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Source: Dr. Jim R. – The Twelve Steps at Starlite Clinic (February 28, 1965).mp3 File: jim-r-twelve-steps-starlite-clinic-1965-02-28.mp3 Duration: 00:56:29
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This is a regular clinic open meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, Sunday, January—February 28th, 1965. This is the regular meeting we have at Starlight Clinic on Sundays. We indulge ourselves up here in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous because, as I've said many times, that although it's not the only way a person can get sober and stay sober happily, it has provided me with more examples of successful, happy sobriety than any other method of recovery.
And, of course, if one occurs, or if in time there happens to develop a method of treatment of alcoholism and drug addiction which is more successful, proven to be more successful by known results, I certainly will observe it closely and probably adopt it. But as of today, it has furnished me with more positive evidence of recovery than any other method of treatment. And, of course, Starlight Clinic is not affiliated with AA, except that we strongly recommend the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and the philosophy of life which is imbued in its principles to those who wish to start a new life, to accept the past and begin a new life.
And I can prove to you through myself and through others that one may have two lives for the price of one and that one can be happy without the use of any chemical that influences the higher centers of the brain. The use of drugs, and I'm including alcohol because alcohol is a drug, the use of drugs that influence my brain, and the influence is shown by a lowering of my sense of moral responsibility, the use of drugs by me to get along in the world didn't start when I began to drink.
Now it did in some of our members. They did say that the first drink they took, it gave them something they needed or wanted. But I don't think I felt that I gained anything from my early years of drinking because my early years of drinking were purely when we'd have a fraternity dance and I'd drink. And then I did go to quite a number of fraternity dances and not get drunk and drink when I was in college, medical school.
And a few times after I got out I'd go to places and have a few drinks and come home after that without a craving for additional liquor. But the use of drugs, and this includes alcohol for me, narcotics, tranquilizers, sedatives, amphetamines, pep pills, the use of drugs to ameliorate my existence on Earth became more pronounced as the years passed. And I started using them for very peculiar excuses, and if I didn't have an excuse I would rationalize or imagine an excuse to use this brain anesthetic, or one of the brain anesthetics.
For 16 years I didn't go to bed without sleeping pills or alcohol or both. And usually I took enough of them to give me partial oblivion from the chemical action of the drug on the brain. Now I long ago realized that sleep gain from chemicals that acted on my brain did not give me that feeling of well-being when I awaked. It doesn't matter whether it's a non-habit-forming drug with quotes around the non-habit-forming, or whether it was getting drunk and passing out, or whether it was taking a shot of Demerol or dope, or whether it was taking barbiturates or what.
I never felt real happy. And I never did get up and look forward to the new day as I look back. And of course to anyone to suggest in those early days that my life was unmanageable would have been ridiculous because I was successful and making a lot of money. And I was well thought of and envied probably by many of the shallow thinkers that surrounded me.
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They thought because I made $1,500 or $2,000 a week and that because I could do difficult surgery that I was to be envied. But inside of me I knew that there was something lacking, that my life was not what I would like it to be. Now what would I like my life to be like? What do I want it to be like now? I want it to be so I don't have guilt over yesterday. And I don't have fear about tomorrow. And that I, even though I have adversities and setbacks today, that I can adjust in such a way that I will cause the least damage to myself and others in taking care of these daily problems.
Now, as I've said before, anthropologists will tell you that the one way that you'll never learn to adjust is by using any drug that influences the brain. You do not adjust unless you feel pain. Our whole process of growing up is an adjustment to pain and pleasure. When we were little babies we first learned that a wet diaper causes pain. The nerves to the little baby's bladder are not completely formed and not in connection with the central nervous system enough for the first few months.
But this is not the whole story. The whole story is that they learn what is painful and they learn what is pleasant. And the first times we begin to eat, we cry when we are hungry. The little baby cries when his stomach's empty and he has hunger pains. These are real pains. And they can measure the increased contractions of the stomach in these very young babies. So our whole life, and when we do something wrong, we're a little older, we've got a spot on the bottom for it.
And we're praised when we do something nice, and that makes us feel pleasure. So everything in life is based on adjustment to pain and pleasure, sensations. Now, the human animal is the only one that acts and thinks different from what he is. We're the only animal, if you care to call a human an animal, and we are in some areas, except we have a conscience. And this, of course, is why we shouldn't deaden our brains.
Because any tranquilizer, any sedative, any chemical that acts on the brain deadens that part of us to some degree that differentiates us from the lower kingdom. Now, we have emerged to a point in anthropology and in civilization where we have an imagination and we have our centers, and we can, by thought processes, we can judge effect, cause and effect. We can judge how much will this cause us to have pain if we do it.
We have a choice on our actions. If we do something that's wrong, we know our conscience will hurt, and we might hurt in other ways when we're found out. So every action we have, we have a certain amount of judgment we can use in it, whether it's in writing a prescription or doing an operation or talking to a patient or spending money or withholding money or the way I brush my teeth or the way I neglect to brush my teeth or establishing eating habits and bathroom habits that are healthy or unhealthy.
Everything we do, we have a choice. And then we make the choice, and then through repetition we develop habits. Now, all of our life is composed of habit response to pain and pleasure development. The way I put on my shoes every day is habit forming. There's nothing more ridiculous than these ads that say, take [unclear], it's non-habit forming. Everything you do is habit forming. The way you brush your teeth, the way you put on your shoes, everybody here probably goes about putting on their shoes and socks a little differently or stockings.
So we are creatures of habit, and our habits in the past were based on pain and pleasure responses. Now we have found a chemical, it's brain anesthetic. Now whether this is alcohol or Librium or Equinil or morphine or amphetamine or what, it's immaterial.
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All of these drugs perform their action by changing the chemical composition of brain cells. The great argument for tranquilizers was that it acted on the brain cells that connected the higher cortex with the hypothalamic area, the more primitive parts of the brain. Well, so what? It has to change the chemistry of those nerve cells to retard transmission of conscience and expectation that are harbored up here in the frontal parietal areas down to the PBX board, which is the hypothalamic primitive areas.
It has to change the relaying of these impulses or it won't relieve your anxiety. Now alcohol and ether and morphine and Demerol, [unclear] and [unclear] and I can sit here and name 500 drugs. They work on that area. Amphetamines, the pep drugs also, they don't stimulate these brain cells. They change the chemical composition and they change it and it prevents the relaying of the feeling of fatigue to the center of the brain.
So you have fatigue but you don't feel it because the transmission of the fatigue has been delayed to the fatigue centers of the brain. Now here we are, supposedly intelligent people that are beginning to use chemicals to try to adjust to life. And going back to anthropology, the only way we make any progress is by meeting pain and meeting problems of adjustment and bending and twisting and making adjustments to our environment, whether it be mental environment or physical environment.
Furthermore, I have been astounded and appalled at my own profession and its indiscriminate prescribing of these drugs. Of course I'm biased because up here I've seen several hundreds of people who have become addicted to Librium and Equinil and Miltown and Valium and all of them, they're all the same. And I've seen in my practice, if we have four people, four daughters and their mother dies, the three who get along pretty good and do the best they can on their own resources will cry a little but they will be fairly sedate.
But the one who's been taking two or three Equinils a day will go into hysteria every time. If I have a tragedy in a family, I can always pick out a person if they just go become hysterical. Now these people aren't alcoholics, they're not dope fiends, but they've used a chemical to deaden their brain so they can get through life. But the thing is that this chemical doesn't allow them to learn. It makes them become more dependent and less adaptable.
And of course as time goes on, that way your nervous system deteriorates. And in my opinion, it's always destructive to anyone who's not psychotic to use any drug that influences the higher centers. But in my case, I didn't believe that. I believed the advertisements and the articles printed in medical literature. Therefore, for many years I got worse, and of course most of you know my story. Now of course, in our first step, on Sunday we usually discuss the 12 steps that are suggested as a basis for a philosophy of life for a person who's had a drug addiction.
And drug addiction includes alcoholism because alcohol is a drug and if you've got to have it to get through life, you're addicted to it. The first step is to admit we're powerless over alcohol and other drugs and our life became unmanageable. Well, of course there's no problem about being powerless over a brain anesthetic. It wouldn't require anybody here would not hesitate to say, well, I'm powerless over ether if I have too much of it.
And ether and alcohol are very similar drugs. They have a similar formula, they have an identical action, and the only real difference is that ether is more volatile. It has a lower boiling point and its action is more swift and the release and its vaporization and its detoxification are more swift than alcohol. But there's no more commendable about a man being a two-bottle-a-day man than is a man being a two can of ether a day, man.
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That doesn't mean he's more, he's got hair on his chest because he sniffed two cans of ether a day. Yet, yet how ridiculous some of the things I heard in the [unclear] house about a gentleman holding his liquor. Now how stupid can we get? And yet we would have been laughed out of the place if we'd said, well, a gentleman can hold his ether. But you see how stupid that I was. Here I was an M.D. and I'd had seven years of college and I'd been an intern, a resident, five more years.
And I was, I thought I was smart. Well, I knew nothing. I had, I had been misinformed, might I say. Not only by, of course, in the medical school, [unclear] Pharmacopeia says that alcohol is a brain, is an anesthetic. It comes under the list of drugs that are under the anesthetic group. The same as chloroform and ether. Alcohol is listed in the same category in [unclear] Pharmacopeia. But of course, I'll let that knowledge be submerged under all this social gobbledygook about a gentleman handling his liquor and so forth.
Well, be that as it may, I had no trouble when I found out that I had to, that a little drinking wouldn't satisfy me, that I had to get drunk before I had any fun. Then I realized that when I started drinking, I wouldn't stop until I got drunk. That is when I realized I was powerless over alcohol. Now, I didn't realize, I didn't admit that my life was unmanageable for ten years after I started an AA and started going to hospitals for treatment.
It took a lot. I was rather immature. I had to be arrested several times. I had to go to forty-some odd hospitals a hundred and something times. I had to make hundreds of attempts to do, live without a brain anesthetic. I had to lose my license to practice medicine. I had to lose all my money, my family, my friends, and everything. And finally, after I was totally disgraced and dishonored by my profession and in the eyes of the people of this state, I admitted that my life was unmanageable.
Now, that didn't take much intelligence when I had been publicly disgraced to say that I hadn't done so well. So finally, after I took the first part of the first step, I was powerless over alcohol probably in 1947, the first time I went to AA. Ten years later, after losing everything I had, my reputation, money, family, everything, then I finally was forced to admit my life was unmanageable. Now, of course, we have had four hundred and something admissions up here, and I'd say half of them have been mature enough.
Now, this is a degree of maturity. If you're really immature, you're going to have to go through the hell that I did to get well. If you are mature, more mature, you don't have to go through so much hell. If you're fairly mature, a little bit of pain will be all you need before you say, well, I'll accept this and start over. Now, it's been demonstrated up here many times that intellect and maturity have nothing in common.
You can have an IQ of 170 or 80, and above that's not measurable, and you can have the maturity of a five-year-old child. In fact, some people with very high intellects are very immature, as we all know. And, of course, maturity is what is necessary for what I call wisdom. Wisdom is how to get along in the circumstance we're in on this earth the best we can, and in such a way we'll have some peace of mind.
So we can have a high IQ, we can have a lot of college degrees, we can have 50 million dollars, we can have unlimited power, and we can still have no wisdom. Because we haven't learned how to adjust to this world we live in in such a way that we have peace of mind. Now, the wonderful thing that occurred to me was I found that a person could have a new life. You could have two lives for the price of one.
One could accept all the disgrace and the problems and the disadvantages that you've brought on yourself. You could accept that and start a new life. Now, I found this to be true. In my case, I've seen it true in many others. Now, it isn't going to be easy because we've had 30, 20, 30, 40, 50 years of habit pattern behind us.
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Just because you realize intellectually that you don't have to care what other people say about you doesn't mean you're not going to care what other people say about you. We know that the road to serenity is for one to be so secure that you don't worry about the other person's opinion. We know that a truly secure person only has to worry about their own opinion of themselves and what God thinks of them.
Now, of course, I had a lot of trouble there about this God business. The second step is came to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity. Well, having been to Menninger's and Merrill's and Hopkins and Anna Freud's place in London and having been to John Seeley three times and been to, of course, I went to [unclear] two or three times and I went to Beverly Hills and I went to a place out of New Orleans.
I went to Shepherd's out of Shreveport. I was at Tracy Farms in New York and then I went to a private hospital there, Towns, in New York. And I was at Shepherd, Pratt & Towson and I was at Merrill's for six weeks and nine months at Menninger Clinic. And then I finally realized that every place I went I got worse. And then I was able to take the second step because I said, if something power greater than myself don't restore me to sanity, I've got no chance because I've tried all scientific methods known to mankind and they had made me worse.
So I had gotten worse and worse and worse. Now, I didn't know what, I had a very, I developed a very healthy curiosity. I said, well, I don't know if there is a God. Of course, I'd been raised to believe there was a God, that I'd been raised to believe as a Christian. But you know, I had disregarded this probably partly because I hadn't acted as I knew a Christian should act. So I had said, well, I don't know if there is a God.
I think in my heart I knew, but the first year I had a healthy curiosity. I said, well, if there is a God up there, there already is, and if I report for duty every day sober and if I'm patient, I wonder what he's going to do for me. And I gradually over the period of seven years have come to believe that this power greater than myself did give me back a degree of sanity. And he certainly has given me happiness and peace of mind.
Now, you see, this second step, the first step and the second step, I was forced. No intellect had anything to do with it. I mean, my college education was actually a barrier. My scientific education was a barrier to my accepting these two steps. Of course, when you give up and say science can't cure you, then you've got to say, well, whatever God and whatever he is, I'll turn my life and my will over to you.
Well, of course, I'm like all humans. I'll turn it over to him when I'm in trouble and when I get on the easy street, I grab it back again. And I imagine, as I've said before, I think God gets a big kick out of me. I think he gets very amused at me, Jim R. So why am I twisting and turning and trying to avoid coming face to face with what's wrong, what isn't wrong? Because I can rationalize and twist and distort the truth still.
But when I got out and when I was down and out and had no one else to turn to, I said, well, I'll report for duty every day, do the best I can and try not to harm anyone and see what God will do for me. The fourth step is to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself. Well, the word moral comes, is closely allied with the word mores. Mores means the customs and the manners of the society we live in.
Now, of course, moral has the connotation of religion because, you know, religion is based upon the idea of one human helping another human. So you can see the connotation of mores and morals. But mores are the customs and the manner of living of our society. Mores is the Latin word which means that. So to take a view of Jim R. relative to himself, to God, and to the people he lived with is what I consider for me a moral inventory of myself.
Now, of course, it's very simple. If I do something and it doesn't worry me, then it's probably all right since I've demonstrated without doubt that I have a conscience. All of you people who've had a drinking problem have a conscience. Our wives don't think we have sometimes, but we do have a conscience.
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If we were psychopathic and if we had no conscience, there would be no need to run away from ourselves with a bottle. So we have a very tender conscience, even though we don't like to admit it many times. So having a conscience, then, we realize that if we do something wrong, it's going to worry us, it'll hurt us in here, and we will feel badly. And we know, I think I know when I do something right or wrong.
I really believe that. Now, I don't always tell the truth about it, but I think I always know in my heart when something's right or wrong. The fifth step is admit to God, myself, and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. Now, this step, I think, requires a lot of time for most of us. It does for me. I'm still taking these steps, at least all but the first step, and I'm still taking most of them every day, and have for seven and a half years.
I don't think I've become a better man. Very little difference now than when I was a bum, except I'm not drinking and not using dope. But you know, for some reason, I have been granted the grace of God to such an extent that I have peace of mind. Now, this truly is the grace of God. When a person who for 16 years didn't go to sleep without being drugged, a person who, despite every advantage in the world, destroyed himself and everybody else he became attached to, to some degree, when he's suddenly been able to go to bed and sleep well and not fear the future and not worry about the past, I think that is a gift that I've been given from my higher power, and I think the gift was given not because I've accomplished anything towards being a good man, but simply because I've reported for duty every day and made a daily effort to be better.
Now, relative to telling to God, I've always felt that that was, for me it wasn't too necessary because wherever God is, he knows all my faults, and as I say, I think he's very amused at Jim R. most of the time. He knows that there's no good humans on earth. He wouldn't have needed, Christ wouldn't have needed to come down here if we'd have been good people. He came down here for us sinners. So there's no good people on earth, and this is, if you're human, you're not good.
You're just trying to be, trying to be better. These things that I'm saying are my opinion, and if you disagree, that's all right. You probably should disagree in some areas. But I didn't have to worry about telling God about my nature of my wrongs. Now, to tell myself, I found that if I told myself out loud, that I did a lot better than when I just thought about my character defects. For instance, it's all right if my heart says, well, you've been selfish.
But you know, it helps me a lot more if I go to the mirror and whisper, Jim, you've been selfish. Now, maybe it won't be that way for you, but it is for me, that I can think of something and it doesn't do me as much good as if I verbalize it, look in the mirror and say, Jim, you're being impatient or you're being selfish. Now, I don't do this all the time, but I do it sometimes, and I realize all the times that I should do it.
Now, admitting to another human being the exact nature of their wrongs, well, I think these things in my case, I think in my case that I have become rather general in the nature of my wrongs. I say you've been impatient or you've been intolerant or you've been untrusting or you've been cynical or you've been resentful. Now, these basic things I admit now. You know, I had a woman in the Presbyterian Church at [unclear] told me, she says, I don't see what difference between AA and our churches, and I said, we get up and admit we're sinners.
I said, well, do you go into detail? Oh, no, no, that's enough, just say we're sinners. I said, well, that's like saying I drink water. It's not admitting any more than say you're human, say you're sinner. I said, do you ever get up and tell the people in the Presbyterian Church there that you're envious of Mrs. J's new Cadillac or you're envious of Mrs. B's husband being better looking and making more money than yours or the time that you have lied and cheated somebody for perhaps to get a better place at the table at the D.A.R. convention or something, I don't know, but I'm just using…
[00:30:00]
But I say, have you ever been specific [unclear] into your group? I said, now if you'll do that, then you're approaching the open confession that the church, the Christian church, had the first 400 years of existence. The first 400 years of the Christian religion, all confession was public, you see. You got up and talked about lusting after your brother's wife, and you got up and talked about cheating someone.
And in the first 400 years, there was more Christianity practiced and pressed, read and taught, than there has been the last 1,500, in my opinion, and in theologians' opinions. But after 400 years, they figured out how they could make money, and so they made confession private, so they could sell penance. Now this is before there was a Catholic church or a Baptist church or an Episcopal church. This was when there was one church, the one church, and they found they could make money.
And this is in the, this is true. They could make money by selling penance, and therefore confession became private. Now, if you've ever read this book, The New Group Therapy, you will be able to, it quotes the statistics on this, and you'll be able to see that this weakness that our churches and also our psychiatry and everything else has been unable to cure emotional and mental illness. This is why we have more mental illness, more emotional illness, more delinquency, more crime, more disastrous wars than we've ever had, because we are afraid of each other.
We're afraid to let our fellow humans know what we are in public. We have grown to worship images. Everybody in the world has gotten so they worship the image that they present to the public world. We have not, we have been too afraid to describe ourselves in honest terms for what we were. I've said this half a dozen times lately, but we all know that a newlywed couple know less about each other than anyone in the world, because the man projects an image to his fiancée that he thinks she would like to see, and the girl projects an image to her intended husband of what she thinks he would like to see.
Now, both of these images are a long ways from what the persons are. I project an image to my patients that is not honest with what I really am. Now, the image I project to my patients is more honest what I am than most people project, I think, because I have never failed to tell them all that I'm a dope, ex-dope fiend, jailbird, and everything else. All my patients say, it doesn't make any difference, but I know that this is the only way I can show that I have any religion.
If you're afraid to trust God, then you're going to be scared to death of what people say. It's ridiculous. I get very amused at ministers, and I've talked to a lot of them, of all denominations, and priests, and ministers, and whatnot. And they're so afraid something will come out because of what their congregation will think, or it'll hurt the image of the Church. I said, look, you're not supposed to worry about what anybody thinks about you but God, if you have any religion at all.
Now, I said, now, you're human enough, so you're not going to, you're going to be like me. You haven't got that kind of courage. You see, you haven't got the courage to trust in God that completely. You trust a little bit, but you're not going to turn the whole business over to it. But I said, the thing is that we must realize the truth and try to do better. We can't have this courage. We can't be our honest selves, but we can realize the truth and work towards it slowly and patiently and gradually.
It's just like trying to be good. You know, I've many times said that I couldn't try to be good because I'd try it and I wasn't good and I was frustrated, and then I'd get in a turmoil. So I quit trying to be good. I just try to be better every day, and I must do that each morning. Now, as I said before, I've made little or no progress, in my opinion. I'm not a better man. In fact, in some areas, perhaps I'm worse than I was.
But apparently I have made enough effort so that I have been rewarded with a peace of mind and a happiness that I never had before.
[00:35:06]
Now, even despite my failure, apparently I've come to believe that God rewards us not for any accomplishment. He rewards us for effort. And I think this is what we should strive for. We should quit striving for accomplishments in changing our personalities. We should quit trying to change our characteristics and our personalities as an accomplishment. We should work on this as an effort. We should put forth a persistent effort to be better.
And I think if we do that, we will receive what I think is the grace of God, and that is peace of mind and contentment. Now, I have problems, but of course all humans have problems. All God's children got problems. But you know, I don't have to use a brain [unclear] to face my problems. I can mold myself and adapt myself and humble myself and force myself to be patient until the problem solves itself.
Now, that's a lot of difference between taking a chemical that made believe the problem wasn't there. You see, there's a great deal of difference to being humble and falling to your knees and asking for help and taking a liquid or a pill that made a distortion of reality and created a fantasy of something that wasn't there. Now, granted, it's a little more painful. The moment of adaptation is a little more painful, is more painful than just deadening your brain.
But you know, we agreed the other day that the mature person took a long view of things. And when we act immaturely, we take a short view. How many of you have said, well, I'm going to, I don't care, I'm going to get drunk no matter what the consequence. I'm going to have this party, I don't care if it does upset everybody. I've said that many a time. See, I've taken a short view. The thing for me to do is to grow up enough to take the long view.
Say, well, now, will the pleasure overweigh the eventual trouble that will come from this action? Now, that's real maturity when you get so you can weigh, take the long view and weigh the pleasure here and the pain here. And if the pain weighs way down here and the pleasure just gives a little weight up here, then you don't pick the pleasure. You take a long view. That's maturity. You're ready, I was ready, I am ready to have God remove the defects of character is the sixth step.
Well, now, nobody with his own willpower becomes to be a good person. And we have said that before. We can make an effort, and I think we get rewarded for our effort. But any time you get to be a saint, it's doubtful if any of us will be, but any time we get to be better, it's because it was a gift. Of course, this is, you know, I sometimes think the Christian religion, this is what it teaches, you see, and this is a better psychology than, upside of this, Freud is kindergartenish.
Because this is what it teaches. It teaches that you can't get to be good. That's what Christ died for, for the sake of our sins. You see how deep and how, the depth to this Christian religion. It's far, compared to these writings of Jung and Freud and these guys, that's kindergarten stuff. This is big stuff. And 2,000 years ago it was true and it's true today. And you can't say that for any scientific fact that's been published 2,000 years ago.
You know, I told you all about the, some of you were here when, I read a thing that was in a medical journal that told about the treatment of Louis IX of France. He had what we think was typhoid fever. And Louis, the king of France had the best physicians of the world called in and they shaved his head and they put leeches on his head. They bled him, they gave him things to make him vomit and things to purge him and make him have diarrhea and it said in nine days they crowned a new king of France.
Now that's funny, but the guys that treated the king, Louis IX, were the Charles Mills, the Paul Dudley Whites, and the Michael DeBakeys of the 10th century. So you see, don't take, it's all right to learn science,
[00:40:04]
but for God's sake put it in the same trivial class it belongs in. Something that 100 years from now will be a joke. It will be a joke. Or 500 years from now, certainly. But these precepts, if you worship terminology more than you do the limitations of the feeble human intellect, then you can be a fatalist. Well I prefer to realize that my intellect is that big and so is Einstein's and so is any other human's and it can't comprehend anything.
All we have worshiped when we worship science is semantics, terminology, that we have used to try to describe cause and effect based on our feeble perceptions of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and so forth. I'm going to ask him to remove my shortcomings. Well whenever you ask God to remove your shortcomings, it's going to be humble, because you're not a big shot when you say, well I got these things wrong with me and I wish you'd remove them.
And then eighth step, made a list of persons I'd harmed, became willing to make amends to them all. Well most of the people that I've harmed can be made amends to by me being good to other people. And most of the people that you've harmed can benefit by you becoming good to other people. I've loaned 50 cents or a dollar a few times to a few alcoholics. And I've told them they didn't owe me and they owed the money.
They owed this dollar or 50 cents what it was. They owed the money but they didn't owe it to me, they owed it to another guy. When they got sober a year or two and another guy needed a buck for food, they owed it to him. You see, it's a debt but it isn't to me. This is the way you can make amends. A lot of people that are harmed are not where I can see them or reach them, or I don't even know a lot of them are harmed.
But I'm making amends to them in my opinion by trying to be honest and tolerant, truthful to other people who are like I was when this guy helped me, you see. Now these are my ideas. You change them and switch them and make your own ideas from them. Made direct amends to such people whenever possible except when to do so would injure them or others. Well, I think we need to, it helps my humility to apologize.
I was, I apologized a great deal more when I was a construction laborer than I do now. And that's why I say in one way I'm not as good a man as I used to be. But I try to apologize or to show that I'm wrong in some way when I am wrong. Now I don't always do it but I think I do it most of the time. Ten, and I think this is the most important thing for me. This step is one of the most important. Continue daily to take personal inventory and when wrong promptly admit it.
Well, I can't, I'm not mature enough to immediately say I'm wrong when I'm wrong. But I sometimes get around to it. My wife's here so I have to be a little truthful about this. But I do get around to it sometimes and sometimes when I haven't the courage to say I was wrong I try to make it up with a pet or a kiss or a little gentleness which she, it surprises her because she says I'm not very gentle most of the time.
But you see I am working on this. I at least realize the importance of doing these things. And this daily personal inventory to me is very important. It's to get up every morning and say today I want to be patient and honest and trusting and tolerant and so forth. And I've done that for over seven years every morning. And I've done the eleventh step for over seven years. Seek daily through prayer and meditation to improve my conscious conduct with God as I understand him.
Praying only for the knowledge of his will and the power to carry that out. I would have never recovered if I weren't a changing person in my ideas of what God is or might be. I have been able to grow up enough to have an open mind about this. At one time I was absolutely sure I even knew what kind of thorns God wore on his head. Then I got to be, I got to be a pseudo-intellectual having had a Bachelor of Science and a Doctor of Medicine degree. I became a pseudo-intellect, and I knew there wasn't any God, because I'd cut up all these cadavers, their heads and their livers and all these, and you do it, you do it, and I'd taken the brains there out, and they'd been liquefied sometimes, they weren't properly [unclear], and I knew then that there weren't any, that there wasn't any God, that you're here, and that's all, now that was in my twenties.
[00:45:21]
But in thirties, I preferred not to think about God, because it interfered with my detachment, I'd learned that, I had a little tenderness inside of me, but I learned that this tenderness prevented me from having the proper detachment, and the good mechanical aptitude that was necessary for me to be a cold, unemotional surgeon. And I labored under this false idea for many years, and I could be as detached on someone I worked on as if I were cutting on a piece of wood, and I still have that ability or disability to some degree, but I am no longer detached from them as a person.
Now it used to be that every patient I had was nothing, they were a patient. Now I've gotten mature enough so I can accept that I cannot be detached from a person as a person, that every person is a reflection to some degree of Jim R. So there's no such thing, whether they're ninety or whether they're nine years old, that I have a relationship with all people. And of course I have an open mind now. I don't know anything about God, but I know that the things that Christ preached were the things that bring me peace of mind.
Did you ever think of that? If you will work on, not do them, mind you, you won't be able to do them, but if you'll work on the things that were taught several thousand years ago, if you'll work on them every day, you'll get happier as the months go by. Now I'll guarantee that. I've seen people do this that didn't believe in God, and I did in the first year. I wasn't sure, I didn't know, but I got happier because I was working on it. And then as time came I realized how minute the human brain's ability was.
Any human brain ability is so minute that it can't be measured, it's minute and it can't be measured by the finest caliber of measurement. In relation to the universe, in relation to, we don't know what anything is. The atomic theory will probably be just as big a joke as the humors of the blood theory was five hundred years ago when Harvey found out about the circulation of the blood. There used to be four humors in our body. The liver was the seat of one group of humors, and this was worship just like the atomic theory, and people were crucified and burned up that argued this.
And this was what the professor, the head of the department at Harvard and at Mayo's and at Oxford and Cambridge of that day, this is what they taught. Everybody in the world was taught these. Well the same thing is just as big a joke in five hundred years what we think today is scientific fact. They didn't make an atomic bomb, well the atomic bomb in five hundred years will be no more of a splash than the guy that discovered the wheel. The guy that discovered the wheel unearthed greater scientific facts than the atomic bomb on earth. It's just everything's so relative and we get so confused of what's important.
Praying only for knowledge of his will and the power to carry that out. Well, you know if you pray for the knowledge of his will you won't rationalize and lie to yourself as much as I used to. And I think that's where it's a benefit to me. And twelve, having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps I try to carry the message and practice these principles in all our affairs. Spiritual awakening should mean something different to everyone here in my opinion. The word spiritual means something that transcends the physical.
And brother when you talk about the physical you've got to include the brain. And if it transcends the physical brain then it transcends what the physical brain can comprehend. And the only way that I could figure that there's any evidence, now it's alright to talk about God's evidence in the trees and the grass and the air and the sun, universe. But this is sort of beyond me. But you know this going back to this interpersonal relationship is a spiritual awareness. My awareness of my relation to you. Or my awareness of your relation to me. Of my responsibility not to cause harm to myself or anyone else.
[00:50:15]
Now this is a spiritual awakening for me. That I have a duty. That I have a duty to preserve the dignity of myself and you. And I think this is true worship of God if we're created in God's image. I have a duty to preserve the image of myself and your image in a respectable manner. I want to become aware of the interrelationship of people. Now I think this is a spiritual thing. And I think how you do these things I don't have any idea. But if you could follow a course imbued in these steps, a course of philosophy of life imbued in these steps.
And if you follow that persistently every day and never miss a day, especially when you think it's silly, you shouldn't miss. And then if you find that you look back and you find you've gotten happier over the period of months and years. You've had ups and downs. You've had times you were frantic and frightened and fearful. But over the period it takes a long view. You have gradually gone uphill. Then this is a spiritual program. Now your idea, I think that this whole AA philosophy is a spiritual thing. I think that mental illness has no place in medicine.
This is just my idea. I think this is a spiritual illness. Of course all the psychologists and psychiatrists have maintained this. The only thing is they use some ten cent words to make it sound different. And in a relationship Freud said that you're guilty. All your troubles come from guilt and you're guilty over what you think your thoughts are. You want to do and don't do. Well that's not true. In my opinion you're only guilty for the things you do. You only feel guilty for the things you do.
You might have a temporary guilt of things you think about. But you know I don't think that's a permanent depressive guilt that you have from the things you've thought about doing and didn't. I think the things we've done that give us this heavy burden that's too heavy to carry. So you have a choice. You select. You take what's pain and pleasure and you weigh them. And in time you learn that your habits will become constructive instead of destructive. Now the third step where you turn your life and will over to the care of God as you understand it is synonymous with the word patience.
If you're impatient, if you're in a hurry, every error I ever made that was serious I made because I got in a hurry and I performed some act under emotional stress. Now any decision or action you do under emotional stress in my opinion has a 99 percent chance of being wrong. Anything you do under severe emotional stress has a big chance of being wrong. So patience. If you believe in God you don't have to prod him along with an electric prodder. Say well I want this girl to get sober this month. I'm not willing to wait five years. Well what if God wants you to wait five years?
Patience. If you truly want to follow God's will. You say well God don't want us to go through all this trouble. In one of Father's father's records I never forget it. He made a talk at a prison and one of the guys said Father can I ask you a question? He said yes son. He said do you think God means for us to be locked up in this prison? He said son do you believe in God? He said I guess so. He said well do you think he can accomplish anything he wants to do? And the guy said I guess he could. And Father said well you're still in prison aren't you?
So you see patience. You say well God certainly don't want little children to die or to be born monstrous. How do you know? You don't know what God wants. Boy you sure are sacrilegious when you start telling God what he wants. And I've heard a lot of ministers say they knew that God didn't want illness and he didn't want people to be born crippled. How do you know? I don't know. I think my God is so big that he's beyond human comprehension. And I think you're sacrilegious when you presume to know what he thinks or what he wants.
[00:55:06]
Now these are my ideas. And what I've said today you should discard and throw away anything you don't like. Because you know I existed 44 years and I was probably totally wrong. In the last seven and a half years I've probably been wrong 80% of the time. So my ideas today could be wrong. But I throw them out because they'll give you something to think about. And then you think your own philosophy out. You think your own interpretation of these things out. But let's think about them and let's formulate some philosophy of living that will be constructive to you. And that's what this place is for. We allow you to recover if you so desire. You will not be harmed. And we will be patient and uncritical of you. We'll close the meeting in the usual way.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.