The Brentwood Beginners Workshop Part 1 of 5

And begin this group meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship with men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other, that they may solve their common problem and help other alcoholics to recover from alcoholism. The only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking. Are there any other alcoholics present for this event? We won't.

Are there any newcomers sober anywhere from one day to 3 months worth. Would you raise your hand, please? Thank you. You're particularly welcome. This meeting is devoted to a discussion of the principles of the AA program and how they work.

Yulita will talk for as long as he chooses to talk and then open it up for questions. He has some written questions and then we'll open it up to the General Meeting. And your latest tonight is Alan Ennis. My name is Alan McGinnis, and I am an American alcoholic. I thought I would say that because it's the 4th July, but I'm not gonna ask you to sing God Bless America.

Would those of you who care to please join me and begin the meeting by reciting our Those of you who have been to meetings before that I have left know that I like to. I'd like for you to think of it not as a meeting, but as a workshop, where you and I come here together and we talk about this thing called alcoholism that we share. And what I have learned about it, what I have come to believe about it, and what you have come to believe about it, and things that you might want to know, questions that are in your mind. Because I saw there were so many newcomers and so I want to emphasize to you and don't ever forget it that nobody speaks officially for the fellowship of alcoholic synonymous, not even the founders. One of the most incredible things about this organization is that I can stand up here at a meeting like this and say, you think that I have come to believe with every fiber of my thinking.

And yet you can sit out there in meetings like this as I have done over the years again and again and again and disagree with every syllable I utter. And yet, both of us can be sober, both of us can be useful and constructive members not only of our house and honor, but of society. So if anything I say bothers you, it shouldn't. You should just dismiss it. Anything I say you disagree with, required entitled to as far as the game.

And it was a long time for me to get this through my head because I thought that if anything had to work, I came to this fellowship from a very authoritarian background. And I thought that if anything was going to work, if it's going to work for me and I wasn't at all sure that I wanted it to, I would have to agree with anything that I heard. And I didn't have to be around very long before I discovered that these alcoholics were not only not agreeing with each other, they would sell them agreeing with themselves 2 days in a row. So I thought, well, this is going to be a pretty So when I saw that that question was following, then I took the next and much more inviting alternative of it. I couldn't agree with everything that I heard, then everybody else would have to agree with me.

Now as I said, this is an inviting alternative and I've just heard this for many years until it finally dawned on me that it it for some strange reasons, it doesn't work that way in alcoholics. And I think without any plan or any great genius desire, what happened was the people who were forever and eternally living their lives on the basis of what does somebody else think, coming to a fellowship where everybody tells them what they think, but it's always different. So, somewhere along the line, you are forced to think to yourself and that's the beginning of growing up. Next to the final chapter in the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, that I'd like to read to you because I want a suspect to be home for what we're going to be doing here for the next month. Our hope is meant to be suggestive only.

We realize we know only a little. God will constantly disclose more to you and to us. Ask him in your morning meditation what you can do each day for the man who is still sick. The answers will come if your own house is in order. But obviously, you cannot transmit something you haven't got.

See to it that your relationship with him is right and great events will come to pass for you and countless others. This is a great fact for us. And what I would like to do for myself and for you and with you it's in the coming months, see if you're trying to start to build a house that is in order and that you can add others to come in and have a little shelter from the wind and the cold. And I'm going to try to do it by reviewing in mind for you the questions that came to me after I came to this fellowship and that I had to answer. And I'd like to go over these 4 talks around 4 questions.

And the first question was at the time is, as far as I'm concerned, is the very heart and the crux of what we're doing here, why we're here tonight and why we're not someplace else. I think it is the most at what and in the same breath and in the same instance, the most promising question an alcoholic has ever asked himself and I think it is also the most dangerous question he has ever asked himself, because depending upon the answer to it, it's largely shaped the future of life. And the question is, what is the point of sobriety? Somewhere, sometime, if you haven't asked yourself back in those words, you will. Sanchez argues you have done it long before you ever get there.

And the reason you've done it, of course, you probably haven't used the word sobriety. It seemed to me that word never existed in my vocabulary until I had a 12 step call made on me on February 6, 1952, when the interview I first heard that word. I went into a state of shock, I was already in a pretty bad state of shock because I just didn't like that word. The minute I heard it, drunk as I was, it brought a vision to my mind that has only been me fated over the years. That was the vision of a person who is in the pink of hell for the huge dead.

So, first, do you mind to ask yourself before you start here is what is the point of my staying sober? What's the point of staying sober? Now, why would we why would you and I look upon the mere fact of staying sober as being something so wonderful that it should have some point to it. Well, I think it's because in our culture, maybe in everybody, but certainly the only one that I know anything about from firsthand in the American culture, sobriety is considered a virtue. Even on the part of nonalcoholics, abstaining from the truth of the vine is often considered quite a thing to do.

And so, if you're virtuous to do this, then it follows as a nice day that, A, you have to be virtuous in order to do it and b, you should get by God a reward for it. Now, by the time the alpha heart reaches AA, this question has been burning in his mind so hard. This virtue has been held up to him as one of being such shining dominance over all others, that he wants something pretty big that I come if he goes along with this. Now, it would be wonderful if we all discussed this from the very beginning, but currently, somehow, we don't. We don't get around to it.

That's why I'm trying to discuss this with you tonight because I think it is the place where it begins, it's where it stays and finally, it's where it ends. If the alcoholic, when he gets here, he's no longer can leave us about this as a virtue. No matter what how difficult it might be or how many benefits he thinks he's going to accrue from it because as he gets here, he finds out that what he has, this virtue that he thinks is something that is done by choice. The lack of it on his part is a disease. When he gets himself, he's sick, And he gets sicker and sicker and sicker the more he says, I'm sober.

He's been testing this for quite a while and, we doesn't really believe the results most of the time, but I I had no longer in quarreled as a result for the time I got here. So maybe I was in the minority. I don't know. I never stopped to figure out whether more people get here hating the fact that they're an alcoholic or more people getting here, kind of glad that they're an alcoholic. We hear that phrase later, you know, I am a grateful alcoholic and just the chair stands up on some people's heads when they hear that.

I was in built for ring fingernail advising about whether or not I was an alcoholic at all. This never even encouraged me to do this. By the time I got here, I and others had called myself so many other names with such deadly access to me that the term alcoholic had a nice finance business now. Now it's kind of upper class. And that, in fact, would have a nice kind of sexy ring to it.

And so I didn't go through any of it. And then when they assured me that I had a disease, I never really paid any attention. It made no business to me then. It made no business to me now that it's a disease because the way I felt, whatever it is, buster, whatever label you want to put on it, whether you want to put some terrible stigma to it or some nice euphemism, whatever it is, I've got it. And I'm here not because I want to be, because others think I should be.

Now, I was asking myself what is the point of sobriety because I had started asking for my own work. I was always saying, well, I will take silver. Yes. And I think that's the way we generally come to this fellowship. Most of it have been falling into 2 groups.

We should not have said this out out loud and that's why I want to bring it out loud here tonight because this is the way it is ending. This is the way, it's failed a lot of times. The logic group, I think, says I will face over if I get back. Now, they have been around for a while and they have crews and choir things and they say this way down deep inside here in the entire appropriate time, they need to say this out loud because if they said it out loud, it would sound it would sound too cracked. But they say to themselves, I will say so if I get back and then there is a long list depending upon the circumstances in the background of the individual, You can supply your own from your background and your circumstances, but they can go, I would say, so great if I get back my wife, if I get back my husband, if I get back my job, if I get back the car, if I get back the kids, if I get back to myself, if I get back to self respect, if I get back to my teacher, on and on and on.

Now this has a very sagittary effect. You can stay sober, start staying away from the first dream and I'm worrying about myself right now to tell you I'm fair to define my turn that because I want to forestall the entire old question that might come up of what is the difference between being dry and being sober. I don't want to split any of these philosophical hairs with you. When I use the term sobriety, I am using it in the sense that it is the absence of any kind of chemical substance in your bloodstream that changes your thinking. That's what I'm talking about.

You get liquid or soft and whether you take it through the mouth, through the veins or some other way. I know you've learned how to do this. But that's what I mean by the grinding. It just isn't there. You're not taking it anymore.

And so you don't go out in the corner and ponder whether you are dry or sober. You just don't have anything inside of you that is changing your thinking, no chemical that is changing your thinking. Now, as I said, when you make this statement to yourself that I will face over if I get back and you have this long list that follows, a fairly standard very things can follow. Your great progress is often made, generally, the Alzheimer's look at these people and say, my job is not their drillings because they grow. Life comes in their eyes.

They start making self-service calls, the brand is walking all over the place. And then one day without any warning, there comes a day, an hour that they suddenly find themselves kind of ticking it off, you know. I've stayed sober to get back and the things they've saved over to get back either haven't gotten back or now the things have gotten back, they no longer want them. So what is the what what course did you take in that part? You say to yourself, what the hell is the point of the virus?

That's what you say, and there's no point to sobriety. If sobriety is going to be a means to an end and the end hasn't been done, then there is no point to sobriety, So you just spent with it. Now, that's one group. The smaller group, maybe it's growing because they're coming in younger and younger and younger. A lot of them have been around long enough to acquire very much to lose anything.

Some of them have been around long enough to lose their baby fat, but they're gaining it here. And they say themselves, I will take over if I get and then their lives follow. If I get a husband, Cadillac, if I get the contracts and they grow, they stake over, great things going, months to pass, years to pass, and then one day it's inventory time for them and one thing that sticks over to get either hasn't gotten or not that they have gotten it has not the value, that they want to convey in turn and say, what's the point of sobriety? And since it didn't get up what they wanted, then again it has no point, it has no value in itself at all, so did it dispense with. The virtue was followed, the virtue was practice.

We were virtuous while we were practicing it, but we didn't get our reward. We didn't get our reward. Now, if you are an anthropologist, this is the most dangerous thing that you can do because it will come this way again and again and again. And it so often comes to the newcomer this way, because he comes in, we define alcohol alcohol as a quaranty telling that the physical part of this disease comes to a total dead stop if he stays away from the first drink. And generally, there will be a great amount of recognition to that statement.

I remember the first time I heard it, I thought my dad, Mine and how did I figure that out? Someone as brilliant as I am, that's the way you say it. So read the same way from the first thing, and that's exactly the way you do towards the physical part. AA has no great form in thought or magic little kind of thing that you do in order to stay away from the first drink. You just stay away from the first drink.

Do anything else that you want to. You're a newcomer and that you can still taste that drink in your mouth and I say to you, there's only one way that you can stay sober and that is to stay away from the first things and that is all you have got to remember. That is all you have got to remember. You think I have done this several times before, Steve, and I'm dwelling on this thing tonight. I leave these meetings and then 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, I get a call.

It's always nice to get a call at that hour. And, generally, this omnice voice on the other end is very it's kind of in the toward the end of the second act. We haven't gotten into the 3rd act yet where it's really going to get crappy. We're kind of in the end toward the end of the second act, and it sounds like it generally goes nothing like this, I know I heard you saw, and I sure as hell like what you say about letting the tailgater pass. Would you tell me some more about that?

And then we go on. Would you tell me some more about this? And, finally, how long have you been sober? Oh, I've been sober. I'm drinking, but I shouldn't like what you say.

Well, you see, that's anything I say is just win unless you're gonna stay away from the first thing. That's the name of this thing. You don't come here to see me walk around with this thing hanging over my head and making up with a lot of nice things to send you out of here, saying, well, my god. That's pretty good. And then go down to the nearest bar or pick up a fence on your way home.

That isn't what it's all about. We are here for one purpose and one purpose We are not going to pot pills anymore. We are not going to hunt it. What do you do with pot? Most pot, I only did it once.

I mean, I don't and then they didn't sell it pot then. They told us it's something else. So whatever it is that you do with these different things, you ain't gonna do them anymore because this is the name of the game. And all you gotta keep in your mind is how does it begin? It begins by saying right from the first screen.

Now and you're gonna say to me, how do I do that? How do I do that? You've done this before. You've done this before. We all have done it before.

There's always been a day or an hour or an afternoon where we've stayed away from the first drink. Somebody or something kept us away from the first drink and that's all I'm saying to you. Get it first in your mind, and then we'll move on to this next thing about sobriety being an end in itself. Get it first in your mind that you stay away from the first thing. That's it.

That's where it begins. That's why you walk through the door at night. And I don't care if there's anything else you do. You don't have to be virtuous in order to do this. It's the journey we start we get you confused.

You lost a lot of time. You come in here. We just find alcoholism party. We've got you got a disease. We've got you gotta find a higher power.

We've got you gotta But you don't have to do any of this, ladies and gentlemen. You just have to send a link from the goddamn first thing. That is what you do. Now do anything else? Kick your wife, your husband, beat the kids, yell at the dog, tell your boss you resign, screw up your life however you want to, but don't take the first 3.

Now, if that isn't clear, I don't know what else I can do. Now, if that's how you do it, then that's what makes it an end in itself. All comparisons are odious, all analogies never quite fit, but let me try to make explicit in another frame. Let us suppose that instead of alcoholism, you have diabetes. The 2 are not too far apart and you go to a doctor and you examine and the test is taken and then he comes in and he says, well, I'm sorry to tell you, Joe, you have diabetes and as you know, you can die of diabetes.

It can be a very, very serious disease, Joe. But you don't need to worry too much because it's a substance called insulin and if you take it regularly as I'm going to describe it to you, you will be able to live a normal life and that by being a normal life Joe, I mean you will be able to come and go, you will enjoy normal health, You will be able to earn a living and do all the other things that normal health means. And you go away with your little insulin pills or your syringe, whether it's whichever way, you can be given to both parts. And after a while, you come back to the doctor and you say, doctor, I have decided not to take the insulin anymore. And the doctor says, Why?

And you say, Well, because I've been taking it regularly now. I take it just exactly the way you prescribe, but my wife doesn't treat me any better than she used to. I still have the same trouble with my boss. He's still a son of a bitch. I think he's driving me crazy.

The taxes are too high. I think I'll sign a recall position on ratings. Over and over and over, nothing has changed, doctor. Nothing has changed. So why the hell should I take the insulin?

And then the doctor patiently says, Joel, you take the insulin because that way you live. That way you live. And this for the alcoholic, whether you like it or not, you stay away from the first thing because that way you live. Now, does that mean that what I'm saying to you now is that if you continue to drink tonight that you will die tonight, no. Too bad maybe in a way that it isn't that way Because my experience with progressive nationalism is that it it is faithful, but long before you die physically, everything that makes life worth living dies long, long before you die physically.

And over in this almost 16 years that I've been in this fellowship, I have had an unfortunate, sad experience of seeing many of the friends that were very close to me and whom I knew very well, retaining here and then left and they are still drinking and they are dying by inches, but they have lost everything that makes life worth living. So you don't just walk off and die, but if it's still life, it is also one other thing that I would like you to think about because this is way it's not interesting to me. Every human being somewhere in his life, sometimes in his life, somewhere in his life, is going to have if he is ever going to grow up emotionally, if he is ever going to accept life on its turn, if he is ever going to recognize and recognize reality, then he is going to have to take a stand somewhere. He is going to have to put his feet down and what in marketing you call it positioning the product. I use that term because I don't know about it, Engineering probably has something, another term that would describe it.

For an alcoholic, there's a wonderful way to depend on the run on your life than you have if you're an alcoholic. There is just one way where you can take a stand. It's so clear cut. Lot of nonalcoholics, just as driven, just as neurotic, just as bugs, just as sure that there's no way out. They don't have a clear cut, a place that they can put their feet down and take a stand.

But you do, just as I did. And as I did one night. I put my feet down and I said, here I will stand. Here I will stand, not take the first drink no matter what. I would expect nothing for it.

I don't give a damn whether things are good or bad, whether I keep my job or lose my job, whether people hate me or love me, whether I finally flick my wig and really go insane, and the boy is miserable, white jacket is finally coming to get me and take me away. At least I've got I don't know where I am going and who is taking it. And I put my feet down, and I said, master god, there were no tears, there were no prayers. You say, no. You don't need them.

You don't need them to do this. You can do it yourself. Yourself. You can put your feet down and say, I'm a god here. I'm a collapse here.

I may go crazy here. I may flip my rig here, but from this spot, I will not retreat. You can do it. I did it. Thousands of others have done it and until you do it, you don't move forward.

You don't move forward, You keep moving backwards. Now, if you have now come to the conclusion that sobriety for an alcoholic is an ignorant self, if you have to quit thinking about it apart from virtue, it has nothing to do with virtue if you're an alcoholic. It has nothing to do with a reward. It has nothing to do with fringe benefits and dividends, those phrases that we talked about like confetti in AA. It had nothing to do with it at all.

The answer to the question for the alcoholic, what is the point of sobriety? The answer is for the alcoholic, the point of sobriety to give life. It is as simple, it is as fundamental and it is as all encompassing as fact. That's the answer to that question, what disappoints the sobriety. And as your days in AA lengthens, you will my thoughts here, remember these when I tell you are only my opinion, but I am telling you to you very vehemently because they are my treatment of opinions.

I don't have these mild opinions. You will hear a phrase as I heard. You will hear 2. Let me I we don't hear this other one so much anymore, but I bore you I should've heard it because with CI, AA as a fellowship has only been in existence as an organization about 30 years. And I've been around 15 of those.

So I got in, we might call, what what was called the early part of the game. And, when I got in day 8, if you still had your own teeth, you were looked upon with a little bit of suspicion. Things maybe things would maybe hadn't suffered enough. So the things that you used to hear then, and maybe it's still hard, quite a lot, but things used to be pointed at you and you were told, then silver is your number one problem. Now can you imagine how that sounds to the new you're staying sober but here's your number one problem.

What you're saying to yourself when I say that I'm quite sure is if you've got a couple of hours, you know, just like I used to when Eddie Bowens and Sully and Eddie Regan and everybody else were sticking their fingers in my chest and things. That's the front. Staying sober is your number one problem. And I'm going to say that I didn't want to mislead such a thing. I'm going to say, why do you dump plants come out into the parking lot of the 63100 Club and give me a couple of hours, and I'll tell you what a few of my number one problems are.

I'll I'll I'll outline them for you. But they were telling me the truth because, you see, I was an alcoholic, and I am an alcoholic. And it's true that sobriety is. The point of sobriety is his life for the alcoholic. Now the other things you hear, and this doesn't quite infuriate you as much as these other ones.

Sometimes it has a well, sometimes it has a kind of a wonderful spiritual noble ring about it. Generally, it's sad with a far off look in the eyes. The head tilted up a little bit towards the heavens, and somebody said, for me, the variety alone is not enough. And then everybody kinda and they wait for all of the recycles, all of the collecting that has to accompany this person's sobriety in order to make it worthwhile. Now fine and dandy, I think that's great.

But I said this is a a fellowship, wonderful fellowship, where everybody can believe what he wants to. All I'm saying is, mister Brian's alone is not enough, and all these blessings disappear as they have a terrific way of coming and going. I tell you from 15 years experience. They sometimes just aren't there at all, and no egg program can guarantee you that they will be there. Sometimes they are so absent that you wonder why you ever started on this at all.

So all I know is if sobriety alone is not enough, on those days when the sky is dark and you are looking in the mirror and and you realize that you are not one quick difference in your words several years ago and these blessings that you thought you had were really wishful thinking. These virtues that you thought you had possessed were kind of being worn as a cloak in order to impress others and went to use the self approval that you had been thirsty for all of your natural life, then what do you do? The bride is sure as hell better be enough at that moment, or you will drink a dip, and you will say the fatal word. What the hell is the point of surprise? That's the first question.

I hope I've answered it. And now I hope for the rest of the session, hope that I can answer some questions of Yuri. We've got 35 minutes. Don't tell me I silenced you that much. Yes.

The question my aunt was, when I was taking the pills and the food, I've had problems. Right? And I coped with reality. Now I am sober, and I'm afraid to let postage stamps. Will there come a time when, in sobriety, when I will have the same power to cope with reality that I have when I am full of booze and pills?

Alright. I'm gonna answer that. If you were really have power in coping with reality that you were coping with, you wouldn't have needed pills or foods. There was a non fear in side of you that made you take pills and booze like it did with all the rest of us. We didn't take them because, you know, we thought that it was just a real round off thing to do.

You know? You see, if you're a very well normal, well adjusted person coping with reality and having a lot of power and getting along fine, you simply don't drink or feel yourself today. You don't have to come to an AA meeting. So the fear that you are now feeling sober, you are feeling because the things you were doing to hide it are absent. And part it's the whole thing that AA tries to do and that's the whole game the whole goal of our of our therapy is to and this is the thing we will examine in the next session, is to change the thinking, change the emotion, change the whole complex that has produced the fear and that is now besetting you.

So the answer is if you are willing to put forth the effort required, if you are willing to do the things that have to be done, then the answer to your question is yes. There does come a day and sooner than you think. When solar, you are able to do what you had to get drunk to do before. And since you are doing the solar, you will do them a lot better. What's the most wonderful about it, you will remember doing them.

So do you wanna define that term, peer group? Are you something? Yeah. But casual facing I get it. You mean when you're going out in non AA surrounding.

Is that what you're saying? AA sitting together the first, just getting, you know, getting. Do you do you feel feel of heat? Well, as we go along here, and you know this, Al, you you we talked about it, you and I together. The reason you built we all built ill at ease sober at first is because we used to feel always feel ill at ease sober.

So we got drunk. In our area, we wouldn't feel ill at ease sober. That's why we brag. We sell GilaBean sober. We didn't know how to cope with what we thought was reality without some kind of aid.

We did not did not know how to stand there as ourselves without a glass in our hand that would just make us witty, charming, intelligent, or brave, or sexy, or whatever we wanted to be on that particular night, our day, our afternoon. So that's why we drink. So naturally, when this artificial aid is removed, until we finally come to know ourselves well enough that we can accept ourselves, indeed, and learn to have what the psychologists and the psychiatrists and the philosophers regard as the ultimate, and that is plain self esteem. Self esteem, self acceptance that leads to self esteem, then there is no we're not uncomfortable no matter what group we're in. And there is a I've heard I'll tell you how uncomfortable I was.

So we're and that's strange to me because I up until the last few years of my drinking, I was not a daily drinker. I was a periodic drinker. I didn't know I was a periodic. I didn't know I never heard that phrase until I came to AA. I could drink when I couldn't stay sober, and then I stayed sober as long as I could.

And when I couldn't stay sober any longer I drank it. See? But after last few years in my drinking, I drank pretty several. That period became, calm, and the silence became common. But, I used to stand outside a, AAV or sit in the car and think, oh god.

Do I have to go in and put on that face and say hello? You know? And everybody say hello. So I just I hate it. Now I I don't know why because I I was able to go to work because, see, I used to go to work a lot of times sober.

But goddamn it, I don't know what they're made meaning sober. It was really it's it's a very strange thing and as a matter of fact, it took a long time for me to believe that AA was real. That's why I came in and I succeeded after far. You see, I was one I was the group. I was the I would take over if I get group.

And god knows it wasn't because I was young and hadn't been around long enough to lose a few things, and it was simply because all I wanted was something very simple, very forthright, very direct. I said to myself way down the pier inside, I said I will take over if I get ten nights. That was all I wanted. But I wanted to tell I was alive and could enjoy it, and I would have preferred it by acclamation. Well, it did come.

It did not come. And so when I think it did come, then I said the fatal word, what the hell is the point of surviving? What the hell is the point of doing all this? Dragging myself to those meetings, making these steps step calls on these dirty, smelly, lousy drums, listening to the crap that I have to listen to, and all those jerks. And I don't become a thing, what the hell is the part of this?

Then I left and I left. I resigned. So it's very, very it's quite natural to feel uncomfortable whether you're in a peer group or not. The the home the the most exciting thing about this is to me once you once you accept this you know, let me put it another way. Every art, every science, every philosophy has a basic premise upon which the whole structure, the superstructure, the rest of the structure rests.

There's a Latin phrase that describes it is it is called the sine qua non and the literal translation of that phrase is without which nothing else. Now there is a sine qua non for recovery from alcoholism in my opinion, and there's it is the fact that sobriety is an end in itself. It's whether it hits you anything, whether you feel comfortable or uncomfortable, sad or glad, afraid or brave, full of despair or full of hope, holy or bad, sinful or virtuous, chaste or unchaste. Supriacy for the alcoholic is an end in itself. That is the fundamental requisite for recovery from this disease.

Until you have that, you can stay sober for years, ladies and gentlemen, and all who are doing the effect, in my opinion, postponing a drug. I have seen it happen again and again. Any other questions? Presenting with what? How long could you then sober?

16 days. Go ahead and let me have your best one. Come back again to what I told you. You see, we give it to you so fast, just stay away from the first thing. If you wanna hate a few people, go ahead and hate them.

So you do not have to be virtuous and argue to the students to stay sober. Now as you go along, you will find as all of us said, that having resentments are uncomfortable, not to the person you resent, but to you. But, all you need to do you see, and if you say to your teacher, put it like this, I gotta get rid of these resentments or I'll get drunk. You will get drunk, bro, because you won't get rid of the resentment. So go ahead and have the resentment for a while.

Stay away from first treatment. Anything else? This is the name of the game. You see? This is the name of the game.

The answer for you is exactly the answer that I gave him. If you are feeling good, enjoy it. Enjoy it. Don't question it. You don't go away.

Yes. You better. Put it on tape and technicolor if you can because you'll need it. You'll need it. You'll need it.

Yes. Well, but, Jake, you have you you you always have to open the door before you go through it. And when you when you have opened the door, as you just have of of discovering that material things are status, playing as dead during or owning a motorcycle does not of themselves change in happiness, then you have opened the door into getting it inside. Now you will go through that door. But you've already started.

These these I have found in my life that the questions that are uppermost in your mind at any given time, and this is gonna sound very philosophical in Michigan and it's it's actually shouldn't have all of its intuitive facts. The questions that are bugging you are always in the process of being answered, and your daily life or they would not be bugging you. And pretty soon, we find that you have worked through to the answer. And if you can keep that one of the most encouraging things, the most sustaining things that I have ever it's done on me. I've never read this anywhere, so I don't know whether I could be supported by this at all and this at all in anywhere, but I found it from my own experience.

That things that keep coming back in my mind, bugging the daylight out of me. After a while, I find out I have been living the answer. The answer has been coming out of this turmoil, and that's why the questions have been bugging me. This is what happened to you. Anybody else?

Yes? Let's have another question. Come on. We've got time to go here. Crisis.

You may never have me again. Well, alright. That's a very legitimate question. The next question is the next very thing we'll ask ourselves the question, is a spiritual experience necessary in order to maintain sobriety? At the 3rd week, the question we'll ask and stick around here in our workshop will be, what are the old ideas and how do you let go of them?

And 4th, the 4th week will be after the old ideas, what? Those are the 4th questions. Okay. Any other questions? You wanna join early, get an extra cup of coffee?

No? Well, alright. I'll few more minutes. And be sure I'd like for you to bring in these written questions next week. And, I guarantee you that if they are capable of being read from the podium, I will try to answer them.

Again, let's get back to the newcomer. Once more, I want to spell it out to you in this because this is this is what really happens. You think you come in here the one thing that you're sure of is that life is pretty grim and that you are pretty grim. You don't dismiss it, but some of you do. I was shouting from the housetops because, I was convinced of it, so I thought it shouldn't be louder.

And finally, I realized that my drinking towards the end was merely to confirm my opinion of myself and to make it better so that I could really say stand in front of the whole world and and say, you see, you see, I always told you I was rotten so here I am, see. Now you come in here last for a year and then we start talking to you, and we say sometimes we, in my opinion, we get the cart before the heart. We start telling you that life can be beautiful. You don't believe it, and you think, well, this is an act like I did when I first came. You see, my first reaction to AA was that it really wasn't real.

I didn't know that at the time. I just thought that I just, like, felt good. I felt uncomfortable. I felt uncomfortable as hell. But I realized later when I looked back that the reason I the one of the big reasons I felt uncomfortable was I didn't believe in any of it.

I didn't believe the people working. In there. I think, certainly, I didn't believe that what I was hearing was real. I read the quote, but I didn't, and I didn't have any quarrel with it. I thought it was completely sound.

And I think that the confusion persists because we begin to talk to you so often about things that can only begin to make sense to you after you have had a certain period of sobriety, after you have stayed away from the 1st and first, certainly, should I? Now I know this is an insult to your television. You think, well, what's my knowledge? What? I can go to work.

I earn a business. I mean, that's all very well and good. Earning a living, driving a car, and all these things that you've done over the years while you've been drinking, making money, paying the bills, or not, but let's say say that you have, that has nothing to do with what we're talking about, about these other things that will come clear to you as sobriety. Because what we're talking to you about, that it takes a little bit of sobriety, is to begin to try to you just try. You just try.