The Metro Atlanta CA banquet in Atlanta, GA

God, please set aside what I think I know

about cocaine, about my addiction,

about these steps, about this book, about this conference, and especially about you, God, so that I may have an open mind and a new experience with all these things.

Hey, y'all, I'm Scott Jackson. I'm a recovered addict,

you know, You got to know if you're sitting here tonight, you got to know there's a a powerful God that we serve because you can't put this many dope beans in a room and get this much fried chicken eating at one time, Man,

we don't eat right.

Yeah, that's right. We good now. But but it took God for that to happen, right?

Yeah,

and that's what happens here. We get, we get hooked up in here, you know, we get hooked up with power as a result of what we do here. And that power enables us to create

this type of event, this type of fellowship and these type of friendships and this type of family. And it happens as a result of the complete surrender that happens in step one.

Everything will happen from that. Buster, I want to thank you so much for bringing me up here tonight. Give me an opportunity to talk. Tarik, Thank you for whatever parts you put into it. And thank you everybody for putting this thing on it, for being here. It's an honor to be here. Adam, I haven't spoken in about a year. I took a a year off from talking to do another body of work. And I just had a need to be silent. So this is my first time speaking since about this time last year. So we'll see what happens.

I come from

First, let me give you a disclaimer. I

this I'm going to tell you about my experience, all right? I got asked to come up here and talk. So I'm going to tell you about what I do a little bit about what happened to me. But what happened to me is what happened to you more than likely. So I don't got a whole lot to say about that,

but I'm gonna talk to you about what I do today and what my experience has been since I came into the rooms because it's the most important experience. The most important experience for me is what has happened as a result of me finding the God of my understanding and beginning to build and nurture that relationship in this body of work and this fellowship of people and doing this deal. So that's what I'm gonna talk about. If what I talk about causes you any offense or there's any resistance to it, or you don't like it, it's not personal.

I don't mean it in that way. Come here to share about what I do in here and how incredible my life has become

as a result of completely giving myself to this simple program.

OK, so I come from a lineage of guys and my sponsor today is a guy named Mike Dolphin. He's he's out on the West Coast now He just left Austin, TX and moved to Los Angeles and he's a member of CA and a, an incredible 1. My sponsor before him was a guy named Mark Houston who passed away in February of this year. God bless him and he was about 5 generations away from doctor Bob and a A and a bark was also a member of CA as well. So we had a, a pretty pure message that comes down to our,

through our family tree or through our sponsorship lineage. And we are guys who, so I think Buster used the word warrior a minute ago. That's, that's what we are because we're aware of what we've got. We're aware that we have an illness of the spirit that will manifest in various forms over time. And ultimately it's all about taking us back out there into that street to do a hit of cocaine. So we don't play around because we're real clear on what we got. We're real clear on where we came from and we're real clear on what we have to do to stay free of what's out there.

You know, it's interesting. I, I was driving up the street a minute ago and it came to me because I used to run right here on these streets, man, and run a lot for years. I was right here, you know, I turned this corner right here more times than I could count, with a pipe in my mouth, looking in my mirrors because I knew somebody was after me.

And this God that I serve got me stand up here tonight talking to you all about freedom.

Cool. Is that

it is cool, right? Yeah. So I was driving down the street a minute ago and I,

you know, I know we got some guys in here. Most of us in here have a good bit of us, and I know some of you have been in here for a while and have gone back out.

There's a reason that happens. I

and it's funny, I was driving up, you know, I can drive up and down pots now and I'm free and I used to not be, that's for sure. And I was a slave out here man, and I shouldn't be alive, you know, but I am. But I drove by the Ponce Hotel, some of y'all might know where it is about 5 blocks down the road. And it brought back a memory. And I'll tell y'all what happens to me

when I take a drink and then when I take a hit of cocaine, where I go and and what happens to me before that if I've made a decision to stop and to stay stopped, right?

I think back in 2002,

I came in and out over the years, I get 30 or 45 days, something like that. The internal condition will become so intolerable. You know? You know how it is when you come in here, man, and you're nude. You get about 10-15 days. You start feeling a little better. About 30 days, you're like, damn, I got this thing. Then all of a sudden, about 45 days, it's like a Mack truck runs into you,

you know, because the problem ain't the dope, right? The problem is the internal condition. The dope is the solution to the internal condition. So at about 4:45 days or so, what happens is inside of me, I get so jacked up that the only thing I can do and I have no choice in doing it is I go take another hit of dough, right? So I've got about that 38 days that time and I and I walked into AI, went to see a show downtown

and I was just nuts, man.

Coming here, I wouldn't get into the steps. I would just come to meetings. I would take no action whatsoever, right? And that's a recipe for a real addict to go back out the door, you know? Because sitting in these rooms, I will not get clean and sober through osmosis. If I'm the Real McCoy, I'm gonna have to take some action. So 38 days, I put myself in an environment that was not best for me. I walk up to a bar. I ordered 6 double shots of whiskey. I hammer those down. I wake up two days later in the Ponce Hotel

and I've done things to myself that

some of y'all know exactly what I've done to myself in that time, right? And I don't have any choice in it whatsoever. And let me tell you, when I came in to the rooms that time, I absolutely with all my heart wanted to be clean. So

but at 38 days, I couldn't hold it anymore, could not stand what was going on inside. So although I've made a firm decision with all of my mind and all of my heart to not do anymore dope

without a spiritual experience, I do more dope every time.

So I go back out. I stay out there for another nine months or so. And and then I came in here. And when I finally, when it happened on April 9th, 2003, the power of God separated me from a crack pipe, from a needle, and from a bottle of whiskey for the last time.

And I didn't choose it.

Real addicts don't choose to get clean, OK? Real addicts get beat down into a place of complete surrender. When that happens, the miracle of step one occurs, right? So I woke up that morning. A voice in my head said, there's a there's a meeting at 5:00. It was 523. A voice in my head said, there's a meeting at 6:00. I said shut up,

no one hear you

voice in my head said again. There's a meeting. Louder, right? 6:00

Next thing I knew I rolled out of bed and

next thing I know and I don't remember anything I pulled those more dirty clothes. I'll pull up in front of the meeting and I'm at a meeting. The next thing I know some guys giving me a white chip and and then the next thing I know is 6 days later I come to in a meeting. I don't remember any of that time. And there's a moment of clarity and says the the voice says again, This is the next thing I hear.

You have no idea how to live and you are going to die,

right? And I stood right up in the middle of that meeting and I walked over to a man and I said, will you please help me? I have no, I, I repeated what the voice said. I said I have no idea how to live and I'm going to die. And this guy said, yes, I will help you. And he grabbed ahold of me and some other guys grabbed ahold of me. And from that day to this day, I've been willing to do absolutely anything I have to do never to be back out there again right

Now, here's the interesting thing is that when that happens in us, when that

see the book says that

we had to admit to our innermost self complete defeat, right? The first step is nothing anybody can take for me. It's nothing you can talk me into because there's nothing you can scare me into with your war stories of how bad it was for you was for you out there. OK, because of what I've gone through out there is not bad enough for me to want to get sober than what you tell me about what you've done is definitely not bad enough for me to get sober. All right.

So it's going to have to happen on an internal level. And when it does,

it's like the heavens will open up for us, man. Because there's this thing in me that says I absolutely have to run every area of my life and absolutely have to run everything that I do, right? I've got everything under control, no matter how crazy it might look. And I've got this whole drug usage thing down too. I'm going to figure it out. I'm going to beat it. I'm going to get it one day. I'm going to turn it all around, right? Who's had those thoughts, right? You don't burn everything you got to the ground. You don't got rabbit ears hanging out of your pockets. You

nothing left, man. But one day I'm gonna turn it around.

I mean, and that's where we get. So there has to be that surrender inside. And when that happened, I became willing to do whatever I'd have to do. No,

the reason that that people like us who have that experience, who get connected, because that's a step one experience, understand that's when it happens, right? And the reason that people like us go back out and use dope again is the one of two reasons. Either we're never connected to step one,

or we lose our connection to step one.

The way I live my life today will look

what my connection to step one looks like, right?

So if I'm connected to the fact that I'm going to drink whiskey and do dope no matter what, and I never have had, never have, nor will I ever have the power to choose not to drink or do dope again. OK, If I'm connected to that, then I'm always going to be remain willing to do everything I have to do in here to stay free from that because I've never given choice. See, there's people in here that say I woke up today and I chose not to do dough.

I say, well, good for you

because you're not. You're not of my ilk. If you can wake up today and choose not to do dope, then you don't need God, You don't need this power. You don't need these steps because we're told clearly that we never, ever recover control. It does not happen. We have lost the ability to control and enjoy our using

whoever controlled using crack in the 1st place right?

Some control crack smoking.

It's funny,

but I,

you know, and I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what what I do. I go back through the work. I'm fortunately I got lined up

at about 2 1/2 years clean. Man I was crazy as a bed bug. I was sitting on unfinished amens

and I wasn't nearly out in a hurry to do them right because I'd lost some connection to step one. Because nine steps about first step, and so is everything else.

But I went pretty nuts in the rooms and my life was

just a disaster. And in that surrender of that current disaster, what happened was I was led to

a guy down in Forest Park who ultimately led me to to Mark Houston, who was out in Texas. And and what Mark taught me was that

for him, and it ended up being paralleling for me, is that one time through the work, going through one through 9 once and living in 1011 to 12, the rest of my life was going to be inadequate for a guy like me. Because see that surrender that happens at step one, that place where the ego is absolutely deflated,

that goes away, right? We start to get our money back, we start to get a girl, we get a girl back or a guy back. We get all the stuff back. And then the desperation that showed up when we lost all the stuff is not there anymore. And what we call that is resurgence of the ego, resurgence of the thing that is going to separate me from God long enough to get me to put another pipe in my mouth or a needle in my vein.

And trust me, man, it's always knocking, right?

It's always knocking

and it will look, I'll be able to see if it's knocking based on the way my life looks, right? So, and I'll get to that. So what happened was I was taught how to go back into the work at a distance away from my last drink and hit a dope and actually have a current step, a current experience with step one and that current experience with step one will thrust me into Step 2 and so on and so forth. See the steps are designed and and remember they're divinely inspired. So they're divinely designed to

trust me into the next step

I don't have. If I'm balking out of step and it's because something's missing in the step that I've just done some work in.

And that's a fact, man. I've got enough experience doing this work to know that when I'm balking at step four, my decision in three ain't firm, right?

So, and that's just the way it is. So we go, me and the guys I work with, all the people I work with, and I'm blessed to work with a lot of people, man. It's a it's a good life.

We go back through the work over and over again. We commit to this body of work a minimum of once a year

and we'll start back in step one and we'll go all the way through and understand the reason we do it. We don't do it because California is not a self help program,

right? This is not about getting all my stuff back.

That's one of the benefits. This is about God and this is about me getting a relationship with God because I'm powerless over cocaine

and my life has become unmanageable, so I need to get some power in my life. So cocaine's gone and I need to get some manageability in my life, and it's going to take God to do that because I can't manage it for a shit on my own power.

So we get connected back to the truth in the first half of step one, which is that I'm powerless over cocaine. And we do that by looking.

You know, there's 53 pages in the big book that tell us about step one, right? You got 100 pages where the whole thing happens. Well, 53 of them are devoted to the first step. So that tells us something about the seriousness of the step.

So the hyphen and my life have become unmanageable. That tells me second thoughts. So what we really look at, once we get

past getting connected to the powerlessness over cocaine again, which we do, what we look at then is is page 52. It says my says I'm having trouble in personal relationships. I'm afraid of misery and depression. I can't seem to be of real help to other people. I have feelings of uselessness. I'm unhappy. I'm full of fear. See, there's some of us in here right now. I bet that I've been here for a while, that I've got some of those things going on in their life

right now. That if if that's now, if you knew you definitely got some of that going on in your life and that's OK.

We got a solution for that. But if you've been here for a while and you've done a body of work and maybe you don't get all your night stepping men's finished and maybe you're not working with 10 and 11. Maybe you're not really in the game. You're just going to meetings. If you're a real addict, more than likely you got some of that stuff on page 52 showing up. Now I understand that's when I talked about cocaine knocking. That's what's knocking. When that stuff showing up, it's knocking, right?

Because this deal in me is going to do everything it can to separate me from you,

from myself, and from God long enough so that it gets another hit of dope.

And it's going to do it in whatever way it wants, right? Maybe look at the stories in the Big Book. We got a couple of them. One guy goes because he's pissed off because somebody owns his old business and he's mad because the boss jumped his ass about something. So it goes out, Jim, you know the story about Jim, the Big Book. So he's got a resentment, he's mad, and he goes out and drink some whiskey, right? Then Fred, that's the end of a perfect day, not a cloud on the horizon. And Fred drinks whiskey too, right? And both of them know they're going to the asylum if they drink whiskey. So

that's how hopeless we are because we all got that going on. So when this stuff's happening on page 52,

that's what that's about.

Now I and when I come through this work, I look at that, I ask those questions. Am I having trouble in personal relationships? How does my work life look? You know, how does my relationship look? How do my friendships look? How do people I sponsor look? How's relationship my mom and dad look? You know, how does this stuff look? Am I trying to manage these people? Am I fighting with these people? Am I arguing with these people?

Right? Because that's troubling personal relationships.

And here's the deal. If my relationship with God is right, which is internal, everything out here will be fine.

If everything, if I got a bunch of drama going on out here, then my relationship in here is tainted. That's a fact, because what's going on out here is a reflection of my connection to Spirit.

It's just a fact.

Now remember, the spiritual malady is not specific, just the alkies and addicts. Spirituality exists in all kinds of human beings. Fact is, our shit manifest in a way that kills us. Graveyard Dead. Dead is that delicious fried chicken we just ate, so we got to get some power

so we don't end up like that, right?

Thank God we know what the problem is,

right?

So when I see all that stuff there on the page, man, it thrust me immediately into something wrong with what's going on with my relation with God. That's obvious. I'm moving to the second step and I and when I move into the second step, we go back into it and we dig. We look at what Step 2 looks like, you know, come to believe I come from step one into Step 2, right?

And I will see if I've got all this unmanageability, why is it

that I've got, why is what's wrong with my relationship with God? What is it that I'm really thinking about God

that would show up in my life and all this unmanageability,

right? Because unmanageability in my life is about self-reliance. If I'm God, reliance and manageability goes away. So it's about myself reliance. It's really that simple.

So when I look at Step 2, I'll work on

the idea that possibly my old conception of God is not working for me. Maybe we need to change this conception to God a little bit. Maybe I need to expand how I feel and view my my God right?

And I'll do that in in direct correlation to what shows up in my unmanageability. But here's,

you know, we all part of getting sober party and clean is is it's a process. We we trade the dove. See, the first thing that sobriety is a never ending series of surrenders, right? The first surrender of which is the surrender to the cocaine and surrender to the whiskey or whatever it is. Then it's going to be maybe some money or maybe it's going to be to my physical health.

To the insanity of relationships or sex or both.

You know, all kinds of stuff shows up. Gambling, there's all kind of other stuff that pops up for us, right?

And that's OK. And if that's your case, if that's your truth and you write at home, you're in the right place because we got a lot of that. It's not to be judged. We just observe it. But there's going to be more and more surrenders that come and and without those surrenders, they're going to be the thing that'll take me back to ahead of dope. Because once I get it in me, I bet I see the book says selfishness, self centeredness. That's a good of my troubles. It also says that selfishness will kill me and I must be rid of the selfishness and I cannot do it without God's help. It doesn't say just that cocaine's going to kill me. It says selfishness is going to kill me and that's going to show up in all

waves, right?

A lot of us about the way we just, we treat our body.

Here's what it says. So when I'm looking out here and all these other things for God, it'll never be there because here's where God is. So actually we're fooling ourselves. For deep down in every man, woman and child is the fundamental idea of God. It may be obscured by calamity, by pomp, by worship of other things. See calamity, pomp and worship of other things. You ever ask yourself that question? What do I worship

doing an exercise? So what things do I worship today? Do I worship her?

Don't worship him, you know. Don't worship the money, worship the job.

Worship the blame,

you know, I'm saying it's all kind of stuff. We might be worship

so that will obscure our connection to God, because faith in a power greater than ourselves and miraculous demonstrations of that power and human lives of facts as old as man himself. We finally saw that faith in some kind of God was a part of our makeup

just as much as the feeling we have for a friend.

Sometimes we had to search fearlessly, but He was there.

He was as much a fact as we were. We found the great reality that's capitalized. We found God,

the great reality deep down within us in the last analysis. In the last analysis. It is only there that he may be found. It is so with us. See, that's talking about step one, right? Step ones, last analysis, step ones. When everything else is done and I got no more power. Only in that place will a real addict turn to power, which is inside. And that's the key. And if you can't stay sober, you can't stay clean,

then soap does not happen in there. That will turn you into that power. There's something

that's not occurring to create that last analysis. You know, maybe we're relying on too many things out here to give us what only that which is in here can give us.

Second step will of course lead me into third step. Now, third step is a great thing because I,

because it says I make a decision here, right? We make a decision. It says here, I'm here after this drama of life, God is going to be the director. Because we just realized that I've been the director all my life and it's failed miserably. It's failed drunk or sober, right? It's failed in everything that I do. So I make a decision, right? But here after, God's going to be my director again, right?

And then I affirmed that decision with a prayer, and I used the third step prayer again from the book. And it's an affirmation of my decision that God is going to be the director. He's going to be the father, I'm going to be the child, He's going to be the principal, and I'm going to be the agent. And I love being known. I love knowing, don't you love knowing you're an agent for God, one empowered to do the work of God. That's what happens here, right?

We can empower to do work.

What will we empower to do before

now? Here's the deal.

Something happens,

you know, I, I fell victim to a belief that

I would be OK in one through 9 once and that I could live strongly enough in 1011 and 12, right? And and it didn't work out because somehow I miss little resentments get by me, little stuff gets by me right throughout the course of a day. And they start building on some level that I can't see inside. So when I commit back to this work, when I come out of that third step and I go into my 4th step again,

I'll start writing and all of a sudden all these names come off the paper, right?

And the book says it resentments and I'm going offender has it. It kills more of us than anything else. So and it doesn't say what degree of resentment does. It just says that resentment does

right. So, and when I showed get up to the piece of paper and I got a whole bunch of resentments, you understand that all of that stuff is in the way of the thing that I need to absolutely maintain sobriety, the thing that I need to maintain freedom. And it's impossible for me to fix that with my mind, you know, and the crafty ego which has rebuilt itself will tell me, no, that ain't a resentment, man. That guy's just an asshole. It's all right,

you know, that's probably a resentment.

Put it the paper and see what happens.

Now here's what four step I've I've just I'm in night current night step amends in my 8th body of work. So I've been eight bodies of work, and that's almost as many years. And

my 4th one, I did my first extended third column.

Now what that means is we, we before that I didn't really know what was going on in resentment. And I in my four step inventory with resentments. And I can say that because I, I had such an incredible contrast between doing checklist style inventories to actually do an extended written third column. See it, it opened my eyes, right? It says the world and its people really dominated me,

right? Write an extended third column, man, and be like, damn, they really dominate me. You know,

I base everything and how I view myself, how you're supposed to view me, the ambitions of what I need and everything we do, the security I need and everything that we do, right? That stuff shows up when I write the extended third column. What comes out is ugly, but that's good because that's going to carry me on the freedom. And until I started to see that, I had no idea what was really going on. I thought that the 4th step was about the 4th column.

I thought the 4th step was about the harm I have caused. The reason I'm causing harm in the fourth column is because I'm so asleep that you're, you're affecting all these areas of self so greatly in me, right? That's third column. So I'm constantly and This is why, because I think that I'm God and it shows up in my actions. I think that everybody's supposed to do what I think they're supposed to do. I think they're supposed to act in a A and CA the way that I say is best. I think my girlfriend's supposed to do what I think is best. I think my boss and my coworkers are supposed to do what I think's best

and you know and won't. None of them do it

and it pisses me off, right?

Yeah. If everybody would just act right, everything would be perfect, right?

You know, traffic. I had a mad traffic man in in a couple of years. Used to have to watch out. I will shoot you in some traffic, man. I was crazy. Now that's sober, all right.

Yeah. Yeah. So

we really see the truth of what's going on in the fourth step. And

there's still

that actually dissolves a lot of stuff when I see that truth, you know, and column three, because here's the key.

If all of my troubles are of my own making, which they are, you're never my trouble. You know, you're not my trouble. No ones my trouble. All my troubles are my own design, right? Every one of them. So

if all my troubles are of my own making, what shows up in column two and the 4th step has to be a lie. So column three and column four are going to have to turn the cause of the resentment into a lie. And I'm able to see that when I write this word every year I see more and more of it. Right now I don't use much treatment center jargons. It's not really my thing. But there is that expression peeling back layers of the onion and and it fits well if you continue to do this work, because we will continue to peel back more and more stuff.

The ego becomes crafty because it doesn't want to die. So the way that it tries to run the show will become more subtle and nice. All right. The way that I try to get you to do what I need you to do will become

slick,

right? Yeah. And the longer we're here, the more dangerous it gets, man. That's the deal. That's the deal.

So

of course I'm moving the 5th step in now. We read most of the time and the guys in my lineage, we read the multiple people in the lineage book says person or persons to hear the 5th step. So we tend to share it around with a bunch of guys that were close to them. We don't post it on, on Facebook or nothing, but we, we, we, we share it around with guys that we trust because you know what happens, you know, sponsors die, sponsors get drunk, sponsors move away. You know, it's good to have a multitude of people in your network to know your truth

because then people can hold you accountable too. And we need some accountability

and it's good to have guys close to us to do that. I'm fortunate enough to have a good crew over

not a six step.

And my current experience with six steps been wonderful. The past few have been wonderful. But in the beginning what happens is I just, I make a list now that the defects are showing up, that they show up in my inventory, right? They're there, they show up in my fifth step and there's a lot of them. But the key is before we really move on to 7th step is we must be ready to have that stuff removed. And I tell you from my experience, if I'm not ready to have lust removed,

I'm not ready to have gluttony removed, I'm not ready to have these things removed,

I will skip over that step and I'll say, Oh, yeah, I'm ready.

Give me that pie, you know, Right. 1:00 in the morning. Yeah. Give me two more chicken layers, Right. Yeah,

yeah. So The thing is now here's the key, man. Step 6 is about, is really about becoming entirely ready to have God remove these defects of character. So I sit with step 6 and I pray for willingness if I'm not willing until it comes. And that could be an arduous process,

but I do it because my life depends on it and I sit with it until it comes. And my buddy Carl over here has got a great experience, man. He, he shares with me, I mean, body work he went through when it came, it hit him like a ton of bricks. He fell to his knees and he prayed A7 step. That's when you know you got a six step. When you feel it, man, it will fill you up, right?

Seven step by humbly from my knees, ask God to remove these defects of character. And now and then I'll let it go because I don't know what God is going to take from me instead of seven steps. And if I have the belief system that God is going to remove all of it, I'm probably going to be pissed off of God pretty shortly thereafter. But it probably ain't going to go away. Not all of it. Because the cool part about it is, is that only that which gave me myself will can remove myself, will from me, which is God. And God might need me to hang on to some of it because I need some stuff. There's stuff I need to learn or maybe people I need to teach.

So when I do a seven step, I know that my heart's in it completely. And then I move on

and whatever goes away, it goes away and that's awesome. Whatever stays is not as awesome, but it's OK.

Was this going to show up again? Right. We're going to do some more work on it,

the eight step

and man, it's a trip. I come through this thing and

let me back up the force there. I was talking to Guy recently.

You know, in case y'all don't know, there's a 2 pages in the book to talk about the sex inventory. But most of the people I know in California and a A don't have anything to do with those two pages because nobody wants to have to actually straighten that shit up in sex. It seems like, you know, sex and checks is where the problems are, right? So

I was talking to a guy the other day, 25 years sober and he's a big name in the in the recovery community around here. And I said, have you ever written a sex inventory from page 69 and done a sane sound ideal from page 69?

He could hear a PIN drop over the phone. Right.

Nope. Damn,

you know, that's a trip, man. I mean, it's right there. There are nine questions right there that are crystal clear that show us how to inventory our sexual relationships. Are he and she. And you can do it in any relationship and do it with your kids and do it with your mom and your daddy. Do any of it that that those nine questions are incredible. And I tell you, if you really do it, take your heart into that piece of work. What will come out of it is amazing.

And then and the reason if we still got a bunch of drama in our relationships while sober. And trust me, I have a profound amount of experience with drama in relationships while sober, so I know what I'm talking about.

It's because of myself, reliance, and my inability to really ask God to help me live up to the ideal that I create in the fourth trip. OK, so there comes another one of those surrenders, right? Then I finally go, all right, you got it, I'm done, you can have it. What do I have to do to live up to this ideal? Because it's been created out of this inventory.

I just want to touch base on that. It's phenomenal how many people in here

don't do it. Just do not do it.

You know, it's a trip. And the truth is nothing counts when it's in the beginning of the fourth day. It says nothing counts but completeness or thoroughness and honesty, right? And we'll just skip right over that.

Never mind not throwing us in honesty. I got this sex thing had

remember cocaine is knocking. It's going to knock with that too. Going to knock. The selfishness kills me. So

nine step and I tell you, man, it's humbling going out here with some time sober and having to go make amends for causing people harm. When I've been here a while, I'm in the game, I'm doing the work, and I'm still harming people because I'm still in little areas of my life, on the line, on myself, and I'm trying to run the show.

But the miracle is, is that if I'm completely committed to this thing and to this game, God will take care of me through all of it. He will let me act a fool.

He has. I know y'all find it hard to believe anywhere

he will take care of me through anything right? I tell you man, I've done.

I really don't understand or comprehend this power because I've done just about everything in sobriety that will get most people drunk and high as hell. I think

that ain't no joke man. I need to do the work a lot, trust me,

because I was a really bad guy before I got here,

so I have to do the work a lot to get hooked up with what I need. But somehow, man, that that complete surrender that happened keeps me in the game, right?

You know, that first third step, evidently there was enough power in it to keep me connected at times, even if it's just been by hangnail. I've been here. But everybody ain't that fortunate, man. A lot. I've buried a lot of people I don't know. I mean, who all here buried somebody since I've been here?

Look at that.

That's a lot of dead people, man,

You know, from this thing

and everyone of them. People at one time probably thought, Yep, I've had enough. I'm not going to do this anymore, right?

They still did.

So

now here's here's the deal. The ten step

Mark used to say to me, he said, Scott, the 10th step is an abyss. It has it is a limitless place to be. And it says it has no ceiling, no floor, no walls, right? The 10th step is an abyss. So and I say, OK, sure, Mark, whatever you say. And because I have no idea what the hell he was talking about really, because it's all those things you got to have experience with, right? I've got to have some experience with that. But now the 10th step is a is a way for me to live recovery when I'm up and walking around. It's a way that I walk out of my door in the morning

and I actually am going to live this thing in my life. I'm going to watch for resentment, selfishness, dishonesty and fear, right? When they're going to crop up, Because when these crop up and they're going to crop up, right, they're going to, I'm going to ask God to help me remove them.

We'll make amends. If I've caused harm, I'm gonna talk to somebody. If I need to write, I'm gonna turn and help somebody or at least turn out of myself into something else. Now, the reason that's an abyss is because the 10th step is about them now. It's about present moment awareness. It's about being right here, right now in my body, not in next week, not in last month, about being right here, right? And that is where God is. Remember, our book says you must find God now, because that's the only place God is is right now.