Sky Camp Men's Spiritual Retreat in Eugene, OR

Miss Clint, I'm an alcoholic. I'm glad to be here. I'm very glad to be here. My friend Gary came up from, Southern California with me today, and I'm looking forward to a wonderful weekend with you. I need a little, information about, where you guys are.

Just in terms of length, is is everybody here a member of AA? Any that are not any Al Anon's? Everybody's AA? How many, people here have, more than 25 years to sobriety? How many have more than 20?

20 15 to 20? 10 to 15 in there? How about 5 to 10? And, 4. How many got 4?

3, 2, 1. Anybody with less than 1? Okay. Well, anybody with, just brand new 30 days under 30 days. Is there anybody that's got a birthday, an AA birthday this weekend?

Yesterday, an AA birthday over there and one back here. 3 make it down tonight. Sir? Okay. We got, 3 birthdays, and if that guy comes in for his 1st, year from last year, that'll be great.

We'll have, basically, the schedule has already been laid out for you tonight. We're gonna have 2 sessions and I like 45 minute sessions with a 15 minute break. And if you can, we don't have any kind of where where we got a clock? Oh, up there on the wall. Yeah.

Okay. It's a little bit after it's about eye show 805 right now. Is that what that thing says? I can't read it. In the first session, I'd like to just let you know who I am and why, I would even presume so much to come up here and talk about this, program, this remarkable program of Alcoholics Anonymous.

And I would like to do this, weekend on the 12 steps. And I would, as advertised. And, I would like to do it from the point of view of step 11. I would like to begin there tonight, talk about that, talk about where we wanna be when we're through the process of the steps. How we wanna be getting through a day and living our lives.

I used to start it from the just at step 1 and 2. And on Friday night, everybody went to bed, ready to shoot themselves over the issues of powerless and unmanageable, and we had a little trouble getting them back. So we're starting at a different place, for good re for a lot of good reasons, which I think you'll see as we go along, because it just gives us a framework and a springboard to work. I know some of the guys that you've had here in the past, and you've had, some some of the people that have taught me what I know about these steps. Some remarkable, remarkable human beings.

And so, I'm sure that, you have, enjoyed these sessions in the past, and it's my idea that none of us is here by accident, that we're all supposed to be together here this weekend. And I'm, gonna have some fun, and I hope you do too. There is, I would like to ask one more question. Has has just about everybody in the room gone through the steps from the point of view as they're laid out in the, big book? Has, is that something that's been your experience?

Who has done that with some detail and just punched on through that way? Yeah. Okay. Good. Well, this is a refresher for most of you.

If you have not done that, the point of this weekend is not to go back and say, well, I did the I took the steps this weekend. That's that will not be where you'll be at on Sunday at noon. Anybody that's done it and done it thoroughly knows it takes a lot longer than a, a weekend to do that. You may wanna get some inventory out of the way on, Saturday afternoon, or you may just wanna play and take it easy. I think the 45 minute sessions and the 15 minute breaks are important because a lot of information, a lot of new ideas possibly for people, and some, particularly, and we just get a little bit assaulted with information and ideas and, we can't there's never enough time there's never enough time to give all of the, steps some real justice.

I mean, you could do a weekend on one step and then another weekend on another step. But we are just here to give it an overview. I'm a product of the, Southern California sobriety. What do we got going on? Oh, we got people coming in.

Welcome, gentlemen. I'm a product of Southern California sobriety. I got sober there. Thanks. I got sober there in, 1966.

I was living in Glendale. I was, walking along the street, and, in July of that year, a guy pulled up to the curb and called my name. I recognized him. He was my bail bondsman. And he said, come here.

And I went over there. I thought there was another warrant or something out. He said, no. I just I'm gonna take you some place today. I'm gonna take you someplace.

And I didn't ask him where he was gonna take me. My life was just hideous at that time. I was living in a shed with 3 other guys. I called it a garage for many years, and a couple of years ago, my my wife said, I want we were over in Glendale. She said, I wanna see that, garage you lived in.

And, I said, well, it's right. And we got down there. She said, is that it? And I said, that's it. She said, that's not a garage.

That's a shed is what that is. And I looked, and by God, no car had ever gotten in that thing. It was just a shed with 4 rooms. I had one of those little rooms, and, there was a shower out someplace. I, could hear it sometimes.

I didn't visit personally, but I, and I my little my little 8 by 10 room had a sticky linoleum floor, and my sole remaining possession was a clock radio, and I had a little box with some sheets in it, as I recall. And, that room smelled bad, and it was a hot summer, and that clock radio was, more trouble than it was worth because it would start playing in the middle of the night. I just damn thing, it just start kinda doing some, music. I thought it might be, hooked to Del Rio, Texas or something. This music just kinda even after you pull the plug out of the wall, that radio would play pretty good for quite a while.

And I, I knew that wasn't right, but I didn't know what to do about that. I had, and so when that guy asked me where that he when he told me he was gonna take me someplace, I figured, this could be anything. This could go back to jail. This could go to county hospital. This might go out to the Laughing Academy at Camarillo.

Remember that we had that out there in those days, and, I they didn't have any treatment centers or charm schools down there in those days. They had, they they had one place out in the valley. A couple of guys from the valley here, Ron Shire ran a a treatment center. He called it Shire's Dryer. And it was a little spin dry operation.

He'd be in and out of there in a couple of days. And that was it. And I thought, maybe out there. I don't know where. I knew I was nuts.

I had no problem with that part of it in the sense of my my life was just a shambles. I I woke up in that little room under the cot one morning, and I'm looking, over in the corner, and I see that rat, the big rat over there, laying over there looking at me. And I'm looking at the rat, and he and I are I'm afraid of him. I just know if I push him, he's gonna charge me. You know?

Figure he's gonna win. I I kinda kept my eye on him for a while, and then I black out or pass out. And I first light of day came in an hour later, and I look again at that rat, and that rat had somehow turned into a pair of socks laying over there in the corner. And I had been held hostage by a pair of socks all night. And, and so I, I was in bad shape, and I knew I was in bad shape.

There were warrants out. And I was I hadn't seen I have 3 sons, and I hadn't seen them in years, nor I had 2 2 wives, 2 2 different marriages for those 3 boys. And I hadn't seen those women or heard from them or sent them any money or anything like that. I was just just about it seemed like Skid Row was maybe 3 weeks away. And so when this guy said, I'm gonna take you someplace today, I had no idea where he was gonna take me, and it didn't matter a hell of a lot.

It just did not matter. And he put me in his car about noon and drove me across Glendale and into a little parking lot behind the laundry, and we went up a long flight of metal steps hung on the side of that building and into a big room, not this big, half this size. And there was a sign that said Alamo Club of Glendale, whatever that might be. And I sat down there with, those guys. And nothing has been the same since that time.

Nothing has been the same. But I didn't stay sober since that time. I was, around for 3 weeks going to your meetings and having a, a sense of liking what I saw, really thinking perhaps, what was, wrong with you was similar to what was wrong with me. But I didn't think your answer would work for me. I don't know why.

I just didn't think that. I found some, pills after 3 weeks, some Dexamil. They had they had, a product that they mixed, Dexedrine and, Milltown, and I liked that a lot. And I had discovered a stash of it, and I started taking that stuff. And I was drunk, in a day, I was drunk.

And I stayed bad drunk for 2 weeks. Bad, bad drunk. Ran out of money, and the 14th August I woke up in that little smelly room, and I didn't have any place to go. And I walked, about mid morning, I walked over to the club, the Alamo club. And I walked up that long flight of stairs and there was a guy that had the door open and coffee on.

A guy doing his job in AA. Thank God he was doing his job in AA. And, he recognized me from the meeting. He said, how are you doing? I said, I'm not doing so good.

He said, what happened? I said, I got drunk and, let everybody down. Oh, he said, are you alcoholic? And I said, I think he knew, but he wondered if I knew. Mustering up all the honesty I could, I said, yeah.

I've been an alcoholic about a month now. Something like that. He let that go. He didn't say anything to me about that. He let it go.

But he did say this, he said, well, if you're alcohol you say you're alcoholic and you drank? And I said, yeah. He said, well, you didn't let us down. Alcoholics drink. It's not that you let us down.

You may feel real bad about it, but you didn't let us down. He said, you didn't even surprise us. In fact, he said, if you want to surprise us, get a job. That that'll surprise us. He's very kind to me, this man.

He was incredibly kind to me, but he didn't, come off of what he wanted to say. And what he wanted to say is that, if I was alcoholic, I was always gonna drink. What he wanted to say was, you'll drink. If you're alcoholic, you're gonna drink. He could have said, if you're alcoholic, you ought to think about quitting.

He could have said, if you're alcoholic, you're gonna you ought to, cut down. He could have said a lot of things. He said, you're gonna drink. He even, kinda, nailed it a little bit more harshly than that. He said, you're gonna drink no matter what.

People tell you don't drink no matter what. You'll drink. You'll drink. I heard it much later from a guy named Joe. You'll drink no matter what.

You'll drink. And I knew I would. I knew that was the deal. I had no doubt about it. I I didn't, it didn't warm me up any.

I and he wouldn't talk to me about tomorrow. He wouldn't talk to me about anything but about staying there that day. About staying there in that goofy little Alamo club at Glendale that day at a kitchen. They said if you get hungry and you need and you can keep something down, we'll we'll fix you. Said you can have coffee here.

You're not subject to arrest here. You're safe here, but you gotta stay here. There's a meeting at noon. There's a meeting tonight. Stay here.

And that's all he would tell me. He didn't tell me, that I would, learn how to quit here. He didn't tell me that it was possible for me to quit. In fact, he said just the opposite. He said, just the opposite.

I stayed that day, it was the 14th August 1966. It was my last day I drank. I didn't drink From that day on, it was 33 years ago. Last month on 13th, I caught up with that bail bondsman in Hawaii at his home over there and, reminded him who I was and thanked him for bringing me to that club. We had a sweet talk.

I called him my 1st year. I said, Don, it's Clint Hodges. And he he he was like, yeah? Where are you? He thought we were gonna do some more business.

You know? And the thing I I noticed early in AA is that, when they asked me where I was, I knew and I could tell them. That's one of the gifts of this thing. You know? We come to know our full name and address.

A lot of us do, not everybody, but a lot of us do. And that, was, something that I knew within a year of sobriety. I, I know today that I'd never quit. It seems so weird to say that. I never quit.

I haven't had a drink in over 33 years. I didn't quit. And I don't know anybody in AA that's a real alcoholic, an alcoholic of my type, that quit. We don't seem to be able to do that. There comes a day beyond which we don't drink anymore.

But I don't I remember Chuck used to say, down in Southern California years ago, Chuck Chamberlain, he died sober. He'd say, if I'd if if I'd had known that was gonna be my last drink, I woulda had 2. Hey. Quit, and I'll celebrate. We don't quit.

That obsession is, removed. It's just taken from us, and we don't you'd think I would know exactly that moment that that obsession was taken. And I didn't know for 9 months that I, that I was on a different footing. There was new soil under my feet. I didn't know for 9 months that I hadn't quit.

It took a while to get that. I mean, it's like, if it was a and you've never asked me to quit, I I've never it's not what's going on here. If it was about about quitting, we'd start any step study weekend with something called step 1, quit. Quit. That's the first thing you gotta do.

You gotta quit. And it doesn't say that. Basically, step 1 says, you gotta get that you are toast, is what it says. Powerless and unmanageable. Oh, great.

But that's what it says. It's like, we're really lost. We're really lost. And we get a glimpse of it, but we know a drink will fix it. And it doesn't fix anything, and after a while, we even know that.

And that was my experience. I had my first drink when I was 16 after a at a party after a football game. And when the party was, over, I was, 29 and living in the shed in Glendale. And that party was over, man. It had been over for a while.

Yeah. I'm 62 now. I've spent more than half my life here in AA with you, and I never signed on for 33 years of this. Never ever Ever. And I don't have any business, telling anybody about anything about the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.

But I will, tell you this. I, I was asked along the way, if I had taken these steps. And I said, sure. Yeah. And then somebody said, have you taken an inventory?

And I said, oh, no. I haven't done that. Well, you ought to do that. And so, at about two and a half years of sobriety, maybe 2 years in there someplace, I wrote out an autobiographical inventory. Just told my life story on paper.

And I, met with some guys over a weekend, and I read that paper to another human being. And I had, begun to pay some money back. I went to, dental school over here, in Portland. And my roommate, there and I both got kicked out at the end of the 2nd year of a 4 year program. His because he was just screwing around.

Mine because I was drinking. But along the way, and to show him how good a roommate I was, I burned his couch down 1 night, falling asleep on it with a cigarette. And, one of the things I did, in those first 2 or 3 years of sobriety was write him a letter and send him a check, and say I'm sober in AA, and I'm really sorry about the couch, and here's, here's a check. And he wrote me back the sweetest letter, and he said, that's so great. He said he he said, I'm sending you the check back.

I'm so glad you're sober in AA. Donate the money to AA. And maybe someday I will. Maybe. Carl, my brother, was, had cosigned a note for me when I was in dental school, and I let him pay that thing.

And he was a little hot about it. And, he was not to get to AA for 17 years. But, one of the things he knew about AA, the first thing he knew about AA after I got sober was you get your money back. He he I sent him the money. I sent him not I sent him, like, $50 a month for quite a while.

And then I made some assumptions. One assumption was that I was living a spiritual life because I wasn't drinking anymore. And, the book says, what we have is a daily reprieve contingent upon our maintenance of our spiritual condition. Well, I'm not drinking. I must be maintaining my you know, what and then I'd move on.

But, basically, I'm a I'm a power seeker, and I have, known since I was 5 years old that I don't have enough power. I'm not big enough for this life. I just am not big enough for this life. I don't I don't have what it takes to do the deal. I knew it at 5.

People say, you're a big boy, now you do this. Uh-uh. But I I knew 2 other things. I knew I can't tell anybody I'm big enough. I'm not big enough.

And I also knew that I had to figure out a way to be big enough. To be big enough. And so, maybe the money in my grandma's missionary jar, if I can steal that, maybe that'll be the deal. Maybe the candy I can steal at the store, maybe that's big enough. Maybe maybe the lie in me are and 16 years old, got it.

Me and the boos. That's big enough. Now I'm big enough. Now I'm big enough. I'm a power seeker.

I want power. And most of us are like that. Most everybody in the room is a power seeker. Lack of power would not be a dilemma if we didn't really dig power. There's people here in, or wherever we Oregon Oregon that, okay.

That don't care anything about power. There are people like that. Well, there are none of them in this room, but there are people like that. We want power, and we sense it when we don't have the power. And we begin to scramble, and we don't tell anybody we don't have we just want to begin to get something cooking.

And sometimes, sometimes we substitute stubbornness for strength, but it's still better than going it alone. You know? I mean, there's a 100 ways to do that deal. But, sober and drunk, can I, I nothing changed about that when I got into alcoholics anonymous? Nothing changed about that.

I didn't have any power. Don we were talking earlier tonight to Don, p, who has been up here, and who is a remarkably wonderful, source of spiritual strength for me, says that when that that the removal of that obsession is a gift, it's an absolute gift, and we have the rest of our lives to become comfortable with that gift. And it is a gift. I don't know. What what I what would I have done on the night of 13th, 14th August to merit 33 years of sobriety?

I was in huge trouble, and drunk, and nasty. What did any of us do the night before we got sober to merit the gift, whether we've had the gift for 9 months or 12 years or 22 years or 33. We didn't do anything, except perhaps we prayed. And some of us remember our prayers and some of us do not. I don't remember mine.

When I was so all during that time, I was 5 years sober, somebody said go to law school. When I was 9 years sober, the state of California gave me a license to practice law, which is pretty colorful because they wouldn't give me a license to drive a car when I got here, you know, so we're we're kind of moving up. But it was about power, you know. I thought that was gonna be it isn't a source of power, so it's just something interesting to do between meetings, but there's not a lot of power for a different set of people to report to. It's better answering ready for the defendant than being the defendant.

But, and I played both of those games. When I was, 17 years sober, I was in full flight from reality. I was banking on an image. I had the right home and the right car and the right girl. I started to say relationship.

It was not that. It didn't have any of that dignity to it, but there she was, gorgeous. I had the right address. I had the right income stream. I was trying big cases.

I had, my name in the paper in LA. I did that. And it wasn't didn't seem to be quite what I wanted. I started taking seminars. EST was a big one in those days.

I mean, I'm on the search for something. Right? I really want something. You get a guy like me with 17, 18 years of sobriety, and I'm on one night, I'm on top of the airport Hyatt in at LAX in Los Angeles doing a fire walk with some guy named Tony. I mean, you know, trying to look cool and go, goddamn that's hot.

But I'm looking for power, you know. I want the there's gotta be a secret here, and I wanna get that secret in. And they will promise you these seminars. Basically, the promise and Paul Martin pointed this out to me. He's in Chicago, got 53 years of sobriety this year.

He says, if I have any message, it's the message of one beggar talking to another beggar about where the bread is. I hear that. Boy, I hear that. But he said the promise of those things is that if you do what we tell you to do, and it will take another $5,000 workshop before we can fully explain it to you, you. But if you'll do what we tell you to do, you can have your own way.

That's the promise. And, some of the information is great. Sometimes you even get your own way. Always a troubling thing for an alcoholic. And I tried that.

And I'm right in the middle of AA. I haven't left AA. I'm still sponsoring people. I'm doing all of that stuff. I'm 20 years sober, and I'm 21 years sober, and I'm 22.

And I'm working harder and working faster and doing all of the things. And 10 years ago 10 years ago, it got flat enough for me that I decided that I better, take the steps. I acted like I take them again as if I had taken them, I hadn't taken them. And so I started at I said the 3rd step prayer. It's kinda like, you might wonder why I didn't start at step 1.

Well, I don't know. I guess I was gonna buy in, like, a multilevel marketing thing. I'll be a supervisor or something. I don't know. I said the 3rd step prayer.

I didn't even take the 3rd step. I just said that prayer. That's a very powerful prayer and it's gonna be, something that I'll talk about a little bit this week and it is extraordinarily powerful, this prayer. And and within a 100 days after that prayer, my life fell apart. About a 100 days, the house was gone.

She was gone. She came to me, I don't want to do this with you anymore. And we've been together 5 years living in this this house. This this house that was just always felt like the real owner was gonna come home one day and tell me to get out, you know. It was like that.

Beautiful place. And there should have been on the back of the front door, check out time is. And I had to earn a lot of money every month just to wake up there. It was gone. And I'm living in a little apartment.

My law partner came to me during that same 100 and 100 days, 110 days, and said, I don't wanna do this with you anymore. And the income stream was gone. My image was gone. The thing I worked so hard to develop over the years was gone. I lost my identity 10 years ago.

Now before I forget to say this, the law practice that reestablished and all that stuff is but from a different place. It shocks you when you're 53 years old and you've been sober 23 years, and you think you're dying, and you are dying, and you think you've lost everything and are left with nothing. And, god, how did that happen? And I went, I I was, scheduled to do some speaking, and I wound up back in, at the, some round up music city round up, ran into some guys from other parts of the country and sat up with them, late at night in a hotel room. Guy named Don Pritz.

I don't know who he is. Guy named Joe. I don't know who he is. A guy named Gary, whoever that may be. People from Louisiana.

People from around the country. And I was one of the speakers and a couple of them were speaking there that weekend and we sat up late and I got that they were doing something that I was not doing and had never done and really didn't even know about. 1 of these guys was then living in Denver, but he told me that he was moving out to the West Coast and that he would call me when he got in town, and maybe we could get together. And by the following January, 91, I guess, he and I were sitting down regularly going through this book. And it started me on the most amazing leg of the trip, the most incredible thing that I have, ever been through.

And it's that that I wanna talk about this weekend. Those steps from that point of view right out of this book where we made some wild assumptions that everything in that book is true. We just assumed that. Everything in that book is applicable to me at 23 or 24 years of sobriety or 33 years of sobriety. It isn't for the guy just getting sober.

Everything in that book has every sentence is a gold mine. It's inspired. I think Wilson just held the pen. I think it came through him. He couldn't have written that in at 3 or 4 years of sobriety.

No way. No way. And they said, you're like a guy, all of this time in sobriety, you're like a guy that wanted a cake, a chocolate cake. And you went out and bought a box of cake mix, and you read the directions on the side, and you said, where's the cake? Come on.

Come on. Come on. I want the cake. I gotta get on with the thing. I don't have a lot of time.

Screw rock. Give me the cake. There's no cake. So if you're like me, what you do is you, go to a meeting where other guys are reading the cake. And if all they're doing is reading the directions on the side, you're not gonna get any cake.

You get a bunch of guys, you can say, speak them in French. No cake. Sing them. No cake. It's just directions on the side of a box of cake mix.

And the more faithfully you follow the directions when you finally decide to do something, the better the cake, the better the cake. They said, you're the lab rat. We don't know if those guys were telling the truth or not. That might be the biggest hoax in the city, this big book. What is that?

You get a guy like Wilson who writes a book, he uses phraseology like the goose hung high. What the hell is that, Bill? Stop it. And they say it's got some value to it and they tell us what to do in the book. We'll never know, will we?

Unless we do exactly what they said they did. And if we get what they claim they got, then we'll have something. At least we'll know it's a hoax if it's a hoax and we can go back to the fire walk on top of the airport high. Don told me, he said, he said, if it's I'm walking down this trail, and if the sign says there's a 2 headed calf 1 mile down that way, I'm going. I gotta go look at the 2 headed calf, and if there's a crippled monkey making love to it, I'll stay a week.

And I said, I'm like that too, man. I look under every rock. He said, yeah. That's great. Look under this rock.

Well, these are only suggested steps. Yeah. It doesn't suggest anything else, though. That's what it suggests. Work with us here.

I'm going, okay. Okay. Okay. A year went by, and I'll shut up here in a minute, we'll take a break, but I'll tell you this. A year went by.

I called him up. I don't know still don't know what happened, why it all hit the fan the way that it did. I I said, Don, I still don't get this thing about I lost everything in 3 months. In fact, I was just looking it looked like a 100 days, and it's gone. Gone.

Everything I'd worked for. He said, well, what were you doing at the beginning of that 3 month period? I said, well, I was just doing my deal. I was, oh, I remember I was AA had gotten so flat, I thought I ought to take the steps, so I said the 3rd step prayer. He said, really?

You did that? Did you take step 1? No. How about step 2? No.

You took the 3rd step. Did you notice that just under that 3rd step prayer, it says, we thought well before taking this step, making sure we could at last abandon ourselves. I said, I didn't notice that. He said, well, did you at least notice that in the middle of the step it says relieve me of the bondage itself? I noticed that.

He said, well, what were you bonded to? I said, oh my God. I was bonded to my image. And what comprised your image? Well, the girl, the house, the car, the address, the income stream, the law practice.

He said, he relieved you of that bondage. Took him about a 100 days to do it. Next question. And so it's amazing how the when we begin this process, it sets into motion spiritual laws that we only dimly perceive. It is such power.

It's what we've been looking for. Not our little ragtag power. Not my power, but power. Power. And so we'll talk about step 11 when we come back.

Let's take a little break. I'm in the middle of a meeting. Leave that tape off for just a little bit, will you? There is, Frank reminds me to tell you that there's paper and pencils over there. If you want to, grab any to make notes or whatever you wanna do.

We have a couple of diners in the back there. I guess they're gonna join us when they get done. That'll I hope. You know what? It's like, we really didn't know the difference between everything and nothing when we got here.

We thought we'd lost everything when we had to go to AA, and we're left with nothing. And the nothing that we, were left with turned out to be everything. And the everything we thought we lost turned out to be nothing. And that was my experience in 1990. I I had lost everything from my point of view and, was left with nothing.

And that wasn't, what it turned out to be at all. I have typically, when we talk about the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, just to give some perspective on it, we talk about a triangle. It's an equilateral triangle, and it has, unity, and it has service, and it has recovery. Unity is, the touchstone of unity is this idea that, we're joined together in brotherly love. Joy he talks, about the feeling amongst the passengers of an ocean going liner moments after rescue from shipwreck.

There's a sweetness and a closeness there. Wilson's language is very precise. He writes tight. He just gets it said in very few words, but listen to that moments after it. Not a week later when the resentments have come back, but moments after rescue from shipwreck.

That's a closeness and a sweetness that we enjoy here that will be part of, our experience together this weekend. That's and it's comprised of 2 things, as you know. Common problem and a common solution. Both necessary. When I was, in jail, everybody in that drunk tank had a common problem had the same problem, but we didn't have a common solution.

And there I didn't get any sense of camaraderie. You know, you don't really say, would you be my sponsor? Just some guy in the drunk tank. You know? Or how about, hey.

Let's say, let's meet a year from today. We'll meet right here. You know? It's not that kind of thing. And I've been in church and perhaps you have too, and, they offer a common solution.

But it didn't warm me up. I was brought up in the Church of the Air in Billings, Montana, and there was some strange stuff going on there from my point of view. I went down to the front of the church one day to see what was going on. My uncle was down there getting saved and they sent him to China to be a missionary. I stayed away from the front of that church for the rest of my time there.

I'll tell you that. I got baptized in the Yellowstone River early 1 March. I didn't find God. I'll tell you that. I didn't find much anything for about 3 days as I recall.

There wasn't a common there wasn't a common problem there. They were offering everybody a common solution. You gotta believe this. You gotta believe but here, we're so fortunate. Common problem, common solution.

We have 12 traditions that that really remarkably tell us how to treat one another. If the steps ask us to make a decision or take an action, the traditions ask us to do something else. They ask us to give up something, each one of them. In order to be with each other, we have to give up something. In order to be in a good marriage, we have to give up something.

I never thought that was gonna be necessary for me. I never thought it would. But look at that language on page 564. Our common welfare should come first. What do I have to give up?

Having my welfare come first. Or for number 2, for our group purposes, but one ultimate authority. What do I have to give up? Being the ultimate authority. 3, the only requirement for AA membership is that it is what do I have to give up?

Stating telling other people whether they can be a member or not. And each one of them is like that. We're not gonna talk much about the traditions, except I would like to, share with you a letter that was, given to me. A copy of it was given to me. This is a letter that was written, if I have it here.

I don't have it here. I'll bring it tomorrow. But we were all in in the early forties. We were telling people that you can't stay here. You can't be a member of AA.

We just don't like you and you gotta go. And there was a letter written by the Important people in AA in Los Angeles in 1941 wrote a letter like that that annoyed them. And that letter somehow was staved in an archive, and somebody gave me a copy of it. I'll read it to you tomorrow. It's amazing.

And we forget how important these traditions are. And so that's one leg of the triangle. Over here is the, service piece. The service really is if it if the, unity is about getting my body to the meeting, about meeting in a body, about being part of one another, the, service is about my spirit. My spirit.

Anytime I'm involved in service, that is doing something for somebody else with no price tag on it, it enhances my spiritual life. Whether I'm setting up chairs or going on a 12 step call or taking a panel into one of the prisons or doing something in a me service, free and for fun for nothing. And it enhances my spiritual life and enlarges me in that way. And we have these 12 service concepts. And they govern that.

And then the base of the triangle, this equilateral triangle, is recovery. Recovery is about the 12 steps. Recovery has to do with my mind. My mind is the problem. There is a process that we can go through if we take these 12 steps that will give us a new mind.

Silkworth called it an entire psychic change. New mind. And that new mind comes up at about step 7. We don't get that we have a new mind for a while. But it's a completely different way of looking at things.

A new pair of glasses. And we this is kind of, there has an antiquity to this. Saint Paul said, be ye transformed by the renewal of your mind. We need a new mind. We need a new mind.

All kinds of treatment on the mind that I brought in here doesn't seem to get the job done. I can't sprinkle enough Prozac on that puppy to really matter much, you know? I need a new mind. And that's what this is about. Recovery is about that.

The steps are about the mind. So we have body, mind, and spirit. And for the first 23 years of my sobriety, I did not have an equilateral triangle. I was engaged in AA, and I was in a group where service is all over the place. And I was in a group where unity was clearly part of it.

But I didn't have any recovery. I didn't get engaged in the steps. I was not signed on to the solution that's offered here. And so my triangle had to look like a little narrow guy with a little narrow base, which is very unstable. It's not an equilateral triangle.

Just an unstable little triangle. That's basically what that looked like. A lot of unit and you you know what? People say, how the hell did you stay sober? Well, you know what?

There there's a great line in step in, the 8th chapter of the book. It says, god has either solved your drink problem or he has not. I mean, anybody that's been here any length of time will join me when I say, sometime along the line, if it had been up to me in 33 years, if I had a choice, I've been angry enough to drink. I've been scared enough to drink. I've been humiliated enough to drink.

I've been jealous enough to drink. I've been terrified enough to drink. If it had been up to me, I drink. That's what I do. And I think it's important that we begin to get the idea that we didn't quit.

We really didn't quit. And we're not I think there's kind of a sober insanity that says, I can keep myself sober and I can get other people sober. And we have to watch that creeping in, I think. Because if I think I'm maybe I didn't get myself sober, but I'm I'm keeping myself sober. How are you doing that?

Well, I'm going to a lot of meetings. No kidding. Yeah. Didn't you tell me that, you had placed yourself beyond human aid? Well, yeah.

Didn't you tell me that no human power could relieve your outcome? Well, yeah. And now you're suggesting that if you get with other human beings, you're cool? Well, that's not quite what I mean. There's some sort of a little thing that happens if we all get together.

No kidding. What would that be? Well, I don't know. But we just sort of it gets some little, we invoke some power. What power?

God's power. Oh, God. Oh. Oh, that. I mean, it like, it doesn't hang together, this assumption that I got myself sober, that I'm keeping myself sober.

If I think I did that, then I got a little tiny god. A little tiny guy. And that's a problem because when I get to step 7 and say, would you remove my character defects? He's too small to do that. I always had a little tiny God.

He was or a God that was big and distant and way out there and mad. Mad. I was with, father, some guy down in Los Angeles, a priest, a sweet guy, a wonderful guy, a priest. I'll think of his name in a minute. He gave a talk.