Working and Reworking the 12 Steps – Paul M.

That noise you heard was not feedback, it was Ted's pacemaker. He got it at Sears every time he sneezes the garage door goes up. If this gentleman doesn't rise up and walk at the end of this talk I'm going to be very disappointed. I'm a young alcoholic in an old container. I went to a motel a while back and went with mirrors on the ceiling. And I woke up in the morning and looked up and I thought I was being attacked by a giant prune. Went to the doctor a while back and he said, you're in great shape. You're going to live to be 73. I said, I am 73. He said, see, what did I tell you? Alcoholics are great people. You know, when a guy comes into AA and he says, I'll do anything to stay sober. A little time passes and he says I'll do almost anything to stays sober. Little more time passes. And he says this is an individual program there was once a sea captain who sailed the seas for 40 years and was very popular and very famous and there was a large banquet for him on his retirement and somebody introduced him and said I noticed that every morning you would take out a piece of paper and read it what did it say and he said here look at it, and it said, starboard right, port left. Which is why I occasionally read this obscure volume we call Alcoholics Anonymous. My name is Paul Martin. I'm an alcoholic. I'm glad to be sober. I'M GLAD TO BE HERE. IN FACT, I'M GLAD TO BE ANYWHERE. ALCOHOLISM IS A DISEASE. I CAME INTO AA WHEN I WAS 25. IF I'M STILL BREATHING ON AUGUST 15TH, I'LL be sober 48 years. I mention that only because I'm bragging. My definition of humility is it's the art of looking ashamed while you say beautiful things about yourself. You know the difference between an alcoholic and a puppy? A puppy only whines for three months. I ended up writing for a living. I did a lot of different things for living before I finally became a writer at the age of 37 in 1959. It's inside work, and there's no heavy lifting. A while back, I was in the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. That's where Darwin got the idea for the theory of evolution from the giant tortoises and the finches. The giant tortoises get to be 600 pounds. I learned that during mating season, the male tortoises gets so excited they try to mate with large rocks. It's pretty much like your average AA convention. You're starting to develop alcoholic Alzheimer's. That's when you forget everything but the resentments. It's a pleasure to see some old friends here, Frank and Ginny. A lot of you probably don't know that they met in a travel agency. Ginny was looking for the last resort. going to meetings and not drinking do not treat my alcoholism working the 12 steps treats my alcoholismo if all i do is go to meetings and not drink eventually i suffer from untreated alcoholism that comes out as anxiety depression fear hostility, apathy, boredom all of those things that can be treated by working and reworking the 12 steps if I start gasping for breath tonight it's not that I'm having a heart attack, I just can't remember where I am I think I left my voice at sea level but I belong to a working step group and by a working step group I mean this is a group where we don't theorize on the steps and we don' t read about them, we don''t just talk about them we work and rework these steps and as a consequence we have tremendous vitality and vigor in this group working the steps releases a vitality for change, a vitality for goodness it's a vitalITY that can be used to wake up spiritually gradually and much slower than I would have expected it enables me to become what I should be I had a lot of theories on what I was supposed to be when I came to AA. Turned out that, like many other ideas I had, these were thoroughly erroneous. What I have discovered is that if I work and rework the steps, gradually this program will take me where I belong one day at a time. We meet on Wednesday night. We start at step 1 each week until we go up to 12, then we go back to 1. And the whole emphasis in the group is to work and rework the steps. Somebody leads the meeting for 5, 10, 15 minutes, and then each person comments. And we find that if we talk about what we really know about the step, what we realmente have experienced with the step it doesn't take very long at all to talk about the stuff. We have all kinds of sobriety in there from less than a year to a number of people in the 20s and 30s, and I'm over 40 in age and sobriety. But what it does is it keeps reminding me of what I need to do to continue to experience those things that I find in AA. I made some major mistakes in my life. One of them was believing that AA was a good place to begin, but then when I had done these kind of simple things I would go on to greater spiritual growth and I spent a lot of time exploring all these things that promised greater spiritual growth and I found that all of them had one thing in common they really did not deliver what they said they would deliver the AA program is specific and it's precise and it will do exactly what it says it will do. It will take me one day at a time to a spiritual awakening Step 1 defines the problem Step 12 describes the goal The 10 steps in between will take my from the problem to the goal Not on my terms I find however And that I think is what sponsorship is about When the big book was written they talked about sponsoring and it talked about what you say to a new man outline the program of action explaining how you made a self-appraisal how you straightened out your past and why you are now endeavoring to be helpful to him says you give him the big book you go back and see him after he has read it says now you're making your second visit to a man he has red this volume and says he is prepared to go through with the 12 steps of the program of recovery. And this is important. It says, having had the experience yourself, you can give him much practical advice. But it also says, without saying it specifically, if I haven't worked the 12 Steps, I really have no message whatsoever. Which is why I continue to go to this group and why we have very, very strong sponsorship in this group. somebody comes in there and we work with a lot of people who suffer from untreated alcoholism some of them suffer are sober a long time we've had them sober 15 20 25 years and they work the steps when somebody comes into that group there is a beeline if it's a new person to the group and we gather around him we do a lot work with repetitive fourth and fifth steps because We have found that that is extremely helpful. We also believe in our group that men should take fifth steps with men, women should take sixth steps with women. We find that working on that basis, there is less tendency to generate new material that requires additional fourth and fifth steps. I think that sponsorship has changed drastically through the years. Part of it is a result of the treatment industry. Something that got sadly overlooked in Alcoholics Anonymous is what Tradition 8 says. Tradition 9 Tradition 10 says that AlcoholicsAnonymous should remain forever non-professional. We define professionalism as the occupation of counseling alcoholics for fees or higher. now that is just about as specific as you can be over and over and over our members have violated that tradition to the great detriment of our society when I was sober well it would be 16 years 1963 I ran into a man who was a research professor of psychology at the University of Illinois and I grew up in an AA area Oak Park Illinois where they said you work the first nine steps once, and then you work 10, 11, and 12 the rest of your life. And I suffered from that familiar misconception for a number of years. I ran into Dr. Maurer who said there is, he was not an AA, but he knew a lot about it. He knew a whole lot more about it than a lot of AAs have run into. And he said there is great benefit in opening up with more and more people. We came into AA and we led secret lives and we didn't want anybody to find out anything about us. And what he said was that the more people who know the truth about us, the freer we become. He referred to depression, anxiety, fear as diseases of the conscience. If I violate my conscience, it's going to make me sick. And the answer is not to take Prozac and hide the symptom. The answer is to work the 12 steps and use the answer that was here all the time. I don't know if any of you have any weight problems, but there's a new diet called the Valium Diet. You take four Valiums for breakfast and the food falls out of your mouth the rest of the day. So I ran into Hobart and I said, well, I had done as much work as I could figure out to do with the 12 Steps, and I had gone on to an advanced spiritual approach to life. I read everything you could find on these books that'll show you how to vault into the spiritual stratosphere. And I became, as I look back, a retarded mystic. I developed a metaphysical hernia. I strained myself spiritually. And thanks to Holbert, I took a look at what is here for me. You know, everybody looks for a guru. I spent a lot of years looking for a Guru. a lot more years trying to convince people I had already become a guru. There's a path here, and it's the 12 steps. And if we look at traditional religions, we find that all of them started out with that. And inevitably, the further a spiritual movement goes from the experience of its founder, the further it tends to go from what they were actually doing when it began, as they say in the big book. The sponsorship they talk about in the big book is very, very hard to find in AA. It certainly is not found in transacting urinalysis or whatever else is popular at the moment. I get Hazelden's catalogs. They have something that is a sponsor bear. It's a little teddy bear this high for $44.95, and it wears a sweater that says sponsor bear and if you can't find your sponsor you squeeze the teddy bear I'm not making this up and it says one day at a time and don't take the first drink and God loves you and then they have a self-esteem bear and the self-esteem bear also has a sweater that says self-estime and you squeeze it and it's like it says you're beautiful or you're handsome or you're smart, all of those things. Now that really works, I'm sure. When I came into AA, I felt very bad. I had a lot of trouble with depression, tremendous fear, a lot to deal with. A lot of guilt. And the reason I had a lotof guilt is because I had lived in a way that would make you feel guilty. Well, you figured that out faster than I did, I'll tell you that. And I spent the first year sober running around to a thousand meetings a week. I had a tremendous honeymoon and then after five months I felt awful. I started to get depressed. My life fell apart. And I'd go to somebody and tell them this and they'd say, no, you're doing fine, you were a winner. And I would think if I'm a winner why do I want to shoot myself? and things got worse with a year of sobriety I've always had a tremendous amount of greed with unfortunately not as much talent for making money and I got into some dishonest business it was the roofing and siding business and I'd gotten in a lot of trouble and I was sober a year and I went to some friends and I said, I think maybe I missed something in this program and they said, son you kept such an open mind that the whole program just blew right through they said there's a book called alcoholics anonymous we suggest that you read it so i read it and it said do an inventory i did an inventory and man it was as honest as i could possibly do and a little while later i let it sit because i felt better i always figured if you do something and it makes you feel better don't do anything else because you might feel too good and then i went to a meeting on the fifth step and again i was in terrible shape and I gave my usual comment on the fifth step which was brilliant about how it worked and how good it made you feel I'd never done one they had all these meetings throughout all the phonies you could have the meetings in a telephone booth so I took a fifth step and had a tremendous experience and then I started to make some amends and then i started to pray and meditate and then became a mystic and so forth And eventually I came full circle and began to see that what I need is here. At the end of one of the stories, it says, I get everything I need in Alcoholics Anonymous. Everything I need I get, and invariably when I get what I needs, it turns out to be just what I wanted all the time. If we look at sponsorship, Bill worked the equivalent of the first eight steps in the first week or so he was sober with the help of Ebi Thatcher, though they were not written at that time. Bill did the same thing with Dr. Bob. Dr. Bob got, he had his first slip, he got drunk after a few weeks and then he started to run around making amends. They did these things almost immediately when people came into AA. And an AA group where that is going on is a tremendously powerful AA group. A person who comes into a group like that is swept along with the vitality and understands this is what he or she needs to do to experience what the program promises. Earl Treat started AA in Chicago. He was sponsored by Dr. Bob in Akron. Bob took him through the first eight steps in three weeks. So this is, I think, why AA was so powerful in the beginning. And I think in recent years we have certainly seen a deterioration and a decline in that kind of sponsorship. They talk about waiting until the person is ready. I didn't know I was ready. I've never seen anybody in AA get in trouble from working the 12 steps too soon. I've seen a lot of people get in terrible trouble from working them too late or not at all. The sooner we do it and the more we do It, the healthier we're going to be. I go to the gym three times a week. You won't believe it, but I used to be an athlete. and that puts me in better physical condition. Working the steps, working all of them on a continuing basis puts me into better mental condition, emotional condition and spiritual condition and it turns out that's what I was looking for all the time when I drank. I was a running drunk whatever I wanted was somewhere else. It wasn't in this gin mill it was in another gin mill, it was in another town. In AA I have found that here I have everything I need. Not on my terms, however. Dr. Vincent Dole was a non-alcoholic trustee and some years ago he said, My concern for the future of Alcoholics Anonymous is that its principle of personal service may be eroded by money and professionalism. Certainly he was a great forecaster. The AA message is a message from one amateur to another amateur. It's not for sale. When I work with people I don't try to function as a therapist or a spiritual guide or advise these people on individual things in their life because I understand that anybody who works the steps will find his own answers. My message is a message from one beggar to another beggar on where there is bread. I didn't come to AA because I wanted to grow spiritually. I came to AA because there were no other answers I came into AA because with my brilliance my life and my brain had consistently deteriorated I didn't know where to go I would have even joined the Democratic Party I'm sorry Frank but I was desperate but I came to AA and a bunch of people I never saw before in my life reached out their hands and they said how can we help and you people have helped me every day of my life and more and more I have come to believe that AA is of itself sufficient in the spring of 1948 I heard Paul Stanley talk he was the number 5 AA from Akron I was sober less than a year and over and over in his talk Stanley said, AA is of itself sufficient. And I didn't really believe him at that time. I believe him today. I think that you and I have within this program everything that we will need to live soberly, sanely, and find those things that we need and really want. Father Dowling was a Jesuit priest who came in contact with AA in the 30s when it was new. And he used to speak of the relationship he found between the 12 steps and the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius. And I certainly find that idea of exercise very, very germane because I exercise to stay in better physical condition and I exercise with the 12 Steps to stay saner and more useful. I can't live on the food I ate 20 years ago, the water I drank ten years ago, or the air I breathed five years ago. I have to do all of these things to live today. No better can I live on the work I did in these twelve steps five, ten, twenty, forty years ago! I have continue to work and rework every one of these steps to continue to revivify my spiritual experience in my AA life. I think initially, and I was talking to Gary about this today, I think initially we work the steps because we're running from pain. We'll do anything to feel better and we feel better and then naturally we stop doing the work. The goal that I have is not comfort. The goal is a continuing spiritual awakening. The only reality I know is a relationship with God and if I clean up the past, I can live in the present effectively, usefully and joyously. So I think that unless we make a transition, after we feel good, what do we do? Well, I think after we fell good, we have a vision of a continuing spiritual awakening. We see that this is real, and this is really what we want, and we gradually see that all it is real. We gradually see everything we want is connected with our relationship with God as we understand him. I think that with that kind of a work on the program, you or I, anybody here, will have a better life than any of us could possibly have expected. I didn't start out to be an alcoholic. I grew up in a little town down in southern Georgia about 50 miles from the Okefenokee Swamp. It was so dull that if you took LSD, you'd had visions of Lawrence Welk. The town was too small to have a village idiot, we all just used to take turns. I did a lot of things before and after I sobered up. I spent several years as a professional wrestler after I was sober. I'm the only professional wrestler our family has ever produced, by the way. But my father was a Lutheran minister, a doctor of divinity. He was listed in who's who. He was also a drunk and a very badly behaved drunk. My mother's father was another Lutheran pastor and a Lutherian minister who was a doctor or divinity also listed in whose who. I come from a long line of Lutheran ministers but in spite of that fact I believe in God today. But my father's drinking became so impossible for my mother that she decided she would get a separation or a divorce which was not done in those years I was 12 it was 1934 and he took off and went down to South Georgia where he had a sister and that fall he came back and picked me up coming home from grammar school and took me down there just about non-stop and my life changed dramatically almost overnight I was a good student in the schools in Oak Park and I ended up as a kind of cretin. I think he took me down there to show my mother and her relatives that he was going to turn me into a genius and I really fooled him. But I couldn't make much sense out of anything and alcohol became a good friend of mine very early and I don't know when I was an alcoholic I know that when Iwas 7 or 8 and there was some beer or wine in a glass and nobody was looking, I'd take a drink of it I ended up down in my aunt's home there. I used to pick the lock on her liquor closet when I was 12 and take a drink out of the whiskey bottle, and then add a little water so nobody would know it was gone. I think that came from a previous alcoholic incarnation. And when I was 14, I got drunk for the first time. I went from a very good student to a mediocre student to an easy student. all of my energy went into sports I played every sport there was and drinking enabled me to function in a world that I could less and less understand it was as if I were in a movie and the picture was out of focus and I could never find the control to put it into focus I could not see, I could make sense out of it I could function in it only badly and I continued to drink and I drank my way out of high school entered college, lasted there a year and a half when I was 19 I came back to Oak Park where my mother was living I was blacking out then, I was boxing for a club on the west side of Chicago going to college World War II had come along and I decided I would be a naval aviator and I went into the service and learned how to fly drunk or sober, I destroyed two aircraft in World War 2 both of which belonged to the United States Navy A friend of mine said if I'd gotten three more, I would have been a Japanese ace. But I really don't know why I did not get in trouble in the service. I blacked out all the time. I drank whenever there was an opportunity. I flew seaplanes that were catapulted off cruisers and battleships. You went from zero to 60 miles an hour in the space of about 40 feet. it wouldn't cure a hangover but it really took your mind off of it for a little while and we had great parties and nothing serious happened I found myself in the summer of 1945 at the age of 23 in a Navy hospital with pneumonia which went into DTS and I didn't think there was anything unusual about that in fact I was in the hospital for a month and I was drunk nine out of the last ten nights in there. And I came out and I started to fly and drink, and again nothing unusual happened. I never drank in the morning. I used to get drunk about nine nights in a row. The tenth night I'd stay home and sleep for about twelve hours and then it would be good for another nine nights. I've never drank from the morning because I was always still drunk from the night before, and that's true. I'd go to bed about three in the morning, get up at 6 and fly. I didn't need a drink, I needed a seeing eye dog. And in the fall, the war ended in 45, and in the fall I ended up at the Norfolk Naval Air Station and they decided, I got lost for about three days, and they decide maybe I should get out of the service. But something happened that I thought of many times after when I began began to think about alcoholics and how sensitive you and I are, and we do have sensitive feelings. Incidentally, in our group, we never talk about feelings. We never talk a lot about feelings, but we talk about the inner child. I have a friend who's an adult child of an Amway salesman. But there's no therapy talk whatsoever. but while I was still at Norfolk a friend of mine got me a blind date and in her honor I got blind and I was starting to have trouble with my stomach I began to eat food that threw up easy so I wouldn't hurt myself we were driving her home and we had to stop the car so I could get out and throw up I was walking her to the door and I had to go behind a bush and throwup then I was very hurt because she wouldn't kiss me goodnight. So the war came along, and the war ended. I went to Great Lakes on December 8th, 1945, and I got separated. And I traveled for three days and three nights and got to Oak Park where I was living about 50 miles away. And I had decided that maybe I should quit drinking. Now, I had a tremendous education in alcoholic drinking from my father. and I always used to say to myself, I'm going to drink differently, and if I ever have trouble, I'll quit. And over New Year's of 1945, I started out for Cincinnati to meet a friend of mine I'd flown with. I ended up in Milwaukee. I don't know how that happened. I was born there. Maybe I wanted to see what went wrong. And I was drunk there for three days. I drank myself sober on New Year morning, and I came back to Chicago on the train, and I had had a transforming experience that night I'd ended up with what had to be the worst looking woman in the middle west she frightened me into six weeks of sobriety she looked like a million dollars and the only reason I say that is because I've never seen a million hours and she looked likes something I never saw before so I figured well I think it's time to do something about my drinking and I decided I'd do some boxing and I can't say I was going to make a comeback because I'd never been anywhere and then in mid-February, I sober about six weeks and a friend of mine and I went up to the air station in Glenview to fly and we drank and he drank so much he passed out and I had to drive him to St. Charles which was about 35 miles west of Chicago and I'd stop along the way it was a blinding snowstorm and I would stop along the way and ask directions in a saloon and get a bottle of beer and drive west. And about the time the beer was gone, I would have forgotten the directions. And I went in one of these saloons and there was a dog lying on the floor and I said hello and the dog bit me on the leg and I didn't think anything of it. And I got my nose broken somewhere that night. I've had my nose broke in three places, Georgia, Illinois, and California. And I was in the saloon and I went to a doctor about my broken nose and accidentally mentioned I'd been bitten by this dog. And he really got upset. He said, find that dog. So I went out to these saloons along North Avenue and I said, have you got a dog that bit me the other night? And of course nobody did. So I took rabies shots for two weeks. I didn't think that my life was unmanageable but it was obvious I was having a great deal of hard luck. And I began to make the experiments and of course nothing worked and I began reading all the books that tell you how to straighten out your life, and you can find them now. Gary and Clinton and I were talking about them this morning. The books appear, and everybody buys them, and nobody gets any help, so then they buy the next book. And I read a book that was very popular by Rabbi Liebman called Peace of Mind. And I was impressed and inspired, and I thought, this is going to change my life. Then I found out that Liebmann had committed suicide, and I figured I didn't need that much change right yet. And I read Dorothea Brandy's Wake Up and Live. She said, act as if it's impossible to fail. And one day I tried that with the dry heaves and I got another book. I read the books and they all had one thing in common. They made me feel good for a few days and then I was back to my state of fearful nervous normal and I began to make various experiments and I blacked out all the time. I'm very grateful that I never hurt anybody or killed anybody with my car. I was in a couple of accidents, and I blacked out a great deal. And Norm Alpe used to say there was nothing more beautiful than an alcoholic who had been reunited with his lost automobile. And I'd lose my car, andI'd wander around, and I'd finally find it, and l'd say, My car. And l'd get in my car and drive off and run into something. but I was, if not unemployable I had a lot of problems finding work when I did work if I took more than half an hour for lunch they had to retrain me January of 1947 I quit forever and I knew I was an alcoholic I knew that I was going to die I knew it, I knew I couldn't take one drink and I thought that knowledge would be sufficient and then after three months I took one drink and then I couldn't sober up. And I learned the other half of the lesson. I learned that I can't take the first drink and predict my behavior, but the other part of it and the other Half of the Lesson was that on my own I can stay away from the first drink. And I drank for four months and then one day in August, one night in August I got drunk. And I got a tremendous gift. It was the gift of honesty. I woke up in the morning and I wasn't in trouble. I still had a job. I hadn't done anything to put me in jail. But no longer could I lie. I had a gift of honesty thrust upon me in a way that never happened before and maybe has never happened since. I will guarantee you that if I had been that honest for the past 48 years, I would have avoided an awful lot of trouble that I got into through dishonesty. Trouble I got in not because I'm a poor sick fellow with a disease, but problems I got it into because sober I can be dishonest, I can greedy, I can selfish, I can resentful and angry, manipulative and all of those things. I think the disease concept of alcoholism is helpful. I think we tend to overdo it and forgive all kinds of things because our answer in the 12 steps is a moral answer. Alcoholism is the only disease I know of where the treatment is commitment to God, moral inventories, confession to at least another human being restitution, prayer and meditation and having a spiritual awakening that's a disease unlike any other I woke up that morning in August and I thought well I really got to do something and for a week I was sober and I kept lying to myself I said well this time it will be different this time you can stay sober on your own and always something would say no you can't you never did before and finally on a Saturday morning I called AA in Chicago and I talked to a lady who put me in touch with a man I went over to see him that afternoon and he was sober as I recall either 5 or 7 years and he took me to a meeting the next morning at the Austin YMCA, it was a Sunday morning meeting there were perhaps 60 people there he said these are all alcoholics he said I don't know what you believe in and I didn't believe in anything I was a fallen away atheist but he said if you want to quit drinking this will work for you and a bunch of people I have never seen before reached out their hands and they said how can we help and every day of my life since then you people have been helping me you've been helping us you've helped me to live soberly you've helping me to learn those things and the 12 steps I need to know you've been helping me to find a life that never would have been possible without this fellowship so as I said earlier I began to run around and went to thousands of meetings and I confused activity with action I confused the activity of being a speaker confused the activities of going to thousands of meetings confused the actitivity of making coffee all of these things are fine emptying ashtrays with the action of working and reworking the 12 steps. As I said, I became a professional wrestler for several years. I wrestled out of the, along others, Rainbow Arena out of Chicago. These shows were televised to the East Coast. I had the privilege of being a guest in Bill Wilson's home on several occasions. The first time I was there was 1951 while I was still wrestling. Turned out Lois Wilson was a great wrestling fan. So that was a plus right there. But I worked on overseas construction in the 60s, or in the 50s. I went up to Greenland, to Thule, Greenland which is 850 miles from the North Pole. I went over to New York City and went up as a laborer on a rigging crew. I made four contracts up there. When I was drinking, people used to tell me I was a smart young fellow and if I quit drinking, I would go far. and now I was 850 miles from the North Pole which was farther than I had planned to go but it was very, very beneficial because it taught me how to work which is something I had never known before we worked 10 hours a day, 7 days a week for 8 month contracts I worked in Iceland in 1955 I worked at Point Barrow and they built the dew line in 1956 and 1957 we had an unusual AA up there in Point Barow Nick's father was Jewish and his mother was Eskimo. Nick always said he's only Juskimo, and I think that might be correct. But most of this time I used to read the big book every day. I read a chapter a day. We didn't have AA meetings a lot of that time, and i read a chapter a day, and went through it over and over and over. And I still read it, and find things that I never saw before. So I guess there is no harm in continuing to read the big book. When I try to work with another alcoholic, we start at step one and we talk about the powerlessness over alcoholism. We take a look at step two. I think that being restored to sanity means that I shoot for rigorous honesty in all of my life. Sanity means that I see and report things as they are. Sanity is sanity means that I don't lie, cheat, and steal because if I lie about anything I lose the ability to see the truth about everything. as a friend of mine once said sanity means that I say what I do and I do what I say if I make a commitment, I keep it and I'm also open with people because they help me to be stronger with the conscience that is frequently very weak we take step 3 aloud as it says on page 63 in the big book the prayer we ran into that in our area in 1964 again, I'd read it many times I never did it and we started to do it and we started also taking step seven aloud and then I suggest that he take a fourth step how soon how soon is too soon how soon did Bill Wilson do it within the first week he was sober Dr. Bob the same thing, Earl Treat the same thing we have gone a long long long distance from what AA did when it began to our own detriment And I help him write an inventory using headings like resentment, dishonesty, selfishness, self-pity, fear, pride, lust, anger, envy, greed, sloth, gluttony. And I suggest that for all of those that he can, he use the method in the big book and always look for the reasons for the problems. My problems over and over have been that people will not run the universe as I would like them to. I got very active. When I came back from the work overseas, they had a lot of stuff going on in Chicago that they hadn't had before. And I became a conference speaker, and I became delegate to New York. I became an important member of Alcoholics Anonymous. You can't get much more important than that. However, I ran into some problems with people who didn't understand God's will when I explained it to them. I ended up with a lot of very bad relationships with people in AA sober. I'd done these things sober. And so one night in 1968 in October, I was feeling bad after a meeting. Talked to a couple of people and they said, well, why don't you write a new eight step? Then you go around and make amends to these people. Well, I thought that was ridiculous advice to give to one of AA's leaders. But I did it, and I had 12 names on there from when I was sober, people I'd pushed around who didn't see God's will when I explained it. Went around and made amends to them. Now, that brought me to something else, because I had not seen or talked to my father since 1941, and I'd heard that he had gotten sober on his own. He still lived in that little town down in South Georgia. Everything is connected to everything else. If I improve something in my life over here, it's going to make it better over here. And if I lie, cheat, and steal over here it's gonna make it bad over there. And I better remember that everything is connected. After I made those 12 amends I had a business convention come up in Miami and I stopped in this little town in South Georgia on the way back. The man who was the secretary of the AA group with somebody I had played baseball with years before. And I went to see him, and then I went out to see my father unannounced because I had called him from time to time for several years before that, and he always said he didn't want to get together. I went in and we talked for perhaps 25 minutes. Rang the doorbell. He came to the door, and I made an amend to him. And then I told him who I was, and I said, I want to come in and talk to you. And I win, and then we talked for perhaps twenty-five minutes. I went back in March of the next year, 1969, because I got the feeling I should. Again, unannounced. And again, we talked for maybe 25 minutes. These were extremely painful meetings. I don't know what I was reacting to, but I know that it changed some things within me that I was never able to get at before. That is one of the many, many, many differences I see between working the 12 steps and any other kind of therapy I know anything about. Two weeks later, after that second visit, excuse me, I see that guy hasn't gotten up yet. Two weeks after that second visit I was home having a quiet time in Riverside and somehow connected to that amend to my father. It was as if a layer of my life had peeled away, and I saw another ten names that went on my list of amends that somehow or other I had never seen before. So when this person I work with does an inventory, if he wants to take a fifth step with me, I take one with him at the same time. I take a thorough fifth step using a written inventory. That again is something I learned from Holbert Maurer. He said one of the many things wrong with psychotherapy was that the psychotherapist learned everything about you and you never learned anything about him. He called this modeling, and he said it made it much easier for the person to talk about himself, which I have found to be very, very true in my experience working with people in AA. Then we take steps six and seven aloud, usually, and then I sit there while he writes his eighth step. And then after he gets his eighth-step written, bug him until he makes his amends I suggest that everybody on the eighth step whether they're alive or dead whether we can find them or not whether we wants to make amends you're not whether to make a men's would injure them or others put the name down that's what the steps is and then go around and begin to make Amman's we hear a lot about the promises unfortunately we don't hear enough about the fact that the promise has only come true when we worked the first nine steps. And as I have continued to work through the first nine steps with many, many fourth and fifth steps, I have continued to find more and more amends that somehow or other were locked up in my forgotten life. I think the memory, you know, I used to get drunk over and over because I would forget what happened. I would wake up in the morning literally throwing up in The Navy, say I'm never going to drink again and I'd be drunk that night. That same thing has happened in other areas of my life. If I can see the whole thing, very often I'm not going to do it. So that what this does is it continues to improve my memory so that I can start to become what I'm supposed to be and avoid those things that prevent it. As I say, I spent a lot of years as a mystic and I used to think that step 11 was more important than I think it is today. I shoot for two to three hours of meditation a day. That's on a slow day. And I don't do that because I think it doesn't accomplish anything. I do it because it changes my life. When I was sober two years, I had first made, I'd done the fourth and fifth, I had made some amends and I began to meditate. Then I began to read all those books that tell you how to get your own way through prayer. And I thought, boy, this is terrific. I can remember one time, and this is true. I was working on construction when I was sober two years and I worked for a small construction company. I ran the cement mixer and it was in Lombard, which was about 20 minutes away on the Aurora and Elgin. And one day we got rained out and I was riding back to Oak Park and it Was raining. And reasoning clearly, as I often do, I said, God doesn't want me to get wet. So I prayed that God would stop the rain by the time I got to the station. The rain stopped. The next week, the same thing happened. And once again, I prayed and the rain stopped the next week. The same thing. Same thing happened at rain. We got rained out. I was on the train. It was raining. I prayed it would stop raining and I got talk back and it was still raining and I have never been able to stop the rains since you probably heard about the alcoholic beer foreman who worked in the brewery and was a compulsive beer drinker and one day he drowned in one of the vats and at the wake his wife went to the general manager she said my only concern is that my husband may have suffered before he died manager said no he didn't suffer a bit in fact he went to the men's room three times. Meditation, I ask for nothing. Meister Eckhart knew something about prayer and meditation and Meister Ekhart said when I pray for something I do not pray. When I pray for nothing I really pray. I did a lot of praying as I said trying to use God to get my own way and I finally came to understand the meaning in step 11 it was always there. It says praying only for knowledge of God's will and the power to carry that out. When I was working up in the Arctic, I used to do an hour and a half a day of meditation and again, this totally changes my life. I ask for nothing. I simply take a word or a phrase, thy will be done, God is love, or the word God and sometimes my mind just slows down completely and what I have found is that the more of this I do, the better my life is. Anybody here who has problems with fear If you will work the first nine steps as thoroughly as you can, and you do an hour and a half a day of meditation, I will guarantee you that the fear will go away. None of this happens by accident, however. I have found that the quantity of meditation influences the quality. The more I do, the better the quality becomes. And I cannot tell how effective it is by how it appears to me. The main thing is report for duty and put in the time. the message i perceive is a continuing spiritual awakening as a result of these steps the message I perceive says that if I will do these things I will have everything I need we've had a lot of people come to our area through the years and what we do is and these are people some of them with 25 years of sobriety in terrible shape with untreated alcoholism we had a man come there 24 and 10 years ago with 24 years of sobriety fear depression anxiety therapy when he took a whole bunch of fifth steps he swapped fifth steps with eight or nine people on the weekend and these are people from our group who each takes a thorough fifth step with the person and then he went home with a list of people to make amends to and started doing that, a thousand percent improved. And this has happened over and over and over with people. We of course have found, as everybody does, if I've got some impossible amends I can find one that I can make. And if I make that one it will lead me to another. This man had an amend that was very, very difficult and he was trying to find a woman for many years before, before he sobered up. And he couldn't. And he made the other amends, and he's an artist. And one day he was having an art exhibit in Brampton near Toronto. This woman came up and tapped him on the shoulder. And it was the woman he had been searching for for many, many years. And they had lunch, and she said, I get everything I need in Alcoholics Anonymous. It's all here. I work with a lot of people because that's what I'm supposed to do. Alcoholics are not always the most charming people to work with. It's amazing how fast they disappear when they feel better. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. The only thing that travels faster is an alcoholic disappearing after he feels good. the message i understand is summed up in the experience of a guy that i worked with years ago he's dead now but he was a badly behaved drunk and when he came into our group he'd been around a for 10 or 15 years couldn't stay sober he started to work the steps he had three boys the youngest was eight and in a class for retarded children because the father was such a badly behaved alcoholic and the father began to stay sober and he began to work the steps and his son went from a retarded class to an average class doing regular average work and continued to do better. When he graduated from high school, he was 18, I had lunch with the father, I said how did your son do in high school? He said he made the honor roll every grade period but one, he said he was a varsity football player, he says none of that would have happened if all I had done is quit drinking. and not work the steps. It's been said there are three ranges to the spiritual life. The first is a change in conduct, that we start to do those things we should do and avoid those things we shouldn't, and that's very simple and specific but not always easy. And the second is a chance of a change in character where we start to become really a different person and automatically do those things we should. And the third is a change in consciousness where we understand and realize those things that were blocked before. Well, after 48 years I'm still working in the first range. However, that's the way it is and the best thing I can do is be honest about where I am and not try to talk beyond my condition. The only things I've learned about living I've earned from you people. I went to that meeting the first time and a bunch of people reached out their hands and said how can we help and you people have done that every day of my life since I'm grateful to it and I'm here because without your continuing help I could never remember it thank you very much