Bob B. from St. Paul, MN – A Conversation on Sandy B.’s 50th AA Birthday – Woodstock of the South – Lake Lanier Islands, GA – 12/7/2014

(0:07 – 1:07)
Hi, I’m Bob, I’m an alcoholic. I had a horrible night last night. I slept about three hours.
I have been, I’ve given a couple of crappy AA talks in the last two months, and I don’t
know what it is. You know, you still have to give them, which you can send the cassette
in. And so I haven’t figured that out, and I doubt I will, but it’s troubling.
And I haven’t been feeling particularly well tonight, and I, but by this morning, I think I
got my demons out. Last night, I took an Alka-Seltzer Plus, and I think it wired me. I don’t
know what happened, but I could not, I could not turn it off.
Sometimes those cold medications have the opposite effect that you want. So we’re
going to see. So I decided rather than give a talk this morning, I’m going to have a
conversation.
(1:10 – 6:31)
And, and also because I’m in the slot that Sandy was in, this is what Sandy and I often
did. Sandy Beach’s 50th AA birthday is today. One of Richard Anderson’s strong wishes is
that, you know, he’d be honored, and he has been honored sporadically through the talk.
He was an extraordinary man. He was, for all sorts of reasons, most of us are familiar
with him, so I won’t get into one. He was always one of the top communicators in
Alcoholics Anonymous.
You know, Clancy talks to more people than Bob Darrell. Clancy and Bob Darrell today
are the most, the largest communicators we have in Alcoholics Anonymous. Sandy was
always one of the best.
He always had a gift for language. He had a gift for humor. He had a gift for conciseness,
which is surprising.
I do not have that gift. I have some gifts of insight. Sandy had a gift of insight and
conciseness, which you need about an extra 10 points of IQ to take, to have that
combination.
Sheldon has that combination. Many of us do, not all of us do. But Sandy, the last 10
years, put it in a different gear.
He took, you know, we all kind of think of drop the rock, you know, we, each of his talks
and some of his talks had a special insight, but the last 10 years, he studied, he read, he
was ready to do his retreat, he was ready to present his opus to us. And I’ve been
exposed to a lot of AA speakers in my 40s, almost 47 years of sobriety. To be a speaker
that people want to hear, you first of all have to have had the problem in a fairly serious
way.
You have to do the work. You have to see what you have done. There’s lots of people
who do the work that have no idea what they’ve done.
They’re just natural. They’re just, you know. And then you have to have the gift of
language to language it.
And he not only had the gift of language, he had a piercing gift of language that’s, and
he was further down the road than most of us have. So for those of us that are
communicators, not just us, for all of us in this room, he shed a light in places that many
of us were headed but had not been. And it was, you know, clear.
So there was a, I don’t know if I could put my hand on more than two. I mean, it’s mostly
Chamberlain and Beach. Beach, to me, was my Chamberlain of today.
I was not as close to Chuck as many people were. Bob White was my Chamberlain. And
there are many people in private rooms, which Bob White was, but Sandy was a very
special gift to us.
And I love you, Sandy. Cool. They’re gonna do Memorial Service for Sandy in Tampa on
January 10th in the afternoon.
I think it’s a Saturday. So I’m gonna do my level best to have a conversation. I don’t
know exactly where the hell it’s gonna go, but I figured out I don’t care at the moment.
So I’m gonna have, I really don’t, so I will see where the hell it goes. And I want to be
clear that Sandy asked Sheldon to join us when Sandy was failing. I don’t think he would
have asked if he was.
I hope we leave this room after this talk in the same, with the same feeling and place we
were after Sonia sang. So I’m gonna talk about, when I listen to Clancy talk, Clancy and I
are so different in so many different ways. We have some similarities.
He is a man who’s focused on action and behavior as anybody that we have in our
fellowship. He has a strength in that area as great as anybody we have in our fellowship.
I have a little different focus.
I’ve always been a little intimidated when I talk that I’m foo-foo, you know, a little on the
light side. When I’m around the old guys, you know, because it just, you know, most of
the old guys aren’t fancy. And the old gals, they have a rock-solid strength.
And they, you know, the Indians talk about Nostra Dene, who was the kind of the idiot
savant who had only one string on his set or whatever it was. And someone said, why
don’t you get a full set of strings? And he said, well, a lot of people are looking for their
note. I found mine.
(6:33 – 7:49)
And if you know how to play your instrument, it is a very good thing. We’ve heard some
great talks this weekend. I repeat that one of the reasons we’re able to hear great talks
is because we’ve got a great group of people to talk to.
There’s pitching and catching. There’s a lot of places you could not have the talks that
you’ve received here this weekend. You have to have someone who, you can see that if
you’ve ever given a talk at Detox, you know what I’m talking about.
They’re not, you would not be, you would not be giving the talks that we have here this
weekend at a Detox facility because it’s just not appropriate. But also because most of,
many of us are here, there are people who are early in sobriety, and I hope they get
something out of what I’m doing. But many people are here to recharge their batteries,
to hear the story again.
Tell me one more time, encourage me. Once you’re beyond, I don’t know what point it is,
10 years, five years, you know, once you become a journeyman, that deepens
significantly, I think around 20, if you’re active and still doing the deal. We’re just fellow
travelers, reporting to each other and encouraging each other as we go.
(7:50 – 10:18)
There really isn’t, most of us have kind of set our path, and unless there’s a serious
problem or a secret that we’re hiding, we’re just going to deepen our path. And every
once in a while there’s a rock we have to turn over, but most of us have turned over
most of those rocks and dealt with most of those issues in our lives. I want to take a
minute and talk about how wonderful we are as a group.
We keep forgetting we’re the head of the food chain. We are the only species that can
have consciousness of self and consciousness of God. You could not have this
conversation with any other species, with any other group of people, than the group of
people that are in this room.
We think we are seated in this room. Let me change the scale a little bit. We’re going a
thousand miles an hour around the center of the earth, and we don’t feel that because
the atmosphere is going a thousand miles an hour around the center of the earth.
We are going 65,000 miles an hour around the sun. The sun is going 500,000 miles an
hour around the black hole in the Milky Way. And the universe is expanding 165,000
miles an hour.
And we think we’re sitting still in our seat. Okay. Through the evolutionary process, do
you realize how many successful matings there would have to be just to have human
beings, much less Polly, Dick, or Bob? This, to have you, it had to be your mother and
father at a specific second.
Because it had it been an instant later, you would have been your sister. You would not
have been you. You would not have been you.
It had to be those specific people. So the way God arranged it to have you here, he had
to have Fred and Mabel at a specific moment, at a specific instant, to have you. You
know what the most common element in the universe is? Hydrogen.
(10:18 – 14:28)
You know what percent of the material it is in the universe? 75% of all the material in the
universe that we’re aware of is hydrogen. You know what the next most common
element is? Helium. You know what the percentage is for helium? Almost 25%.
Doesn’t that seem weird? That 99.5% of all the elements in the universe that we’re
aware of are hydrogen and helium. All the rest of the elements are roundineers. In order
to get the elements that comprise our body and make our planet, after the Big Bang 14
billion years ago, there was a big, there was a supernova explosion in the Milky Way.
Supernovas are the collapse of large stars. When a star is formed at the furnace, and in
that furnace, it starts making elements. And it makes elements that get heavier and
heavier until it gets to iron.
And when it gets to iron, it can’t make any more, and it starts to die. And when that star
dies, it implodes. And in that fusion process of that star exploding come all the heavier
elements, heavier than carbon.
So we literally are the thing of the stars. So all the material of our solar, 99% of the
material in that solar, in that stellar explosion is in the Sun. The rest of it is in the
planets.
But we are literally made of the stuff of the stars. There are 32 trillion cells in your body.
Every three months, every red blood cell in your body is replaced.
25 million a second. And we have no awareness of that. Any idea of the complexity and
wonder that we are? That how high up in the food chain? Yeah, but I just lost my job.
You are the king of the universe. You can commune with God. You can love.
You know, but we’re car payments late. And that is what, I mean, it is the yin and the
yang of the thing. So much of what goes on in our system is the autonomic system in our
bodies.
Almost all the conversations we’ve had, we’ve had some really rich, funny, in-depth
conversations. I’m a little bit more tuned into what Bob and, but Mary, during my night
from hell, I was going over the communications and the talks of the other people. We
have so much talk about ourselves.
And we are so neurotic. I mean, 99% of the problems, I mean, alcoholics have, are
manufactured by the alcoholic, resolved and congratulated by the alcoholic. I mean, it is
just, they’re illusionary.
I mean, they’re just, they’re illusionary. We make them up and then we congratulate
ourselves for resolving them and we talk about it the next time we give a talk or the
meeting. You know, have we just left the damn thing alone? It would have resolved on
itself, but we got our nose in the middle of it.
And the other thing I found myself wanting to say is alcoholism is a disease. We talk
about that, but most of us don’t stray from the book and say that it’s an allergy of the
body and an obsession of the mind. And we talk about the allergy or the physical
element of that thing more about how our bodies react.
But it’s a disease. It’s, a disease is diagnosable. There’s plenty of people outside of the
program of Alcoholics Anonymous that you could take yourself to or take your child to,
which we had done a couple of times.
(14:28 – 27:58)
My wife’s a carrier and none of us were alcoholic when we met her. The good news is
she’s also a healer. It’s diagnosable.
It’s diagnosable by your pattern of drinking. It’s diagnosable by our obsession with it. It’s
diagnosable by the consequences in which we do it and we keep going back.
There is no other element in the world other than some drugs that we would take, where
we would keep going back and having the consequences we had to something that we
were not as addicted to and entwined with as we were with beverage, alcohol and other
chemical, other drugs that we take. When I was young in sobriety, they had us, a lot of
sober people, take the MMPI. And the purpose of us taking the MMPI at that point who
were sober was to compare the MMPI to the MMPIs of people who were coming into
treatment who were wet alcoholic.
Well, you know, the MMPI of a wet alcoholic looks like the silkscreen of the Grand Teton
Mountains. You know, it has got a lot of peaks and valleys. We have been diagnosed
through time with every mental disease known to man.
Okay. Chronic depression. And one of the reasons that we have been so searched in that
process is that medicine in large has looked at alcoholism as symptomatic, not a direct
illness in itself.
And if we could treat the underlying symptom, the alcoholism would be handled. Now,
most of us to some degree have sociopathy, have behavior disorders. We talked about
marriage, you know, illuminated that, you know, why do I do the things I do? I mean, bad
girl, bad guy.
Why do we, you know, and we cross lines that if you regularly cross those lines, people
would say you had a behavior disorder. We regularly show symptoms of manic
depression or mood issues. Okay.
We have conversations with ourselves, we almost exhibit symptoms of schizophrenia,
not the psychosis aspect of it, but many other aspects of it. So it’s not surprising that
people who had a chronic alcoholic taking a look at the actions in their lives would have
diagnosed us symptomatically. And many of us drag some of those symptoms, some of
us have elements of those symptoms alive in our sobriety and have to have help and
deal with those symptoms beyond what the normal trace of, but many of, all alcoholics
to me have, I mean, when you look up alcoholism, it’s not in the physical part of the
DSM.
It’s under mental illness. Most of it, we are the elite of the mentally ill. But the
conversations we have amongst ourselves is, and I’m going to pick on Sheldon a little bit,
and then I did this, and I thought this, and he has such a humorous way of getting into
what we all do with our stories when we’re kind of telling those embarrassing moments
where we’re still dealing with the defects of character and some of the lingering things
that we have not dealt with.
Well, that’s no surprise to anybody who deals with alcoholics. It’s only surprise to us.
We’re not surprised when it happens to anybody else at the meeting.
Okay, we kind of expect it. We recognize the patterns of the people in our group, and
you know, Joe did it again, but when it happens to us for the 172nd time, okay, we were
surprised because, well, this is different, you know. I mean, it’s different.
Our wives are not surprised. Our children are not surprised. Our employers are not, just
us, because we don’t get it, okay.
In some ways, alcoholism and recovery from alcoholism is as simple, and I think that’s
why the people who founded it and some of the people who came closely after,
especially the Second World War crowd, just had a rock-solid, simple, they were not as
psychological. I mean, the religion of today is psychology. The amount of depth, I mean,
people doing 30-page inventories, I mean, give me a break.
If you would have done a 30-page inventory when you were, I mean, you know, I mean,
the inventories were, you know, mom and dad, wife and children, work, money, you
know, and a couple, you know, brothers and sisters, and they were not complex, you
know, going back to grade school and all the sorts of things, but why today? Because
psychology is a place of interest, and it’s about us, and so many people today also have
therapists when they come in, you know, in addition to if they have money in the family
or whatever going on, they’re doing some search, and that’s helpful, but as Anthony
DeMella said, psychology, you know, transfers the bomb from your lap to under your
seat, but it is not deep enough, you know, to really reach the resolutions that we need
reached in our lives, okay. So what we have access to is a program that alters our lives
in a way that is just absolutely unpredictable. What we have in Alcoholics Anonymous is
a program that replicates spiritual awakening.
I don’t know where the hell else you could say those, that sentence, and have anybody
hear it, much less catch it, and go, yeah, yeah, what are we doing? We’re trying to take
someone who’s broken, who has had every kind of help thrown at, every kind of advice
thrown at that person that they could possibly have, and no one could make a
difference, and we’re trying to bring them into a process. We’re trying to, what we’re
trying to do is light their pilot light. The 12-steppers light pilot lights, and once you get
the pilot light lit, Bob talked about the embers last night, it’s going to be okay.
You have to keep it lit. There’s some pretty, pretty strong winds out there today. The
environment in which we are doing that today is so different than the environment, I
laugh at the people, not laugh because there’s serious members of Alcoholics
Anonymous who think we’re going to go back to the 30s.
We aren’t the people of the 30s. We don’t have the consciousness of the people of the
30s. You know, I mean, God, I mean, today the kids are growing up with these video
games, and they’re just, you know, everybody’s walking around with a phone and a
Starbucks cup.
I mean, it is, if you don’t have the right pair of jeans on, the right pair of glasses, the
right car, you’re just trash. I mean, it is just, we have sold out at a level of externalness
that would be hard to explain. And, and our, our heads, our lives are so busy.
I mean, I look back at the time in the 50s, and like, I mean, you can leave your bicycle at
your neighbor’s yard for three days and go back and get it. You know, today, you know,
you have to have a titanium lock on the thing. Today, you can bring your computer in
your bedroom and you can have pornography, gambling, and order medications.
Okay, without ever, whatever happened to Bob? Oh, he died. Yeah, of what? Starvation.
He couldn’t leave his bedroom.
I mean, it wasn’t, people are selling your credit cards. You can get 75 grand worth of
debt in credit cards, you know, with an ease that, you know, I mean, the worst trouble I
could get in with a couple of grand on my checking plus line, you know. But today, there
is just, there’s a wind blowing out there today that is 30 miles an hour.
If you’re wondering why you might drift if you stop, it’s that. You are, we are what we fill
ourselves full of. And we don’t, that’s invisible to us.
So is an hour a day going to impede that? Yeah, for most of us, it is going to impede that.
But when you’re new, you may need one or two meetings a day to impede that
conversation that’s going on in your head. Most of us walk, alcoholics have one of the
highest suicide rates of any group of people on the earth.
Sober and drunk. Okay? What kind of an internal conversation would a person have to
have to do themselves in? I have a tendency to serious depression. I used to think that
was an indication of a bad program.
It’s just something I have. It’s like, I also have diabetes. I mean, it’s just, I have it.
No, you know, no good or bad, just have it. Doesn’t have me as much as it used to have
me, but I have it. What kind of an internal conversation do we have to have to have that
be a real, these teenage deaths? What kind of a conversation are these 15 year old
children having? That life is so unbearable to them.
They’re having our conversation. They’re having our conversation. And we have a place
that heals that, that transforms it.
I don’t know where else you’d take a body. I mean, would you take it up in the top of the
house and lower it, you know, to the master who’s down below talking to the people to
get, you know, would you take it to Bethesda to throw them in the pool? You take them
here. You take them here.
It doesn’t matter what kind of a problem they have. You take them to the power. You
take them to the source.
The language, as I get older, my language has changed around some of the things that
we’ve been talking about. We have a fascination in the type of conversations that I’m
going to go back to that specific conversation that Sheldon had about the job and the
work. And by the way, it was interesting to me, I love your conclusion, but Sandy talked
about anytime we have an upset, okay, we either owe someone an amend or we need to
forgive them.
And I thought, oh, that’s a cheap reduction of a very complicated process. But that’s one
of his gifts of simplicity. Anytime we have a reason, we’re caught, we’re hooked, in that
moment, we either need to forgive someone or make an amend.
And I have yet to, and I have looked, and I’m looking for an exception to that. But if I
want to heal that process, like Sheldon healed that process, that’s what I would do. This
surprise that we have, that we are as neurotic as we are, is a surprise of the mind.
It’s a surprise of the ego. So I’m supposed to talk about the 10th and the 11th step. Let
me do that just for a minute, because I’m in serious danger of getting sidetracked, as I
already have been.
But this is, this is not a talk, this is a conversation. And often, and often in a
conversation, we would stray from the central subject. So we’ve taken people whose
lives have disintegrated, who have harmed everybody they’ve come in arm’s reach of,
who have broken laws, who have crossed ethical lines, and crossed moral divides, with a
regularity that only a, you know, a sex addict bank robber would, you know, have the
audacity to do.
We started lying when we were young. One of the great questions about your use is
when did you start lying about your drinking? Almost immediately. Almost immediately.
Who taught you how to do that? Was Mari said, no one taught me how to do that. And
we show up here with a, you know, razor wire, 30 feet out in all directions. Skull and
crossbones, landmines, sitting in our tanks, looking through the slot at them.
And we enter into Alcoholics Anonymous. And then we, people try to find an entry point.
You know, like an egg, there is no entry point.
(27:58 – 29:00)
Like Leonard Cohen talks about, the entry point is where you get cracked open. That’s
where the light comes in. That’s where the grace enters.
Your gift is your surrender. So we come in here with zero insight. Many of us are smart.
A lot of us have, you know, information. A lot of us have some insight. Almost no
wisdom.
Okay? Almost no understanding. With a pattern of habitual behavior that has been so
ingrained and locked in, we literally almost have no choice and those behaviors and
patterns show up like in a blackout. They are automatic.
You know, the bell is going to go off, we shoot our jump shot. Automatic. Not a question,
not a thought.
Automatic. Most of us focus, when we tell our stories, and we get into the delightful way
we do that, we talk about what we’re conscious of. When 98% of what’s going on in your
system is unconscious.
(29:02 – 29:43)
But all we’re aware of is what we’re conscious of. We’re not aware of the subconscious,
which many of the serious things that we’re dealing with, that Mari was talking about,
come from the subconscious. Not from our consciousness.
If they came from our consciousness, we could head them off. We could, many of us, find
ourselves into those patterns without having any idea. Well, you’re riding an elephant.
The elephant’s invisible. When the elephant wants to go left, unless you really have
something else going on in your life, you are going left. And in some ways, in Alcoholics
Anonymous, with the grace of God and the 12 steps that we have, we have a practice
which trains elephants.
(29:45 – 29:53)
We do. Later, I’m going to talk about meditation. Thomas Keating, I think I upset Bob.
(29:57 – 30:37)
Thomas Keating is kind of the successor of Merton. And Merton, I read Merton every day.
I mean, he’s one of us.
I mean, he really was all over the map. He was just, I mean, he was one of us. And you’d
be more, you’d be less surprised.
So many of us don’t deal with the chicken shit little things in our lives because we just
don’t want to kind of admit to them or face them. Everybody has them. Merton had
them.
You know, Peter, you know, lived with Christ. Jesus who? I don’t know him. You know, I
mean, you know, for three years, he hangs out with the guy and throws him to the
wolves the moment the heat comes on.
(30:37 – 31:06)
I mean, it is not, they’re just, they don’t make anybody who doesn’t have, who doesn’t
leak and doesn’t have the holes and doesn’t have the cracks. The cracks are there for a
reason. As Sheldon talked a little bit about in his talk, it’s the opening.
It’s where we’re healed. It is a signal. It is like putting your hand on a hot stove.
The message from the universe is it is not working. So our program takes the only thing
that the universe can do. It cracks us open.
(31:07 – 31:51)
We don’t surrender. Most of us are surrendered by the circumstances in which they
overwhelm us. Our walls have to be cracked, and we are not strong enough to punch a
crack in them.
The punch has to come from God. It has to come from the universe. It has to come
externally.
And we are handed it, and when we are handed it, our ego collapses, and when our ego
collapses, we’re open. There’s a clearing. In AA, we talk about the honeymoon.
That’s the clearing. That’s the person who wasn’t interested in any of your little
meetings. You know, what’s the difference between an alcoholic and a drunk, you know,
and meetings and all those things.
(31:51 – 32:01)
I don’t want your meetings. I don’t want your God. I don’t want that kind of, I’m not
interested in that.
I wasn’t interested in that conversation. It didn’t matter. I was broken open.
(32:02 – 32:48)
And without having any sense that anything was different, but anybody who was an oldtimer could have told you, something’s different about that kid. I think he’s going to be
okay. You know, news to me, I continued to have a lot of problems.
I mean, I still did things that weren’t great, but I was in my seat, had my place, and in
the game. Imperfectly, but in the game. And because I stayed in the game, I was able to
have this thing happen to us.
So on the big book, in the four-step, when it talks about first we get well spiritually, and
then physically, and then emotionally, I mean, then emotionally, then spiritually, I always
thought that was backwards. That first we get well physically, because that’s the
simplest. I’m young, you get well physically.
(32:49 – 33:55)
But had I not had something happen to me that would have allowed me to go to
meetings, get a sponsor, listen to what you were saying, I would not have been able to
take my seat. I wouldn’t have been able to hear. So the something that happened to me
was spiritual.
It was profound. It was different. In a treatment facility, everybody knows when it
happens to Mary.
Mary was a pain in the butt for the first two weeks. You know, she was always trying to
leave. We were trying to talk her out of it, and all of a sudden, bam, Mary’s in the game.
What happened? Step one. What happened? Surrender. What happened? Ego collapse.
What happened? In the game. Mary is now talking people out of leaving. Entirely
different conversation.
I don’t think Mary knows what the hell happened to her. But everybody in the group
knows what happened to her. They know she’s different.
She looks different. Okay? Butch just got healed of a physical situation in his life. He
looks different.
There’s a different vitality. There’s a different energy. There’s something different.
(33:56 – 34:52)
Okay? We’re waiting for that to happen with Sheldon. Sometimes quickly, sometimes
slowly. I’m sorry.
It was just… So if we have that level of distress, if we have taken our lives and burnt
them to the ground, why are we surprised? No one who works with alcoholics would be
surprised if any of the conversations that we have up here, we’re going, oh, then it
happened. Well, yeah, but that’s number 172. It happens all the time in your life.
We’re not surprised about that. You’re pathologically immature, chronically narcissistic,
60 miles an hour, head first, no helmets. We are not surprised that you are having these
type of issues with regularity in your life.
(34:52 – 35:08)
Okay? The mistake that I think I have made… I have spent most of my life… I’m a
practicing Catholic. I haven’t gotten away from it. I spent a lot of my life trying to get
better.
(35:09 – 36:08)
I just… I’m a member of Notre Dame. I was such an asshole. I went out drinking almost
every night alone.
No one else. I would go drink 13 Manhattans. I just… I’d get up in the morning.
I would not go to class. I didn’t… Excuse me. I would get up in the afternoon and not go
to class.
And then I’d think, you should really get a book, study. And then I’d hear a ruffle of a set
of cards down the hall, and I’d get into a bridge game. And then at four o’clock in the
afternoon, I’d put my sweater on and I’d go downtown South Bend to my bar.
And I’d walk in that bar and I’d stay there till a hell of a lot later. After curfew, I have to
sneak in the dorm. You know, I remember one time I snuck in the wrong side and the
cloister of the priest threw a priest out of bed because I thought he was in my room.
(36:13 – 36:17)
I was the class drunk. They used my room as a study hall. I was never in it.
(36:19 – 37:12)
When I left in my senior year, then when the rector tried to talk me out of it, he said, just
stay. You’re in the yearbook. Stay.
And when I left his office, I did not know where my classes were. I mean, how far away
would you have to get from where, I hadn’t been in my classes in so long, I did not know
where my classes were or what they were. Okay.
I have spent most of my life trying to get better. I think that many of us take the
program of Alcoholics Anonymous once we start to become practitioners of the program
and use it to get better. And that’s the kind of the central theme I want to talk about for
the time that I have.
(37:15 – 38:30)
So we come in here broken and without a clue. We are surrendered. We are directed and
we start to have a sense of hope, which comes in the second step, that there’s going to
be a power greater than ourselves.
In the third step, we make a decision to turn our will and our life over to that power and
we are invited to turn our, to define that power in our own terms. No theology, no
teaching, no one way to do it, no barrier to that entry. Not a religious process, a spiritual
process.
Incomplete? Absolutely. You know, missing pieces? Absolutely. It’s only our
understanding.
We start out saying we are powerless and unmanageable. Will we expect someone who
is powerless and unmanageable to have a complete understanding of the power that’s
going to restore them to sanity? No. But we are so respectful of that person, of that
specialty that that person is, of the individuation of God that that person is, that that
person has to define their own understanding of God.
That will evolve. It will change. It will deepen.
(38:31 – 39:47)
But it’s going to start with your seed and it’s going to start and it’s going to continue with
your nurturing that seed, that seedling, that plant, that tree, that harvest. Okay? To
allow us to have a platform from which to live our lives as we have lived them so poorly,
we have to clear away the wreckage of the past and clean house. Step four is the
starting of that process.
Step four is the starting, if you read step four, it’s a starting of starting to take
responsibility and it’s a starting of forgiveness, which has to be included. Most of us are
so ashamed and so self-hating in that process that this, but this, we have to put
ourselves in front of the truth in order for us to be healed. So step four and five are the
first or the second major rite of passage in Alcoholics Anonymous.
(39:48 – 43:30)
Kind of like you’re, you know, you go from Weeblos to Scout or something when you go
through that process. Six and seven, most of us do not get in any depth because we are
so connected to this, the profound experience we’re having is so big that to pick out with
great effect somewhat smaller items, most of us are not sophisticated or educated
enough in our own recovery yet to really get to the causes and conditions of our illness,
and we get to those somewhat later, but we can get to many of them. So most of us, at
least I, went through six and seven with almost, of course, am I ready to have God
removed? Yep.
Humbly ask Him to remove our shortcomings? Absolutely, because I was. Why the hell
else would you do a confession? Why the hell else would you do an inventory? You know,
I mean, if I didn’t have some intent to change, I mean, I don’t, why do you think I’m
here? Why do you think I’m in my seat? Why do you think I’m doing what I’m doing? I
want it different. I want to change.
You’re telling me that if I go through this process, I’m going to be okay. You seem to be
okay. You seem to be okay.
And then we go through the most healing process, one of the most healing process, the
thing that completes the circle. We do steps eight and nine. To take a person who has
raised the level of jerk to an art form, and to bring the, and who blames most of the
significant people in their lives for the bad circumstances that they find themselves in,
and to take them from that point to a point of putting all those people on my A-step list
and making amends of the people that I put on my resentment list.
Now, if we told people when they made the resentment list that we were going to go
make amends of those people when we did it, even though most of us have been in
meetings and we kind of understand that, it’s in the back of our minds. That is, could we
understand what kind of a change you’d have to go through to be able to be willing to
make amends to the people that you hated, to the people that you blame, to the people
that you hurt you? Can you imagine what kind of a spiritual change would have had to
have taken place for you to be able to identify that, agree to it, and do it? It used to be,
in my opinion, that many people didn’t have the full measure of recovery because they
often didn’t do step five, and what I find today is you don’t do step eight and nine.
Almost no one who is relapsing on any kind of a regular basis or even an irregular basis
has usually done a complete job on eight and nine.
Eight and nine are life-changing. That was put the, you often wonder why people are so
damn talented and can’t put it, you know, because when I borrowed $1,500 from Bob at
a meeting saying my tax return’s coming through in March, would you, you know, I’m
really tight, would you lend me $1,500? He lends me $1,500. I don’t have a tax return
coming in.
I start, and then I, you know, I start missing the meeting where Bob is because I told him
I’d get it back to him in March, and it’s June, you know, and then I, and Bob’s kind of a
jerk, and he’s, he’s well off, and I don’t think he needs the $1,500, and I, I gotta kill Bob. I
mean, I have a choice. I can kill me or I can kill Bob.
(43:34 – 50:26)
Okay. But every time Bob comes around on the carousel of my mind, my lights dim. And
I don’t have one of those.
I have dozens of those that bleed my soul. I need that energy to live. I need that energy
to source myself as I get about the business of my life, and it is not available because it
is being sucked into little black holes of incompletion in my life.
That gets restored in eight and nine. And then they say for people like you, as troubled
as you are, we have another practice that we are going to ask you to do. It’s going to be
a daily, it’s going to be an ongoing inventory, a lifetime process, for by this time we’ve
entered the life of the spirit.
And we’re going to ask you to keep watching for, you know, dishonesty and resentment
and self-centeredness and fear, because those are the words that they keep, they seem
like they almost overuse them. I think people overuse them in the four-step process, and
I often encourage people to put other words in that might be more suiting to the things
they do. But those are the broad categories of the things that bedevil us in our lives.
And so they’re just saying you have emptied the knapsack that you’ve been lugging
around. You’ve had nine bowling balls in that thing, and you’ve been wondering why you
can’t run with the other kids. Why you can’t run as far as the other kids.
You’re as smart as the other kids, you have the advantage of the other kids, but you
don’t seem to be able to keep up with the other kids. Well, not surprising. But now that
you’ve emptied that out, let’s try to keep it as light as possible.
Let’s not throw more rocks in the knapsack, or as little as possible. So we’re going to
take a look at our actions, and for most of us, it’s those flinch moments. It’s those
moments where you walk out of an incident where you didn’t handle it correctly.
By your assessment, by your values, by your ethics, by your morals, by your
compassion, by your sense of how you want to be in your own life, you didn’t handle it
well. And in that moment, it’s what we talked about with Sheldon, you either forgive the
person, or you make an amend. You talk to another person if you’re really hooked, and
then you get about the business of trying to help someone else.
That’s about as simple and about as clear and about as, you know, I mean, of course.
You know, that’s great. You’ve now given me a practice, a mechanism.
We’re saying the biggest thing you have, we’re trying to get you to not be upset. We’re
trying to calm you down. We’re trying to have you stay in peace.
How are we going to do that? We’re going to give you a mechanism, you’ve handled your
past, and now we’re going to give you a practice to handle the present. And then the
following that, we’re going to get into prayer and meditation, and I’m going to talk a little
bit more further about that, because a lot of us have issues with that. But the central
thing, I’m not exactly sure, Lee, when I started, the central thing that I find for myself,
and this is, I do a lot of reading, I tend to get complicated, and I may get lost in what I’m
about to share with you.
But I, if I can’t share what’s going on with my life, I don’t want to do this. So this isn’t,
you know, I’m not up here trying to give a canned talk. I’m trying to give you, you know, I
live a pretty good life.
I’m 30 pounds overweight, and I have issues with smoking. And I have too much focus on
finance from time to time. Those would be the three leading issues in my life that I have
to deal with on an ongoing basis.
Aside from that, most of my problems are chicken shit. I love my wife, I have a good
relationship with my kids. My life’s pretty clear.
There isn’t anything in my life that I haven’t talked with someone about. And, you know,
so my life’s, so I’m a, you know, give myself a, you know, a B-plus, B-minus. Don’t know
how, if I’m grading myself, which I shouldn’t do, because you never have a sense of how
you’re doing in a, in a spiritual process.
But I think a mistake that many of us make, and I, and I think we are led into it, often
when we’re listening to someone give a pitch, our minds are listening. The judgment part
of us, right now, our minds are not listening. Our hearts are listening.
There’s a quietness in this room that is, we’re connected. We’re having, we’re in this
conversation. I’m not giving a pitch.
We’re in this conversation together. Okay. But a lot of times when we’re listening to a
talk, we just get there, we park our car, we walk in the meeting, and we’re in a hurry,
and we walk in, and we still have our daily mind in the process.
And we listen with our heads, which we’re listening to a spiritual communication with our
heads. We’re evaluating how the person is saying, and what the person is saying, and
we’re judging that process. And it’s bringing a knife to a gunfight.
It is just, it’s, it’s like missing each other in that communication. For the new person
coming in, the steps are just as simple as they read. You don’t need an MBA.
You don’t need a 130 IQ. You don’t need the experience that I have with 47 or 46 years
of sobriety to do the steps. You just need the plain old ordinary English understanding
that you have at the moment, that you put yourself in front of those steps, and have the
willingness, having the blessing of a surrender, and the willingness to make a decision to
do the steps four through nine.
And do them to the best of your ability, which for many people early in sobriety is like a
third-grade art project that they bring home to mom to put on the refrigerator. It is not
that if, it is not the inventory that someone who’s 25 years sober wants to take, or has to
take. You don’t have to do it like someone who’s 15 years sober.
You have to do it like someone who’s brand new in sobriety, who doesn’t have, you
know, who has whatever understanding they have at that moment. Period. End of story.
(50:27 – 51:43)
Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. You wait to do it perfectly, you wait to do it
perfectly, you don’t, don’t wait. Get into it.
Do it imperfectly, and if there’s something that you need to add or increase or deepen in
that process, if you stay, if you stay sober, if you stay in the game, you will add and
deepen that process as you go on. Okay. But the process is not what the mind thinks it
is.
The process is not what psychology thinks it is. It is a spiritual process. Why do we value
Sandy so much? Because he could transcend with his metaphoric gift.
You cannot talk directly about God. You cannot talk and access and contain spirituality
directly, because it’s of God. You can point to it.
But as the Chinese say, when the master points at the moon, all the idiot sees is the
finger. If you point, if you focus too much attention on the finger, you will not see the
moon. If you focus too much attention on the book, you will not get the gift.
(51:44 – 52:39)
But in order to get to the point where you transcend, where you take the message from
the book into your soul, you have to study the book. You have to be a practitioner of the
book enough to know when to leave the book. And you don’t know that in your mind, and
I’m not recommending that we leave the book like physically leave the book.
I’m talking about when the donkey takes you to the door, when the treasure map takes
you to the chest. You have to dismount to enter the door. If we get too locked into the
words, we are locked into belief and have no faith.
The spiritual process. We are not going to be able to abandon the ego. The ego is a
spacesuit to take the trip.
(52:41 – 1:01:08)
You cannot escape the ego. But the ego can become a junior partner in the trip. It can
become the errant child.
It could become the noise in the back of your head that you don’t pay as much attention
to. I’m about as uninterested in my AA talk these days as I could possibly be. It just,
which is why I have to be careful about how often I do this and how, if I can keep it alive.
What happens is we end up discovering we’re not who we think we are. When de Mello
tells that story, Anthony de Mello was a Indian, East Indian Jesuit, died 35 years ago,
something like that, 30 years ago. He was insightful enough that the Pope banned him.
He thought he was too Eastern. But he has many, he has books full of these spiritual
stories, kind of like Ernie Kurtz did with the spirituality of imperfection. He talks about
that the farmer was out in the woods one day and found an eagle’s egg and brought it in
and put it in the hen house.
And the egg got laid, you know, sat on and hatched. And for this entire life, that golden
eagle walked around the yard pecking in the dirt, eating the seeds with the chickens.
And one day they were out in the yard and they looked up and they saw this beautiful
golden eagle flying by.
And the eagle said to the chicken, what is that? He said, that’s a golden eagle. It’s a king
of the sky. He says, we’re chickens.
But somewhere, somewhere in the process of our healing and alcoholics anonymous,
someone holds a mirror up to us. Says, you don’t look like a chicken. The pilot lighters,
and many of the older members, see in us what we cannot see in ourselves.
I see it mostly in women. Women look more broken when they come in here. And the
physical transformation of women once their pilot light is lit is, you know, dramatic.
And when someone holds that mirror up and says, this is what you are. So the spiritual
process is a process of removal, not addition. As Meister Eckhart would say.
Most of us in the human process and the psychological process and intellectual process,
we are looking for addition. Give me more. Give me information.
Give me a tip. I’m going to this thing, I’m going to learn a better way to do the fourth and
fifth step. We’re not missing any information.
Does anybody in this room have a serious problem that’s less than four years old? I
mean, we have health issues and other things, but most of us, most of the ongoing
issues in our lives are older than dirt. They’re part of the fabric of how we are, and we
haven’t always been able to deal with them as effectively as we are. And that’s the
human condition.
It’s the human condition. It is exaggerated, my wife says, that’s all of us. Well, we do it
more dramatically than you do it.
And my wife says, of course you do. We take it and we paste it on our eyeball, and it
becomes our reality. And we are, we don’t suffer well, and we are overreactors.
And we really want our way. And we want it now. Now is not quite fast enough, but now
would be okay.
How much would you like? I’d like more. It’s all you can eat for $2. I want $4 worth.
You don’t need, I want $4 worth. So, okay. You are not going to end up dealing with the
broken person we came in with.
The broken person that we came in with is the manifestation of our ego. We are going to
find home. We are ET, home.
We’re going to find the true self. In that place, in that connection, we are united with our
higher power. Not different, not separate, one.
And when you’re in that place, it’s okay. Most of us in the room right now, are in that
place. Okay? This is the conversation.
This is the story of Christmas. This is the campfire story. Come home.
The call, the breakdown, the collapse, the surrender, is the universe saying, over here,
honey. Come home. Come home.
And in the process of our practice of the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, Thomas
Keating, the guy out of Snowmass, I took a 10-day retreat from him, and every other
night he’d come down and we’d talk. And he’d say, in centering prayer, which is the code
word in the church for meditation, because church doesn’t like meditation because it’s
Eastern. Many of the things that we would think needed to be healed with
psychoanalysis, get healed in the process of meditation.
They are like plaque on our souls, that Sheldon talked a little bit about. And they arise,
and they break off, and they go away. And we are enlightened without ever an in-depth
conversation about that issue in our lives.
The healing here, it is beyond healing. It is redemption. It is transformation.
It is not improvement. It is not change. It is not taking that person that keeps breaking.
It is our true self. The problem is, is that we get distracted. We cannot escape the human
condition.
We cannot evade the ego. The ego is always alive. So why the hell are we surprised? And
why the hell do we spend so much time talking about our failures? And it’s part of our
story, because it’s, you know, if we ever get to a point where we aren’t sinners, we’re
gonna end up like a lot of the churches.
The churches have lost a lot of their power, because there aren’t as many sinners in
them as need be. Okay? We are a group of people who are not short on sinners. Which is
our strength.
Which is our strength. The strength of the higher power is in our weakness. As God said,
I didn’t design you to know ahead of time what to do.
I designed you to be in constant contact with me. You will always know what to do, if you
are in contact with me. We all have a knower.
You sit in a meeting and someone says something that’s just the most profound thing
you’ve heard in a week. And it just knocks you off your seat. And your head doesn’t go,
oh I like that.
I think I’ll take a note of that. Your soul just goes, oh yeah. You don’t think it’s so.
(1:01:08 – 1:03:06)
You just know it is so. Chuck Chamberlain and Sandy Beach had a way of touching us
with a clarity and a strength that contacted our knowers. And that knower wasn’t
something you developed.
Okay? So inside, we have a piece of original equipment manufacture called a soul. And in
that place is our union with our higher power. That is intact, unchanged, clean, pure.
It is not a place that the ego can enter. It is not a place that most of us in our illness,
because of our separation, have been able to be aware of on an ongoing basis.
Tangentially, we often are, we have some awareness of that.
Some of the great weeping that we do, is this profound sense of separation and
aloneness and apartness. The most profound sense of separation is our separation from
God, which is who we are. My biggest issue is if I turn my will and my life over to the care
of God, that I, you know, have to go to India with Sheldon.
Okay? That’s a head thought. That’s not a heart thought. But if I, if I really turn my will
over, I mean, all of it, you know, my pornography, my, you know, my money, my anger,
my business, all of it.
I mean, that’s a lot. Why would I have to? I don’t have problems in two of those areas.
Why would I have to? But what you discover as an old guy, is you’re coming home.
(1:03:07 – 1:04:43)
You’re not going over to Bob’s house. You’re going to your home. You’re going to your
place.
You are a soaker hose. God placed the holes in your hose. They’ve been clogged up.
You have now gone through a step process which has unclogged many of the holes in
your place. Together, we’re the fountain at the Bellagio. Individually, we’re soaker hoses.
Okay? But when those holes get unplugged, the force of God, the force of your higher
power, the force of the universe comes through and you get to express who you be. The
program of Alcoholics Anonymous is a transformation of being, not just a process of
doing. The initial transformation has nothing to do with doing at all.
It is a gift and you are struck, surrendered. Then there are lots of things to do. But the
doing simply brings us into a process.
The doing is like almost at a lower level and as it deepens, your higher power reveals
himself to you. It isn’t, most of us come in here with beliefs that are in the way of our
discovery of our higher power. Most of us have to, we are, the beliefs are struck out of us
in our surrender.
(1:04:45 – 1:08:58)
But when our ego returns after the honeymoon, we reclaim them. We go out to the
garage, we pick them up and we start to walk with them again. But for most of us, our
higher power is a collection of experiences, not ideas, not beliefs, not thoughts.
By the time we are here, a year or two, and you’ve been to 500 meetings, and you’ve
seen the power, you’ve seen the grace, you’ve had the experience, you started to make
the change, you are in the process, you just know. Someone walks up to you and says,
tell me about it. And it’s like I can’t.
I don’t yet have the words. I’m sober for 18 months. I don’t, I cannot explain it to you.
I just know that two years ago, someone grabbed me and said, what’s it all about? I said,
I do not have a clue. You grab me today and say, what’s it all about? I know. I can’t
explain it.
But I know. Everybody who came to this room to spend the four or five hundred dollars
that we spend at weekends like this knows. And what we’re here for is encouragement.
What we’re here for, it is difficult as you get sober a long time, your heroes are gone,
and you start to lose your running buddies. Two years ago or three years ago, I lost my
sponsor of 47 years, 43 years, excuse me. And I lost my spiritual advisor of 30 plus
years.
Big, big loss. My sponsor was like my dad. He was in his 90s when he died and he hadn’t
been a sponsor in the typical way that we talk about it now.
I’ll call these anonymous for a long time. So I used Frank Milos and Jerry Jones, who’s
now dead. Milos called me yesterday, thinking about coming down to Sandy’s Memorial.
Why? He didn’t know Sandy very well. It’s one of the big guys. It’s one of the big deal
guys.
One of the guys that pulled a pretty big wagon in Alcoholics Anonymous, and Frank’s
been pulling a pretty big wagon in Alcoholics Anonymous, and he wants to go honor the
guy who pulled that wagon. Okay, which is why I’m going to go to his. So you don’t have
to become perfect.
You do not have to take the troublesome pain in the ass that your ego and identity has
manufactured. It is an artifice. It is not real.
It is a manufactured product. There is inside of each of us a true self, and all spiritual
literature talks about, you know, true self and false self. In that place, it’s all okay.
Which is what I used to love about my sponsor and used to love about my spiritual
advisor. I had a place I could go where someone would pat me on the head and tell me
it’s okay. Okay, so when I talk to Milos today, when I’m telling him I’m having a bad day
and told my wife to stick it in her ear, he doesn’t tell me what I should have done,
because I’m talking to just a fellow traveler.
He knows that this is my day for, you know, stick it in the dirt a little bit. You do not have
to get better. You already are everything you’re ever going to be.
You’ve been in this program five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years. Are you
not you? Have you changed? Oh, I know things have changed in your life, but have you
changed? Or have you simply found what has always been there? So the process of this
program is not change in the sense that the mind holds the change. It is the process of
removing the impediments that are in our way to the spiritual walk.
Thank you.