AA Speaker – Sandy B. – Ellenton, FL – Part 3
AA speaker Sandy B. explores practicing the presence of the now—how to find God in the present moment and let go of past and future through the lens of AA spirituality and step work.
Sandy B. from Ellenton, FL takes on one of AA’s most subtle but powerful practices: learning to live in the present moment. In this AA speaker tape, he connects the search for God directly to the eternal now, drawing parallels between the steps and the spiritual work of eliminating everything that isn’t the present—including time itself, identity, and the ego that keeps us trapped in past regrets and future anxiety.
AA speaker Sandy B. teaches that conscious contact with God only happens in the present moment, and that working the steps is essentially about eliminating everything that isn’t the now. He explores how alcohol once gave people a glimpse of presence, why we spend our lives chasing a future that’s always out of reach, and how surrendering ego and identity is the pathway to experiencing God’s kingdom. Sandy draws on AA literature, philosophy, and creative storytelling to show that all roads—to God, to recovery, to our true nature—lead to right now.
Episode Summary
Sandy B. takes his audience on a deep exploration of presence and the present moment, a topic that at first glance seems impossible to fill an hour and fifteen minutes about. But he makes it work by asking a deceptively simple question: if we’re always told to live one day at a time, why not take it further and live one moment at a time?
He starts by grounding the idea in AA literature. The Big Book promises that God could and would reveal himself if he were sought—but where do we go to find him? Not to a distant place or future time, Sandy argues, but to the only place God actually lives: right here, right now. The eternal present moment is God’s kingdom, and it’s the only location where conscious contact can actually occur.
What makes this talk land is that Sandy doesn’t just philosophize. He tells stories. He explains how religion and science both obsess over the past and future—science can take us back to microseconds after the Big Bang and project forward 11 billion years—but neither has much to say about the present moment itself. It’s almost as if the present doesn’t exist in our intellectual frameworks.
He walks through how we spend our whole lives in a kind of perpetual reaching: as kids waiting to be in school, then waiting to be in high school, then waiting for a job, a promotion, a partner, a house. The goalpost is always just out of reach. And then alcohol came along and gave us a taste of the present moment—those first few drinks when we were fully, completely here, not thinking about how good things could get but how good they already were.
The challenge now is how to get there sober.
Sandy develops this by asking what would happen if we applied the step work logic to the present moment. Steps ask us to get rid of everything that isn’t truth about ourselves. So what if we got rid of everything that isn’t the now? We’d have to eliminate time itself—not because time doesn’t serve a practical function (you need it to catch a plane), but because it has no meaning in spiritual life. Time is something we invented. It serves commerce and coordination, nothing else.
He illustrates this with a parable about the Past, Present, and Future arguing about where to hold a meeting in Philadelphia. The Past wants to meet two years ago because it’s familiar and comfortable. The Future wants to meet two years from now because it’ll be exciting and unpredictable. But the Present makes a simple observation: whenever you actually arrive at either place, it will be now. So why not just meet right now? They can’t argue with that logic, and when they finally sit down, they discover there’s only one at the table—the Now—and great peace fills the room.
This is where step work intersects with spiritual practice. Step Six says we’re entirely ready to have God remove all our defects. If that were fully accomplished, Sandy says, there would be nothing left of our will, and we’d simply be a vessel for God’s guidance moment to moment. That’s exactly what another AA figure (Chuck Chamberlain) described doing for the last 22 years of his life: getting up each morning and seeing where God guides him. No five-year plan. No retirement strategy. Just now, then now, then now.
Sandy reads from the Big Book and the Twelve and Twelve, pointing out that all the passages about finding God, about Him disclosing Himself, about being granted a glimpse of ultimate reality—they all point to the present moment. “When we drew near to him, he disclosed himself to us.” Near where? How? By eliminating time and entering the present moment. “Be still and know that I am there.” There, not somewhere else. There, meaning now.
He creates a parable about a seeker knocking on a door marked “The Now.” A voice asks who’s there. “Sandy Beach,” he says. The voice says he can’t come in—he has to figure out the mystery of the now first. But when he comes back and says “The hole in the donut. I’m a non-entity. I’m anonymous,” the door opens. Because there’s no room for the “I” in the present moment. And that’s why the AA introduction—”My name is [Name] and I’m an alcoholic”—is itself a password: it’s a statement of absolute humility and need, a renunciation of the separate self that thinks it can survive without God.
This connects to a larger theme Sandy develops: getting rid of identity. When we say “I’m an alcoholic,” what we really mean is “I’m too far away from God, and without Him, I won’t survive.” It’s the same thing a church says when it says “I’m a sinner”—just packaged differently so people will actually listen. Bill Wilson, Sandy notes, doesn’t use the word sin much, but he sneaks it in the Twelve and Twelve when he lists the seven deadly sins. Same message, different language.
Sandy then proposes what he calls the Wilsonian Order of the Present Moment, modeled on the Franciscans and St. Francis’s lifelong work of killing his ego and serving others. The membership pledge, delivered with wry humor, requires swearing to abandon your personality, goals, opinions, fears, memories, beliefs, hopes, power to choose, faith, resentments, plans for the future—everything. When he reads it, you can hear people groaning in recognition. They’re willing to give up resentments, sure. But plans for retirement? No way. And that’s the catch: you’re not allowed in unless you give up all of it. Because in the present moment, there is no “you” constructed from all those things. There’s only the now, and in the now, you’re nothing—which paradoxically makes you a perfect instrument for God.
He uses George Carlin’s routine about stuff to illustrate this, and then a parable about leaves on a tree. Give a leaf an ego, Sandy explains, and suddenly it starts comparing itself to the leaves above it, resenting its position, blaming the tree, and eventually sabotaging the whole system. The same happens with our arms and legs—if they stopped feeding the stomach out of resentment, they’d starve. We don’t have separate identities. We’re all part of one body, one universe, one life. The search for God is like two little fish asking “What’s water?” while swimming in it. God is here. The only question is whether we can see it. And the only place to see it is now.
Sandy brings in Eckhart Tolle’s observation about people in New York City rushing so fast they’re literally trying to get to the next moment, the one that will be better than this one. But if you’re always in such a hurry to get somewhere better, you never stop long enough to realize how things actually are. You might already be in something perfect, but you miss the whole show.
He also talks about meditation and consciousness. The whole point of meditation, Sandy says, is a sudden change in consciousness—a moment when something of great magnitude occurs and is revealed. He loves Bill’s phrase: “Something of great moment is apt to occur.” A great moment is a singular moment after which things are different forever. The printing press. The atomic bomb. The Big Bang itself. And in AA, there’s a big bang too—that moment in Towns Hospital when Bill had his spiritual experience and realized the obsession to drink had been lifted. In that instant, he saw the entire vision: one alcoholic passing the message to another, all around the world. And Sandy suggests that moment is still happening, still alive in every person in that room and every person in recovery, because the spiritual energy of that moment never wavered and never will.
What Sandy B. accomplishes here is taking an abstract spiritual concept—living in the now—and making it concrete through AA experience, step work, and storytelling. He shows why it matters (because God is only found there), how it connects to everything we do in recovery (the steps are essentially about eliminating the false self so the real self—the now—can emerge), and what gets in the way (our constructed identity, our plans, our beliefs, our hopes, even our faith—because faith is just the tool that gets us to let go, and once we’ve let go, we don’t need to carry faith with us anymore).
Notable Quotes
If you’re not in the present moment, you’re never going to find God. You’re just not going to find him any place else.
The trick would be to get rid of everything that isn’t the now and then that’s what would be left.
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.
I believe in letting go. My belief in God is limiting me from letting go and finding God.
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.
The present moment is the door of heaven.
There is only life. There is nobody who has a life. I’m simply part of life.
That moment is still happening. And you and I are part of that moment. It’s still going on inside of you right this second.
Step 11 – Prayer & Meditation
Spiritual Awakening
Acceptance
Letting Go
Topics Covered in This Transcript
- Step 3 – Surrender
- Step 11 – Prayer & Meditation
- Spiritual Awakening
- Acceptance
- Letting Go
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Full AA Speaker Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated and may contain minor errors. For the best experience, listen to the audio above.
Welcome to Sober Sunrise, a podcast bringing you AA speaker meetings with stories of experience, strength, and hope from around the world. We bring you several new speakers weekly, so be sure to subscribe. We hope to always remain an ad-free podcast, so if you'd like to help us remain self-supporting, please visit our website at sober-onrise.com.
Whether you join us in the morning or at night, there's nothing better than a sober sunrise. We hope that you enjoy today's speaker. Before I get started, I got two uh things I want to talk about, but I want to get them on the tape there.
One of them is at um 2:15 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 AA talk, but he's talking about spirituality, and you'll recognize um 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, we'll 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 back in the back.
This one would be very attractive to any AA history buffs. um of which I'm one. And if you study AA history, including the trivia, there's a name that um if you're at AA conferences and that, you know, they have the trivia quizzes and they'll say, "What did James Newton contribute to AA?" And that's the name is James Newton.
And most people haven't got a clue because he wasn't an AA member. And it turns out that he was um Thomas Edison's right-hand man down in Fort Meyer and a real estate developer in the 20s 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 Akran, 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, the spiritual power of the Oxford meetings. And when he got to uh Akran, 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 son 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 the Oxford movement? So he told him and he says,"We have to have that in Akran." And he personally called up Frank Buckman.
And Buckman brought all his heavy hitters to Akran where the newspapers covered this thing like it was a presidential visit. And because of the wide publicity, Dr. Bob Anne 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 Lindberg, and a Nobel Peace uh prize doctor from France named uh 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 were 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 Lindberg. I decided I 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 um one of the more fascinating topics that we have this weekend.
And you see on your schedule, what does it say exactly? Practicing the presence of the now. Now in AA we recognize how important it is to not be consumed by the past and the future.
And so we u 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 bringing it 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 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.
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 um I want to make sure it comes out right.
And I started out with um the uh ABCs at the end of chapter five or the end of what we read in chapter five. The third one, God could and would if he were sought. And we all know that line.
God could and would if he were sought. 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? Where 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 uh 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 him any place else.
If you are not there the contact won't be made. Now religion and science have both address the past and the future in great detail. I mean, science can take you back to I I think it's about two millionth of a second after the big bang and take us all the way up through uh 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 um divinity and how what happened and what was taught. and they talk about what's going to happen a lot about the future and uh 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 um as a result of that, we spend a lot of time anticipating those things that'll make us happy.
And we can hardly wait um 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.
Then we go there and 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 we get there and we're the bottom of the heap again, we don't know what's going. 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'll be important. And you start at the bottom of the workplace. And but when I get promoted, boy, if I get her a 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. We're just about And one thing that put us in the now was alcohol. We really discovered the present moment the second we drank.
I got about three 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 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 I tried to come up with um well, how do you get there? And how 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 to bring that up, 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 a 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. Um, 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 I'm just here.
Um, Echart Tol uh is an author in the back who writes a lot about this. He wrote the power now in the um new earth. And I uh 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.
If you've been in New York, you know how fast everybody going. 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 stop 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 miss 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." Um so the um 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 um the future said, you know, we're in a historic building.
They were in Philadelphia. And so 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 um desire to get something really done go to some place that's very comfortable. And 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 the now 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." And the future went, "Yeah." 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 peace 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 um 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 I which is my own creation which ties into the question yesterday who am I? And the answer was I am. Um, so I' I've got to eliminate anything that connects me to time.
Do you follow what I'm saying? You I have to eliminate anything about me that connects me to time. Um, we're entirely ready to have God remove all my defects of character.
If that were accomplished, we would be in the now. There'd 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 Um page 7 57 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, you we have to go into 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 or my true nature.
uh 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 11 step and the 12 and 12.
We may be granted a glimpse of the ultimate reality, God's kingdom. That's a lot to put in a AA 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 tr trekking down a path and all of a sudden there's a door in front of me 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 a voice 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 I had no identity. I was allowed in because there was no I left.
There's no room for the I 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. I 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 a spiritual experience can conquer. So it's a tremendously humble statement to say I'm anonymous.
I'm a person who desperately needs God. Well, come 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 sinner 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. Remember, he said, "We don't like the word sin, but I'm sneaking it in anyway. Here's the seven deadly sins." You remember that?
And I go, "Okay, 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, okay. I just don't want to be a sinner. You're not.
You're sick. Okay, come on in. Well, what do you do about being sick?
Same thing about being a sinner. Oh, I'm sorry. No.
No. We have this thing that'll help you with your disease. Well, what is it?
Finding God. Wow. That's what the minister told me over there.
Yeah, but 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 um learn the password to get in. So, how do we stay nothing?
See, the only way you get in there is if you're nothing. The hole in the donut. I remember that in the 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 Voit goes, well, if I do that, I'll be the hole in the donut.
You remember that? And as you study that, you realize the hole in the donut is a completely spiritual person. It's nothing.
I have be gone 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 uh 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.
I 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 cuz you got some more stuff. Your boat and then you have a smaller boat and a RV and a motorcycle that you tow behind the RV and a fishing thing that you tow behind the Yeah. a lot of stuff.
And when you go on vacation, you can't take all the 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 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 really got to be a 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.
In the Catholic Church, they have orders, priests that belong to different orders, and they specialize in taking a group somewhere. And um 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 St. Francis, we have his prayer out on 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 St. Francis devoted 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 sacrifice 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.
Oh, so I see a few hands. Yeah. Yeah.
I'm going 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. Okay.
Okay. You would raise your right hands, but we're not going to do that. Do 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, okay, I'll get rid of the resentments, but 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 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.
He 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 in the prayer of St. 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 my world and my world. But 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 sixth 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 were 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 and it's 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 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.
I'm 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 get 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. What I believe is going to be there. I've got too many things that I made up in my head.
Uh 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. That 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 um 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. 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. We're all 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 an ego. I did a whole routine on the elm trees in Connecticut. They were fine until we gave him an ego.
And then the leaves, these leaves were on the bottom limb and they're looking around and they're going, "Wow, this is kind of cool. Look at this." 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 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 something better in this freaking tree on the bottom limb. Birds all over me. What the hell?
This is really awful. What's that down on the ground? 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 freaking 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. And you can 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 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 um 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 leg 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." Okay. Okay.
Okay. What? Where is the water?
Where is God? He's He's 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.
Uh then as we get down to the home stretch, um one author suggested this and I really liked it and I found that when I use this as a target in meditation, it really works. The whole point of medit meditation is to have a sudden change in consciousness. That's the point of it.
And so I just look forward to that. I look forward to sitting on a bench and just breathing until I see something different. In other words, it's as if I expect it.
It isn't that I expect it because that's um you know the future this or that. It's like I'm aware that that's exactly what will happen, that something will be revealed. And it always is.
There's a sense of um dropping burdens. I'll just feel something go away from me that I don't have to deal with anymore. It's gone.
And so I've always liked that definition. Bill writes, "Something of great moment is apt to occur." I've always liked that. Something of great moment is apt to occur.
I forget what what we were doing when he what he's writing about when he says that. And the great moment is the presence of God. In other words, the conscious contact actually happens.
And when I think of a great moment and this is the end of this. When we say something of great moment, what that means is after that great moment things are different and will be different from then on. Um, the printing press, the second the printing press was invented, the world changed dramatically.
It was never the same again. And we can the atomic bomb the second it went off that was a singular moment. People's peace of mind has been affected by that.
Just the didn't know that was much power was there. A black hole when they first found that and they go freaking star was burning for 9 billion years and it just went and it imploded and now light can't escape. It's the only thing that light can't get out of you.
Wow. I would say that would change the neighborhood. You know what I'm talking about?
If our star just went, man, things would be a little different. Singular moments, the big bang, that is a they call that a singularity. So if you eliminated time, which is what we're trying to talk about, the way you would refer to the universe is instead of dividing it up into eons and 1 billion, 2 billion, 3 billion, 4 billion, we would simply say the big bang is still happening.
We're part of it. We were there when it started and it's still going on. We were part of that present moment and we're still part of the expanding universe.
That's a whole different way of looking at it. And so I started thinking about AA. Was there a big bang just for us to look at?
And if you talk to people who've been around a while, there's probably three big bangs that um would be submitted for consideration. One would be the Mayflower Hotel. There's a there's plenty of people in AA that like that one.
At that moment, AA was born. Other people might choose the kitchen table. when Ebie and Bill were sitting there and something allowed Bill to change his mind about God.
And the third one, the one I happen to like was his spiritual experience in Towns Hospital because up until that singular moment, there was no hope for alcoholics anywhere and hadn't been forever. Right up until that moment. And in that instant, everything was changed forever.
In that instant was an awareness of God, an awareness that the obsession to drink had been lifted and an absolute compulsion to make sure other alcoholics had the same awakening. all contained in a split second. And the compulsion, the desire to save every alcoholic in the world was so strong that it never wavered.
And Bill went through a lot of bad times. Being evicted, couldn't raise money. Every ID he had didn't work.
And he could not stop. He just kept going. And eventually it the whole vision that he had came true.
He actually saw one alcoholic passing to another alcoholic all around the world all in a second. Boom. And so I like to think that that moment is still happening.
And you and I are part of that moment. It's still going on inside of you right this second. So, we're still present at December of 1934.
We're still experiencing that now. And I think you can feel it. You can feel that spiritual energy flowing through everybody in this room as if it were 1934.
And there's nothing we can do about stopping it because no matter what happens to you, you will be unable to not help the next alcoholic. You will crawl out of bed. You will answer that phone when you don't want to and you will pass this message because that's the power of that moment.
That's my best shot at the now. So, let's wrap it up. Thank you.
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