Workshop called "Our Troubles Are of Are Own Making Workshop" at the 2006 Crested Butte Mountain Conference in Mt. Crested Butte, CO

Well, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the, 3:30 workshop on the riddle of our existence not the riddle of our existence, problems of our own making. My name is Sandy Beach, and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Sandy. Let's start the meeting out with a moment of silence followed by the serenity prayer. God God.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength, and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees for AA membership. We're self supporting through our own contributions.

AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization, or institution, does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses nor opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety. And I'm really honored that I was asked to, attend this wonderful week. I can see why people have been talking about it so much. It's been absolutely delightful.

And the topic this afternoon is, our problems are of our own making. And I wanna start out with just a observation to demonstrate how problems are how we make them, how we turn something into a problem. And this may not set you'll go, well, gee whiz. That's not a very good example. But for the point I'm trying to make, it is.

And it goes something like this. You know, if we went back and we're talking about this at lunch today. If we went back about, 60 years ago, in most towns and in even small cities, there was only one meeting a week. That's it. One meeting a week.

And you think back, you know, and talk to some of the real old timers and they go, how in god's name are you gonna stay sober on one meeting a week? And they were staying sober in possibly higher percentages than we are today. Well, if you talk to them, they go, what this is one thing. You really look forward to that meeting. You really look forward to that meeting.

And the second thing, maybe you found somebody else that was in that group, and you made arrangements to have coffee about halfway through, and that cut the time lapse in half. But mostly, you just prayed like hell. I mean, you just prayed and prayed. And now we fast forward to today. And I don't care.

You're in a small town. You've got 6 AM meetings, 8 AM meetings, 12 o'clock meetings, 4:45 meetings, 7 o'clock meetings, midnight meetings. You got men's meetings, gay meetings, women's meetings, pilots meetings, lawyers meetings. You've got, a pamphlet on every possible problem there ever was and ever will be. And we have clubs and we have conventions and we have dances and we have CDs and we have tapes.

Hell, you don't have to hardly pray at all. Now when you think about that, it it, you you can end up with middle of the road sobriety on the support system alone. And Bill Wilson would call that good sobriety in order to make this point as he quoted Abraham Lincoln, good is the biggest enemy of the best that there is. And so here, we look at success and see that there's a problem even in success. And that's not only in the entire fellowship, but in our programs themselves.

It seems to be, one of the dynamics of spirituality that as we start out incredibly desperate, we are doing things that are absolutely necessary for our survival and our moving on and moving on, and we get results from that. And the results themselves are wonderful. It's the serenity that comes in and the new perspective, etcetera. But with the serenity comes the loss of desperation and a sense of having arrived. Wow.

I finally made it. It's so much better now. Well, it depends how we are describing that situation to ourselves. It's so much better now. On the one hand, it could be a healthy explanation.

It's so much better that I fully realize I'm still as dependent as I was. Or we could be, without realizing it, telling ourselves, isn't this wonderful to be further along and to be in a much more solid position than I was when I arrived here? Translated into spiritual ease, I don't need God as much now as I did about 3 years ago. In other words, this is the how problems are created inside of us is by using language that is used very common in the material world and applying it over in the mid in the, spiritual world. And I have a terrible time with that because, I talked to 2 f 4 pilots right before the the the meeting.

And, when we look back I mean, being a pilot isn't any different than, learning how to drive a car or whatever it is, But the process goes like this. You have an instructor pilot and you both get in the plane together and then he is teaching you, but the goal is to eventually be on your own, to be on your own. When do I no longer require all of this help and I am now doing it on my own? Now that happens in all kinds of things. You get sales training and then you're out on your own.

Whatever. Nurse's training. Now I'm out on my own. I'm fully self sufficient. And it's real easy to carry that over into our program and start telling ourselves, jeez, I've been sober 15 years.

I ought to be more on my own than I am. What's wrong with me? What? Gee whiz. I'm almost like an old newcomer.

You know what I mean? I haven't made any progress at all. I'm still this far away from a drink. What the heck is that? I ought to be able to do better than this.

You can see how the ego is slowly sliding into our program and telling us the song and, you know, the the little fiddle. You're doing great. You're doing great. Oh, good. Good.

I don't need God as much. No. You don't need him as much. We never did need us. You and I are doing great.

And there's the music being played. And, of course, it's very seductive and, it feels wonderful. And I'm going to just, get on the record the, quotes from the book that I wanna use. And, of course, the, Problems of Our Own Making, page 62. I didn't mark these things.

I'm sorry. So our troubles, we think, are basically of our own making. They arise out of ourselves, and the alcoholic is an extreme example of self will run riot, though he usually doesn't think so. And then, on 103, At the very end of working with others, it's all in italics. After all, our problems were of our own making.

Bottles were only a symbol. Besides, we stopped fighting anybody or anything. We have to. And page 58, right at the beginning of how it works, some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas, and the result was nil until we let go absolutely. And one of the things I think that is crucial to understanding this is the power of our old ideas and how you think they're gone, but they're not.

They are still a tremendous controlling, part of our lives, are these old ideas. And here's we and the result was no till we let go absolutely let go of this idea. And so that becomes a very important part of the process. And let's see. In the, 12 and 12, page 90, the spiritual axiom in the 10th step, if something disturbs us no matter what the cause, there's something wrong with us.

Woah. What's wrong with us? We're disturbed. We created a problem. And in the old days, we would go, no.

We didn't create it. That guy did when he cheated me on the payment. He created the problem. I didn't. And and then that's what Bill's trying to say.

That may be true under the old guidelines, but under the spiritual lease. And we ought to have a sign outside of all the meanings, spiritual lease spoken here, so that we know to shift over to this new perspective. Oh, and then page, 36 in the 12 and 12, I really like this. They'll be I only get one more and then I'll won't have to stop looking down. This is in step 3.

And, Phil is quoting you know how he always makes a point and then he tells us how we're gonna object to it. I always love that way of presenting things. Blah blah blah. And they go, wait a minute. So he's just explained turning our lives over to the care of God.

And and the response is, yes. Yes. Respecting alcohol, I guess I'll have to depend upon AA. But in all other matters, I must still maintain my independence. Nothing is gonna turn me in to a nonentity.

You remember that line? Nothing's gonna turn me into a nonentity. If I keep turning my life and my will over to something or somebody else, what will become of me? I'll be like the hole in the doughnut. Okay?

I'll be the hole in the doughnut. Okay. So now if we had a spiritual needs dictionary and we looked up nonentity and hole in the donut, it would say completely spiritual person. You know what I'm saying? It it wouldn't mean the same thing as over here.

And And so we got you see how we got a shift? Oh, nonentity. Good. That's good. In other words, of myself, I'm nothing.

The higher power does the work. And so these are just some play on words. And then, the last thing is the, page 99, the last line in the prayer of Saint Francis. It is by dying that we awaken to eternal life. It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.

And so I'm gonna get to that. It's a that, that's a very important thing to understand. What's Saint Francis talking about? You know what I mean? You just pull out a gun and go, oh, well, eternal life.

There I am. And, obviously, it doesn't mean that at all. He means that we have to kill the ego, that we have to make an entire separation from this old self in order to experience this, and that, understanding that and accepting dying is one of the most wonderful things to do in order to enjoy living. And it sounds almost like a paradox, but it isn't. And, as a matter of fact, I'm gonna do, men's retreat, some of them in Tampa, and I'm working on a whole hour on dying and death in terms of spirituality because I think it's that important.

So anyway, those are the, foundation out of the big book and now I'm just gonna make up stories and try to illustrate some of these points in my with my insane perspective. And I I always like to start a jeez. I heard this so many years ago and I never saw the wonderful value in it until a couple years ago. It's it's humorous, but then it just goes on and it becomes deeper and deeper and and it's goes like this. Let me get a drink.

The guy got up to tell his story and he said, ladies and gentlemen, my story is divided into 2 parts. What happened during the years that I drank and what I thought happened during the years that I drank. And then everybody laughs. And they go, oh, boy. I can relate to that.

Isn't that funny? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm here this afternoon to submit to you that we could tell that about anything else in our life.

We could say this, my childhood is divided into 2 parts, what happened to me when I was a child and what I thought happened to me when I was a child. My relationship with my boss has 2 parts, the relationship with my boss and what I think the relationship with my boss is. And this could go through every situation that we have. There is what happened, and then there's my version of what happened. So in other words, every event that happens gets spin put on it by me as I've officially record it.

And, so when we think about this, so what it's not by accident that the speaker got up and said, my story is divided into 2 parts. Well, what's a story? It's something we make up. It is our old ideas. And as long as we keep playing that story, we're going to keep getting the same results.

And so we just and and I was thinking about this and I went, that couldn't be true. I mean, that's too simple. You did what are you talking about? And here's a couple of points. If you went back and listened to the talks telling my story that I gave in 1970, say, and then compared it to today, you would suddenly notice that today, I had a better childhood than I did in 1970.

Now how in God's name is that possible? How could I have a better childhood? Part of it is, I've been getting rid of old ideas and I have been trying to get free from the problem creation of my own ego in order to enjoy conscious contact with my own creator. And this contact and this new perspective makes it look that way. That's all.

I'm just reporting what I see today. And when I look at it from a relatively undisturbed center compared to 1970, my parents did a great job. And my insincere apologies to all the things I said about the Catholic church. I would like to admit right now, I was wrong. But that was my story and I was sticking to it.

And so it's it's just a fascinating thing. Now here was just as as as I was starting to realize this and maybe work it into a talk and think about it, one of the girls in my home group had the most amazing thing to contribute to this. She came in one day and, I'm guessing that she's in her forties. And she said, we went to dinner and there's several of us. And she said, oh, I'm so excited.

I'm so excited. I guess all of you did you know I was adopted? No. We didn't know you were adopted. Well, I am, and I've always wanted to meet my real father, And I finally found him about 6 months ago, and I contacted him, and we agreed that it would be wonderful to meet.

And I'm so excited, and we're having the meeting this weekend up in Saint Louis. And and I'm so excited. And off she went, and, of course, we're all waiting to hear the report on how it went because sometimes those go good and sometimes they're not they're painful or whatever. When she came back and she was so excited, it was just the the greatest thing. It was a new friend.

They're gonna stay in touch, etcetera, etcetera. And then she got to one point and she said, god. It was really amazing because we got talking about my childhood, and there were several things that I thought happened that didn't happen. And then she said these words, so so I had to change my story. I had to change my story.

So I think one thing that we can start thinking of in terms of one of our AA slogans when we say let go and let god, we're letting go of our story, letting go of the power that those things that we keep repeating to ourselves have over us. And any disturbance in a story and old ideas are probably all the disturbance that we really ever get is the main thing that blocks us from conscious contact with our higher power. We can that's why that axiom is so important that we are disturbed. Because disturbed means the channel that Saint Francis talks about in the beginning of his prayer is blocked. One way of looking at the entire AA program is, just from the perspective of the Saint Francis prayer, is make me a channel thy peace.

The channel is blocked by character defects. And so we have a process for opening the channel, and that's what all these steps are for, and to maintain it open in the 10th step. This continual inventory of whenever I'm disturbed in the 4 part thing that's in the 12 and 12 of honest self restraint, honest analysis of what's wrong, willingness to make amends if it's my fault, and the willingness to forgive if it's somebody else's. What is that for? It's to become undisturbed right away.

Whenever a disturbance comes, then I wanna get undisturbed. Now the channel's still open and I am still, in a much different perspective than I was when I was disturbed. And so this you suddenly realize that the entire point of this is to always stay plugged in. Now I don't know why alcoholics wouldn't know this. What was the whole point of being an alcoholic?

It was to never run out of booze. We have one solution for all problems and that solution was drinking. I mean, think back. You're in a bar and your friend comes in and he said, oh my god. I just found out my wife is gonna divorce me and I may get fired.

How do we help him with his problem? What did we say? Let me buy you a drink. We didn't we didn't discuss the ins and outs and ups and downs and this and that. We just went here.

This is a problem remover. This is a problem remover. And when we come over into, spiritual ease, this is Bill doesn't talk about problem solving, talks about problem removing. And so when I'm working with, my sponsees, pigeons, we used to call them, and they I don't say this to them, but when they come and they wanna talk about a problem, my job is to convince them that they don't have a problem, that everything is already okay, and that you are looking at it wrong. And I had this is what spiritual perspective means is that, well, let's take another look at that.

And I remember going to my sponsor early on, you know, when you come running in, oh my god. The report is gonna find me. The sky is falling. They're gonna my car is gonna and then he'd go, okay. Okay.

Okay. But listen. What about the fact that you're in the program now, you got lots of new friends, you're on this path, things are changing, your family start. What about all that? And then I said, well, if you look at it that way, not so bad.

If you look at it that way, which lays the foundation for telling us that as Clancy says, life is a disease of perception. That that every time we get round up about something, we're looking at it incorrectly. And we're looking at it incorrectly because we're disturbed. And so how can we get to look at it correctly, get undisturbed? In other words, that becomes the new top priority.

So I was trying to think so what's necessary is a new way of looking at everything. And, I was trying to find a way of looking at the ego. You know, make up a story so we could have some dynamics about what the ego is. And I, I'm not gonna go through the whole thing, but I came up with an analogy to a tree and that, the elm trees in New Haven where I grew up were very big and they had 15,000,000 leaves. I looked it up.

And and and the tree is is this incredible entity that functions like a symphony orchestra, and there's obviously some divine guidance going on. And all of the components of this tree work together and it's in harmony. It does amazing things and the leaves are very important. And in in this analogy, the higher power gives the leaves free will. And after a while, they're sitting on the branch board, and they're looking around going, well, I'm this low branch has a lousy view compared to those guys, and we're much bigger, and they're doing more work, and we're doing more work than they are.

We're producing more sugar than they are. We we ought to organize, and and all kinds of things happen to them. And after years go by, they're all frustrated. They hate being a leaf on a tree. It sucks.

It's the worst thing that ever happened. And the only thing hold them together and they're almost born with it is a desire to go back and just be a leaf like they were. And there's when you read spiritual writings, it's like we were all born with something that was causing us unrest and Carl Jung, and I'll get to that a little bit later, talks about that. CS Lewis, all the writers talk about god in terms of the unrest that is inside of every human being and the human being's attempts to try and fix it. And the alcoholic found alcohol, and it really was a spiritual quest.

And doctor Young insisted on that. That's exactly what alcoholics are doing. They're trying to slake their thirst for God, And they're off on this tangent thinking that alcohol is doing it, and then and drinking in a way was a spiritual experience. It was a very transforming thing so that because of a power greater than ourselves, it changed the way we looked at everything, and we liked the world when we saw it under the influence of that power. But anyway, instead of using that one, I was list I like to, you know, listen to these programs about space.

I mean, the universe and these cosmologists and they're trying to figure it all out. And so these guys were talking about quantum mechanics and some of the things that they're discovering and then they go, and then we have to just throw away all our ideas because everything this is and, you know, they're talking about how open minded you have to be to make any progress whatsoever. Said you just have to be able to see everything entirely different. For example, one way of looking at a chicken, it's an egg's way of reproducing itself. Now that's a rather different way of looking at a chicken, isn't it?

A chicken is an egg's way of reproducing itself. Well, if you sat there as an egg, you could go, you're damn right it is. That's how it's done. So anyway, that got me thinking that, perhaps we're all eggs. So now we got to imagine that we got little legs and arms and a little head sitting on top there.

We're just eggs. There's I don't know how many on the planet. 10,000,000,000? 10,000,000,000 eggs. They're all going around.

Some of them are painted white. Some are painted black. Some are painted brown. Some are painted yellow, and they're just eggs. They're all going.

And, most of them just end up rotting and falling by the wayside. Some of them get scrambled, fried. Some go into cakes. Some of them go into cookies. Some of them go into fudge, some of them go I mean, they just have all these different places they end up.

But they're trying to have a house and a family and a car and get ahead of the other eggs and doing all these things. But one of the things that happens to some of them is they hatch. You know what I mean? They hatch. Now that's a whole different deal than the scrambled eggs and the fried eggs and the rotten eggs and the gates.

There's a small percentage that hatch. And as the people started studying the egg population, they noticed that there was a large amount of hatching going on in the alcoholic population of eggs. You know what I mean? That now granted, a whole bunch of them just fall off of buildings and splat on the on the road or just drive a car into a tree and then that that's the end of them. But there's a percentage there, there's about 10% that somehow gets singled out for this thing called hatching.

And it's a very funny process how an alcoholic egg gets singled out for hatching. It looks something like this. He's the alcoholic egg driving his car is 2 in the morning. He's been in the bar all night. He's on his way home, but he forgot where he lived.

But he has lots of gas and he's got the radio all the way up and he's singing. He's got 6 more beers under the seat, and he's singing his favorite song, I Did It My Way. I mean, obviously, that's that's the ultimate alcoholic theme song. And, a, Texas state trooper suddenly is behind him with the red and blue light going and he has to pull over and he's cursing. Why is he picking on me?

And we freeze frame right now because this is god's agent coming in and selecting this one for hatching. And pretty soon he's up in front of it. He has no idea. He thinks this is the worst thing that ever happened to him. You know, the the unjust treatment and, you know, he tried to slip a $100, didn't do any good.

And next thing he's in front of a judge and the judge going, okay. It's gonna be, this is your 5th DWI, so it's gonna be, like, 4 years in jail or you can join AA. And so he goes, oh my god. I don't wanna join those guys. That's the last place I wanna go.

And so he goes. And they go, okay. We're gonna start you through the hatching process. You're not gonna believe it because everything as you see it now isn't gonna be the way you're gonna see it when we get through with you. And now that you're here, you you can't go back.

We're gonna take you through a process where you're gonna hatch. And, of course, this is like, woah. Woah. These guys are weird. I mean, what is that?

Yeah. We have 12 step patching process, and we you just have to keep attending these, incubation sessions. We have little meetings, and we're gonna put you right there and, of course, you don't believe me. You don't but you you're there a while and you feel something inside of you that feels like it's alive and that it is seeing things a little bit. Do you have no idea what is happening, but you know something is happening.

There is an awareness and it's and then they go, you we just need you to poke because nobody can do this for you. And if if you can imagine how hard it is to poke through your entire support system on the grounds that there's something over over there. And we're not gonna tell you what it is, but you're gonna love it. It's like, you want me to poke through and break this? I mean, you know, the the word was, this is it.

If this breaks, you're in a lot of trouble. You'll be dead. And so finally, you can see that there's something out there and you go, look, we gotta get you all the way out. You gotta keep poking until that's bigger and we have steps for that. And it's very painful to every time you poke one of these things, it's gonna hurt.

You're getting rid of this stuff and you're you feel totally naked and exposed and you have no protection to anything and you have to keep on poking. And you come out and you start to realize that there is something out there, and you have actually made it out and the shell is sitting here with this little hole, so it's like a secret home. And we spend a little time out here, then we go back in there and we're looking out a little bit more. What is this spiritual dimension that I'm supposed to be going into? Now the problem is the shell doesn't want to give up its existence.

That has been in charge of everything. That's where all of the perspective on the world has come from is from the egg. But we have something other than an egg that is now starting to take a look around and see what is what start questioning all the ideas that that Shell had. And so this is the struggle that we have, is to stop listening to this entire package of information. And so when we find ourselves making progress in the spiritual world, the shell is beckoning us.

Come on back. It's not safe out there. You're having a hard time. You've lost contact with God. You're having a little bit of anxiety.

Come here. Come here. I'm always here for you. Don't worry, you can come back into the safety of self centeredness. You can come back into this old familiar.

They may be crappy ideas, but they're familiar. These are your comfort zone. You you don't wanna stay out of the comfort zone too long. You gotta stay so now we have established the dynamics of trying to grow spiritually versus the comfort of the familiar that we were raised in and that has been part of us forever. And it's very difficult to make a total separation And so, you know, maybe Saint Francis did it and maybe there are other examples throughout history, but our challenge is to see how far away we can get from the power of that shell.

There was one of the things I was gonna do in this, workshop was, I ran across a poem I was talking, to Mike about it, and it was, poem poem called High Flight, and it was, written by a young man named William McGee. I don't know if you've heard it or not, but it's, many years ago when television used to go off the air. Everybody remember that? You talk to younger people off the air? What is that?

Well, at 12 o'clock at night, they just stopped broadcasting, and they played the star spangled banner, and then there was a test pattern until 9 in the morning. And if you couldn't sleep, you just sat there and looked at the test pattern, but there was no program on. Well, when they played the Star Spangled Banner, they also always played a movie of an air force fighter pilot climbing up higher and higher and higher, and this poem would be read about breaking the bonds of earth and climbing and soaring and and then the last line and then the TV would go off the air was, and I reached out to touch the face of God. And and so the astronaut program, they had to get to the point where they got free from earth's gravity. That you would call total freedom from planet Earth was to get where you were no longer being pulled by the forces of gravity on the planet.

And then you could say, wow, we are now on to another journey. And the same thing exists in the power of our ego to hold us from going any further towards touching the face of our own creator. That so the dynamics of the whole program describe that. They don't use those exact words. So I'm trying to paint a picture of what each one of us is struggling against.

And, you know, gravity on planet Earth is that pretty hard thing to get away from. You remember how long it took the space program to get They had the X15, they were right there. You know what I mean? But god, he they have to take him up in the B52 and then shoot the rocket off to get him out even close so you can see how much effort is required to get anywhere near that. And so where does Bill write about this?

Where does Bill write about this struggle? Where does Bill cover this particular situation that I'm talking about? And I'm gonna suggest to you that he writes about it in, the 12 and 12 in the 6th step because the 6th step, we're entirely ready to have God remove all defects of character. Could be rephrased to have God remove all of our old ideas which is where all the defects of character come from. Which is to say, to totally remove the shell so that there's just me and God.

And then my total identity is, well, who are you? Well, I'm a child of God. And that feels so good to my heart. My heart would love it if every time anybody ask who I am, I said I'm a child of God. But my ego goes, wait a minute, pal.

You're more than that. You're you're a lot more than that. You know what I mean? You're a real estate giant. You're a mother of 5.

You know, so it's a child of god and a. You know what I mean? Like, I'm an alcoholic and a. And we start down the whole list of other things that qualify us to be more unique than just an alcoholic. And so in this step, we're entirely ready to have god remove all these defects of character.

Bill says it right out. The clear implication of this step is perfection. Perfection To which the eggshell replies, yes. But remember, progress not perfection. Don't go too far.

Come on back, pal. Now so progress not perfection can be a very healthy statement. It can it can help us to not feel bad about ourselves as we're trying to work along, but it can also be a limiting thing. Well, why try to go any further from the shell? After all, who could get up there?

Oops, they did. And so Bill says, well, wait a minute. Did you know what proof do we have? And he writes that, right, in the 6 step. What proof do we have?

What is this? You know, this is a theory. Remember that? You got it up here somewhere. The spiritual life is not the theory.

We have to this is just a theory. He said, well, let me give you an example. We'll see if it's a theory or not because we like practical things. What was your biggest problem? Oh, am I drinking?

Well, did you get entirely willing to have that removed? Oh, yeah. God damn, boy. That thing was killing me. Well, did you humbly yeah.

Yeah. What happened? It's gone. Oh, so your most serious problem has been perfectly removed and you can feel it and you saw it happen with your very eyes. So you've been given absolute proof that this works And you go, yeah, but it happens in god's time.

That's the shell. It's it's not me it's not me that is still closer to the shell than up here. It's when it's supposed to happen, it's gonna happen. Does that sound like a little rationalizing? Like, it couldn't be that I'm not willing.

Could it? And what does Bill write about? He says, we can't get the same willingness on our other character defects as they did. They aren't killing us. They aren't killing us like alcohol was.

So even the shell, our ego could agree we ought to give up drinking because it knew it was gonna get squashed if we kept on drinking. So we had the ego and the heart agreeing on asking God to get involved in giving up drinking. But what about all the other areas? Why can't we get the willingness to have God remove all these other defects and then we'll be sitting in here a room full of perfect people? You know, wouldn't that be nice?

And he says, well, the answer probably may only lie in the mind of God, but he speculates that it really has to do with the fact that they aren't killing us and that we enjoy them, That we enjoy these defects even though we wanna get rid of them. And he uses the wonderful line in there, we tend to settle for as much Total honesty. However Total honesty. However, in my business, I wanna reserve the right to occasionally re explain things so the deal goes my way. So what I really want is an honest reputation.

That's what I really like. And we find ourselves gossip. Doctor Bob, gossip is a terrible thing. It's gonna destroy a a world in the air. Remember our tongue and all of this and, so we go, how about gossip?

Jeez. At least we could just say to God, please take every piece of gossip machinery out of my body. Just remove it. Just yank it out. Yeah.

Yeah. You see that we always go, yeah. Yeah. And then part of us goes, wait. Wait.

Wait. Wait. Let's talk it over. What? Why don't we agree that originating gossip is pretty darn rotten and that we ought to just sign a blank contract.

No more originating gossip. Now somebody else originates it and I am simply like a telephone pole so that it's just passing through me going on to someone else. That doesn't seem as serious. So what I would like, I would like all gossip origination lifted out of me today. It's gone.

Gone. And the same thing with greed. I'd like a 90% reduction in greed. I would like I would like at least 80% of this lust taken out of me. I'd like to be free from that.

I would like this and I would get so what are we doing? We're we're we're without realizing it because there's fun involved or feeling superior or feeling whatever pride. And CS Lewis says people who stick up banks have a better shot getting into heaven than somebody feels superior to the people who stick up banks. You follow what I'm saying? In other words, pride is the ultimate one that to try and get that reduced.

Anytime you find yourself comparing yourself to someone else, that's pride. Well, I'm doing better than her. I'm better looking than him. I got more money than him. I mean, if everything is comparing comparing, being rich is greed.

I wanna be rich. I wanna be rich. That's not pride. I wanna be richer than you. That's pride.

You see what I'm saying? There's a it's always the comparison. And humility is when we're able to look around and I have to compare anything. We just are and you just are and we're all children to God and there's nothing to compare. There's just it's a great freedom.

So anyway, we're in this dilemma of the 6th step. We're and this is our struggle is to try to continuously increase the amount of willingness that we have in having things removed. The dilemma that is faced there, there there's a spiritual writer, c s Lewis. He wrote a wonderful story and I have it on a lot of my takes it. I work into my talk a lot because it describes to me the problem.

It's a 10 year old boy who's a baseball player and he has the the big game tomorrow. And his coach says, I don't want you to think about the game. I don't want you to I want you to have a big meal. I want you to go to bed at 9 o'clock and get 8 hours sleep. That's all he told the kids.

If you get 8 hours sleep, we're gonna kick their butts. So he went home, told his mother, you gotta get 8 hours sleep. Feed me now. He's in bed. He's out.

He's out. Out. 9 o'clock sharpies. Out like a light. About midnight, he feels the beginning of a toothache.

It's just that little twinge, you know how you got that And immediately his mind says, call your mother and get 2 aspirin. She'll run right in. She'll have the glass. She'll hand them to you. You'll drink them down and in about 15 minutes, you'll be back to sleep.

It'll take care of it. Done it before. Good. Oh, yeah. But he says, no.

You know what? I'm gonna I'm gonna wait and see if it goes away by itself. I'm just gonna hang in here. It's I think it could disappear on its own. And he waits and waits and pretty soon there's another twin.

I don't know. It's not going away. We're gonna get the no. No. I'm gonna I'm gonna wait.

I'm gonna wait. You wait 2 hours. And then he gets the 2 aspirin then he goes back to sleep. Doesn't get the 8 hour sleep, makes 2 errors, gets no hits. Team doesn't win.

So we're down to the question, why what's going on in his mind that he waited 2 hours to get the 2 aspirin? The answer to the question is, he knew his mother and he knew that she would immediately get the 2 aspirin and give them. But she wouldn't stop there. The next morning, she would call the dentist and set up an appointment so that the dentist could go look at this tooth even if it wasn't hurting anymore. And he knew the dentist.

The dentist not only would look at that tooth, he would look at every tooth in his head to make sure there was not any other problems and if there were, he would have a series of appointments until he had perfect teeth. He didn't want perfect teeth, he wanted 2 aspirin. We don't want perfect help. We just want to move a little further along. And the problem is the only help that's available is perfect help.

That's the only help. So we have to we can't get semi sober. You gotta do that on your own. You wanna try controlled drink, you gotta do that on your own. We wanna try all these things.

So our whole problem making is involved in this resistance to this perfect help. The other two things I'll talk about real quick and then we're gonna I'm gonna try and stop after an hour because that's too that's about as long as I like to sit. It is how a problem is created by the ego. A a problem is nothing more than an event. That's all it is.

It's just an event. This happened. That happened. This happened. So you read the paper.

Everyday, you read the paper. What's in the paper? Events, sporting events, political events, business events, they're all over there. There must be when you read a paper, there must be 500 events, and you just go down. Event event event event event event event event event problem.

I don't like that event. That event shouldn't have happened. That I'm I'm very upset with that event. I turned that event into a problem by myself. In other words, I imposed my judgment on the situation and decided that it never should have happened in the first place and I'm very upset about it.

This event didn't happen, just upset me, it just happened. In other words, it's a neutral thing. I remember when I was first sober and I always use this example, everything was driving me crazy. Remember that how self centered your ego was out to the edges of the universe and I remember there was a TV thing and they had just discovered another moon on Uranus. And I remember going, another moon on Uranus?