Why the Results Beat the Theory – Sandy B.

well good evening everybody my name is sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic how y'all doing I want to thank you for inviting me here and I want to offer my congratulations on your 13th anniversary something is working well and that's so typical of Alcoholics Anonymous to just start something the seed gets planted and next thing you're having a big deal you know what I mean it's just amazing God I was thinking as Conway was talking and thinking back on when we met and we were talking about spirituality on the way over here and I was think that there's so many definitions of alcoholism that i'd like to add another one tonight you know we're never going to get it right but there's you see them everywhere and it occurs to me that alcoholism is a continuous journey away from god and that recovery is a continuous journey back to god and it doesn't look like that you stop any of us in the middle of our alcoholism say how does it Feel to be constantly walking away from God would be going. What are you talking about man? I'm just having a party I'm not, you know, I have a disease I'm doing that and yet look at our steps and look at what happens to us when we come in here and Begin this remarkable journey that most of us didn't believe in. I certainly didn't it. I remember when they told me the 12 steps contain all of the answers and all of the solutions to every problem you'll ever have and I had a lot of problems like any other alcoholic who comes wandering in here and those problems included money and sex and power and security and you know just about everything and everybody I talked to said you just work these steps you're gonna be amazed and so I finally had to believe them you know what I mean I had I'd done some lip service to reading some of the literature. I'd taken my big book and moved the pages around so they looked like they'd been read a lot, and I got a magic marker and just went around putting little underlines in a couple of wows and things like that. And then the coup de grace, especially with my sponsor, I got an old coffee cup and spilled some coffee so I had it on the bottom, And then it had what looked like coffee cup stains in the big book so that it really looked used. And then I just left it to sit on the shelf. And so when I got this idea, you know, and started to believe that all solutions are going to be found in these 12, I went back there and started really looking, having listened to enough speakers that I became convinced. So I started in and spent about an hour very carefully reading the 12 and 12 and the big book. And I missed it, you know what I mean? I went through there, and I just couldn't find it. And I remember going back and saying, I'm going to read this again. I have seen nothing in here about money, which was one of my biggest problems when I came in. And there was no money step that I could identify by reading them. and then I went into security that I'm you know I had this job secure I'm getting thrown out of the Marine Corps I'm having all these problems insecure and I couldn't find a security step and right down the list of all the problems that I had I found no step that went along with them and I was about to learn one of the first lessons I guess on the spiritual path which is that the answer doesn't look like it'll work and I think that's what we all end up doing when we come in here and start working on these 12 steps is that we end up taking a series of actions that we don't believe in and we have to take other people's word for it that this is going to indeed work for us and as it turns out it only becomes visible after you do it and we can read this stuff until the cows come home and nothing will happen in our lives And it's throughout our literature you see that knowledge avails us nothing. The only difference between studying a lot about alcoholism and not studying a lot about alcoholicism is that you have a real smart drunk when you get through who, if he ever sobers up, can tell you all about the disease of alcoholism and how it progresses and all of that, but it'll be of no help whatsoever in staying sober, because our problem was not ignorance. It was powerlessness. And that was very hard for me to accept that I was powerless over anything. At the time I came into the AA, I was in the Marine Corps, and we don't admit we're powerless over anything. You know what I mean? It's like, no way. And then they tried to tell me that pride was a character defect. And I remember having bumper stickers, you You know, the few, the proud, the arrogant or whatever it was that we had on that on the Marine Corps emblem. And, you know, pride, a character defect. I said this must be a communist organization and they're trying to weaken the will of our country and take away pride. And so, you Know, it's really quite a transition to go from our old ideas into this new ideas. And I think that sobriety is an endless search for something else that we have up here that's wrong. I remember Charlie Bruton was a wonderful little guy up in Washington from Alabama. He was the chief counsel for the House of Representatives, and he had all these sayings, and one of them was, it isn't the things you don't know that kill you. It's knowing things for sure that just ain't so. And this is what I brought, and I think everybody else that brings into AA, is a lot of knowledge that isn't true. And when you believe in that, it can be a very terrifying world. And getting rid of that has been my journey in sobriety, is looking for something else that I may know that's wrong and getting rid of it rather than having my ego jump in and defend it. It's really hard to defend stuff that doesn't make sense, but when you think it up yourself You're stuck with that. You know what I mean? I know it's a bad plan for living, but I thought it up And I just don't want to change it. It's sort of a pride of authorship Yeah, I'm in jail again, but got here myself You know and I mean, it's not like somebody helped me get here And so we hang on to stupid ideas because we thought them up and it's really hard to let go of those things i don't know about you all but that's that's always a problem i don' know why i'm on charlie but the other thing i'll never forget one night at a meeting we had a clock in the back of the room and it said uh quarter after eight and then the clock up behind the speaker said 8 30. and you know a new guy he can't handle that you know i mean 8 30 is at 8 15. he probably didn't even hear the speaker at all you know what i mean hey it's 8 30 back there and it's eight fifteen up here so charlie looked like he was in charge of the group you know he had a suit and was just sort of distinguished looking and the guy came up to him and said i'd like to report the clock in the back you know why do you have says 815 and this one says 830 and Charlie looked right at him he said if they both said the same time we wouldn't need but one clock I don't know if the guy went back to drinking but I thought that was a incredible answer so I don't really know where this talk is going I just got off on this thing I hope I talk about my drinking at some point, but I'm not ready yet. I just was thinking about that definition, that disease really was a journey away from God and how horrible that is to be and to be out there all alone. The further I go from my higher power, the more I'm alone. And it's just me against the world. And that's really scary. And I'm starting to realize you're not supposed to be able to get through life on your own. you know we're just not supposed that's not supposed to happen and i think the fact that we fail and find it so overpowering and find it so lonely is how we are communicated to to turn around and let's go in the other direction and let'S come back into the fold and admit that we need help and that this help comes from source of divine love and that it's available to all of us. And what makes me think about that, I don't know if everybody's familiar with the AA history, but I just recall one little incident back in the origins of AA. There was a millionaire businessman from Rhode Island and his son was named Roland Hazard and the father wanted him to take over the business but he was an alcoholic and they'd send him to the best hospitals, and this is back in the 1920s early 30s and he'd send them off to these hospitals that we had in the United States and his son would come back and last about a week and be totally drunk again and he was just at his wits end when someone suggested that there was a psychiatrist over in Switzerland that could, if anybody in the world could help an alcoholic it was Carl Jung And so they made arrangements, and young Roland went over to Switzerland and stayed a year with Dr. Young. And during that time, Dr. Jung tried to cause, through psychotherapy, a personal transformation that we call a spiritual awakening, an entire transformation of his personality in order to enable him to see the world differently so that he could stay sober. And at the end of that year, Dr. Young said to Roland, I've done everything that I can. I think you understand the situation. If you drink again, it's just going to be disaster. We're going to end up having to lock you up and throw away the key. And Roland said, yeah, I understand that. And he got as far as Paris where someone asked him the wrong question. They said, would you like a drink? And he said, yes, I would. and his sobriety lasted about a week after a whole year with Dr. Young and so he went back and here we have the millionaire's son with the most famous psychiatrist in the world we have an unlimited supply of money for treatment and Dr. Yang said something that started the path to AA he said to Roland there's nothing I can do for you and whenever I think of that moment in time I think about no human power could have relieved our alcoholism and there was the ultimate human power that was available on the planet at that time speaking with such humility to say to an unlimited supply of money there is nothing that I can do for you which totally deflated all hope it caused an immediate surrender of unlimited proportions in Rowland. And Rowland said, is there nothing? And Dr. Young said, I have read of certain cases such as yours where they have sought a spiritual awakening. So if I was you, I would go down that path and go see what you can find that might cause something like that. And it was because of those words of Dr. Jung that Rowland came back and joined the Oxford movement, and he in turn made the 12-step call, or Ebby made the12-step called from the jail to Rowland. And next thing you know, Rowland Hazard has gotten Ebby Thatcher into the Oxford Movement. And then, of course, you all know that Ebby went out and called on Bill Wilson and brought him into the Oxford Movement, and then AA took off from there. So you have sort of this origin of Roland Hazard and Dr. Carl Young. And Bill was aware of this and he always knew that this was a very key element in the beginnings of Alcoholics Anonymous but he forgot to contact Dr. Young and let him know what had happened and I think it was somewhere in the middle 60s I forget the exact date it was before Bill died obviously in 71 and he said you know I never closed the loop with Dr. Young and told him what's happened as a result of his last meeting with Roland Hazard so he wrote him a letter and these letters have been in the grapevine I don't know if you've ever seen them the correspondence between Bill Wilson and Dr. Carl Jung and it took place right before Dr. Jung died so it was very timely and he wrote them and said I don't know if you remember Roland Hazard, but you saw him in such and such a year. And as a result of your advice, he came looking for a spiritual path and found the Oxford Movement and then came to EBBIE and then we started Alcoholics Anonymous. And now there are thousands of people all around the world that are staying sober. We have this wonderful spiritual program. And I just thought you'd like to know that you played a role in this. And the interesting part was when I got the answer back from Dr. Young, and he said, thank you very much, Mr. Wilson. I often wondered what happened to Mr. Hazard. I'm so glad to hear that. He said, back when he was calling on me, it was almost dangerous within the psychiatric world to mention spirituality, and so I could never tell anybody or my colleagues what I was really trying to do in causing this spiritual displacement was to cause a spiritual awakening. And then he went on to say that he's been thinking about alcoholics ever since, and he felt that alcoholics had one quality that kind of separated them and perhaps was a driving force in the disease, and it was an inordinate longing for God. And when I think of that, I just go, what a beautiful way to describe this. And I look back on my alcoholism. I didn't know what that was. I just knew that I always knew there was something missing. I always new that I wasn't comfortable with the way I was and that I felt different from other people and alcohol fixed that whatever that was i didn't know what that was but i knew that alcohol fixed it when i induced alcohol into my system i felt as if i was complete for the first time in my life that i was now a hundred percent i could now understand why other people talked about how great this world was up until that point i used to think they were just making it up you know they say isn't this a great life isn't it's a great world and i would go i don't think you're on the same planet that i'm on as i look at the world i don'T see it that way at all i heard a speaker one time say that he strongly suspected that at some point he was going to be standing out in his backyard and a spaceship was going to come down from outer space. And a couple of weird looking little creatures were going to came over to him and say, we're so sorry. You're not supposed to be on this planet. Get in the spaceship with us and we'll take you over to where you're supposed to be. You know what I mean? It was that sense of just not the same as everyone else. Just I'm not complete inside. And then alcohol came along. And of course, alcohol, like spirituality, is an inside job. And it came inside and it transformed the world that I lived in. I always talk about my first drink and why I'm an alcoholic, and it all took place on the first night that I drank. I was in a social situation, room about a third as big as this. I Was at a local university where I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. I I was in there on one of the things that was the most terrifying for me to do. The dean had said, I want you 30 guys, and a list came out, meet in there and get to know each other. Now, asking me to go do that back in the 50s was like asking me to go attack a machine gun nest with a water pistol. It was just terrifying to walk in with 30 other strangers and walk up and just go, hi, you know, stick my hand. I mean, I would start up, and then I'd see their eyes, and they were looking at me going i don't need you as a friend and i would just back off and then i'd go over here and these three guys were all talking and they didn't want anything to do with me and i looked around the room and i decided no one wanted anything to deal with me i could see it i didn't have to talk to anybody and i felt terrible i just felt this hostility and felt that they saw how different i was and i had never had any alcohol in my life i'm 19 years old and my roommates are going look you're in college you ought to be drinking it makes you feel wonderful there and i finally decided that this would be the night what the heck i'll find out what they're talking about this stuff makes you feel wonderful i'll go up and have some so i ordered a whiskey and something and i drank it down waiting to feel wonderful and i didn't feel anything so i order another one and drank it down waiting to feeling wonderful i didn'y feel anything. So i got the third drink and i was starting to think maybe this stuff doesn't work. It's a rumor that all this stuff is supposed to make you feel wonderful. And I was sort of working on the third drink, and I just concluded that I ought to just leave it. And I put my glass down, and I was starting to leave, and I turned around and looked out at these guys, and they were gone. And they had been replaced by 30 of the friendliest guys I have ever seen. All the people in the room were looking at me, and their eyes were begging me to be their friend. It was just like, please, oh, we'd give anything if you would join our group. Oh, don't go over there. Come and join our room. And it was just, like, wow. This is, wow, this is what a change. The whole world is different. And then I felt a little different. It was like, I'll be getting over there when I'm ready, you know. You'll be lucky to know me. and i intuitively knew how to handle situations that used to baffle me and i went over and i made small talk and i knew everybody's name and i told jokes and i did this and i drank too many more drinks and threw up all over the place but even while throwing up i knew i had discovered something important you know what i mean like whoa this throwing up as a small price to pay for what i'm on to what i was on to was in terms of my life was the secret of life i now found the missing ingredient so i agree with the people who say alcohol is not the problem alcohol is the solution to the problem it solved my problem in life and for non-alcoholics it doesn't solve their problem it does not cause that transformation and make it a whole new world and make them complete and make function like they could never function before makes them have more fun or something like that but it's no core change like that so that's why they don't understand why we're willing to puke up blood and go to jail and go right back in and keep drinking and and I explained to them hey he's puking up blood and going to jail is a small price to pay for what I'm getting out of this. And they're not getting that out of it. And so it really is a tricky thing when you think about this disease of alcoholism. The alcohol solved the problem. The disease of alcoholismo, in my judgment, occurs when there's no alcohol in our system. That doesn't sound straight, but it is. Think about it. If our only problem was whenever we drank, then not drinking would solve it. But every time I didn't drink, it was awful. I mean, my problem when I really look back on it was sobriety. I kept getting sober day after day and I would sit around experiencing sobriety and all the pains of being sober. And when I would go to the bar, I never said this to the bartender, but you know, I really could have been saying this. I could have said, Fred, thank God you're here. I seem to be sober again. Do you have something back there that can help me with this? I've got to get un-sober soon. I don't think I can take being sober much longer. Now we never thought that way, but think about it. Alcohol wasn't causing any of these problems. Being sober was causing it. Alcohol was fixing it. Now, there were other associated problems with alcohol, drunk driving, getting in fights, liver damage, throwing up blood, minor, minor stuff compared to the fundamental problem of being so uncomfortable in life that you weren't willing to stay sober. And so it really isn't that I had a bad reaction to alcohol or an allergy to alcohol. Because if you think about an allergy, suppose that you occasionally when you eat out, you come home and you break out in a rash and you're all breathing hard. You know, oh, I don't know what's going to happen to me. And so you go through a lot of tests. And finally they go, Mary, we got good news for you. It's strawberries. every time you eat strawberries you're going to have this reaction so just don't eat strawberries and she's the happiest lady in the world and she just will never have to deal with this again the mere knowledge that it's strawberries is all she needs she doesn't need other people who can't eat strawberries to meet once or twice a week how did you not eat strawberries today and how did you do that? See, that's what an allergy is. When you have an allergy, you just find out what it is and then that's the end of it. So if our problem was that we're allergic to alcohol, all we'd have to do is not drink and we would be fine. But we all know we're not fine. That's the worst thing in the world to be. It's sober. Someone says, just think, you don't have to drink for the rest of your life. I'm just going, I don't think I can last that long. That's why we can't last when we go on the wagon. i mean we just go you know two weeks of not drinking and you're grinding your teeth and you can just see the neck muscles are sticking out like this and you go fred what are you doing i'm not drinking i'm nutria it's like it's taking all my energy to not drink and and then you just go well geez 50 more years you'll be dead so it's not that long you know and you just the thought of trying to hold your breath and endure this for 50 more is too much so we go drink We just go, we have to change. I need relief from this problem that I have, which is called alcoholism. And it is, there's something missing in my life that alcohol fixes. Now, I thought it was the Marine Corps. They were treating me shabbily. I thought my wife, my six kids. I thought financial problems. I thought health problems. I thought all these crazy things were what was my problem. and I come to AA, and I follow the 12 steps, and I find this higher power, and now that problem is gone. So if you work backwards, you'd have to conclude that my problem was a lack of a higher power. And it manifested itself in all these other ways. It's very hard to see that until after we come into AA and find that this program does, in fact, meet every situation that we have and enables us to never have to live alone again. Now, I mentioned the Marine Corps, so I'll just tell you that very briefly. When I graduated from school, the Korean War was going on, and everybody had to join the military. A bunch of guys were drinking beer. They said, let's join the Marine Corp. I said, yeah, yeah. I didn't know. I had my golf clubs. so I'm going down to the Marine Corps. And, geez, I got into that outfit, and it was too intense. That's the only way I can describe it. These guys were awful intense. And I just said, this is too extreme for me, but what am I going to do? I'm an infantry officer, and we're going to go out. And then I saw a training movie about pilots, and they were at the bar. And I had to sign up for three more years to go to flight school, And I said, it's worth it to get away. This is just, I couldn't take this for, you can see I don't have a military bone in my body. I mean, it is just. So, I got the Pensacola and made it through flight school. And that is what I did for the next 12 years of my alcoholism was I was a fighter pilot in the Marine Corps. And at the end of that time, the disease had progressed to the point where I no longer trusted the pilot of the plane I was in. Which was me. because I was having withdrawals. And I talked to some Air Force pilots, and they said, well, you're supposed to bring booze in the plane with you. You're really not supposed to try and go 12 hours without drinking and then go fly. That puts you in the worst shape you could be in. You're in the middle of alcoholic withdrawal. And I said, hey, those Air Force guys, they're so smart. They learned how to solve that problem. So I'm up there going through withdrawals on a daily basis, and just freaking out with sweats and loss of vision and all kinds of terrible things. And I went to see a doctor, and they said, yes, indeed, I had this terrible problem. I'm back to Pensacola after flying for 12 years, and they're trying to diagnose my problem. And this is back before alcoholism was a disease. There was no alcohol programs anywhere in the military. and so at the end of two weeks the only clues they had was that I shook a lot and I sweat and I just always covered with this clammy sweat and I had very high blood pressure my voice trembled my eyes were all bloodshot and I smelled of alcohol almost 24 hours a day the dentist was checking my mouth he said you just reek of alcohol I said well I got drunk last night and he said oh okay well then that's explains the alcohol smell and you know so it wasn't like boom he's an alcoholic so i was diagnosed as a childhood fear of flying that was my diagnosis um by the doctors and i was sent back to cherry point and i waited two months and i got that set of orders from headquarters marine corps what do you do with a guy who has now gotten himself in this kind of condition make him an air traffic controller So that's when I came to Glencoe, Georgia to go through air traffic control school and went on and did that during the last two years of my drinking. But fortunately, I never had any bad stories to happen there. But when I was thinking about Glenco, Conway told me how close it is to here. I'd forgotten where it was. And I remember something wonderful happened over there i had had i had my flight status taken away and i loved flying it was oh god i love flying those military airplanes and here we are now it's three or four months later and i'm in this school and part of the thing that we had to do because the other guys weren't pilots the students uh we got in the back seat of a plane um that was flying the gca approaches so that we would be in the plane and hear the guy you know us talking on the ground and see what it looked like to have these commands come over the radio and the guy who was the pilot in that plane i didn't know him but he knew my story he had been told you know that this guy was had 12 years of flying and now he can't fly anymore so we got through and he said would you like to fly and i said would i and we're flying in a plane i used to be an instructor in he said you got it and then we went out into an open area and i spent about 15 minutes just doing acrobatics and he just said take as long as you want and it was he was breaking the rules and everything to do this and i had forgotten how much that meant to me even back then you know right near the end of my drinking that this guy was kind enough to understand how wonderful it would be to just go do that and that was the last time that i ever flew was right over there in glencoe and it was a beautiful experience um anyway i when i got into this job there was no more control on the drinking, you know, 12 hours without drinking. So I just drank around the clock. I lost 50 pounds from what I weigh now and malnutrition. I was just barely surviving and I was sent to a career school in Quantico and I had a seizure, just about bit my tongue in half, and I'm on the floor so they have to do something with me. And they send me up to Bethesda Naval Hospital and three days of close examination to see what could be wrong with this guy. And I went into the DTs and had the terrible hallucinations about the CIA and they were moving the walls. It was unbelievable, the stuff that went on. I wrote it all down because I was going to report them. I mean, I didn't know that it was not happening. I thought it was, and it was terrifying. and I finally freaked out and ran out in the hall and was whatever and so they got a straitjacket and locked me up in the nut ward for six months and just stayed in there because you're crazy and thank God AA came in to that hospital and talked the head psychiatrist into having an AA meeting that there were some alcoholics there and that's how I got to AA a corpsman said all drunks fall in right face and had a meeting and when i finally got to be an outpatient i did go back to drinking for a week and i was smuggling vodka back into the nut ward even though they told me it would be the end of my career so on one weekend pearl harbor day in 1964 which is coming up on 34 years ago i called intergroup and they sent a big marine captain over who is still my sponsor i've had the same sponsor for almost 34 years. And he came into my house and he just took over. He just took over, you know. Get in the car. Sit here. If you need an opinion I'll give you one. Shut up. And we went to all speaker meetings and back then there was seven speaker meetings for every discussion meeting and I kept hearing about the discussion meetings and I like to talk and so I kept saying when are we going to go to a discussion meeting because he would just have me sit in the front row He called it an incurable row. Sit there, don't talk. Just listen to everything those people say. Shut up. So I'm going, how about the discussion meeting, Bill? He said, we don't go to them until you have three months. And then you don't Talk There either. And I'm just going, geez. But I got a lot of ideas. I've been looking over the steps. I got some suggestions. I think they're in the wrong order. I got all these. i had a lot of great ideas for improving aa you know and and i was just don't talk just don's talk so that went on for quite a while but you know where we'd talk in the car going back and forth from the he'd say what did you think of that speaker oh i thought it was terrible what's he saying that stuff then he'd tell me why and tell me why it was wisdom and why it was going to work in my life. So it's wonderful basic training and it went on for a couple years until the Marine Corps didn't promote me and I was thrown out and had a big resentment about that and went to an AA meeting every day for two years and now me and my wife and my six kids are out in the streets no retirement nothing I got to keep my sword that was what I got to keep so i had a big resentment i thought if you work these steps and you're praying to this higher power who loves you he wouldn't throw you out of the marine corps right i mean that's not that happens if you're drinking and i boy i had resentment and i knew my sponsor would talk me out of it so i didn't tell him i mean if you want to keep a resentment keep it to yourself i I mean, don't be telling anybody and get in a room by yourself. I had a little den and I'd go in there and resent. It was like putting yeast in bread, you know. I mean that resentment was growing up. It was just this far behind the Holocaust in terms of something bad that happened on this planet. And so I'm really just nurturing this thing and most of the resentment was at God. You know, go ahead and exist, God. Thanks a lot, God, I'm going to meet in every day, God and look where I am, no money. What am I going to do? Nobody hired me, I don't know how to do anything but, you know, fly airplanes and they're not going to hire, you don't want an alcoholic they don't need an alcoholic pilot I got nothing, so I'm trying to be a salesman I'm getting a real estate license a stockbroker's license and all that and I'm not very good at sales so people are running out of money and I've got a resentment and I guess you could say that I was whining occasionally at the major league level whining people didn't want to talk to me have I told you my story or anybody I could corner now I know why we avoid people like that like the plague been out about three months and I was reading the Washington Post and there was a little paragraph in there that said, Marine Instruction Team Killed in Plane Crash in Denver and it was my team that I was on and if I had gotten promoted I would have been on that plane. I mean, it was that simple. All my friends were dead including the general that was in charge of this team that I wasn't on and so I looked at that and I just went, oh my God and then I realized And God knew that I had just read that because I had just been sitting there, you know, and I had that sinking feeling, you know, like, and I kind of looked up and I went, listen, if you just told me this was going to happen, I wouldn't have been complaining so much about all this bad things that happened to me. And, you know, so there I was, grateful for having been thrown out of the Marine Corps and a lot of times things happen in life that we don't know the reason yet but generally if we're staying sober and we're working our program they'll come an answer someday and I've looked back on all the adversity that's happened in my life getting divorced or bankruptcy or health problems whatever it is and in every instance the plus that came out of that adversity was getting closer to my higher power. I always ended up digging down a little bit deeper and trying to get closer for the comfort to get through that problem, and then once I got there, I was glad for the problem. And it's gotten to the point where I'm glad I'm an alcoholic. I'm happy that I had the disease of alcoholism because if I wasn't an alcoholic, I would predict that I would be a middle-aged to elderly skinny guy walking around totally neurotic, trying to figure life out, but never having a bad enough problem to ever do anything about it. And I never would have found this spiritual path. I never Would Have Found These Twelve Steps. So I'm just delighted that I was forced into taking a series of actions that has transformed my whole life, and that's what AA does for each of us, is to kicking and screaming cause us to change our mind about a lot of things, about ourselves, about spirituality, about other people. And the doors start opening as our mind opens and we start seeing the world as a fabulous place to be. And that's where drinking did. It transformed the world into a fabulous place to be. And that's what the 12 steps do. They just transform. Somebody told me early on that if you've been in AA a reasonable amount of time and you're not happy, you're doing it wrong. You're just doing it wrong because the power to be able to see the world with serenity and peace of mind is easily available and has nothing to do with circumstances in our lives or this happened or that happened. It doesn't have anything do with that has to do with whether i've done this work or not it would be as if someone came up to you and said you know i drink a lot and nothing ever happens would you believe that i wouldn't i would never believe that say let me watch you drink i'm going to sit here and watch you drink because we all know that if you drink enough something's going to happen you're not going to just sit there the same as you were with no booze in you why do we know that because we You know how powerful booze is. This program is certainly a billion times more powerful than that. If there hasn't been a transformation, then let me watch you work the program. That would be all I'd want to ask because it's here. I really believe it. This is a non-fail, fail proof or whatever you want to call it, program. The love of this higher power is infinite. There isn't a problem that I can't be lifted above. And, you know, it doesn't solve problems. Have you noticed that? Nowhere in our literature does it really say it solves any of our problems. That was the old way, the intellectual way. We look for solutions. You know, to where we could see it and understand it. We go, look, I have financial insecurity. And we'd go, okay, I see how that works. It's like I work three jobs and then I have this much money and you put this money against the insecurity and it's fixed. So you could see this, but that isn't how the program works. That isn't How Spirituality Works. It doesn't solve problems in that sense. What it does is it removes the problems. It removes the financial insecurity even though there's no money. Everything works backwards. I used to think that every problem that I had, I would have to go and meet the demands that I had, whether it was a demand for sex, a demand for power, prestige, a demand for emotional security or a demand for financial security. The only way I saw that as using my intellect was, oh, you need more security or whatever, get promoted, and then you'll be the boss of the company and then finally you'll have this internal satisfaction but demands are limitless no matter how much money you get you can still be insecure because the guy over there has more no matter however much power you get, you can be insecure they might take you out tomorrow and then the other guys in there and you don't have any power you know what I mean so our Our ability to create demands for stuff is unlimited. So to run out and try to think that life can be solved by meeting all the demands that our instincts create is backwards. And so we come into AA, and I couldn't believe what they told me. They said, oh no, no, we're going to use a spiritual power to reduce the demands. And I never thought of looking at that side of the equation. We're going to reduce the demand so that I'm not asking for anything. All of my needs are going to be met internally, just like alcohol did. I used to go into a bar with all kinds of problems, and about the third drink, I'd just be going, this is more like it. This is more Like It. Nothing had changed. The rent still wasn't paid, you know, and this person still wasn'T speaking to me, but I'm sitting there just going, ain't life great? You know what I'm saying? It's just amazing. Well, that's what I think the program is. It gives us the power to reduce all these demands that are driving us crazy that don't have anything to do with anything because even if we could meet them, even if мы могли найти эти цели, это не будет забыть основной проблем потому что в моем случае, я не знаю о вашем, это был случай мисс-диагноза. Я не понял, что это был спиритальный дефицит that I was trying to solve with money or a spiritual deficit that I Was Trying to Solve with Sex or a Spiritual Deficit I Was trying to Solved by Getting Promoted, then this feeling would go away. And I came in here and you just started me down that journey of a new game plan for living. And I think that's what our 12 steps are. And I remember discussing it with my sponsor going, This is a new Game Plan for Living? Why should I try it? And he says, Because your plan stinks. And the one thing about AA, they don't discuss theory. If you're new, you could have a Ph.D., and have you noticed how you keep losing arguments to people in AA? You know why? Because they don' t compare theories, they compare results. And when we come in here, the results aren' t that great. I remember giving some guy a long talk about my ideas about stuff, And he said to me, I find it hard to lend a lot of credibility to a guy who's wearing a wristband from a nut ward. So what I was saying was just wonderful, but he was looking at the results and then he just threw out my theory. And so AA has the results. And if you're new, you don't. If there's somebody brand new here tonight, I'll guarantee you I wouldn't want to change places with you and I don't even know you. I'm just guessing. Just guessing that your last year has been bad. And if you were to write a book tonight and try and sell it in this room, my ideas on how to live, I don' t think anybody would buy it just based on looking at you. I'm not buying that guy's book. So we don't argue theory back and forth, we just talk about results. You're thinking of suicide, but you don't want to change your plan for living. Come back and talk to us when you do because look at AA's plan for life. And we parade people up to the podium, we go to discussion meetings, and what you see are the results of these 12 steps. So you may not want to believe by reading these steps that they work, but AA is a big show and tell operation and you just get to look at the results of these steps this is a program of attraction if you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it here's the plan the one you read that you don't think works if you really want it then give it a try and so I think in closing I would like to say to anybody who is new here tonight this is the ultimate journey that a human being can take this is the one This is where we go as the seventh step. And six and seven, I think, are some of the biggest steps in the program. It's an epic journey. We're talking about we're entirely ready to have God remove all defects of character. Now, when you think about that, that's like becoming Mother Teresa. Anybody have thought of doing that? I remember going, would you like to be Mother Teresa? And I remember saying to myself, I don't think she's having any fun. You know what I mean? And it's like, I'd like to go a little bit in that direction, but that's such extreme. I mean, she's totally stopless. All she cares about are other people. I like to bowl once in a while or something. So I would like to settle for, right out of chapter five, half measures. I would like to become entirely ready to make some progress does that sound good? entirely ready I'd like to be a better person that's good that's somewhere a little above where I am now considerably lower than Mother Teresa this is getting too far out there well if we're going to do that you have to do it you have got to do that by yourself because one of the problems with higher powers and spirituality is the only help that's available is perfect help. We can get you totally sober if you'd like to get there all the way, no alcohol at all. We have the alcohol problem totally removed. You become entirely willing to have this problem removed humbly. It'll be totally gone. You won't even think about drinking day after day after today. Be totally removed while alcohol is life-threatening. so we can get entirely ready to have that removed. Now let's deal with lust. How about entirely ready to have lust? Whoa! I mean, would you just sit around and be celibate? I think I'd like to be halfway there. I'll meet you halfway on that. Okay, how about greed? And as we start down every character defect it's like, well if I don't have a little greed who's going to look out for me? And if I become selfless, God, I might do something irrational. I'd give all my stuff away to the poor. So I want to keep some control in here about how spiritual I allow myself to get. And this is in the sixth and seventh step. Bill writes about that. We settle for as much perfection as we think will get us by. What we want is to be known as an honest man. We don't want to become one because then we can't weasel a little bit with the IRS and we can'T, you know, skizzle this guy out of a deal. We've got to keep some wiggle room here. So I'd like to get 60% honest, which is above where I am now. And this is how we deal with our progress, trying to move from the clutches of the material world into the spiritual world. It's like, I don't want to go all the way in there because who knows what that would be like. And it's so funny, there's the beginning of all of this debate that I think goes on until we die. We never get there. But it's a funny, humorous struggle to watch each of us thinking that we're making progress and rationalizing the heck out of ourselves because we didn't steal something that was right out in front and we'd go to jail if we did. but if they just weren't looking, I don't know. It might be a different story. And the beginnings of this in the AA literature is in the chapter of the agnostic. And there's this great, and I always called it the Jack Benny line. And, you know, the chapter the agnostics is with the second step, and that's one of the hardest things when we first come into AA, which is to change our mind about a higher power, came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. So in a sense, we were all sort of agnostic or atheists as we arrived here. And now we find out since we're powerless over alcohol, we're going to have to change our mind about this because there's no way to get out of powerlessness without some power. And Bill writes in there, it said, here's the line, it says, To be doomed an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not always easy alternatives to face. So here you are, you've hit the crossroads, and you have to go through one of these doors. Die an alcoholic death or live on a spiritual basis. So you stand there going, wow, these are two bad doors. Call up your doctor. How bad is an alcoholic life? How bad can an alcoholic die? You know what I mean? I have a hunch this spiritual basis stuff is, phew, that's the end of the fun. And so we come in and stick our foot in the water and we start moving in this direction and then we find out how wonderful it is to experience serenity instead of excitement and danger and to experience peace of mind and to suddenly find out that what we were really born to do was to give and not to get. And we just reverse the polarity of our lives and become a channel going the other way. Instead of going through life trying to grab everything, we turn it around and go out and try and spread it around and try to reach out to the next person. And in doing that, we achieve what we thought we could get by grabbing everything. We find that it's just backwards from what we taught and it's the most beautiful surprise in the world. Thank you all very much. Thank you.