The Far Corners retreat in Ellenton, FL

OK, Lee.

Thanks.

I spill it every year and so far

right at this year, supposed to put it on there, I'd be able to kick it. So I'm not worried

now when we get to this, which is my favorite part because it's so interesting,

you, you have to understand that there's no one answer to these questions.

And so all you're getting is what it looks like

what I see right now.

So if you got something and then you went home and you was troubling you and you ran it by your sponsor and he told you something else, go with that.

You follow what I'm saying. This is just

what I see when I open these SO

and I do want to say

that last year Scott Redmond and I did this together

and I miss them. And Scott, we all wish you were here. You meant a lot to us and

I'll do the best I can.

As one becomes more awakened, there is

no guarantee that a spouse or partner is going to have a similar experience. This can stretch a relationship. Slight understatement. Since preaching or coming from position of spiritual pride won't work. What is the best way to gain acceptance of the others spiritual view?

If you believe the answer is as simple as prayer, how would you pray in this case?

Gain acceptance of the others spiritual view.

I would say first we want to get rid of the

feeling that it's not acceptable the way it is,

and that

our spirituality should give us the flexibility to allow people to be any way they are.

And the problem may lie in wanting them to be different,

disguised as wanting them to also have the advantage of

a clear spiritual view.

And like everything else in spirituality, it involves changing ourselves into letting go of the demand or the desire for someone else to change, because that desire is the only pain we're experiencing.

So the trick is to be absolutely comfortable with the situation just the way it is.

That's not easy to do, but it's the right goal. And that type of prayer will always be answered. Please allow me to accept everything just the way it is.

So that would be 1 answer to that question, not the one that was being looked for.

I've been there.

It's enough, Kevin.

How do you deal with someone

who revere's the messenger more than the message, whether it be a sponsor, a speaker, or some other individual? How do you deal with someone who reveals so it's someone other than you?

Revere's a messenger.

I mean, we're back to acceptance.

I'm reading in here a desire to change someone else

Who

revere's a sponsor or something like that.

I gather it's not the sponsor who feels their pigeon is overreacting in their relationship to them, but rather someone that you're observing.

And again,

it seems like it's a nice healthy desire to want to fix this because it might not be healthy for that person. And it requires acceptance and

loving them just the way they are and waiting for God to give them the clearer perspective.

Because a lot of times the

messenger will suddenly fall off the pedestal,

do something stupid, run off with his maid, and we suddenly realized it's the message

and not the messenger. But I think that lesson has to come directly from God sometimes

and just our own experience. And again, it isn't anything that we can fix.

Which goes back to simply allow everything to be as it is.

Whoops, must be part one.

No,

I'm going to save that in case I get something with it. Looks like the second-half of a question put. Please help me understand. Chuck Seeds value of free in the phrase Our job is to help God's kids for fun and for free.

Obviously

he's describing the joy of freely giving. Freely you have received, freely give. It is giving just for the joy of giving, not expecting anything. It's so much fun to pass this on

and

to help God's kids for fun and for free.

It just ties in with the joy of living happy, joyous and free,

and he just captured it there. We do all this for fun and for free. Obviously there's no money involved, but there's also no expectation.

The gift is in the passing it on. The gift is in the feeling of God's message flowing through you and the, the, that's its own reward.

Whether or not it transforms the other person

is between that person and God. And so I just love that expression. I'm glad it came up for fun and for free. And it really describes a, a we're just, if it isn't fun to pass it on, I would really look at that. If you find it a chore to go to the prisons or this or that, see if it isn't really there's something wrong there, that it's not fun.

It's designed to be

fun. Fun is big. I've Chuck was great that you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong. It's just that simple.

Great questions.

You've been carrying the message effectively for a long time. How do you do what's asked of you and continue to grow in spirit and humility?

I tried to stop doing this

and I decided to go. I made a great mistake. I the the the travel is really is really I don't like it. So I decided, I added it up and I said I've done 1000 of these

and I think I've done enough and I like staying home. And I thought I made a big mistake and I went to Clancy

and I sat down and I said I want to quit. I just said I don't want to do this anymore and all that. And he said, well he said I have that. I've had that about three times where I just said and then he just looked me in the eye and he says you can't quit,

you have a gift and you have to share it and that's the end of it. And I never wanted to hear another sentence about that.

And I said, if you were a good friend, Clancy,

you would lie and tell me, yes, you're tired. You really ought to be able to do.

There's something about the message flowing through you

and seeking to improve it, find better stories or a better choice of words or some other way to capture the essence of it that is so exciting to me that I'll wake up at 3:00 in the morning with another idea. It'll they'll just arrive and I'll go write them down. And that means a lot to me.

And I realized if I wasn't doing this, I probably wouldn't be have that energy going on. And as far as humility goes, I revel in the idea of humility. I when I was out Brentwood, I talked about the misnomer we have in Alcoholics Anonymous, that if you even

say a word that sounds like humility, you've lost your humility.

We can't even say

humbled. Well, you used to be humble, but you just said humble, so now you're not humble anymore. And that is a gross exaggeration in the wrong direction. Humility is one of the great gifts that we have. It's the ticket out of self centeredness. It's the only way out of self centeredness is through humility and recognizing that you can't get out of self centeredness on your own and you have to ask for help.

And the willingness to ask for help is the ticket.

And so to sit around and pretend that we don't ask for help all the time is crazy. Every time you read the big book, you're asking for help. Every time you say you're an alcoholic, you're announcing you need help. Every time you go to a meeting, you're saying I'm here because I need to be here. That's total humility. And so humility is we should be talking that word all we want

it. It's just funny how we got that little routine going that if you say you're humble, you're not. I mean it. I could see the whole some water, but it's really

a complete misnomer. We should be using this word like gratitude. We use gratitude all the time. And so I think

I I love the idea of humility and constantly being in a state of receiving help.

We think about giving it all the time, but the real secret is to be receiving it all the time, constantly receiving help, and then you can pass it on with a lot less effort.

What I have is a disease of perception, and even though I can usually see when my thinking or perception is Askew,

that in itself does not

leave the emotional turbulence I feel because it is indeed still my perception. How can I reframe or change my perception so I don't have to suffer from it? Is there something God must do for me because I can't do it for myself?

I like to run my perception by someone else

to validate that I'm not kidding myself about what I see. And the line that I'm reminded of is then I think it's the 12 and 12 step three. People of very high spiritual development always insist on checking with others the guidance they feel they got from God. That's people of very high spiritual development.

So we should always be checking with others on all kinds of things.

If someone says, how do I know if it's God's will, Ask somebody else,

do you think this is God's will for me? No, I don't think you should run away with that girl and go to Costa Rica. Oh well, I thought.

I thought I heard God tell me that last night. And

now

how can I? And the last part is how can I reframe or change my perception?

Perception doesn't get changed, it happens.

So all all of this stuff is changed by spending more time with God. I call it hanging out with God. Brother Lawrence in the back is a great practicing the presence. Another example I like to use is those of you that remember the movie Harvey with Jimmy Stewart and he had a six foot rabbit. It was invisible rabbit

and he and Harvey went everywhere and he just well Harvey, we're over at the railroad station. Let's sit down and wait for the train. And he's just carrying on this conversation and had this 6 foot rabbit friend

with him everywhere he went.

And I don't know about you, but when I got to the end of the movie, I wished I had a rabbit

who was hanging around with me. Because the point was he was never alone.

He was never alone. And God is that close.

Well, here I am gonna go. Let's go over and get something. Be God. Well going to have another cookie. God. Well, let's go back and think about this. Well, I think I'll sit on the bench and look at your beautiful trees. God. Well, this is nice. It it is that amount of time. Out of that activity comes a change in perception. It can't fail.

It simply can't fail,

OK?

How can you simply allow everything to be as it is when my job is to change existing conditions in business

and in general? What this phrase

really means? Simply allow everything to be as it is. What this phrase really means? Simply what are the implications of this in my daily life? Work family defects of character

it's.

We're trying to

not have our spiritual condition altered by circumstances.

That's what this is talking about.

Just when it says allow everything to be as it is, it means nothing should upset me, nothing should disturb me, so that as I go about my work, I am doing it in an undisturbed way. And when I am undisturbed, I can receive intuitive guidance and make better decisions in my work than if I try to force them out by thinking it myself.

And So what we're trying to stay in the 10th step in the 12 and 12 is undisturbed

and the ticket is to allow everything to be as it is. In other words, the well, they just canceled the sale contract and we probably won't meet our goals.

All right, I go. That's the new thing that I'm going to allow to be as it is so that I can stay

calm enough to hear guidance on what could be done.

Many times the guidance isn't available right now.

What am I going to do about this problem? And the answer I give to the guys I sponsor is go to the movies.

But I

go to the movies. That means you've turned it over to God. You said, God, what the hell do you do

in this business situation?

Now, in order for him to work on it, you have to let go of it.

And the best way to let go of is to go to the movies. Then you get out of the movies and you see if anything's been done yet.

You either trust God or you trust yourself.

Its guidance is either gonna come or it isn't. And I remember asking Chuck, well, how do you get guidance from God? You sit and wait for it.

Well, when does it come? It'll come,

but I got to. I got You can see the resistance to trusting that there really is a loving God who's standing there going What would you like me to do for you?

Nothing. I got to do it myself

and so that can work in family defects of character, it can work in anything.

Let go.

You get a problem like Ovid immediately, like a hot coal.

But it has to be solved. Yeah, let go of it. You can't. You cannot get spiritual help and hold on to it.

Can't you see with it, it's like a little kid with the yarn, all that's screwed up and you want the mother. Can you help me with this? And but you want to do part of it. Well, she goes give me that and then there and it's all straightened out.

That is what it means to simply allow everything to be as it is. Every time there's a problem, let go of it. Don't touch it. Don't just say this needs to be resolved.

So there's there's doing nothing. You remember in the 10th step the four parts to

becoming undisturbed and the first one is self restraint.

Well, the first step in everything is to do nothing,

allowing time to calm down

self restraint. Then we need a clear picture of what the problem is,

meaning we're disturbed by it. Generally that involves calling up someone else to run it by them, and that's the second part, which is to get an understanding of what it is. And then the third part is either forgiving or making amends.

So we forgive the person who canceled the sales contract so that we have no anger left towards them.

It's all geared to allowing God to help us and He can't help us if we're trying to help ourselves.

So that's I hope that answers that because it's a very important point to understand.

Either you can let God help you or you're not and you can't do it yourself and ask him to part partly help you with your way of handling it.

Okay, good question.

All right.

Do we let go of everything? Aren't we responsible to do the footwork and let go of the results?

I love this question, I really do,

because I believe that for a long time I really did.

God does the hard stuff and I have to do the legwork.

I have to do,

I have to do, and then God will take care of this or God will take care of the results, or I don't care about the results. Here's something. It's in the fine print, so maybe you didn't see it. God will also do the legwork.

How do you like that?

How do you like that? He'll also help you with the legwork.

He wants to be involved in everything,

and a lot of these sayings are designed to keep God out of it

so that at least I get to be in charge of something. At least I can do the legwork and get credit for the legwork.

It's the it's that somehow I have to be the operative person

and God standing there. I do legwork also.

It's almost like, oh,

I don't want to be give up control of everything. OK, then keep doing the legwork yourself,

which you don't have to. It's the it's amazing how much God wants to help you. He's just standing there. Could I clean this? Could I help you with that? Could I help you with this

now? What does it mean by help you? Let's use cleaning in the bathroom.

The way he would help us clean the bathroom is to make us happy to clean the bathroom.

It would be thrilled

now, whoever thought that could happen,

but that's what the help would look like in that case would be just, well, if it's for you, God, it'll be a lot of fun

and doing things. We're doing things through him, with him and for him. Everything's being done for him

all right now, These amazing

How many newcomers might the Lord's Prayer have killed?

And what if the answer was one?

I don't know that's

Bill wrote a

Grapevine article on the Lord's Prayer simply

fell into place. It wasn't a conscious decision. It wasn't some

religious overtones. That just was something that the Oxford people were saying and

people of all walks of life came to learn to say it and to enjoy it.

And so

I'm totally unqualified to answer if somebody was killed by it.

I mean, I have no way of knowing.

Were newcomers killed because a group was back to the basics too strong?

I don't know,

was newcomers killed because the groups hardly talk about God at all? I don't know. I mean, it's a whole bunch of things you could put in there. But I'll say this, and this is a very important point, because we're talking about spirituality.

The purpose of spirituality is to teach us how to adjust to the situation and not demand that the situation adjusts to us.

You see what I'm saying?

Things should never be changed because somebody doesn't like it.

That's the exact wrong way. You don't like it, you will after a while. I'm going to show you how to like it.

Once you show a person how they can adjust to the reality of the world, you've given them a

free ticket home. Simply allow everything to be as it is.

We were discussing this topic in general,

Steve. Yeah, we were all talking about it.

And I gave the example of if you looked around your Home group and you suddenly realized that 90% of the members were Jewish

and somebody might go, hey, look at we had all these Jewish members here. Why don't we ask them to teach us a Jewish prayer and we'll sing it for a year at our group?

That would be a wonderful reason for changing, because somebody thought of something exciting and new to different, not because someone didn't like the way it went. That would be teaching the wrong. That's what the whole society is based on. If you don't like it, we'll adjust to you. And that teaches no spirituality at all, no flexibility, no changing.

And so that's enough of me on that.

How do you achieve the absolute certainty that our Creator has entered your hearts?

It,

it sounds like the answer should be obvious, but it's not.

And the example I will give is

that sometimes other people see the changes in you before you do.

And they know that you've been gone through this little transformation because they can see your face and your demeanor and, and the kindness that is now coming out of you.

And so sometimes you might listen to other people describing you compared to the way you were to realize that something huge has happened

and you actually didn't see it.

Sometimes we bring in the idea we have all these old ideas that this God stuff really isn't true,

and even when it happens, we don't like to be wrong.

So we write it off as a coincidence or it wasn't a spiritual hot flash, it was indigestion.

That's what I really experienced. And it simply comes from those years of

violently contending that God's doing more damage in the world than I mean, all of the I had a million of them and you just said God and I went bang

just from the word, just front. And yet I'm suddenly getting happy and more comfortable in my own skin. And as people pointed it out, I had to go, wow,

this crap works. It was. It was there,

so if you haven't seen the results, maybe those around you have.

And

I ask people all the time, do I look different? Do you think I'm changing? Do you think I'm getting self-centered from all this attention? Do you think I'm doing this wrong? Do you think of whatever it is? I love feedback from other people. It's really helpful.

And when they, let me say this also, that if you

have a real good sponsor

who's fairly spiritually wise and you, you're very excited about your insight into something and you go to him with this insight and he is happy that you have that and then offers something that is even perhaps more true, don't take it as an insult that yours was wrong and his was right.

As you deal with truth, there's truth and then more truth and more truth,

but they're all still true. And you weren't wrong. Just look at it like, Oh my God. Here's the something more exciting. And the writers that I read talk about the fact that Newton's laws of motion are absolutely true. They just, no matter where you go, they apply. But there are places in the universe where they don't.

But it doesn't mean they're not true. Do you see what I'm saying

there? It's just that's the truth here. But over here, this is the truth. So don't be upset if you hear an additional layer of insight on top of your own. It doesn't mean you failed. It means you were lucky enough to find something to add on top of that.

My belief ebbs and flows. Is there a way to know

of to have a working faith with absolute trust and faith in God?

Obviously there is.

I mean, we have to understand

that in the absolute sense,

God

can make us perfect

and that we're standing in the way of letting that happen. So yes, absolutely is there.

I think the answer I gave early of spending more time with God don't. Don't try to have a particular objective. I think this said

for having a working faith that doesn't even flow. Just get rid of ebb and flow and and the work all that and just hang out with God more,

read a little more spiritual books. No demands for anything,

and you'll see that it arrives as you get rid of the demand that it happened.

One of the blockages is wanting it to happen

and letting go of the want to have it happen opens a door to allow it to happen.

The greatest freedom, we're talking at lunch or out here that you could have is the freedom from want

and to have inside of you

wanting nothing.

I mean you. When you think about that, you go, what the hell would I do all day?

You would experience life exactly as it is, and you can't get any closer than that.

All right, I'm going to do one more. Then we'll take a 15 minute break, have some coffee, and those of you that feel like it, come up here and straighten me out on these things.

Steve doing a lot of writing I

and as soon as I get corrected, I'll pass it on in the second-half.

Alcoholics often say I'm sober by the grace of God.

The moment we receive or experience grace in terms of getting sober, what exactly is grace? I'm hoping you will discuss this precious moment in terms of cessation of ego rather than in religious catch phrases such as grace is an unearned gift from God or grace is an undeserved gift from God. What do you believe constitutes the moment

we struggle to define the word grace? Or There's two questions here, here. So I'll do

Grace.

I would say

grace is the nature of God's love.

It is what is what is being said as I see it

is.

No matter what we've done,

were loved equally.

If I've murdered someone and you've robbed 5 banks,

you and I are loved unconditionally

by God

and that fact

could be called grace

in in the sense that we certainly do any didn't do anything to earn it.

But whereas kids,

as Chuck says,

and his love is to enable us to forgive ourselves

so that we can enjoy being close to God.

And so that's where I would put

grace. And also I would say we really have to. And I've, I was, I suffered with this for 35 years in a A,

I had a thing about religion and religious people

and it caused me a lot of grief and it was absolutely unnecessary.

And I had to get rid of that and start looking at the principles behind religions, not the people practicing the principles. Because I will assure you there are some real jerks in a A that if an outsider use them to measure our program, they would think very poorly of us.

Do you follow what I'm saying?

And so I have to go beyond the personalities I may have observed into the underlying principles

and see that that's where all the principles of AEA came from.

And they're saving our lives. And we're very fortunate that all of that fell our way and that we're allowed

to rephrase it in any way we see fit through the wonderful freedom of God as I understand Him. And that allows us to,

let's go back to a religion or not. And we're all still right here practicing the same principles. And it's a wonderful freedom. But I sure feel better when I got rid of that. And I remember the Ocean City, Jack, you may have been there. They had a couple years in a row where the Sunday morning speaker brought a Bible up to the podium and quoted a lot of things from Jesus. And I was going to kill him

due to my very deep spirituality.

He may have been a brother a a member, but he deserved to be killed for what he did. If I could find him, I'd make an apology,

and it's great to get free of that

prejudice, I guess is what I would. What I had was pure prejudice. 2 If spiritual energy is like other forms of energy in that it can neither be created nor destroyed, which certainly seems to be the case, what are your thoughts on what happens to this energy between the periods of death and birth?

Wow,

I like that.

I like that. I like

death.

I like I like the topic of it

because death is the egos biggest weapon. It loves to oh, you could die. Whoo.

To the point where we're terrified to even hear the word.

Which keeps us from accepting the most natural part of life.

It is. It is as natural. So there's

I'd like to use a breath as an example because each breath is separate from the one before it,

so they each have a lifespan of three seconds. And so as you breathe in, that's the birth of a breath.

And as you breathe out, that's the death of a breath.

Now I've I'm the type of guy that does some weird experiments and I decided to see which was more enjoyable,

breathing in or breathing out.

To experience the birth of a breath

or to experience the death of a breath. And as you go,

you wish you could keep exhaling forever because it requires no effort, it just

And there's a great peace as it gets to the end. And so I

now we'd start again.

And life is like that. It just starts and ends and then it starts and then it ends. And so if I'm a spiritual being having a human experience,

where was I before

I was a spiritual being not having a human experience?

What about afterwards? I'll be a spiritual being who just finished a human experience,

and a human experience of 90 years is a blip

in the eternal nature of a spirit of the Spirit.

I question whether I'll even remember the visit here.

It'll be so unimportant

in the reunion

with

my creator.

The bliss of that will almost surely obliterate

this experience by comparison.

Now I know that everybody thinks, well, I'll run into all my relatives and do this and that, and maybe that's true. My own inner awareness is says the reunion will be so monumental, it'll make this pale so much that it'll be hard to even

remember it. So why come here?

How do I get on this?

This was, I had it in a talk somewhere.

You have to make up stories. I mean, you can't. There's nobody knows the answer to these questions. So you have to make up a story and see if that story resonates with your spirit. That's how you

and so I really went. I said what the hell is the point of coming here in the first place?

What is why?

And I said, maybe the secret. The answer to that is in a story of the prodigal son,

and the story is that if you were to leave your true nature home

and take off on a wild

search with the thought that I could do a better job than my father did,

and failing, we come home.

That home is better than if we had never left,

and it's the only way it can be made better

is to lose it and regain it.

And that would make this little visit

pretty powerful.

We may have felt that we were in perfect harmony with the universe and God said no, it can be even better than that.

And umm, I like that story. It makes the trip here have some meaning, and

maybe it'll do the same for you.

And so I think that the eternal nature of what we're trying to get in touch with

is little affected by

birth and death,

very little.

But the ego doesn't want us to think so. And so that they can really ruin the visit here and prevent us from ever

being reunited. I noticed in our big book, as I've probably seen it there for a long time and now I can't tell you what page it's on, but I'm sure someone in here there actually is a three word sentence that says we were reborn.

That's a very interesting word.

Reborn

sounds like born again to me.

OK, How can I surrender all the way and stay surrendered? Why do I still want things that I that do not appear to be God's will for me? Why won't I patiently wait for whatever is to be for me in God's plan?

Because you're just like the rest of us

that

I'll take you right to the sentence.

Go to the 12 and 12 and go to step 6

and Bill says the question you just wrote right there is the Riddle of our existence. I don't know if you ever saw that line, he said. That, my friend, that you just wrote is the Riddle of our existence.

And he said the answer may lie in God's mind, but I can make a guess as to what it is. And then he goes on to explain that the reason that we were able to become entirely ready to have God remove the drinking was because the drinking was killing us. And even the ego had to go along with that because it saw the handwriting on the wall. You can't be an ego in a dead body.

But the other defects aren't

killing us in that sense that alcohol was, and therefore it's harder to develop the willingness

that that it was for alcohol. And that explained the Riddle. But in the seventh step, he talks about something called a great turning point. I don't know if you know that sentence.

A great turning point came when we saw humility as something we wanted rather than something we had to do.

So this was the

maybe through adversity and suffering, we were humiliated into giving up something else.

So we acquired humility,

but the results we got from that were so rewarding that we started entertaining the idea of going through the pain of change when we don't have to. But we were going to do it because we we want to. Now we've crossed into another level of moving towards God,

where we the results

of painful humiliation themselves have enticed us into trying it on our own. Maybe I can get rid of judging. Maybe I can get rid of this old prejudice. Wow, wouldn't it be fun to go through the pain of getting rid of this?

And the 7th step talks a lot about pain and our attitude towards pain changes because of the results we get from going through it.

And suddenly it isn't pain anymore, it's effort. It's some other word because we see the result attached to it of getting closer to God. OK. Let's take a break for full 15 quarter after and we'll come back and get the rest of them, I hope.