs your thinking your behavior so what you're looking at is the tools that you're using for living and who wouldn't want better tools who who wouldn'T want to wear better clothes who wouldn'T WANT TO TO EAT BETTER FOOD SO THIS IS THE WAY I WAS EXPLAINING IT IS IS YOU'RE KEEPING AN EYE ON THIS STUFF SO THAT YOUR LIFE WILL IMPROVE THESE ARE NOT DEFECTS OF YOURS IN THAT They're not they're not you. They're what you're carrying around and don't want to be. So it's always in your interest to spot these. But to treat the faculty of watching as being like one of those antivirus programs, which is constantly running in the background, scanning this and scanning that. But if you if you're at least if your computer is powerful enough, it doesn't slow down the running of your computer and the performance of your daily tasks. You're still able to do everything without any compromise whatsoever. So only flags up a problem. If there is one, you're not constantly obsessed with yourself. So it's developing the ability as developing a sense of mindfulness towards one's own beliefs, thinking and behavior, particularly the thinking as it proceeds in real time. When these crop up, we analyze them at great. Oh, no, it doesn't say that. It says we ask God at once to remove them because this is, of course, what everyone does. um because i need to talk to you about my resentment and you're like how do you know no i know you've got one how doyouknow you need totalk about the resentment maybe you just need to ask god to remove it or do the prayers on page 67 or you know i don't know go and eat a cake or something but just drop it just drop it. I'm sure you've seen the Bob Newhart sketch, Stop It. If you haven't seen the Bob Newheart sketch, stop it. Go and watch it immediately after this. Get a YouTube, Bob Newhardt, N-E-W-H-A-R-T, and stop it, so we've already proved in step four that resentment is futile and fatal. We've already proven that fear is nonsense created out of the illusion that we are physical beings so we don't need to re-analyze them there's a caveat later on I'll come to that so basically what we want to do is immediately adjust back to the present back to awareness of the presence of God back to the task at hand so when it says now it does say we just discuss them with someone immediately and make amends quickly if we have harmed anyone now we discuss themwith someone immediately the caveat if you have a novel situation which requires negotiation then you might need to discuss it with someone else if you've got a practical course of action that you're uncertain of in terms of how to fix something then of course you have to discussit with someone elses but I found even in my early years the need the actual need to do this was infrequent uh i did need to do daily debriefing with friends and i still do but uh i only call people during the day or interrupt them with a rapid fire troubleshooting round of right this is the situation how should I look at it what should I do then immediately get back to the task at hand. The last clause of that phrase of that sentence we discuss them with someone immediately and make amends quickly if we have harmed anyone there is ambiguity unfortunately the ambiguity is the scope of the conditional clause so if we have harmed Anyone does that govern just we make amens quickly if we have harmed anyone or we discuss and make amends quickly if we've harmed anyone i take the first one so we discuss anything of importance with someone uh but the making amends quick is obviously only if we have harmed someone so we do get to discuss things even if we haven't harmed someone so harming someone is not the only condition for discussion um then we resolutely you turn our thoughts to someone we can help love and tolerance of others is our code uh now sometimes uh this operates at two levels the first level at which this operates is sometimes i fall into some complacency of some description and i just are i'm just not doing i'm not going to enough meetings i'm talking to enough people i'm making enough effort with my service there There's always little extra bits of service you can do if you put your mind to it. Sometimes the turning of thoughts means turning your thoughts to the task at hand from which someone will benefit. So you repurpose the task ahead as being something for the benefit of the person that is ultimately for or. sometimes what you can do and this is a very good trick whatever you're going through imagine when you're next to the meeting how you'll share about how you're currently using the program to address this situation and turn it around with God's help so you're immediately repurposing the very cause of the upset or whatever it is to being uh something that you can use to help other people and so this comes straight from the big book where it talks about capitalizing when trouble comes we capitalize it uh using it as an opportunity to demonstrate god's omnipotence and you can activate that straight away i remember i i did that when um you know so when i don't know what disaster catastrophe when very serious events have occurred particularly in my family to immediately lock you know you lock on to that method and say right this is the test it was always coming I'm going to use this as a test of can I remember and apply the program and recall as much as possible of what is going on that I can then use this in meetings to demonstrate how the program works completely changes your attitude to the crisis situation now the next passage is strictly a set of promises what i encourage people to do um there are a couple of things here that i can use i can turn them into instructions so that one tries to make the most out of this we have ceased fighting anything or anyone and to practice using this as a corrective measure who in my life am i currently in conflict with what would happen if i stopped fighting and fighting can come in all sorts of forms it can come in the form of arguing answering back um fixed change control it can comes in the format of uh uh repeated requests when one request would do like if you request something once and the person doesn't do it they have you know because i haven't been heard no they've heard you they just don't they're just not going to do it and so you don't so fighting can take all sorts of different forms just to leave things be um other good examples of how you can encourage people to do this is uh someone someone i don't know where this tape is going but well i'm just going to go for it someone called me a few i don't know a couple years ago about their home group and they said the group consciences were going on for like two hours and they had a back like having a group conscience once or twice a month and they Had a backlog of about four months of suggestions from people about how to change the group and ceasing fighting can be just go to your home group share for three minutes and keep your mouth shut in business meetings and group conscience meetings there's nothing worse than a group where you've got sort of 47 people trying to basically fight the reality of what the group peers and trying to change it the whole time so just to leave as many things be as possible leave as Many people be as far as possible reserve keep your powder dry and pick your battles what else can we look at here we feel as though we've been placed in a position of neutrality safe and protected i have mentally a sort of space i can go to which is a place of complete neutrality in which i'm safe and protected and i encourage people to visualize this themselves particularly in the minutes before going to sleep imagining like your your being your spirit your aura whatever you want to call it traveling to this place which is real reality with this realm being like a shadow land or a stage and the other place being real reality where everything is neutral where everything is safe where you're protected and i'm in a position now because i've done this such a lot i can just go like that and be there and i'M FINE it's a very helpful thing to foster so this stuff will happen automatically but it doesn't hurt to give it a helping hand So there's no conflict between turning everything over to God and doing your bit. And the principle here is God will do for you what you can't do for yourself, but God won't do for you, what you CAN do for your self. It is easy to let up on the spiritual program of action rest on our laurels um uh i think it's well said that the laurels are the sense of achievement from having completed the first nine steps sometimes people say they're resting on their laurels now unless you finish the first line steps it ain't your laurels you're resting on it's something else you might want i don't want to alarm you but you might want to just stand up and see what you're sitting in because it ain't laurels um we're headed for trouble if we do for alcohol is a subtle thing we're not cured of alcoholism what we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition and now it's that's all lovely blah blah now we have the instructions every day is a day when we must carry the vision of god's will into all of our activities i get an exercise i get people to do i don't know if i mentioned this before but it won't hurt to mention it again because we've all got goldfish brains um uh the book talks about a sane and sound ideal on page 69 as a problem solving tool here it talks about the vision of godís will uh in the 12 and 12 and step 11 it talks about if an architect is going to build a building he has to visualize it first otherwise nothing is goingto get built and on page 83 it talks about there is a long period of reconstruction ahead and of course reconstruction can't take place without a vision now i think there's a balance here uh between on one hand asking god what to do in the moment and being flexible and adaptable and all of those things but i think it's also important when i get to the end of a step nine process with people i get them to do something that i do whenever i'm in trouble in an area is to have a sane and sound ideal stroke vision of god's will for me in that area so those beliefs thinking patterns and behavior patterns which act as corrective measures to current problems so that i've got a sense of what i'm trying to do so one of the things i've had with sponsorship which i'm gradually getting better at is is i'm i'm a little more patient than i used to be and so when the phone is ringing when i sit ringing there are the vision that the same as sound line bill the vision of god's will is to to be patient to try to sit down rather than pace uh all sorts of other little tricks to make sure that i'm responding in as measured a way as i can master on the day in question so so i'm not just going into things situations blindly i'm going in with a sense of what i should be now the progress towards those sane and sound ideals if you're anything like me is painfully and embarrassingly slow but it's better than nothing and uh it's I don't know what the alternative is other than to have that vision of God's will how can I best serve thee thy will not mine be done that's a very powerful restorative for a situation where I give this to people at line as a restorative when they're in a situation involving other people particularly work family home group where they're all in a tizzy and all mentally separated from anyone everyone around them is stuck in their own head because i did this i remembered a family situation in my family situations throw us together in the same room on occasion very infrequently but when they do none of us know what to say to each other And we can just about put names to faces, but it's awkward. It's embarrassing. People make the most appalling small talk. I mean, small talk that people have to leave the room. They're so embarrassed about how trivial and unreal it is. I remember a particular can are going on for about 20 minutes one year about whether or not we have they have Christmas crackers in France and someone actually could not stand. They had to leave the room because they were going to explode. And these situations are so tense. I just say no now. I just don't go. Everything's much happier. But in situations like that, I would as soon as I say, God, how can I best serve thee? thy will not mine be done, I can start to contribute more constructively and humanly to the situation. These are thoughts which must go with us constantly. So I think step 10 is a game of two halves. You're on one hand spotting all the stuff you shouldn't be doing, particularly with your mind. People get quite good at behaviour after a while in AA but the mind seems to be the thing which takes the longest time to catch up so on one hand on page 84 you're spotting all the problems and in step 10 on page 85 you're saying well what's the solution the solution is to be constantly thinking what can I constructively contribute to this situation we can exercise our willpower along this line all we wish is the proper use of the will so this results a question of if I let go does that mean I sit there like a potato no you you you engage vigorously in the world and there's a line earlier on that we're intelligent agents uh of god's ever advancing creation so it doesn't mean that one's not vigorously active it's just the power the direction for the vigorous activity and the power comes from god rather than selfish demands and the next bit is a bit of blah blah it's very nice blah blah but it is by no instructions in it but much has already been said about receiving a strength inspiration and direction from him who has all knowledge and power um so uh when people have a uh a problematical conception of god i say just rip write down what you think your concept of god is now time to rip up the piece of paper and say go with this so who is god god is that which has all knowledge and power and is the source of strength inspiration direction go with that for five years ten years and then come back and see how that works it's a great definition of the higher power what is god the sort that the repository of all knowledge and all power what do you get from God's strength inspiration direction and you can turn it into a prayer oh you who have all knowledge and power please give me strength inspiration and direction and that is not a bad prayer and the next bit you have to caution people if we've carefully followed directions we've begun to sense the flow of his spirit into us to some extent we have become god conscious uh we have begun to develop this vital sixth sense now what some people understand this to mean is that you sort of have some paranormal experience and if you're not having a paranormal experience with the presence of the actual creator of the universe in your living room with you or inside you then if you don't have that experience well i'm obviously doing something wrong and there are some lovely people in AA who wax very lyrical about very conscious experiences of God that's very very good but I don't know if what they're experiencing is that or if it's something else it may be I'm experiencing it but just terming it very differently as I mentioned before sometimes you leave the house in the morning and you realize oh I'm having a nice day sun shining walking there's a squirrel over there that's nice just having a Nice Time other people might characterize that as feeling the presence of god whereas i think if it's seeing a squirrel i'm thinking that's nice could be this could be exactly the same actual experience but which has been construed and communicated in a different way so just because the sponsee doesn't feel the spirit of god the the holy spirit moving within him um doesn't mean something has gone wrong and in fact if they do it could be a sign of a mental health issue which indeed sometimes it is so i had someone once who um started to experience uh god very in a very kind of real and tangible way and um the the vision started to become sexualized which i don't think is help i don'T think that's part of the program now if that happens you might want to tone down the step 11 and just keep it super practical um so you've got to be slightly careful with that now the question is well what does it mean uh it means that you are more likely than otherwise to remember to call your mother you realize you start to realize two days before the laundry tablets run out that you need to go and buy some new ones rather than only realizing once they've run out it's remembering to do the things you said you were going to do it's it's saying something particularly acidic and for the first time in your life realizing oh i shouldn't have said that i'm going to apologize right now so you think that sent the flow of god's spirit into you is some sort of uplifting you know like being lifted on angel wings very often it's a sudden and new sense of responsibility and guilt for things undone that's how you know god is your your when you now feel guilty for things which are wrong which you wouldn't have batted an eyelash i i lit what do you bat eyelids eyelashes whatever that you wouldn'T have battled an eyelid at six months ago but suddenly you're wet you narrow you're you're now aware of your effect on other people i think that it's awareness of reality that's what happens and generally having better ideas than you did before so i thinkthat's probably all i've got on step 10 so alistair do you want to uh turn it over for questions thank you very much tim yeah and with that um i'll open up the meeting forum for questions which can be done by the raised hand function in zoom or you can message me through the chat function and I can ask Tim directly. If all else fails, please just wave your hand at the camera and I will try to come to you and we'll try to close on the hour mark. Sometimes we run a bit over for questions. Seamus. Hi, am I unmuted? Yes. OK. Thank you. Thank you, Tim. I've got two questions, actually. One is kind of like one I baked earlier, so to speak. It was on my mind before the session. And what I'm going to ask right now is more of a technical nature. Does the pre-baked question relate more to the 12 and 12? I won't ask that unless we have time. But the technical question is to do with the big four. So we've got to continue to watch for selfishness, dishonesty, resentment and fear. I've always found a very helpful list. You're trying to simplify people's approach to step four. Look no further. These are the big ones. But there is something a bit odd about it, which I never really understood, never really dared to articulate my uncertainty about it. Which is that the list is in a different order from what we had in step four, where we're told that resentment is number one offender and lying behind that is selfishness, dishonesty, self-seeking and fear. So that's a that's A different list. And then and then again, if you go back to step three, you've got some first uh selfishness um which is defined as being i lost the place um yeah um to do with uh self-centeredness resentments and self-pity and then selfishness being driven by a hundred forms of fear self-delusion self-seeking and self pity now i can almost hear the answer ringing my ears that you know these are these are concepts which are inevitably fuzzy at the edges you know overlapping they don't lend themselves to crisp definition um but i have to there's certainly been times in my own recovery and i've been trying to help other people perhaps when i'd have given my it through a venn diagram if the big book had been written by the heart of Harvard Business School at some point would have been a Venn diagram showing how these how these concepts overlap and kind of interlock with each other so that's my question really is there any significance at all to be attached to the varying orders and just one further point on that when you're talking about dishonesty you didn't specifically mention self-delusion and i've always thought that self- delusion seems to be the source of the problem more than almost anything else um in the people that i i find myself dealing with it's the stories they tell themselves which are very often you know completely wrong when you point that out so oh if i haven't realized that no sort of end of problem so i'll stop there okay so there are lots of questions there so uh just in the order that i remember them this is like the generation game with the conveyor belt um if any of you are old enough to remember that or british enough to remember uh so the yeah so those forms of dishonesty uh you've got concealment distortion fabrication those can be towards oneself or towards other people so there's equal opportunities but the same scheme applies to both concealment distortion or fabrication uh so i think that covers that one um with the order i'd be extremely hesitant to read an order into them without further evidence uh there there is what there are some places where there are extraordinary coincidences with order i'll give you one uh it talks about when the spiritual condition clears up let me just get the exact quotation i want to get the exactly quotation out um here on page 64 where is it when the spiritual malady is overcome so spiritual we straighten out mentally mentally and physically physically spiritually mentally physically mind spirit mind body so you get spiritually straight first and your mind clears up then your what your circumstances clear up third and it echoes that later on the big book that spiritual the spiritual comes first the material comes second and in step 11 on page 86 when you ask god what you ask God for is inspiration an intuitive thought or a decision which mirror those three levels of spirit mind body in that specific order so there are occasional coincidences there I've not discerned any particular significance to the ordering of uh resentment fear selfishness and dishonesty there there is that there are those little quartets which appear all the way through the big book another one is patient tolerant kind and loving and that occurs with some variation throughout the book the orders the order changes one of the words changes at a particular point so um i'm hesitant to read too much into it when bill wants to point something out he'll probably he will usually do it overtly those other little coincidences i suspect are inadvertent manifestations of his underlying design rather than treasures which are hidden in the style of the da vinci code um because people read all sorts of stuff into the big book as though there's buried treasure which has been left there on purpose and bill is you know giggling behind his hands trying to work out which smart alec is gonna is going to to join the dots and you know solve the riddle i don't think it's riddles uh now with selfishness um you've got you've got three big places where it gets described the first one is that little passage on 61 where it talks about let's while let's get the passage where is it or 62 rather selfishness self-centeredness and I mean there it's presenting them as as effective synonyms that being one thing it doesn't say those says that we think is the root of our troubles earlier on it gives self-centered and egocentric as synonymes by the way the way bill uses dashes is to say the thing before the dash is the same as the thing after the dash or the thing after the dash is entailed by the thing before the dash so in step one powerlessness entails our manageability they're not two unrelated motions one entails the other and because that's just how bill uses dashes so he's doing exactly the same there selfishness self-centeredness and then it's got these other then it'S got the subdivisions of fear self delusion self-seeking self-pity so you've got that little cluster there you've Got the page 67 questions which very clearly overlap so on page 67 when you say what my mistakes if you accurately answer what are all of my mistakes you'll capture everything this is self-seeking all the fear all the dishonesty all the faults all the wrongs because all of those things are by definition mistakes so those are deliberately overlapping terms and then you've got a completely different usage here on page uh 84 with um selfishness dishonesty resentment and fear being a little quartet which i think is supposed to capture the full gamut of human ills so i think selfishness here is since it's supposed to be it must be terribly broad really covers everything to do with self or all of those little self-aggrandizement self-abasement self this self as self delusion all of the forms of self come under that it's meant I use what I use it at any rate in a much narrower way on page 67 to really hone in so self-seeking is on page 67 is what am I after selfishness is where I'm putting my interests ahead of other people's and what I get people to do I think this is very helpful put yourself in the shoes of the other person in the situation ask what interests of mine being the other person are being compromised by the sponsor's behavior so so in the strict sense i would call selfishness where i put myself illegitimately ahead of other people but selfishness here is a much broader term which aims to capture everything does that cover i think that covers all your points Seamus yes yes thanks I was much more comprehensive than I was daring to hope actually thanks thanks very much Tim yeah it's great and what was the techie question on the 12 and 12 ah yes um uh it's the spiritual axiom uh I had to do a talk about this and it got me thinking about the spiritual Axiom it's a spiritual axion that every time we are disturbed there is something the matter with us yeah and i got to thinking about this and i thought about what about dead mothers so your mother dies and you're upset or disturbed um does that really uh is that really what we're trying to say or or is it not not because whenever i look at the big book i cannot actually get to the spiritual action the closest i can get is um sometimes they hurt us seemingly without provocation but we invariably find that sometime in the past we've made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt um so i'm not sure about the spiritual axiom and it is is grief a form of um disturbance which is you know to some extent um a matter of a matter of choice i mean many great religions have um practices around grief that suggests that it's something to be um well if not welcome certainly accommodated um rather than shall we say got rid of do you see where i'm what yeah absolutely yeah so it's a it's uh it's a well-established question um and it's a good one it's helpful one um let's make i'm going to make a three-way distinction there are types of emotion that i would refer to as notifications so fear is a notification that my mind has spotted a threat. That's the nature of fear. Resentment is a notification from or a little burst of anger, not resent, a little bust of anger. So fear in the moment when a fear hits you, it's it's a little notification that there is a threat. When anger hits me, it's a little notification that something does not match the blueprint for how things should be. Guilt is a notification that my conduct doesn't match the blueprint for what my conduct should be, so you've got three basic notifications, anger, fear and guilt um and also as a subset of guilt there is shame which is a sense that i in my being am not as the blueprint would stipulate now the thing about these emotions i oh i don't think i i'm skeptical about calling them emotions even i liken them to lights on the dashboard of the car. Either they're on or they're off. They have no colour, they have no flavour, they are dull. I don't know about your rage but when I'm raging it doesn't matter what I'm raging about the feeling is the same. When I'm frightened whether I'm threatened of something ridiculous and trivial or something um world churning the feeling is the same they're not really emotions and rabbi manis friedman said a very extraordinary thing in one of his talks he's very in manis freedman he's very interesting there's almost everything he says is entirely unexpected some of his stuff is is really for you know for family only as it were you know unless you're orthodox and jewish it won't be of any relevance whatsoever because he addresses specifically matters within that domain but lots of his stuff is of universal application one's going to be slightly careful what one's listening to some stuff is completely impenetrable um but he said that anger is not an emotion it's a barrier between you and the other person which prevents you from feeling anything real and I think there's something to that so on one hand we've got these notification style emotions I'm using emotions in inverted commas so we've got these notifications on the other hand you know it depends what music you listen to some music is very monochrome emotionally there's a lot of excitement there's not a lot going on emotionally but if you listen to music which has got a lot going on emotionally so i don't know mozart's um the 40th or the 41st symphony um uh any beethoven piano snarter has got a huge amount going on emotionally if you sit if you really listen and listen a few times in the space of half an hour you will have a thousand emotions none of which are remotely describable that's emotion or when you spend an afternoon with someone and you have this and you're genuinely with them you havethis kaleidoscope of emotions the same as when you're with small children or animals or with nature kaleidoscopes of emotions all of which defy description there's a categorical difference between uh a fire alarm and a symphony orchestra playing and that's the difference between on one hand anger fear guilt shame and on the other hand all of the emotions of life now onto this so those are two those are three types of emotions are two types the third type is is disturbance and disturbance is it's to do with a state where of resistance of reality where i'm resisting reality in some way and it activates all sorts of as it were subroutines or subsystems of fixed change control plot plan scheme uh fret brood worry moan wine gripe and all now there are flavors within though because that's the superstructure built on top of the the alarm comes in and the department gets activated and all of the darkness the interesting darkness of coen brothers films resides in that disturbance realm and it is interesting it's not as interesting as Beethoven but it isn't it is interesting uh it's all as interesting als Mozart so what it's talking about is when I'm disturbed when I'M resisting reality the problem is me not reality now when you come to there I think there are two there are two types of event which are of interest here the first one when in a healthy person let's say you are racing for a train and it's cancelled you might have the emotion of disappointment you might be in a hurry you might not have the emotional anger you might have all sorts of different emotions in a healthy person they'll pass straight through you and then you resolve what to do, and then you get on with your day. And there might be a little residue left behind. If you're ever at a train station or an airport and you see something which is canceled and you watch different people's reactions, and some people couldn't give a shit. They're just reading their book like Honey Badger doesn't give it down. Other people immediately start storming up to the desk and they transport themselves into the state of disturbance and stay stuck there so that state of disturbance is a state where the fire alarm has gone off everyone else has turned the fire alarm off and has got on with their day whereas the disturbed person is sitting shouting at the fire alarm rather than turning it off and that's your fundamental difference when you come to grief as is the people always go to the most difficult example and c.s lewis says if you if you're struggling with theological philosophical question it's usually best to start with most banal of incidents and gradually progress towards the most extreme so if you're learning how to forgive you want to forgive barbara who does the flowers in the church down the road who you can't stand there's a teeth clack when she's eating start with start with something like that rather than the nazis don't try and forgive the nazies first put them maybe a little bit further down the list it's like people are questioning about god you know well what about syria well yeah what about what about geraniums yeah what why are you starting why are starting with Syria? Can't we start with something more banal? But the grief is a good example and it's interesting for all sorts of reasons. Grief and death, okay let's cover both of those in the next minute or so. Anthropologists will report that every society responds very very differently to death if you look at reports of how people would deal with infant mortality in the middle ages very very different to how people respond to infant mortality now um the same with death in death in the community death in villages uh children in some cultures they're born into a community and they're raised by the whole community And there still remains a relationship between the biological mother and the child, but it's not the same relationship as in the West. So the idea that any particular emotional reaction is somehow innate, that there are predispositions towards that. But the cultural differences are so radical. I'd be very hard pushed to say that one is necessarily condemned to a particular reaction. and the best examples of this uh two examples uh if you hang around very old people in aa you'll see a lot of them die of cancer mostly because of smoking so usually lung cancer or pancreatic cancer liver cancer it seems to be the things that that get people and you meet people who i've met a number of people over the years who died in aa of of very and pancreatal cancer in particular is a very, very difficult one for various reasons. And to watch people go through those experiences where one would say one is necessarily condemned to enormous amounts of emotional suffering, people to walk through those with grace and cheerfulness. And I've seen people walk through grief with grace, and cheerfulness, but without even much resistance. So a lot of it has got them with grief particularly a lot of it has got to do with the preparation for it and rejigging your attachments whilst the people are still alive and if that if that rejiggering takes place you're going to have a completely different experience you're gonna have a completely different experienced when the person dies now when you have a very bad knock and you go into a grief process either it can be because a person has died or because there's been a radical change often there is a very very severe attachment which was created and fostered over many years and because you've established the structure just because and sometimes you don't realize the structure of attachment is there until the catastrophe happens and then you realize and you're like i i i would have liked to have known i was this attached before um so i've lost my i have no sense of smell now after covid um it's just not coming back and uh i wished i'd prepared for this but i didn't so there's a i'm afraid you just have to go through the process when the car stops the momentum will mean that whatever is not nailed down will fly through the windscreen you can't stop it on the basis you should have put a seat belt on so when something hits even if there was a mistake of building an attachment i'm afraid you have to go through the process and it's no you can'T it's too late to stop it because all of the events are in motion uh but i think it's possible to walk through with sufficient preparation to walk through one's people walk through their own death experiences and walk through the grief of very significant losses without disturbance in the sense that it's described in the big book so pain is inevitable but suffering is optional was the phrase that was always given to me and it says although a situation was not our fault so we're not responsible for situations but we're 100% responsible for our contribution to them and it talks about our troubles are not of our own making are of our making rather now clearly there are events which are not of our own making but the trouble is the disturbance about it so it's not I mean I've tried to give as comprehensive an answer as i can to essentially what is a philosophical question which keeps people uh keeps philosophers in in clover in as far as they're ever in clove for decades but that's the short answer seamus thanks thank you very much um if there is yeah any more questions sorry we were at five past not being the case um i'd like to hand it hand the meeting back to you tim uh to close with this serenity prayer thanks would you please help me close in the usual way god grant me serenity serenety so accept the things i cannot change the courage to change and the wisdom to know the difference thanks thanks everyone thank you