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Source: Bob D. & Don L – Lighthouse Big Book Weekend (2018) – CD 02 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: bob-d-and-don-l-lighthouse-big-book-weekend-2018-cd-02-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 01:16:25
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Well, from the cheat sheet, I guess we're supposed to move towards, into step two a little bit, I guess, okay. I'm curious, how many people in this room ever pursued church religion seriously and then drank after you did that? Oh, whoa, that's, how many people pursued therapy and then drank after that? See, I knew it, see Alcoholics Anonymous, we're all the church and therapy dropouts, we're all, we all end up here, isn't that bizarre?
And it's not that there's anything wrong with either one of those things, it's just that there's some elements missing that are necessary for our recovery. There's this alcoholic who's walking down the street and he's in bad, bad way, bad way, he's ruined his life and he doesn't know what to do and he's walking by this church and he hears this singing in the church and he thinks to himself, oh, you know, maybe I'll go in there, who knows, I gotta get some kind of help.
He goes in there and he's in the back of the room and the minister, it's one of those fundamental Baptist Christian churches and they do an altar call, which is the minister asks anyone who have, anyone have problems, come down to the front, we'll pray over you, pray over your problem. The guy thinks, well, man, I got a lot of, I got problems, okay, and he goes down there to the front and the minister says, son, what's your problem and he goes, sir, it's my hearing and he goes, that's not a problem and he puts his hands on the guy's ears and he prays over him fervently and lets him go and he goes, how's your hearing?
He said, I don't know, it's not till Tuesday. See if you'd say you had a problem with your hearing in Vegas, they'd go, you got a lawyer? I mean, but we come at life from a little different angle. And we, our solution seems almost hard to believe. If you ever come to Alcoholics Anonymous in the despair and hopelessness of recently burning your life to the ground and look at the 12 steps, they do not look like they would help you at all.
They almost look like they're potentially a punishment for being a bad drunk. And yet, everyone who does it, it changes their lives. There's not a, we don't know what you're going to believe. We don't know if you're going to go back to the religion of your childhood. Some do, some don't. We don't know. Don't have an opinion on any of that really. We just, but we do know something for sure. And we know it from the experience of over 4 million people who have done this.
If you are diligent in this way of life and you keep it centered in this way of life yourself and you work those steps, we know something's going to happen to you. We don't know what it is, we don't know what you're going to believe, but it's promised and it's read at every meeting. It's the great promise of step 12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the single, as the result of these steps. We know something's going to wake up inside you.
Maybe it's the same thing that woke up inside you when you were a teenager and you had a pint of rum in you and you woke up and you came alive and you're connected and one with. But we don't know, but we just know we can promise you that it happens to everybody and Alcoholics Anonymous does not fail. We fail it, but it does not fail. As I stood on a bridge in 1978 trying to take my own life, some guy would have come along and said, Bob, I'll let you go back to AA.
I think I would have probably said, you don't understand, I've tried all that and it didn't work for me. But I never really tried it. I went to hundreds, a couple hundred meetings, probably 150, 200 meetings I suppose. I had tried not to drink. I did what I was led to believe was a fourth step in a treatment center, but it was really a written first step. Really it wasn't, it had nothing, it wasn't even in the same zip code as our fourth step.
I made a couple amends, but you know the amends some of you had to make. The ones that are breathing down your neck. Ones where you're under the gun to make them. You don't have a choice. It's not like you've come to, I've had an awakening, I'm going to make things right.
[00:05:02]
It's not that at all. It's like there's a gun to your head, right? And you make those amends, I made those kind of amends. But that's about all I ever did. See, I never did do AA, but nobody ever asked me. I wonder what would have happened if someone would have said, Bob, so you think you did AA, did you? How many people do you sponsor? Oh, that many. Did you do the fourth step out of the book? Oh, you think you did.
Okay, what happened when you did this was our course. Did you make your amends? Did you seek out the people you owed, the hurt? Did you have a transformation where now you see what happened with you and those people through their eyes, rather than just from your own selfish point of view? What about God? What about God, Bob? Do you have a relationship with God? I would have said no. Service been musicians?
No. I think at the end they would have said, so what is actually did you do in AA? Right? You took up space and tried not to drink is what you did. A friend of mine used to say, sitting in meetings doesn't get you sober any more than sitting in a garage will make you a 57 Chevy. And I missed the whole ball of wax. I missed everything. I heard a story 35 years or so ago. The story was about this young boy who grew up on a ranch outside of a city and he was out front doing chores and one of his chores that particular day was to mend a piece of fence along the front of the property and he was mending the fence and there was a telephone pole there and on the side of the telephone pole was a bright neon poster advertising a circus that was coming to town and it had pictures of clowns and elephants and things on this poster.
It was a one dollar admission. The kid didn't know what a circus was but it looked very cool and he ran back to the house and he got his dad and he said, Papa, there's a circus coming to town on such and such a day and it's a dollar. If I work hard and do all my chores, can I have a dollar? Can I go to the circus dad? And the old man said, absolutely son. Well the day it came to the circus, that kid's up before the sun.
He's excited. He doesn't know what a circus is but he knows he's going to like it. And he's excited and he heads off to town with that silver dollar and he gets into town and there's this big crowd of people on the curb, the main street. Because he's a little kid, he weasels his way up through that crowd, gets right on that curb and he looks and there's a parade coming down the street. And there's these clowns juggling stuff with all kinds of outlandish outfits on.
You'd never see anything like it. Behind the clowns, there were elephants being ridden by these beautiful women with sequined sparkly outfits. And behind that, there was a wagon with tigers in the wagon pacing back and forth. Then there was another wagon with giraffe's heads sticking out the top. And then there was jugglers. And then there was horse people riding, standing on the back of horses riding down the street.
And then more clowns. And more animals. And it's just amazing to the kid. Finally, at the very end of the parade, there's this one little clown who's kind of dancing down behind the last wagon was one of those calliope's and he's dancing behind the calliope. And the little kid got the silver dollar. So he goes like this to the clown, he holds it up, the clown tips his hat, the kid goes okay and throws the silver dollar, the clown catches it, bows to the little kid and dances off down the street.
And the kid runs home to tell his dad how amazing the circus was. The problem is he never saw the circus. He just saw the passing parade. He never got into the big top. And I, seven years in Alcoholics Anonymous, I was part of the passing parade on its way to the graveyard and I never got in the big top. Because all I ever did was just come here and try not to drink. In 1978, I got a sponsor and I told him in desperation that if he would sponsor me, I would do anything he asked me to do.
Not suspecting that they have so many things they want you to do. One of the first things he wanted me to do was pray. He said, I want you to physically get down on your knees and ask whatever's around the universe for help and thank that thing at night.
[00:10:00]
I said, I can't do that. He said, why not? I said, well, I don't believe in God. He said, I didn't ask you to believe in God, I asked you to pray. And I said, but if I pray and I don't believe in God, I would be a hypocrite. He said, you've been a hypocrite all your life, what's the difference? Just do it. And I started taking directions that I didn't agree with, I didn't believe in, and my life started to change.
From the moment I was willing to follow someone else's directions, my life started to change. And isn't that the essence of surrender? You see it hundreds and hundreds of times in war movies. You see people who are faced with annihilation. And what do they do is that they lay down all their means to defend themselves. Their hand grenades, their knives, their guns, their pistols. If they have a tank or a jeep, they walk away from it.
And they sit down on the side of the road, defenseless, and they sit there and wait for someone to tell them what to do. And isn't that what's happening to us? I almost died of this disease because I fit the old adage, you can always tell an alcoholic, you just can't tell him much. I had a great psychiatrist, maybe some of you guys, he worked out not too far from here, Abe Torsky. I was in three different treatment centers where he lectured.
The third time, I think he was tired of seeing me. And he cornered me and he said, guys like you never get better. He said, some of you will find a way to stay abstinent for a decade or two, but you never get better. And you never get better is that even though you have no real true self-esteem, you have this giant ego. And because of that, you have an inability to listen to anyone in order to hear anything new.
You're only capable of listening to see how you are already right. And I thought, that guy's stupid. That was the most accurate diagnosis of me. My God! I would sit in AA meetings and just take everybody's inventory. Nothing you could say could ever get into me because I can't stop picking you apart. I can't stop finding fault with you. I can't. You know, I'd just sit there and people would share things and I'd be like, he's a sunbeam for Jesus.
You know. I'd make fun. Oh, that guy's really full of himself. I had to discount the messenger to defend myself against the message. Because my alcoholism has a survival mechanism that's stronger than mine. And if you don't think that's true, how many times do people like my… It's like, I don't care if what I'm doing is going to kill me as long as after I'm dead everybody walks around and goes, yeah, but Bob was right.
How many of us have thought about hurting ourselves to show them? Right? Right? I mean, if you identify with that at all, you do not have a high mental health quotient. So you guys got me to start praying. There's a line in Diagnostics, I love this line. There was a point many, many years ago after I started to develop this relationship with God, through the actions that I didn't believe in, when I read this line in the book, I teared up a little bit.
It says that God does not make hard terms with those who seek him. Oh my God. I'm the guy who cursed God. I'm the guy who was belligerently against God. I was the guy who fancied myself an atheist. I wanted to be an atheist, I couldn't. I've known some real atheists. You have to be very religious about your atheism to be a good atheist. I just can't get that much angst about it. The real truth is I'm afraid of God.
The real truth is that I just somehow feel too stained and too bad for God. I'm the kind of guy by nature, my emotional disposition, if I just think you don't like me, I'm going to not like you first. And I did that with God because I'm afraid. I'm afraid that I don't measure up. And you could tell me, oh God loves you anyway, yeah sure. What do you want? You know, I just, it seemed like I couldn't, I'm like, I just came from Ireland and there was a big thing about George Bush.
[00:15:14]
In other words, I start imagining God is as childish and petty and judgmental as I am. And so you guys had me take actions towards this power that I don't believe in, and God started showing up. And what was showing up was favorable to my recovery, and favorable to my life. It was eerie in my first year or so of sobriety. Crazy stuff. Every time I needed something, the stream of existence would just bring it right in front of me.
I didn't have to work for it, it would just come. I can't tell you how many thousands of times I'd be in some meeting, and I'm messed up, man, I don't know what to do. And there'd be some stranger in the meeting saying exactly what I need to hear. That didn't happen once or twice, that happened over and over and over again. And God started showing up. And I started to come to believe the only way a guy like me could come to believe.
Over in England, the old parts of Westminster years ago, now they've replaced most of them in the last ten years, I noticed, when I was over there last. But they used to have these street lights that were gas. And on the side of the older poles, there's still gas today, but on the side of the older poles there was a box that was welded shut and painted over. And what it was, was before the technology of the computerized deals that turn the gas on and light the lights, these gas street lights had a guy that would go up and down the street, and that little box was actually a door.
He'd open that door, he'd stick a key in there, and he'd turn the gas on. He'd reach up with a long pole with a flame on the end, he'd light that street light, close that box up, go to the next one, do the same thing. And you could climb up to the top of the highest building in Westminster at twilight and look out over the city. You could not see where the guy was, but you could see where he'd been.
And I came to believe in God through the hindsight of my own personal experience. Because I could sit in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous for a year and a half, two years sober, and I couldn't see where God was, but my God, I could see where he'd been. And I started sponsoring guys and doing service when I was brand new. You want to get up close and personal, look at the hand of God, sponsor people.
Oh my God, they're amazing. How many times do you have a guy and he's got a problem, and he's afraid he's going to go to jail, and I don't know what to tell him. And so I say the stupid thing they tell you, and I tell him, just pray about it. And he prays about it, and it straightens out. It's like amazing. Wow, that's amazing. There really is a God. It's like the story of a Catholic priest walking down the street.
He gets to the bottom of a steep hill. He looks up at the top, and there's a little kid, probably three years old, four at the most, on a tricycle. And he's getting ready to come down this steep hill. And the priest looks and goes, oh no, no, there's a big bump at the bottom. Oh, don't do that. Oh, here he comes. Oh God, here he comes. And he's zooming down that hill like shot out of a cannon. Sure enough, he hits that bump at the bottom, flips over, rips his pants up on his one leg, and he's bleeding.
Oh, bloody. And the kid gets off the bike, and he goes, God damn it. And the priest goes, son, son, son, son, don't say that. That's a sin. Oh, I'm sorry, Father. I'm sorry. He says, say God bless me. Oh, okay, Father. All right, I won't say that again. God bless me. All right. About a week later, the priest walks down that same street and looks up. Oh my God, here's that crazy kid. And sure enough, he comes down that hill even faster than before.
He hits that bump on the bottom, flips over, crushes in the front wheel of that tricycle, rips both pants legs up, they're all bloodied up. And the kid gets off the bike and looks at the priest and goes, God bless me. And the wheel straightens out. The cuts go away and the pants come together. And the priest goes, God damn it. And that's what working with newcomers is like. Because I think we all get jaded and we get used to God.
Yeah, God's funny. Oh yeah, you've given me a great life. But what have you done for me lately? It's a very selfish, spiritual entitlement that happens to so many of us. We don't even know it's happening. You just get used to it. We get used to having a life that is a miracle.
[00:20:02]
A life that's impossible. I know there's people in this room, myself included. If you looked at where we were and where we are, you can't get from there to there. You can't. We take a freaking miracle. But the miracle happens so slowly. Every step of the way, we take it for granted, don't we? We get used to it. We just take it for granted. And alcoholism works the same in reverse. As we get sicker, we just adjust to the journey.
There's probably people in this room that are on their way to a relapse and you don't even know it. It happens in a lot of forms. Maybe you think you're fine spiritually, but you're starting to notice how sick the people around you are. Maybe you're judging your way out of alcoholism as one person at a time. Maybe you have too much entitlement to do the same actions and service commitments you used to do at one time.
Let the newer people do it. And you're diminishing your participation in the miracle. And the miracle starts to fade. Somebody reminded me, I'm going to tell this story. My sponsor first told this in 1980. I think I'd tell it better. Don't tell him that. No, that would be bad. He said that when we hit bottom, and this kind of ties into a part of the book. He said it's like being shipwrecked at sea.
And there you are hundreds of miles from land, treading water. It's frightening. Because you know, you don't know how long you're going to be able to tread water. You're going to eventually die. You're going to drown. And you're getting tired and you look up and here come, there's two people just sitting on top of the water. And they're making these weird motions like they're moving something. There's nothing there. There's nothing there.
And yet they're coming towards you. And they grow up to you and they go, My name's Mike. My name's Sandra. We're from Alcoholics Anonymous. We have God and these beautiful 12 steps to solve all your problems. And you go, you've got nothing there. You're bringing me into your hallucination. There's nothing there. I don't know what mental health hospital you came out of. But just leave me alone. And they row off.
And about that time over the horizon comes this big chrome, multi-deck, shiny ocean liner. It says treatment center on the side. And they've got therapists, group counseling, biofeedback technicians, dietitians, vocational rehabilitation specialists. They've got people in there that will help you find and reparent your inner child. They've got some stuff. They've got medication. They've got, oh my God.
And you know, you know, that someone of your depth and complexity would surely need all of that. Not these two idiots in that invisible boat. And there you are on board this big ocean liner. And it's amazing. You're going watching the Father Martin movies. And you say, oh my God, this is amazing. You listen to the doctor talk about the acetate in the brain. Oh yeah, yeah, that's why I do what I do.
About how we were hurt and deformed emotionally in childhood. Oh yeah, that's why I'm like this. Connecting all the things together intellectually, as Dr. Bob said. It's a great excitement to the scientific mind. But it really has nothing to do with what we do. But it's exciting. And you get to a point where you're so full and puffed up with all this knowledge. And knowledge always presents an illusion of power.
You have all this knowledge and you start thinking, I got this. I get it. I got this. About the time you say, I got this. It's over the side. You, your $30,000 big book and your graduation chip. And you're treading water. And all of a sudden the boat's gone. Nobody's gone. You're just all by yourself out on a limb. And you don't know what to do. And you start going under and you fight to get back above the, to get air.
And you look up and here come those two idiots in that invisible boat. Oh my God, here they come. They roll up to you and, my name's Mike, my name's Sander, we're from Alcoholics Anonymous. We got God and these beautiful 12 steps to solve all your problems. And you think, you don't got nothing. But you're tired and you're dying.
[00:25:01]
And you let them pull you on board. And there you are sitting on top of the water. You can't even see what's holding you up. And some of us sat in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous at a year sober. And the truth is, we can't see what's holding us up. And you say, what do I do? And they say, row. Row? There's not even a boat. There's not, or is it, oh no, no, row. Oh come on, there's not, what do you mean row?
No, go like this, just go like this. Oh, come on. No, no, just go like this. I can't do, just go like this. And you go, alright, I hope nobody sees me. And you start going like this. And a funny thing happens, as you start to row that boat, it starts to materialize. And you keep rowing that boat, you can build a life in that boat. You can raise a family in that boat. You can have a business in that boat.
You can sail around and pick up other drowning men and women in that boat. You can have the greatest life you could ever imagine in that boat. But if you get sober long enough and your ego returns and you don't know it, you'll get entitlement. And entitled people don't have to row, do they? Let the younger people row. And you stop rowing that boat, and it slowly starts to dematerialize. And you don't end up in the drink overnight.
Sometimes it takes years of compromising actions. And your ego screams at you. Oh, you're alright, I got this. Or maybe, maybe you judge how you're doing by how you feel. And if you're building a house of cards based on self and self-gratification and self-aggrandizement, as you're getting your way, you feel pretty good. Until the wheels fall off. And you end up in the drink. It happens. It happens a lot.
On page 55 of the book… Before I say it, on page 55 is a view, I think, in the middle two paragraphs, of what we all seem to accomplish here as a result of steps 3 through 12, I guess. Or, really, maybe 4 through 9. It's coming, this is the second full paragraph, it's coming out of the section in We Agnostics where it talks about our doubts, our prejudices, our fear of God. And it says, actually, we were fooling ourselves, for deep down in every man, woman and child is the fundamental idea of God.
Deep down in me. People used to say that, and I don't get it. Chuck Chamberlain used to say that. I remember watching him, a guy in the thank you line, asked him, where do you find God? And he just laughed, that little funny laugh of his, and pointed in the guy's chest. And he says, not lost, he's right in there. It's not right in me, not in here. How could something so good and so powerful be in something I secretly know is so bad and so weak?
It doesn't make any sense to me. There was a woman I used to go to meetings with named Diantha, and she was very spiritual. She was a funny gal. She used to say the most profound stuff. I'd go home and think about it for days. What does she mean by that? She had an awakening, evidently, looking back. But I didn't. I don't know. She was a knitter. The knitting annoyed me. She'd sit in the meetings and knit and smile like the Buddha.
This guy I ran around with, he never did stay sober. But him and I, we discovered that if you used the F word in the meetings, she'd knit a little faster. So we're trying to make sparks fly off her knitting needles. Because we're idiots. And one day she talked about the joy and how wonderful it was for her to be alone and commune with God. And evidently she'd work the steps. And I thought, the way she said it, it sounded, it was a seductive thing.
It was like, this is going to be very cool. And I went home thinking, I'm going to be alone and I'm going to commune with God. And I went home and I had no TV, no stereo, nothing, just me and God. And I discovered something, that when it gets quiet out here, it gets very noisy in here. Thirty seconds later, I felt like I was having a panic attack and I had to turn the TV on. Had to turn the TV on. Now what's that about? Is what you're saying about the God deep down
[00:30:01]
within me, about the still small voice, that God's within me, is that just crap? Or is there something else missing? And the book talks about what the problem is. It says, even though it's deep down within me, it says it may be obscured, which means blocked, by three things. By calamity, by pomp, and by worship of other things. And the calamity, we all know that, it's the clamor, it's the chatter, it's the monkey mind, it's what the Buddhists call the monkey mind. It's like, if you're like I was when I got sober, if God was inside me with a megaphone, I don't think I would hear him over the loudness of my head. My head was very loud. It scared me all the time. It would panic me at times.
That's why one time I was diagnosed as a free-floating anxiety and panic disorder, because my head would scare the crap out of me. Projecting problems that haven't occurred yet. So, the clamor, you know if you look in the book of Genesis and you read Genesis in the original Hebrew, when they introduced the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the actual Hebrew word they used would not translate into the English as the word for serpent. It was the word they used to describe the sound the serpent made. It's the hiss. It's that seductive, mesmerizing voice that we think is us. Did you ever notice that the voice in your head is more reasonable than your sponsor's voice, isn't it? It's a kinder, nicer voice. It says things to you that just make you go, yeah. You know, your sponsor said you should stay away from that new girl. Maybe he wants her for himself. Your boss disrespected you. You shouldn't let him do that. It's the voice of the enemy. Don says it best. It's the voice of the negotiator.
I have a moral compass in me. The difference between me and my daughter, my daughter does not negotiate her moral compass. Oh, give me a second. I negotiate it all the time. I argue with it. I argue with that thing inside me that knows the difference between right and wrong. I can argue with that. Because I'm an extreme example of self-will run riot. My daughter, not so much. She doesn't argue with it. But her selfishness isn't on steroids like mine is. The other thing is pomp. I get so full of myself that there's no room for anything else. And then worship of other things. I was ending a relationship and it was killing me. I couldn't even listen in meetings. I couldn't pray. I couldn't stop having conversations in my head with this girl that just broke up with me. I couldn't shut it down. It's consuming me. I told this old timer I was visiting from out of town all about this. He said something I never forgot. He said, kid, have you ever thought about the first commandment? I was only a couple years sober. I said, yeah, I'm not really into that. I'm just into AA. He said, I know. He said, oh my god, you and I are so much alike. Guys like us have a hard time with the thou shalt not part of the Ten Commandments.
He said, in my experience, Ten Commandments were originally written as statements of spiritual cause and effect. They've been translated through several languages and now they have an authoritarian spin on them. It says, I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not put false gods before me. He said, but I know. God loves me no matter what. No matter what. I can put anything I want between me and God. God still loves me. The problem is, if I put something between me and God, I block the light. He said, when you worship something, it doesn't mean to bow down to it. It means to obsessively turn your consciousness towards something.
He said, it's easy. If you want to know what you worship, at the end of your day, imagine a pie graph with everything you think about. The thing that would dominate your thinking or that pie graph of your thoughts would be the thing you're obsessively turning your consciousness towards. I could picture it in my mind. It was the relationship that dominated
[00:35:02]
the pie. Other times it's been business. It's been money. It's been being right and getting you to see that. It owns you. It owns you and becomes an obsessive part of my consciousness. That's what cuts me off from God. When I was that way with that relationship, and every other time I've been that way, there's a desolation about that where it feels like someone stepped on the oxygen hose to my soul. I feel cut off. I feel stuck. I feel locked up and unfree inside of me. Because this thing is consuming me. It's eating me alive. It's cooking me in my own emotional juices. We finally saw that faith in some kind of God was a part of our makeup. Just as much as the feeling we have for a friend, sometimes we had to search fearlessly. Fearless in searching. But he was there. He was as much a fact as we were. We found the great reality deep down within us. The last analysis is only there that he can be found. I took shots at the steps in my first several years. I stayed sober, truly, on a ton of 12-step work and a ton of service and 15 meetings a week my first four years. I did two inventories in those four years, but I hadn't done one out of the book. When I was four years sober, I finally started the steps out of the book.
It changed my life. But during that period of four years, I went through nine jobs. That speaks volumes of untreated alcoholism right there. I'm always the guy that's leaving. They're wrong, I'm right, but I'm leaving. Some of those places are still wrong successfully for decades now. But I'm the guy that's leaving. One of my bosses gave me a set of motivational cassette tapes by a guy named Earl Nightingale.
This has nothing to do with recovery. It's just the kind of tapes you give to an employee if you want to make him a better employee, a better team player. I listened to these cassette tapes and there was some good stuff on there. Earl started telling a story. In the story, he was talking about a guy who grew up in South Africa and inherited a ranch from his father. It was a pretty good ranch, evidently, a ranch that would have provided him and his family for generations a pretty nice living. But he inherited it at the beginning of the diamond boom in South Africa. There were stories of guys becoming Bill Gates kind of rich overnight, striking it rich with diamonds. The more he heard about their striking it rich, the more dissatisfied he became with what he had, until eventually he sold the ranch. He took all the money from the proceeds and he invested it in equipment. He went out into the bush and obsessed with finding diamonds. He never did. He died in the bush, bitter, broke, and alone. It came to pass that he had sold the ranch to these two brothers and they were developers. One day they were clearing some land and they had to move these big rocks and stuff out of the way. They found these really weird looking rocks. They didn't know what they were. They took them to a guy and the guy said, Oh my God, those are uncut diamonds.
The one diamond he brought them ended up being the largest diamond found to date in South Africa. I forget the name of it. It's an amazing diamond. They discovered that this ranch was the largest diamond deposit ever in all of Africa. These two brothers overnight are like multi-millionaires. They're bringing down diamond cutters from Belgium. They're hiring thousands of workers to dig. They're putting together a marketing company to distribute and market these diamonds all over the world. The one brother one day says to the other brother, Well, we need to name this company something. The one brother says, Yeah, let's name it after that poor son of a bitch that we bought the ranch from that died out in the bush. Wasn't his name De Beers? I'm hearing that story and I'm thinking, My God, that's me. I'm looking everywhere else and it's right here all along. I'm looking everywhere else and it's right here all along. As Chamberlain used to say, You don't understand what you're looking for, you're looking with. The great reality was deep down inside of me. I think
[00:40:03]
it's in her. I think it's in it. I think it's in that. I think it's a lot of things. The book says, In the last analysis, that means after you've looked everywhere else, in the last analysis, it is only there that he may be found. It was so with us. I'll call it synonymous. It's a journey of uncovering, discovering and discarding. It's digging for a diamond in the bottom of a dung heap by throwing away the dung and everything that's not the diamond and the diamond starts to shine. It's everything we're not. As Michelangelo was asked one time how he made the amazing statue of David and he said, Well, I took a piece of marble and I just cut away everything that wasn't David. The great reality is sought and found through self-reduction. That's why we're not promised a nearness of our Creator or that we'll even begin to have a spiritual experience after step three. You'd think it would be, but it's not. Or step two. It's not until after step five. It's in the fifth step promises that I'm promised a nearness of my Creator that I'll begin to have a spiritual experience because Bob has to get smaller for me to get closer to God. Alcoholics Anonymous is a program of self-reduction. A program of self-abandonment and ultimately of service.
Isn't it funny that what's keeping me from you and keeping me from God is me? And isn't that separation, that lonely feeling that we all seem to have, isn't it really because there's too much of me between me and you and there's too much of me between me and God and in a peculiar kind of way I am lost from myself because there's too much of me between me and me. By the time I got sober I've been listening to this chatter in my head for so long I don't even know who I am anymore. I'll tell you this quick story and I'll turn it over to Don. I heard Sandy tell this story. Sandy's been such a great part of my recovery. Sandy said he was new and he was haunted by fears and insecurities and shame and all the mistakes he's made. He just kept spinning his head about all that stuff. He didn't even want to do an inventory because he thought he'd just quantify what a piece of crap he was on paper. He went to a meeting one night and he got there early and he's sitting there and he watches a new guy come into the meeting. He can tell he's been through a lot and he's sick and his hands are shaking and he goes up and he gets a cup of coffee and he can hardly hold it and he spills some of it and Sandy's looking at him and he knows exactly how he feels. The guy sits down with his cup of coffee and he's trying to drink it and he's pathetic looking and everything in Sandy, something inside of him wanted to say, you've got to go talk to that guy. You need to go talk to that guy. And his head said, oh, I don't know, he'll think I'm, he'll literally think, he'll think I'm, maybe he'll think I'm gay or maybe he'll think I'm trying to con him or maybe, I don't want to be intrusive. And he never goes and talks to the guy and the meeting over and the guys all go home. And he goes home and he starts thinking, I should have talked to that guy. I should have talked to that guy. He can't wait for the next week to come to go to that same meeting and he gets there 15, 20 minutes earlier than normal for him and he gets there and he's waiting and he's watching that door and the guy doesn't come in. And he's sitting there and he's in despair and he's thinking, man, I should have talked to that guy. I know how he felt. I should have talked to that guy. And five minutes after the meeting starts, the guy walks in and he walks up to the coffee with a steady hand. He pours some coffee and he goes and sits down and he said, there was a little guy inside me that was jumping up and down going, yeah, yeah. And he said, that was the first time I ever really met my real self. That was the real me. Not the spinning, not all that other stuff. That was me. And Alcoholics Anonymous is going to introduce you to yourself.
Don. You've got 30 left on this disc.
[00:45:03]
No pressure. Well, it looks like you have a problem. Gee, I guess he just felt like sharing. Thanks, Bob, that was great. It was so good, I forgot I had to do this. I was like, ah, this is good. Go to bed, get a good night's sleep after this. So, a couple of thoughts. There's something I really like on page 52, and it's actually, just dropping back, talking about the unmanageability. It's probably the best definition of unmanageability in the book.
I really like this. We were having trouble with our personal relationships. We couldn't control our emotional natures. We were prey to misery and depression, and we couldn't make a living. We had a feeling of uselessness. We were full of fear. We were unhappy. We couldn't seem to be of real help to other people. These are commonly referred to as the bedevilments. You know, when you read this when you're new in the book, and you go, yeah, that's definitely how I was when I was drinking, and then this stuff starts showing up in our life in sobriety, and we start to overcome that brainwashing a little bit more, because I'm quick to admit I'm a liar, a cheat, and a thief, and I'm in a, you know, drunken state, but sober.
I'm a wonderful human being. Just ask me. Until I continue to lie, cheat, and steal in sobriety, and you start being a little bit open-minded to the idea that perhaps there's more to this than just not drinking. And one of the problems I had is, you know, if you read those bedevilments, they're about feelings. You know, this is some, I'm having trouble with my personal relationships. I feel about that.
I'm not happy in my relationships. There's trouble in there. They're not pleasurable. They're not peaceful. It's a feeling, a negative feeling that's happening. I can't control my emotional nature. You know, I'm a reactor. You know, people hold up hoops, and I leave my feet, and I'm diving through them, and I don't even realize that I've leapt. You know, I can't control myself. I can't be of real use to other people.
I'm prey to misery and depression. I don't know why. I'm just negative, you know. For years, after I got married, my wife's nickname for me was Doomsday Dawn. Just to let you know, it doesn't go away right away. But these are feelings, right? And every human being on the planet, from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed, they take a series of actions in their life. And you know what they're trying to do?
They're trying to produce feelings. Everything that we do, from the time we wake up to the time we go to bed, whether we were conscious of it or not, is we're trying to produce good feelings. Everything we do, what we choose, how we choose to recreate, what we're going to eat, what we're going to drink for our coffee drink, all these things are decisions that we enter into, going, I think this will be pleasurable.
Here's the problem with being an alcoholic. We have a much higher opinion of our ability to make ourselves happy than we're actually possessed. And if you don't believe me, I remember I showed up in an emergency room for the second time in a week, and I caught the same emergency room doctor, and I went, oh, no. And what I had done is I had cracked the other side of my head open, and he had already stitched up this side, and he saw me and goes, oh, my God, kid, what happened?
So I lied and made up this story. But if I had been honest, if I was as informed and enlightened as I am today, this is what I would have said. Well, I was just trying to make myself happy. Kind of overshot the mark a little bit on that one. But it doesn't look like that to the people around us. They see us, they go, that looks hard. And they don't understand that we're doing the best we can to be happy.
And we're doing it, you know, alcohol is our solution, not our problem. So we're drinking, we're drinking, trying to produce those good feelings, and then we get sober and we can't drink anymore. And the first thing we do is we start reaching for other things that we think we have old ideas about, maybe this will make me happy. Maybe it will be the money. Maybe it will be the girl. Maybe it will be the job.
Maybe it will be the car. Maybe it will be achievement. Maybe it will be that. You know, God forbid I'm not the one guy in AA who doesn't go back to college. You know what I mean? I'm going to go do these things. And we fail miserably. And in the second step, we really start to confront this idea, this basic idea, what if everything in my life that I would take my labeling machine at and label it as a problem, what if every single thing that I would hit as, that's a problem, turns out to be nothing more than a spiritual dilemma?
What if it's spiritual in nature? And the good news about that, if everything in my life is a spiritual dilemma, nothing more, nothing less, then everything has a spiritual solution. And what I've done is I've just simplified my problems and simplified my solution. And that's what the second step really starts to introduce to me, that I've been making much, much too hard of this thing called life
[00:50:03]
because I've been going it alone. And much like my friend Bob, I didn't have anything against God when I got here. If you had asked me, are you atheist, are you agnostic, are you a believer, I wouldn't have known what to say because it wasn't coming up in the bars I was drinking in. We weren't hammering back shots of whiskey, snorting lines off the bar and coming up going, So, what's your conception of higher power?
I mean, it just wasn't coming up. So I don't have an opinion, it's an unexamined question. And I'll tell you, I was blessed that my first sponsor, who was assigned to me, which is a whole other conversation, on my third night of recovery started talking to me about God, without my permission, as he did everything. And he said, I want to ask something of you. And I said, okay, what's that? He goes, when you go home tonight, I'd like you to get on your knees and I'd like you to thank God for keeping you sober today.
And I interrupted him and I said, well, I don't believe in God. He didn't miss a beat, he goes, that's okay, he believes in you. So when you get home tonight, I want you to get down on your knees and I want you to thank God, and I interrupt him with a little bit more force, I go, you're not listening to me. I don't believe in God. He goes, kid, you keep interrupting me, this is going to take all night.
He goes, listen, stand up. Because we're sitting at this table, I stand up. He goes, now sit down. I sit down. He goes, your knees work, you can pray. And what he was trying to get me to do was take an action. And I've got to tell you, I've had some embarrassing moments as most drunks have had in their life. But one of the most embarrassing moments that I felt the embarrassment was probably the first time I ever prayed sober in Alcoholics Anonymous.
You know, it's funny. As a drunk, I will lay in the gutter, in my own filth, and as you walk by, I have the kind of ego that I will still take your inventory. Where did you get those ugly shoes? Yet in a sober state, a sponsor who suggests that I'm going to pray, I mean, I've got the door closed, I've got the door locked, I've got the lights off. God forbid somebody sees me doing something that might benefit me.
And I'm not thinking about God. I'm not thinking about, is it true? Are we all children of a common God? Does he really care about me? No, I'm thinking things like this. Should I be dressed for this? Pressing question in my mind. I grab my sponsor the next night, I explain to him, I go, listen, man, I prayed right before. He goes, good, good. But I sleep in the nude, man, so I wasn't wearing anything.
Do you think I should be wearing clothes when I pray? He used to do this a lot early in my sobriety. He would get this weird look on his face and then he would cover his eyes. Like he was trying to make me go away. And he said, God made you. He knows everything about you. I'm sure he doesn't care. Just please don't ever talk to me about it again. And he explained to me, he said, Don, we're not asking you to be Gandhi.
Do you think by some quirk of the universe, some oversight of your keen alcoholic intellect, you overlook the possible existence of a creative intelligence, a power greater than yourself, a God of your own understanding? Well, maybe. Great, you're on the road to spirituality. And I started. And you know, it's interesting, the early part of my recovery was a conversation that I started with this God that I didn't believe in yet.
And I remember thinking, what if it's true? And I thought of God much in the same way that when I was a child, I thought of Santa Claus. You know, when I was a kid, I loved me some Santa Claus. I mean, one of the big heartbreaks of my life was when I found out Santa Claus wasn't real. Because I loved that whole idea, he's bringing me toys, he digs me, I'm going to wake up tomorrow, there's going to be new stuff here, this is awesome.
And man, I was so disappointed when I found out it wasn't true. And that's how I thought of God. It's a great story. Wouldn't it be nice if it was true? When we agnostics, it says that faced with alcoholic destruction, we soon became as open-minded on spiritual matters as we had been in regard to other things. So I've got to be open-minded. And it turns out that this desperation that I have creates enough open-mindedness that I start to take actions I don't yet believe in.
And something's happening without my permission. And Bob made the good point that it's so incremental that I don't understand it. You know, I'm a daily drunk.
[00:55:00]
I can't stay away from a drink on a daily basis. What's my first evidence of God showing up in my life? I'm just going to a thing called AA with people I don't know, listening to a language I haven't learned yet, reading a book I really don't understand with a tyrannical figure in my life I call sponsor. And nothing else has been added into my life but those things and this God I don't believe in that I'm praying to in the morning and I'm praying to at night.
And I'm having conversations in my head during the day about whether it exists or not. And you know what happened? I immediately stopped drinking whiskey. And I missed that point. And I'm going to AA every night. Two meetings a night. And I'm coming home to a house that's been devastated by the disease of alcoholism. Everybody in that house was affected by my alcoholism. And you know, I've got a sister who loves me very much.
She's one of the most important people in my life. And she's a professional. She's a child psychologist. She's very learned and has a lot of letters at the end of her name and very successful. And she has a real job, a big job. And, you know, I would go to AA and she would always be up waiting for me at the end of the night. And it wasn't early. You know what I mean? Because I'm new in AA. You know how that is where you're like, you go to two meetings a night and now the second meeting ends and it's 9.30 and you clean up and now it's 10 o'clock and you're tired and you just want to go home.
And then somebody goes, Hey, we're going out to coffee. You want to go? And you go, Coffee? Coffee sounds good. I've only had 15 cups a night. I go, Coffee sounds really good. A double espresso to really hit the spot. Hit the spot. Hit the spot. So now I'm walking in at midnight and my sister's still up. And I'm so self-obsessed and self-centered that I don't even realize that she's waiting up because she cares about me.
And she would ask me about AA and ask me about my sponsor. She loved my sponsor because I had one of those mean sponsors. And he wasn't mean, actually. What it was is he was the first man in probably 10 years to have the audacity to very calmly point out the truth to me. And it made him feel mean because I am a guy that I use my size and I use my bullied him and a lot of things to create an environment where you won't tell me the truth.
You'll stick your toe in that water one time and then I'll make you wish you had never done it. You'll never tell me the truth again as you see it. And suddenly I've got a guy who's not impressed with my tough guy-ism. He's not impressed with my street cred. And he's willing to tell me the truth because he cares more about my life than I do. And it felt like he was mean to me. And I would come home and I would tell my sister what my sponsor had said to me.
And the meaner he was, the happier she was. Oh, he called you a little boy in a man's body? Oh, that's great. What else did he say? And she'd get all excited. And she'd ask me about AA and I'd tell her what we were reading and I'd tell her what my sponsor had me doing. And she was encouraging. And I told her about Alcoholics Anonymous in Southern California. I told her, you know, if you get sober and you're lucky enough to stay sober 30 days, they give you a little token they call the chip.
It's just a colored hunk of aluminum. And then if you do it again, it's 60 days, 90 days, 6 months and 9 months, you'll get a token. And if you're lucky enough to stay sober for an entire year, they'll bake you a cake. And they'll put a candle in it, light the candle and sing happy birthday to you. It's the dumbest thing you've ever seen. Until it happens to you and then it's kind of cool. And so I'm telling my sister all that stuff, you know, and I come up on 30 days in Alcoholics Anonymous and all I've been doing is going to two meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous at night.
I'm hanging out at the clubhouse. I'm being a service because my sponsor told me to do that. I'm praying in the morning. I'm praying at night. And in my opinion, nothing's changed. I can't sleep at night. I'm thinking about how horrible my life is and I'm completely missing the fact that I'm not drinking and I've got this whole new experience happening in my life. And I show up at the clubhouse and the day I turn 30 days sober and I walk into the first meeting and they're all grinning at me, you know.
And at that moment I realized they were counting days with me. And I get up and I take a coin for 30 days and everybody applauds, you know, and I can't let you see how much it means to me. And I take that little hunk of colored aluminum and I hold it between my thumb and forefinger and I put my hand in my pocket and I can't let go of it. And I can't understand why it means so much to me because I've done some things and I've been some places and I've accomplished some things in my life but this colored hunk of aluminum means more to me in that moment than anything that's ever happened.
And I'm afraid to let you see it, you know, and I'm tearing up and I'm fighting back the tears because I don't want you to know how much it means to me. I can't let you see how afraid I am to hope that maybe I found something. And my sponsor gives me a ride home that night and he drops me off. And my sponsor gives me a ride home that night and he drops me off and says something spiritual like, do it again, and I walk into a house that's been devastated by the disease of alcoholism,
[01:00:00]
and I close the door and I turn around and my sister comes around the corner and she's got a cupcake and a candle and the candle's lit, and she sings Happy Birthday to me, and I blow out the candle and she says, you know my brother, I know you don't get a real cake until you're sober, but for you, 30 days is like a year, and I'm so proud of you. And we held each other and we cried and I didn't really realize what had happened until many years later and how God was showing up in my life long before I realized he was.
That you know, my family was so destroyed by the disease of alcoholism and without my permission, God started showing up in my house. You know, this is a family that never went to Al-Anon, never attended a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, didn't read any AA literature, didn't read any Al-Anon literature, yet there was something that happened to me when I was with you and that loving God that you believed in so strongly somehow attached himself to me, and when I went into that home, he came with me. You know, there's a part in the book, in A Vision for You, that says that when a new man or woman comes to Alcoholics Anonymous, there's something about the atmosphere of the place, the electricity in the air, the light in the eyes of the people that conspire to let the sufferer know that maybe they found safe haven at last. And I'm of the belief that when we come to Alcoholics Anonymous and we get a sponsor and we start taking the simple actions dictated here, we're actually trying, we're making an effort that God shows up in our life and he attaches himself to us and he returns with us to our respective homes, occupations, and affairs and he lets those sufferers know that maybe they found safe haven at last. And the very first thing that Alcoholics Anonymous gave back to me and gave back to my family was the very last thing that my disease took from me. Because you know, until the very end, I could drink for oblivion and for a couple hours a night, my drinking would produce a feeling in me that vaguely resembled hope. And what is hope?
Hope's that it's going to get better, although you have no evidence to prove it. I would drink whiskey as I approached oblivion and a blackout and I would think tomorrow, tomorrow I'll get caught up at work, tomorrow I'll call my mom and make arrangements to pay that money back, tomorrow I'll call her and I'll say I'm sorry, tomorrow I'll get in touch with the IRS. You know, when I'm drunk on the couch, I can always imagine a sober life and a better dawn.
And at the end, I wasn't getting that click. I wasn't even getting that false hope. The last thing my disease took from me was that false hope. And the very first thing Alcoholics Anonymous gave back to me and to my family was a feeling of hope. I would sit in meetings with you with my life in tatters, hopelessly in debt, unemployed, physically sick, dying from the disease of alcoholism. Yet when I was with you for a couple hours a night, I had a feeling that vaguely resembled hope. I didn't know why I was better with you. I didn't know why I dared to hope, why I dared to believe that maybe I found something here, maybe it would work for me.
And I didn't realize the key ingredient that I brought into that equation was this and nothing less. I was seeking. You know, I think we get confused in the steps about our relationship with God that we think the power is in knowing and believing. And for me, God is a result. You know, I always feel closer to God after I've done what I think he would have me do, not before. I always feel closer to God after I seek, not because of my belief. And my sponsor, in a gentle way, got me to start seeking God. He told me early on, thinking about God is a form of prayer. That helped me a lot because I was thinking about God all the time. But I'll tell you, you can lose that wonder and you can lose that childlike discovery of finding out that it's true. That moment you realize that something is happening and God's doing for you what you can't do for yourself. And that can go away. And I remember I was about 15 years sober and I'm in a meeting, no particular meeting, just one of those AA clubhouse discussion meetings. I was just catching a meeting and a lot of new people in the room, probably 80%, 90% of the people in the room are new. So the chairperson is calling like new person after new person. He calls on this one guy and this guy comes up and, you know, he starts sharing. He goes, well, you know, I left the halfway house this morning, you know, and I'm walking, I'm walking, I'm thinking how I'm broke, I got no money, I got no job, I got no prospects. You know, and I smoke and I'm thinking it's going to be a long day with no cigarettes and I'm going to have to bum cigarettes and that makes me feel bad about myself. And I'm going and I turn the corner and there's a $10 bill just sitting there on the ground. I couldn't believe it. I picked up that $10 bill, went around the corner, I bought two pack of smokes. It was a real God shot. And I'm thinking God shot, what are you talking about?
What a goof, you know? And then the next guy comes up and another new guy and he's going, you know, I left the halfway house this morning, you know, and I've been really down lately because, you know, I'm in this halfway house. I burned my life to the ground and, you know, I come from
[01:05:01]
another state and I found out my grandfather had died, as I told you guys a couple of weeks ago, and I couldn't make the funeral. I couldn't do any of that. And, you know, I feel so bad. I feel like I let my grandfather down, you know, and I'm walking along, you know, and as I'm walking along, I'm looking up at the sky and I'm thinking about my grandfather and this beautiful hawk flies right in front of me. And I remembered that the hawk was my grandfather's favorite bird.
And I thought to myself, that's my grandfather. And I knew that my grandfather approved of what I was doing. I got to tell you, it was a real God shot. And I'm thinking, Jesus, now we're seeing grandfathers and hawks. And I'm thinking, God, we're so goofy when we're in AA. We're so goofy when we're new. A little voice in my head says, hey Don, when was the last time you had a God shot? I sat back and I thought about it. I couldn't remember. I mean, I knew my life was great.
I was 15 years sober. I had a good relationship with God. Things were going swimmingly. But I couldn't remember the last time something got my attention. I went, oh God. And I started to think about it. It got under my skin. It got in my brain. And I was like, what are they doing that I'm not doing? What are they doing that I'm not doing? And then it hit me. They're looking. Because they're living in a halfway house and their life is burned to the ground. And they don't know if it works. They don't know if it's real.
They don't know if God's there. And they're just starting off like I did when I started off. And I remember walking to that clubhouse or my sister's house looking for evidence of God every step of the way and finding it. They were looking for God and they were finding him because they were seeking. And I wondered how much I was missing. How many times that God was right next to me dropping the breadcrumbs right in front of me and I wasn't missing it because I had just calmly told myself, I know, I believe. And I was missing the beauty of the seeking.
And at 15 years sober, I made a commitment to myself that I keep my eyes open. As I go through the world, if I'm driving in traffic, I look for the beauty. I look for the evidence of God. I look for it in people's eyes. I look for it in the way they treat each other. I look for it in what happens in my life. I look for it in nature. I look for it everywhere. And I got to tell you, I find God all over the place every day of my life. But it's only because I seek.
And I think the second step is really about seeking. And it's really about that wonderful spiritual sandbox we get to get into and we get to play. You know, on our format here, there are a couple of things I really like. It says, where am I still agnostic? Well, every time I'm scared. Where am I still agnostic? Every time I'm scared. I believe there's a God, I just don't believe he's there for me. I believe there's a God, but this is too big for him.
This is too big for him. Where am I really believe there's a God big enough or willing to handle the stuff I do? Usually fear, you know, Bob read the beautiful part about deep down inside every man, woman, and child is the fundamental idea of God. It may be obscured by pomp, by circumstance, by calamity, by worship of other things, but in the final analysis, it's only there they can be found. Well, that calamity is another word for fear, you know, and the calamity, by the way, is not outside of myself. It took me a long time to realize this. I'll jump ahead, you know, in the fear inventory, it says there's a, there's almost a mathematical formula and it says just to the extent that I trust and humbly rely on him, does he enable me to match calamity with serenity? I remember my sponsor going, what do you think the calamity is? I go, the warrants for my arrest, the 80 grand I owe the IRS, the fact I'm living at my sister's house, I don't have a car. He goes, no, the calamity is that feeling three inches behind your belly button you walk around with all day long. And today the calamity is always located there. You know, it's a funny thing, and I don't think I'm unique as an alcoholic. When I'm uncomfortable in here, the first thing I do is look out there for what the source is. I never look within, you know, the more uncomfortable I get, the harder I look. And you know where I usually look? The things that are closest to me, my job, my marriage, my friends, my home group, the town I live in, you know, the things that are closest to me suddenly become the problem. There's a, there's a term for that. It's called when your blessings become burdens. And when your blessings become burdens, it's very hard to be talked out of it. And it usually comes because of what? A spiritual deficiency, a spiritual dilemma. So where are the areas of my life that I don't think God is big enough?
You know, I'd love to say that when I'm confronted with calamity, that my initial default setting is to turn to God, to lean into God. I don't. My undirected, unsponsored default setting is to lean into self, to lean into fear, to feel like it's my job to figure
[01:10:00]
it out and to fix it. And what I move away from is this idea that everything that's happening is happening exactly as it's supposed to happen. You know, I'm good when the road is straight and I can see way down the road. But when the road starts to get a little windy and I can't see around the bends, that's when my faith starts to chatter a little bit. I can feel myself getting a little bit shaky. And that's the times that I have to remember one of the most important facts. And I'll tell you, it's a fact for everybody in this room tonight. Nobody can deny this. It's important that we know this and we cling to it. Up to this very moment, we've all made it. Let that sink in.
That means in spite of all of the fear you've had your entire life, you're still here tonight. So what we really have as individuals is a stockpile, plethora of information that tells us that most of our fear isn't real and is unjustified. But God adhores a vacuum. I cannot remove my fear without replacing it in faith. So the simple question I start to develop in the second step is a simple idea. I ask myself a question when I have that emotional disturbance.
I have a choice which way I turn in this moment. Do I turn to fear or do I turn to faith? And that's it. It's a very simple question. And most of us are able to answer it by saying, I prefer to turn to faith. And that means that we've made a decision. And the decision is always followed by action. And so I go back to the simple actions I was taught when I was brand new at Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't have to learn anything more. I don't have to become more spiritual. I can remember to pray when in doubt. I can remember to talk to another alcoholic.
I can remember to not keep secrets. I can remember to stay teachable. And I can take these things and practice them as a way of life. And as I do it, it seems that when I talk to another alcoholic about these things, there's a light between us that shrinks my fear. It seems that my fear is the strongest in the dark, in the quiet of my mind, where nobody else knows what I'm thinking and what I'm feeling, where my ego gets in there and says, you've been sober too long to feel this way. You've been sober too long for this to be happening. This shouldn't be here. And I think it's my job to fix it. But the minute I'm willing to be humble enough to tell somebody I'm afraid, not concerned, not worried, I am afraid. Plain English language, where I start calling things exactly as they are. I've never had anybody say to me, an alcoholic synonymous, my God, Don, you're 26 years sober. Get over yourself. What the hell's wrong with you? Say a prayer. Leave me alone. Everybody goes, I know, buddy, we all get that way sometimes. Let's talk about it. And the minute that light comes between two alcoholics, my fear starts to shrink. And this is, you know, and here's another thing I want to say this, and then I'm going to stop.
I couldn't figure out for years why I felt better every time I went to a meeting. I'm an information guy. I want to know, you know, I wish I wasn't like this. You know, I'm the kind of guy, like, I'll be drowning in the ocean and you'll throw me a life preserver, and I might fling it back at you and say, wrong color, you know, and you'll say, you're drowning. And I'll say, yeah, but I want to know why I'm drowning. You know, I just, I have this desire for information and it doesn't serve me well. I'll be really honest with that. And I wanted to know, instead of just being happy that I feel better after a meeting, I couldn't figure it out.
I'd go to a meeting, man, and the world's hanging all over me. You know, I got all these problems on my mind. I'm crazy. You know, I walk out of the same meeting, it's an hour later, all that stuff is still there. It's still there. My attitude about it's completely changed. Nobody said a damn thing in the meeting about my problems. I didn't get any answers, any solutions, yet I'm thinking about the business problem, the marriage problem, the money problem, whatever it was that night, and I'm like, yeah, you know what, probably work out. The emotion's gone. And I figured out there's two things that happen that allow that. One, when I go to a meeting, if nothing else, at a minimum, it's a wedge between my constant thought of self. It forces me to just take a little vacation from Donnyville.
You know what I mean? Greatest vacation I ever can take is an hour with you not thinking about me. You know? But that's not the power. If inside every man, woman, and child is the fundamental idea of God, and as Bob said, Chuck Chamberlain said, what you're living It's already here. That means I've got that divine spark within me, which means you have that divine spark within you. You see, when I'm alone in my truck and I'm driving along, I've just got my spark.
[01:15:00]
When I'm sitting at my house and I'm thinking about my life, I've just got my divine spark. When I'm moving through the world among strangers and I'm not really connected to anybody and I'm just in my business life, I've just got my divine spark. But when I'm with you, you all brought your spark to the meeting too. And I'm sitting there on Wednesday night at my home group, my men's group, and there's 80 guys in there.
There's 80 divine sparks in that room, not just mine. And I was wondering why I felt better when I left after being with you. Because I didn't just bathe in the glow of my own conscious contact, I got to bathe in the glow of yours. And I think that's why we're better when we're together. Because the more of us there are, the more God there is. And I'll tell you, you mentioned George Bernard Shaw, who's also one of my favorite writers.
And I'll close with my favorite George Bernard Shaw quote. George Bernard Shaw said, this is the true joy in life. Being used for a purpose, recognized by yourself as a mighty one. To being thoroughly worn out before you're thrown on the scrap heap. To being a force of nature rather than a selfish little clod of grievances and ailments complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
Good night. Thank you.