Transcription of amazing talk given by Sandy Beach in April 2003.
Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6PNKwUhukA / https://www.xa-speakers.org/pafiledb.php?action=file&id=720
Well good morning everybody, I’m Sandy Beach and I’m an alcoholic.
Let’s see. I got sober on December 7, 1964. And, I’ve had the same sponsor since that date to now. I don’t know if that’s a record but it’s a long time for two guys to stay alive.
I’ve been very lucky to have this guy in my life. And if you’re new, you want to make sure to get a sponsor. It’s like getting a guide. Because AA is the world’s largest lost and found department.
And if there’s anything that describes us when we’re new, it’s that we’re lost. We haven’t got a clue. And so, it’s not like – Bill (Wilson) wrote about this somewhere – the guides are totally enlightened and have a clear vision of the entire future. It’s just that the half blind are leading the totally blind.
And somehow, we’re following the next person up there and it all seems to turn out the way it’s supposed to.
So, I feel really great about that.
I decided this morning not to tell my story. I hear it so much. I’m just going to talk to those of you who may be new. I’m just going to share how the spirituality was put inside of me. And how it came about.
I am an alcoholic. I did drink excessively. And ended up in the marine corps and in the nut ward. And had the DTs and convulsions and malnutrition and miraculously got sent to AA and then got my sponsor and it’s just been an entirely different life. And I think the beginning of spirituality for me probably occurred when I had two months or three months and my sponsor said, “We’ve got the not drinking and going to meetings going on, but let’s just sit down and talk about some other things”. I said “right, OK”.
So he said:
“Do you pray a lot?”
“No, I don’t pray. I’m not into that at all”.
“Do you think about God a lot?”
“No, no, I don’t think about God. I stopped doing that a long time ago”.
“Well do you do a lot of spiritual reading?”
“No, no, not into spiritual reading”
“What about meditation. Have you tried that?”
“No, no, I don’t even like the name of that”.
“Well let’s see: How’s it going?”
So that’s what spirituality is all about: “How’s it going?”
And that’s what AA and sobriety gets us to look at. “How is it going?”
Could you get totally honest with yourself and say, “How is it going?”
And if you get honest, it’s not going very good. It’s really bad.
And that’s the beauty of alcoholics anonymous. The emphasis is not on trying to convince us of the existence of God. That’s for religions to do. What AA does is convince us of the need for God. And once we acknowledge that, the door starts to open.
And so, I started to think about how bad things actually were: that I was uncomfortable in my own skin, that I had used alcohol to fix the problem that I had. And so, alcohol was not the problem, it was the solution. And now the solution had been taken away from me so I was going to be permanently uncomfortable.
Going to meetings and not drinking made me feel a little bit better but it wasn’t making the dramatic change that I had seen in people around me so I was attracted to whatever had happened to some of these people. And of all of the places that we find answers, they come in some of the most unlikely spots.
Looking back, I would say that the prayer of St Francis in in the 12 and 12 under the 11th step was just an eye-opener when my sponsor explained it to me.
So, if you’re new, I’m just going to focus on the first line in that prayer and see if your evaluation of it was the same as mine was when I first heard it.
The prayer starts with just,
“Lord, make me a channel of thy peace”.
So, what do you picture when you hear that? And I’ll tell you what I pictured: here I am, just a wreck. Full of anxiety, all these things and here’s this vision that I have. “Make me a channel of thy peace” – so this channel opens up from somewhere up there and all this peace flows in to me and I feel wonderful.
And my sponsor says, “Well that’s close, but you have it exactly backwards”.
“You have it exactly backwards. That’s not what happens at all. You see, you are living in the self-centred, intellectual perspective and that’s exactly how it looks but nothing in the spiritual world conforms to the intellectual world and that’s not how it is at all.
And I’m saying, “Oh my god, this is getting complicated. I just don’t understand this. All we’re talking about is a little channel and now he’s got me off into advanced something-or-other”. And he says, “Well, look at the rest of the prayer. It says ‘I want to be a channel of thy peace, so that I can go out and bring understanding and bring love and bring comfort and bring peace. So that I can go out and take care of all other people that I may run in to’.” And he said that the channel comes from inside of you, out. “You had the energy completely reversed, you thought that you needed something. You don’t need anything at all. You already have it all inside and it’s been locked in there through your character defects. It’s been blocked and that’s why we have these steps to open that channel so that all of this can come out and you can allow this infinite supply of peace and love that’s already inside of you to get out and you’re going to find that the greatest joy in the world of just spreading this.”
And I remember saying, “well it doesn’t feel like that, it feels like there’s nothing inside of me. It feels like I’m empty and if I ever open up and let whatever little is in there out…” I had the picture that I was like a balloon that was just going to deflate when the air was let out. And just be flat.
And so, it took a leap of faith to understand that this is what he was talking about. And for me, the most amazing place to find all of this information in our Big Book – and this is my favourite chapter – is in the ‘Chapter to the agnostic’. I think it’s the most spiritual chapter in our big book. And I remember when my sponsor gave me my big book, I had no intention of reading it. I already knew what my problems were. I already knew what the answers were. I had known all my life, so I didn’t need to be bothered with, you know, details.
But he was dead serious about this book so I knew I want to convince him that I had read it and I remember taking it home and puffing the pages and I got magic markers and scritted around and put the coffee cup on it to make coffee stains, and let a cigarette burn out on a page. It looked like this book had just been devoured. And while I was skimming though I saw this chapter – the Chapter to the agnostic. I didn’t read it – but some of us know what’s in stuff without reading it – maybe some of you here. But I thought well yes, that’s the chapter to the agnostic and that’s where people like me stay sober. And you people read the rest, and the steps and all that. So, when I get with it I’ll be getting that chapter and I’ll be learning how agnostics stay sober.
Of course, it was quite a bit later when I actually got serious about all this and got into that chapter, and – if you’re new- I can tell you what the chapter says in three words. It says: “Change your mind”. If you’re an agnostic, become a former agnostic.
And it really helps – this is why AA is so practical in terms of spiritual things. It starts out – and this is where I get my definition of the disease of alcoholism – with something like: if, when you drink, you have little control over the amount you drink and if, when you try to stop, you can’t do it for any extended period of time, then you may be an alcoholic. Well, everybody can fit themselves into that.
And then it goes on to say, if that be the case, you may be suffering from a disease that only a spiritual experience will conquer.
Now, there aren’t too many medical journals that would show it that way – back in the appendix of all of the diseases on the planet are those that only a spiritual experience will conquer.
“Don’t go to the doctor on this one. This disease is not going to be one that we’re going to be working on because only a spiritual experience will conquer this.”
But that’s what we have. So, what a disease that is: no medicine, nothing, just a spiritual experience. And so, if you’re like me you say: “well, I don’t believe in spiritual experiences,” and my sponsor says “NEXT – this only works for somebody whose willing to believe in spiritual experiences”.
The only way I could get there is to… change my mind. And that’s really what’s going on. In other words: I came in with all these old ideas about me and the world and all this stuff and none of it involved having a spiritual experience and all of sudden I have a disease which only a spiritual experience will conquer. And I’m up against it. I’m really up against it mentally.
The chapter goes on to say, “To be doomed an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not easy alternatives to face”. Now if you don’t think that’s a funny line… Think about that line. “To be doomed an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not easy alternatives to face.” Why is that a funny line?
Because when we’re new it’s like we’re on a quiz show and they say “we’ve got two doors and you’ve got to choose one. Ready? Die and alcoholic death or live on a spiritual basis.
Oh man! Whoa! That’s it? There’s no door three: just coasting along like I’ve been doing. You almost feel like sneaking out and getting on the phone, calling up a doctor. “Listen doc, a friend of mine is curious about this: how bad is an alcoholic death?”
Because I already know what ‘Living on a spiritual basis’ means. I’ve never done it but man, when I imagine it. Because what do I know. I’ve got to imagine it. What would living on a spiritual basis be like? Who are my role models?
And I think the biggest role models I have is Mother Theresa. You can’t get beyond that. And I’m thinking: that’s wonderful… for her. I’m going to give all my stuff away? And I’m just going to be over in some little poverty place just taking care of people for the rest of my life?… What about bowling?
Does it have to be that intense? I can’t get too spiritual. I might give all my stuff away.
So, I’ve got to control… This is the mind trying to come in here. Talk about half measures. I’d like to get half spiritual. And it turns out that there’s no ‘half help’ available. There’s no middle ground. You can’t get a little bit sober. You can’t be a little bit spiritual. That’s what makes it such a monumental programme.
And then we start talking about what the bottom really is like. If you went back to drinking. I go to meetings and I hear people who were willing to go beyond the nut ward and get sick beyond where I ever dreamed of getting.
And I started realising: this was the only alternative. That if I continued drinking, that was going to happen to me. That was the most spiritual thing I could be doing. And if you’re new, that’s what you want to focus on. Because that will get you in to the open mind that is so necessary.
Nobody’s going to jump up with the proof of the existence of anything. But if you understand the hopelessness of your situation and the reality that you’re powerless over alcohol, we might embrace this alternative. It’s almost like we become spiritual by default.
I wasn’t planning on this. I would never have chosen any of this. I’m not that kind of guy – who’s interested in any of this stuff. I just had a deal. It’s like the mafia made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. It was like, “You get spiritual or Guido comes by”.
And so, this might sound like a strange way to get people interested in spiritual principles. But let’s face it, that’s how we all got interested. Whether we admit it or not. It was because the reality of our own nature was explained to us. And it was explained that our problem was lack of power.
And so, I wrestled with this. What I wrestled with was not wanting to lose total control over my life. I wanted to become a little bit spiritual but keep some bad stuff just to have fun with. When I look at the seven deadly sins and we’ve got to get rid of all of those and I go, well OK. Pride, I don’t want anything to do with that, get rid of pride. But… I’m proud of this. I always found exceptions.
I remember there was this meeting up in Washington. It was an old group. This meeting had been around for a lot of years. And they had about 50 character defects listed on a big board. Somebody had hand painted them all and lo and behold, on that board, there wasn’t pride. It was ‘false pride’.
I remember reading that and thinking “false pride-that’s it.” False pride would be bad but some pride – like my pride (and I was in the marine corps at the time) is OK. I must have gone four years just on the word ‘pride’ trying to justify it and it’s like the book says, it’s not by accident that it heads the list because it ends up justifying all the rest of them.
Surely, you’ve got to have some pride? As I examine this, year after year, I would come up with examples. It certainly must be alright to be proud that my son is a good little league player. I’m so proud of him out there.
But when I got honest, I’ll tell you what that word meant. It meant: I want everyone to know that I’m the father of the kid that hit that home run. And he would never would have hit the home run had I not been the father. And I see you giving him a lot of the credit for that home run, when it really belongs more over here.
The pride always came back to me and as I move along, I realised I had the wrong word. What I was trying to express and the correct word was: grateful: I’m so grateful that that boy has all that talent which he got not from me but from God. So if anyone wants to applaud that home run, give God a big hand because that’s where the credit goes. So it was a question of inventorying it going in. So pride was a hard one to even make a beginning on.
Greed. When I first got in to AA, I didn’t want to hear anything about the steps or go to meetings. I just wanted a loan. I just needed $2,000. I saw that as the answer to everything.
Greed. Just the idea of not wanting to take care of myself because there was so much lacking. Inside of me, I felt this lacking. Because I was not interested in spirituality, I was not going to understand that I could be filled from the inside out, I saw that I would have to get things from out there.
So, I went through all of them. Envy. Course I’m envious. Look at that car he’s got, and I’ve got this piece of shit, and I can’t even afford a battery for it. I won’t be driving it till next Wednesday when I get paid.
And then… lust. I remember thinking, ‘I want to get 100% rid of lust?’ Any of you think about that… 100% gone? Doesn’t that sound kind of strange. Does that worry you at all? Am I the only one? Zero lust? Zero? I don’t think we want that. You’ve got to have some of that energy going on. I had no concept of what we were talking about in the sexuality area.
Gluttony. I’m too skinny so I could skip that one.
Procrastination. Being lazy. I love to just not do anything. When I retired, it took me one minute to get adjusted to it. I’m so glad to not even say the word work any more. I think I’ll take another nap! It came naturally.
As I went through anything that you presented to me, I qualified it and moved it down.
I certainly don’t want to get rid of ALL of anything, but I want to become better than I am: I don’t want to become a saint, I just want to be thought of a saint. I don’t want to be honest, I want to have a reputation for being honest. And people will deal with me in business and I can take care of them as appropriate. I’ll be honest most of the time, but man if we’re not making our quota…
So, this is the spiritual dillema. If you’re new you’re probably thinking, “Man, this sounds difficult”. Well it is, because it constantly involves changing our mind. Changing what we set up for ourselves as an ideal. Because these are ideals are very limited. And it’s a struggle that just goes on and on.
So, I was thinking about how this all got started and I always like to give credit to Dr Jung.
If you remember AA’s origins, it really started when Roland Hazzard, the millionaire form Rhode Island, an alcoholic, ended up probably going to lose the family business, which had been there forever and tried everything the United States had to offer and someone came up with the idea that Karl Jung in Switzerland was the last chance for this young man to possibly save his live.
And he went over there to spend a year seeing Dr Jung. And at the end of the year, Dr Jung said, “I’ve done everything that I can for you. You understand the situation. If you keep on drinking, you’re going to end up in a sanatorium for life.” and Hazzard said that he understood. “So, I think I’ve made all the changes I can in your personality. Good luck, and we’ll see you later.” Roland left and he got as far as Paris and someone asked him the wrong question. They asked him, “Would you like a drink?”.
He said, ‘Yes I’d love a drink’. And he’s drunk again and he comes back to Dr Jung after some drinking in despair and he says, ‘Look what happened to me’. And this is when Dr Jung said the most humble thing I can imagine – for the world’s greatest psychiatrist, talking with this millionaire. He said, ‘There’s nothing I can do for you’.
And whenever I see that, I think about the end of our readings from Chapter 5: ‘No human power could have relieved our alcoholism’, and certainly Dr Jung symbolised the epitome of human power that was available at that time.
And here was the absolute zenith of what human kind could accomplish at that time and it looked this alcoholic straight in the eye and said, ‘there’s nothing I can do for you’. It was the ultimate first step. Do you understand powerless now Roland? And it hit him like a tonne of bricks, the hopelessness. “Oh my god, it’s over for me.”
Then Dr Jung said, ‘Now I have heard of some cases, like yours, where people have gone and sought a spiritual experience and they have recovered. So, I would suggest to you that you go out and look for some sort of spiritual experience.’ And Roland did, and he found the Oxford movement and got sober. Because it had all the principles that AA was to adopt, and it wasn’t long after that that the second character that got the message to bill – Ebby Thatcher got drunk one last time up in Manchester Vermont and they were sick of him in the town. He’d already driven his car into a farmhouse (and if you remember the story in the Big Book, he asked the lady for a cup of coffee when the car reached the kitchen). And then he went out and was going to paint his house. His family had disowned him and gave him the summer home and – like all us alcoholics – he said, “Oh my god, I’ve got to do something constructive, I’m going to paint my house”. So he bought some paint and ladders and brushes. He got about 10 square feet painted and sat down to admire the work that he had done.
He got a beach chair and sat out in front and imagined all the rest of the house painted. And he was having a few drinks and some birds came by and crapped on the paint. And it just infuriated him so he went inside and got a couple of shot guns and sat outside waiting for birds to come by and then “boom”. The people in the neighbourhood thought a war was starting. “Oh, it’s just Ebby over there blasting away.” So, he gets sent in front of the judge and the judge says, “I’m going to have to do something with you. Maybe I could call somebody.” And Roland was up in Manchester, doing some Oxford work, and the judge released Ebby into his personal recognizance. And he whisked him off to the Oxford group. And not too many months later, Ebby thought about Bill Wilson and told him, ‘Bill I’ve found something. You ought to come and check it out.’ And Bill checked it out and the rest is history.
Many years later, Bill realised that he’d never closed the loop with Dr Jung and so he wrote him a letter and said, “you may not realise this but you saw a patient named Roland Hazard and this is what happened as a result of what told him. That you could do nothing. That he should seek this spirtual answer. And he did, and now we have found AA and we consider that you are one of the founding ‘energies’ of the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous and we’re very grateful.” And he wrote that letter shortly before Dr Jung died. And Dr Jung got to write back (in the grapevine you’ll see this exchange reprinted from time to time).
Basically, Dr Jung said, “Jeez, I’ve often wondered what happened to Mr Hazzard. Back then, when he came to see me (probably late 20s, early 30s), it wasn’t safe for a psychiatrist like me to professionally talk about God. Because the rest of the psychiatrists would laugh at me.’ But Jung was very spiritual if you’ve read any of his stuff. He was very much in to spirituality and God being the centre of everything. But he said, “I couldn’t really say that, back then. Now I can talk about it more freely and that’s what I wanted for Roland and I knew this was his answer. And I since looked at a lot of alcoholics and I’ve concluded that one of the things that alcoholics have is an inordinate longing for God.”
Now think about that as the disease of alcoholism. That the real problem that alcoholics have – and we don’t know it – is that they miss God a lot. We don’t know that that is what our problem is. We just know that we’re constantly restless, irritable and discontent.
And we use our intellect and we look at it. And we’re not going to see we’re missing God – that God is missing in our lives. It’s just that money must be it. We’ve got to find something to relieve this freaking thing that’s always nagging at us. Something’s missing. I just don’t feel right, like other people. And so, I’m struggling in the material world to fix that underlying problem. And nothing would fix it until I found alcohol. And alcohol is the closest thing to spirituality that I think you can get. It is almost identical to spiritual experiences: suddenly a power greater than ourselves fixes us from the inside out. Nothing out there changes. Nothing. You don’t get any money. The world doesn’t change. Nothing. Except we live in a different world. We’re at peace with ourselves. We really have found an answer. Unfortunately, vodka is not a loving higher power. And does not have our best interests at heart, but it shows – we were struggling with a problem we could never put our finger on and no matter what we did to try and relieve this problem it wouldn’t go away.
You can talk to AAs who came in and became incredibly successful financially, and ask them: did that fix the underlying problem you had, and they’d say, “No, I was thinking about committing suicide on my yacht”.
Get into incredible physical shape, become workout addicts. Then you just stand there in front of the mirror, going “It ain’t gone. It’s still there”.
Get on the health food diets, get on whatever it is, get the perfect relationship. It couldn’t be better. But when you’re alone you’re going “God, I still have it, whatever it is, it’s just not fixed. I need to fix something.” And, that’s when we get to the last part of it, in Chapter 5: “No human power could have relieved our alcoholism, but God could and would if he was sought”.
Now, if you’re new, I’ll guarantee what you just heard me say: ‘that God could and would’. That’s what you just heard me say. You didn’t really sync in with ‘if he were sought’. That little part just got missed. ‘Oh yeah! God could and would. Thank you God! I’m here, I’m in the programme and I’m going to meetings and I’m not drinking and I’m just in God’s hands and boy is it great’. And then nothing seems to happen. And so maybe we’ve got to focus in on a word that’s right in there and it’s called ‘seeking’, which is exactly what Dr Jung told Roland Hazzard – ‘Go seek a spiritual solution to your problems’. And he did. And he found it.
I don’t know where I came up with this but this is – in my mind – the evolution of seeking as I experienced it in my life. The first time I ever remember seeking was in grammar school, playing hide and seek. Someone hides. Remember the first time you played that? ‘What’s the game?’ Hide and seek. So, one guy hides and then what do I do. You seek. What’s that? You find them. OK. You remember how hard you looked? You were totally focussed. It was… zooming. Because you wanted to be the one to find whoever was hiding. You weren’t thinking about anything else.
And the next time I remember getting involved with that was Easter. My mother would hide the Easter basket from my sister and I, and we’d say, ‘Can we start? Can we start? Can we start?’ And then they’d say ‘Go’ and I’d be really focussed on it. But even then, with all that candy that I could hardly wait for, if it went more than 30 minutes, the seeking power started to diminish. I’d say “Can you give me a hint?”. “Am I warm?” The seeking takes a lot of energy, to stay that focussed.
The last example I remember is that we had a golden retriever when I was 12 and we’d had him for years and years. And he ran away. I don’t know if you’ve ever had your favourite dog run away but I looked for that dog really hard and for a very long time. I would go out in the woods and call his name two years after he’d been gone. And I’d think, “maybe tonight, I can find him.” Because I missed him so much.
So, there was seeking.
Now we come in, and we read Chapter 5 and it says ‘God could and would if he was sought’. Now, let’s discuss some of the seeking that we’ve done. Here’s a typical seeking day for us alcoholics. Are you ready? We start the day with the 24h/day book on the toilet. But we’re late today – we’ve got a very important appointment and God knows, I might get a deal out of this, so we have to speed read it. If anyone asked us on the way out what we just read, we’d have forgotten because we’re thinking about the deal.
The end of the day, we get down on our knees and we say “Thank you god, and … (oh am I tired, maybe I’ll cut it short here)… I’m very grateful. I’m very grateful.” Boom (sleeping).
Well out of 24 hours we had something like 63 seconds of seeking.
I don’t know if that qualifies. I don’t know if you could get in the dictionary under seeking with that. That’s not seeking at all. It’s messing around.
I started thinking, “this is not that huge priority”. Because, it doesn’t appear to be life or death like the dog was. It’s like: I could delay seeking one more day and it really won’t make that much difference. I could delay really trying to grow another day. And I believe that’s why we have tragedies come into our lives. Everybody who has been sober has had things happen to them. Painful, painful things. Awful things. And if you looked at it in the big picture, it’s just God sitting up there and saying ‘God, I love that Alice. I just want her closer to me but I can tell she ain’t going to get closer the way she is. I guess I’ll just have to have this awful thing happen. And it doesn’t make sense at the time.
When I was sober two years, I went to a meeting every single night. I did everything my sponsor told me and I didn’t get promoted in the marine corps and I’m out. 14 years as a regular officer, six kids to support and I got to a meeting every night and I’m out. And I remember going to meetings and people would say ‘anyone got a topic?’ and I’d say ‘YES, I’ve got a topic – getting thrown out of the marine corps’ and they say, ‘that’s not really a good topic for AA’, ‘Well I don’t care… I got thrown out of the marine corps and …’
And I heard that stupid advice you hear in AA. People don’t even listen to your problem, they tell you stuff like, ‘Double up on your meetings’, ‘work with new people’, ‘Say the serenity prayer’, ‘Say the prayer of St Francis’…
I wanted them to say, ‘You were thrown out of the Marine Corps? Oh my god. Listen, I own this big corporation and I’m looking for a top executive. Would $65,000 and your own car be alright?’ That would be some spiritual help.
Don’t tell me to say the Serenity Prayer.
I had this huge resentment and then three months after I was out, I was in a lot of pain and thinking about how unfair this all was, and there was this little story in the Washington Post about page 5, a small paragraph. It said, ‘Marine Corps instruction team killed in Denver in plane crash’ And that was my team. And if I’d been promoted like I wanted, I would have been on the plane and that would have been it.
And I remember realising when I read the story that God knew that I had read it. I had just been complaining to God like mad and I knew that he knew that I read it. Because he knows everything. And I felt awkward to say the least.
And so, I said, “Well if you’d just told me that was going to happen, I wouldn’t have been complaining about all this stuff.”
All the Chapter to the agnostic and all that AA is, is trying to overcome our objections to our ego staying in charge. That’s all spirituality is and that’s all our steps are.
We have all these obstacles, called character defects that are blocking this channel. And none of this stuff can get out. You can put a lie detector on most of us and ask “have you ever had any conscious contact with God?” “No”. And we’d be telling the truth. We can’t have any contact, we shut it up. And the disease cemented it. It just sealed it. We’re telling the truth when we say we don’t have any of this at all.
We have to pull all of this stuff out of the way, so that the channel can be opened again.
And I remember saying, “You want me to believe in this? You want me to believe I’m being guided by God and I’ll be turning my who life over to him?”
But I remember when I was twelve years old and I joined the boy scouts. I was only in one year. The scoutmaster got up and said “This is a compass. And I’m going to explain how the compass works. And then, you’re going to keep it in your pocket. And if you’re ever in the wood and your totally lost and if you don’t find your way out, you’re going to starve to death or freeze to death, this compass will get you out. BECAUSE, there’s this big rock at the North Pole and this needle will always point at the big rock and it will save your life. All you do is turn your life over to this needle that points at the big rock”.
Now as a boy scout, I didn’t say “Big Rock at the north pole?? You want me to risk my whole life on the theory that there’s a big rock and this needle will point at it?”
I just said ‘that’s terrific’. And I put it in my pocket.
I was now ready to risk my life.
And later on in marine corps when I went to flight school and we’re going through all the different things and they said, “Now we’re going to go to instrument training’, Here’s the deal: we have this little radio station on the end of the runway and it sends a little radio beam up to your plane. And if you dial this little thing in and you listen and you hear the ‘A’ and the ‘N’ and the steady beam, you can come down between these two huge mountains without hitting them.”
I didn’t say to them, “Are you kidding? You want me to believe that a little beeping thing down here is going to make me miss the mountains? And I’m going to put my life on the line?”
I didn’t say that, I just said, ‘Isn’t that wonderful?’
Then I come in here and you say, “You know, there’s this wonderful spiritual supreme being at the centre of the universe and if you will follow these steps, you will establish contact and you will be guided by this incredible supreme being”.
And I’m saying, “You’ve got to be kidding,” What do you think I am? A sucker. You want me to believe that?
I never would have believed it because there’s no proof. I heard the rest of you. So, I had to take your word for it. But it all comes back to: “I have a disease that only a spiritual experience will conquer.” So, I came in to this thing and I finally gave in and said, “Ok, what’s the deal, let’s go, I’m in.” And that started the whole deal.
No more, “Well I don’t think so, I don’t do that.” And then of course, results started happening. So if you’re new around and you’ve been studying the steps for years and nothing has happened, you can study them for 20 more years and nothing will happen, you have to do them.
They only become visible when we do these things. And then we can see what – prior to that – was invisible. It only becomes visible through action.
And then you start seeing the transformation in your own life and you start seeing a different world out there. Just like alcohol made it a different world. Spirituality – the power of this higher power – makes people look more friendly, make the world a more comfortable place and makes you equal to everybody else. That’s the power that is missing when we’re just trying to go out there by ourselves.
The bottom line, when I look back on everything that I’ve learned in AA goes like this… This is my favourite place to go and I’m just going to spend the last few minutes on it.
It’s in the 12 and 12 under the 10th step, and it’s how to live one day at a time.
That’s what it’s all about.
So we finally clear up the wreckage of the past and we’ve done all the surrendering and inventorying that we can, we now ready to get the big reward because all of spirituality is learning how to live in the now. And the 10th step is where it’s all done. And so, here’s this little sentence in there. This little axiom, that if you’re disturbed, no matter what the cause, there’s something wrong with you. That doesn’t sound like a lot of wisdom. (But) it’s the most I’ve ever seen anywhere. That if you’re disturbed – no matter what the cause – there’s something wrong with you. Well, what’s wrong with me? I’m disturbed, that’s what’s wrong with me.
Someone did something outrageous, absolutely unjustified. Everyone would agree it was unjustified so I deserve to be disturbed. You understand what we just said? “I deserve to go to jail and stay there.” I sentence myself to being disturbed because my ego wants something. And I’ve just shut myself off from God. As soon as I slam down disturbance, I’m on my own. “You want to be disturbed?” God says, “Go do it, but you’re going to do that alone”. So now it’s just me against the world. I don’t even have my higher power any more when I’m disturbed.
So, what does it say? It says we’ve got to have a way to get un-disturbed. We’ve got to have a way to make getting undisturbed our top priority. And as you start your day, anytime you get disturbed say ‘time out’ and get undisturbed again. And there’s millions of ways to do it.
Just stop. Get out the serenity prayer card. Read that a couple of times. Call a sponsor…. Now move forward. It’s like you’re not allowed to advance in a disturbed fashion. Because every time you advance in a disturbed fashion, you do things you have to make amends for later on. And you treat people badly. You got disturbed – legitimately – so you go into the drycleaning place and you take it out on the lady in there. “Where the hell’s my dry cleaning!?” And then she retaliates, and then you do the same thing in the supermarket and then you do the same thing wherever else you’re going.
And you get home and you say, “The world is filled with cranky people. God I can’t stand it out there.” We have no idea that we did that to all the people out there. This was brought home in spades to me by my sister who now has 25 years in AA when my parents – they’re both passed away now but some years ago were having their 50th wedding anniversary. She’s planning the party, up in Connecticut and I’m going to go, and she’s calling me and she’s saying, “I’m going to invite uncle John” and I say, “God Sue, don’t invite Uncle Jon, we want to have a happy family get together. Is there any way we can not invite him, he’s just so obnoxious, abrasive and all this.”
And she said, “Oh, he only does that when you’re around. Everybody loves him. He’s great. A wonderful guy.”
And I said, “That can’t be possible.” But she had a lot of years at the time so I said “I’m going to trust her.” Let’s pretend he’s a great guy. So, when I saw him I just ran up and said “Hey Uncle John, how are you doing? I’m so glad to see you”… And I think it just blew his mind and he said, “Well I’m so glad to see you”. And he was a great guy.
I must have had some other idea and just brought out the worst in him. And that’s what us alcoholics have the power to do – to bring out the worst in people. And then we come home at night and complain about the world that we live in and we don’t see our role in it at all.
So, it all comes back to: Never do anything when you’re disturbed. So, in other words, pick a day next week, and make it un-disturbed Thursday. I may not get anything else done by I’m not going to get disturbed. I’m going to go out and let everyone be wrong. Hey, you want to drive that way, it’s free driving day. You just go ahead. I don’t care. I’m backing off three car lengths, you drive any damn way you want. I’m not in to this because I’m going to go through without being disturbed. What happens when we go through a day like that? We have so much more energy than we normally have. We are so close to our intuitive creative side that answers just flow in. And we can solve problems. It’s so easy to make decisions when we’re not disturbed. We’re in touch with our spiritual side when we’re undisturbed. We are allowing god to flow through us and guide us in our thinking and our actions. And we’re treating people in such a loving fashion that they’re loving us back. And we come home at night and just say, “Man, I ran into the greatest people today. It’s just amazing the people that I ran into.”
And so, when you look at that in the 10th step: how can we stay undisturbed and it suggests a spot check inventory – an honest analysis of what’s wrong. Really be honest, what’s going on here, is it my role or was it them? If we decide that the blame belongs somewhere else, we forgive them. If we decide it’s our fault, we make an amend. Our top priority is self-restraint in the very beginning. And that’s why we talk about: go out of the house in the morning with a 10 second cushion. Let anybody do what they want. And if we get disturbed, we allow 10 seconds to go by so we can get absolutely furious and then come back down before we do anything. And this to me is just one of the great spiritual things that I’ve picked out of living a day at a time: If I’m undisturbed, I treat other people like God’s children and they treat me well back and I go home at the end of the day and say “what a great day”, and it all was because of the priorities I put in my life.
And the last thing I was going to talk about was forgiveness.
Because my ego sets limits on that: Yeah, I can forgive up to a limit.
But sometimes people go over the line. They shouldn’t be forgiven. It’s almost like it’s going to hurt them. But the only person it hurts is me when I decide not to forgive. So, I’m trying to decide – has there ever been a teacher? Has there ever been someone where they sort of gave us a clue as to what the limit might be? And I was thinking about a teacher we had about 2,000 years ago. And they’re nailing him to a cross, getting ready to kill him and he said, “forgive them, they know not what they do.” And so, in my score book, when something awful happens to me, it has to exceed being nailed to a cross and killed in order to qualify for not forgiving. Ok?
In other words, I think that’s the standard. If you have something that’s worse than being nailed to a cross and killed, then go ahead and hold on to that one.
It’s all ego.
There a wonderful reading for May 3 in the 24 hour a day book about forgiveness. And it’s talking about having a hard time of forgiving and it says, “forget about trying to forgive, you’ve got to get rid of self”.
You know: the prayer of St Francis. You have to kill self. You have to kill the ego. We’ve got to get rid of the self-centred part of us. And as we work on that, by applying our principles, talking to our sponsors, praying, meditating, whatever it takes. If we can reduce that self down to a nothingness, we will find that there’s nothing inside of us that remembers the injury. Because the only part that was hurt, the self, is gone. And we’re free.
So it’s always a question of our self that gets hurt and that’s not who we are at all. We’re the person behind all that. And to me, that’s what spirituality is. It’s the willingness to take the journey with the hope that we will finally solve that fundamental dis-ease that has been inside of us all along that Karl Jung suggested – we just miss God a lot. And part of us is dying to get back in contact so we have this channel so open that all of our needs are being taken care of from the inside and therefore we don’t need anything from the world. So, we can just let it go, we can just have a wonderful time and see where we can be useful. We have that throughout our literature: make me useful.
So, it’s a question of giving God all the credit, just becoming an instrument. Instead of trying to be as huge as we can be, we try and be as small as we can be. Remember what a big shot we wanted to be? Well we are creating a vessel to go through the sea of life and when you create an ego-centred vessel, you’ve created a boat that’s about 120ft wide, 15ft deep, and you’re pushing it through.
And when we can become selfless, we can go right through a screen door. In other words, there’s nothing that can hit our ego because we’ve made it so small. So, anything can happen. The only pain that human beings experience is not getting their way. There is no other pain. And the programme suggests, “well, don’t have a way”. Then nothing can go against your way.
Remember that? And then the 12 and 12 says, “well then I’ll be the hole in the donut.” No, I won’t. I’ll be the instrument of thy peace. I don’t have to be anything because I’m everything from the inside out.
And if you’re new. This is my wish for you: that you just try this thing. And the reason you should try it is because everything else is so awful! That’s why you try it. You don’t try it because you believe me or anyone else. You just try it because you’re tired of everything the way it is. So, surrender your will to this path. Get a guide, follow it down. And the path isn’t going to go out there, it’s going to go in here (inside). We’re going to open you up so you can see what a magnificent person you are. That’s AA present to you. It’s you. And when you arrive here, the wrappings around you are pretty lousy. It’s not the best wrapping paper in the world. It’s pretty smelly and not too good. And you don’t think you should open it because it looks like it’s going to be a pretty bad present and you don’t really want to look inside. But the programme forces you to see what’s really in there. You are going to love yourself. You’ve never seen yourself in all your magnificence. You’ve never seen what a loving, caring person you are. It’s been trapped by all these crazy ideas you heard that are just baloney. And they’re preventing you from carrying out what you want to do which is to help the next person and just be an instrument of God’s grace in this world. It is the greatest life. And we all struggle everyday with our egos to get close to it and that’s why AA is so much fun.
Thank you all very much. God bless everybody.
Shrd 