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Source: 1985 Montreal International Convention – Unknown Speaker – GOD GIVEN INSTINCTS – RS 06392.mp3 File: 1985-montreal-international-convention-unknown-speaker-god-given-instincts-rs-06392.mp3 Duration: 01:18:04
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Hello, good afternoon everyone. My name is Mireille and I am an alcoholic. Very grateful. Hi. Before starting the meeting, I would like to ask you a moment of silence in gratitude for the AA recovery of the past 50 years. And now, can you join me at the serenity prayer, please? God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the difference is no difference.
Thank you very much. I have to tell you, I'm very nervous. English is not my mother tongue, as you know. I'm going to try to do my best. I'm sure you wonderful people will forgive me if I made a mistake here or there. I know I can count on your support. Well, thank you. Now, I want to explain about anonymity tradition because some of you may be not very familiar about that. So, there may be some here who are not familiar with our tradition of personal anonymity at the public level.
Our public relation policy is based on attraction rather than promotion. We need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, TV, and film. Thus, we respectfully ask to not AA speaker or indeed any AA member be identified by full name or photograph in publishing or broadcast report of our meetings. The insurance of anonymity is essential in our effort to help all the problem drinkers who may wish to share our recovery program with us. And our tradition of anonymity remain us that AA principle come before personality.
Well, today the topic is God-given instinct. To tell you the truth, first of all, I was a bit confused with the theme because I couldn't really understand the meaning of it. And I'm not sure that I did even now. So, I have to make up my mind that I always remember leader are leading and speaker are speaking. So, then I know here my left and right are going to extend much more than I can myself. But I think God giving me an instinct of survey, the day I push, I open AA door because otherwise if I didn't have that really instinct of leaving, only if I didn't want to leave rather than die, I was on my way of dying, that I wouldn't be here tonight to share with you.
So, then if now I think I'm going, it's my privilege to introduce you, John Edge of New York, who is going to speak about his view of the problem. Thank you. I'm John and I'm an alcoholic. I wonder if, because I hadn't thought about this God-given instinct until I was asked to speak, but I wonder if what I really think is the greatest God-given instinct that I have is to laugh. I wonder if we could just take a minute to laugh.
Because there's something about laughing that says everything is all right, you know, and it really is, I think, but I want to, I wonder if I could stand up, I feel better. Is that working now? My, the reason I wanted you to laugh is my story is very sad. This God-given instinct, it takes me back to October 24th, 1924 at 4 o'clock in the morning at St. Mary's Hospital in Philadelphia and I was born.
[00:05:05]
I understand, there's a rumor about that I was conceived at the Equinox House, but that's never been confirmed and the two participants are no longer with us, so there's no way we're ever going to know, but I do know I was born there. Now, here I was with all my God-given instincts. I mean, I really had them all right then. It was the very beginning. At that particular time, I could laugh, I could play, I could joke, I had a great sense of humor.
I think I probably, if put to the test, could dance quite well. I could probably play an excellent game of tennis and golf and I was probably, I don't know how I would do with spelling, but I really had all the God-given instincts all right there, you know. I was just thinking that at that particular point in time, and just then, that I accepted what Paul said, that love is patient and kind. I'm going to sit down, it's not too serious.
Love is patient and kind. It is not jealous or conceited or proud. Love is not ill-mannered, and I wasn't ill-mannered then, or selfish, nor was I irritable. I kept no record of wrongs, and I was not happy with evil, but I was happy with truth. And love never gives up, and it's faith, hope, and patience never fail, and love is eternal. And I had it all there. I had it all at that minute. And I think I went along with St. Francis, who said, Lord, make me an instrument of light, peace, and I was.
I was an instrument of peace. Whether it's hatred, let me sow love, and I went around sowing love. Whether it's injury, pardon. Whether it's despair, hope. Whether it's darkness, light. And whether it's sadness, joy. And I think with St. Augustine, who said, I believe, love God and do what you want to. And that's exactly what I was doing at 4 o'clock in the morning on October 24th, 1924. But then began the training program.
I was going to be taught. I was going to learn. I was going to get to find out about judgment. I was going to get to find out about doubt. And the whole process was going to start off. I mean, it was a very interesting one. I was going to be trained to see all these things. I was thinking, coming up on the train, one of the remarkable phenomena I never understood is my father was a wonderful man. But when we would get in the car, it was always the mockeys who were causing the trouble with the traffic.
I finally got him to explain what this term, mockey, meant. It was a derivative way of talking about a Jewish person. But why Jewish people couldn't drive, I never quite understood. But then there were the Protestants to be avoided like a plague. I mean, they were going to get you into no trouble. I mean, stay away from them. And even stay away from people going to public schools, because that's going to get you into trouble.
The big thing was to keep out of trouble. It was really to watch those God-given instincts, because they're going to put you in hell. I mean, that was the name of the game. And that was a training program. I mean, the whole thing about sex, that was a thing all of its own. That instinct really was handled jointly like people who never had sex. And then the subject of power. My God, who do you think you are?
And all these instincts that were somehow in that kid, in that hospital, were put, were trained. They were going to be disciplined. They were going to be organized. And what he found out was he really was in a life of finding out what not to do. I mean, really that was all about what not to do and what not to become. And it was interesting. The most important thing, because my father was an alcoholic and my mother was an alcoholic, and a lot of people around him were alcoholics, from all this at the age of about ten came a real deep vocation.
And that vocation was to not be an alcoholic. I mean, above all else, the one thing I was going to die without being an alcoholic. And the rest of my time was spent determining how to not become an alcoholic. That was where these God-given instincts had been taken, by ten or twelve. Meantime, I didn't have any friends. Putting the baseball team together, I was ten. Putting the football team together, I was twelve.
There was no place that John fitted in. John was totally ill-equipped to be ten or eleven.
[00:10:00]
Just generally uncomfortable in my skin, and not knowing any way out of it. I can't think of anything that was really fun. Riding with the chauffeur was a big deal. I mean, I don't know why that was, but there was something about a car, and he knew how to handle it, and that was a big deal. It was the only thing that was really any fun. There was an incredible yearning to somehow join this human race in which I've been born into.
And this yearning, as I realized after I started thinking about this meeting today, it had to do with instincts. And all of a sudden, at the age of fifteen, I was sitting in the backyard of a friend's house in Philadelphia. It was the first week in July, interesting enough, the second week in July of 1940. And he had a quart of beer, and he suggested I get a quart of beer, and another friend got a quart of beer.
And it all came true. Every instinct that I had lying in that hospital came alive again. I was with St. Francis, I was with St. Paul, I knew love, I knew freedom. I was there. I mean, it was the most incredible thing. For fifteen years I had waited for this freedom, to sing, to dance, to join, to be part of it, to love, to truly love, to love my fellow human beings. And here I found it. I found it in the very source I wanted by more important than anything else in the world to avoid, and that was alcohol.
It's interesting, just as though I did my homework, Carl Jung, in a letter to Bill discussing Rowland, said his craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness expressed in the medieval language, the union with God. And there I found the union with God. I found the freedom, I found my God-given instincts in alcohol. And I'm going to skip through, I've got to be in AA within five minutes, so I'm going to skip through it.
Once I get in, I don't go out again. But I'm going to skip over the next nine years. That was 1940. One incident, someone was talking about Hawaii here a little bit earlier. In 1943, I was in Hawaii, no, 46, BJ Day, 45 I guess it was, and they announced that the war was over. The war was over, over. Europe had quit, the Germans had quit, the Japanese had quit, it was over as of tonight. And it was the most incredible experience.
I mean, everybody felt as if people were rushing to chapels, they were throwing themselves on their knees to pray. And I sat there stoically and turned to a man next to me and said, I wish I had a bottle of whiskey. And he produced it. And we experienced peace. Again, it was that incredible, well, except the things we cannot, it was that incredible yearning to find those instincts. Because whatever it was, the war was over, I was free, the world was free, there'd be no more Hitler, there'd be no more Japanese domination, we were free, and I wanted to find that instinct, that God-given instinct of love and faith and hope.
And there was only one place I could find it, and that was in the bottle. And I found it. Comes 1949, and we come to deflation at depth. Nothing had happened. I mean, all the dreams and visions of the young boy had disappeared. The more I turned the accelerator on, the more the tires spinned. Friends were going off, going to graduate school, getting law degrees, getting engaged, getting married, buying houses, having children, and I was spinning the wheels.
Nothing was happening. And I couldn't find anything. I was roaming around, and therein begins my story with Bishop Sheen, and it's only ended last night. Maybe it hasn't ended yet. But I was walking around carrying a piece of soul by Fulton Sheen, reading it in subways and so forth, trying to find the answer to this totally lost sense I had about myself and my life. I went to a graduation at Georgian Court College in Lakewood, New Jersey, and Fulton Sheen was there.
[00:15:05]
And he said that sometimes if our heart is so hard, God has to break it to open it. And I identified. Now I had come up the Catholic, Irish Catholic way. My life, my religion, my religious life had been devoted to avoiding hell. I mean, that was the name of the game. And as a result, I rarely missed mass because I didn't want to go to hell. And that was the extent of my spirituality. I heard this message and the following Monday morning, that was on Saturday, the first Saturday in June, the following Monday morning, I was on my knees at St. John's Church in Philadelphia giving up, giving up.
I didn't know what I was giving up to. I'd never had this experience before, but I was giving up. There was nothing more I could do with my life. Five o'clock on Wednesday of that week, I went into Alcoholics Anonymous. And that was the important day of my life, the most important day of my life. I want to go back for a second to our friend Bishop Sheen, and then my senior Sheen. I was sober 28 years.
I had been very happily married. My wife had died rather tragically in 1976. And during this recent years, I had always been invited with some other people to speak at Lenox Hill, which is a meeting in New York on my anniversary. And we had, it was a big dinner and so forth. In this particular year, I didn't, I was invited to speak. My wife didn't, not a soul seemed to know I was in 28 years sober. No guns going off at GSO.
I mean, the day was just being passed without note. And I'm walking through the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria at exactly five o'clock on June the 8th, 1977. And who walks up to me? It's Fulton Sheen. You know, what that means, I mean, they say there's no coincidences. There's more than no coincidence. I knew I was in the right place at the right time. The most remarkable thing happened last night coming up on the train. I was reading Pass It On.
And I realized, and I have to say I broke out in sobbing to my roommate. I realized that the week, the first week in June of 1949, the Saturday that I heard Fulton Sheen, Fulton Sheen was counseling Bill Wilson. I mean, absolutely, I mean, to this moment it takes my breath away to think that I sat there, I didn't know what the hell I was doing, listening to this man talking, and little did I know that that particular Saturday, as it points out in Pass It On, was when Bill Wilson was taking counseling from Fulton Sheen.
And I don't know what the next step is in that story. But I walked into this clubhouse in 1949, and there was a guy there, and he said sobriety. And he said sobriety for 24 hours. And that word so captured my imagination. It was so much of everything I'd ever wanted all my life. Because it had not to do with not drinking, it had to do with the incredible pursuit of sobriety, a pursuit that has not ended to this very minute.
Because sobriety in its fullest definite came to me like that. Talk about God-given instincts. That word sobriety described everything I ever wanted in life. And to this moment it describes everything I want, because it is the absolute and total fulfillment of everything in life. I want to, having gotten me into AA in time, I want to go back to what's happened since then. Because where I believe I'm headed is back to that hospital in Philadelphia, where it was much easier to pick up that training than it has been to shed it.
It's been much easier to lose that trust in those God-given instincts than it has been to regain it. But it is that incredible trust, unless we become like little children. And that's really what this whole process is all about. We all go through the process, it's familiar to most of us. We come in, we're all mixed up, many times unemployable, certainly unrelatable. And then this begins the process.
We get a job, and all of a sudden that doesn't work out. We get another job, and that doesn't work out. And then finally we get a job that works out. And then we get a girl, and that doesn't work out. And then we get a girl, and that doesn't work out. We finally get a girl that works out.
[00:20:00]
But this involves sponsors, therapists, you name it. But the thing of it is we stick to it. As they said to me when I came in, you've got to learn how to do it on ginger ale. And that's what it was all about. I remember one of the most meaningful meetings or encounters I ever had that my sponsor walked in the clubhouse and I was absolutely, totally wiped out. And he looked over at me and he said, cheer up, you'll soon be dead.
And it was exactly what I needed to hear. But what has happened in the ensuing 36 years? Indeed, I fell in love, and she married somebody else, and I didn't drink. And I fell in love again, and I married her, and I didn't drink. We had an incredibly happy life, and we had a wonderful son, and we had all the wonderful rich things that many of us want in life. And she died, and I didn't drink. I had moved to New York when I first came into AA, and I was the highest-salaried employee of one of the most prestigious advertising agencies in the country, and I didn't drink.
And I got fired, and I didn't drink. And I made a lot of money, and I didn't drink, and I lost a lot of money, and I didn't drink. And the whole process was this incredible unlearning of all the failure to trust those instincts. I think what it is really is somehow when we come in here, we reach for every single training wheel we can get. I mean, I tell you, the first three or four years I was in AA, I bought the suits my sponsor wore, I talked like he talked, I walked like he talked, and I went where he went.
I needed everything. I had priests, I had therapists, I had counselors. I mean, I was addicted to advice because I was absolutely… I thought it was wise, and I was totally dependent. I remember one time I went to a psychiatrist's office, and he said, you know, you're a very dependent man. I think if I had to pay him for him to pick that out, because anybody who'd sit with me for three minutes knew I was dependent.
But at any rate, some place along the line, somebody said to me, you can trust your instincts. And I really didn't believe it. No one had ever said that before. I thought my instincts were going to take me to hell. They said, you can trust your instincts. And that was a long, long, long time ago. And in the course of that time I have learned, not totally, but I've learned to trust my instincts. I've really learned that what St. Paul said about love is true.
And I can't practice it the way I'd like to, but it is my instinct to do it. If I can take all the other stuff away and just let my instinct come through, I'll practice it, as St. Paul says. And I'll practice it, as St. Francis says, because it's my instinct. God gave me the instinct that day in 1924 to love, as St. Paul said, and to love, as St. Francis said. He gave me the instinct to believe, to really and truly believe that everything is all right, and really to come to believe that his will and my will are pretty close together.
And we come to the 11th step, and we pray for knowledge of his will for us. The knowledge of his will for us, most of the people sitting in this room, is exactly what we want. I mean, I was trained that that wasn't quite the way it was, that I was going to… For me, it was chastity, poverty, obedience. I mean, that's where you went when you turned your will over to God. That isn't the case, I don't believe.
But praying for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out, we have the power. The power is all here. And I don't need to get permission to use the power. The power is all there. And what I've really learned is that the joy, the joy that I experience and we all experience here today, that joy is valid. When I feel joy, whatever I feel with that joy is valid. And turmoil is deceit.
When I feel turmoil, it's something taking me away from the mainstream. That's deceit. And it's the joy which is really where the validity is. And what can I say about all this? I think that I can say that June the 8th,
[00:25:03]
I completed my 30… I can't figure, it's 35th year. I guess, maybe I'm in my 36th year. I can't do the arithmetic right. But I have to say that every single one of those years, year to year, every single year, life has gotten better. Now, that is a pretty… I mean, to try to say that that trend is going to change is pretty crazy. Because every single year for 35 or 36 consecutive years, whatever it is, my life has gotten more rewarding, full of more love, more satisfactory, more of everything, and really more of an experience, these God-given instincts that believe and to trust and to hope and to love.
And I'd like to close with something that has come to mean a great deal to me. It's on my wall in the office, and it really describes my relationship with AA, with God and with my own God-given instincts. This is from… Well, it's from Teilhard de Chardin. If we believe, then everything is illuminated and takes shape around us. Chance is seen to be order. Success assumes an incorruptible plenitude.
Suffering becomes a visit in the caress of God. But if we hesitate, the rock remains dry, the sky dark, the water is treacherous and shifting. We may hear the voice of the master faced with our bungled lives. Oh, men of little faith, why have you doubted? Thank you. Thank you. Well, thank you very, very much, John. You make it clear in the beautiful way you share with us. For that, thanks a lot. Yes, God-given instinct, as I said at the beginning, I had the instinct to leave or die, and I had the choice.
But another way of feeling that God-given instinct was to understand and to try first to reach AA, second to understand. I couldn't understand much, but my instinct forced me to understand that I had to come to the meeting and keep coming on and on and on again. And when I first stepped into an AA meeting that was in 1962, I didn't have lots of hope. I was all lost myself. But my instinct pushed me to do the last thing I could do, and the last thing was just knocking at the door.
And for that, I'm very grateful. But I'm not here to talk myself. I would like to introduce to you another of our friends who's going to share, and it's Lewis W. applause My name is Lewis, and I know I don't look like one, but I am an alcoholic. laughter For you people who came here to listen to Gene see from Florida, I'm not her either. laughter When they asked me to take Gene's place on this table, I wanted to instinctively say no.
laughter But they wanted a woman from Florida to talk of God-given instincts. And I'm not a woman, I'm not from Florida, and I don't know nothing about God-given instincts. laughter But I said yes. That's become instinctive now. I don't know why. I say I don't look like an alcoholic. When I first came to AA, I had my picture of an alcoholic. And the alcoholic had gray hair and no teeth. laughter I don't know where I got that picture.
laughter I remember when I was very young, we passed by a pawn shop, and there was some teeth in the window of the pawn shop. There was some teeth in the window of the pawn shop, and my mother said, somehow I'm a holly, while they're honking their teeth, so I thought that they had gray hair and no teeth, and I still had 14 teeth left, and I didn't identify.
[00:30:15]
I, by the way, in AA, you can grow teeth. I haven't found it necessary, nor have I taken a drink since November the 6th of 1973, and I owe it all to not drinking alcohol. And I didn't know what was going on until they told me. I had it figured out a little bit differently. When I went into the Marine Corps when I was 17 years old, and I drank my first whiskey, and that very first night, I remember I was running down a hill, for some reason or other, and I ran into a barbed wire fence, and I still have the scars from that.
But I remember that they were sewing me up over the hospital, and I was laughing. I mean, there was blood everywhere, and I was supposed to be hurting, but I didn't feel no pain, and I found my thing in life. Alcohol caused me some problems along the way. I was in the Marine Corps, and then I got out of the Marine Corps, and then I tried to get back in the Marine Corps. I got in trouble with alcohol while I was in the Marine Corps, and so I thought if I got out, well, everything would be all right. It was just the Marine Corps.
And when I was out, I was out 13 months, and I got locked up twice for alcohol-related instances. So I went back, tried to get back in the Marine Corps, and they said, no, we don't want you. But the Army took me, and so my story is, I'm going to take anybody, and everything is going to be all right. My first night in the Army, I burned up a bed. And then it got worse. But after about 17 years, I was going through a divorce, and by the way, I went from the Marine Corps to the Army after a 13-month break in service and didn't lose my rank.
I mean, they thought so much of me, they put me right back in at the same rank I was. I mean, I came out of the Marine Corps a Private, and I went in the Army a Private. This is not a story of a has-been who went all the way down. This is a story of a never-was. But after a hectic career, well, I figured that if I'd have stayed in the Army another 74 years, I'd have made General, because I was getting promoted about every five years, and just 14 more promotions, and I'd have been right up there with them.
But after about 17 years, well, my wife and I were going through a divorce, and I just got my second DWI that year, and the Army was frowning on my not coming to work and things like that, and they were threatening to kick me out with no retirement pay or anything else, and they just didn't understand me. I had a lot of people in that didn't understand me. That wife, I'll have to tell you about her and how hard-nosed she was. She didn't understand. She had a restraining order saying I couldn't see the children, and then finally she agreed one Saturday morning that I could pick up the children at 9 o'clock, and I could have them all day.
Now, they were the age of 3 and 8 and 9 at the time, and I went over there at 9 o'clock and picked up the children, and then that woman at 10.30 came in that bar to take them back. Embarrassed me in front of my friends and everything. She just didn't have no respect. Anyway, the Army was threatening to do bad things to me, and so I decided that I'd show them, and I had showed them before, I'd just kill myself at them.
Is there anybody in here that ever tried to kill yourself at somebody? That was contrary to a God-given instinct to survive, but that's where I was. I was ready to die.
[00:35:05]
Death didn't scare me. It was the living that was getting to me. As a matter of fact, getting on ahead there, I was at about my second AA meeting, and somebody said if it wasn't for AA, I wouldn't be alive today, and I couldn't understand why in the world you even wanted to live. My nature and my instinct at that time was things would be better if I just wasn't even here. Well, anyway, believe it or not, I did not succeed in killing myself, even though I did attempt it.
They had me talk to a psychiatrist. Well, by then I was sobered up and I was giving the psychiatrist the strangest thinking I could think of, just right from the bottom of my heart the way things were, and thinking that was going to take care of it, and he said we'll have to keep him here about six weeks. That's where my thinking was. My story starts when I was in St. Isidro. I was up there that first day, and a guy named John came running in, and he said here, this is a book called Alcoholics Anonymous.
He said read the first 164 pages. Don't pay any attention to those stories in the back, because I've got to get my book back tomorrow. I've lost too many books to you nuts, and he left that book, and he said I'll be back tomorrow to pick up that book. Well, I didn't have any idea why he gave me that book. I was in there for depression. I was explaining to everybody I wasn't an alcoholic, and I didn't know why in the world they thought I was.
But anyway, I got that book from John, and as soon as he left, I opened it up to the back to see what he didn't want me to read. I picked out a story about a drunken housewife who hid her whiskey in a dirty clothes hamper, and I did not identify her. John came back the next day and said what did you think of the book, and I said oh, real nice. And that was it. Now this was an unsolicited visit. I did not call John. I did not call AA. I didn't ask to speak to anybody about alcohol.
I went back and started telling my story again to the psychiatrist about this and about that and so on and so forth and so on and so on, and I didn't drink. Well, how in the hell could I drink? I was locked up there, and I couldn't drink. As a matter of fact, I was in there a total of 56 days, and I only got drunk twice. Another time while I was in there after about a month, there was a guy named Sam Cromwell came, and he said we're going to have an AA meeting, and I still wondered why me.
I didn't know what they were talking about, but I understood that if I went upstairs there, I could stay out past 8 o'clock, and I could go to that meeting, and they would have cookies and so on and so forth, and so I went on up there. It turned out there was a meeting between Sam Cromwell and myself, and that was it. It was one-on-one, and then afterwards we held hands and said the damn Lord's Prayer, and I thought this was the silliest thing I had ever run into in my life, and Sam was serious about it, and I was in there, and he was out there.
I couldn't figure it out. There were two unsolicited visits I had in that hospital. Well, after 56 days, an amazing thing happened. I got a certificate saying that I was sane. How many of you got them certificates? Don't you believe them. We had figured out that my little brother got a tricycle before I did or something. I don't know, but I was a fantastic piece there figuring all this stuff out. Now, with that certificate saying that I was sane, I had to go about a quarter of a mile back to my outfit. I was going from the hospital back over to my unit in the Army there, and dividing the hospital from the Army portion, there's a street, and you know what those streets are like.
[00:40:02]
It's a civilian street with bars on it, something fierce. So it was two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, and I stopped in to have a beer and shoot a game of pool on my way back to the unit, and it took me eight days to cross Dyer Street. That's after I was sane. That's after I was cured. On day eight, the only reason I know of today, I put a dime in the telephone and I called Alcoholics Anonymous. The only reason why I know I did it is because those people didn't know that they were supposed to wait until I called and come up to see me in another house.
That's the only reason why I can think of. But I called Alcoholics Anonymous, and I was in this bar, and they said, can you drive? And I said, no, I'm too drunk. Of course, I've been driving all over El Paso and Juarez for eight days, but never mind. And there was somebody there that day that did not know that you were not supposed to come down to a bar and get her drunk. He said, I'll be right down, and I'll get you.
Of course, after I hung up the phone, I went back, and I still had some beer left, and I wanted to finish that, but I didn't want him to catch me drinking it. So I finished it real quick, and then I decided I wanted another one. So I ordered another one, but I didn't want him to see me drinking that beer, so I moved down four barstools. Now, he didn't know where I was sitting to begin with. He didn't even know who I was. But I thought I'd fool him. As a matter of fact, I'd changed my mind about this deal.
And I was also worried. I was hoping he'd come in an unmarked car so that my friends wouldn't see all this happening. But he came in, and he walked right to me. I don't know how he knew who I was, but he walked right to me and said, are you Lewis? I said, yeah. He said, come on. I said, okay. So he hauled me off down to the club. And at the club, ran into a guy named Lee, and he kept asking me if I wanted to quit drinking, and I kept telling him all the sad stories that was going on in my life, and I kept telling him I wasn't an alcoholic, I could quit any time I wanted to, and all this stuff.
And just that people were treating me bad and didn't understand me, and so on and so forth. And he kept saying, do you want to quit drinking? Do you want to quit drinking? That's all he could talk about. He had a one-track mind. Do you want to quit drinking? And I said, look, I'm not an alcoholic. He said, look, if you, if alcohol has caused you that much problem in your life, and you say that you can quit any time you want to, and you don't quit, and you're not an alcoholic, you must be stupid.
And I said, wait a minute, let's reconnoiter here. I decided to give it a little bit of thought, but that's how it all started. I started, and he invited me back to a meeting that night, and they took me back to my car, and believe it or not, I didn't drink. I didn't go back in the bar. I haven't the slightest idea today except a power greater than myself was working. I did not go back in there, and I wanted to, very bad. That's how it all started. From that time on, I learned a new way of life that I did not know existed.
They started telling me from day one things that were contrary to my nature. They were asking me questions, what do you do, and I'd tell them what I do, and they'd say, why do you do it, and I'd say, that's just the way I am. I thought that I was working on my instincts, that this is just the way I am. I don't know where I learned all those things on how to react to life. I learned some in school from mother or whatever, I don't know.
But anyway, the way that I was reacting to life was causing me great pain, and that is not instinct working. When you're doing things that are contrary to what makes you feel good, and what's best for you, that is not instinct. Because we have a God-given instinct to survive and to be comfortable, and I had violated all of those instincts. They started teaching me a brand spanking new way to live, and now I find today, thank God, that instinctively I'm doing things differently today than I used to.
The tricks that they taught me, the first was, and it still brings tears to my eyes, that you didn't have to drink if you don't want to.
[00:45:06]
There's a lot of people that don't know that and we got to tell them because they flat don't know it. I happen to know from personal experience that I didn't know that I didn't have to drink if I didn't want to. They taught me all kinds of other things too. They taught me that there was a power greater than myself and that wasn't the way that I believed. I believed that I was the highest power there was.
The things that they taught me, well I've been prone to cry a lot at this conference. It really got to me last night, thinking it's going to be there forever, well then I can, me and God can have a talk and I'll say God I did it again and we have a good laugh. I know today that I don't have to be perfect and you don't have to be perfect. Nothing has to be perfect. I know that everything is going to be alright. I was talking about praying. I know that my needs are going to be met.
I know that everything is going to be alright with the help of a power greater than myself. I know that everything is going to have to be just exactly the way it is. Reality, reality to me is where it's at and not any kind of fantasy or anything. Just what it is. I've got a new philosophy now that whenever I'm trying to figure out this and figure out that and I'm down about this. You know the things that occupy all this stuff are things I can't do anything about. Those things and what turning it over to God means is everything is going to turn out one way or the other. Period.
Thank you very much. I remember it took me about three months before getting dry. It was a long time but yet if I look back it was a short period and finally I get dry and by getting dry I thought it was the end of it. It was the only thing I wanted and after six months of being dry my instinct, God-given instinct told me that I should do something else because not drinking was not enough and thanks God I understood that all the wool I have built around myself during my drinking period who made me stay away from other people.
I had to break them and with the program and only with the program I could do the tremendous job because all those wool were very, very, very thick and little by little, day after day, day at a time, one wool after another came down and I get closer from everyone even though all of you around here that I've never met you but you are just near from my heart because you are just like I am. You are alcoholic. You are very grateful alcoholic just the way I do feel today and thanks God for giving me this kind of instinct.
Now I'm going to have our last speaker here. It's Bob R. from Arkansas. Give him a clap. My name's Bob and the R stands for Rogers and the AK stands for Alaska. That's the second time that one of our speakers from the little town of Wasilla which has about 400 or people in it has been introduced as being from Arkansas. We're from Alaska and dang proud of it.
[00:50:01]
Bob from Maryland over there was introduced being from Arkansas yesterday. I was going to talk about humility but the crowd's not big enough so I won't bother. There must be, I'm sure, I didn't realize it but I think that there's a taxi strike or else the buses went on strike because I've spent three days here now and I've been taking this little book and circling this meeting and I've done it for about 60,000 people and I don't see any of them and so I'm sure that they must have been some kind of a problem.
Things like that happen to me, problems. Like last night I was sitting in a hotel and this really nice lady, I mean a real doll, she walked up to me and she said, could I spend the night with you? And I said, well, you know, if that's what you would really like to do. And she said, yes, what room are you in? And I told her and she said, well, do you have any coffee up there? And I said, no, I don't. She said, well, why don't you give me your watch and I'll be up there in about 20 minutes and give me some money and I'll get us some coffee. So I gave her a hundred dollar bill and a watch.
And you know that damn woman forgot my room number? I don't understand it. I mean, people are forgetful about things like that. Now that I've got your attention, I'm not a very smart person and everything that I know in AA is something that someone else has said in front of me. And you know, I've never heard anybody talk about God-given instincts before so I don't know what the heck to say. So what I did was, I got this wife that's in Alaska and she and I have been, she's an Al-Anon by the way, and I only see one Al-Anon out there. Hello.
And this, she said, well, look, you know, she made me a copy because I can't write and she made me a copy of what it says in the dictionary an instinct is. An instinct, an impulse to a, I can't read either. Well, that's no joke. I had to quit school because I couldn't read. An impulse to a particular kind of action which the being needs to perform as an individual but which it could not possibly learn to perform before it needs to act.
Now that's what the dictionary says an instinct is. So I would say that reproducing is an instinct because you know how to reproduce. Now you ladies know what I mean by you have to learn to make love but you know how to reproduce. So that is one of the instincts that God gave us and that one I know about. I did it three times. I think. And then they did it and then they did it, you know, and we wind up with all these little children running around.
But all of the animals and everything, they manage to live very nicely. They don't worry about where the food is going to come from because the instinct tells them that. We people, he touched on it a while ago, he was talking about when he was born, you know, he had all these instincts and that's right. When you're born you have all these instincts and if you didn't get all this training you'd be in good shape.
No, I mean you're trained just like he said. I mean I was trained. I was spanked because I didn't do certain things and whenever I went to bed, you know, I was spanked and whenever I didn't learn to spell I was spanked when I didn't learn. Well, in fact I was retarded, they told me, you know. No, I'm serious. My daddy told me I was retarded. And he was always banging on me for some reason. I don't understand that. But anyhow, the problem was I had a brother that was a genius and so compared to him I was retarded.
But this, see these instincts are dulled by the things that we do. Now an alcoholic has to dull his senses because probably he is not exactly a real nice person, probably.
[00:55:17]
Now some of you were, I know. Some of you drink because you just like the taste of alcohol. Mmm-mmm. Is your drinking a pure alcohol? I have, that damn stuff tastes terrible. That's the reason we disguise it with lemon juice, you know, 40 proof whiskey is only 20% alcohol. So you got to put all this other stuff in there so you can stand the taste of it. So it's not an instinct to drink it. So we start drinking, in fact alcohol came about to be something that we used to dull our feelings so that we could, the medical doctors used to do that many years ago.
They would give you alcohol to dull your feelings and I drank the damn stuff to dull my feelings because I wasn't good enough to be alive. In fact, I never thought that I was good enough to be alive. And I came in AA thinking the same thing and I read that article in the Saturday Evening Post many years ago as a very young man because my dad and my grandfather were alcoholics and I wished that they were alcoholics but I knew they drank a lot.
But they weren't alcoholics because they weren't the skid row types, you know. And then whenever I got into a lot of trouble, I was always, my instinct was to hide, you know, from the world because my training had taught me that I was not a good person. I had been told that because I was raised a Baptist and everything, if it's good buddy, I mean it's sinful. I mean you can't go to movies, I couldn't, because that was sinful.
And girls, oh no, no, I mean, you know, we just did natural things like I was curious about women and still am. And women were curious, the little girls were curious about little boys, you know, and we would do the thing, play mom and daddy, you know, and do the curious things and I'd just get snot beat out of me by somebody. I mean I'd always get caught. And that just made me more curious. But every time, and those are only, I mean those things to me are instincts. I mean if I see a woman, I start following her.
My wife gets upset over that sometimes, I don't understand it, but then that's her problem. I mean she's got her instincts. That used to hit me in the head with a rolling pin every once in a while. You know, I would like to have had a different subject so I could have told you about the time that I came into AA over 30 years ago. And I've been in, let's see, somewhere around 1951 or 1952 I came in, that was what, 33 years ago, and already I'm sober 15 years. I think that's a pretty good miracle.
And I fought it. I fought it hard. I came here kicking and screaming and I was hunting a place to hide. I was too young to be an alcoholic and I thought, oh my God, if I could just go in there and fool those people into thinking I'm an alcoholic, I'd have it made. I'd have a place to hide for just a little while. So I went to my first meeting and I thought, well, I'm going to get in there and I'm going to hide because that's an instinct. God gave me that instinct to hide. So I came to an AA meeting to get my wife off my tail, get the base commander off my tail, and I was selling automobiles at the time because you have to do a lot of things if you're in the service in order to make a living.
You've got a $200 a day habit, you know, drinking that booze and you can't steal it fast enough so you've got to get into something. So I sold automobiles as well as being in the service because I never made any rank in the service. After 16 years, I was discharged. I wasn't even discharged from the service. I was discharged. I wasn't even discharged to PFC. They just threw me out. I made the rank of E4 one time before they threw me out. But anyhow, I went to AA in order to hide
[01:00:01]
from the world and hoping that I could con them into thinking that I was an alcoholic. And I did. And that was what I did, I thought. Now I'll go in there and I'll con them into thinking I'm an alcoholic and they'll let me stand there and I'll learn the secret and I'll get cured. But all the time I knew I wasn't an alcoholic, I was crazy. Because I had to do crazy things. Now, Bob Rogers was not normal. I guarantee you, I was not normal. I was never a normal person. Because normal people can walk down the street and they don't have to do something. A normal person can control their own actions. I could not control my own actions. I mean, if you made me mad, I'm just liable to follow you around until you turn your back and then I would hit you in the head with a club. Now that's not normal, I don't think. Is that normal? Okay, she said it wasn't normal, so she knows. But now I was going and I thought, now if I could just, now I didn't drink for a long time. I didn't take a drink. And I found myself something I could do. I like to sell things. So I found this program and they had 12 steps in here and they told me that I could take these 12 steps, you know, and admit that I was powerless over alcohol and carry the message. And I did. In fact, I come to find out a fellow that I talked to 33 years ago, just died about six months ago in Tampa there, and he died sober and he never took a drink after the first time I talked to him. Now, I took lots of drinks.
Lots of them. In fact, I'm one of those unfortunate individuals, or fortunate, whichever one it happens, whichever way you want to look at it, I'm happy today, that went to probably oh, 20 years worth of meetings, always drinking. Go and stay away, you know, and then I'd take a few, I'd go in and I'd get me a chip. They give chips in a lot of places. And I'd get a chip, you know, and I'd say, well, I'm not going to drink. And I'd go down the street and all of a sudden somebody would make me mad. I mean, you know, people were always making me mad because I wasn't as good as other people. I was never as good as anybody.
And they would make me mad, and then I'd have to go in and I'd get me a drink to drink at them, and then I'd get up enough nerve to go down and get even with them. Because I was a coward too. Still am. In fact, I'm such a coward that I'm scared to take a drink today. Anybody else that's scared? You know, the last time that I took a drink and proved that I was an alcoholic was in Alaska, and I drank some NyQuil. And that's whenever I found out that I was an alcoholic and not crazy, and I'd been around AA for almost 20 years at the time. And I drank some NyQuil, and I was, all of a sudden, I went through an absolute complete personality change. In fact, I was pretty happy there for about six or eight months. And I went and drank the NyQuil, found out it was a fat 40% alcohol, and the first day I took one or two little snorts of it, you know, and it made me sleep good. And the next day I took a couple of bottles of it, and then the third day I went down and bought me a six-pack and whoopee. The fourth day I told my wife, I said, I have got to get drunk. Nobody knows anything except me. The people that I was working for, Anchorage Chrysler, they didn't know anything about the car business because I had forgotten more than any of them down there knew. Of course, I went broke several times in the car business, but I forgot more than this man that was a multimillionaire ever knew. I was always that way. I always had forgotten more than the other man ever knew. But I really didn't know anything, and I knew I didn't. I knew I was stupid. But I drank. I went on my last drunk, and it wasn't much of a drunk either. It only lasted a few days. I came back in AA, and this time I was barely determined to stay sober. I was going to find out what it was, why other people was getting this program, and Bob Rogers could not get it because I had done the inventory.
Guess who I did the inventory with? I did it with my wife. Isn't that awful? I do not advise it. But I did it because we were fixing to divorce, separate, and leave. We were sitting there splitting up the kids. You take that one, and I'll take this one. An old dog walked by, and she said, well, you do have a little good in you because I patted the dog on the head. We started looking for something good in me, and all of a sudden, I just started letting her know what a person I was. That was about seven or eight years before I took
[01:05:02]
my last drink. Of course, I was in AA at the time, and I just knew that nothing in this world was going to ever get me drunk again. Nothing could force me to take a drink because I didn't even hit the floor for a month, and then I was sitting in Georgia one day, and all of a sudden, I was just drinking. You know, I missed a sale that day. I remember. I was selling chemicals, and this dude didn't want to sign that order and let me fill it in later. He wanted me to fill it in first. I wonder if that had anything to do with it.
Well, anyhow, all of a sudden, I'm just sitting there drinking, you know, and this is what happened to me, but when I came back this last time, there was no way I was going to take another drink, and I didn't, and I mean, life got good for about nine months, and then my wife made me mad one day. She burned the beans or whatever the hell women do, or maybe she didn't cook any, so I'm punishing her. You know, don't speak to her. I mean, you let these dang women get the better hand of you, you know, and you had it, so I just didn't speak to her, and I'd go to the back. I'd gotten us a nice mobile home to live in, but now we did live in a 26-foot Airstream trailer, and it was 30 below zero, but I had gotten us a place to live, and I'd go to the back of that mobile home, and I'd stay back there, and my wife would come out and the kids, you know, and they'd be in the other room yabby, yabby, yabby, yabber, and I'd just say, well, I ain't going to have no part of that, Big Daddy. You're not going to talk to her. Don't speak to her. She was working at the basin.
We had to drive back and forth 45 minutes to work, and she'd drive around, and she'd say, isn't it a beautiful day? It's so pretty outside. Oh, it's so nice. Look at the trees over there. Oh, I see a moose. I didn't speak to her. Don't talk to her. Punish her, and that went on for about six weeks, and one day she said, God, forgive me. Why won't you? I said, go to hell, and I got in the car and drove into town to commit a little old felony.
That's something I didn't tell you you used to do. You used to have to commit these little old felonies. In fact, I picked a mini-an apple just south of here because I got into trouble, and it cost several thousand dollars to get me out of it. Every town I'd ever been in, I'd been in a lot of trouble, and I says, oh, God, get me out of this mess. I'm a jailhouse prayer. I can get out on my knees, and I won't never do it again, and I just knew I was going to get caught this time, and I said, God, don't let me get caught. Oh, please. That's the only state that I've ever lived in that I haven't been charged with a felony, and I didn't. I just didn't want to have to face all that again. It's awful to be standing there and have the police walk in and say, what's your name? You tell them, and then they read you your rights, and they carry you off, and they put those handcuffs on you, and they take you down, and they lock you up, and then you've got to go home and try to explain why you were mischarged. I mean, you didn't do it. You can't admit that you did it, and I just didn't want to have to go through that again, and I said, oh, God, don't let me have to do that again. I was riding along there, and it was an old crooked road at the time. They put in a new road since then, and all of a sudden, the Lord's Prayer went through my mind, and in the Lord's Prayer, it says, forgive us our sins when we forgive those that sin against us or as we forgive those, and somewhere in a grapevine or something, I had seen putting that word in there, when. All of a sudden, it occurred to me what I'd been doing there. I'd been punishing my wife, wouldn't speak to her, and all she did was burn the beans, and I went out and committed a felony, and I'm asking God to forgive me.
Well, I wasn't in that car. I don't know how to explain it, but I did not drive that car the 35 miles home. Somebody else drove it. I was watching it. I understood everything, and when I got in the house, I walked in there, put my arms around my wife, and I said, honey, I'm here, and from that day till this, I have not had an overpowering desire to take a drink, and until then, anybody that said that they were NAA and wasn't thirsty, I knew was lying because there was never a day went by that I could stand and even think about slits or anything else, and my throat would just get so bad, I just couldn't hardly talk, and today I can walk. In fact, I've owned a bar since then. Now, I have gotten real upset. In fact, a man just died, Joe Fuller. He just died in Anchorage, and I got so mad at Joe one time that I didn't speak to him for a year and a half. Joe was a cocky little fellow, and he did an awful lot of good for AA, and I went in, and you'd have to know him to understand,
[01:10:00]
but I didn't go around the Alono Club for a long, long time in my life. Everybody was on me. Internal revenue was on me. The banks wouldn't loan me any money. Everything in the world that could go wrong with any human went wrong with me, so I got to looking around, and then I drove by a sign, and I saw it, and it said slits, and I thought, I wonder what one would taste like, and I thought, I think I'll go see, and then all of a sudden, I said, hey, boy, what you doing wrong? Who are you mad at? Now, I had been mad at that man so long that I forgot about it, and my life was just going to heck in little pieces, and so I walked into the Alono Club. His Cadillac was sitting out there, and he lived upstairs.
I went upstairs. He wasn't there. Now, Joe never went anywhere without his Cadillac or his pistol, so I went upstairs. In fact, they put him in jail here in Canada for trying to take it across the border, but I went upstairs, and Fuller wasn't there. I went downstairs. He wasn't downstairs. I asked everybody if they'd seen him, and they said, what are you doing here? I said, I'm here to apologize to him because I've been harboring resentment against that man and wishing him harm. He reminded me that my daddy was the problem.
He used to bug me about what a liar and a thief I was. See, he knew me. He knew what I was, and I stood around there for about an hour and a half, and I had a portable telephone, and I told everybody that came in there I was there to apologize to Fuller. The phone rang, and a bank told me, they said, we can loan you a few thousand dollars. I think we found a way. If internal revenue, well, if you can get in here and we can get it on there before they slap a lien on you. Then I said, okay, I'll be right down. He said, no, I don't come in until tomorrow. Then internal revenue called me up, and this is a miracle. They said, we have decided that you do not owe the $60,000 that Bill Slack was the one that owed it. You didn't owe it in the first place. Then another fellow called me up and told me that he wanted to make an offer on a building that I had for sale. All that happened within a 30-minute period of the time that I went in there to apologize to Joe Fuller. I never apologized to Joe Fuller because God didn't want me to do it. He couldn't have stood it.
His ego wouldn't have allowed him to. But as I was leaving the place, he was coming in, and he said, what are you doing in here? I said, I come in here to pay you my dues. I touched him a little bit, and he said, all right, it's about time. That was it. But I was willing, absolutely willing to do anything to get the misery over with. I better get back and start talking about these instincts. Because my instinct is to talk about being sober. But this is not what they wanted me to talk about. Now, when you have these instincts that you have just been born with, God will take care of you. So how do you get these instincts back? Well, they come up with a, you know, these guys that wrote this thing, they come up with this third step. And in here it said, made the decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood it. Now, these instincts can get through if you will let God help you. Because he has given you the proper instincts to live with. I'm supposed to stop here in a second, aren't I? I am awful sorry I went over. I'm sorry I went too far over. I didn't realize I thought I was supposed to stop at everything. So with that, I'll let you, I'm sorry I went too far.
Well, thanks very much Bob for your nice way of sharing with us. And while you were speaking, I was thinking about going far, far, far from the beginning of AA. I'm convinced that Bill, God instinct told him in 1935 that he had to look around and find another alcoholic to share his will with.
[01:15:01]
Now, we still have a few minutes to go. If there is anyone who wants to ask a question to our speaker, please do so. No questions? Come on. You have a microphone over there. Can you go there, standing? You know what, honest to goodness, I went to bed last night, and I did not sleep one, I didn't sleep not even a minute. I made this speech 20 times, a thousand times, and none of it came out today. I had a brilliant speech last night.
What were you going to say about the third step? And I'd read all this stuff, and then I'd go to bed at night, and I'd wake up the next morning and I'd know what to do, because my subconscious mind would absorb these things. Your subconscious mind will take care of you, and if you do the third step properly, which is to turn your will and your life over to care of God, then you will not have a problem, because God will take care of it for you and let your instincts take over. That's my opinion.
One more question? No? No more questions? All right, then we're going to end this meeting. I thank you, all of you, to be here tonight, this afternoon I should say, because I love you all, and we are going to end with the Lord Prior. And I'm going to say it in French, if you don't mind, because I don't know it in English. That's all right, I know it in English. The Lord be with you. And with your spirit.