Workshop on the topic "There is a solution" in Tampa, FL

Hour and, before I get started, I wanna thank you all. I mean, I've really had a good time. I've seen a lot of friends I haven't seen in a while, and it's been a great pleasure, for me. I enjoyed this. Like I said earlier, it's nothing like handing out good news.

And that's all this is, is to just tell everybody. There used to be a radio commentator named H. V. Kalpenborn, and he used to start his program, there's bad news tonight. And I like to start ours.

There's good news tonight. All we got here is good news, and, so continuing, my favorite prayer is the Saint Francis prayer And, Saint Francis is was quite a character because he was kinda like us a little bit. He was like a crusader with the swords and going off and whacking all the Muslims heads off and just razing heck all over the Middle East and, in the name of God. And, he just saw that he'd wanna do that anymore. And he started really thinking about what would spirituality be?

What how how how do you do it? And he came to the conclusion that you must try to totally eliminate your ego and that's what he spent his life doing, was trying to find one more thing where his ego was demanding something, you know, so he would sleep outside and he would give away possessions and do various things. Not to be a nice person, but to keep reducing the ego so that the channel between his spiritual energy inside could open, and he could feel nothing. He would be closer and closer to the pure energy, and as he did that, people liked to be near him just to feel the energy, just to feel that. And so his very being brought joy wherever he went, and that's the main attraction about Saint Francis, and you see the birds and the animals and they're all, just wanna hang around that energy.

And of course, that's the energy of our higher power. So the real joy of the whole thing was just go hang around your higher power. I mean that's what it's about but you can't go there because your ego doesn't want you to. So the steps are designed to crash all the blockages between us and this flow of energy. Saint Francis called it the channel.

Help me to open the channel of thy peace. I used to think that the peace was God's peace out here and if I could get my character defects and do all the steps and open this up and this peace would come in, I'd just be overcome by this wonderful feeling. That's exactly backwards. The peace comes out from me. It can finally, I can see that that I was born with that.

It's been in there all along. Part of the suffering that we do is that the real us wants to love everybody we see. The real us wants to just help other people, but our ego is going, don't fall for that junk. You gotta get out and get yours. You gotta get out and do that, and our real self is crying.

It's why are you doing that? That's not who I am. Let me out of here. Let me show you who I am. So your ideas about yourself are totally wrong.

You are magnificent creature who is being blocked by a bunch of ideas that are wrong. Old ideas have failed us nothing so we go and get them the heck out of there and we learn in the, 4th and 5th step that it's impossible to see the truth about ourselves alone. That's why we go to another human being and we get to see the 4th dimension of our 4 step inventory with our 3rd dimension. It's just sitting there. How do you know anything you wrote down is right?

Since you rationalize all the time, that list is probably nothing. So when you self evaluate, you can only do it in 2 dimensions so we need always another person. Don't forget the line. People of very high spiritual, development always insist on checking with others the guidance they feel they've got getting from God. So high development and they still check with somebody else check with somebody else.

How many times we go to our sponsor with this problem, they're after me, they're gonna get me to get to bed. And then he goes, wait wait, There's this, there's that, there's this, there's that. And then you say, well, if you look at it that way, It's a different thing. This is what power is. It's the power to see it differently.

When we see it differently, it changes everything. So when we I read a book where the author said that, you know what the planet Earth is? It's a soul school. That's what it is. That's why it's here.

There are a whole bunch of souls and they're going to school down here. So every, and we come in here and now we're really in the soul school. In order to get through the school, there have to be quizzes and there has to be exams and there have to be things. And so, okay, now we're in the whole school. We're gonna show you how to use the power of this wonderful program to get through grief.

Wouldn't you like to be able to do that with grace and dignity? Okay. Then we gotta kill somebody in your family. Now, see, I'm I'm I'm making a joke, but I'm saying, these events have to happen. So now your mother dies.

Now we're gonna have to deal with grief. This is the saddest thing. This is, what would the program have us do? Wow. My mother died, and I've got 10 years in the program.

Why don't I try to show the new women in our group how to go through this with grace and dignity so that when their mother dies, they won't be as afraid of it, and they won't be as afraid frightened of the future. I've been given a very noble challenge here. So I will experience my grief, but I will also experience something bigger than that. Oh, what a new way of looking at it. You see the difference?

It it it just takes every challenge that comes along and if we can get other people to help us see it, see it as having a purpose. It's not to destroy you. It is to destroy more of our ego. It is to have us come out the other side a different person. And so that's the way I look at, all the early steps, are opening the channel, opening the channel so this power can flow through.

We have to clear up the records of the past and then when it comes back to me, I'm gonna make a comment about 6. But what I wanted to get to now is I talked about the promises earlier and the verbs in the promises at the end of the 9th step was, you know, it's all these abstract verbs that are only spiritual verbs. You couldn't get that from figuring anything out. It is just a gift that's just handed to you. Peace is handed to you.

A way of seeing things. Suddenly life takes on a real meaning. How? Hey. Don't worry about how.

It just happens. Just happens. You're doing these stupid steps that you don't believe in and all these things are just happening because the power is causing them to happen in you. And in the, big book, it's an interesting sentence in the at, right after the promises, it says now we're at step 10 and it's, about the 4th sentence now it says, we have entered the world of the spirit and and we saw that we entered it when we saw the promises. See, the promises are using verbs that describe the world of the spirit.

So after the first 9 steps, now we're gonna enter the world of the spirit and that world exists in 10, 11, and 12. This is the world of the spirit. So where is the world of the spirit? You know what I mean? Is it, another planet?

Is it, it, over there? Or you go to India up in the Himalayas? I mean, where's the world of the spirit? We find out the world of the spirit is in the now, which is exactly what Bob was talking about in the book that he was kind enough to get me a copy of. The the spirit only exists in the now.

There's no other place to find it. So anytime we're worried about the past or frightened about the future, we're cut off from the spirit. So the whole 10th step and and and 11 and 12 passing the message on and practice of principles in all our affairs. You look at the 12 step, it lists a 100 different problems. You know what I'm saying?

You remember the 12 step in the in the in the 12 and 12? It's just a 100 different problems. And then this is gonna happen, and this is gonna happen, and that's gonna happen. Those are all spiritual quizzes. They're all little tests to show you the power that you now have access to, and it'll show it just talks in there about now when this happens and you just get closer to your higher power and it'll lift you out of that one.

It'll give you a different way of looking at it. It'll always show you how these are designed to have you grow and not get destroyed. Your ego is getting destroyed but you're being set free. So problems, our attitude towards problems or or circumstances changes and we it says that in the 7th step that our attitude towards pain changes because pain is just the ego being crushed some more and some more. And, as we see the outcome and the growth that comes out of every bit of that pain, Bill writes, our attitude about pain changes and we suddenly see, oh boy here I'm gonna be going somewhere.

This is and so it all of a sudden it becomes effort. It's kinda like when you're out of shape and you haven't worked out when you first start. Isn't it painful to go over and work out and the muscles are going and this and that? Well, what about 3 months later when you're in shape? You're still doing the same thing that was so painful.

Now you're over there going, god, this feels so good and it's it's energizing me and I'm doing this. So your whole attitude about pain has changed because you see the results that are coming. Before we got to a8, we were going to the gutter and every bit of pain was driving us down, and now every bit of pain is guiding us up. The the the course of spirituality is like a beam. When I was was taught flying and I think Creighton the same thing, the only navigation they had was the radio range.

You remember the radio range of Creighton? There was no needle. You didn't have anything in there to tell you. You had to listen and pick up this beam and then if you were off the beam to the right you heard an a, you know, and then if you went off to the left you heard an n, dot, dot, whichever they are. And so, if you ever got on a radio beam and heard nothing but a solid beam, you knew there was something wrong.

Nobody can fly that beam with wind and altitude and planes and this erratic equipment and everything without constantly going off it and then that told you to get right back on it. So in order to get communicated to that you are on the right path, you had to get a signal that you're going off. Now in our spiritual life, we call that pain. It's to get if we never if we just sat in oblivion the whole time, we couldn't believe that it was real. And so the pain that comes into our lives are these corrections so that we can continue to grow from it.

So it's built in. It's the way it's supposed to be is to experience these discomforts along the way. So if you're experiencing them, you're not doing anything at all wrong. It's the way it was set up. This is how God set the radio range up so that you will be able to follow his guidance to this freedom that is out in front of you.

And, it is simply a matter of maintaining that. And so that's what this step is talking about. The essence of the last three steps in my judgment is staying undisturbed. That's what the whole deal is, staying undisturbed. Because when you're undisturbed, you're in the now.

When you're undisturbed, you have conscious contact. So all we gotta do when we feel ourselves getting disturbed is to go, time out. There's 4 little things in the 10th step. Just stop and say, I'm getting disturbed. But we don't like to promptly admit that there's something wrong with us.

You know what I'm saying? We don't like to go, I'm off course. I'm starting to go a little bit off course. We like to pretend we're still on course, and we'll stay in that pain for a month. You know how far off course you can get in a month?

Takes forever to get back on the a a beam because we didn't want to admit we were going off it in the first place. Oh, no. I don't go off the beam. I'm I've got the program. I've been sober 20 years.

I just fly right straight ahead. That's what they're saying. When we're disturbed, no matter what the cause, there's something wrong with us. What what's wrong with us? You're disturbed.

That's it. That's what's wrong with you And so all you have to do is change your priorities to my new goal is to always get undisturbed. I'm gonna pray to not get as disturbed in the 1st place, but then my new goal is I get disturbed, I'm gonna get undisturbed. So in other words, you're going down the field. It's almost like we have a referee.

You're going through your day. Oh, disturbed. You can't go forward until you get undisturbed. Time out. Time Time out.

You can't move the ball any further till you get undisturbed. Why? We don't want you moving down the field disturbed. You're gonna throw the ball at the referee. You're gonna do this.

Now you're gonna have to make amends. Now it's gonna take forever to clean the thing up. So when somebody comes into your office and and your boss comes up to you and says, you know this memo you wrote last night, it sucks. You're disturbed. If we don't go time out, we're liable to say, hey, take this job and shove it and as those words are leaving our mouth, we're trying to get them back.

We need this job, And he goes, oh, too late. Out of here. So we gotta go, oh, disturbed. Get on the phone. Call up.

I call up my friend, Dan. I go, Dan, let me run something by you. This is my favorite thing to do. See, the longer you're sober, the quicker you pick up the phone. Newcomers take forever to pick up the phone.

When you're around a long time, you just oh, we're getting a little tiny bit disturbed. Hey. Let me run something by you. I did that, the boss came in, he did that, and, he'll say one of 2 things. He will either say that other person's being totally outrageous.

They're totally off the wall. Forgive them. Or they'll say, you're all screwed up. Go make an amend. The the goal is once I finish, I'm back to being undisturbed.

Now I can proceed through the day. Now as you proceed through a day undisturbed, you are generating Saint Francis like energy. You you follow what I'm talking about? You don't think of yourself as Saint Francis, but you have the same standard that he did. It's all the same.

The same amount of wonderful, spiritual, loving energies inside of everybody in the room. So all put in there exactly the same. It's just a question to gain this channel open wider so that it can go and when it's disturbed, boom, it's gone. So let's compare a disturbed person and an undisturbed person through a couple of normal events during during a day. The disturbed person walks into the dry cleaning on the way home to pick up his tuxedo for this very important wedding tomorrow morning and is told that it won't be back.

Now guess what that poor clerk is feeling when he has to tell mister x that his tuxedo isn't gone. They are shaking in their boots. And when he finds out, he goes, do you know who the hell I am? Let me talk to your boss. And then she reacts in some horrible way and he goes home and everywhere he went that day, and over at the pharmacy, they didn't have something else.

Yeah. And they went, well, take your business somewhere else and and he comes home and he just goes, the world is filled with rotten grumpy people. That's all I ran into today was rotten grumpy people. The same person undisturbed, he had that channel open, goes into the dry cleaning and says, I'm sorry your tuxedo isn't gonna be ready. It's got a mess up in the truck or whatever, and it won't be until Monday.

And he sits there and he goes, god. I'm glad I'm not this clerk. What a terrible message you'd have to give to somebody. Look, I'll wear a dark suit. It's not a big teal.

It's just a freaking wedding. Relax, God. I love coming in here. Do you know what you did to their day? Have any idea what you did?

They glow. And the same thing at the pharmacy. I'll be back Monday. Yeah. Relax.

Jeez. You probably get a lot of people in here chewing your head off. Relax. It's just wonderful. As you go through the day, you get the feedback from that kind of energy and you conclude as you're going to bed that night that the world is filled with wonderful people.

And they're all wonderful because of you. And you created your own reality out of this reversal of energy and putting a priority on being undisturbed. And so that's sort of what that means to enter the world to the spirit, and we have to stay there. As Bob said, we have a daily reprieve. I did a routine one time where I said, let's stop working the program, and then I went back and took the promises and had them go in reverse.

We will lose, surrender thee, and peace. We will, you know, and it just all gets taken away. In other words, none of that stuff is permanent. And so we just maintain this undisturbedness and developing the channel further is the whole realm of the spirit in 10, 11, and 12. Those are some thoughts that I had.

I'll pass it on to Bob. Sandy talked about ego. There's a couple of things I wanna read. As you grow up, you form a mental image of who you are based on personal and cultural conditioning. We may call this phantom self the ego.

It consists of mind activity and can only be kept through constant thinking. The term ego means different things to different people but when I use it here it means the false self created by unconscious identification with the mind. It says there he starts the book when he says there is an eternal ever present one life behind the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death. Many people use the word God to describe it. I often use the word being.

And I think when each of us get a sense that there is something beyond form that that we connect with, that we that we call God. And he said you can only know it when the mind is still. One of the things we talked about when he talks about being undisturbed. In order to access the now, in order to access God, we talked about prayer and meditation in our program. Over a period of time, we have to become more still.

We have to become there has to be more of a silence in the center of our being because we have too much velocity in our minds. We have too much chatter that occupies us as we go through our daily business. So part of the reason we talk about having the discipline of prayer and meditation is to offer ourselves a chance to step aside and to calm down and to quiet. And one of the things you notice when you step aside and you do that is how busy your mind is, you are not even aware of it until you step aside to try to be quiet. But that practice over a period of time is since you can only know it when your mind is still, when you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the now.

Being can be felt felt but it can never be understood mentally. A couple of people have said I you know, you guys are talking and I have trouble understanding. I like what you're saying. And the nature of spiritual material is is you can't hold the ocean of the world in the teacup of your mind. It is not it's pointing to God.

You can't contain God in words. You can point to God. But as the master said, you know, when the master points to the moon all the idiot sees is the finger. The words are the pointer not the item. It's just to regain awareness of being to abide in the state of the feeling realization is enlightenment.

The enlightenment is really the simply your natural state of felt oneness with being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable, indestructible. Something that almost paradoxically is essentially you, yet as much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form. I love, you know I think if you have been in the program a while, you get kind of themes or ideas and one of the things that is attractive, there is 2 things that have attracted my attention in the last year a little bit.

One of them is in the 3rd step, the word decision. I never paid as much attention to that word as I have in the last year. And the book talks about you know ask the guys who wants to come over to your house and make a decision. I think sometimes we skip over that word. When Sandy talked about make a decision to believe in God.

You know, I mean what I thought. Most of us say I don't believe. Why don't you decide differently? And there's a real active will kind of directing your attention to it. One of the other words that has caught my attention in the tall steps is spiritual awakening.

So, when we're talking about, what are we talking about being in the now and being present, being enlightened, being more aware, being more spiritual. I think what happens to us is you become more awakened. I think the analogy that most of us have been sleepwalking would not be an incorrect analogy. Most of us have been doing things in our lives that we are not very conscious to. We have been hurting people, making decisions at a low level.

Now as you start to become, as you start to do the work, as you start to get sober, as you start to go through the steps, as you go to meetings, little by little, you start to hear something. You go, oh, yeah. Yeah. I I you know, someone says something in the media and you go, yeah. Me I I had that experience.

You know. And what's happening to you is part of you is waking up that wasn't conscious. And as you increase your consciousness, you start to see the world differently. What did, I mean I love the word that Carl Jung said to Roland, what page is that on? Find that for me, will you?

When he when he said the central ideas of our lives are suddenly cast aside. The ideas and values that I had are, you know, and whenever the book talks using spiritual, the result of a spiritual experience you often see the word suddenly, almost at once, you know I mean the the preface is the moment I made the decision to go through my life I really felt and one of my favorite things when we're so what we're talking about is that if you if you use this practice, you are not the same person. We one of the things we forget is we're not who we used to be. We're not the unthinking, unconscious person we used to be. Maybe we still do some of the same things, same Chevy, you know, we're driving the same car, same hubcaps, but there is an alteration, there is a raising of consciousness and I like one of my favorite passages is right after step 10 when Sandy was talking about, you know, we have entered the world of the spirit, but at the bottom of page 84 it says and we have ceased fighting anything or anyone even alcohol.

For by this time, sanity will have returned. We will seldom be interested in liquor if tempted will recoil from it from a hot is that as from a hot flame. We react sanely and normally and we find that this has been happened automatically. We will see that our new attitude towards liquor, gambling, sex, whatever. Our new attitude towards liquor has been given to us without any thought or effort on our part.

It just comes. That's the the miracle of it. We're not fighting it neither are we avoiding temptation. We feel as though we've been placed in a position of neutrality, safe and protected. We have not sworn off instead the problem has been removed.

It doesn't exist for us. We are neither cocky nor afraid. This is our experience. This is how we react as long as we are in fit spiritual condition. Drop another sentence and it says we are not cured of alcoholism.

We're granted a daily reprieve that that condition on the contingent upon the maintenance of our spiritual condition. We're not the same people when we are in connection and but the memory we we sometimes I think we are too strongly connected to our past. When Sandy talked about being in the present because our past gives our ego the identity. Without our past, who are we? So our story becomes ever important to us.

Well, when you have that story, you've got some place life is not okay. You've got some place you have to go for it to be okay. So we've got an enormous amount of attention in the future where our salvation is gonna be. As soon as I find the right woman, it's gonna be okay. As As soon as I make $50, it's gonna be okay.

As soon as I get this, as soon as I get rid of that, as soon as I so we're in the past running towards the future, having almost no experience I mean, today, now is just something we have to pass through to get to where we have to get to for it to be okay. When the only peace and the only place you can ever be is now. And right at this moment, I suspect for most of us, right now, it's all okay. For every person that's present and in this conversation, and if you like this conversation, the reason we're able to have it is because of you. This conversation is contingent upon pitching and catching.

You know, there is you can't say the same thing to a different group. There is something that we are doing together. We are creating that you are pulling out of us what is coming out of us. If we did this to another group, it would be a different conversation. So we are creating this together.

But so our level of consciousness as we wake up, we just be different. And when you are present in this moment, there's nothing wrong. Pain, when you talked about the helm Helm saying misery is optional. K. Suffering is optional.

Suffering and pain have to do with one thing, rejection of what is. When something happens, we're just confident that it should not happen. Flat tire, tuxedo getting screwed up, not getting the check-in the mail. We're just confident that that shouldn't happen. The person who is who has some spiritual development, who has advanced, it is the way it is.

It's just just the way it is. It isn't personal. It's just the way it is. And my job is to be with that. They told me when I came in today, there's 2 weeks for you to be at peace.

Get everything you want or change the way you react to whatever happens in your life. The second thing is not contingent upon anything. Mhmm. When you can be comfortable with whatever is happening around you, you can have peace regardless of the circumstances. And so when you say to yourself, all I really want to do is be happy.

I've been changing that word. All I want to really do is be at peace. I just want to be here now. There's nothing wrong. Most of us are we've had this busted sense inside of us.

The sense of what Sandy talks about this deep longing for God. It shows up as a sense of separation because the ego is the separator. Chuck used to talk about the ego as the sense of conscious separation from and that is what makes you over there, me over here. What makes me different, puts us in opposition, wants me to be right, you wrong, wants me to dominate, wants you to be dominated. That is the business of the ego.

When our fundamental spiritual business is to be loving. This is a soul school. The subject is love. You want to know if your life's moving in the right direction? If it's moving towards love, it's moving in the right direction.

So rather than happiness, rather than trying to keep assembling the circumstances of our life, what if we remain undisturbed? What if we just trusted that it is the way it is supposed to be? It's just the way it is and became lovers of reality and allowed ourselves to simply be in that process. One way right now, there's nothing wrong with us. Because we've had a busted sense.

We've always had a sense that it's not okay and I am not okay. That busted sense came from the sense of separation. When we start taking the spiritual journey, we get reconnected. When we are reconnected, we are not separate. It is okay and I am okay and then you can be in the present.

You're not running from the past to some salvation in the future and never being in the now. And what I think that is is a different sense of consciousness. It's a different it's an elevated awareness. It is a elevated awakening. And as you are more awake, many of the things that you did that don't work in your life, you just no longer do.

They just you see through them. They don't work. Okay. Two more little stories and then we'll do questions, and you better have some. Bob made me think of something.

A lot of us knew doctor Paul. What a wonderful man. And doctor Paul used to cause some controversy. People used to write in the central office, not about doctor alcoholic addict, but about acceptance is the key to everything. Acceptance is the key to everything.

Now when you when you see that, you would go, what about the serenity prayer? There are things you accept and then there are things that you change, and I have to need get the wisdom to know the difference. So you don't accept everything. So doctor Paul is wrong. And that was the am I making my point that that that it's like you can't accept everything if the serenity prayer says no.

When things come along, they're in 2 categories. They're those you accept and those you change. They're both right. They're both right. We have to accept everything in order to return to undisturbedness so that we can make any evaluation at all about the serenity prayer.

So everything does have to be accepted because that's what happened. Then from an undisturbed point of view, we can in fact decide if something needs to be changed. Now if we're not disturbed That is an action, not a real Yeah. If we're not disturbed, we may just not change it because what was driving us to wanna change it in the first place? Something happened that now there's gonna be category of things where you would, absolutely calm as can be, decide to get a lawyer and sue somebody.

But it wouldn't be it would be because it was the right thing. You talk it over with people and they say, yeah, this is the right step to take. I'm using that. It could be many other things, but it's being done from a calm point of view and undisturbed. So if we're gonna get the wisdom from our higher power, he can't communicate to us while we're disturbed because we can't hear him.

There's too much noise. The still small voice can't get through the rage. So you see that they're both right. I just I just wanted to make that point that, acceptance is the key to everything and from that, you can move into that. Now the thing I was gonna talk about was mercy because you brought this up and I I just love it.

You said we don't want justice. We want mercy. And I think mercy is is a very powerful thing. And there's someone who needs a lot of mercy, and I'm gonna ask you all to be especially merciful. And this person is you.

It's you. Get off your back. Get off of it. Who the heck are you to be beating up you? You deserve the love from you.

So let's let me show you where the dilemma comes and this is the last point I wanna make, it's in the 6th step. And it's called the riddle of our existence and it's gonna get back to this coexistence in spiritual and material worlds. In the 6th step where Tyler read have god remove all these defects of character, we find out that the implication of that step is perfection. It doesn't say some of our character defects. It says all.

Have you ever seen anybody with all their character defects gone? Nobody ever made it. Nobody ever made it. So so what does that mean? It built built sees that this could create a mental problem.

Why do you put a step up there that can't be done? I mean, why would we have that step? And he goes and he goes to explain it, and and I'm gonna try to see if I can get this clear. First, he says, we have to say to ourselves, well, what proof do we have that if I got entirely ready, God would remove entirely a character defect. He said, unfortunately, my friends, we have perfect proof.

You're drinking the biggest problem you ever had, you became entirely willing to have this problem removed and it was removed after you humbly ask. So we already know that this principle works. If you get entirely willing, well, why don't we get entirely willing on all the rest of them? And Bill calls that the riddle of our existence and he says the answer, the true answer maybe only in the mind of God, but he speculates on what it might be. And what he speculates is that the rest of the character defects are not fatal like alcohol is.

They're annoying. They are definitely blocking us from a closer contact with a higher power, and they are controlled by our ego. And so when someone comes up to us and says okay I've got the see everybody has the same character defects. They were issued to us at birth. So you didn't create any of them.

So you can't take credit. Well, I made myself lustful. No. We put that in when you came out to shoot. That's just part of the deal.

But we have the power here and we know we just saw what we did with alcohol and so here's your chance. That's really kind of ruining your life. Right? Right? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I'm doing things. I'm embarrassed and then, you know, I don't know. Well, come here. We have a step for that.

How would you like 100% of your lust removed? 100%. What would that be? What is that? Like he joined a nunnery?

What is a 100%. What I'd like is to be I like 80% removed. I might get lucky once in a while. Alright. Alright.

So you want 80% with the lust. Okay. Fine. What about greed? Stop wanting stuff and getting all this stuff.

How about greed? You know, it made you cheat in business and it made you lie on your income. So would you like to get rid of all greed? Well, I would, yeah, I'd like to get rid of most the greed. I would really like to get rid of most greed.

You see what we're saying? Most, most greed. Put me down for 70%. Well, how about gossip? Doctor Bob said gossip is one of the worst problems we have in Alcoholics Anonymous.

Watch that airing member of the tongue. Gossip. Gossip. Don't you see the harm it does suggest? Yeah.

Yeah. It does. I I really hate gossip. I hate gossip. I would like to stop originating gossip.

Now, if somebody else originated it and I'm just the conduit. It's technically not my gossip. I am I'm simply reporting, so I'd like to no longer originate gossip And as we go through this step, we find nobody wants to write down all. And so why? This is the riddle.

This is the problem. And it was that's the way the system was set up. And it was set up because we're spiritual beings in a material world, and we have our instinctual drives and no one's been able to ever get rid of all of them, and we have our quest to become closer to our higher power in opposition to the spiritual, to the instinctual drives. That's our challenge. And we're never gonna get there.

If some I forget exactly, maybe in the 4th step. It says, desires will always exist that oppose the grace of God. So what we have to do is accept that this is the deal. That this conflict is built into our system and that we will strive towards perfection knowing we will never get there. So you can't beat yourself up because there it wasn't set up that you can become perfect.

It wasn't set up that you're not gonna screw up. And so get off your backs. You're doing the best that you can. And and this is the a very important point or we have no fun in the journey because the journey is it. And if there wasn't this conflict, it wouldn't keep on going.

And so we have to enjoy the fact that we're on the journey and we never get there. And as soon as you can get happy with the conflict, you have peace of mind. So I don't know if that made any sense, but I wanted to throw it out on the table. And going along with the mercy sort of thing, the lack of mercy means we are judgmental. Many of us are judgmental.

We have the right answer. Some of us and what happens if you are too judgmental to forgive me my trespasses as I forgive others, you turn the blade on yourself. In order to get deeper and deeper into what we have to take a look at in our lives, you need compassion, compassion for yourself. You have to be able to be gentle in the examination of your life or you will not be up to examine it. You will suppress it and deny it and be not able to deal with it.

You need a gentleness in that process and I couldn't be more supportive of that.