The How to recover from a spiritual malady weekend seminar in Fresno, CA

Whatever you're doing. My name is Bob Darrell. I'm an alcoholic. So I'm in a trap I can't spring. I had this physical allergy that when I start to drink, I'm I'm compelled to drink to the wall, and I destroy myself, and I crash and burn eventually, and, enter into a state of abstinence, and I get sick of spirit, sick of heart, and I I just abstinence kinda wears on me until I can't take it anymore and I eventually seek relief.

And if I can't find relief in money or sex or stuff, the shine of that stuff wears off, and I'll seek you the relief again in alcohol or combinations alcohol and drugs and I crash and burn again and just it's back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And, through all of that came day meetings. I remember I remember sitting in meetings, feeling like I was dying with this big secret and the big secret was I was a phony member of AA. Big secret is I'd I'd go to discussion meetings and the subject was gratitude and I'd I'd make a little intellectual list of everything I was grateful for and tell you how grateful I am, go back to the halfway house and wished I were dead. Until I got to a place where I turned the corner where the the thing that happened to me that pushed me out of the group that would not or could not completely give themselves to the simple program and to the group that would.

And to tell you a little story, that something that happened to me before I got sober right before I was I had a period of abstinence of several quite a not a year, but a lot of months for me in a halfway house, and I drank again because I couldn't take it. I was just up to here with the boredom and the loneliness of abstinence, and I drank again. And on that drunk, I got a felony, hit and run, DUI, and a stolen car. It wasn't really a stolen car. I borrowed it, but that's, you know, always humorless people.

And I ended up in a county jail cell when I was facing 2 years in a state penitentiary, and a guy that I knew from the halfway house who was an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous, sober probably 10 years, he used to come into the halfway house I was in when I started to run with the AA group and bring meetings in there, came into the county jail. And he was part of the AA group that came into the county jail. And his name was Woody, and I I didn't wanna see Woody. You know, when you're like that, I don't wanna see anybody when I'm like that because I'm I've trashed my life again. I'm I've lost my place to live.

I've lost all my clothes again. I have nothing, you know, I'm back to 0 on the streets, and I'm in jail, gonna go do 2 years in the state penitentiary, and here comes Woody. And Woody is one of those grateful, enthusiastic, funny guys that laughs a lot. I mean, he's not the kind of guy you wanna see when you're like that. You know what I mean?

He's not really I think I'd rather have a root canal than face Woody. There he comes. And so I go into my act. I go in. I say, oh, Woody.

How you doing? He says, he looks he says, make some wise remark like, doesn't look like you had much fun on this run and there's something, you know, like that. And I went into my spiel and my spiel is, oh, I'm so sorry I let you guys down. And, you know, this one I get if I get out of here and if I can I'm gonna get in a good halfway house, not like that one that took advantage of me, but in a good one, you know, where they really understand a guy like me and I'm gonna get a good job and maybe I'm gonna go back to school. And I'm gonna go back to some of your meetings and I'll work your stairs and I'll do all that stuff and and I'd you know?

And and Woody Woody looked at me and he he really hurt my feet. He said, kid, he says, you who you kidding? You're not done? He says, you're not done. He says, you haven't hit a bottom yet.

You haven't surrendered. You're not done. And I didn't say nothing to him because I don't like confrontation, but I thought at him. You ever think at people? And I'm screaming at him in my head.

Who the hell are you to tell me I ain't done? You don't know nothing about me, you and your Cadillac and your nice home. You don't know nothing. I've lost everything. What do you mean I'm not done?

I haven't lost enough. I haven't so what are you talking about? What's your I got nothing left to lose. I've lost everything. I'm going to prison.

There's no when they gave me the phone call when they arrested me, there was not a person on the face of the earth to call. There's nothing left of me. What are you talking about? I haven't lost. There's nothing left to lose.

And Woody was right, that was not my last drunk and I hadn't I hadn't surrendered and I hadn't lost the one thing. The one thing. And I've it it was I had sober a number of years before I got it. I understood what had happened to me. Guys lose that one thing living in $1,000,000 homes with wives and kids and have never been to jail.

They lose the thing that keeps you from getting sober. They come to you and they get sober and their life is wonderful. And then there are other guys that never lose it. They go down. They lay in the gutter.

They die in their they drowned in their own vomit when they throw up and they when they're passed out or they hang themselves in county jails, or they drive their motorcycles into bridge abutments, or they they never lose it. And it's not the house and it's not the job. It's not it's not the self respect. I think, God, I left that in the dust years before I got sober. The one thing that I couldn't give up that kept me from getting everything that you had was my self reliance, my judgment.

And Woody knew that he looked at me and he heard my little plans and designs and he saw me, he saw me at the steering wheel of my life once again, telling him what I'm gonna do. I couldn't see that, and he knew by looking at me that I wasn't gonna make it because I was still running the show. I'm the kind of guy that, I can go on a run and alcohol take everything away from me. I get sober, come back to a, and the first thing I get back is my damn opinion. And my opinion and my judgment is what kept me at the helm of my own life, at the helm.

And I couldn't see it. You know, I you could have seen it. My folks could see it. The people in AA can see it. Anybody who watched me for any period of time at the end, it didn't take a rocket scientist to look at me and what's happening in my life and easily come to the conclusion that whoever's running this guy's life is out to kill him.

But it doesn't look that way in here, really, because I'm just trying to make it better. I'm just trying to get along. I'm just trying to help myself and I can't connect the dots that I'm in this spot because I am at the helm of my life. I can't get it. Would he saw it the minute he heard me talk?

And what is it that brought me to the point of surrender? What it wasn't it wasn't the face in the 2 years in prison. I came off my last run. I'd I'd a judge had sentenced me to 2 years in a state penitentiary, cut me a break, put me into a long term I call it a treatment center. It really wasn't.

It was a skid row place. It was the bottom of the food chain for treatment. It was a place that housed about 200 low low bottom alcoholics. He told me if I stayed in there for a year, got good UAs, good PO report, made the restitution, restitution, that I was supposed to come back in front of him and maybe he would we wouldn't have to do the 2 years. But if I, he said I remember him saying to me, kid kid, he says, you don't you you go out.

You do this again. You go out. You don't fulfill these requirements. You're gone. And I couldn't fill the requirements because I don't have the power.

I don't have the power even when I've made up my mind that I'll never drink again. My best effort in all my power will just put it off for a while. That's all. I can stretch it out, months, maybe under the right circumstances with if I had had enough props in my life, financially and emotionally, maybe I could have stretched out to a couple years. Who knows?

But I'm the alcoholic that with untreated alcoholism, the drink's coming. It's coming. I throw a lot of stuff to slow it down, get new relationships, slow it down a little bit. It's still coming. Go get a new job, buy a Harley, get a sports car, move, slows it down but it doesn't change the reality that it's coming because I haven't gotten free.

I don't have the power. Lack of power is my dilemma. And the thing that brought me to the point of surrender was nothing I ever would have imagined. If you would have told me that this was gonna happen to me, I wouldn't have understood what you were saying. I wouldn't have got it until it happened to me.

And I, what had happened to me is exactly what it talks about on page 151 and 152. I think of these these two paragraphs as the description of the entrance to Alcoholics Anonymous. The entrance to as Bill says, so poetically the of to being rocketed into the 4th dimension of existence to, into the world of the spirit. And this is the thing that brought me to the threshold of that world of the spirit. The bottom of page 151, it says, now and then a serious drinker being dry at the moment says, I don't miss it all, feel better, work better, having a better time.

As ex problem drinkers, we smile at such as Sally. We know our friend is like a boy whistling in the dark to keep up his spirits. He fools himself inwardly, secretly. He would give anything to take a half dozen drinks and get away with them. He will presently try the old game again for he isn't happy about his sobriety, really.

Not really happy about it. Feels like he's doing time. He cannot picture life without alcohol and that's what all my experiences with abstinence were like that. You know, I would say this stuff. I never read this part of the book but I would almost parrot it.

I would say, how you some of the aid asked me, how you doing? All doing great. Work better, feel better, having a better time. Well or I just say, oh, I'm just so grateful to be sober. You know, I I guess I I guess I thought maybe if I said that enough, it would eventually come true or something.

I don't but you know what always happen is that I'd feel like I'd feel phony. I'd always I'd go back to my bunk in the halfway house and feel like, you know, god, I feel awful. Because my head would spin and I depressed and I you know, lonely. I can't imagine life without alcohol. And I eventually try the old game again because I'm not happy about my sobriety really.

Not really. I have not had a spiritual experience. There's nothing different about my there's nothing that is awoken in me. Really, not in here. Not really.

I'm just the same. I'm the guy. I'm Bob not drinking. I'm Bob not drinking. Bob doesn't do well not drinking.

Bob not drinks for a while and he remembers why drinking was a good idea. I can't picture life without an uncle. And then here's exactly what happened to me. It says, someday and this happened to me on my last run. It was so I remember the moment.

Someday, he will be unable to imagine life either with alcohol or without it. Then he will know loneliness such as few do. He will be at the jumping off place, which I think is the entrance to alcoholics anonymous. And it says he will wish for the end. That's what brought me to the bridge in 1978, trying to get up enough courage to take my own life.

I finally understood that the party was over. I finally got it that no matter what I drink or take or smoke that I cannot and never will be again able to jump start the party and get back to the good old days. That it's a memory. It's just a memory. And yet And there's no more fun in it and yet I The hopelessness about it is I the truth I got it finally.

I knew I can't live without it. I know that there's something about me that I do not have what it takes to live in this world and be okay without something to change the way I feel. I don't have it. I don't know why I don't have it. I don't know what's wrong with me.

I don't know that it's alcoholism. It's a spirituality. I don't know that that's what it is. I just know that I can't live with it and I can't live without it. And that brought me to a place that says, well, no loneliness such as few do.

When you finally get it that the party's over, when you finally get it that now you're the guy drinking yourself to oblivion watching everybody else drink and have a good time and you know you're never gonna be like that again, that is loneliness. That it doesn't externalize you anymore and it never will. It's never gonna let you come out and play again. That you're never gonna be like you used to be. No wonder guys like me start thinking about often themselves.

Once I once you get to a place where you get it, that drinking sucks and not drinking sucks, suicide looks like a good deal to a guy like me. And that's what took me to the jumping off place till I wished for the end. And coming off that run, something had changed. I didn't know that what it was was surrender. I didn't know that I'd even had that experience.

But I'll tell you what happened, I sat in the detox and members of Alcoholics Anonymous came into the meetings in there as they had done in every institution I'd ever been in. And for the first time in 7 years, sitting in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, the thing in me that always picks apart what you say and tries to pigeonhole you and say, oh, he's a phony and he's a born again and he's this and she's that, you know, so I don't have to listen to you. It stopped. And I found myself sitting in those meetings and people would share and I sat there and I'd nod my head, And I think, oh my god. I'm like that.

I felt like that. I drank like that. I failed like that and I started to connect. When I was early in sobriety, gay guy gave me a box of books and he gave me clothes because, you know, I came I had nothing. And in this I like to read when I that's how I do time.

And I'm reading this book and it's not a self help book and it's not a book about alcoholism, it's it's just a novel, but there was a passage in that book that blew my mind. And it showed me, it gave me greater insight into what had happened to me and my disease of alcoholism than anything I'd heard in AA. And what the book was, this passage was about these scientists that were doing experiments on the human brain. And they found that in the human brain was a little part that in the book they called it the pleasure center. It's the part of the brain that allows you to experience the euphoria from alcohol and also other drugs.

It's where you get high. So these scientists took these laboratory rats and they put 2 tiny wire filaments into the pleasure center of the rat's brain, and they would pass a mild almost undetectable electric charge through those wires just to stimulate the pleasure center in the brain, what would happen is the rat would get loaded, get high. So what they did is they hooked up the juice that went through the wires to a pedal in the rat's cage and the rat would learn he could hit the pedal and get high. So the rat would just go over and lay on that goddamn pedal. I mean, he does he doesn't drink water.

He doesn't eat. He doesn't have sex. Nothing. He's just partying hitting that pedal hitting that pedal. And the rat would these rats some of these rats would hit that pedal until they die, usually of dehydration because they wouldn't even drink water or they wouldn't eat they wouldn't do nothing.

Just hit the paddle. And these scientists, they'd wait till a rat is almost dead and they come along and they turn the juice off. Now the rat goes back and hits the pedal, nothing happens. And he hits it again and nothing happens. And again and again and again and again.

And finally, after many, many futile vain attempts to turn the juice back on and failing, he finally gets it that the party's over. And instead of being able to just go back to being a rat, the rat would curl up on the floor of the cage and lay there to die. Because without the juice there's nothing to live for. In 1978, I was broken. My surrender was because I was like that rat.

My surrender was that I was couldn't live with it and I can't live without it and I don't have the balls to kill myself and there was absolutely no options. And in a moment of of abject hopelessness in a detox, I did something like that a guy like me would never ever do. A woman that worked there told me about a prayer on page 63 of the big book and I and and I'm just I'm getting ready to be checked out of there and I know I'm gonna drink again and I know it's gonna kill I can't do this. I can't do this anymore. And I opened up this big book that they'd given me and I turned to page 63 and I started reading this prayer and I don't understand it and I'm not I don't even believe in God but there's a line in the middle of the prayer that says, relieve me of the bondage of self and I'm in this hospital, sitting on this hospital bed reading that and I threw the book across the room and I started sobbing And I fell down on my knees and from the bottom of my being, I begged something I didn't even believe in for help.

Because when I read the line, relieve me of the bondage of self, I knew the truth that I'm going to drink again and I'm probably gonna die and my life is gonna be this way because of me and I can't get away from me. I don't know how to I've been by this time I've spent years in therapy. I've tried every type of medication. I've done everything I could do and it's still there I am. And I there was a hopelessness about that that drove me to that point of surrender.

And I had a I don't know what it was, I could have been d t's. I had a experience not like Bill Wilson, but I'll tell you what, after the sobbing all of a sudden went away. And I remember being there on the floor of that hospital room with my on my knees and having this sense come over me that had no logical place to come from. And the sense was that I was going to be alright and I needed to go to a a. And I don't know where that came from.

And I started going to the meetings in that detox and I started not identifying with the people there and I got a sponsor and I got out of there and I went to 15 meetings a week and I still go to 10, and I became I got out of the group that could not or would not completely give themselves to this simple program and I got into the ones the group that did. And I've never looked back and my life has changed as a result of it. And I'll tell you something if you're new here that I didn't understand for a lot of years, and I've come to believe this with everything in me that I think the whole purpose of Alcoholics Anonymous, the whole purpose of the the meetings and sponsorship and the 12 steps and helping others is designed to only do one thing and one thing only and it's not to get you to quit drinking. If you want to quit drinking punch a cup, you'll quit for a while. The purpose of Alcoholics Anonymous is to do one thing and that's to turn the juice back on.

So when I get up in the morning, I can come out and play like I could only ever come out and play after 5 shots of Jack Daniels. So that I can integrate myself into society and with people and be a part of the way I only ever could do in the early days of my drinking when alcohol still worked for me. The big promise of the 12 steps is having had a spiritual awakening as the, meaning only, the only result of these steps. That the promise of Alcoholics Anonymous and the process that we're gonna talk about this weekend is designed to do one thing and one thing only, is to awaken my spirit. And isn't that what alcohol did for me?

I don't know about you guys but I could walk into a bar feeling like I'm dead in here and have 5 shots of tequila would awaken me to life. And if I don't find in a way to do that, to get back in that zone and you know what that zone's like. You ever been in the zone in early drinking man where you can't miss? Shoot pool better than you can ever shoot pool. Dance better than you can ever dance.

Talk to people. Beef I mean you got to get to you got to get back to awakening that thing in you that alcohol at one time awoken. And that's what the 12 steps are designed to do. The great psychiatrist, Carl Jung who's the founder of Jungian Psychiatry, said in a letter to Bill Wilson that he always suspected when he treated Roland Hazard another to attempted to treat alcoholics, that he always suspected that the alcoholics thirst for spirits was secretly a thirst for the spirit. It was this that the alcoholic was thirsty because he was disconnected from his own spirit.

And alcohol gave me the illusion of being it it was really a spiritual experience, really, by every definition of a spiritual experience. Carl Young told Roland Hazard who told Abby Thatcher who told Bill Wilson about this about what Carl Young told him. Carl Young as as Roland Hazard who was came from one of the wealthiest families on the face of the earth in Switzerland, in his private clinic, he told Roland Hazard, you're gonna die. There's nothing we can do for you. And Roland begged him, he said, isn't there anything doc, isn't there any exceptions in role and and Carl Jung told Roland, he said, well, there is there is some phenomenons that occur.

They've occurred throughout history. We don't understand them. I I in my therapy, I was hoping to duplicate some similar experience for you, but it's never been effective in alcoholic, chronic alcoholics of your type. But there are people who have these conversion experiences throughout history. They're rare.

Once in a while, someone will have a born again conversion. He said it's not really religious because it happens in every single it'll happen in Buddhists to Buddhists as much as Christians. And it happens every once in a while and Roland thought that, well, maybe I can go back to my church in Carlson. I don't think that's it. I think it's it's an inside job.

And Roland Hazard came back and he threw himself in the Oxford group and the myth was in AA for years that he never drank again, which is not true. There's a biography out of Roland Hazard that where they documented him in and out of many sanitariums from the time he joined the Oxford group and documented him visiting the 24th Street Club in New York but he could never go to a meeting and join a a. And as a result he never did stay sober. But he gave that information to a guy named Eby Thatcher who gave the information to Bill Wilson and all as and one more piece of the puzzle fell together that allowed us to all be here. When Bill Wilson was in town's hospital in December of 1934, Bill Wilson had a spiritual experience possibly more powerful but I'm not too unlike the one that I had that that people have throughout history, these born again experiences.

And he said to doctor Silkworth, he told him what had happened and Silkworth coulda shot him down. Silkworth said, Bill, it's d t's. He never said that. He said to him, I don't know what happened to you, but hang on to it. You look different.

Something looks different about you, and Bill hung on to it. And Bill got hope and he realized that something in here was different with him, that there had been a rearrangement of his emotions and perception in life. And he started to get some hope that maybe he'd found it and he was given a copy of a book called the varieties of religious experience. And I've read that book. I have a copy of it at home.

It's a hard read. It's written by a guy named William James and William James is credited to be the founder of modern psychology as opposed to psychiatry. And William James did something in the varieties of religious experience that I don't think it ever been done to the degree he did it, is he chronicleized religious conversion surrender experiences from a scientific point of view. And he found that these conversion experiences that alter people's lives that caused huge displacements emotionally within the person have 2 things in common. First thing they all have in common is that they never happen to you when you're on a roll.

You know what I'm saying? They never happened to you when you hit the megabucks and you're with the 3 showgirls. I mean, it never happens that you never get to where it's going your way and you go, oh, it's time to find God now. Never happens that it always happens when you're broken. And then the second thing that that William James noticed that they had inevitably and invariably in these experiences, not always, but frequently is that they were transitory which means that they don't last.

And we all know that if this is a typical gathering of Alcoholics Anonymous, there are probably people in here that have had a born again experience and drank again. That alcoholics of our type have been having those experiences for years, and there's something about them that the shine wears off of. The impact of them dissipates and evaporates in time until the emotional rearrangement that had happened as a result of the surrender wears off and we revert slowly back to being the exact same way we were. And that has been happening since the beginning of time. And Bill Wilson read that for the first and and all of a sudden his hope that he'd he'd arrived, that he was cured, that he was fixed, that god's grace had fixed him dissipated.

And out of that came the intuitive thought that I think is why we're here, is that maybe if I can do 2 things, if I can align my myself with people who are trying to grow spiritually and probably more importantly, if I can devote the rest of my life to helping people just like me that maybe I can keep this alive. And that was the beginning of Alcoholics Anonymous. And we have found this is the first time in you human history that we have been given a process that's designed not to create a conversion experience. Your own pain can do that. It's to maintain it.

Alcoholics have been dying for centuries because they even if they can get it they can't hold on to it. And it's the first thing that's been designed that allows us to keep that going in our lives and keep it vital. So we're gonna start talking a little bit about step 2. For those of you that, are a little on the muscle about spiritual terms as I was. A lot of people a lot of us a lot of us have had our fill of religion and failed.

It doesn't mean that the religion was wrong. We just had a bad experience. We ask religion to do something it was never designed to do. There's a term in it, there's a line in we agnostics that asks us to do something that none of us have ever tried to do. It says, do not let these terms such as spiritual experience in God, etcetera, deter you from honestly it's not the ministers, it's not the ministers, it's not the ministers, it's not the ministers, it's not the ministers, it's not the It's really your deal.

It's not the ministers, it's not the bibles, it has to be in here. It's an inside job. What's this stuff really mean to you? And I'll tell you the beginning for me. I balked at the idea of alcoholism being a spiritual illness.

I'd I balked at the whole thing. I balked at religion. I had a bad experience. I had my fill with religion as a kid. I developed a lot of prejudices about religion, about God to the point where I I fancied myself an atheist even though I don't know that anybody really is an atheist.

I think I was a wannabe atheist. And I think I was a wannabe atheist because I'd come to the conclusion that God existed to judge me, and that if there is a God, I am probably in a lot of trouble. Right? But nobody's really an atheist because in the human heart is the knowledge and the connection with the rest of the universe. But it said, what are these things real honestly mean to you?

And, though what was my first breakthrough, I guess, in this is that I started to realize that for me when I drank alcohol it vitalized my spirit and when I stopped drinking alcohol my spirit got sick. And I went back to drinking alcohol because it was medicine for something in here That was above and beyond mental or physical or emotional. There was something right in here that got didn't get due too well that needed medication. On page 20 5 talks about a couple things that really brought me to AA and brought me to the table. And in in a sense was my first awakening of sorts.

The first paragraph, the 4th line down it says, we saw that it really worked in others. My first really, awakening was that I saw that it worked in a guy that I knew. Now I came to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous for years and listened to your testimonies about how it changed your life and it need it meant nothing to me. Because there's something about me that separates me from you, and you're that's you're those people. You know what I mean?

You're them. It doesn't mean nothing to me. That's those AA people. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't even listen. But I was in a halfway house with a guy who was exactly like me, we were running partners. And this guy had been on the streets with me, he drank like I drank, he did same a lot of the same drugs I did, he did a lot of the same stuff, he felt and thought the way I did, and we were running partners. And we were both sober a number of months in this halfway house, and we go to they'd make us go to AA meetings. So we went to AA meetings.

We'd sit in the back of the room and just judge everybody in AA. To judge properly, you need a partner. And we just be back there with just no respect for AA. We didn't be back there bad rapping, like, we did listen to this phone. You got I remember 1 and and we're both on marijuana maintenance.

Right? I remember we'd smoke pot and go in to the meeting and go, wow, man. Did you hear what that guy said? We we had this one meeting, and we were both offended by talk about God. It just made us both of us uncomfortable because where we came from and our fears and prejudices about God.

And we're just one particularly spiritual meeting where there's a lot of God talking. I remember after the meeting, we're saying, you know, if we could get enough money, we'll get a lot of LSD. We'll put it in their coffee. Let's see how spiritual those AA people are. Right?

Thank God that I never did that. That would have been a hard immense to make. Oh my God. Oh, jeez. What happened is I drank again and he before he did.

And I got thrown out of the halfway house and I'm living in this abandoned building that had been sort of semi burnout. I'm laying on the I live sleeping on the ground and there I pass out. I I go out and I hustle money to get cheap wine. I go back there, I pass out. I come down to the halfway house during the day and I stand on the corner because I I wouldn't let me on property.

I would stand on the corner and I would pan wait for the guys to come out on their way to the laundromat, on their way to work and I would panhandle nickels and dimes from them to support my wine habit. And one day I'm down there and I'm dirty, I have I have hair down to about here and it's matted and I get this long z z top kind of beard, you know, that's got stuff in it, you know, and little twigs and things. It's that, was that Entish Lord of the Rings look, you know. And, I'm down there and I'm my I'm rummy and I'm bloated and I'm not eating. I'm emaciated and bloated at the same time.

Right? And puffy red eyes, and I'm pathetic. I'm and I stink. Stink. Stink.

Stink. And here comes my running partner, and he sees me and he gives me that look that I think I think most human beings go through a whole lifetime and never see that look on a person's face secured about them. It's that look that's kind of a cross between pity and contempt. And he gave me that look and he gave me a couple dollars and I shuffled off to the state store and got another jug of wine and went to the park to blot out the madness. And him seeing me like that shocked him, did something to him.

And he got off the marijuana maintenance. He changed his sobriety date. He went and got a sponsor. He got this guy that we hated, that was hideous, was one of those fanatic AA guy, preachy, do gooder, you know, one of those guys. He got one of those guys as a sponsor.

Unbeknownst to me, and he joins AA, starts working the steps and doing all this stuff. Many months later, I'm in another institution. Right? And here come the AA group, here come the AA people and he's one of them. And he drove there in his car that was licensed and insured and he's got 2 newcomers with him that he's trying to help.

And I'm watching him at the coffee pot at the back of the meeting laughing and making fun of these guys and they're kidding around and joking and he's got that thing in his eyes. And he was talking I overheard him talking about getting married and him and fiance buying a house and about this job and how he might he got promoted. He was different. Something had happened to him and I could not discount him. I could discount you as you're them, but this guy I knew was like me.

And I saw for the first time that it really not only worked in others it worked at someone that was just like me. And then it says, and we had come to believe in the hopelessness and futility of life as we've been living it. And I believe that before I ever believed in God, before I ever believed in the steps, before I ever believed in AA. I believed in the hopelessness and futility of my life as I've been living it. I I couldn't go on no more and I couldn't stop from going on.

I was hopeless. I was hopeless. And it says, when therefore, we were approached as I was in that detox in 1978, by those in whom the problem had been solved. You guys in AA as you came into the detox the last time. There was nothing left for us but to pick up the simple kit of spiritual tools.

There was nothing left. If I'd had another idea, if I'd had a plan, if I'd had some hope, if I'd had any bit of opinion, self reliance, judgment, anything left, I would not have been at the place where there was nothing left because I still had something left. I got to the place there was nothing left. I was at the very end of my rope. There was nothing left but to pick up the simple kit of spiritual tools that you had been laying at my feet for 7 years and I've been kicking it out of the way because I got an opinion about what you're laying there.

And it's opinion, it's it's a valid opinion really. If you if you ever sat in the bottom of your life when you've just trashed it, and you ask somebody for help, and you're just and you're you think you're going to jail and you don't know what's happening and you've lost your and you have no friends and you feel awful and you've trashed your life and you're broke and homeless and you don't know what to do, and you ask somebody in AA and he says, well, we got these steps. Do you ever look at the steps when you're like that? It's like, what else you got? I mean, I mean, I might do that crap.

Hey. I might join a gym too, but I got problems here. I still had an opinion and a judgment. You're laying this kid of simp simple kid of spiritual tools at my feet and I was still following my own direction of what I needed, what I believed I had to have. I was pursuing what I needed to fix me, and I was getting the results.

Not this time. This time when people in AA said come with us, you know what I said? Yes. Go over here. Yes.

Turn yourself into the cops. Wait a minute. And I said, yes. And all the things they told me to do I just started saying yes. And I I think God implanted into my consciousness a phrase that went through my mind the 1st year I was sober over and over again probably saved my life.

When people in AA would tell me to do something I did not wanna do, the line would go through my head. What do you got to lose? I never had an answer to that. I never had an that I had nothing to lose, so I just do it. And I little did I know that I I was actually acting like someone who had completely given themselves to this simple program and I didn't know I was doing that.

As I started to work the steps, I I did it because you told me to do it. I didn't do it believing that it was gonna change me. I didn't do it but thinking that 20 years later you're gonna have the life you've all you that's beyond your wildest dreams. I didn't do it thinking any of that. I didn't even do it thinking my life was gonna change, I just did it because I had nowhere else to go and nothing left and I was with you and this is where I needed to be and you told me to do something and I did it.

That was it. Little did I know that you guys were encouraging me to take actions that were gonna repair and heal and awaken and vitalize my spirit. That I could become the guy that's in the zone. And I tell you, when you're in the zone, you can't miss. You are protected.

You can't miss because you're directed. And if I can stay in the zone, my life stays good. But I don't know what it is about me. I I can be in the zone, things are going really good, God's grace is in my life, and this is so good that just had this itch to improve it. I I don't know what it is about me that does that.

You know, I just don't wanna get in there and then then I'm calling my sponsor frantically a week later. I don't know why I do that. That's my nature. I find I was 18, 20 years old before I before I understood why in the book it says we must constantly remind ourselves we're no longer running the show. Why does it say constantly?

You know why it says constantly? Because I am constantly trying to run the show. That's why I have to constantly remind myself I'm not running the show. If it was not my inclination to constantly try to run the show, I would not have to constantly remind myself that I'm no longer running the show. I would just But there But there's that thing in me that just I do you ever I have that kind of consciousness things are going good and just get that frame of mind, we start noticing things.

Things that need your attention, they're not really problems yet but you can see how they could be. And I'm real good at solving problems that haven't occurred yet. I'm real good at that. I I I it did just I've it's got a nature to me to do that. That's why I have a sponsor.

I tell the guys I sponsor, if you get a good idea, call me. If you get a great idea, come and see me. I will enjoy your idea. That takes us up to WEAgnostics. How long are we going?