AA - Alcoholics Anonymous
February 20, 2024
(0:00 – 0:15)
Good evening, my name is Sandy Beech and I’m an alcoholic. How y’all doing? Never
gave a talk off a bar stool before. I feel like I ought to start complaining.
(0:20 – 0:35)
I was out, for those of you that hate joggers, I’m gonna make you feel good. I was out
jogging this morning and sprained my ankle. Yay! And I was hobbling back, and I’m very
grateful to the people that loaned me the crutches.
(0:36 – 1:17)
See me after the meeting and I might want to keep using them the rest of the night and
maybe tomorrow and I want to find out how to get them back. But I was hobbling back to
the hotel and people were driving by going, serves you right, serves you right. Anyway, I
do want to thank you all for inviting us out here and I always enjoy being with a big
crowd like this, with all this sobriety and all this excitement, and it’s just something
about getting in the middle of these events and seeing the dynamics of Alcoholics
Anonymous.
(1:17 – 1:36)
That is a never-ending wonder to me, and I’m very pleased and grateful to be here
tonight. I did come into Alcoholics Anonymous on Pearl Harbor Day in 1964 in Manassas,
Virginia. And I haven’t been drunk since my first meeting, and I owe it all to not drinking.
(1:37 – 2:05)
And that’s how you like to get that out of the way. It’s a… A lot of times we get into the
steps and the principles of the program, we forget to mention the not drinking part, and
there’s somebody new here, and they don’t hear about it and wonder, well, you know,
and they have a lot of trouble. So if you’ve been coming around a while and your
program didn’t work in too well, check your drinking.
(2:14 – 2:42)
I heard a long time ago that it’s very difficult to have a spiritual awakening while you’re
throwing up. And the funny thing is that tonight, I don’t know why, I was sort of wrestling
around trying to get comfortable up in the room and sitting around thinking of things to
talk about other than a drunkologue, which I know how it turns out I end up in AA. It’s the
same damn story every time.
(2:49 – 3:31)
This term, spiritual awakening, out of our 12th step, having had a spiritual awakening.
And I thought that I would just share some of the thoughts I had about it, and then we’ll
see where that talk goes. And I’ll tell you, if you could find some of the Marines that I
used to fly with, I did most of my drinking in the Marine Corps, and if you could locate
some of them, I don’t know if there’s any in the Burge group over here, but if you could
find them and contact them and tell them that Sandy Bench was out here about to talk
about spiritual awakening, you would get some funny looks.
(3:33 – 4:18)
They would say, well, yeah, he used to do that a lot, that’s why they locked him up. And
you know, I am surprised that I’m just sitting up here and then thinking about that word.
And just the idea of an awakening, I suppose it happens on a daily basis, which gives us
our whole daily program, that you know, the whole day just starts with that awakening,
and how different these days in sobriety have been than those old days when an
awakening was sort of a fitful panic, and you’d just wake up with a because you heard a
loud gasp somewhere, and it was you, you know.
(4:19 – 5:26)
God, I’m alive, and I got to go out there again. Oh, Jesus, where’s the booze? And then
calm down, and then the panic of that kind of an awakening, as opposed to the ones that
we can get accustomed to, you know, our day-at-a-time program now are so different.
And there’s other kind of awakenings.
It’s a funny word as I think about it. There’s, I remember the gradualness of learning
about our sexuality, you remember that when we were teenagers, and we became aware
there was that awakening of, what is this? There’s something in me, and then all that
mystery, and finally that came to be one of our great problem areas that we had to deal
with, and are still dealing with in our sobriety. It was an interesting awakening, though,
you know.
It just came along, and there it was. Boy, this is it was a process of growing up, and we
were aware of a new power. And I think about my alcoholism as an awakening, the
power of that drinking.
(5:27 – 7:24)
For me, I was a primary alcoholic, and primary alcoholics have different kind of alcoholic
awakenings than the educational variety, if I can steal from that book. We come to know
our new higher power the first night that we drink. You know what I mean.
Our drinking becomes unmanageable during the second drink. I sometimes say I drank
socially about 10 or 15 minutes, and then crossed the line into alcoholism that night.
Others of us around the program, apparently, and I have to believe you because you get
up here and say this, you didn’t have that kind of a problem.
You at least claimed to some years of social type drinking, where it was fun and alcohol
was your friend, and then your filter broke, or whatever the hell happened later on. And
then you knew what it was to be powerless over alcohol. And so I suppose awakenings
do happen in different forms and shapes to different people.
And I think our literature would have us, or would show us, that a spiritual awakening
certainly has that dimension. When we think about Bill Wilson’s rather sudden and
spectacular spiritual awakening on a hospital bed, and apparently a rush of light and
possible audio effects, and this huge event takes place in a very… Well, that doesn’t
happen to most of us. There’s a much more gradual type of change that seems to take
place.
(7:25 – 8:42)
But when I think about this 12th step, and I think about that having had a spiritual
awakening, I can honestly say that I am convinced that that has happened to me. I
wasn’t convinced at the end of one or two years. I had the type that, you know, you look
back on and probably other people were aware that something was changing, that I
honestly began to establish some contact with a higher power that was as powerful and
much more powerful than my old vodka, which was certainly a higher power.
Boy, that thing was so great and so reliable that there’s a great deal of similarity from
my perspective, and anything I say is just my opinion, between these things, between
the relationship that I had with vodka and the relationship that I have with my higher
power that I found here in AA. There’s tremendous similarities. There is a just an
amazing comparison, except one was so destructive, and this new one is so… I mean,
the one was so destructive, and this new one is so constructive.
(8:43 – 9:21)
But somewhere along the line, I became aware that I was, for me, was able to rely on
something beyond me. And that was a great mystery. At first, I wasn’t sure.
You know, it’s like, I wonder what’s going on around here. You have an hour or two
coping with life a little bit better than you used to, and you go, well, that must have been
an accident. I don’t know, you know, that probably won’t last.
I’m an eternal pessimist. That’ll go away. I’m sure that I’ll remain frightened for the rest
of my life.
(9:21 – 9:48)
And it’s funny how sobriety works, and we just keep coming back to the meetings. And
eventually, I think I was sure that a higher power was available to me to meet any
situation any time I asked. And I’ve thought a lot about how this happened, why it
happened, and what is, you know, what this program, and how this program enables this
to happen to us.
(9:48 – 10:46)
And I think Bill wrote in the 12 and 12, the best way that I can describe it, that this
particular thing is a gift, a spiritual awakening. And that we don’t know when we’re going
to get it. Could come early, could take a long time, it’s hard to say.
But it is a gift, and it seems to come to everybody who makes themselves ready to
receive it. That there was the problem. There was the interesting analogy.
If I were to draw an analogy to making myself ready to receive this particular gift, I
would think about a mailbox. And if I had a house out in the rural countryside
somewhere, and wanted the US Postal Service to deliver mail to me, I understand the
one requirement is to put up a mailbox. And then I have made myself ready to receive
mail.
(10:47 – 11:18)
Now being a self-centered drunk, I might approach that situation by telling the postman
to just drop it on the ground. I’ll get the damn mailbox up later. They never sent me
anything but bills anyway.
Who the hell wants mail? And you know, and you guys are always late, and you couldn’t
find it anywhere. So I wouldn’t have the mailbox up, and I wouldn’t get any mail.
Because that’s one of the deals is, in order to be eligible to receive mail, you got to have
a place to put it.
(11:20 – 11:44)
And I think that that was my attitude towards a higher power. I never saw any evidence
that it was around. I never heard anything, any message from it.
I never got any mail from my higher power. I never heard anybody knocking. I heard
other people talking about higher powers, but you know, I said, I’m not sure that if I built
a mailbox, anything would arrive.
(11:46 – 12:20)
And I think that’s why I didn’t work too hard in the early years in the program. It was that
doubt. I never saw any evidence around.
And I realize now that there’s a great analogy to that higher power. When they talk in
that 11th step about the prayer of St. Francis to make me a channel of thy peace, and
opening up a channel, they sometimes refer to higher power as a still, small voice. And
how quiet one has to get in order to hear a still, small voice.
(12:21 – 12:39)
And I don’t know about your alcoholism, but my alcoholism was noisy. I mean, there
were noises in there you wouldn’t believe. There was, well, there was the normal
stomach noises, you know, and all of those.
(12:41 – 13:03)
But then there was the special perspiration noises that, you know, when you sweat, even
when it’s 20 below zero, you remember that kind of perspiration, just, you could just feel
that oozing out. Then there was an internal buzzing in the ears, just, I don’t know what
that was. It was there all the time.
(13:03 – 13:29)
I was amazed when it went away. I thought it was on this planet. Then there was the
grinding of the teeth that were in there.
Then there were the muscle spasms and the yippy jumps around. And then the skin,
when it itched, it just crawled and it had a noise of its own. And then there were all the
people yelling at you all the time.
(13:31 – 14:20)
That was going on. Get up! And panic is noisy. When I’m terrified, I can hear it, I can
hear.
Fear is just, I mean, the whole thing. And someone says, are you listening to the still,
small voice? And I say, what? I don’t think it’s possible to hear a still, small voice, in the
condition that we bring ourselves into alcoholics and omniscience for a long time
afterwards. I don’t know about you all, but just stopping drinking didn’t get me
unpanicked.
(14:21 – 14:40)
It was more terrifying, because now you took away my secret weapon. Now I was facing
the world unarmed. And it took a long time before I was ready to relinquish my grip of
panic in order to listen.
(14:41 – 14:58)
So I needed to rely on you all. And I think we do. We rely on the people who have gone
before us, so that we can just hold on to them and maybe relax, just take and release
our death grip on life for just a second.
(14:58 – 15:44)
You just sort of see if we’re going to fall off. I think I had that fear of falling off the world
or something like that, that God, if I ever let go, if I ever completely relaxed, what would
happen? There was this tremendous self-centered panic about life that led and
contributed and was developed during the drinking years. And I look back now and see
how this kind of all fell together and how the steps, one by one, were able to remove the
debris, they were able to cause those fists to unclench, and they were able to relax some
of the muscles, just a little bit, just so that the noise level dropped down.
(15:45 – 16:06)
It’s very difficult to listen when you have the perpetual thought. You know what I think
the most commonly thought thought is amongst us? If you think of all the thoughts we
could have, this is the one I think. Hey, what about me? That would be my guess as to
the most commonly thought thought.
(16:07 – 16:29)
And this is even when we’re on a 12-step call. I mean, even when we’re into the it’sbetter-to-give-than-receive mode, I still think that’s the most commonly thought thought.
And we’re rendering to the best of our ability to share and so on down, and then we go,
God, I hope this gets over in the next hour or so.
(16:29 – 17:01)
I’m getting tired, you know, and our own little thing starts surfacing and the true colors
are starting to fly. And I suppose that’s how I was born, very self-centered. I think that’s
just what a baby is, that just sits there and pounds on the high chair and says, I’m
hungry, and then starts going, my pants are wet, and change them, and I’ve got to go to
the bathroom, and we’ve got all these problems.
(17:01 – 17:39)
And then we’re 40, and we’re still doing this, and they’re going, God, he wet his pants
again, and the bed is wet, and he’s banging on his high chair, he wants his bottle. And
then we go, as we get older, we just go, God, I guess they’re not hearing me, I’d better
yell louder. And I’ll tell you what, this may sound ridiculous, but I really think this
happens, that we’re so self-centered, at least I am, and anything I say is just my opinion.
(17:39 – 17:59)
We’re so self-centered, we don’t know it. Have you ever gone to a group, this is the same
syndrome, the baby syndrome, have you ever gone to a group, and you take your
problem, and you lay it on the table, you’ve heard that in AA, go ahead, you want to lay
it out on the table with your group. So you come in there, and boy, you’ve got a problem.
(18:00 – 18:37)
I mean, you’ve got 12 bill collectors that are hounding you, some of them with guns, and
you’ve just been told you’ve got 10 more days on the job, you’re getting laid off, and
you’ve got a serious financial problem. So you lay it on the table, and you explain, you
know, man, I’ve hocked everything on, I’m down 10 more days, and then these guys with
the guns, and they start around the table addressing your problem, and they go, well,
keep going to meetings and pray. And the next person says, yeah, the answer to your
problem is spiritual growth.
(18:39 – 18:58)
And so you go, wait a minute, wait a second, let me stop the meeting here a minute. I
must not have explained my problem correctly. I can tell from the answers I’m already
getting, I haven’t really, let me take another shot at that for you.
(19:00 – 19:10)
Money, money, money is the topic tonight. What we’re talking about is good, hard cash.
Now, let’s go around again.
(19:10 – 19:25)
And people are going, okay. And the rest of the table finishes out with a unanimous
decision, spiritual growth. And I’ll tell you, you just sit there, and we go back, and we go,
well, I’ll never do that again with that group.
(19:28 – 19:45)
And we go back and try and re-explain it. And that’s what I’m saying. When we can’t get
the people to give us the answer, we just keep explaining the problem, keep demanding,
keep hammering out that the answer to that is money, and nobody would agree with it.
(19:45 – 19:56)
How could you tell me the answer is spiritual growth? And we may have a health
problem, or we may be having a relationship problem. Oh, she left me. What am I going
to do? Pray.
(19:58 – 20:30)
Pray. And we go, what about revenge? Doesn’t anybody? Where are you? And we try to
go to another group, like we used to take geographic cures. You know, we can take
geographic cures and sobriety, just keep going until we get some other losers that’ll
agree with us.
(20:32 – 20:38)
Start our own group. No literature allowed. No literature allowed.
(20:46 – 21:02)
We could call it the resentment group. You’ve got serenity, you’re not welcome. And
that’s what I’m saying, this tremendous self-centeredness.
(21:02 – 21:16)
Oh, I need an answer, and I need it now. Well, that to me, as I’m describing whatever
that is, is noisy. You know what I’m saying? When you just think about yourself all the
time, you can’t hear anything.
(21:17 – 21:39)
Yeah, I’ll listen as soon as I get the money. As soon as I get revenge, I’ll go in for spiritual
growth. But I’ve got a lot of crap I’ve got to deal with, then I can put my feet up and
intellectualize with a philosophy and get serenity and some of those things.
(21:39 – 21:57)
But I can’t get that now, man, I’m in the middle of a mess. You don’t think you can apply
serenity to messes, do you? And I think we missed the point, you know, and it just seems
so vital, and we just don’t understand what they don’t understand. Alcohol understood.
(21:58 – 22:18)
Boy, alcohol didn’t question, you know, this, it, we just… And the funny thing was,
alcohol didn’t give us money or revenge. It was very similar to spiritual growth. It solved
the problem by changing how we felt about it.
(22:19 – 22:27)
Hey, I owe all these guys all that money. I think I’ll get drunk. Dooby-dooby-dooby-dee.
(22:27 – 22:38)
Screw them. You know? But I care. Tell them to come in here.
(22:41 – 23:07)
We solved the financial problem with no money. We just changed our attitude about it.
And they claim we can do that spiritually, that we can stop being so frightened about this
problem that we’re able to hold a job, or look for one, without being so nervous that
nobody wants to hire us.
(23:07 – 23:14)
You know, when you’re desperate to get the job, people don’t want to hire you. They go,
yeah, this guy’s a wreck. I don’t want him working in here.
(23:14 – 23:21)
He means the job so bad. This is awful. So you’ve got to go in and be calm.
(23:21 – 23:36)
How do you get calm? That was the problem. And I didn’t believe that this power was
available to fix all these things. And I looked at my alcoholism, quite frankly, as a fixer.
(23:36 – 23:42)
That was a good thing. When they called the drugs, you remember, they’d give me a fix.
That’s a good word.
(23:42 – 24:11)
Has alcohol fixed things that I didn’t know how to fix? Because I didn’t learn how to grow
up. I took an easier, softer way. I think, you know, the normal growing up process that
most of us encounter involves a lot of pain, how to deal with rejection, your first
girlfriend runs away, then you lose a big game, and then you lose something, you don’t
get the job you wanted, and all these problems.
(24:11 – 24:32)
And we learn how to, well, that happens, and this is what it feels like, and it’s kind of
painful, but pretty soon we take that in stride and move on to the next one. But for some
of us alcoholics, we discovered a painless way to grow up. Rejection, no problem, I’ll just
chug-a-lug this fifth.
(24:33 – 24:43)
Then I won’t feel the pain. And I wake up the next day and I haven’t experienced
anything out of that situation. I haven’t learned anything except how to avoid it.
(24:44 – 25:11)
And I did a beautiful job with my alcoholism, avoiding things, never realized I was
avoiding them, but it worked beautifully. As time went along, I found that alcohol could
take care of some of the normal problems that people encounter. I always like to talk
about my first drink because I did become an alcoholic that night, and it was in college,
so you can see I was a late starter.
(25:11 – 25:38)
The reason I was a late starter, I had been into the Catholic Church at an early age, and
my relationship with the Catholic Church was like a lot of little kids. The Church said,
Welcome little boy, you’re in trouble. That was the initial entree there, and I looked up
with big round eyes and found out this was a serious game we’re playing.
(25:38 – 25:53)
It involved a lot of heat later on, and this had me quite panic-stricken. I just went through
life hearing the flames of purgatory. I could just hear them out there.
(25:53 – 26:11)
Oh, boy. And the normal growing-up things happened. There was an epidemic of impure
thoughts in my neighborhood, and they would come in my bedroom window, and I would
try and keep them out, but they were too powerful.
(26:12 – 26:26)
They would overpower me, and there would be another 10,000 years added on to the
book, and you couldn’t tell anybody about that. You couldn’t share that with anybody.
That was a secret.
(26:27 – 26:43)
I started collecting a lot of secrets and worried that there were secret finder-outers in the
world. Later on in the drinking years, I knew there were secret finder-outers. There were
people who looked you right in the eye, so I started wearing sunglasses.
(26:45 – 27:10)
A lot of us drunks wear sunglasses because they can’t see what’s behind there. As a
matter of fact, I got so paranoid near the end, I was worried that the government had
people out there looking for shells. I felt like just a shell of a human being, and I just
figured if I ever made eye contact with someone, and it was a government guy, he’d look
in there and go, there’s no one in there.
(27:10 – 27:26)
Get him off the street. Oh, God, they’re going to find out that I’m grown up, but there’s
nothing in here but a little baby who’s terrified of being out here, unless he’s got booze.
Then it feels fine.
(27:26 – 27:31)
Then it isn’t. Everything’s in proportion there. Then I felt like a grown up.
(27:31 – 27:39)
I had that drink. That’s what that first drink did. I was in this university, and there was all
these grown-ups around, other freshmen.
(27:43 – 27:59)
They had all those manners, and they knew how to talk, and they knew how to divide up
into groups. I still don’t know how that works. Some people just intuitively know how to
handle situations which used to baffle them.
(28:01 – 28:22)
But think, you know, when there’s 50 strangers, and you put them all in a room, and you
just say, here, have some soda and drinks and pretzels and mints. If you come back
about 15 minutes later, there’ll be eight people over here having a nice conversation.
Only three over here, and then 12 over here, and five, five.
(28:22 – 28:44)
How do they know where to go? I mean, I would end up being the one that’s left. I run
over to the group of 12, and do I belong in there? Nobody. What do you want? No, I don’t
belong in there.
(28:45 – 28:50)
I could see the way they were looking. They didn’t want me in there. There was that
questioned look.
(28:50 – 28:56)
What? What? Okay. I go over to the next group, and they didn’t want me there either.
They had the same look.
(28:57 – 29:12)
So I check them all, and nobody wanted. So I just stood around the wall, and said, boy,
this is a great university. And then I had a drink, and all the groups wanted me.
(29:17 – 29:35)
So, that is power. I could take and change all those groups with one drink. Changing
from people who didn’t even care about me to people who went, hey, get over here,
come over here, tell jokes, we love you.
(29:37 – 30:00)
I drank, and you started smiling. I drank, and I had the power to change the world that I
lived in from a very intimidating, frightening, confusing place to one where I knew all the
rules, where I understood every little nuance of life just by drinking. So you don’t think
that was a higher power.
(30:00 – 30:06)
God, that was so magic. It also solved all the other problems. It solves the fear.
(30:07 – 30:12)
It solves the sex problems. It solves the money problems. It solves the inability to be
creative.
(30:12 – 30:35)
God, I’ll never forget, you know, when I stopped drinking, I read somewhere that Edgar
Allan Poe wrote all of his stuff drunk. And I remember telling my sponsor, here’s two
Marines, and I’m discussing how Edgar Allan Poe could only be creative when he was
drunk. And Bill said, we don’t need no poems about ravens.
(30:40 – 31:06)
And the Marine Corps tries, okay. But I had the feeling that all creativity took place under
the influence, that that’s the only time the brain would function, and I would get these
tremendous thoughts late at night and jump out of bed and write them down. Then you’d
have to get drunk the next night to read them.
(31:06 – 31:17)
Right. And you never could bring them into the real world. They were only available late
at night.
(31:19 – 31:36)
So I guess what I’m trying to say is that alcohol was some power. That stuff, I mean, I
didn’t realize I had put that investment in this chemical, but I really had. I relied on it to
have answers.
(31:37 – 31:45)
It took care of the future. That’s why we stocked up. Boy, I got my future taken care of.
(31:46 – 31:59)
In the garage, in the basement, in the trunk of the car. I’m not going to get caught short.
I’m not going to be out there without my future taken care of.
(32:00 – 32:07)
And there’s a tremendous dependence on that. There is a faith. You know, like, go ahead
world, do your worst.
(32:07 – 32:20)
Man, I got a fifth in the trunk. But if you knew it wasn’t there, we were terrified that
something challenging might occur. That something we couldn’t handle might occur.
(32:20 – 32:32)
And life became terrifying without this power that I had faith in. And eventually, you
know, we had to keep it in our pockets and in our briefcases. Keep it real close.
(32:33 – 32:42)
And we come into Alcoholics Anonymous and they go, okay, no drinking. You don’t
understand. You wouldn’t… You couldn’t understand.
(32:42 – 33:07)
I mean, I needed to even think about walking out of my house and you’re telling me no
drinking. And you know, there’s a very gradual weaning process. I don’t know about you
all, but I bet I’d been in AA about six months when I realized I had a $50 bill hidden in a
secret compartment in my wallet that I was dependent on.
(33:09 – 33:29)
It was… because it was there just in case this program didn’t work. You know what I’m
talking about? It was there together with the intimate knowledge of the hours and
location of package stores. But I wasn’t, you know, powerless over alcohol.
(33:29 – 33:34)
My life wasn’t unmanageable. And there I was. You know, I wonder how many of us have
that.
(33:34 – 33:46)
We sort of, oh, no booze anymore. But we have an emergency thing we really haven’t
discussed with anybody. You know, we’ve got a secret bank account or a hidden bottle
somewhere or a plan.
(33:47 – 33:55)
Maybe an emergency plan. We don’t have any of these things. We just have sort of, I
know how quick I could get a fix in case.
(33:55 – 34:10)
Just in case something came up that this program couldn’t handle. You know, something
real frightening. And then, you know, it would be a question of losing my job or having a
drink for my family’s sake.
(34:11 – 34:21)
You know, just to save them. And it’s so frightening to disengage completely from that
chemical. I mean, that to me is what alcoholism was.
(34:21 – 34:32)
And it really wasn’t occurring so much, that dependence, when I was drinking. You know,
the illness seems to occur when I’m not drinking. That’s the funny part of it.
(34:33 – 34:45)
And Bill writes about that. You know, in the first, he talks about a double-edged sword.
The one is the compulsion which sets in after I have the first drink when I was only going
to have about three and I end up having 35.
(34:47 – 35:09)
And that one is the chemical part that I look at. Where I pour it in and, boy, it does
something to my system that it doesn’t do to other people’s. And it ends up with funny
kind of livers and high blood pressure and convulsions and DTs and shakes and
malnutrition and all the little fringe benefits of drinking that we run into.
(35:10 – 35:18)
And that’s the medical profession seems to write about. And there’s a great deal written
about that. But that isn’t the part of the illness that I feel powerless over.
(35:19 – 35:40)
I feel powerless over alcohol when I’m not drinking. That’s the part that we need each
other and this program and a higher power and everything to deal with. It kind of
reminds me if my brain were broken in its learning experience with fire.
(35:41 – 36:01)
And I don’t know if any of you were fascinated with fire as a little kid. But I think the
average person growing up when they get big enough to turn on a gas stove and they
see the flame burning up there and they go, damn, is that real pretty? And they stick
their hand in it trying to play with it. And pretty soon we get a big message that comes
back.
(36:01 – 36:20)
And that is, keep your damn hands out of the flames. It’s sort of a permanent record of
that little transaction that takes place. But if we had a distortion, if we could have such a
thing as a flameaholic, we wouldn’t have a complete learning experience that would take
place.
(36:21 – 36:32)
We would have something like this. Well, I stuck my hand in that flame and it burned this
finger. So what did I learn? I learned that that flame burns this finger.
(36:34 – 37:01)
What about this finger? What about the elbow? What about that flame? What about my
nose? And I would have an obsession with flames. And I would be consumed with a
resentment that flames are so pretty and you can’t play with them. And somewhere in
the world there may be someone who knows how I would be able to do that.
(37:01 – 37:11)
And I would have this abnormal interest. And I think that’s what I had with alcohol. When
I wasn’t drinking, I couldn’t stop thinking about drinking.
(37:11 – 37:24)
It was just there. And the more I realized in my sobriety, there was no way I could get rid
of it. There was no way that I could stop thinking about drinking.
(37:25 – 37:41)
And yet they tell us when we come into AA, that if you can’t stop thinking about drinking,
you’re going to drink again. And if you drink again, you’re going to die. And I go, well,
you know, you’re going a long way around to say, I’m going to die.
(37:43 – 37:57)
And they go, yeah, that’s what our first step is. The first step is, it’s more serious than
you thought. And I don’t know about you, but I came in, I told my sponsor, you know,
there’s a compulsive honesty that sets in in the program.
(37:57 – 38:03)
And when we come in, initially we’re minimizing our drinking. I don’t know, that’s what I
would do. I’d say, well, I didn’t drink that much.
(38:04 – 38:21)
And then I found out in Alcoholics Anonymous we have reverse snobbery. The further
down you went, the more status you have. You know what I’m talking about? You know,
you were really only arrested five times, but you say seven.
(38:23 – 38:48)
Because then they listen to you when you discuss the topic at the closed meeting, oh,
seven times arrested, let me talk about honesty. And we just, you know, so all of a
sudden, oh, you want to really hear about it, and it’s probably in the first month or
somewhere, I said to my sponsor, let me tell you, I’ve been, you know, kind of minimizing
my drinking. This is what really happened.
(38:48 – 39:21)
And I started unloading about how sick and the malnutrition and losing 50 pounds and
getting locked up in a mental institution and the DTs and all of these things. And when I
got through, he said, yeah, if you keep on drinking, you’re really going to get in trouble.
And I think that’s what the first step tells us, is no matter how bad we think it is, that’s
nothing compared to what it’s going to be unless a miracle takes place.
(39:21 – 39:43)
And I don’t think there’s any bones made about that, that that to me is the proper
explanation of the situation, that unless a miracle takes place, you’ve got a very bad
future. And you want to see it? Come on, I’ll pick you up and show you a wet brain. Oh,
geez, I don’t want to see that.
(39:44 – 40:04)
What are you trying to do, get me upset? No, we’re trying to get you to let go. We’re
trying to get you to declare an emergency. And I think that’s what has to happen, that I
have to end up declaring an emergency in each one of us.
(40:04 – 40:21)
I think that’s what has to happen. Because up until then, I’m not going to go through an
emergency procedure. You know, they’re nice to know that these twelve steps are there,
and they certainly would be useful in an emergency.
(40:23 – 40:36)
But if you don’t have an emergency, they are academic discussion principles. Oh, yes,
inventories, very good, they’re very good for the human soul. And if I had an emergency,
I might get serious about them.
(40:37 – 41:05)
And I think that’s what happens in that first step, is we recognize that this, that my
illness, the one I have, the alcoholism that I brought in, is indeed a fatal illness, and I’m
about ready to declare an emergency. And the steps take on a new dimension. There is a
sudden awareness that I’m interested in obtaining the results that are available here in
AA.
(41:05 – 41:41)
I think the experience might be an analogy to a jet pilot who were flying along and a
plane caught on fire, so he ejected, and the chute stayed in the plane. And I’m sure his
initial reaction might be that, you know, I think I’ve got a problem. As I’m whistling along
at 55,000 feet, observing the world out there in some distance, you know, I’ve got a
problem here.
(41:42 – 42:06)
But as you go coasting along and you’re a good rationalizer, you might start going, you
know, nothing’s happened yet. I wonder if some of us are above the law of gravity. If I
put my arms like this, look at this, I can go this way and I can go that way.
(42:07 – 42:38)
You know, we can come into AA and we can go, yeah, my drinking was bad, but it wasn’t
as bad as some of these people are talking about. I mean, a fatal illness, fatal? You’re
talking about the drinking I did is fatal? I mean, that means like I could die from it and
we’re just yapping away, meeting after meeting, sort of rationalizing our situation. In the
meantime, we’re coasting closer and you know, something different happens when you
move down around 80 feet.
(42:44 – 43:06)
The relative motion picks up. You’re going, hey, I think we’ve got a serious problem on
our hands here. And if we could, we could just freeze everything at about 12 feet and
just ask each one of us, listen, we’re conducting a survey.
(43:09 – 43:41)
How do you feel about God? This is the right time to ask. And I don’t know about you, but
my answer would have been, well, all my life I’ve been able to prove the non-existence.
But boy, I hope like hell I’m wrong.
(43:44 – 44:05)
And you know, that’s what the first step can do. It can blow away all of our previous
positions on that subject by creating the absolute need for the existence of a personal
higher power. And we just go, what do I care what I used to think? I’ve got to be wrong or
I’m going to splash.
(44:09 – 44:32)
And now you’ve got an open mind. And that’s what I’m so grateful for is a fatal illness
that gave me an open mind, that allowed me to change my position on several major
issues. And spiritual awakening was one of them.
(44:33 – 44:48)
I no longer denied that they could exist. I acknowledged the need for this to happen to
me. And if anybody is new out there, this is the process that I think you’ll go through.
(44:48 – 45:01)
And there’ll be a lot of in-runs and a lot of detours and a lot of shenanigans. But one of
these days we’re going to come face-to-face with our own illness. And we’re going to go,
Jesus, this damn thing is serious.
(45:04 – 45:08)
You know, and we’re going to see it. We’re just going to get a glimpse. I’m at 12 feet.
(45:10 – 45:17)
Time out, time out, time out, time out, time out. I’m changing my mind on several major
issues. Man, whew.
(45:19 – 45:26)
Give me those old 12 steps. Let me at them. Because now they take on a whole new
meaning.
(45:27 – 45:32)
This isn’t some academic. This is a rescue rope. This is the answer to this.
(45:32 – 45:45)
This is how miracles happen. This is Alcoholics Anonymous. We are driven in there with
this fatal illness and we end up coming out the other side very grateful that we had the
fatal illness in the first place.
(45:45 – 46:02)
This is why so many people get up and say, I’m glad I’m an alcoholic. Because it drove us
to this spiritual awakening. It drove us to this place that many of us feel we never would
have discovered had it not been for this desperately fatal illness.
(46:03 – 46:12)
And so if you’re new out there and you’re sort of wrestling with the magnitude of your
illness and so on down. One of these days this will happen. And it’s going to be a great
day.
(46:13 – 46:30)
It’s going to be an awakening. An awareness of the reality of this illness and what it’s
going to take to stop it. It’s going to take a power so great that it can reach down and
just grab you individually just before you hit those rocks.
(46:31 – 46:42)
It’s going to pluck you out of mid-air and turn your whole life around and then you’re
going to have to explain it. And there’s no other way to explain it. Miracle.
(46:42 – 46:47)
This was not a human power. This was something I could never have done. You’ve heard
it.
(46:47 – 46:57)
You’ve heard people after people get up here and try and explain the turnaround, the
change and what a process it is. And that’s what the steps do. And I’m not going to go
through them all.
(46:57 – 47:08)
I’m going to stop in about five minutes. That’s what the steps do. They allow us process
by process to discover every area that we were wrong about.
(47:10 – 47:17)
Chapter 5 talks about that. Old ideas availed us nothing. Whenever I talk about old ideas
I always have to talk about Charlie Bruton.
(47:17 – 47:25)
He’s my old friend back there in Washington. He was in the A.A. for a bunch of years. He
passed on some years ago but he had some great sayings.
(47:26 – 47:59)
And whenever I mention old ideas I think of him. One of his practical jokes at meetings a
guy would come up to him and say Hey Charlie the clock over there said 8.15 and the
one over here says 8.30. What’s wrong? He said if those clocks both said the same time
we wouldn’t need but one clock. And that was now there’s no hidden meaning in that but
that’s what he would say.
(48:04 – 48:20)
But he summarized the old idea issue as well as I’ve ever heard it. And that was he said
it isn’t the things we don’t know that kill us. It’s knowing things that just ain’t so.
(48:21 – 48:30)
And that’s what I brought in here was a whole bunch of information that was wrong. I
said there was no higher power for me. I said you were all rotten.
(48:30 – 48:37)
I said the world stunk. I said that there are no values. I said there’s no such thing as
spiritual principles.
(48:38 – 48:56)
This is dog eat dog world. And I wanted to hold on to those ideas for some strange
reason I was reluctant to give them up. Why the hell would I want all that to be true?
Think about it if you’re new and you’re holding on to all these things I don’t want to be
wrong about all this.
(48:57 – 49:05)
And I go why not? What the hell do you want all that to be true for? You’re no good. Your
own family hates you. Your mother hates you.
(49:05 – 49:09)
There is no God. You’re going to die next week. Bad death.
(49:10 – 49:25)
Nothing good’s ever going to happen to you. And I’m going to hold on to this forever. You
know why we hold on to that? Because it’s painful to change.
(49:25 – 49:48)
I think I’ll suffer the pains of being wrong rather than the pains of change. And I go well
that’s a dumb position but if you want, go ahead. And eventually the pain of being wrong
gets too big and we cash in and take the risk and take the jump into this unknown area
into the spiritual principles.
(49:49 – 50:18)
I’m going to finally cut the rope to that path and I’m going to walk with you people and
see where I end up. And I think the surprise of your life is awaiting to find out who you
really are. And that voice when you make yourself ready to hear it through all of these
processes of getting rid of character defects cutting out all that noise until there comes
the day when you finally sit down and you go you know, I think I’ve got it quiet enough
now I wonder if I’m going to hear anything.
(50:19 – 50:31)
And you start listening and you get a glimpse and then you start going you know, I think
I’m on to something. It’s so exciting I can’t believe that this is going to happen to me.
And you know in the big book it writes about that.
(50:31 – 50:40)
Deep down inside of every one of us is a fundamental idea of God. It’s been there ever
since we were a child. All we have to do is get in touch with it again.
(50:40 – 50:48)
Be able to listen. Be able to have our lives quiet down enough to hear what’s there. And
I’ll tell you what you’re going to hear.
(50:48 – 50:53)
You’re going to hear joy. You’re going to hear the whole joy of living. Your attitude is
going to change.
(50:53 – 51:03)
You’re going to walk back in. You’re going to want to go out and carry this entire
message to the next person. And you’ll be out on a 12-step call and whatever you’re
conveying you’ll have a new power.
(51:04 – 51:35)
Do you ever think the power that you have as a recovered alcoholic to walk into a home
that hasn’t seen any hope in five years and you’re there ten minutes and the entire
family’s eyes are lighting up and are listening to every word you’re saying because
you’re bringing hope where it’s never been before simply by sharing and saying I know
exactly what’s going on here. I know exactly where you’re coming from and I know
where to take you. And I’m going to take you out of this hell because I’ve been in it and
you can see I’m out.
(51:36 – 51:52)
And they grab hold and they’ve got hope and the power of your illness and the power of
this program is transmitted in that split second. And then we come back and try and
explain that. What is that power? What is it? And we’re at loss for words.
(51:52 – 51:58)
We try our best but we know what it feels like and we know what it looks like and it’s in
this room tonight. Thank you very much.
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