Why Steps 5 Through 7 Are Really About Smashing the Story You Made Up – Sandy B.
About This Speaker Tape
Sandy B., a beloved AA old-timer with 43 years of sobriety, speaks at the 18th Spring Conference in Cocoa Beach, Florida, offering a radically different perspective on Steps 5, 6, and 7. He frames the entire program through the lens of a Lakota Indian teaching he encountered at the Crazy Horse monument: that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. From this starting point, he argues that the purpose of the steps is not merely sobriety but spiritual awakening, and he works backward from that solution to redefine the problem as being spiritually asleep, trapped in a manufactured story of our own making.
Sandy uses vivid personal stories to illustrate how our self-created narratives cause all our suffering. He shares how he carried decades of shame from leaving Marine Corps aviation, believing his squadron despised him, only to learn 45 years later that he had been popular and admired. He describes the fifth step as the beginning of real humility, where a sponsor helps us see that our life story, the collection of all our manufactured problems, is largely wrong. The fears, resentments, and anger we carry were never real; they were reactions to a world we invented.
Moving into the sixth step, Sandy draws on the 12 and 12 to explore why we resist perfection. He uses a charming C.S. Lewis parable about a boy with a toothache who delays calling his mother for aspirin because he knows she will not stop at pain relief but will pursue perfect dental health. Similarly, we want 80% relief from our defects, not 100%, because total surrender means giving up control entirely. He notes that the only reason we received absolute release from alcohol was that it was killing us, but since gossip and greed are not fatal, we compromise.
Sandy closes with the seventh step and humility, explaining that every act of prayer, sponsorship, and meeting attendance is an act of humility because it acknowledges we cannot make it alone. He reframes pain as effort, like working out, and argues that the results of humility are magnificent. His final message inverts everything we were taught growing up: instead of making something of our lives through willpower, we should recognize it is Higher Power's life and let him make something wonderful out of us.
Topics
Timestamps
Full Transcript
There we go. Thank you Ralph and hi everybody my name is Sandy and I'm an
alcoholic. They indulged me and got me a bar stool to sit on. Standing on my knees
just is getting painful so I think I can see everybody from here so I think this
is...
alcoholic. They indulged me and got me a bar stool to sit on. Standing on my knees
just is getting painful so I think I can see everybody from here so I think this
is...
There we go. Thank you Ralph and hi everybody my name is Sandy and I'm an
alcoholic. They indulged me and got me a bar stool to sit on. Standing on my knees
just is getting painful so I think I can see everybody from here so I think this
is working okay. I agree with Polly this is indeed a wonderful assortment of
perspectives on spirituality that we've got assembled here and when I talk about
the steps I really don't talk about how to do them or how I sponsor someone to
do them.
I
mean lately I've been talking about what I see as a result of the steps and how
everything looks to me now. In other words I have after 43 years a different
perception on many many things than I used to have and Clancy points out that
alcoholism is a disease of perception and I would submit that all of life is a
matter of perception.
That every time we're disturbed our perception is incorrect and we go to a friend who helps
us see it differently and the matter is resolved. And so I'm going to start with a different
frame of reference. I ended up with Bob's steps so I ended up with five steps and I'm
going to discuss all of them from this point of view.
So I'm going to start with a different frame of reference. I ended up with Bob's steps so I ended up with five steps and I'm going to discuss all of them from this
point of view. So I'm going to start with a different frame of reference. I ended up with five steps and I'm going to discuss all of them from this
same vantage point and then look how they fit into the setup that I use. And I
think I'll start out by saying that a couple weeks ago I was in Rapid City,
South Dakota and one of the sites out there of course is Mount Rushmore but the
other site even more interesting is where the Lakota Indian tribe decided to
create a monument of similar
magnitude of their highest spiritual
Indian, Crazy Horse. And they chose the
most sacred mountain that they had out
there and I don't have the date exactly
right but about twenty-five years ago
they saw the work of a Polish sculptor
from the East Coast and they liked it
very much and so they contacted him and
he came out, met with the
tribe, they showed him the mountain, and they asked him if he would like to tackle this.
And he said yes.
And he started out all by himself down at the bottom of the mountain.
He built a little tent.
He had hand tools, and he'd climb up 600 or 700 feet with a star drill and a striking
hammer and a supply of dynamite and a vision of what this would eventually look like.
And after all these years, he eventually built a house.
He got married, had 10 kids.
Someone gave him an old compressor that you had to start with a crank, and they still
have it there in the museum.
And in the movie describing the activities of the last 25 years or so, it shows him trying
to start that thing with the crank in the morning.
And finally, he'd get it going.
He'd start dragging the hook.
He'd get the hose up to run the pneumatic drills.
He'd get up 300 feet or so, and he'd hear the thing quit, and he'd go all the way down,
start it up again.
He'd stand there and stare at it for a couple of minutes and go, okay.
And then sometimes he'd get all the way up and be drilling for two minutes, and then
boop, it would quit.
And so you can see the commitment that he had, and the head is finished, and he's on
a horse.
It'll be 50 more years, and he's passed away, and his widow and eight of the 10 children
are totally committed to this project.
And so it's really quite interesting to look at and to realize how much was done and how
sacred that is.
Now the interesting thing for me was that the movie was narrated by one of the elders
of the Lakota tribe.
And when they put his name up, and Chris remembered it, his name is Billy Mills.
And sports fans will remember a Marine second lieutenant in the 1964 Olympics, winning
the 10,000 meters in Tokyo, much to the surprise of the entire world.
And he ran something like 30 seconds faster than his previous best time.
And so I was in the Marine Corps at the time.
And he was just, you know...
You know, one of our heroes.
So I listened very attentively to him.
But here's the thing that he said that I think is so applicable, and we hear it in AA.
He said, the Lakota Indians believe very deeply that we are spiritual beings having a human
experience.
And then he went through the whole thing, and then as he was closing, he reminded everyone,
that we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Now when life or the program or anything is approached from that starting point, sometimes
what we're looking at has an entirely different perspective than it did when we were just
trying to get sober.
In other words, we all went through that, and our sponsors help us, but then as we move
along...
And we get more comfortable, we realize what is happening is we are becoming more aware
of that particular truth.
And so the way I would like to look at these five steps is by going to what Scott pointed
out so perfectly, when he pointed out that all of this work in these 12 spiritual principles,
and they are designed to accomplish only one thing.
There's not multiple objectives, there's just one thing, and that's a spiritual awakening.
Now how do you look at a spiritual awakening, and how do you look at these steps in contact
with that?
Now I remember Johnny Carson had a thing called Karnak .
where Ed McMahon would bring the sealed envelopes out
that had been on Funkin' Wagnall's back porch
for the last month under armed guard.
Do you remember all that stuff?
And in the envelope was the answer to a question.
And Johnny, without knowing what that...
I mean, in the envelope was the question.
And Johnny, without knowing what the question was,
would give the answer.
In other words, he was going to do it backwards.
Here's the answer.
Now we're going to open it and see what the question was.
And it was quite humorous.
He would... I remember one of them was...
He held the envelope up and he said,
the answer to this question is frat house.
And then he'd rip the envelope open.
And the question was,
what happens in Japan when a large boulder falls on a house?
Frat house.
So, if we started out by looking at it backwards,
like that,
where I tell you the solution,
and then you surmise the problem.
So if I said that the solution is rat poison,
you might conclude that the problem was
somebody has rats in their house.
Or if I said the solution,
the solution is earplugs.
You might go,
I bet the problem is loud noises and they can't sleep.
Or if I said bug spray,
then you work backwards
and you see what the problem is.
There's a lot of bugs around.
So now let's take spiritual awakening.
What is the nature of a problem
that spiritual awakening fixes?
You can see that leads to a different chain of thought
than you might normally have.
It doesn't fix sobriety.
That's an incidental on the way.
So it fixes the opposite of awakened.
It would be unawakened.
In other words,
we, Scott pointed out,
our problems are of our own making.
All our problems are of our own making.
How do you create a problem?
You think about it.
You just look at something
and you're sitting in here
and everybody else is sitting in here
and you go,
it's too hot in here.
And then you react to the thought,
it's too hot.
Oh boy, I'm sweating.
I'm very uncomfortable.
I wish I wasn't here.
I wish I wasn't here.
There was no problem until you thought about it.
So if every problem
that we've ever, ever had
and ever will have
are created by ourselves,
what is the collection of all those problems?
If we put them all together,
what would we call that?
I would call it
our strength.
Our life story.
Our life story.
And so if we look at,
Clancy was talking last night
and he said that somebody at his work
made fun of his teeth being missing.
And boy, I related to that.
I could just feel how that would hurt
and how painful it was.
And so he lived with that story
that he told himself about this.
Awful thing that happened.
And then when he went back
and the man said,
no, I was actually admiring the fact
that you were way up at the top
and came down
and now you're coming back
even though you don't have your teeth
which you'll get someday.
And now we looked at the old story
and saw that we had it wrong.
We had it wrong.
So as soon as he got rid of the old story
by finding out
the new story or the truth,
he felt better about the whole thing.
So the problem went away
because he was able to
look at the situation differently.
And I had the same thing happen last year
when I was out in California.
I went to Clancy's group
and then Brentwood
and before the Brentwood group started,
a guy whose wife was getting
the 30-year medallion
told her that he thought he knew me.
And he wanted to talk to me outside.
And I went out there
and he said,
in 1962,
you were flying an F-3T-2Q radar plane
in a flight of four
on a cross-country.
You declared an oxygen emergency.
All the planes had to land.
There was nothing wrong with your oxygen
and the next day
you wouldn't get in the airplane
and you never flew again.
And I went,
how do you know that?
He said, I was in the plane with you.
It was staggering because
we had the photo planes
which were really high performance
and then this radar plane had two seats.
And I thought that the radar guy
was in the other seat
which is why I wasn't going to jump out
because he wouldn't know how to fly it.
I had to get out of that.
I was just coming unglued
about to have a seizure or something.
And it was true.
I got on the ground
and I'd been experiencing this
for about six or seven months
and I just couldn't take it anymore.
I knew I was going to explode
inside of one of these planes.
And so I went back to the squadron.
He flew the plane back
and I told the colonel,
I can't do this anymore.
After 12, 13 years.
And he said, well,
we'll have to notify
headquarters Marine Corps
and then we'll have to wait
and see what they want to do with you.
You'll have to be retrained
in some other specialty.
And so it took about three months.
And during that three months,
I came to work
and the only emotion I felt was shame.
I had let these guys down.
This was an exclusive squadron.
This is my thing for all these years.
I failed.
I'm a piece of junk.
And I could feel them.
They let me do the legal work
and I could feel them
as they went by my office.
I hated to make eye contact
with any of the pilots.
But I could feel them looking in going,
what a piece of junk.
I could just feel it.
And boy, those three months
couldn't go by fast enough
for me to get out of there.
It just hurt so much.
And I've carried that all these years.
And he says to me,
did you know that I was a pilot?
Did you know that I was a pilot?
Did you know that I was a pilot?
Did you know that I was a pilot?
Did you know that I was a pilot?
Did you know how popular
you were in that squadron?
Do you know how much
everybody liked you?
Oh my God,
the colonel was pulling
every string he could
to keep you on flying.
We were trying this
and we were trying that.
And I went, really?
So I had to go back.
Wow, that's 40 years ago.
No, this was 62,
yeah, 45 years ago.
And tell me,
take that part of my life story
and go erase, erase, erase, erase,
no shame,
there wasn't anything like that
that happened.
And substitute,
they liked me,
I was popular.
Now,
whenever I think about those years,
I smile.
So,
the big book says,
and I can't quote it exactly,
the idea that someday,
somehow,
we'll be able to drink
like other people
is an illusion
that persists to the grave
or something like that.
The persistence of this illusion
is astonishing.
The idea that somehow
we can drink like others
has to be
smashed.
So here's this idea
that is part of our story.
And we're being told
to smash it.
I think
we could simplify
the whole program
if somebody could come up
with an idea smasher,
like an atom smasher,
and go in and smash
our whole story.
Because,
as we get to the fifth step,
and the fourth step
was covered so well,
that we finally have
been honest with ourselves
and have faced things
that we never faced
before,
and we have them all
down on paper,
and we're going to run this
by someone else,
much to our shame
and chagrin.
And as we do this,
we are helped
by our sponsor
to see each incident
differently.
Something I thought
was very, very important
turns out I overreacted.
Something that I thought
that I could dismiss,
I found was very serious.
And as a result of this,
I began to change
my perception
on my whole life story
on that piece of paper.
And the beginning of that
is humility.
It is the very beginning
of humility, really,
in this program
after we go to detox.
It is to acknowledge
that maybe
I'm not such an expert
on me
as I think.
Imagine that.
You aren't the biggest expert
on you.
Wouldn't you think you are?
You live inside there.
You would think
you're the ultimate authority
on what's going on in there.
And yet,
after,
after one little episode,
we find we're not so sure.
And mostly we find
things aren't as bad
as we thought they were.
And things aren't,
and we aren't as bad
as we thought we were.
And so we're beginning
to assemble
all of the ideas
that we're going to
get rid of.
Which is
six and seven.
We're going to assemble
everything about ourselves
that we're going to
get rid of.
And in that process,
what will be left
is the truth.
The real truth about
ourselves.
Which is
what an awakening is.
It is
an awareness
that things are quite different
than I thought they were.
The universe is different.
The world is different.
I'm different.
And I go,
how could I have ever
fallen for all that?
Well, I was up against
the biggest con artist
you could find.
Me.
Who knows how to con me
better than me?
This time,
I'm going to have
just two beers.
Yeah.
I mean,
how many times
do you do that?
You remember Lucy
with the football
on Thanksgiving
and he'd come back again?
Oh, I know she won't
pull it away.
And I can't believe
she pulled that football away.
And I go,
I can't believe
I did it to myself again.
And I would come up
with this idea again.
And I really see
the,
um,
I don't think my ego
is my enemy.
It is the necessary part of me
in order to have
this human experience.
It's the middle man
between the spiritual
entity
and the human experience.
It's how I have this
so that I can
see what it's like
to not be just
a spiritual entity.
When I think of what the,
um,
Billy Mills said,
you have to realize
that this doesn't start
with the human experience.
In other words,
well,
what was I before
I had a human experience?
Well,
I was a spiritual being
who hasn't had
a spiritual experience.
And when it finishes,
what am I?
I'm a spiritual being
who just finished
the human experience.
But I
am constant
all the way through.
And that I,
or whatever we want to call it,
is our true self.
It is the nature
that we've lost touch with
because of the story
we made up
that we're a piece of junk.
And then we feel
the emotions
of being a piece of junk,
of being afraid.
In other words,
there was no fear.
There was no resentment.
There was no anger.
Until
we manufactured
a world
of our own making.
Sometimes people will say,
trying to put a derogatory term
on somebody,
well,
she lives in her own little world.
Did you ever say that
about somebody?
She lives in her own little world.
Well,
so do you.
And so do I.
And no matter how well
you may know someone else,
you don't know their whole world.
You don't know
some of the fears
that race brings you.
Or some of the
things that
they are still using
in order
to ruin their own lives.
And so
as we look at this,
we can see that
the whole process
of the 12 steps
is to erase
what's separating us,
as Scott said,
from our own creator.
I like to think that
that's the way
we're going to do it.
I like to think
that I was just...
Why would a spiritual being...
See, I'm making things up now.
Why would a spiritual being
have a human experience?
What the heck
is that all about?
Why can't you just be out there
and be part of the universe
going,
yeah, this is cool.
I really enjoy this.
I really think
it has to do
with improving
on the situation.
And one of the ways
that things get improved
is by losing
them and getting them back.
The
reborn
is better
than being born.
The prodigal son,
we're all on
prodigal son and prodigal daughter journeys.
And boy,
do we take ourselves
on some really winners,
don't we?
I mean, we take it down there.
We take it out
to the extreme limits
so that when
we're
that moment
of clarity comes
and we begin
the journey back,
we really appreciate
the simple things
in life.
You lose all your possessions.
I went through
a few divorces.
Very familiar
with the,
where's that going?
Oh, I guess you don't get
to keep that.
And
as they go,
it feels like
they're ripping
part of your flesh away.
Because
that's who I was
after all.
That coin collection
or that
Japanese
stuff that I got over there.
Whatever it was.
And then when it's all gone,
I realized I'm fine.
I'm just me.
That was stuff.
And as we
come back
and get more stuff,
it doesn't have that hold.
It just is there.
Oh, it's very nice
and all that,
but it is not part of
who we are.
And so I like to look at
this journey back
that AA is providing us
through these set of
spiritual principles.
And so the fifth step,
I'm only going to read
one little thing.
Thanks for the,
you got me a book
with big print.
And it's right at the end
of the fifth step.
Whenever you read
words like this
or like the tenth step promises,
you realize
you are hearing
something other than
psychological
common sense
events.
We're talking about
the spiritual world.
So these
and the tenth step promises
are like magic.
You know, self-seeking
will slip away.
Woo, gone.
Oh, boy.
That is not a
psychological process.
Work with me for a year
and self-seeking
will slip away.
One day you'll be in here
and put it,
it'll be gone.
So,
let's look at
the results of this visit
with our sponsor.
And we finished.
We've covered everything.
Once we've taken the step
with holding nothing,
we're delighted.
We can look the world
in the eye.
We can be alone
at perfect peace and ease.
Wow.
Our fears fall from us.
How about that?
They aren't figured out.
Nobody walked through them.
They just went,
bye.
They fall.
We begin to feel
the nearness of our creator.
We may have had
certain spiritual beliefs,
but now,
we begin to have
a spiritual experience.
So,
using the model
that we started out with,
we are beginning to awaken.
This is what is happening.
We're looking around
and we see no reason
to be afraid
because the fearful world
that we created
isn't there anymore.
You follow what I'm saying?
It's like you're in
the dark woods at night
and you're going,
oh, I'm full of fear.
And then we go,
only kidding.
You're not in the dark woods.
You're at the beach.
Oh, okay.
And we're standing on the beach
and the fears fall away
because we're not in the world
that we created.
We're exiting it.
We're on our way out from it.
The feeling the drink problem
has disappeared
will often come strongly.
Disappeared.
You see these terms?
Well, what happened
to your drinking problem?
I don't know.
It disappeared.
It was around here one day
and,
I don't know where it is.
I think my neighbor has it.
I was looking over there
and he's having a terrible time.
I'm going to let him keep it.
And then it closes.
We are on the broad highway
walking hand in hand
with the spirit of the universe.
Now, if that isn't
a breathtaking picture,
if that is,
this is the picture
that we allow to be
of what life is all about.
Here's a hint
on what life could be.
It consists of walking down
a broad highway
hand in hand with our creator.
Just walking along.
Who could be afraid?
Well, that big guy
walking right next to me.
Who could worry
about how things
are going to turn out?
When he's in charge.
He's picking where we're going.
He's walking down.
I'm just going along
like a little kid
with his father.
That's the way
it's supposed to be.
The problem with that picture,
he gets all the credit
for everything.
Oh, God has taken
such a good care of you.
Oh, look how happy
God's making you.
Look what God did.
Look at your little family.
Look what this happened
and you're sober.
Look what God got you
this nice job.
And pretty soon we're going,
God?
I'm getting sick of hearing
about God.
What about me?
And the second we go,
what about me?
We start getting afraid again.
And we start having resentments.
Because things aren't going
my way.
My way.
And so when I was brand new,
and I met Chuck Chamberlain
and I love him.
He's my hero.
All my perspectives come from
stuff he has taught.
But when I knew him in the 70s
and all the way up to 1980 or so
and went to his house
and did all this,
I just sat totally enthralled
with everything he was saying
but I didn't have a clue
what he was talking about.
But it felt wonderful.
I just said,
yeah, yeah,
he sure knows that.
It just felt,
it felt wonderful.
So being able to walk hand in hand
is so simple
and so nice.
Something's holding us
from getting there.
The mystery is why
don't we do that?
We just had this marvelous experience.
Our sponsor revealed
the real nature
of our fourth step inventory
which is our story.
Pretty much covers everything.
I heard somebody a couple weeks ago
they said,
let's try this out.
Now I'm breaking my train of thought
and I'll never get back to where I was.
They said,
just imagine right now.
That you forgive
every unkind thing,
every unfair incident,
every terrible thing
anyone,
anything,
any government,
any entity
ever did to you.
How do you think you'd feel?
And I thought about that
and I went,
there wouldn't be much left of me.
That's who I am.
I'm the memory bank
of all unfairness.
I'm the one that collected the garbage
to go along this human experience.
I was supposed to
simply watch it.
My higher power
brought me down here
for an 80-year movie
and I'm just supposed to go,
oh wow, look at that,
oh man, oh wow, yeah, yeah,
this is good.
And you can't just have a movie
of a waterfall and a palm tree.
You've got to have action.
You've got to have
buses going off the cliff.
You've got to have,
bang, you're dead.
Well, yeah,
you've got to have a movie.
Because after all,
it's only a movie.
I'm just throwing in a sideline.
That's where I live.
And the problem is,
I'm at the movie.
Picture yourselves,
you're at the movies, okay?
And you have a favorite character
in the movie.
This is your favorite person.
And they're sitting in a chair
and this guy that doesn't like him
is sneaking up behind him
with a club.
And you're in the audience
and you jump up and go,
watch out,
there's a guy behind you
with a club.
It has no effect, does it?
Because it's a movie.
The guy in the movie,
he doesn't know anything about that.
He doesn't hear you in the audience.
But that's what I feel like doing
in controlling the world.
I've got to fix that.
I've got to fix that.
I've got to fix that.
And as Scott said,
it just unfolds.
The universe just unfolds.
So I have no part in it?
Yeah.
My part is my reaction to it.
That's my part.
Free will gives me
the ability
to turn
a peaceful afternoon
into a seven-car accident.
And the director said,
that's not what the scene was.
I don't know how you got it into a...
So anyway,
what is blocking us
from walking hand in hand
with the spirit of the universe?
And now we come
to a difference
between the 12 and 12
in the big book.
And I've been reading
Ernest Kurtz a lot.
I just love his history book,
Not God.
That's the best thing
I've ever read about AA.
And as you know,
the Oxford movement
had the four actors.
And the Oxford movement had the four actors.
And the Cleveland Intergroup
still prints them.
And they're very powerful.
And there was a lot of pressure
to include them
in the program
of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I think the Akron crowd
really wanted them,
but the New York crowd,
Bill in particular,
said, man,
you throw perfection
at a new alcoholic,
you're going to drive himself crazy.
Because half of us
are perfectionists already.
And the last thing we need
is to be successful.
And we start now going,
perfect, I'm going to get,
if I'm not perfect,
I'm no good.
So they didn't become
part of our program.
But he mentioned in the letter
that he snuck them back in
in the 12 and 12
in the sixth step.
And so as we look at the sixth step,
one of the,
all you have to do is read it.
We're entirely ready
to have God remove
all these defects of character.
So entirely,
means absolutely,
you take everything
and remove all defects.
So without thinking too hard,
that means perfection.
And Bill writes in there,
we have to start raising our eyes
towards perfection.
So the big book is progress,
not perfection.
And now we're moving progress
towards perfection.
And we can understand
what this means.
No one,
none of us,
could become perfect.
That's absolutely,
there's no way,
it's absolutely impossible.
On the other hand,
perfect help
could make us perfect.
In other words,
perfect help is available.
Our higher power
is perfect love.
And if we would allow that in,
we could be
all the way to the top.
So why don't we do it?
And that's the discussion
of the sixth step.
Why not?
And it's just that,
well, I gave up drinking.
And I gave up having extramarital.
And I gave up this.
I got to keep something
where I'm involved.
And that's what he discusses.
It's one of the lovely parts
of spirituality
is to understand
why we are remaining this way.
And it is our choice
to not surrender
more of the control
of our lives.
And he points out
that we were granted
absolute perfect release
from alcohol.
And the reason we were
is because we became
entirely ready
to have that gone.
That was killing me.
But gossip doesn't kill you.
And greed doesn't kill you
like alcohol does.
It ruins our lives,
but it doesn't kill us.
And since it's not fatal,
we compromise.
And we settle
for as much perfection
as will get us by
right out of the 12 and 12.
And so
I use the root term
about
the seven deadly sins.
So why don't we start
with lust?
How many...
Who would like
100% relief from lust?
Oh, not too many hands.
One, two...
We have a few saints
that are sitting out there,
but hands started like this.
Now, wait a minute.
Wait, wait.
What would perfect release from...
What would that be?
Dead?
Dead.
That's what it is.
Dead.
You have no lust left.
None.
Now, I agree.
It's causing me
a lot of problems.
I'd like to get rid
of most of it.
Most.
What is most?
Well, you know,
put me down for 80%.
Put me down for 80%.
And years ago,
a friend of mine,
Bill Hatch,
he's passed away.
He gave me a C.S. Lewis
little book.
It's a little story
that covers this.
And it was the...
And I've told it
quite a few times,
but it does fit in here.
The little 10, 11-year-old boy
has a big, important baseball game
the next day.
And the team is in the finals.
And this is crucial.
And the coach gives the team
only one instruction.
Go to bed early,
eat a nice meal,
and get eight hours sleep.
If you guys have that rested,
we're going to do great.
So the kid came home,
he told his mother,
they've got to eat early.
Went to bed at the prescribed time,
went to sleep,
and he'd been asleep
about three hours,
and he woke up
with a little toothache starting.
And he went,
ooh,
and he could feel it.
And he knew if he called his mother
for a couple aspirin,
she would give them to him,
and he'd go right back to sleep.
But he didn't call her.
He kept waiting,
thinking it could go away.
Maybe it'll go away.
And he sucks air around it.
Ooh, no, it's still there.
Okay, maybe a little while.
A little while.
A little while.
And he actually,
he delays about an hour and a half
before he calls his mother
who brings him the two aspirin,
and he falls back asleep.
But he didn't get the eight hours thing,
and he makes an error and whatever.
So the moral dilemma is,
why didn't he call his mother right away?
He knew she'd give him the two aspirin.
And the answer was
that he knew she wouldn't stop there.
She would give him the two aspirin,
but as soon as daylight came,
she'd make a dental appointment.
To go and see what's wrong with that tooth.
And he also knew the dentist.
And the dentist,
whenever he came in with a problem here,
took extra time to see if there weren't
any problems anywhere else.
And sometimes he found three other areas
that were going to need work,
and we had a series of appointments
until we had perfect teeth.
See, the only help that's available
was perfect help
coming from the mother.
He didn't want perfect teeth.
He didn't want perfect teeth.
He wanted two aspirin.
And that's what we want.
We want 80%.
Not perfect release from anything.
And so our struggle,
as they discuss it,
in this becoming entirely ready,
takes a long time.
And it is the measure
of our spiritual progress.
What else am I willing
to get rid of?
There's nothing to learn
in spirituality.
It is a matter of unlearning.
As we completely get rid of
everything that isn't us,
the truth,
as somebody was quoting
the last part of the page,
164,
more will be revealed.
And the revealing
is between us,
between you and your creator.
That's how it gets revealed.
It suddenly occurs to you.
You intuitively see things.
I know how I could solve this.
It just comes.
Effortlessly.
No struggle
on our part.
We don't like no struggle.
We don't like simplicity
and we don't like easy.
I don't want it simple.
I want it complicated.
I remember in the beginning,
all you have to do is not drink.
That can't be that simple.
I know it can't be that simple.
I'm a much more complex.
Shut up and get in the car
and don't drink.
But it was that simple
and it drove me crazy.
I'm much more complicated than that.
You can't have a simple answer
to these complex, complex.
And there it lies.
And so that's just the perspective
I'm throwing on this
because each time
that we are willing
to surrender
through the next step
that talks about humility,
the more we awaken
until we suddenly realize
that that, I think Bill writes somewhere,
we were granted a glimpse of the kingdom.
Remember that line?
We were granted a glimpse.
That's all it takes
to start making the kingdom
the top priority.
I want to see more
what I just had a glimpse of.
And as I'll talk about in the 11th step,
that becomes a personal endeavor.
Nobody can pray for you
and nobody can meditate for you.
And no one can seek
our true nature or God.
And so I'm going to start
I think that seeking our true nature
which is pure love
is the same as seeking God.
And the big book tells us
that God is inside of us
and it's only there
that he can be found.
And so it is a journey inward
which is accomplished
by destroying,
smashing our story.
And so that we're reduced to
observers.
I'm just here at the movie.
Been a hell of a movie.
I can't tell you.
Boy, I went through this.
Oh, here I am being sad again.
Oh, yeah, that's a good part.
I remember that.
Oh, yeah, here's the part where...
And...
So I just leave it at that.
That the struggle there
of letting go 100%
is, as Bill says,
what separates
the men from the boys,
the girls from the women,
the seekers from the hanger-on-ers.
It's possible
to...
Yeah, I thought
it's a little extra time
because seven won't take very long.
I like to use this analogy about AA.
You know, a lot of things
that cause problems
for societies
are success.
Yeah, even our country.
You know, it was great
while you're working and working
to get there.
Now we all got it
and everybody's rich
and we're sitting around
and, I mean, compared to how it was.
And then the trouble starts.
You know, because
I already did the sacrifice thing.
Now I just want to reap.
Give me a moment.
Give me a moment.
So if you went back
55 years ago
in most cities,
in small cities
and all towns,
there was one meeting a week.
And you say to yourself,
how did they stay sober
on one meeting a week?
One meeting a week.
Well, you really look forward
to the meeting.
Well, three more days
and the meeting will be here.
So that became quite a big highlight
and maybe halfway through the week
you met with another guy
or gal for coffee.
And the two of you said,
three more days,
the meeting will be here
and you can make it.
I can make it.
You can make it.
Okay.
But what we really did
was pray.
And prayed like heck.
And then prayed some more.
Okay, one more day.
Let me through this day.
Give me through this day.
Give me through this day.
Ah, I'm at the meeting.
So contrast that with today
when we have 6 a.m. meetings,
noon meetings,
5.45 meetings
on the way home from work,
8 o'clock meetings,
midnight meetings,
gay meetings,
women's meetings,
men's meetings,
discussion meetings,
speaker meetings,
CDs,
tapes,
conferences,
conventions,
pamphlets on everything.
Everything.
I'm waiting for one
about old marine pilots.
I just don't know.
Because we have
very unique problems
that need to be...
Only kidding.
Do not call New York
and tell them about that comment.
We have such...
And the treatment center.
And all the professionals
that are now involved in alcoholism.
We have such a support system now.
You don't have to hardly pray at all.
You don't have to hardly pray at all.
And so,
that's why I'm focusing on this awakening
and taking the goalposts up.
You could have pretty good
pretty good
sobriety
sort of
going through some of the motions,
doing some of it,
giving it a little bit of an effort,
and then just
attending and watching.
And you'd be in a
semi-comfortable position.
And Bill wrote,
and he's quoting Lincoln,
that the good is the biggest enemy
of the best that there is.
If it would just get worse,
we'd really go back...
I can grab this program.
But it's...
I'm hanging in pretty good.
Yeah, I'm hanging in.
How's it going?
Pretty good.
Yeah, pretty good.
There's so much more.
There's so much more.
And then we come to humility
in the seventh step.
And this is a wonderful discussion
in the 12 and 12
about what humility is.
And we began it...
with the fifth step
with our sponsor.
Sometimes people say,
if you say you're humble,
you're not.
It goes away.
Well, let me tell you something.
If you say a prayer in the morning,
that's an act of humility.
If you read the big book,
that's an act of humility.
If you call your sponsor,
that's an act of humility.
If you go to a conference,
that's an act of humility.
All of those are statements by you
that you can't make it on your own.
That's what all those statements are,
which is what humility is.
It's an acknowledgement.
I can't do this by myself.
I can't make it.
And then we give up.
And we have one of the first paradoxes
in spirituality
that you win by giving up.
And you become totally independent
by becoming totally dependent
on a higher power.
And we have things revealed to us
with no effort.
We don't have to study.
We just have to follow the directions.
I would call our AA literature,
the big book,
I would call it a treasure map.
It has precise directions to the treasure.
But it is not the treasure itself.
The treasure is awakening.
The treasure is our creator.
The treasure is getting the hell out
of this world.
The treasure is getting the hell out of this world.
This world that we created for ourselves
that's so scary and unfair
and just filled with all these things.
And this process allows it to be destroyed
piece by piece as the drinking was.
And so in the seventh step,
we find something out about humility.
Some of the humility is
God is everything, I'm nothing.
One of the great measures of humility
is we don't compare.
There's no comparing anything.
Nothing is better than or worse than.
I'm not better.
I just am.
It is.
They are.
No adjectives.
Just is.
See what I'm saying?
The comparison's all gone.
The thing about humility
and acquiring it in the seventh step is
there's a four-letter word involved
called pain.
And I remember reading that.
I said, let's skip to eight.
I don't want to hear about pain.
I want to hear about pain.
Well, I am giving up control
and there's no way to give it up painlessly.
All right.
I always like it.
That's my...
When new people say that word,
they're being very spiritual.
Okay, got to do it.
All right.
Yeah.
You are getting it now.
You mean I'm going to give this up too?
All right.
Boy, if you find yourself saying all right,
you are on a roll.
You are on a roll.
Because you're going against whatever it is
that didn't want you to say those words.
All right.
And so we find,
oh, I don't want to go through that again.
That's exactly how Bill puts it.
I don't want to go through what I went with the drinking.
I just don't want to humiliate my friends.
I don't want to do that again.
All right.
And then when we do it,
we go,
God, that feels better.
And our attitude towards pain and humility
starts to change
based on the results.
And suddenly,
pain becomes effort.
Just like working out.
When you first start, it's painful.
But three months later,
you're doing the same workout.
And it's effort.
You don't even classify it as painful.
It's producing these results that are so wonderful.
And that's the key
to understanding humility
is that the results that will come from it
are indeed magnificent.
And so,
I guess I'm running out of energy.
I started by saying,
we're going to look at the steps
from just a different storyline,
a different perspective.
Spiritual beings have a human experience.
So the manufactured problems
that we ended up drinking over
weren't there.
And the fact that drinking seemed to fix them,
as Scott said,
it's just,
it's just an illusion.
So we're using this process
to crush the illusion.
To just have it collapse
through examination
and through willingness
to stop being the author of our life.
And when I get to step 11,
you'll see,
I just want to touch on that now
before I wrap up.
This is one of the,
I've studied a lot of other things
and that's part of what step 11
suggests that we do.
And this really is unique
where we are suggested
to pray only
for knowledge of his will for us
and the power to carry it out.
That is the
ultimate humble prayer.
The prayer is saying,
you know much better than I do
what would be best for you.
What would be best for me.
So I'm going to leave it all up to you.
How do you like that?
Because even in our prayers,
we have it figured out
how it ought to be.
And we're going to pray for
our way to be implemented.
And it may be noble.
And it may,
the motives may look good.
But in the final analysis,
it's being generated by my view
of how things ought to be.
And it's being generated by my view of how things ought to be.
And the secret to happiness
is to not have a view
about how anything should be.
It's really the exact opposite
of what we were taught.
And I'll close with this.
When I was a little kid,
I was told everything
that everybody else was.
It's your life
and you have to live it.
Nobody else will live it for you.
It's up to you to make something
out of this world.
It's up to you to accomplish this.
Well, how do you do that?
Well, you go to school.
You study hard.
You go over here.
You keep your nose clean.
And you will.
Get there.
And then you're
50 years old on your yacht
thinking of suicide.
And so,
what they should have told us was
it's not your life.
It's God's.
Let him make something
wonderful out of you.
That would have been a nice journey.
Thank you all very much.
alcoholic. They indulged me and got me a bar stool to sit on. Standing on my knees
just is getting painful so I think I can see everybody from here so I think this
is working okay. I agree with Polly this is indeed a wonderful assortment of
perspectives on spirituality that we've got assembled here and when I talk about
the steps I really don't talk about how to do them or how I sponsor someone to
do them.
I
mean lately I've been talking about what I see as a result of the steps and how
everything looks to me now. In other words I have after 43 years a different
perception on many many things than I used to have and Clancy points out that
alcoholism is a disease of perception and I would submit that all of life is a
matter of perception.
That every time we're disturbed our perception is incorrect and we go to a friend who helps
us see it differently and the matter is resolved. And so I'm going to start with a different
frame of reference. I ended up with Bob's steps so I ended up with five steps and I'm
going to discuss all of them from this point of view.
So I'm going to start with a different frame of reference. I ended up with Bob's steps so I ended up with five steps and I'm going to discuss all of them from this
point of view. So I'm going to start with a different frame of reference. I ended up with five steps and I'm going to discuss all of them from this
same vantage point and then look how they fit into the setup that I use. And I
think I'll start out by saying that a couple weeks ago I was in Rapid City,
South Dakota and one of the sites out there of course is Mount Rushmore but the
other site even more interesting is where the Lakota Indian tribe decided to
create a monument of similar
magnitude of their highest spiritual
Indian, Crazy Horse. And they chose the
most sacred mountain that they had out
there and I don't have the date exactly
right but about twenty-five years ago
they saw the work of a Polish sculptor
from the East Coast and they liked it
very much and so they contacted him and
he came out, met with the
tribe, they showed him the mountain, and they asked him if he would like to tackle this.
And he said yes.
And he started out all by himself down at the bottom of the mountain.
He built a little tent.
He had hand tools, and he'd climb up 600 or 700 feet with a star drill and a striking
hammer and a supply of dynamite and a vision of what this would eventually look like.
And after all these years, he eventually built a house.
He got married, had 10 kids.
Someone gave him an old compressor that you had to start with a crank, and they still
have it there in the museum.
And in the movie describing the activities of the last 25 years or so, it shows him trying
to start that thing with the crank in the morning.
And finally, he'd get it going.
He'd start dragging the hook.
He'd get the hose up to run the pneumatic drills.
He'd get up 300 feet or so, and he'd hear the thing quit, and he'd go all the way down,
start it up again.
He'd stand there and stare at it for a couple of minutes and go, okay.
And then sometimes he'd get all the way up and be drilling for two minutes, and then
boop, it would quit.
And so you can see the commitment that he had, and the head is finished, and he's on
a horse.
It'll be 50 more years, and he's passed away, and his widow and eight of the 10 children
are totally committed to this project.
And so it's really quite interesting to look at and to realize how much was done and how
sacred that is.
Now the interesting thing for me was that the movie was narrated by one of the elders
of the Lakota tribe.
And when they put his name up, and Chris remembered it, his name is Billy Mills.
And sports fans will remember a Marine second lieutenant in the 1964 Olympics, winning
the 10,000 meters in Tokyo, much to the surprise of the entire world.
And he ran something like 30 seconds faster than his previous best time.
And so I was in the Marine Corps at the time.
And he was just, you know...
You know, one of our heroes.
So I listened very attentively to him.
But here's the thing that he said that I think is so applicable, and we hear it in AA.
He said, the Lakota Indians believe very deeply that we are spiritual beings having a human
experience.
And then he went through the whole thing, and then as he was closing, he reminded everyone,
that we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Now when life or the program or anything is approached from that starting point, sometimes
what we're looking at has an entirely different perspective than it did when we were just
trying to get sober.
In other words, we all went through that, and our sponsors help us, but then as we move
along...
And we get more comfortable, we realize what is happening is we are becoming more aware
of that particular truth.
And so the way I would like to look at these five steps is by going to what Scott pointed
out so perfectly, when he pointed out that all of this work in these 12 spiritual principles,
and they are designed to accomplish only one thing.
There's not multiple objectives, there's just one thing, and that's a spiritual awakening.
Now how do you look at a spiritual awakening, and how do you look at these steps in contact
with that?
Now I remember Johnny Carson had a thing called Karnak .
where Ed McMahon would bring the sealed envelopes out
that had been on Funkin' Wagnall's back porch
for the last month under armed guard.
Do you remember all that stuff?
And in the envelope was the answer to a question.
And Johnny, without knowing what that...
I mean, in the envelope was the question.
And Johnny, without knowing what the question was,
would give the answer.
In other words, he was going to do it backwards.
Here's the answer.
Now we're going to open it and see what the question was.
And it was quite humorous.
He would... I remember one of them was...
He held the envelope up and he said,
the answer to this question is frat house.
And then he'd rip the envelope open.
And the question was,
what happens in Japan when a large boulder falls on a house?
Frat house.
So, if we started out by looking at it backwards,
like that,
where I tell you the solution,
and then you surmise the problem.
So if I said that the solution is rat poison,
you might conclude that the problem was
somebody has rats in their house.
Or if I said the solution,
the solution is earplugs.
You might go,
I bet the problem is loud noises and they can't sleep.
Or if I said bug spray,
then you work backwards
and you see what the problem is.
There's a lot of bugs around.
So now let's take spiritual awakening.
What is the nature of a problem
that spiritual awakening fixes?
You can see that leads to a different chain of thought
than you might normally have.
It doesn't fix sobriety.
That's an incidental on the way.
So it fixes the opposite of awakened.
It would be unawakened.
In other words,
we, Scott pointed out,
our problems are of our own making.
All our problems are of our own making.
How do you create a problem?
You think about it.
You just look at something
and you're sitting in here
and everybody else is sitting in here
and you go,
it's too hot in here.
And then you react to the thought,
it's too hot.
Oh boy, I'm sweating.
I'm very uncomfortable.
I wish I wasn't here.
I wish I wasn't here.
There was no problem until you thought about it.
So if every problem
that we've ever, ever had
and ever will have
are created by ourselves,
what is the collection of all those problems?
If we put them all together,
what would we call that?
I would call it
our strength.
Our life story.
Our life story.
And so if we look at,
Clancy was talking last night
and he said that somebody at his work
made fun of his teeth being missing.
And boy, I related to that.
I could just feel how that would hurt
and how painful it was.
And so he lived with that story
that he told himself about this.
Awful thing that happened.
And then when he went back
and the man said,
no, I was actually admiring the fact
that you were way up at the top
and came down
and now you're coming back
even though you don't have your teeth
which you'll get someday.
And now we looked at the old story
and saw that we had it wrong.
We had it wrong.
So as soon as he got rid of the old story
by finding out
the new story or the truth,
he felt better about the whole thing.
So the problem went away
because he was able to
look at the situation differently.
And I had the same thing happen last year
when I was out in California.
I went to Clancy's group
and then Brentwood
and before the Brentwood group started,
a guy whose wife was getting
the 30-year medallion
told her that he thought he knew me.
And he wanted to talk to me outside.
And I went out there
and he said,
in 1962,
you were flying an F-3T-2Q radar plane
in a flight of four
on a cross-country.
You declared an oxygen emergency.
All the planes had to land.
There was nothing wrong with your oxygen
and the next day
you wouldn't get in the airplane
and you never flew again.
And I went,
how do you know that?
He said, I was in the plane with you.
It was staggering because
we had the photo planes
which were really high performance
and then this radar plane had two seats.
And I thought that the radar guy
was in the other seat
which is why I wasn't going to jump out
because he wouldn't know how to fly it.
I had to get out of that.
I was just coming unglued
about to have a seizure or something.
And it was true.
I got on the ground
and I'd been experiencing this
for about six or seven months
and I just couldn't take it anymore.
I knew I was going to explode
inside of one of these planes.
And so I went back to the squadron.
He flew the plane back
and I told the colonel,
I can't do this anymore.
After 12, 13 years.
And he said, well,
we'll have to notify
headquarters Marine Corps
and then we'll have to wait
and see what they want to do with you.
You'll have to be retrained
in some other specialty.
And so it took about three months.
And during that three months,
I came to work
and the only emotion I felt was shame.
I had let these guys down.
This was an exclusive squadron.
This is my thing for all these years.
I failed.
I'm a piece of junk.
And I could feel them.
They let me do the legal work
and I could feel them
as they went by my office.
I hated to make eye contact
with any of the pilots.
But I could feel them looking in going,
what a piece of junk.
I could just feel it.
And boy, those three months
couldn't go by fast enough
for me to get out of there.
It just hurt so much.
And I've carried that all these years.
And he says to me,
did you know that I was a pilot?
Did you know that I was a pilot?
Did you know that I was a pilot?
Did you know that I was a pilot?
Did you know that I was a pilot?
Did you know how popular
you were in that squadron?
Do you know how much
everybody liked you?
Oh my God,
the colonel was pulling
every string he could
to keep you on flying.
We were trying this
and we were trying that.
And I went, really?
So I had to go back.
Wow, that's 40 years ago.
No, this was 62,
yeah, 45 years ago.
And tell me,
take that part of my life story
and go erase, erase, erase, erase,
no shame,
there wasn't anything like that
that happened.
And substitute,
they liked me,
I was popular.
Now,
whenever I think about those years,
I smile.
So,
the big book says,
and I can't quote it exactly,
the idea that someday,
somehow,
we'll be able to drink
like other people
is an illusion
that persists to the grave
or something like that.
The persistence of this illusion
is astonishing.
The idea that somehow
we can drink like others
has to be
smashed.
So here's this idea
that is part of our story.
And we're being told
to smash it.
I think
we could simplify
the whole program
if somebody could come up
with an idea smasher,
like an atom smasher,
and go in and smash
our whole story.
Because,
as we get to the fifth step,
and the fourth step
was covered so well,
that we finally have
been honest with ourselves
and have faced things
that we never faced
before,
and we have them all
down on paper,
and we're going to run this
by someone else,
much to our shame
and chagrin.
And as we do this,
we are helped
by our sponsor
to see each incident
differently.
Something I thought
was very, very important
turns out I overreacted.
Something that I thought
that I could dismiss,
I found was very serious.
And as a result of this,
I began to change
my perception
on my whole life story
on that piece of paper.
And the beginning of that
is humility.
It is the very beginning
of humility, really,
in this program
after we go to detox.
It is to acknowledge
that maybe
I'm not such an expert
on me
as I think.
Imagine that.
You aren't the biggest expert
on you.
Wouldn't you think you are?
You live inside there.
You would think
you're the ultimate authority
on what's going on in there.
And yet,
after,
after one little episode,
we find we're not so sure.
And mostly we find
things aren't as bad
as we thought they were.
And things aren't,
and we aren't as bad
as we thought we were.
And so we're beginning
to assemble
all of the ideas
that we're going to
get rid of.
Which is
six and seven.
We're going to assemble
everything about ourselves
that we're going to
get rid of.
And in that process,
what will be left
is the truth.
The real truth about
ourselves.
Which is
what an awakening is.
It is
an awareness
that things are quite different
than I thought they were.
The universe is different.
The world is different.
I'm different.
And I go,
how could I have ever
fallen for all that?
Well, I was up against
the biggest con artist
you could find.
Me.
Who knows how to con me
better than me?
This time,
I'm going to have
just two beers.
Yeah.
I mean,
how many times
do you do that?
You remember Lucy
with the football
on Thanksgiving
and he'd come back again?
Oh, I know she won't
pull it away.
And I can't believe
she pulled that football away.
And I go,
I can't believe
I did it to myself again.
And I would come up
with this idea again.
And I really see
the,
um,
I don't think my ego
is my enemy.
It is the necessary part of me
in order to have
this human experience.
It's the middle man
between the spiritual
entity
and the human experience.
It's how I have this
so that I can
see what it's like
to not be just
a spiritual entity.
When I think of what the,
um,
Billy Mills said,
you have to realize
that this doesn't start
with the human experience.
In other words,
well,
what was I before
I had a human experience?
Well,
I was a spiritual being
who hasn't had
a spiritual experience.
And when it finishes,
what am I?
I'm a spiritual being
who just finished
the human experience.
But I
am constant
all the way through.
And that I,
or whatever we want to call it,
is our true self.
It is the nature
that we've lost touch with
because of the story
we made up
that we're a piece of junk.
And then we feel
the emotions
of being a piece of junk,
of being afraid.
In other words,
there was no fear.
There was no resentment.
There was no anger.
Until
we manufactured
a world
of our own making.
Sometimes people will say,
trying to put a derogatory term
on somebody,
well,
she lives in her own little world.
Did you ever say that
about somebody?
She lives in her own little world.
Well,
so do you.
And so do I.
And no matter how well
you may know someone else,
you don't know their whole world.
You don't know
some of the fears
that race brings you.
Or some of the
things that
they are still using
in order
to ruin their own lives.
And so
as we look at this,
we can see that
the whole process
of the 12 steps
is to erase
what's separating us,
as Scott said,
from our own creator.
I like to think that
that's the way
we're going to do it.
I like to think
that I was just...
Why would a spiritual being...
See, I'm making things up now.
Why would a spiritual being
have a human experience?
What the heck
is that all about?
Why can't you just be out there
and be part of the universe
going,
yeah, this is cool.
I really enjoy this.
I really think
it has to do
with improving
on the situation.
And one of the ways
that things get improved
is by losing
them and getting them back.
The
reborn
is better
than being born.
The prodigal son,
we're all on
prodigal son and prodigal daughter journeys.
And boy,
do we take ourselves
on some really winners,
don't we?
I mean, we take it down there.
We take it out
to the extreme limits
so that when
we're
that moment
of clarity comes
and we begin
the journey back,
we really appreciate
the simple things
in life.
You lose all your possessions.
I went through
a few divorces.
Very familiar
with the,
where's that going?
Oh, I guess you don't get
to keep that.
And
as they go,
it feels like
they're ripping
part of your flesh away.
Because
that's who I was
after all.
That coin collection
or that
Japanese
stuff that I got over there.
Whatever it was.
And then when it's all gone,
I realized I'm fine.
I'm just me.
That was stuff.
And as we
come back
and get more stuff,
it doesn't have that hold.
It just is there.
Oh, it's very nice
and all that,
but it is not part of
who we are.
And so I like to look at
this journey back
that AA is providing us
through these set of
spiritual principles.
And so the fifth step,
I'm only going to read
one little thing.
Thanks for the,
you got me a book
with big print.
And it's right at the end
of the fifth step.
Whenever you read
words like this
or like the tenth step promises,
you realize
you are hearing
something other than
psychological
common sense
events.
We're talking about
the spiritual world.
So these
and the tenth step promises
are like magic.
You know, self-seeking
will slip away.
Woo, gone.
Oh, boy.
That is not a
psychological process.
Work with me for a year
and self-seeking
will slip away.
One day you'll be in here
and put it,
it'll be gone.
So,
let's look at
the results of this visit
with our sponsor.
And we finished.
We've covered everything.
Once we've taken the step
with holding nothing,
we're delighted.
We can look the world
in the eye.
We can be alone
at perfect peace and ease.
Wow.
Our fears fall from us.
How about that?
They aren't figured out.
Nobody walked through them.
They just went,
bye.
They fall.
We begin to feel
the nearness of our creator.
We may have had
certain spiritual beliefs,
but now,
we begin to have
a spiritual experience.
So,
using the model
that we started out with,
we are beginning to awaken.
This is what is happening.
We're looking around
and we see no reason
to be afraid
because the fearful world
that we created
isn't there anymore.
You follow what I'm saying?
It's like you're in
the dark woods at night
and you're going,
oh, I'm full of fear.
And then we go,
only kidding.
You're not in the dark woods.
You're at the beach.
Oh, okay.
And we're standing on the beach
and the fears fall away
because we're not in the world
that we created.
We're exiting it.
We're on our way out from it.
The feeling the drink problem
has disappeared
will often come strongly.
Disappeared.
You see these terms?
Well, what happened
to your drinking problem?
I don't know.
It disappeared.
It was around here one day
and,
I don't know where it is.
I think my neighbor has it.
I was looking over there
and he's having a terrible time.
I'm going to let him keep it.
And then it closes.
We are on the broad highway
walking hand in hand
with the spirit of the universe.
Now, if that isn't
a breathtaking picture,
if that is,
this is the picture
that we allow to be
of what life is all about.
Here's a hint
on what life could be.
It consists of walking down
a broad highway
hand in hand with our creator.
Just walking along.
Who could be afraid?
Well, that big guy
walking right next to me.
Who could worry
about how things
are going to turn out?
When he's in charge.
He's picking where we're going.
He's walking down.
I'm just going along
like a little kid
with his father.
That's the way
it's supposed to be.
The problem with that picture,
he gets all the credit
for everything.
Oh, God has taken
such a good care of you.
Oh, look how happy
God's making you.
Look what God did.
Look at your little family.
Look what this happened
and you're sober.
Look what God got you
this nice job.
And pretty soon we're going,
God?
I'm getting sick of hearing
about God.
What about me?
And the second we go,
what about me?
We start getting afraid again.
And we start having resentments.
Because things aren't going
my way.
My way.
And so when I was brand new,
and I met Chuck Chamberlain
and I love him.
He's my hero.
All my perspectives come from
stuff he has taught.
But when I knew him in the 70s
and all the way up to 1980 or so
and went to his house
and did all this,
I just sat totally enthralled
with everything he was saying
but I didn't have a clue
what he was talking about.
But it felt wonderful.
I just said,
yeah, yeah,
he sure knows that.
It just felt,
it felt wonderful.
So being able to walk hand in hand
is so simple
and so nice.
Something's holding us
from getting there.
The mystery is why
don't we do that?
We just had this marvelous experience.
Our sponsor revealed
the real nature
of our fourth step inventory
which is our story.
Pretty much covers everything.
I heard somebody a couple weeks ago
they said,
let's try this out.
Now I'm breaking my train of thought
and I'll never get back to where I was.
They said,
just imagine right now.
That you forgive
every unkind thing,
every unfair incident,
every terrible thing
anyone,
anything,
any government,
any entity
ever did to you.
How do you think you'd feel?
And I thought about that
and I went,
there wouldn't be much left of me.
That's who I am.
I'm the memory bank
of all unfairness.
I'm the one that collected the garbage
to go along this human experience.
I was supposed to
simply watch it.
My higher power
brought me down here
for an 80-year movie
and I'm just supposed to go,
oh wow, look at that,
oh man, oh wow, yeah, yeah,
this is good.
And you can't just have a movie
of a waterfall and a palm tree.
You've got to have action.
You've got to have
buses going off the cliff.
You've got to have,
bang, you're dead.
Well, yeah,
you've got to have a movie.
Because after all,
it's only a movie.
I'm just throwing in a sideline.
That's where I live.
And the problem is,
I'm at the movie.
Picture yourselves,
you're at the movies, okay?
And you have a favorite character
in the movie.
This is your favorite person.
And they're sitting in a chair
and this guy that doesn't like him
is sneaking up behind him
with a club.
And you're in the audience
and you jump up and go,
watch out,
there's a guy behind you
with a club.
It has no effect, does it?
Because it's a movie.
The guy in the movie,
he doesn't know anything about that.
He doesn't hear you in the audience.
But that's what I feel like doing
in controlling the world.
I've got to fix that.
I've got to fix that.
I've got to fix that.
And as Scott said,
it just unfolds.
The universe just unfolds.
So I have no part in it?
Yeah.
My part is my reaction to it.
That's my part.
Free will gives me
the ability
to turn
a peaceful afternoon
into a seven-car accident.
And the director said,
that's not what the scene was.
I don't know how you got it into a...
So anyway,
what is blocking us
from walking hand in hand
with the spirit of the universe?
And now we come
to a difference
between the 12 and 12
in the big book.
And I've been reading
Ernest Kurtz a lot.
I just love his history book,
Not God.
That's the best thing
I've ever read about AA.
And as you know,
the Oxford movement
had the four actors.
And the Oxford movement had the four actors.
And the Cleveland Intergroup
still prints them.
And they're very powerful.
And there was a lot of pressure
to include them
in the program
of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I think the Akron crowd
really wanted them,
but the New York crowd,
Bill in particular,
said, man,
you throw perfection
at a new alcoholic,
you're going to drive himself crazy.
Because half of us
are perfectionists already.
And the last thing we need
is to be successful.
And we start now going,
perfect, I'm going to get,
if I'm not perfect,
I'm no good.
So they didn't become
part of our program.
But he mentioned in the letter
that he snuck them back in
in the 12 and 12
in the sixth step.
And so as we look at the sixth step,
one of the,
all you have to do is read it.
We're entirely ready
to have God remove
all these defects of character.
So entirely,
means absolutely,
you take everything
and remove all defects.
So without thinking too hard,
that means perfection.
And Bill writes in there,
we have to start raising our eyes
towards perfection.
So the big book is progress,
not perfection.
And now we're moving progress
towards perfection.
And we can understand
what this means.
No one,
none of us,
could become perfect.
That's absolutely,
there's no way,
it's absolutely impossible.
On the other hand,
perfect help
could make us perfect.
In other words,
perfect help is available.
Our higher power
is perfect love.
And if we would allow that in,
we could be
all the way to the top.
So why don't we do it?
And that's the discussion
of the sixth step.
Why not?
And it's just that,
well, I gave up drinking.
And I gave up having extramarital.
And I gave up this.
I got to keep something
where I'm involved.
And that's what he discusses.
It's one of the lovely parts
of spirituality
is to understand
why we are remaining this way.
And it is our choice
to not surrender
more of the control
of our lives.
And he points out
that we were granted
absolute perfect release
from alcohol.
And the reason we were
is because we became
entirely ready
to have that gone.
That was killing me.
But gossip doesn't kill you.
And greed doesn't kill you
like alcohol does.
It ruins our lives,
but it doesn't kill us.
And since it's not fatal,
we compromise.
And we settle
for as much perfection
as will get us by
right out of the 12 and 12.
And so
I use the root term
about
the seven deadly sins.
So why don't we start
with lust?
How many...
Who would like
100% relief from lust?
Oh, not too many hands.
One, two...
We have a few saints
that are sitting out there,
but hands started like this.
Now, wait a minute.
Wait, wait.
What would perfect release from...
What would that be?
Dead?
Dead.
That's what it is.
Dead.
You have no lust left.
None.
Now, I agree.
It's causing me
a lot of problems.
I'd like to get rid
of most of it.
Most.
What is most?
Well, you know,
put me down for 80%.
Put me down for 80%.
And years ago,
a friend of mine,
Bill Hatch,
he's passed away.
He gave me a C.S. Lewis
little book.
It's a little story
that covers this.
And it was the...
And I've told it
quite a few times,
but it does fit in here.
The little 10, 11-year-old boy
has a big, important baseball game
the next day.
And the team is in the finals.
And this is crucial.
And the coach gives the team
only one instruction.
Go to bed early,
eat a nice meal,
and get eight hours sleep.
If you guys have that rested,
we're going to do great.
So the kid came home,
he told his mother,
they've got to eat early.
Went to bed at the prescribed time,
went to sleep,
and he'd been asleep
about three hours,
and he woke up
with a little toothache starting.
And he went,
ooh,
and he could feel it.
And he knew if he called his mother
for a couple aspirin,
she would give them to him,
and he'd go right back to sleep.
But he didn't call her.
He kept waiting,
thinking it could go away.
Maybe it'll go away.
And he sucks air around it.
Ooh, no, it's still there.
Okay, maybe a little while.
A little while.
A little while.
And he actually,
he delays about an hour and a half
before he calls his mother
who brings him the two aspirin,
and he falls back asleep.
But he didn't get the eight hours thing,
and he makes an error and whatever.
So the moral dilemma is,
why didn't he call his mother right away?
He knew she'd give him the two aspirin.
And the answer was
that he knew she wouldn't stop there.
She would give him the two aspirin,
but as soon as daylight came,
she'd make a dental appointment.
To go and see what's wrong with that tooth.
And he also knew the dentist.
And the dentist,
whenever he came in with a problem here,
took extra time to see if there weren't
any problems anywhere else.
And sometimes he found three other areas
that were going to need work,
and we had a series of appointments
until we had perfect teeth.
See, the only help that's available
was perfect help
coming from the mother.
He didn't want perfect teeth.
He didn't want perfect teeth.
He wanted two aspirin.
And that's what we want.
We want 80%.
Not perfect release from anything.
And so our struggle,
as they discuss it,
in this becoming entirely ready,
takes a long time.
And it is the measure
of our spiritual progress.
What else am I willing
to get rid of?
There's nothing to learn
in spirituality.
It is a matter of unlearning.
As we completely get rid of
everything that isn't us,
the truth,
as somebody was quoting
the last part of the page,
164,
more will be revealed.
And the revealing
is between us,
between you and your creator.
That's how it gets revealed.
It suddenly occurs to you.
You intuitively see things.
I know how I could solve this.
It just comes.
Effortlessly.
No struggle
on our part.
We don't like no struggle.
We don't like simplicity
and we don't like easy.
I don't want it simple.
I want it complicated.
I remember in the beginning,
all you have to do is not drink.
That can't be that simple.
I know it can't be that simple.
I'm a much more complex.
Shut up and get in the car
and don't drink.
But it was that simple
and it drove me crazy.
I'm much more complicated than that.
You can't have a simple answer
to these complex, complex.
And there it lies.
And so that's just the perspective
I'm throwing on this
because each time
that we are willing
to surrender
through the next step
that talks about humility,
the more we awaken
until we suddenly realize
that that, I think Bill writes somewhere,
we were granted a glimpse of the kingdom.
Remember that line?
We were granted a glimpse.
That's all it takes
to start making the kingdom
the top priority.
I want to see more
what I just had a glimpse of.
And as I'll talk about in the 11th step,
that becomes a personal endeavor.
Nobody can pray for you
and nobody can meditate for you.
And no one can seek
our true nature or God.
And so I'm going to start
I think that seeking our true nature
which is pure love
is the same as seeking God.
And the big book tells us
that God is inside of us
and it's only there
that he can be found.
And so it is a journey inward
which is accomplished
by destroying,
smashing our story.
And so that we're reduced to
observers.
I'm just here at the movie.
Been a hell of a movie.
I can't tell you.
Boy, I went through this.
Oh, here I am being sad again.
Oh, yeah, that's a good part.
I remember that.
Oh, yeah, here's the part where...
And...
So I just leave it at that.
That the struggle there
of letting go 100%
is, as Bill says,
what separates
the men from the boys,
the girls from the women,
the seekers from the hanger-on-ers.
It's possible
to...
Yeah, I thought
it's a little extra time
because seven won't take very long.
I like to use this analogy about AA.
You know, a lot of things
that cause problems
for societies
are success.
Yeah, even our country.
You know, it was great
while you're working and working
to get there.
Now we all got it
and everybody's rich
and we're sitting around
and, I mean, compared to how it was.
And then the trouble starts.
You know, because
I already did the sacrifice thing.
Now I just want to reap.
Give me a moment.
Give me a moment.
So if you went back
55 years ago
in most cities,
in small cities
and all towns,
there was one meeting a week.
And you say to yourself,
how did they stay sober
on one meeting a week?
One meeting a week.
Well, you really look forward
to the meeting.
Well, three more days
and the meeting will be here.
So that became quite a big highlight
and maybe halfway through the week
you met with another guy
or gal for coffee.
And the two of you said,
three more days,
the meeting will be here
and you can make it.
I can make it.
You can make it.
Okay.
But what we really did
was pray.
And prayed like heck.
And then prayed some more.
Okay, one more day.
Let me through this day.
Give me through this day.
Give me through this day.
Ah, I'm at the meeting.
So contrast that with today
when we have 6 a.m. meetings,
noon meetings,
5.45 meetings
on the way home from work,
8 o'clock meetings,
midnight meetings,
gay meetings,
women's meetings,
men's meetings,
discussion meetings,
speaker meetings,
CDs,
tapes,
conferences,
conventions,
pamphlets on everything.
Everything.
I'm waiting for one
about old marine pilots.
I just don't know.
Because we have
very unique problems
that need to be...
Only kidding.
Do not call New York
and tell them about that comment.
We have such...
And the treatment center.
And all the professionals
that are now involved in alcoholism.
We have such a support system now.
You don't have to hardly pray at all.
You don't have to hardly pray at all.
And so,
that's why I'm focusing on this awakening
and taking the goalposts up.
You could have pretty good
pretty good
sobriety
sort of
going through some of the motions,
doing some of it,
giving it a little bit of an effort,
and then just
attending and watching.
And you'd be in a
semi-comfortable position.
And Bill wrote,
and he's quoting Lincoln,
that the good is the biggest enemy
of the best that there is.
If it would just get worse,
we'd really go back...
I can grab this program.
But it's...
I'm hanging in pretty good.
Yeah, I'm hanging in.
How's it going?
Pretty good.
Yeah, pretty good.
There's so much more.
There's so much more.
And then we come to humility
in the seventh step.
And this is a wonderful discussion
in the 12 and 12
about what humility is.
And we began it...
with the fifth step
with our sponsor.
Sometimes people say,
if you say you're humble,
you're not.
It goes away.
Well, let me tell you something.
If you say a prayer in the morning,
that's an act of humility.
If you read the big book,
that's an act of humility.
If you call your sponsor,
that's an act of humility.
If you go to a conference,
that's an act of humility.
All of those are statements by you
that you can't make it on your own.
That's what all those statements are,
which is what humility is.
It's an acknowledgement.
I can't do this by myself.
I can't make it.
And then we give up.
And we have one of the first paradoxes
in spirituality
that you win by giving up.
And you become totally independent
by becoming totally dependent
on a higher power.
And we have things revealed to us
with no effort.
We don't have to study.
We just have to follow the directions.
I would call our AA literature,
the big book,
I would call it a treasure map.
It has precise directions to the treasure.
But it is not the treasure itself.
The treasure is awakening.
The treasure is our creator.
The treasure is getting the hell out
of this world.
The treasure is getting the hell out of this world.
This world that we created for ourselves
that's so scary and unfair
and just filled with all these things.
And this process allows it to be destroyed
piece by piece as the drinking was.
And so in the seventh step,
we find something out about humility.
Some of the humility is
God is everything, I'm nothing.
One of the great measures of humility
is we don't compare.
There's no comparing anything.
Nothing is better than or worse than.
I'm not better.
I just am.
It is.
They are.
No adjectives.
Just is.
See what I'm saying?
The comparison's all gone.
The thing about humility
and acquiring it in the seventh step is
there's a four-letter word involved
called pain.
And I remember reading that.
I said, let's skip to eight.
I don't want to hear about pain.
I want to hear about pain.
Well, I am giving up control
and there's no way to give it up painlessly.
All right.
I always like it.
That's my...
When new people say that word,
they're being very spiritual.
Okay, got to do it.
All right.
Yeah.
You are getting it now.
You mean I'm going to give this up too?
All right.
Boy, if you find yourself saying all right,
you are on a roll.
You are on a roll.
Because you're going against whatever it is
that didn't want you to say those words.
All right.
And so we find,
oh, I don't want to go through that again.
That's exactly how Bill puts it.
I don't want to go through what I went with the drinking.
I just don't want to humiliate my friends.
I don't want to do that again.
All right.
And then when we do it,
we go,
God, that feels better.
And our attitude towards pain and humility
starts to change
based on the results.
And suddenly,
pain becomes effort.
Just like working out.
When you first start, it's painful.
But three months later,
you're doing the same workout.
And it's effort.
You don't even classify it as painful.
It's producing these results that are so wonderful.
And that's the key
to understanding humility
is that the results that will come from it
are indeed magnificent.
And so,
I guess I'm running out of energy.
I started by saying,
we're going to look at the steps
from just a different storyline,
a different perspective.
Spiritual beings have a human experience.
So the manufactured problems
that we ended up drinking over
weren't there.
And the fact that drinking seemed to fix them,
as Scott said,
it's just,
it's just an illusion.
So we're using this process
to crush the illusion.
To just have it collapse
through examination
and through willingness
to stop being the author of our life.
And when I get to step 11,
you'll see,
I just want to touch on that now
before I wrap up.
This is one of the,
I've studied a lot of other things
and that's part of what step 11
suggests that we do.
And this really is unique
where we are suggested
to pray only
for knowledge of his will for us
and the power to carry it out.
That is the
ultimate humble prayer.
The prayer is saying,
you know much better than I do
what would be best for you.
What would be best for me.
So I'm going to leave it all up to you.
How do you like that?
Because even in our prayers,
we have it figured out
how it ought to be.
And we're going to pray for
our way to be implemented.
And it may be noble.
And it may,
the motives may look good.
But in the final analysis,
it's being generated by my view
of how things ought to be.
And it's being generated by my view of how things ought to be.
And the secret to happiness
is to not have a view
about how anything should be.
It's really the exact opposite
of what we were taught.
And I'll close with this.
When I was a little kid,
I was told everything
that everybody else was.
It's your life
and you have to live it.
Nobody else will live it for you.
It's up to you to make something
out of this world.
It's up to you to accomplish this.
Well, how do you do that?
Well, you go to school.
You study hard.
You go over here.
You keep your nose clean.
And you will.
Get there.
And then you're
50 years old on your yacht
thinking of suicide.
And so,
what they should have told us was
it's not your life.
It's God's.
Let him make something
wonderful out of you.
That would have been a nice journey.
Thank you all very much.
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