The topic of "Varieties of Spiritual Experiences James, Jung, Shoemaker & You" in Indianapolis, IN

Thank you, Jason. Instead of qualifying, I figure one photo's worth a thousand words. That was when it was working.

When Mike was kind enough to extend the invitation for me to come and join you, I have been giving, there's about five different history talks that I give.

And because of the esteem that I hold my nephew in, and the reason that I refer to him as my nephew is that we're both great fans of C.S. Lewis's The Screw Tape Letter.

And it's my favorite book on sponsorship. Great, great book.

And anyway, so this is my nephew and I am his uncle.

But I decided that what I wanted to do if I was coming to join

is to see if there was something else that I could add to my knowledge.

So what this particular talk is, and if you want, you can start the tape here.

Okay.

is the varieties of religious experience.

And so we'll call this talk the varieties of spiritual experience.

Now, again, when we're speaking about these spiritual terms,

first and foremost, we're using medieval language,

mostly language that came out of the King James Bible.

So when you hear them, if you've got some kind of physical reaction to it,

remember that it's medieval language.

and don't get hung up in those terms.

So the varieties of spiritual experience, again,

we'll get out of the medieval and into something more contemporary.

Chronicles of the twice-born.

Now, Jason was kind enough to read this letter from Bill to Ebby.

It's a wonderful piece.

And the thing that Bill was talking to Jung about is that these conversion experiences that James spoke about, that's what happens in AA.

And that they're available on a wholesale basis, that this is not something that just happened to Bill a little flash.

But that each and every person that recovers in Alcoholics Anonymous,

or as he says, the foundation of such success as Alcoholics Anonymous has achieved,

is laying a newcomer open to a transforming experience.

And so...

It goes on to say, so to you, Dr. Jung, to Dr. Shoemaker of the Oxford groups,

to William James, and to my own physician, Dr. Silkworth,

we have AA owe this tremendous benefaction.

As you will now clearly see, this astonishing chain of events

actually started long ago in your consulting room,

and it was directly founded upon your own humility and deep perception.

So this is William James, the father of American psychiatry.

Well, who was this guy?

Well, he came from a very affluent family in the Northeast.

His father was a Swedenborgian theologian.

The Swedenborgians were a mystical Christian sect.

If you want to get lost for 8 to 15 hours, just Google that and see where you end up.

Yeah.

He was the older brother of Henry James, and some of us that have been on the planet a little longer.

We had to read the turn of the screw as one of our...

are books in an English class.

And so this family is something that's been part of the fabric of American life.

He suffered from soul sickness his first 30 years.

His mother was so incredibly, he always had something going on.

He was kind of a hypochondriac.

And he wasn't real physically strong, but he kept going and doing all these really wild things.

Like when he was at college, he decided to go with this doctor who was going up the Amazon to figure out whether or not trying to disprove evolution.

And he went along and was part of that.

He got very sick during that and came back to the United States.

His family moved around a bunch.

His high school years, he was in like five different countries.

And so he wasn't tied to usual ways that people get and assimilate information.

Later in his life, he became the first professor of psychology at Harvard

and later became the professor of philosophy.

And he died in 1910.

Okay.

Now, James concluded that while the revelations of the mystic, in other words, the spiritual experience of the mystic hold true for that person that has the experience, that it's not something that anybody else particularly can experience.

In other words, that for others, they are certainly ideas to be considered, but they can't hold claim to truth without the personal experience.

So in other words, you know, I've got to, I can hear you talk about it,

but I have to experience it in order to have it mean something to me.

There's the varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.

Now, James also was, when he wrote this book,

it was a book that just about anybody that had anything to do with psychology

or religious life had to read.

So it was a book that was just tremendously impactful to just, you know, the intellectual evolution of psychology and religion in this country.

So you can imagine that we're talking about a time when just about everybody was affiliated with some kind of church in this country.

And so this was a tremendously impactful book.

And both Shoemaker and Jung and Bookman all referred to it and used it frequently.

And one of the great sadnesses, I actually am fortunate enough to have some of Frank Bookman,

the man who was the initiator of the Oxford group, some of his books.

And I had a chance to get his varieties, but with the other stuff, I didn't get it.

And now this book has become so very dear to me.

And I...

This is Clark University in 1909, seven years after Varieties was published.

And at this thing at Clark University, this is a picture in the front from the left is

Sigmund Freud, William James, and Carl Jung.

There were having a fundraiser for Clark University, and William James recommended that

Sigmund Freud be invited out to give a series of talks.

And so this is a picture of that.

And during that time, Jung had the chance to be with William James for a couple of evenings.

I'd like to read you a little piece from a letter that he wrote to his friend, Virginia Payne.

Two personalities I met at the Clark Conference made a profound and lasting impression on me.

One was Stanley Hall, the president, and the other was William James, who I met for the first time then.

I remember particularly an evening at President Hall's House.

After dinner, William James appeared, and I was particularly interested in the personal relation between Stanley Hall and William James,

since I gathered from some of the remarks of President Hall that William James was not taken quite seriously on account of his interest in Mrs. Piper and her extrasensory perceptions.

Stanley Hall had prepared us that he had asked James to discuss some of his results with Mrs. Piper and to bring some of his material.

So when James came, there was Stanley Hall, Professor Freud, and one or two other men and myself, he said to Hall, I brought you some papers in which you might be interested.

And he put his hand into his breast pocket and drew out a parcel which, to our delight, proved to be a wad of dollar bills.

Considering Stanley Hall's great services for the increase in Wallfroller of Clark University

and his rather critical remarks as to James pursuits, it looked to us a particularly happy rejoinder.

James excused himself profusely and then produced the real papers from the other pocket.

I spent two delightful evenings with James alone and I was tremendously impressed by the cleanness of his mind

and the complete absence of intellectual prejudices.

Stanley Hall was an equally clear-headed man, but of a decidedly academic brand.

The conference was noteworthy on the account of the fact that this was the first time that Professor Freud had an immediate contact with America.

It was the first official recognition of the existence of psychoanalysis, and it meant a great deal to him because recognition in Europe for him was regrettably scarce.

I was a young man then.

I lectured about association tests in a case of child psychology.

I was also interested in parapsychology,

and my discussions with William James were chiefly about this subject

and about the psychology of religious experience.

Now, Jung also emphasized the importance of balance and harmony,

and he cautioned that modern humans rely too heavily on science and logic,

and would benefit from integrating spirituality and an appreciation of the unconscious realm.

Here's another fan of James Sam Shoemaker, who was an Oxford group leader.

He was the rectory of Calvary Church and the founder of Calvary Mission,

and he was a spiritual mentor to Bill Wilson and many of the original members of Alcoholics Anonymous.

In his book, Realizing Religion, Shoemaker's talking about having a scientific definition of what is conversion.

So when I say conversion, I'm not saying what you think I'm saying.

But this is what, this is, this is Shoemaker's definition.

I think it's a good one for us to work from.

The process, gradual or sudden, by which is self,

Hitherto divided and consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy becomes unified, consciously right, and happy.

So this book, the varieties of religious experience, a lot of people say,

That's the toughest book I've ever had to read.

Well, it's a book that's a series of lectures, and they're all interrelated, but it's really good if you've got a short attention span and a little ADD.

or a little post-methodrine stress disorder,

to start where Bill Wilson started.

Start in conversion, which is in the middle of the book.

I think it's like the seventh lecture.

And then read back through conversion and then back before it,

and end of mysticism and the like.

And it's a fascinating, fascinating read if you're a strange chap with a queer idea of fun.

But if you sit down to read it like a book, you may want to just get out razor blades and run a warm tub.

Now in it, James talks about the fact that God has two families.

Of the children on this earth, there are the once born and there are the twice born.

The once born.

They see God not as a judge, not as a glorious potentate, but as an animating spirit of a beautiful and harmonious world, healthy-minded.

They generally have no metaphysical tendencies.

They don't look back into themselves.

And they're not too distressed by their own imperfections.

Then there are the twice born.

These people are wrong living.

They have impotent aspirations.

What I do, that I do not, but what I hate that I do, says St. Paul.

They're self-loathing, self-despairing.

An unintelligible and intolerable burden to which one is mysteriously the heir.

Do you go to meetings with people like this?

Huh?

Now, who are the candidates for this conversion process?

In other words, of these twice-born folks, they're these folks that are preoccupied with themselves.

They hate what they're doing.

They are completely unsatisfied all the time, and they're always seeing where they're wrong.

Well, so to begin with, there are two things in the mind of the candidate for conversions.

First, the present incompleteness or wrongness, the sin in which he is eager to escape,

and the second is the present ideal that he longs to compass.

In other words, I've got to have something not only that I want to get out of, but that I want to grow too.

So in these varieties of spiritual experience, James talks about there basically being two types, two categories.

One is the educational variety, and he describes it as a moral incubation, that what happens is it's kind of like an athlete who keeps engaging in a sport, and there may come a day when all at once the game seems to play itself through him, or like a musician.

who practices and practices and practices,

and then in performing somehow, it all comes together and comes through them.

That what this is is that it's a process of education,

it's a process of being immersed in something and growing through it.

And then there's the sudden experience.

Now, what James says about this is that it unconsciously develops,

until it's ready to play a controlling part when it makes a sudden eruption into conscious life.

So in other words, the same thing's going on.

There's something happening that the conscious mind is not aware of, but when it comes, it's now.

Now, in these sudden spiritual experience, oftentimes voices are often heard.

Lights are seen, visions witnessed, automatic motor phenomenon occur.

And it always seems after the surrender of the personal will,

as if an exterraneous higher power had flooded in and taken possession.

Oh, there's higher power.

How'd they steal that from Alcoholics Anonymous?

The term's been used for a long time by a lot of really wonderful people.

And then what about the agnostic?

Well, James said that what the agnostic does is that they just out front veto faith.

as something weak and shameful.

And they're afraid to use their instincts.

In many persons, such inhibitions are never overcome.

They make that decision and that's it.

But this may only be a temporary inhibition, even late in life.

Some thaw, some release takes place,

and such cases suggest that sudden conversion is by a miracle.

You've been sitting with Earl for 35 years in the meeting.

And he always says, I don't know anything about this God stuff.

And then one day, something happens.

And if that's not miraculous, what is?

So what's the test?

Well, the test that James gave is that impossible things are possible.

New energies and endurances are shown.

The personality is changed.

The man is born anew.

Whether or not his psychological idiosyncrasies are what gives shape to his metamorphosis.

They didn't smoke any methamphetamine for a whole day.

That's it.

I didn't have anything to drink, and I'm in Indianapolis.

I mean, my God.

So what's a good example of a sudden experience?

Well, in the varieties of religious experience, James refers to one, S.H. Hadley.

who after his conversion became an active and useful rescuer of drunkards in New York.

In Down on Water Street, his autobiography he wrote,

It isn't the last drink that hurts a man or the fourth or fifth.

It's the first drink that ruins a man.

Well, that's Alcoholics Anonymous.

This book was written in 1890.

Where'd they get it?

Here's a picture of the book down in Water Street by S.H. Hadley.

The story of 16 years of life and work in the Water Street mission, a sequel to the life of Jerry McCauley.

Jerry McCauley was the guy who established the first Bowery mission in New York.

And here's a picture of S.H. Hadley. I love this. Yours for the lost.

I believe that's on Lorenza's new card.

And again, in this, Hadley has this white light experience.

Although up to that moment my soul had been filled with indescribable gloom,

I felt the glorious feeling of the noonday sunshine into my heart.

I felt I was a free man.

And from that moment till this, I've never wanted a drink of whiskey nor seen enough money to make me take one.

And doesn't that sound a lot like I stood on the mountaintop?

I felt like a wind blew through me.

And so here Bill is.

He's sitting in towns.

He's just had this huge emotional experience.

You know, he's conscious of the presence of God.

He's wondering if he's crazy.

And his buddy brings a book, this varieties of religious experience, and goes,

here it is.

You've had this.

And he reads it and he goes, yeah.

And that's why this book was so important to Bill.

He used to say that what it did is it gave him the cash value.

And in this conversion section, the conversion are two lectures.

What James does is he talks about a lot of different types of conversion experiences

that people have, both gradual and sudden.

And here's a picture of the Water Street Mission.

And Hadley's there in the front with a stick and the big...

The big mustache. Some people can really grow mustaches, aren't they had joy?

Now, James gets tagged with this line, but it's a quote that he said,

that the only radical remedy for dipsomania is religomania.

Is it saying I've heard quoted from some medical man?

A lot of people say that that's a quote that James came out.

For those of you who don't know, one of the old terms for alcoholism was dipsomania,

where the little thing about...

for the older people to say, don't be a dip.

Well, that's from being a dipsomaniac, not from dancing poorly in Philadelphia.

So, twice-born.

Now, there are some wonderful other things, books that had to do with this concept of the twice-born.

And one of them is this book called Twice Born Men.

It's a clinic in regeneration, a footnote in narrative to Professor William James's

varieties of religious experience by Harold Begby.

And this is a wonderful book.

Begby wrote about the work of the Salvation Army in London.

And in it are nine personal stories, which when you read them, read very much like the ones that are in the back of our book.

They're, you know, what it used to be like, what happened and what they're like now.

And there's the puncher and there's the cop basher.

In I think the second edition, there's Annie the Cop Fighter, you know, of our book, Alcoholics Anonymous.

There's the criminal.

And then my personal favorite, OBD, old blind drunk.

And his story is just great.

So, and he talks about these people having contact with the Salvation Army,

having a conversion experience, and then, you know, going on with their lives.

Begby said on conversion, he says,

conversion is the only means by which a radically bad person can be changed into a radically good person.

Pretty close, huh?

Oh, I know. In Indianapolis, you guys aren't radically bad. Sorry.

Now, a few years later, Begby came in contact with the Oxford group,

and he got lit up by what went on, and he wrote a sequel called More Twice Born Men,

narratives of a recent movement in the spirit of personal religion.

And in the United States, this was introduced as the life changers.

Now, James and the varieties of religious experience, and so did Paul and so did Jesus.

They all said that you will know whether or not something is from God, or whatever you want to call it, by its fruits.

By its fruits, they will be known.

And in varieties of religious experience, James brings this home quite clearly that, you know, how do we know whether it's true, a true religious experience or not?

What happens out of it?

So let's talk about the experiences that some of these people from our history had.

Now, Frank Bukman, who in Life Changers is called The Life Changer,

he has this experience in the chapel at Kesek,

where he's convicted of his own sin of hating the people that he thought had wronged him.

And what were the results of this experience?

Well, he ends up doing some really wonderful work at Penn State University

and helping a lot of people to a spiritual experience,

coming up with a whole set of steps.

And then this morphs into what was called the first century Christian fellowship

that was an international movement of people that was trying to...

Trying to introduce this concept that if you've got a problem in your life, in your home, in your business, in anything, that if you clean yourself up spiritually, that all these other areas will clear up. But you've got to clean yourself up spiritually first. They also did a lot of work going around working with missionary communities.

telling folks that were working with others.

Again, trying to do the key person strategy.

How can they touch the most people?

Well, when they went to work with missionary communities,

they'd teach this to them so that hopefully the Christian message that they were able to transmit would have power to it.

This became the Oxford group, out of which Alcoholics Anonymous springs.

moral rearmament, which if you were here earlier today I spoke about and all the great international things that have happened out of that.

And now it's called initiatives of change.

So, I mean, out of the fruits of this one man's experience, how many millions of lives are touched?

William Gilliland.

Now, his experience was of the educational variety.

He's hanging out with Bookman.

They're talking about changing your life.

He's kind of going along with it.

It's okay.

He gets stuck in a place where he can't get a drink

and has an experience where he stops drinking.

But the reason that I put this as an educational is

is he has the ramping up to it and then bang it happens.

And, of course, he went all over the world as part of Bukman's team in different places

talking about what happened in his family and about what happened with his drinking problem.

And that's why Bukman and the Oxford group were not interested in Bill Wilson.

They had hundreds and hundreds of people who had quit doing drugs, doing liquor, smoking, doing strange sex.

They had people that had all kinds of problems solved.

Right.

So when Bill says, well, send me a drunk, they're going, well, we got people that have drinking problems, but they got lots of other problems besides just drinking.

But Bill was obsessed because his experience, he had the vision of each sufferer passing on to the next.

Fortunately for us, Sam Shoemaker backed that experience.

Now, oh, here's Shoemaker on Bookman, and this is in more twice-born men.

He's called, Sam is called the Virginian in that book.

They were all anonymous in the beginning.

They were anonymous.

The Oxford Group was probably anonymous, the first 15 years of any publicity about them.

Frank would only say, you can write about me, but you have to use FB.

Yeah.

And anyway, Sam's called the Virginian because that's where he was from.

And on Shoemaker, or Bookman on Shoemich.

Stop.

Breathe.

Shoemaker on Frank Bookman.

The truth is the man is a born mystic.

Get him alone and you'll realize this at once.

And you also realize the truth of what James says,

that we've got to accept the experience of the mystic as a valid experience.

F.B. made a tremendous impression on me.

His simple insistence on the power of sin to wall out any vital consciousness of God was irresistible.

He showed me quite mercilessly my spiritual impotence in the lives of other men.

This is a picture of Frank at Kuling, China.

This is the place. I actually have one of my treasures that I have the notes of Frank's talk that he gave at Kuling, and this is the talk that Sam Shoemaker was at. Sam was there. He was a...

From a well-to-do family in Virginia, he decided that he was going to go into the ministry because it was a good thing and it would be a wonderful thing to do.

And he went along and part of the deal was if you were going to be a man of the cloth, he had to go someplace.

And he ended up in China because Princeton University had a school in China.

And so he's got a men's Bible study.

And for the first time in his life, Sam is not being successful.

These guys just aren't getting it.

And he's having a real hard time with the language.

And he really doesn't like being in China.

He doesn't like the food.

The fact that God and pig are very similar sounding, it's very difficult.

And it's just awful.

So anyway, he'd started out.

He had about 50 guys in his class.

He's down to about 12.

And he goes and he hears Frank talk.

And he walks up to Frank afterward.

He says, that's wonderful.

He said, why don't you do this?

Why don't you come?

I got this one guy, back to the keyman strategy.

You got this one guy.

And if you didn't get through to him, I know that his change will produce results

and everybody will come back and will be successful and be a wonderful thing.

Help me out.

Would you please?

Frank Lick-Sidaman said, what's wrong with you?

That you cannot transmit a message of power.

Sam was just a little upset.

Yeah.

He left in a rage.

I mean, this guy's from Pennsylvania.

He's a Lutheran.

I mean, and he's telling me that I can't transmit a message of power.

What the heck's wrong with him?

And Sam could not get that out of his mind.

And all night he thought about it.

And he realized that he'd really probably only given about 65, maybe 70% of himself to God.

And he could see that other 30% really, really clearly.

And that night he got down on his knees and he said, you know, not in an emotional desperation,

but as a conscious act, I can't do it.

I need your help.

The next day he went and he told Frank exactly the experience that he had.

He and Frank walked and talked and he went back to his class the next day.

And, you know, Frank said, well, you got to go, you know, make restitution.

And so he gets up in front of this class of...

Chinese guy and he says, I'm really sorry. I've been talking a good game, but I've only been playing at about 70%. I've been talking down to you because I felt uncomfortable. Will you please forgive me and allow me to try and share all of myself? And the most amazing thing happened. These guys responded and the class grew. And out of that,

period of regeneration for the next almost 40 years, or 30 years, 31 years,

Sam and Frank went all over the world.

My friend Willard Hunter, who came into the Oxford Group in 1936, who's still alive,

said that they really needed both of each other quite badly,

and that it was a shame that they split in 1941.

A lot of people like to say that it had something to do with some...

that Sam wanted to be something in the hierarchy of the Episcopal Church.

But if you've ever been involved in a church, I mean, Sam had given all this time and energy to the Oxford group.

They had the church, Calvary Church, was the center of the Oxford Group movement in the United States,

the clearinghouse for all the literature.

And when the movement went from the Oxford group to moral rearmament from being a

thing of one informed Christian talking to the next, to an international movement of trying to work in the political arena,

Sam couldn't support that. He's busy running this place on other people's money.

So that's why there was this schism between them, but they were really close for about 34 years.

So I like to say that Sam had an educational variety.

Sam wrote a book later on called twice-born ministers, talking about exactly this experience

and other people that had the same type of experience.

He asked his friend Harold Begby if he could use the title, Twice Born Ministers.

And the quote that he's got on the front of this story,

is a quote from James, and it says,

the real deliverance, the twice-born folk, insist,

and must be one of universal application.

I've got to give it all, all of it.

So Sam wrote a lot of wonderful sermons, and they're collected in different books.

And the reason that I like to acquaint you with him more is to give you more of a feel about the Oxford group

and the spiritual experiences that came about in the group.

In confident faith, what Sam said is that the decision that we need to make, that religion is a risk.

Faith is not...

sight, it's a high gamble. There are only true alternatives here. God is or he isn't. You leap one way or the other.

Sound familiar? Again, as God, as you understand him. So they prayed together, opening their minds to as much of God as they understood, removing first the hindrance of self-will.

surrender as much of himself as he could to as much of Christ as he understood.

And again, in the beginning, we know only a little.

I mean, think about how much of yourself that you gave

the first time you made a surrender in Alcoholics Anonymous.

And think about how much more you know about yourself

and how much more you're able to give to your higher power now.

Action. I love this. This is from realizing religion, 1928.

Sam wrote, A moral experiment...

is worth ten times an intellectual investigation into apprehending spiritual truth.

Obedience is as much the organ of spiritual understanding as reason.

Don't drink.

He got to be obedient first before we didn't get much anyplace else.

So here are the types of conversion.

The sudden are...

S.H. Hadley, Frank Bookman, Bud Firestone, Charles Clap, Roland Hazard, Bill Wilson, Marty Mann.

The gradual are Sam Shoemaker, Harry Hadley, Ebby Thatcher, Bob Smith, and William Gilliland.

Now, interesting to me is that the fruits of the gradual being Sam Shoemaker...

touch all these other people that are on the,

or most of the other people that are on the left-hand side.

And the other thing that's really interesting is,

you know, here he is, he's the minister at this very well-known,

big, Episcopal Church in New York City.

So who's he end up touching?

A lot of very wealthy guys.

In a wonderful piece, which you'll find in A.A.grapvine.org.

Or in...

Best of the Grapevine, there's an article called The Spiritual Angle,

written in my 195 by Shoemaker, and then he's talking about the steps of the program.

And he says that when Bill comes to, we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

He says the basis of this belief is not theoretical.

It was evidential.

before us were people in whose lives the beginning of transformation had taken place.

You could question the interpretation of the experience, but you could not question the transformation

itself. We sit in the meetings and we hear all these people that are describing their personal

experiences, drinking and not drinking and all that stuff. And we may think, well, it's a little

squirrely the way they're putting that, but you can't.

they're not drinking.

Something's going on.

So here's Harry Hadley.

He had a sudden experience.

His father, S.H. Hadley, that was in the varieties of religious experience, had wanted his son's heated band in his family at a young age.

And there was nothing that he wanted more than for his son to get sober.

His son was a drunkard and a gambler and just a horrible rake.

And he wanted nothing to do with his old man.

But days after his father died, Harry had an experience.

And he quit drinking, and he took up the family business.

And he went around being a temperance preacher and did a lot of wonderful work.

And he was tired of being on the road, and he came back to New York.

And Sam Shoemaker was starting the Calvary Mission, and he said,

come on and join me.

And he had this amazing ministry at the Calvary Mission helping drunks off the street.

He worked with thousands of alcoholics, and he was especially close to Sebrough Graves,

Shep Cornell, Tex-Franisco, and Charles Clap, Jr.

All people who were sober in the Oxford group when a certain stock speculator,

he was not a broker, rolls in.

Bud Firestone.

Bud Firestone was a sudden experience.

He had it as a result of a conversation with Sam Shoemaker on a train from Denver.

Right.

He was an Oxford group member.

Another reason that he's special to us is that his family was very close to the rector at St. James Episcopal Church in Akron, Ohio, the Reverend Walter Tunks, the same guy that when the stock speculators is looking for somebody to call instead of going in to get a ginger ale and...

meet a woman who understands, he gets a hold of Walter Tunks.

Firestone also attended Oxford Group meetings with Henrietta Cyberling and Ann and Bob Smith.

And he was responsible. His change, his conversion experience was responsible for the Oxford group coming to Akron, getting things rolling there,

having an infrastructure of meeting set so that when Bill comes and he's thirsty,

he's got someplace to go.

He's got friends.

Pretty stunning.

This is another one.

Charles Clap Jr.

He wrote a couple of great books.

One's the big bender.

This is written again before Bill's written the big book.

And I love it because he talks about the Oxford group and drink it and go into meetings.

And he's...

He was a stockbroker.

That little illustration in the book is from the chapter,

gin and religion mixed.

Anyway, claps in a little bit of a jam.

His wife didn't really want to give him a divorce.

He's going to the meetings, but he's really not that interested.

So he decides to go and see Sam.

He has a personal interview with Sam.

Goes to Sam's office.

Here's a great picture of Sam in his office at Calvary Church.

It was really fun.

When I got this picture, it was the one there on the left, and I go, I know that guy.

And when I blew it up, sure enough, it's Bill Wilson.

It was a little picture of Bill that was in Sam's office.

So in it, during the whole time he's talking to Sam,

what Charlie Claps really thinking about is this date he's got with this dolly.

And so he finally gets himself out of there, and he says,

I departed Girlward.

Leaning back in the taxi, I lit a cigarette.

Pugh.

It's a wonder that I didn't make an ass out of myself and surrender my life for some full thing.

And then suddenly, the streetlights grew dim.

The most overwhelming, powerful feeling gripped me.

Something inside me said, you must surrender your life to me.

So it's really fun.

It's the flip of bills.

It's dark.

But yet the spirit's there.

Roland Hazard.

I like to say that Roland had the educational varieties hanging out with

with...

Carl Jung, he's tried all these different things, and he's drinking.

He had two profound changes.

He had two different experiences where he sobered up in the Oxford group.

But the one that I like to refer to is when he's on the train,

he's been drinking and going to meetings since he's gotten back from Paris,

and he's on the train, and he's reading Vic Kitchens' book, I was a pagan.