At a Big Book Study Weekend in Adelaide, Australia

Public service announcement

If you have cell phones, turn them so they don't ring and I'll tell you why. I'm not trying to tell you what to do. This is a public service now, so I'll tell you why we say that here because we know how God works. He's God sometimes gets out the Bozo the Clown knows and just screws with us and he's got a great sense of humor. If you leave your cell phone on, you can bet in the middle of the meeting it will go off. Everybody sitting around you will turn and stare at you. He'll spend the rest of the

day having conversations in your head with the people that stared at you. And why do you have your phone on? I know, I know. You secretly suspect that your ex is going to come to their senses in the middle of this meeting

and realize how wrong they were and call you. But it's not going to happen during the meeting. Trust me, it ain't going to happen. So you might as well just save your If you have, if you have some serious thing, somebody going into surgery or something, keep it on silent. Watch it. But

try to. They used to tell me when I was new. Try to keep your mind where your butt is. Right here.

So what this 4th step is, is is so simple in the book, but it's not simple into the in the book until after you do it.

It's one of the most misunderstood

steps in in the in Alcoholics Anonymous and I'm a literalist. I'm going to go through this exactly. It talks about in the book I don't have, I don't, you won't see me add stuff that's not there and you're not going to see me leave out stuff that's in there. We're going to go through it. I learned how to to help guys with the steps by sitting down with the book and literally just doing everything that it says to do.

And what's it start out? It starts out on page 64.

It says

we had to get down to causes and conditions. Therefore

we started upon a personal inventory. This was step 4A business which takes no regular inventory, usually goes broke. Now check these implications. This Bill's trying to paint a picture of what we're going to do here. He says taking a commercial inventory is a fact. Finding other words, you're going to find some facts about yourself. The implication is that maybe you didn't know and

a fact facing and you're going to face some things about yourself you never faced before

process. It's an effort to discover the truth about stock and trade. When I did the two previous fourth steps and I wrote my whole life story and everything I was ashamed of. I mean, I I shared some secrets with another person, but honest to God, there was nothing on there I didn't know.

I didn't find and face any facts about myself I didn't know. I didn't discover any truth. I shared some secrets with someone else. When I did the one out of the 12 steps and 12 traditions, same thing. It was, it was an interesting prospect,

but there was no new information. There was no as my sponsor talks about this being a disease of perception, there was no shift in my perception.

The the goal is I should come out of this thing different

and let's see what happens if we do this. You might. Some of you, if you've never done it out of the book, you're going to be amazed and some of you would have you have done it. Maybe you'll find little ways to make it more effective with the people you sponsor.

One object is disclosed, damaged or unsealable goods to get rid of them promptly and without regret. This is this is a process of getting rid of. This is not learning or getting knowledge about yourself. This is getting rid of crap. We we approach God. This is not by by self reduction and subtraction, not by acquisition. This is about getting rid of stuff.

I,

if the owner of a business is to be successfully, cannot fool himself about values. Oh, if you're like me, you're. I found I fooled myself about so much. I listened to all these little stories in my head about my life, and they weren't even true. These cases I'd build against people. So it says we do the exactly the same thing with our lives. We took stock honestly. First. We searched out the flaws in our makeup which caused our failure.

Being convinced that self manifested in various ways is what had defeated us. We considered its common manifestations.

The book said earlier in the chapter that the real root of the trouble was selfishness and self centeredness. So we're looking, we're going to start looking for the manifestations of the enemy of self, the thing that we're in the bondage of, that we're hostage to, to see where this stuff is, is defeated us.

So we considered its common manifestations. And here's the first one is resentment. The inventory is in three parts. Resentments, fears, and sex conduct.

And oddly enough, those three areas will crisscross across our entire lives and our entire being and our entire approach to the world. We will uncover, discover and discard all the calamity and the sources of it,

the pomp and the sources of it

and the things that we worship or became obsessed with.

We are going to, as my grand sponsor used to say, under this process of uncovering, discovering and discarding, we're removing the blockage between me and God and me and others and, and me and my ability to carry out the decision. In Step 3, resentment is the number one offender. I didn't know what resentment was. I thought it was anger because it kind of looks like anger but it's it's not really anger.

It comes from a Latin word, resent Tierre, meaning to resensitize, to re feel

to replay.

I don't know if you guys have I don't watch much. You guys have football and soccer here. I think it's a little different than we have it in the States, but it may be viewed on TV the same. Do you guys have the instant replays? Right, OK, we got that. And that's what a resentment is. A resentment is there's there's somebody is is smashed up pretty good and then they replay it with a commentary who just the commentator will tell you about what a real Oh, this. That must have really hurt,

you know, I mean, he'll, he'll say those things and he and what's it? You zoom the camera on the guys leg getting snapped

and you kind of fade out the other stuff till you just really get it right. Oh my God, look at that. Oh, and that's what a resentment is, is is we. I replay this stuff in my mind and but I replay it with the mind of a chronic alcoholic, a mind that is just is ego driven and self-serving and wants to be right and wants them to be wrong. So if you're like me, every time I replay it, I zoom the camera of my mind a little more on what

they did and I kind of shade out anything that I that's really not important. I know I did that. Let's look here, right here, right here.

Look what they did. Look what they did. My God.

And I'll replay it. And every time I replay it, I make them a little worse and me a little better and them a little worse and me a little better and told by the time most of us get the Alcoholics Anonymous, we're just, Oh my God. No ones ever done so much for so many, so often for so little.

We end up we end up feeling victims, right? And who's we're the victimizers?

So resentments the number one offender. And you know, when I was new, I wouldn't have thought that I I would have thought it should have been guilt or remorse because I was plagued with it. But in actuality, guilt and remorse just ends up being a little bit of, of, of the sphere inventory. Resentment really is the number one offender because and nothing will alter your perception and your relationship to life more than a resentment. Think about it,

if you're like me, from the moment you get a resentment, someone hurts you deeply

from the moment they hurt you, Did you ever notice how your shift, if this shift in your perception from that moment on, they can't do anything right, can they?

They can't. It's like what happened. It's they could. It's as if these are always all the time, 24/7 bad people now. Well, nobody's like that. I mean, we're silly in the way we in our perceptions. Kind of silly, isn't it? But yet from the moment you hurt me, you'll never do anything right again. I will only be able to observe what you do wrong, and I'll keep score.

Oh, I'll keep a little book and I'll just watch you. I'll watch it closely sometimes because I need, I need more evidence. I need more in the book here, right?

I'll just build these cases on you because I want to be right. And then maybe years later, what if maybe you get sober before I do and you come make an amends to me? Or maybe you do something nice and altruistic and giving. What's the ego say? Because don't trust them. They're just showing off because my ego wants to be right about you.

It doesn't care if I'm alone, if I'm miserable, it doesn't care. It just wants me to be. It wants to be right. I don't think my ego cares if it kills me as long as after I'm dead, everybody realizes how right I was.

And so resentment will alter my very perception of reality.

It keeps me hostage. It keeps me locked up in here. And everybody, everybody I've ever known, it's ever had a deep resentment. You're it, it owns you. It's got you right up in here grinding away with the the scenarios of I should say this to them and they'll say that and I'll say this and they'll say that it owns you. It's it's got you hostage,

so it is the number one offender. The book says it destroys more Alcoholics than anything else. Wow, really? More than alcohol?

I think so.

I think so.

I know that when Tim at 31 1/2 years of sobriety put the pistol to his head sober,

he had about he had about 10 years of dealt with resentments that he accumulated and he thought he was right about all of them.

When Ritchie with a little over 20 years killed himself, he never could, he never could or would work the steps. And he said I when he was 10 years sober, he went through a terrible breakup and his his wife wind up wind up going with some old timer in a A and he could not let go of it. He asked me to sponsor him. We got him right up to step four. And when he got to the part where it says, we look at these from an entirely different angle, he ain't coming.

He don't. He wants to be right.

He will not back off of it. And it killed him. He took his own life, a 20 year little over 20 years sober. He he could he just he grind away. People wouldn't have anything. By the time he killed himself, people wouldn't even have anything to do with him. They wouldn't even call on him on meetings because he's still talking about the crap from from years before.

They're tired of it. He's bad rapping people now that are very well respected in Alcoholics Anonymous.

Not perfect people, people that make mistakes, but he won't let go of it. It killed him,

destroys more Alcoholics than anything else from its stem. All forms of spiritual dis ease

for we've not only been mentally and physically I'll we have been spiritually sick in this next line, I think is one of the most beautiful and dynamic promises of Alcoholics Anonymous. When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically. You know, when I was in my, you know, by the time I was

24 years old, I felt like I was 80 years old.

I felt I was like dying

from this disease and I was sick all the time I could. I was weak all the time. I I couldn't even hold a job. I was so debilitated by my physical, emotional and spiritual condition. I was a mess. I the vitality, the physical vitality that has come to me as a result of working the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous is amazing. And the mental. I spent years with psychiatrists being diagnosed as all kinds of stuff.

I haven't. I'm alcohol. Alcoholics Anonymous has come true for me. When the spiritual malady is overcome, you will. You will. Everything that you couldn't do in therapy will happen for you

if you'll just do it.

If you just do it. It almost seems like how could this, how could this simple process do for me what these learned psychiatrists couldn't do And all those medications and all that therapy,

the proofs in the pudding.

I of the guys I sponsor, I bet you there's close to 20 of them that had been hostage of the mental health system for years.

Psychiatrists and therapists and medications and all kinds of in and out of mental hospitals and, and these are free men today. These are framing free men.

Unbelievable.

It's hard to believe when you don't really trust God. It's hard to believe God could do that for you, isn't it?

That he can.

Sometimes our God's not big enough.

Sometimes our fear is a lot bigger than our God.

So what do we do? OK, here's here's the nuts and bolts of it. The books asking us to do 6 things in the resentment section, 6 things first number one. It corresponds to the column number one on the on the left. On page 65 it says we listed people, institutions, or principles with whom we were angry. Can you see that in the book 4 lines up from the bottom on page 64 of those of you who are following it? First thing we do, we listed people, institutions or principles.

Now, in my experience over the years, 95 to 98% of its people,

but you might have some institutions. There's there's one institution in the, in the United States that comes up on almost every inventory and that's the IRS, the tax people, They come up on almost every single something. The police are there quite a bit I but often when you look more specifically, it really wasn't the police, it was that one cop.

The one cop would beat the crap out of me

and then we find out later why'd he beat the crap out of you. Well, I have this tendency to counsel policeman when I'm drunk.

They don't like that. So first thing I do is listed the people, institutions, or principles with whom I are angry #2 The second thing I ask myself why? And that's column #2 on page 65. Why? So I got who column #1, why column #2? And if you notice in Page 65, in column #2 very small

bullet points, not a lot of, not a lot of talk here, not a lot of verbiage. Because we're not, we do not want to go into building the case to make the person you're reading this to understand that this person deserved to be resented. You know, this is just the facts. Just the facts. Brief to the point.

2nd grade teacher. Why embarrass me in front of the class for not doing my homework? I don't have to go into the fact that she was a nun and her vow of chastity made her hate boys. And I don't have to get into all that. I don't have to tell you what she did to the other kids in the class that justify my hating her. I don't have to tell you about her bad attitude about the the sports team I really liked and all right,

how she disrespected people. I don't have to what's what actually happened. My ego got got you. I got humiliated because I was embarrassed in front of the class and I hated her. From that moment on, she couldn't do anything right.

The third thing, the third column talks, it has a little more verbiage to describe what we do in in calm #3 because this is where we're starting to look for the first time for the manifestations of self. And the, the way you can tell that is if you change the pronoun at the bottom of the page. Now this, the book was written in the third person because it's written written about a group of people called Alcoholics. But if you're going to personalize it, let's make it about us and see how it fits.

When the bottom of the page it says

we ask ourselves why we are angry. In most cases, it was found that my first person self esteem, my pocketbook, my ambitions, my personal relationships, including sex. And then here's some of the words that we're going to look at. We're hurt or threatened. So we were sore burned up on our grudge list. We set up opposite each name, our injuries. So, so far we got three. We got 3 words that are describing what we're looking for. We're looking

for what was hurt, we're looking for what was threatened and we're looking for our injuries or what was injured. And then it goes on with two more. It says was it our self esteem? Was it my security, Was it my ambitions? Which is a great way of saying get my way, me getting my way, my ambitions. Was it my way? Was it my personal or sex relationships which had been interfered with?

So we're looking for what was hurt, aspects of self that were hurt,

that were threatened, that were injured, that were interfered with. And then the top of the third column says affected

or what was affected. And

Bill, Bill has tremendous economy in his wordsmithing

and he doesn't waste words. And I, I, I've been, I've read everything I can get my hands on. Written by Bill Wilson, and he's a remarkable writer.

By a lot of standards in English literature is it would be they could easily critique him but he is he has economy of scale and when he mentioned something he mentions it for a reason. So when I ask myself

of these things that it lists

sex, relations, self esteem, ambitions, pride, security, etc etc, what was affected in some resentments? I don't, I don't get it. I'm affected. I don't know. I don't really see it.

And then I have to ask myself, well, OK, what was interfered with?

And that's still not really getting it either.

What was injured?

Getting closer

What was threatened?

You threatened my pride. You threatened my relationship here. You threatened my job

or maybe what was hurt?

Oh, you hurt my pride, you hurt my, my security and every word. It's like looking at something from different angles and you pick and then you finally, I use the one that goes, Oh, that's it was it was pride. Oh, it was self esteem. And a lot of a lot of the resentments, especially the long term ones, the deep ones, it's almost everything was hurt, threatened, affected, injured or interfered with.

So we got these three columns. OK,

this is not the end. This is just this. Is this a horrid format of victimization that we actually have to put on paper in order to do the real work of setting ourselves free, which occurs on the next two pages

And on the bottom of page 65, after making the list of the three columns, Who,

why, and what was affected, threatened, et cetera, it says we went back through our lives. Nothing counted but thoroughness and honesty

when we were finished the 1st 3 columns. When we were finished, we considered these three columns carefully. The first thing apparent was that this world and its people are often quite wrong. Very apparent to me.

Oh yeah,

they're really wrong, is it? Isn't that what we're doing here? The 1st 3 columns? Isn't it really a list of people that are wrong? People? That if there was any justice, they would owe you an amends, wouldn't they? They know the world in a man's probably. These are the out of line people. These are the stupid people. These are the wrong people.

Let's see.

To conclude that others were wrong was as far as most of us ever got.

Well, how'd that workout? Well, the book says the usual outcome was that people continued to wrong us and we stayed sore. So you can change towns. Do you ever notice? You ever change towns? And you're away from those assholes and their cousins show up in the new town. Oh my God, they're growing them out in the desert somewhere. They're the same people, different faces, same. It's the same conflict. Now here I am, angst up again, locked in that pissed off position

because when nothing changes in here, nothing changes out here. I will duplicate and replicate the same crap no matter where I go, because wherever I go, there I am. That's the problem.

I take me with me,

so can people continue to wrong me? And I stayed store. Sometimes it was remorse,

and it was remorse a lot for me.

I would attack. I would do all this stuff. I'd try to manage and arrange and then I just implode.

Sometimes it was remorse and then we were sword ourselves. But the more we fought and tried to have our own way, the worst matters. God, as in war, the only the victor only seemed to win are moments of triumph were short lived. Now the next two paragraphs, I'm not going to read them, but the book is is heavy-handed here. It's it's, there's seven death threats in the next two paragraphs.

I mean, it's brutal. It just

resentments lead to futility and unhappiness. They, they're fatal. They're infinitely grave. They shut us off from the sunlight of the spirit. The insanity of alcohol returns and we drink and we die. We die, we die. You know, they're poison. It's just like, okay, all right, stop it, I get it. They're fatal. All right, all right, all right,

I get it. And then it says something very, very important.

The second line in the second in the last full paragraph

says we're prepared to look at it from an entirely different angle,

and this is the introduction to a change of perception that the books going to facilitate in the next couple paragraphs.

But objectively, what would that look like

an entirely looking at them from an entirely different angle? Well, I think reasonably in order to see what 180° is from one point, I have to kind of see the point that I'm starting from in order to measure 100. And in order to see an entirely different angle, I have to kind of be very genuine about how I'm looking at this to begin with in order to see it from an entirely different angle.

So how are how are you looking at these resentments? Would it be fair to say that you're looking at them from the perspective

of a prosecuting attorney?

You got column one, you got the perpetrator

call #2 the heinous acts column #3 the damage that was done

when you got your cases built pretty good here. So if you got to look at this from an if we, if you got to be prepared to look at it from an entirely different angle, wouldn't that be to get up and cross the courtroom and sit down on the defense table and start pleading their case? Start looking at it through their eyes,

start seeing at the way they saw it, start having dialogue about what it looked like to them. Now,

I don't know anything about the particulars of your particular resentments, but I can bet one thing, I bet you that the person you hate, if they had a, if they were explaining what happened between you and them, their version of it would be different than yours. Now, the ego rears up automatically. Well, yeah, of course it was because they're stupid and my aversion is right. Well,

maybe, maybe not.

Are you prepared to look at this from an entirely different angle?

Do you want to be free

or do you want to be right?

It's your choice.

Every, every alcoholic says, well, I want to be both. Well, it doesn't work that way. I mean, you can't be both. You can't it. Wouldn't it be nice? It'd be great if I could be free and right. But I got a choice here. What do I want to be? What do I do? I value my Peace of Mind and my freedom more than I value this case. I build against these people.

Am I willing to entertain a possibility

that my perception might not have been right?

Is it possible?

Is it possible that my memory of what happened between me and them might be tainted a little bit by years of tweaking and and replaying?

You ever sat down with a sibling someone wrote raised in the same house you were in and talk about your childhood? I did that with my sister. I it drove me crazy. She kept saying things. I kept thinking, oh, it didn't happen like that. No, I almost said something to I was sober several years and she's telling stories about stuff in our child and I remember complete and I almost said something and I thought, I think this was God. The idea came to my mind. Well, Bob,

if one of the two perceptions here is wrong, what are the

with your track record, Bob,

what are the chances of being her?

And I tell you to this day, there's some things she thinks happened. We were kids. I don't remember. I remember completely different,

but I'm willing to consider that maybe she was right. I just had a thing happen to me not too long ago. I was in the middle of talking about a story of something that happened to me 35 years ago, over 35 years ago. And in the middle of the story, it was like this veil lifted and I I stopped. And I thought,

oh, that didn't even happen.

Oh my God, it didn't even I've been telling that story to make myself look good for over 35. It was like that didn't even happen. I've been I created that lie, that story. There's like a little tiny element of truth and then they build it up into this thing that made me look very tough and very cool and every

I didn't even happen.

It's amazing. Is it? And I told it so many times to you and told it to myself that I believed it. I believed it.

So we're prepared to look at these from an entirely different angle. We began to see that the world and its people really dominate us. In that state, the wrongdoings of others,

fancied

or real, had the power to actually kill.

Some Alcoholics die over imagined wrongs. I could take you to prisons in the United States where I've taken meetings and introduce you to people who are going to be there for the rest of their life because they killed someone based on something they thought the person did and found out later it was the wrong person that that person didn't even do that.

And they played the game of let's bet your life. The ego wants to be right so much, it doesn't care if it ruins you.

It wants to be right.

This idea that that

that my perception could be fancy, that my resentments in these cases I build against people could be partially fantasy is, is a hard thing to swallow if you've been entrenched in being right all your life.

I had something happen to me in my first couple years that really affected me. And I'll tell you this story and maybe you've had something happen to you like this. There was a guy named Billy Taylor.

Billy was one of the old timers in AA and he's a good guy. He still like to go out to coffee with newer people and talk about AA and coffee shops. I, I got a lot of my early AA and coffee shops and one night after a late night meeting, I was in this coffee shop with Billy. It's just him and I in this booth. A couple other guys had left and he's an easy guy to talk to. And because he was an easy guy to talk to, I found myself sharing a couple deep dark secrets with him though. You know those things. Did you come in that you're really, really ashamed of?

Want anybody to know the things you want to take to the grave kind of things? And I shared those things with Billy because he's easy to talk to. And he seemed to take it pretty well.

I got to tell you, though, he never said, yeah, me too. That would have helped. He never said that. And instead, instead, he gave me something I remember in the back of my mind felt a little bit like the a, a party line, like he said, well, I'm sure you're not the only one that's ever done that. And someday that might help somebody, you know, that kind of thing. But he didn't reject me. He took it well. He didn't need, you know, he didn't seem to have any disdain or

And I, I went home that night and I got my shift changed at work.

Well, all of a sudden, my whole meeting schedules upside down. And now I'm not going to late night meetings anymore. I'm going to noon meetings and I'm going to midnight meetings because I don't, I work, I'm working till midnight every night. So I go and we had these new 1215 meetings at night. I went to and so good part of the year went by and I didn't see this guy Billy for anywhere because I don't go where he goes anymore. And then I was working six days a week. I only had one night off. And on my one night off, I I went to a meeting I normally wouldn't go to and the meetings get ready to start

across the room. And Billy's there. And I was very delighted to see him as we all are with people in our early sobriety that it affected us. He was one of the guys, one of my go to guys. I said, hey, Billy, Billy, hey, how you doing? And he looked at me with this pained look on his face and he doesn't even say hi to me. He just turns away as if as if his whole demeanor and body language were saying,

oh, you

and just turned away. And he sat down

and

the meeting starts and I'm sitting there and I can't hear what's going on in the meeting because I'm having a conversation with him in my head

and I know what's going on. I know this guy's judging me for that crap.

And there's a part of me that doesn't blame him, really. I, you know, God knows I've surely judged myself harshly for that stuff all my life. And I, I guess I always secretly believe that if you knew those things about me that I know about me, you'd feel about me the way I feel about me. And that's not good.

And I thought that he was condemning me and judging me for that stuff. And I, I sat there and I was very hurt by it. And but I don't stay hurt. I get these, these hard wired defects or defense mechanisms that like anger. You hurt me. I just, I, I snap into anger and I start getting pissed. I'm sitting there building my case. I'm thinking that hypocritical phony

son of a, you know, saying it was alright, that crap.

And then I had this epiphany. It was like, wait a minute,

the reason he can't even look me in the eye and say, Oh my God, he's been telling people that crap.

And it became so clear to me. I had just asked a girl out to coffee and she would not go out to coffee with me and he's friends with her. I knew he told her that disgusting stuff. I'd told him Oh my God. And then that, now I think about it, his buddy who he runs around with, his been very distant to me.

Oh my God, he's he's been telling. And now I am so angst up by the end of the meeting, I'm going to go over and I'm going to beat the crap out of him and he's going to deserve every single bit of it. Because if he's doing that to me, he's probably doing it to other new people.

He's ruining Alcoholics Anonymous.

Somebody ought to beat the crap out of him. So I'm angst up and I'm ready to go and the they're getting to the end of the meeting and the chairman says, before we close, does anybody have a burning desire? And Billy raises his hand and he tells everybody in the room that the that the biopsy came back and the tumor is stage 4 and malignant and he has no very little time to live.

And I remember sitting there hearing that and it was like, it was like I came out of a Daydream. It was like

like somebody poured a bucket of water on me. I remember sinking down into my chair and just going, Oh my God,

what I saw in him that I thought was about me, wasn't about me on On the day he found out he was terminally ill,

he was so afraid, I'm sure as I would be. He didn't even see me. The pain in his face was the fear he was feeling. It had nothing to do with me.

I mean, Oh my God, I remember seeing. They're just feeling like soap. Oh

horrible. It's like a a postcard from God. Dear Bob, you don't know crap. Love God

right when it says in here that the wrongdoings of others fancy to real had the power to actually kill. Oh my God, what would have become of me if I would have attacked a man who did nothing but love me and try to help me on the lowest day of his life

and then found out later that I just what I did? How could I have ever come back to Alcoholics? I'm in rooms where he was so loved.

I would have been condemned. It would have been a mortal blow to my soul. I would have gone and drank myself to death.

I couldn't have faced it

and I would have died a horrible, horrible alcoholic death

over nothing,

over something that was imagined.

And if that was true for Billy Taylor, when I time I got to my resentment list, is it possible that this kind of situation could be true to some degree for some of these other people? Is it possible?

And the towards the bottom of the page, it says, what do we do? It says, how can we escape? We saw that these resentments must be mastered, but how we could not wish them away any more than alcohol. Before I ever did the 4th step. I'm helping a guy do the 4th step and we're going through every, every line of the book and we get in this guy's got a lot of resentments and they're killing him and we get to this line.

They have to be mastered, but how? You can't wish them away any more than alcohol. And this guy, Bills, looks at me and he goes,

my God, what do I do?

And Joe and Charlie never covered this. They never talked about it. They went right from the third column into the 4th column. They never talked about the stuff in between.

And I didn't know what to tell him. I didn't know. I I have nothing here. I don't know. How do you get free of this? I don't know. Just look for your part. I mean, that doesn't seem this is hardly enough. How do you get free of this stuff that's killing you, this cancer inside you that's eating your eating your heart out. How do you get free of it? And I don't know what to tell him. And I'm just looking down at the page and I swear to God that seemed like the next 4 words were in neon. And it says

I said to him, this was our course

as if I knew.

I don't know, I'm just I'm ad libbing here and reading. This was our course. And we started, I started to read the next two lines when we started to talk about them and the books asking me innermost self stuff. It's asking me to make a realization.

Encompasses a tremendous shift in perception and consciousness. It's asking me to realize that the people on my resentment list, that I have the cases built against, that these people who wronged me were perhaps spiritually sick. Well, that's easy enough. They're sick. They're assholes. I get it. Somebody should punish them, I understand. But it it's the next line that that, that that changed my world.

And the next line says, though

we do not like their symptoms. What symptoms column #2

if they weren't spiritually sick, if they were right with themselves and right with God, would they have done what they didn't? Column number two, they couldn't have. Oh my God, look at all the stuff I did that hurt people as a result of how sick I was.

So even though I did not like their symptoms, column #2 and the way these disturbed me. What's that about? Column #3 the pride, the self esteem, the pocketbook, the ambitions that even though I didn't like their symptoms and the way there's a symptoms, symptoms disturbing. And here's the kicker. I must realize that they, these people on my list,

like myself,

were sick too.

Well, what does that mean?

That means that I got to get off my high horse. I got to get off the Throne of Judgment and come down until I'm looking right across the table at these people eyeball to eyeball and understand the truth.

The truth is that if I was afraid like they were afraid, if I'd been raised like they were raised, if I'd been hurt and abused and scared like they were hurt and abused and scared, if I was drunk and frustrated and resentful the way they were, if I had everything going on within me that was going on within them, can I get it? That I could have easily been driven by the sickness inside me to do to someone else what they did

me.

Can I get that? Can I see that if I had the same stuff driving me insides insane that I could have done to someone else what they did to me? Or do I need to remain smugly superior?

And I started to see something that was remarkable to me. I started to see myself and the people that I built these cases against,

and it was a remarkable thing there. There was a movie years ago that when I saw it, I thought, Oh my God, that's exactly what's going on in the big book when it talks about this was our course and the movie was The Bucket List. And if you saw the Bucket List, it was a remarkable movie. There was a beautiful scene in there where now Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson have been both diagnosed as terminally ill with cancer and they're both being given this last ditch

effort of extreme chemotherapy,

hope just a shot in the dark trying to fix them. And they're not given the chemo on the same day. So what happens is the one guy is sick, sick, awful from the chemo. And the other guy's not doing so bad because he's been a couple days since he's had it. And then is the one guy gets over it. They give it to the other guy. And there's this one scene where the one guy's kind of recovered and bounced back a little bit. And he's not as sick from the chemo, but his roommate is in the grip of it and he's throwing up and he's cursing and he's just irritable.

He's like awful. He's really sick and driven by. And his roommate is not looking at him like he's out of line. He's not looking at him like he's

like an idiot. He's looking at him with love and compassion because he gets it. He sees past the symptoms of the chemo to what's really going on and how that guy feels because it was him three days before.

And So what the book's asking me to do here is to see past the facades. It's asking me to get people in a way I've never got them before. The the Buddhists bow to each other and they say something. They say namaste. Which one translation of that is, is that the God in me sees and recognizes the God in you?