Why the Knowledge of the Text Is the Baseline – Myers R.

So grateful to be here. I am it. This kind of freaks me out seeing so many nice folks on here. I do a lot of zooms where I don't know anybody. I don'T KNOW ANYBODY ON THERE AND AND AND ON THIS MEETING THIS MORNING. I PROBABLY KNOW AT LEAST TWO OF YOU. NO, NO, I KNOW THERE'S A WHOLE BUNCH OF YOU GUYS THAT I KNOW AND IT JUST IT'S LIKE BEING LIKE SITTING AROUND A CHRISTMAS TREE ON christmas morning like that just with your fam um it's it's pretty uh it's pretty special some of y'all have come long distances to get on here and had to get up real real real early and um and i'm i'm so grateful um the um you know this um oh i guess i ought to for those that i don't know uh that i have not met my name is myers ramer very grateful recovered alcoholic from Ingram, Texas in the middle of freaking nowhere. And I took my last drink January 15th to 88 and that's all that. Of all the things that I get a chance to do, I love talking for family weeks and treatment centers where I'm talking to families that don't really understand the whole piece of, of alcoholism and addiction. And I love doing those talks. And I really, really, really love doing a foundation stuff like this. Um, it's, it's funny that I don't know, uh, 25, 26 years ago, whatever we, when we started primary purpose in, in Dallas, um, after a while we realized that we had a rooms that were filling up with people that wanted to hear the message of recovery but there were so many people in there that were new and we were in the chapter to the wives or someplace back over in the book and we felt uncomfortable because there were a lot of folks couldn't get that they didn't they were just behind and so they started a beginner's meeting and it took us about a month and a half two months for somebody to finally say, golly, my daughter was in that meeting and she came out talking about stuff that I've never heard of. I wish I wasn't older. If I was a beginner, I could go to that meeting. And so I looked at Clifford and Clifford said, we're changing the name of that dang thing really quick. Andso that's when they, we started calling them foundation meetings and we're welcoming. And, and I got to tell you, there's nothing that was more fun than to rush out of that meeting, our book study at the end of the meeting and slide around the corner to where that foundation meeting was being held in another room and watch those guys that had been in the room for 17, 20, 25 years walk out just like what, what the heck just happened in there? I mean, I just, I heard stuff that I didn't connect up, that I did not understand, that it was amazing stuff i um i i just i'm gonna get into this i promise i need to set some some stuff up here first the um have y'all ever if y' all ever noticed how fleeting willingness is and and um and motivation i mean you will get guys that are a week uh from their last drink and they're real motivated to do something and then three weeks later you couldn't get them to get on a zoom at gunpoint they just they're not motivated anymore they figured it out they kind of worked it all out there's always that side of it but there's also another side that we don't ever want to talk about but we're gonna for 60 seconds um folks it's disturbing how many people come to and then leave and and we we always kind of co-sign it by saying well they they just weren't ready. They're just not ready yet, and I got to say, y'all, I've been doing this long enough now and watching it long enough that somewhere along the line, I need to ask you this question, and I think it's the $64,000 question. What is it that those newcomers needed to hear that they didn't hear? And I'm not trying to spank anybody because I spent years and years sitting in meetings talking about my story and this sort of stuff. My buddy Chad was talking about it some yesterday, and I totally agree. Sometimes we waste the golden opportunity of being able to pull those folks with a vision of how cool it is by just staying in the text. Bill Wilson calls it a common solution, and i just think that sometimes we need to pay attention to that. Guys, it's a big world and it's different in different places and if you were raised in a culture in your AA group where people had big books and used big books and talked big book then you have a different view on this as if you Were raised in a in a cultural in that meeting where all you did was share your experience strength and hope There's nothing wrong with that necessarily. But the problem is, is that you'd end up like me, seven years in AA, so amazingly unhappy that I could not even begin to describe it. Suicidal would do a pretty good job of it. I don't even know who the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous are, because we're not talking about any of that stuff. That's the reason why I think this stuff is so much more important. It sets a baseline for not only our own recovery, but it also sets a baseline of how we handle the unbelievable task of being able to carry other people through this work. Are we just shooting from the hip trying to be hip slick and cool? That's me. I'm poster born for that narrative like that. Or are we understanding the text in a way that will allow us to just simply carry that? There's a great deal of freedom, an amazing amount of freedom in being able to just share what the book says. And I don't have to be slick and cool. I don'T have to BE smart. I DON'T have TO BE anything. I just have to be a vessel carrying a clear message that was spiritual in nature, that was brought to us out of a dark, dark time in the world when alcoholism was killing hundreds of thousands of people and we had nothing to fix it. Um, the, um, I think sometimes it's a good idea and then I'm, I'm getting into this. I think it's good idea sometimes to, uh, when next time you're sitting in a meeting, if you want to know kind of where you stand in the big picture, close your eyes, sitting in a media, just sit there for a minute and then just close your ears, even whether it's on a zoom or whether it is, it's, uh in a face-to-face and ask yourself, where are you, what is the new person hearing? What are they hearing? It's funny. You'll discount a lot of stuff, but when you really pay attention, when my daughter sobered up a couple of years ago, when she was in the rooms, I became vigilance, not the word, hypervigilant may be the word of paying attention to what it was that she was hearing. And I would walk out of some meetings just like on fire because i was so upset that she was hearing somebody's pet died and they we talked about i'm sorry the pet died i am truly i'll send them a text after the meeting and tell them exactly how sorry i am but but taking up valuable recovery time when we've got this little window somebody sent me a new copy of the harris county uh chip sales and i'm not going to get into a bunch of it like this. But in one year, they gave out 16,000 desire chips. Guess how many one month chips they gave up? Right at 6,000, which means that 10,000 people didn't pick up a one month chip, which is disturbing. And you have to ask yourself the question. Yes, some of those folks decided they didn't want to do what we do. But a lot of those folks, it bothers me to say it, but a lot of those folk I don't think heard what they needed to hear. They weren't excited about the idea. They were pulled with this vision of maybe staying sober one day at a time, which is horrific. It's fun for a while, but after you've been doing it for a couple of years, it becomes a burden to carry that is goofy Bill Wilson and those cats were talking about this amazing program where we could live life free of the bondage of self and free of this nightmare that was just sobriety, and they introduced us to this idea of recovery. And that's where I want to start. We'll talk about that for just a second. If you can, your book flip over to the the title page, Alcoholics Anonymous. The and there's a little piece there, the story of how many thousands of men and women have recovered from alcoholism. The word was used for a reason. And Bill will beat us up with it 30 times, something like this. 31, 32, depending on what reference you're using. At times they use the word recover in the big book. Recovery and sobriety are two distinctly different things. Sober is cool. Sobre is better than dying. But sober is not what he was after. He was after a step past that where we could look at what real freedom is to get up in the morning and take a deep breath and know that you're not having to grab your trigger list off the night table and be ready to go uh-uh that doesn't sound that doesn'T sound like freedom to me that sounds like another thing of of bondage flip flip over to um the uh forward to the first edition XIII. I'm just going to read certain pieces of this because I'm kind of setting this thing up a little bit. At the top of that page, forward to the first edition, it says we of Alcoholics Anonymous are more than 100 men and women who have recovered. There's that crazy word again from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body to show other alcoholics precisely how we've recovered is the main purpose of this book. Notice it didn't say how we got sober. It said how we recover. This is a big thing. If you've never messed with it, if you've just discounted it, I hate that word recovered. I hear that all the time. People will send me texts. I'll always be recovering. Look at what the text says. So we're going to have to either figure this out and decide, each one of us for ourself, is the text the basis of our recovery? Is it this is the textbook that we're using, and we're going to follow these, or are we free to choose and pick whatever we want to do? And I'm telling you right now, that cafeteria-style approach has disturbed lots and killed lots. And so we don't want to doing that. If we could help it, let's just just just stay this um are your experiences are hugely important i'm not ever discounting the importance of that but i think bill was kind of right in your face about all that um for a lot of folks that are newer in the program if you flip back over to xvi i'm in the forward to the second edition i'm kind of back over in there the um the um about two-thirds uh of the way down they're talking about this experience of of bill wilson um and um they're Talking about this this idea that that maybe there was something more than just being sober i'm about two-third of the way down he suddenly realized that in order to save himself he must carry this message to other alcoholics. That alcoholic turned out to be the Akron physician, Dr. Bob. The physician that they're talking about, we're getting ready to talk about here in just a second, had repeatedly tried spiritual means to resolve his alcoholic dilemma, but it failed. But when the broker gave him Dr. Silkworth's description of alcoholism and its hopelessness, the physician began to pursue the spiritual remedy for his malady with a willingness that he'd never been able to muster. If there's a single piece that all of this morning's talk is going to center around, it's that idea that they just read. If you understand the nature of your disease, then you are infinitely qualified to carry this message and to help other folks that are struggling with this nasty stuff. It's sort of an amazing deal. If you don't know what alcoholism is, and that had been the problem before Silkworth started trying to codify some of this, if you don'T understand, then you will quickly be back in a position with your hand on the tiller, running the show, trying to, well, I know I just made some bad decisions and that's why I'm loaded. If I could just get a better job, if I could just get a better girl, if I could get that girl back, you'll have 100 reasons and that's tragic. I just think that if we spent more time, Bill Wilson at least four times, and somebody told me the other day they counted another one, at least four times Bill Wilson refers us back to the chapter on alcoholism chapter three, to try to get us to see and understand what alcoholism look like. Because if I'm crystal clear that I have a disease which is progressive in nature and which is destined to either kill me or get me locked up, then things get pretty sweet. It's a common thread that runs through most of us, that moment where we realized and connected to the idea that maybe I'm not just a weak-willed little bastard. Maybe I'm not just an spineless guy. Maybe I have a disease, genetic in nature, that's destined to kill me if I don't do something. The level of anxiety, the level of your discomfort goes up about 10 notches right there because now it's not you making decisions it's not you um you'll have to make some decisions but but the the point is um the life is chad was talking about it yesterday this cycle thing that you go through like this i mean how many of us have had a blowtorch right up against our rear and we have both hands in the air going okay okay okay i'm i'm not gonna do anything i mean i'm gonna go ahead and try to just to stop and then we do and then the blowtorche backs away she comes back make the payments on the house everything seems rosy and pretty soon i'm back drinking again my family's baffled everybody around me is baffling and i'm destined to do this over and over and again everything crashes to the ground and then i say okay okay okay i'll stop and we do how many of y'all have tried to stop a bunch of times and and it i mean when you look back at it it's embarrassing it's ridiculous i I mean, people will look at it like this and go, geez. I mean normies will look at us and go y'all I don't get it. I mean why couldn't you just stop? Well that's a great question. That's an excellent question. Anyway on that same page I'm not going to read the deal but that little piece I just read he suddenly realized that in order to save himself he must carry. That's the first must in the big book? How many of us have sat in meetings with people who meant well, but said there are no musts in the Big Book? Well, there's a ton of them. There's one right there. And so we'll pay attention to that and see. There's a couple of things about Bill's story. If you flip over to Bill's story on this stuff. For a long time, I couldn't relate to Bill at all, and the problem was is that I didn't play golf, and I'm not a stockbroker. I don't know. I didn' t know what a whoopee party was. I do' n't know, guys. I just did' n relate to bill at all. But really, one night after a meeting this guy came up to me and he said Myers every time we study this um this uh chapter you always seem to check out and I went well I kind of do I guess I wish I'm sorry and he said no no no but he said the next time we studied it like this look and see how many things you that Bill did that you did in trying to quit and I want what do you mean and he said, well, let me ask you, did you ever exert willpower to quit drinking? And I went, well of course I did. Well so did Bill. How about self-knowledge? I mean how many of y'all have ever been in treatment and you left treatment thinking because I know so much about myself and my internal stuff that I'm going to be able to stay sober based on self- knowledge like that and then find yourself later standing in front of a beer cooler at a 7-Eleven. Yeah, that's it like that. How about fear? Because all of these were marked in my story now, Bill's story where he tried to fear sobered me up for a bit. Yeah, I'm going to lose her if I don't get sober. Fear is enough to get me sober for a little bit. Dozens and dozens of times it was enough. And the last one that most of us have probably tried is the geographic part. How many of us decided I remember Chris one time saying that he was having trouble staying sober where I was in Houston. So he was going to move to Austin, Texas, which was which was like party central and I remember going Chris yeah that nobody gets drunk in Austin. I mean, it was insane like that. But that's what we do. Then he moved to Atlanta. Then he moving to Vernon, Texas in the middle of nowhere. Then he move. I mean it's crazy. There's four different examples right there of things that Bill Wilson had done and to get sober. Flip back over to There's a Solution on page 18. There's some little squiggly lines down there So let me set this up before I read this, because it's important that we this is kind of nuts and bolts stuff that we've got to cover real quick. So Dr. Silkworth's piece in there, I want going to get into a bunch of it like this, but 98 percent of everything that Dr. Silkworth talked about was his realization and understanding that the physical allergy, the physical component of this once i start i can't seem to call the shot i mean maybe early on i could say i'm gonna have two beers and i'd have two bears but later i'd go i'm going to have two beers or not have six or three or 20 or i don't know i don'T KNOW WHAT IT'S GOING TO BE LIKE THAT MOST OF US UM WILL CONNECT WITH THE PHYSICAL COMPONENT OF THIS REAL QUICK that's the part I didn't intend to get so drunk I threw up on the table I didn' t intend to do all that kind of stuff we'll connect with those dots like that then in the next two chapters after there's a Dr. Sokey story like that we get Bill's thing out of the way and then there's A Solution and more about alcoholism they introduce us to this unbelievable idea about um the the mental component which is the most baffling piece of the whole whole thing why is it stone cold sober do i pick a drink up again knowing intellectually we're not stupid well i am a little bit but most of y'all aren't you're not stupid you're you're you understand these things um and yet we do this over and over and over again. Our families look at us and scratch their head and go, what the? You were sober, dude. Why did you get loaded? And the answer is you really don't know either. And most of you cats that are newer in here, y'all get that. You understand what that's like. And there's a solution. They talk about it being an illness of sort. I'm over on page 18. But the ex-problem drinker who has found this solution, who is properly armed with facts about himself, can generally win the entire confidence of another alcoholic in a few hours. Under such an understanding as reach, until such an understandings as reach there's little or nothing can be accomplished. Um, the, these were pieces early on in this chapter like that, that were connecting dots for us and helping us to understand, um, that as I began to put together the nature of my own disease, then I could help other people find the other one out of, out of topic here and completely kind of one little fast zig sideways like that. Look over there on the next page on 19, two thirds of the way down the page. There's a little piece there where it says, we have concluded to publish an anonymous volume setting forth the problem as we see it. We shall bring to the task our combined experience and knowledge. now i i refer back to it all the time because i think it's important to understand our experience ryan remembers what it was like to be a knucklehead doing the crazy things that we did that's his experience and the knowledge was what he earned what he learned from both working with others and reading the text and you know you you piled you pile up the knowledge there It would be a decade or so later, decades later, when the publisher of the Grapevine magazine would introduce us to the idea of experience, strength and hope. And now everybody leans into that that moniker like it's carries a bunch of weight. We're going to share our experience, strengthen hope. I wish we could go back to the original book and read it like this. We're gonna go back and share our experiences and knowledge. Strength and hope is cool. I love that like that. But guys, unless you notice that they took the knowledge out of there. But unless we have a knowledge of the basic text and how this works, we're going to have a difficult time carrying the message to anyone with any success. I'm never saying that the affiliation with other folks face-to-face and the fellowship and all that, I'm not saying that any of that's not important because it is. it's a big piece of our program but um i just i just wish there was a little uh more of the of the knowledge part that's the reason why i've been so delighted through zoom how many book studies we've seen that have popped up in the last three years that weren't there before tens of thousands of people are getting a chance to see and understand uh the basic text in a way that was never available to them um and and thousands and thousands and thousands of i couldn't begin to count how many lives have been saved because um of the knowledge gained um in sitting in these uh um in these meetings pretty pretty amazing um let me let me ask you a real quick question the the um one of the things that was the most disturbing for me in terms of trying to figure out how to deal with this stuff was this idea that, um, that I couldn't do this by just getting stronger. And so the, the, when they introduced me to this idea of a second step deal of an idea of moving towards my creator like that, it was all foreign to me. i could understand it on a kind of an intellectual basis but i could never internalize any of that and it was troublesome um the um i mean if i get a cold and the doctor says take the medication i'll go take the meditation and i get over the cold and it's fine but i did it and so i'm expecting that i would be able to do that um um in in all of this stuff um the Let me look at this thing from, I want to, if we all understood, if we could get everybody that's in our room to understand the physical component of our disease and then keeping in mind that because of the progressive nature of this, we don't really know where people are on that line. We can guess where they are on That Continuum from, I just drank my first beer leaning against my truck out by the 7-Eleven, from there to over here. They're getting ready to unplug the life support thing and I'm going to die. I mean, there's the continuum, but we don't know where you are guys. I've worked with kids that were 21 years old. They were already an end stage alcoholic. We don't know treatment center. You walk into treatment centers these days and you look across the room. I was in one the other day and it looked like a geriatric thing. It looked like an old folks home. I mean, there were 40 people in there and they were all in their 50s and 60s and 70s. And the disease had just manifested. They drank without a whole lot of problem for a lot of years. We don't know when that stuff is going to change and when it's going to affect us like that. That's the reason why we have to kind of be aware of that. But this mental thing, And by the time Bill gets in there and they start connecting up all the dots on this stuff, they wanted us to understand that the pure insanity of this thing. How many of y'all ever read the Jay Walker and looked at the book and went, what the? Why would they put that in this book? I mean, who? It doesn't make any sense. And then later you went, oh, damn, that's me. and you connect up the dot that I never connected it earlier like that. That's what pure insanity looks like. We would all have 10 stories about how often we said, I'm going to stop, I'm not going to do this anymore. And then we did. We crashed and burned and our families are just devastated. we are demoralized and completely baffled that why we would do that um and but at some point in time and especially if you have a decent sponsor they'll tap you on the shoulder and say dude how long is it going to take before you finally realize that you can be perfectly sane in every area of your life but around this alcohol you're you're screwed dude you are never going to be able to call the shot and unless you get the third component of that that spiritual malady taken care of how how many go flip over to page 52 let's talk about this real real quick the the um how many of y'all remember the day that you connected the dots and realized that stone cold sober, no booze, no funny stuff, no dope, no nothing in the picture that you felt like the bedevilments over on page 52. I'm going to read this real quick. It just takes just a second. We were having trouble with personal relationships. We couldn't control our emotional natures. We Were Prey to Misery and Depression. We Couldn't Make a Living. We Had a feeling of uselessness. We were full of fear. We were unhappy. We couldn't seem to be of real help to other people. Was this not the basic solution was not a basic solution of these bedevilments more important than whether we should see news reels of lunar flight? Of course it was guys at seven years sober all of these have and sobers in a big quotation mark at seven years over all of these had manifested in my life. I can't hardly work i'm having trouble with personal relationships i can't control my emotional natures like this i'm feeling full of fear i'm depressed all of these things were manifest but because i never ever picked up this book and because i was in a group with the culture that never reads the book nobody was able to help but i guarantee you it is a it is game changer to be in a position where you're sober and you're whistling down the road and everything is all groovy and then a year later you're sitting there day by day feeling distant and apart from everything and pretty soon the only thing that you could think of that might connect the dots the only things that will scratch that itch that restless irritable and discontent would be a drink and then the insanity returns and you drink and the cycle starts all over again this is this is crazy so the solution obviously the solution is always going to be stay focused on the spiritual solution that the center of our program centers around a relationship with our creator bill wilson wrote a whole chapter um we agnostics um um around this whole idea of trying to make sure that you understood what was going on and why things were happening the way that they will do. Look, for just a second, flip back over to not that one, We Agnostics, page 44. I want to read something real quick. This is again something that If you're if you ever find yourself in a situation where you feel overwhelmed, trying to qualify somebody, there's just too much stuff to do. And it happens. There's just two. Do I read the whole book? Why? Whatever. Do you know that? Let me make a suggestion real quick. If I've got a brand new little guy, let's say let's see. Will will looks like he needs some help this morning. And there he is right there. I'm going to let's let's say I just met Will and in a meeting and he was sitting looking at his looking at the table and he's not really engaged in anybody. And he's just sort of sitting there like that. My very favorite place to read is this first paragraph in We Agnostics on page 44. I haven't met Will before. I haven'T. I HAVEN'T. I don't know him. And so here's the deal. I'm going to I would say in this meeting, I'd say, well, if you got two seconds and he said, yeah, let me I want to read you a paragraph and see what your answer would be. And he said. OK, we hope we made clear the distinction between the alcoholic and the non-alcoholic. If when you honestly want to, you find you cannot quit entirely and it's in the same sentence, there's just a word or and a comma there. them. If when drinking, you have little control over the amount you take, you're probably alcoholic. Now hold your finger right there. There's two things they're talking about choice and control. It's that simple choice and control like that. If you tell your wife, hey, I'm never going to drink again. And then three weeks later, you find yourself drinking. You've lost the power of choice. If, if you tell that same wife, I want to stop off at this place and drink a beer with these guys on the way home, I'll be there at six for dinner. And then you don't show up because you're back over there drinking beer with these knuckleheads. There it is. Now you've lost the choice of control. The choice and control are the two indicators that we are in some dark tunnel there we're in trouble and so without all the reading without all the other kind of stuff um and so he's gonna these are answers the way the sentence is put in there you can answer them yes or no there's not you don't have to be vague about it yes yes and if that's the case look at what it says if this be the case you may be suffering from an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer so now i i got i got the hook in this guy and and and we have an opportunity to make some progress if he if he wants to he gets to make the decision whether or not he moves forward about this stuff sometimes i i watch me and my buddies for years we try to pull guys along against their will and and you can't you can'T do that you you gotta they have to be motivated to do that but i'm gonna to say right now at this opportunity like that, that if you don't move pretty quick, you'll find yourself in a weird situation, guys, where the motivation is gone and the willpower is gone. That's the reason why when I first sobered up, people were taking eight, nine months to work guys through the steps. I have a lot of friends that were taking through the steps one step a month. So it would take them a full year to get through that step. And very few of us were staying sober. And then I got hooked in at seven years, I got hooked in with those crusty old guys at primary purpose. And those folks were taking guys through the work in 35 days, 40 days, you know, 45 days is a long one. And I mean, it would make people's hair catch on fire when you would talk about this stuff. And in those days, I was traveling a lot and I'd be in Europe talking to someplace like this and And I'd have five or six people come up at our talk going, no, no. You can't do this. This is not a race. Oh, guys, it is. You're racing against your willingness to do this because I promise you, I've watched it so many times that it's sickening to see people that were so excited to be in these rooms and so excited to be doing this work that they could already feel is moving them towards this amazing end of the picture, this relationship with their creator. And people start stopping and slowing down and this kind of stuff. And it only takes a little bit and you'll lose them. And it's just troublesome. So if we understand clearly that we have this piece of physical stuff and this mental component, this pure insanity that's there like this, then we're left with this solution which is spiritual in nature like that and and Bill Wilson I mean to stop and think about this y'all that Bill Wilson would write a chapter like this is amazing I mean in a few pages back over on page 13 or 14 whatever when when um uh Bill Wilson is talking to Ebby, Bill is contemptuous times 10. I mean, he's just like, he doesn't even recognize that it's a possibility. Some pages later, he is laying in the hospital and going, holy cow, I just had this experience. And then this thought comes to him, this contemptuous, I hate anything religious kind of thing. He has this thought that says, hey, wait a minute. Maybe I could carry this message to somebody else. And then he begins to modify his approach to that whole thing. Step two stuff does not take a lot of time. Guys, I've done hundreds and hundreds and thousands of step stuff, steps one, two, and three, sitting on the tailgate of my truck before a meeting with somebody that I had just met in the parking lot before the meeting. it is it is not take a long time and yet how many of us have sat in meetings going well and heard people go well i'm working on step two well i'M WORKING ON STEP TWO I'M WORКING QUIT THE BOOK IS CLEAR AND THEY'RE IN THERE'S A SOLUTION AND MORE ABOUT ALCOHOLS THAT ALCOHOLISM THEY'RE PAINFULLY CLEAN THAT THIS IS A DECISION THAT WE GET TO MAKE ARE YOU WILLING TO BELIEVE THAT THERE'S A POWER GREATER THAN YOURSELF IF YOU ARE LET'S GO I DON'T CARE WHETHER YOU THINK GOD IS THOR or whether you think God is some tree. I don't care, and nor should you at this point. What's important is that you're willing to move towards that creator. And if you are, that means that as you do this, your hand comes off the tiller and you get to experience maybe for the first time ever in your life a sense of peace, a senseof comfort as you realize that you are not controlling the show, that God is. And I'm telling you, if you ever want to know what true serenity feels like, connect that dot and you'll be you'll be blown away by by what that stuff looks like. The. It's funny, I guess God wanted me to say I just dropped part of my book and was looking at it like that. And back on twenty nine, it says further on, clear cut directions are given showing how we recovered. there it is again. Don't send me any texts or anything about how much you hate the word recovered, okay? I get it. But I think you'll totally dig it later on. And I got to say, I didn't say it before, but if you're 20 years sober and you're still introducing yourself as recovering, what does that say to the new guy? 20 years later, I'm still carrying a trigger list and I'm still not well. That's a scary thought. Wouldn't it be cooler if you could just say 20 years down the road that I've recovered from a hopeless state of mind and body? Yes, I'll always be an alcoholic. I'll also be a little dope being from hell. I will. But the obsession is gone. When restless, irritable, and discontent comes back into the picture, I just move gently back towards my creator and that stuff goes away. Or I do what Clifford says, Myers, why don't you get off your skinny butt and go help somebody? and then I would do that, and it would be amazing how different that would feel. Flip over to page 60 real quick and we'll kind of get the things connected up here. We're in a position on this stuff, y'all, where if we have made these decisions that we admit the powerlessness of this deal and we admit that we're willing to lean into an understanding of something that I may not even understand, but at least I'm willing to lean that direction like that. Then we've satisfied what's necessary in step one and two. And then the only other piece in here that is so important early on is this idea of step three, which was simply making a decision. I mean, making a decisions that we were going to go on and finish the rest of this world. But notice, because of the way that the stuff is set up, we have the power now to do that. I mean, come on, what would happen if they had switched it around and put your inventory in step one and the amends in step two? And y'all understand? I mean that's a no-brainer. This would be a train heading for a dumpster fire overnight. I mean it's not going to be anything that's salvageable like that the idea that i could gently kick that door open and let god into the picture and realize that the things that i wasn't willing to look at all of a sudden i'm willing to looked at that's that's nothing short of of miracle on top of mirror bottom of page 60 bill introduces us to this idea and and and he'll he'll he starts talking about it on 62 that selfishness and self-centeredness that we think is the root of our troubles um early on everybody pushes back against it i'm not selfish i've made some bad decisions i own that but i'm Not Selfish and um but he introduces us to this idea um and then he he paints this picture which i think is probably the most eye-opening thing that there ever was written in the big book is this miracle work from 60 to 63 where the third step prayer is where they introduce you to the stage character and then you get to decide where you are. I talk about it all the time because it's so fun to talk about like that. There's nothing cooler than to wake up and realize that you're a gold-plated fake, that you are simply a stage character full of manipulation, full of dishonesty, you you seem to think that you can overcome selfishness by exert. Being more willpower do any I remember him looking at Clifford and he looked back at me and he look back at Cliff again and he just kind of shrugged his shoulders and he said, Clifford, you got your work cut out for you. And it was a little later I asked Clifford. I said, what did he mean? And he said because the basis of our program is that you're not trying to run the show. And, and, and Joe would tell me a dozen times before I finally connected that if I would ever, ever get my hand off the tiller and let God run the Show, that my life would be transformed. Guys, I'm telling you it's to this day, 35 years down the road, it still doesn't make any sense to me intellectually. I still can't line it up on an intellectual plane, but where i can line it up is the anecdotal part of that the the watching thousands and thousands of people that have come into these rooms that have followed this program and have been transformed uh by the very nature of the because they were willing to do the work um and they were unwilling to uh to do what they were asked to do um there's something there's something pure magic here guys with the idea of being able to um rely on our creator um and know that i don't have to get up in the morning and and um i don't have to be special i can just get up and let god do that deal um we do the third step and then we get up in some inventory and we see some clarity and then we take the things that we see of that are objectionable um and it's fascinating how many folks see that for the first time. I remember that, and then we ask God in six and seven to remove those things. We get ready to make the amends and go through all that. Again, we feel like we are on a different plane looking at this thing. Instead of being Myers-Ramer defensive idiot, always trying to defend my mistakes, always try to defend everything that I did like that. Now, I'm not like that now. I'm sitting there quietly going. I stepped on some people, and there are things I regret, and I want to go back and try to clear those regrets up and deal with that magic stuff. I get into 10 where I can make these basic inventory stuff every day and try just keep my side of the street as clean as I can be. Our goal is not a spiritual plane where we're just floating through space. Our goal is to be crystal clear in this thing and see and understand that there is a different way to live my life, a completely different way. And then Bill would, we don't have time obviously to do that, but Bill will introduce us to this amazing 11 and 12 where we get to understand that everything valuable in our program centers around what we do in our effort to stay close to God. Joe McWaney and Cliff used to always say, Myers, go back to Dr. Bob's thing. Go back this clean house deal like that. This is all about how much time are you spending with God and how much Time are you spinning with God's kids? Are you spending time with your creator every day? And are you Spending time and making it a priority to spend time with God'S kids? you have to listen it I'm telling you I just if there's anything that I could get you to understand if I could just kind of if I can give it to you in a pill I would that would make you just go go hey wait a minute I need to stop thinking about me all the time and start thinking about somebody else let me close with this if you're if you knew I'm I already love you I I just I wish you were here. I'd give you a little noogie and just, I want you to stay buddy. It would be the coolest. If you've been around for a little bit like this, instead of going to a meeting and sitting there talking to your homies and all your pals like that, stand outside and watch the people that are walking across the parking lot with their head on the parking light. Pay attention to the peoplethat are sitting in the meeting that are staring at the tabletop and are not looking around the room any like that these are people that are hurting this is help hurting drunks 101 um don't don't spend that time i tell all the men that i sponsor at a minute that are were there in meetings i said don't come up to me during our meetings like that i'm available 24 7 you can call me anytime we can talk we'll do whatever but at that meeting i'm looking for the same people that you need to be looking for which are the people that ARE struggling and hurt And I'm going to slide up next to them, ask them what I can do to help, offer some hope, read them that paragraph at the top of page 44, and see if I can't begin to pull them gently with a vision of how magic this whole thing could be. Yes, you can live your life with no booze and no dope. But more importantly than that, you Can Live Your Life Completely Transformed. That's some badass stuff. I think I better shut up. I love you guys. Thank you so much for letting me come. Ron, Risa, you guys, I sure love y'all.