The Far Corners retreat in Ellenton, FL

Before I get started, I got two things I want to talk about, but I want to get them on the tape there. One of them is

at

215 after the group picture

we're going to play in here. It's optional. You don't have to attend.

But if you've never seen Chuck Chamberlain

given a talk, we have a DVD of him, very poor quality and he's giving a talk to college students. So it's not an A, a talk, but he's talking about spirituality and you'll recognize

Chuck. And so it's a chance to experience his presence for those of you that came in after he passed away or never got a chance to go out to California,

and we'll play it right here. I think it's about 45 minutes, but just to get 20 minutes of seeing him will put

a person connected with the new pair of glasses. So that'll be available then. The other thing is I wanted to talk about this book that's back in the back. This one would be very attractive to any AA history buffs

of which I'm one.

And if you study a A history, including the trivia,

there's a name that if you're at the AAA conferences and that you know, they have the trivia quizzes and they'll say, what did James Newton contribute to A A and that's the name is James Newton. And most people haven't got a clue 'cause he wasn't an A A member. And it turns out that he was Thomas Edison's right hand man down in Fort Myer

and a real estate developer in the 20's

and into the early 30s. Even in the Depression he was making money

and Harvey Firestone was, you know, Ford and Firestone and Edison were all very close. And Firestone came down to visit Edison. And while they were talking he said, I need a right hand man out in Akron, somebody that can really help run my company. And Edison said here's your man right here. So they talked and he thought he was really cool, so he took him out.

Now, Newton had been a member of the Oxford Group for a few years

and was totally carried away with the power,

his spiritual power, of the Oxford meetings. And when he got to Akron, it didn't take him long to realize that one of Harvey Firestone's son was a raging alcoholic.

So he took it upon himself to take him to an Oxford weekend in connection with a business trip. And the sun was so taken with the whole weekend that he had a spiritual experience and never drank again. Well, when he came back and was sober, his father is going well, how did what happened? And he explained that he went out and went to an Oxford thing. And he said, well, what's Oxford Movement?

So he told him and he said, so we have to have that in Akron.

And he personally called up Frank Buckman. And Buckman brought all his heavy hitters to Akron, where the newspapers covered this thing like it was a presidential visit.

And because of the wide publicity, Doctor Bob and Smith, Henrietta Cyberling and a whole bunch of others found their way to the Oxford Group, laying the foundation for Bill Wilson to come out and make the connection.

And some about 10 months ago, somebody mentioned to me, hey, did you ever read the book by James Newton?

And that's what Uncommon Friends is. This is James Newton's account of his incredibly close relationship with Edison, Firestone, Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Nobel Peace Prize doctor from France named Carell. He's one of these guys that when he meets somebody like that, they immediately make him their best friend.

And so he is like on the inside of these people

sharing his recollections of what it's what these people would really like. And there's a whole bunch about AA in there from his point of view. And if you like history, this is a lot of fun and it really gives you some insights. I kind of changed my mind about Lindbergh. I decided I'd like him, after all,

I had kind of pre prejudged him when he didn't go along with Roosevelt

on the war.

So anyway, that's it and we'll move into one of the more fascinating topics that we have this weekend

and you see on your schedule.

What does this say exactly? Practicing the presence of the Now,

now in AAA, we recognize how important it is to not be consumed by the past and the future.

And so we talk a lot about a day at a time. That's a very common thing. You got a sales meeting next week. Well, don't think about it today. Just just Live Today, today and, and what you give that advice to everyone and we talk to each other about it.

But

that still allows room to spend the morning worrying about the afternoon

and the afternoon regretting the morning.

So we took a monstrous step in the right direction by eliminating the last 10 years in addition to the morning and eliminating the next 10 years to worry about and bring you down to just this afternoon.

But it's still a heavy load to carry.

Why? Why do we, why don't we narrow it down all the way to the present moment? And I think everybody, I, I heard that and I said, right,

right.

And then the question comes, well, what is the present moment?

And how in God's name could you give a talk

for an hour and 15 minutes

on the present moment?

So. So if you were caught unprepared, you'd come up and you'd go, you know, right now.

You know what I'm talking about in the present right now.

And then your talk would be over,

am I right? I mean, so keep going. Let's draw it out a little more, you know, like now, now, now, now.

So it it's not an easy subject.

So I made-up some stories and

some ways of looking at it,

and I actually made cards because

I want to make sure it comes out right. And I started out with

the ABC's at the end of chapter 5 or the end of what we read in chapter 5, the third one. God couldn't would if he were sought. And we all know that line. God couldn't would if he were thought.

And we talked a lot about seeking here, becoming a seeker.

And so if we were going to seek God,

where do you go to find him?

You know, what? Do you go down by the water? Do you go in your bedroom? Do you go over there? Do you go over there

and there is a place where people throughout the ages have gone in order to find

their higher power? And I wrote a little my thoughts on where this place is. And it goes like this. I dream of a place where all dreams end. A place where love, truth, and light were born.

A place known as out of our literature, the land of the ages, God's Kingdom, the ultimate reality, or the world of the Spirit. A place far away from us in distance and time. A place called right here, right now.

I dream of someday awakening and returning to my land of origin. A land known as the Now. The eternal present moment, God's only home.

So that kind of narrows it down that if you're not in the present moment, you're never going to find God. You're just not going to find many place else if you are not there, the contact won't be made

now. Religion and science have both addressed the past and the future

in great detail. I mean, science can take you back to, I think it's about

two millionth of a second after The Big Bang and take us all the way up through 11 billion years and tell us everything and what is going to happen and all these projections. But there's very little written about the present moment.

It's almost like it doesn't exist.

We're not going to study that because it doesn't really fit in.

And the same thing with a lot of religions. They talk about

the origin

of

divinity

and what happened and what was taught, and they talk about what's going to happen a lot about the future. And somewhere off in the future this entire contact will be made and there's all of these things. And once again, there isn't a tremendous focus on the present moment.

Matter of fact, there's a lot of emphasis on the good that's going to happen to you. If you continue to pray, if you continue to do this, something wonderful will happen, will happen.

And

as a result of that, we spend a lot of time anticipating

those things that will make us happy.

And we can hardly wait

to get there. And I think we're, you know, when we're little, we go, oh boy, oh boy. Pretty soon I'll be in school like my grown up sister, and then that'll be a good deal. And then we go there to go, this isn't a good deal. How the hell did I want this for?

But when I get out of grammar school, look at those high school kids, they got cars. But when I get there, and then we get there and we're the bottom of the heap again, we don't know what's going on. But when I get in college, I mean, you know the whole thing. And then I get out of college, I'll have a degree, man, I'm being important. And you start the bottom of the workplace. And but when I get promoted. But if I get her job, boy, if I could ever get this girl to marry me, boy, if I could get this, if I could get that, if I could get that.

And so there's a tendency to be just out of reach all the time

were just about

and one thing that put us in the now was alcohol.

We really discovered the present moment The 2nd we drank. I got about 3 drinks down. I wasn't thinking about how good things could get.

I was thinking about how good things are right now.

It was wonderful. It was,

yeah. I just sat there. Didn't want it to end. People would be going home to their wives. No, no, no. Don't end this. Don't end this moment. So we got a glimpse of it,

but now we're sober. We can't do that. We can't use alcohol to get there.

And so I tried to come up with,

well, how do you get there and what would the program say about it if we took our steps and translated it into

the present moment? And I came up with this.

We do it the same way that we find out the truth about ourselves,

by getting rid of everything that isn't the truth, by getting rid of all our defects and old ideas until there's nothing left but the truth about ourselves.

So following that model, the trick would be to get rid of everything that isn't the now,

and then that's what would be left.

If you think about it, we're going to have to get rid of time itself.

Anything that's connected with time has to go

and we go. Whoops.

I don't think that's possible.

But we invented time.

We invented it as a means of meeting each other for lunch

and having everyone show up at the business meeting at the same time

and all agreeing to get to the airplane which is going to take off at 3:00. So it serves a nice function in order to accomplish certain commercial and everyday things, but it has no meaning in our spiritual life.

And so

if you can imagine,

we're all now perfectly spiritual beings. I know that's a big stretch for

some of the people in this room whose names I will not disclose,

but it is possible.

And so if we were there in that precious moment,

we'd notice that people are still wearing watches

only they had, they were cooler looking, they were a lot thinner, but they were fashion statements just like watches are today. And we might go up to Jack over there. So that's a nice watch you got. Jack, what time is it?

It's right now. Thanks.

And we let what seems like an eternity go by and go back to Jack. Well, Jack, what time is it now?

Right now,

this watch is never wrong.

It has no moving parts.

It just has a beautiful band

and it reminds us that it's always right now. So there's a just a visual of it's right now. There's nothing else. Everything that happens happens right now. There's no it's going to happen. That's out of the picture.

So the only thing that I now am limited to experiencing is

right now I'm just here.

Umm, Eckhart Tolle is an author in the back who writes a lot about this. He wrote The Power Now and The New Earth,

and I somebody gave me a CD of a lecture he gave in New York City.

And he said he went out for a walk

and everybody's walking so fast that he had to increase his pace or be crushed

on the sidewalk. Have you been in New York? You know how fast? Everybody will, but they're going, man, they're going. And he started watching what the hell everybody was in such a hurry for, and they were really going somewhere. And he finally figured out where they were going was to the next moment

because it was going to be better than this moment.

And and it captured the whole thing of our entire lives. I can hardly wait until I can hardly wait until. And when you're in such a hurry to get to something that's going to be better than it already is, you never take the time to see how it is. It may already be perfect,

but we never stopped long enough to go well. How is it right now? Well, who cares? It's going to get better later.

So we never really looked at it. We just concluded that it couldn't be as good as it's going to get. And with that mindset, we missed the whole show and we could miss it all the way through life and go all the way up to the death bed going well, I hope it's better after you die

because I never found how good it actually was.

So the story that comes up next is the past, the present, and the future.

We're having a conversation and they decided that there was a lot of tension between them at all times. They were just pulling and tugging in many different directions. So they decided why don't we hold a meeting and we'll see if we could compromise and find some way of reducing all the tension

And the future said, you know, we're in a historic building.

They were in Philadelphia. It's a right upstairs is a very famous room. I think that would be the place to hold the meeting. And they all agreed, boy, that is cool. That is really that should be quite a meeting. So it was easy to discover the location or to agree on the location of the meeting. Next came when the meeting is going to be held.

This was a horse of a different color because right off the bat, the past said

we got to hold the meeting two years ago.

It's familiar. We'll all be comfortable. We've already been through it. I think we should definitely, out of desire to get something really done, go to some place that's very comfortable in the future. Disagreed immediately. I hate that it's boring. I didn't like the past at all. I don't like you. I think

we should make this a very exciting meeting and hold it two years from now.

That's when it should be held. We don't have a clue what that'll be. It'll be really cool and we'll we'll go there. That's what I think we should do. And then I said you guys make a pretty good case. And I'm, I'm really torn. I think you both have very good ideas, but I would point out one thing,

that if we do go back two years and we settle in for the meeting, it'll be now

when we get there

in the past. Yeah, I guess so, He said. Now, if we wait and go in there two years from now, it'll be now when we go in there in the future. When he said, I think we ought to hold it right now.

And they couldn't think of a argument, so they grumpily went up into the room and took their seats at the table to hold the meeting.

And observers say that as they sat down,

there ended up with just one at the table. The now

and a great piece came over the room. It seemed to light up a little bit and the people watching felt really happy because they saw something of great magnitude happen.

And that's the type of meeting we ought to hold with ourselves.

End the debate, end the worry, cut the ties and get there.

Chuck talked about that. That conscious contact can only happen in the now,

and our whole weekend

has been designed to talk about conscious contact.

The saying on the board behind me simply allow everything to be as it is, is an automatic ticket to the now.

It just places you there, and as long as you stay there, you could have everything that needs to be revealed, revealed,

which is much more important than anything we could accomplish by preparing for some future goal.

So in a way, when we work the steps and we get rid of our old ideas, in this instance, I'm going to give up everything that I've created

and everything that I've created is my identity. I'm actually going to give up the eye, which is my own creation. Which ties into the question yesterday, who am I? And the answer was, I am,

so I've got to eliminate anything that connects me to time.

Do you follow what I'm saying? I have to eliminate anything about me that connects me to time.

We're entirely ready to have God remove all my defects of character. If that were accomplished, we would be in the now.

There be nothing left

of my will

and I would simply be a servant of God and from moment to moment would simply carry out what guidance I feel I have received. And that would be the extent of my entire plan, which sounds vaguely familiar about Chuck Chamberlain saying, for the last 22 years, my entire plan for life is to get up every day and see where God guides me,

which is, you know, we go, well, that's good for Chuck,

but I got a real life to lead. Like he didn't run a business and didn't have his marriage and all these other things. It sounds

too remarkable.

Then on page 757 in the Big Book, when we drew near to him, he disclosed himself to us.

Well, again, where is near? How do you draw near?

Go to Jerusalem?

No, we have to go in. We have to eliminate time and go into the present moment and then He will reveal himself to us and again more will be revealed. Be still and know that I am there. There's hints all over the place about where God can be found and they all lead to the now.

It's no It's like all roads lead to now,

and all roads lead to God and all roads lead to the real me, which are my true nature.

In the 12 and 12 and the 11th step, it said, we may be granted a glimpse of the ultimate reality, God's Kingdom. I've always liked that line. It's in the 11th step. In the 12:00 and 12:00,

we may be granted a glimpse of the ultimate reality, God's Kingdom. That's a lot to put in a a book, isn't it? You're going to be granted a glimpse of God's Kingdom.

And again, the Kingdom is the present moment. That is the Kingdom. There's there's nothing beyond that. That's it. It's to somehow get to that present moment.

So I made-up another story about a I'm searching for God

and I'm tracking down a path and all of a sudden there's a door in front of Maine and the door is marked the now. And I go, hey, doesn't get any better than this. So I go up to the door

and I knock on the door and the boy said who's there? And I go, Sandy Beach

said. Sorry, you can't come in.

You have to figure out the mystery of the now. Come on back when you've got it figured out. Come on back when you think you understand the password to get into the now.

So now I got to go back and I got to talk and I got to get some advice and I got to get some wisdom.

And somebody tells me the secret

and I went, wow, I knew that and I forgot it.

So I came back and I knocked on the door and they said who's there?

I said the hole in the donut.

This is a non entity.

I'm anonymous. Oh come on in.

I was allowed in because they had no identity.

I was allowed in because there was no I left. There's no room for the eye in there,

but there's and that's why

our my name is Joe and I'm an alcoholic is one of the passwords to get in there.

That's who I am.

Joe the alcoholic. What is an alcohol? What do we say? What do we really mean when we say I'm an alcoholic?

When you cut through it all, it says

I have a condition

that unless I find God, I won't survive.

My name is Joe and I'm too far away from God.

I need to find God. That's what I'm an alcoholic means. We have a disease that only from the chapters of the agnostic of spiritual experience can conquer. So it's a tremendously humble statement to say

I'm anonymous.

I'm a person who desperately needs God. Welcome on in This is where God lives and we only let people in who desperately need Him and are willing to give up that other world in order to get here.

Oddly enough, in churches they would say I'm a Sinner

and the definition of the center is I'm too far away from God. It has nothing to do with doing wrong things or this or that. It's a simple statement. I'm too far away from God and I need to get closer to God. So we're saying the same thing,

but Alcoholics like our version better. You notice how Bill shies away from sin? He sneaks it in the 12 and 12 memories. We don't like the word sin, but I'm sneaking it in anyway. Here's the 7th deadly sins. Remember that and go. OK, Alex, I'll concede that they're there, but I like having a disease better.

And that's how we get everybody in here. We don't tell them they're sinners. We tell them they're sick. Oh, OK. I just don't want to be a Sinner. You're not. You're sick. OK, Come on in.

Well, what do you do about being sick? Same thing about being a sin. Oh, I'm sorry.

No, no. We have this thing that will help you with your disease. So what is it? Finding God. Wow. It's what the minister told me over there. Yeah. Don't listen to him.

We got it right here. So you can see it's really been packaged in a most remarkable way. And we talked about that earlier, the manner in which it's presented,

what we've done, who presents it, somebody on the level playing field. All of this leads us to this door

and we finally come in and we're

learn the password to get in. So how do we stay? Nothing.

The only way to get in there is if you're nothing. The hole in the doughnut. I remember that. And I think it's step three in the 12 and 12 if I turn my life over. Remember he said you got to turn over everything, including not just alcohol. And then as Bill writes a lot, if you notice how he writes that, he'll advance a point and then he'll tell you the objection that you're going to have to that point.

And so he goes,

some fictitious void goes, well, if I do that, I'll be the hole in the doughnut. You remember that. And as you study that, you realize the hole in the doughnut is a completely spiritual person. It's nothing. I have begun all the way from a big shot to a servant, which is the highest pay grade in Alcoholics Anonymous. Everybody arrives here a big shot,

and if you win, you become nothing. You become so small you can go through a screen on a screen door

because you have nothing that you are grabbing onto that has to come in with you.

Now, that's a lot to get rid of.

There's a lot of things that we take with us. George Carlin had a funny routine about our stuff. Don't you remember that? You know, you're going on vacation first. Your house is designed to hold all your stuff. And sometimes you need to build an addition on the garage because you got some more stuff, your boat. And then you have a smaller boat and the RV and a motorcycle that you tow behind the RV and a fishing thing, but that you tow behind that, didn't it? Yeah, a lot of stuff.

And when you go on vacation, you can't take all this stuff from your house. So you got to pick out what stuff you think you're going to need when you go on the vacation. And you go through the whole routine. And then sometimes you're in the hotel, you're on vacation, somebody wants you to go up there for one night. So you want to take a little bit of the stuff that you took on the vacation from the stuff from your house, and it's all your stuff. Well, you can't come in. Knock knock. No stuff allowed.

Can't bring it in.

So you can really see, now we see the now

you've really got to be nothing to get in there.

How about that? I'd like to vouch for my friend Dennis. He's a nothing.

That would be a spiritual endorsement.

Trust him, he's a nothing. Do you ever think you'd want to be a nothing? Someday have somebody say what a man, he's a nothing.

Doesn't sound attractive, does it? Doesn't sound like that should be the answer. I'm a nothing, of course. A Nothing means I'm a perfect instrument for God. Now

He I'm a pen and he's the writer.

That's a nothing,

But without the pen,

none of Shakespeare's words would be written,

so that pen is pretty important.

Amazing.

So I said, well, what can we design to get us into the now? We need a club. We need something powerful to get us there. Most people can't do it on their own. And the Catholic Church, they have orders,

priests that belong to different orders, and they specialize in taking a group somewhere.

And

the Jesuits focus on knowledge. These guys are smart and they can debate. They've really focused their minds. We're not going to qualify for that, so we're not going to organize anything like that.

But the Franciscans on the other hand, and we're all familiar with Saint Francis,

we have his prayer out and the Stations of the Cross where you can read one line at a time. So I thought that that's who we ought to model ourselves after. The Franciscans.

Now Saint Francis devote his whole life to get rid of his ego. He got rid of all his material possessions. He just went around and if he saw somebody with that was cold, he gave him his clothes so that they could get warm. He was only concerned about other people. So he was obviously sacrificed getting rid of, getting rid of simply trying to devote his whole life into killing his ego.

And I said to myself,

I'm not going to be able to create one of those in AA where these guys have to get rid of all their stuff. So I came up with a an order that we can form here in AA, and I called it the Wilsonian Order of the Present moment,

named after our co-founder. I thought there'd be a lot of guys. Oh, yeah. And I'm telling you ahead of time, you get to keep all your stuff.

So I see a few hands. Yeah. Yeah, I want to. I'm going to wear a little pin. Wilsonian order of the present moment. I'd like to join that. Now, just before you come in, I'm going to read you the pledge

to get in to the Wilsonian order of the present moment,

and I want to see how many hands are still up

when I get through. OK,

OK, you would raise your right hands, but we're not going to do that.

You solemnly swear to abandon and renounce

your own personality,

All of your goals,

all of the causes you are involved in, all of your opinions, all of your fears, all of your memories of the past, all beliefs,

all hope,

all power to choose,

all faith,

all resentments,

all desire to know or understand

all plans for the future.

You solemnly swear to let go. Absolutely.

And I can hear the voices. What an order.

I can't go through joining it.

Do not be discouraged. None of us are Saints. We're willing to grow.

So there it is.

The ticket to the now

and I could see as we go through the list,

OK, I'll get rid of the resentment. I'm not getting rid of my causes. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I got to save the world.

How about your plans for the I'm not getting rid of all my plans for the future. I've got a plan for my retirement. I got a plan for this. My kids are going to go to college.

Go ahead.

But you're not allowed in,

so we're going to have to reconsider. You remember that? I forget where that is in our literature. It says you're going to have to reconsider or die. It was over the fact of whether you're an alcoholic or not, or whether you're going to choose God or not. Reconsider or die. What's this God stuff?

Here it is. What's the last line? The prayer of Saint Francis? It's by dying that we awaken to life eternal. What dies?

Not the body. We're not talking about that where we bury you in the ground. We're talking about the eye, your personality, your view on everything. What what constitutes you in the world that you put together? Well, in my world, I'm a famous this and in my world and in my world and my

world sucks. That's what we finally agree. Wouldn't you like to go to God's world?

Yes. Then get rid of yours and you'll be there. It's no big mystery. It's the same as the six step.

It's exactly the same.

Would I be willing to get rid of every piece of identity that is connected with me

in order that God can shape me into what I could be going back to? When that thing about when you're a kid, it's your life, you have to take care of it. And we should have been told it's not your life, it's God's life. Turn it over to Him and let Him make something out of you.

And so you see the parallel of our steps in the present moment work.

It's almost an exact parallel that we in its spirituality is very much like this. It's a paradox. If you want to get there, you have to eliminate everything that isn't it.

And in this case, we have to eliminate time

and we end up in the eternal moment.

And then I wrote some lines down that helped me understand this.

And I'm not saying they'll all fit, but this one I really like.

The question that is asked me is do I believe in God?

And my answer now is no, I believe in letting go.

What am I saying? I'm saying my belief in God is limiting me from letting go and finding God.

At the point my belief got me to the point where I'm going to let go. I don't know who God is. I haven't got a clue what it is. So I'm now willing to jump off the platform of my beliefs and stick my hand out and see what grabs it.

But I can't go there with my belief. I have to just go. I have to get rid of faith. I have to go. I'm going to let go. Absolutely. There's no room for any of those things now,

and it was astounding when I felt that the power of letting go

supersedes all hope, faith, beliefs, everything.

They were holding me back. Isn't that funny that you would suddenly be abandoning your beliefs?

It's as if they got you to the point where you let go,

but you can't keep them with you. They're too restrictive. There's too much of me at what I believe is going to be there's. I've got too many things that I made-up in my head.

Then I saw a definition of faith. Faith is letting go. There's no other need for faith.

It serves no other purpose whatsoever other than to allow us to let go.

It takes a lot of faith to let go. I'm going to let go of everything in my world and see what's there. I have no idea what it is. I don't have a clue

and again I found that different. The moment is the door of heaven,

the present moment.

And I covered this

yesterday. There is only life. There is nobody who has a life. I'm simply part of life. And that's what Chuck was trying to say, is

this conscious separation gives me the feeling that I exist by myself and there's no such existence.

The universe is life and I'm part of it. As soon as I realize that, then I'm part of you. This whole room, we're all part of something bigger than us. Nobody is an individual here.

We're all leaves on a tree.

Raw leaves on a tree.

This a leaf doesn't have an identity of its own. Well, I'm tired of this tree. I think I'll go for a walk and go over there. He may make it up in his head if we gave a leaf in ego. I did a whole routine on the Elm trees in Connecticut.

They were fine until we gave them an ego. And then the leaves that these leaves were on the bottom limb and they're looking around and they're going, wow,

this is kind of cool. Look it is. And then they look up at the top and they go, those guys got a lot better view than we do.

How the hell did I get down here?

And they're a lot smaller than we are.

We do a lot more work than they do. We process and we keep the tree alive

and we're down here. We have a freaking bug ate part a hole in me. I look like a piece of crap sitting down here.

This really sucks.

There's got to be some veteran. This freaking tree on the bottom limb bird shitting all over me. What the hell?

This is really awful.

What's that down on the ground?

Shit. Dead leaves.

Dead leaves.

We're going to freaking die. We're on the bottom limb and we're going to freaking die.

Let's stop

synthesized photosynthesis process and bring this frickin tree to a halt.

Why should we be? What do we care what happens to the tree

we got? I got to take care of myself for God's sakes. I can't be loafing around

feeding this tree.

You can just see the loss of awareness that they are the tree.

They're not. There's no such thing as a leaf. There's a tree with all its parts, but no part has a separate identity, and we think we're separate. We've created that,

which was normal because it looks like we're a little kid and we're at the center of everything. So we know what that is. But that's what we're trying to destroy. Through the steps to destroy that. There's a parallel story where the

hands and the feet are having a discussion and they said, you know something, we do all the work. We're out in the field. You're pushing, digging.

Legs are lifting. We do all the work in order to get the food to feed the stomach. The stomach does nothing. It just sits there. We're the we do all the work. Let's stop feeding them. Screw them.

Can you imagine doing that?

What would happen? Freaking arms and lay and feet would

starve to death until they realized they were all part of the same body.

There's no such thing as a separate part.

Everything functions as a unit. And so this is what we're trying to do, is to understand

I'm part of God.

That's my identity.

Some authors would say

that what's going on right now is God is Sandy beaching.

I'm his creation and you're watching his creation

talking.

That's how intimate and closely connected God is in all of us. And the search for God is almost like a practical joke. The the classic story is the two little fish out in the ocean, real young little fish. And a big fish goes by and says to them, how's the water boys? And swims off and one turns to the other, says, what's water?

What is it? And other fish are playing. Oh, water. You got to go all the way to Hawaii. And then you'll find some over there. OK, OK, OK.

What? Where is the water?

Where is God?

This is God here right now. This whole room is. The question is to be able to see it. The only place to see it is in the present moment. The only way to get there is to destroy everything that we've built that connects us to time. And so that's where we're going in this.

Then as we get down to the home stretch,

one author suggested this and I really liked it.