>> 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. If you'd like to help us remain self-supporting, please visit our website at sober-sunrise.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. >> >> Thank you, Jason.

Um instead of qualifying, I figure one photo is worth a thousand words. That was when it was working. When uh Mike was kind enough to extend the invitation for me to come and join you.

Um I have been giving uh there's about five different history talks that I give. And uh because of the esteem that I hold my uh nephew in, and the reason that I refer him to him as my nephew is that uh we're both great fans of C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters.

And uh it's my favorite book on sponsorship. Great, great book. And uh anyway, so this is my my nephew and I am his his uncle.

Um but I I decided that what I wanted to do if I was coming to join is to see if there was something else that I could add uh to my knowledge. So, what this particular talk is, and if you want, you can start the tape here. >> >> Um is is The Varieties of Religious Experience.

And uh so, we'll call this talk The Varieties of Spiritual Experience. Now again, when we're speaking about these spiritual terms, first and foremost, we're using medieval language. Mostly language that came out of the King James Bible.

So, when you hear them, if you've got some kind of physical reaction to it, remember that it's medieval language. And don't get hung up in those in in those terms. Uh So, the varieties of spiritual the varieties of spiritual experience, again, we'll get out of the medieval and into something more contemporary.

Uh Chronicles of the Twice-Born. Now, Jason was kind enough to read this uh this letter from uh Bill to Ebby. Uh and it's a wonderful piece.

And the thing that that Bill was talking to Jung about is that these conversion experiences that James spoke about, that's what happens in AA. And that they're available on a wholesale basis. That this is not something that just happened to Bill, a little flash.

But that each and every person that recovers in Alcoholics Anonymous, or as as he says, the foundation of such success as Alcoholics Anonymous has achieved, is laying a newcomer open to a transforming experience. And uh So, it goes on to say, "So, to you, Dr. Jung, to Dr.

Shoemaker of the Oxford Groups, to William James, and to my own physician, Dr. Silkworth, we have AA owe this tremendous benefaction. As you will now clearly see, this astonishing chain of events actually started long ago in your consulting room and it was directly founded upon your own humility and deep perception.

So this is William James, the father of American psychiatry. Well, who was this guy? Well, he came from a very affluent family in the Northeast.

His father was a Swedenborgian uh theologian. The Swedenborgians were a mystical Christian sect. If you want to get lost for 8 to 15 hours, just Google that and see where you end up.

He was the older brother of Henry James and some of us that have been on the planet a little longer, we had to read the turn of the screw as one of our our books in in uh in English class and so that was so this family is something that's been part of the the the fabric of American life. Uh he suffered from soul sickness his first 30 years. His mother was so incredibly he always had something going on.

He was kind of a hypochondriac and he wasn't real physically strong and but he kept going and doing all these really wild things like uh when he was at college, he decided to go with this uh this doctor who was going up the Amazon to figure out whether or not uh trying to disprove evolution. And he went along and and uh and was part of that. He got very sick during that and came back to the United States.

Uh he his family moved around a bunch. His high school years, he was in like five different countries. And so he wasn't tied to usual ways that people get and assimilate information.

Uh later in his life he became the the first professor of psychology at Harvard and later became the the professor of uh of philosophy. And he died in 1910. Now, James uh concluded that while the revelations of the mystic, in other words, the spiritual experience of the mystic hold true for that person that has the experience, that it's not something that anybody else particularly can experience.

In other words, that for others they are certainly ideas to be considered, but they can't hold claim to truth without the spiritual without the personal experience. So, in other words, you know, I I've got to I can hear you talk about it, but I have to experience it in order to have it mean something to me. Here's The Varieties of of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature.

Now, James also was when he wrote this book, it was a book that just about anybody that had anything to do with psychology or religious life had to read. So, it was a book that was just tremendously impactful to just to you know, the intellectual evolution of psychology and religion in this country. So, you can imagine that we're talking about a time when just about everybody was affiliated with some kind of church in this country.

And and so, this is was a tremendously impactful book. And both Shoemaker and Jung and Buchman all referred to it and used it frequently. And uh one of the great sadnesses I actually am am fortunate enough to have some of Frank Buchman, the man who was the initiator of the Oxford Group, some of his books.

And I had a chance to get his Varieties, but with the other stuff, I didn't get it. And now this book has become so very dear to me and I couldn't have it. I couldn't have it.

This is Clark University. In 1909, 7 years after Varieties was was published, and at this thing at Clark University, this is a picture in the front from the left is Sigmund Freud, William James, and Carl Jung. Um they were having a fundraiser for Clark University and William James recommended that Sigmund Freud be invited out to give a series of talks.

Uh and so this is a this is a picture of that. And during that time uh Jung had the chance to be with William James for a few a couple of evenings. I'd like to read you a little piece from a letter that he wrote to uh his friend Virginia Payne.

Two personalities I met at the Clark conference made a profound and lasting impression on me. One was Stanley Hall, the president, and the other was William James, who I met for the first time then. I remember particularly an evening at the president at President Hall's house.

After dinner, William James appeared. And I was particularly interested in the personal relation between Stanley Hall and William James, since I gathered from some of the remarks of President Hall that William James was not taken quite seriously on account of his interest in Mrs. Piper and her extra-sensory perceptions.

Stanley Hall had prepared us that he had asked James to discuss some of his results with Mrs. Piper and to bring some of his material. So, when James came, there was Stanley Hall, Professor Freud, and one or two other men, and myself.

He said to Hall, "I've brought you some papers in which you might be interested." And he put his hand into his breast pocket and drew out a parcel which to our delight proved to be a wad of dollar bills. Considering Stanley Hall's great services for the increase in welfare of Clark University and his rather critical remarks as to James' pursuits, it looked to us a particularly happy rejoinder. James excused himself profusely and then produced the real papers from the other pocket.

I spent two delightful evenings with James alone, and I was tremendously impressed by the cleanness of his mind and the complete absence of intellectual prejudices. Stanley Hall was an equally clear-headed man, but of a decidedly academic brand. The conference was noteworthy on the on the account of the fact that this was the first time that Professor Freud had an immediate contact with America.

It was the first official recognition of the existence of psychoanalysis, and it meant a great deal to him because recognition in Europe for him was regrettably scarce. I was a young man then. I lectured about association tests in the case of child psychology.

I was also interested in paradise psychology, and my discussions with William James were chiefly about this subject and about the psychology of religious experience. Now, Jung also emphasized the importance of balance and harmony. And he cautioned that modern humans rely too heavily on science and logic and would benefit from integrating spirituality and an appreciation of the unconscious realm.

Now, here's another fan of James Sam Shoemaker who was an Oxford group leader. He was the rectory of Calvary Church and the founder of Calvary Mission and he was a spiritual mentor to Bill Wilson and many of the original members of Alcoholics Anonymous. In his book uh Realizing Religion, uh Shoemaker's talking about having a scientific definition of what is conversion.

So, when I say conversion, I'm not saying what you think I'm saying. Okay? But, this is what This is uh This is Shoemaker's definition.

I think it's a good one for us to work from. The process gradual or sudden by which a self hitherto divided and consciously wrong inferior and unhappy becomes unified consciously right and happy. So, this book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, a lot of people say That's the toughest book I've ever had to read.

Well, it's a book that's a series of lectures. And they're all interrelated, but it's really good if you've got a short attention span and a little ADD or a little post-methadrine stress disorder um to start where Bill Wilson started. Start in conversion.

Which is in the middle of the book. I think it's like the seventh lecture. And then read you know, back through conversion and then back before it and into mysticism and and the like and it's and it's a fascinating fascinating read if you're a strange chap with a queer idea of fun.

But, if you sit down to read it like a book, you may want to just get out razor blades and run a warm tub. >> >> Now, in it James talks about the fact that God has two families. Of the children on this earth, there are the once born and there are the twice born.

The once born, they see God not as a judge, not as a glorious potentate, but as an animating spirit of a beautiful and harmonious world. Healthy-minded. They generally have no metaphysical tendencies.

They don't look back into themselves. And they're not too distressed by their own imperfections. Then there are the twice born.

These people are wrong living. They have impotent aspirations. "What I do that I do not, but what I hate that I do," says St.

Paul. They're self-loathing, self-despairing, an unintelligible and intolerable burden to which one is mysteriously the heir. Do you go to meetings with people like this?

>> >> Huh? Now, who are the candidates for this conversion process? In other words, of these twice born folks, they're these folks that are preoccupied with their selves.

They hate what they're doing. They are completely unsatisfied all the time and they're always seeing where they're wrong. Well, so to begin with, there are two things in the mind of the candidates for conversions.

First, the present incompleteness or wrongness, the sin in which he is eager to escape. And the second is the present ideal that he longs to compass. In other words, I got to have something not only that I want to get out of but that I want to grow to.

So, in this spiritual in these varieties of spiritual experience, James talks about there basically being two types, two categories. Um one is the educational variety and he describes it as a moral incubation. That what happens is it's kind of like an athlete who keeps engaging in a sport and there may come a day when all at once the game seems to play through itself through him.

Or like a musician who practices and practices and practices and then in performing somehow it all comes together and comes through them. That what this is is that it's it's a process of education, it's a process of being immersed in something and growing through it. And then there's the sudden experience.

Now, what James says about this is is that it unconsciously develops until it's ready to play a controlling part when it makes a sudden eruption into conscious life. So, in other words, the same thing's going on. There's something happening that I the conscious mind is not aware of but when it comes it's now.

Now, in these sudden spiritual experience, often time voices are often heard. Lights are seen, visions witnessed, automatic motor phenomenon occur and it always seems after the surrender of the personal will. As if an extraneous higher power had flooded in and taken possession.

Oh! There's higher power. >> >> How they steal that from Alcoholics Anonymous?

The term's been used for a long time. By a lot of really wonderful people. And then what about the agnostic?

Well, James said that what the agnostic does is that they just out front veto faith as something weak and shameful. And they're afraid to use their instincts. Uh in many persons such inhibitions are never overcome.

They make that decision and that's it. But this may only be a temporary inhibition. Even late in the life some thaw, some release takes place and such cases suggest that sudden conversion is by a miracle.

You've been sitting with Earl for 35 years in the meeting. And he always says, "I don't know anything about this God stuff." And then one day something happens. And if that's not miraculous what is?

So what's the test? Well, the test that that James gave is that impossible things are possible. New energies and endurances are shown.

The personality is changed. The man is born anew whether or not his psychological idiosyncrasies are what gives shape to his metamorphosis. They didn't smoke any methamphetamine for a whole day.

Oh my god. You know? That's it.

I didn't have anything to drink and I'm in Indianapolis. I mean, my god. So what's a good example of a sudden experience?

Well, in the varieties of religious experience, uh James refers to one, uh S. H. Hadley, who after his conversion became an actful a active and useful rescuer of drunkards in New York.

In Down on Water Street, uh his autobiography, he wrote, um "It isn't the last drink that hurts a man, or the fourth, or fifth. It's the first drink that ruins a man." >> >> Well, that's Alcoholics Anonymous. This book was written in 1890.

>> >> Where'd they get it? Uh here's a here's a picture of the book uh Down in in Water Street by S. H.

Hadley. Um The story of 16 years of life and work in the Water Street Mission, a sequel to the life of Jerry McAuley. Jerry McAuley was the guy who established the first Bowery Mission in New York.

And uh Here's a picture of of uh of uh S. H. Hadley.

I love this. Yours for the lost. I believe that's on Lorenzo's new card.

And again, in this uh Hadley has this white light experience, you know, "Although up to that moment my soul had been filled with indescribable gloom, I felt the glorious feeling of the noonday sunshine into my heart. I felt I was a free man. And from that moment till this, I've never wanted a drink of whiskey, nor seen enough money to make me take one." And doesn't that sound a lot like I've stood on the mountaintop, I felt like a wind blew through me?

And and so here Bill is, he's sitting in Towns, he's just had this huge emotional experience. You know, he's he's he's conscious of the presence of God. He's wondering if he's crazy, and his buddy brings a book this Varieties of Religious Experience and goes, "Here it is.

You've had this." And he reads it and he goes, "Yeah." And that's why this book was so important to Bill. He used to say that what it did is it gave him the cash value. And in this conversion section, the conversion or two lectures, what James does is he talks about a lot of different types of conversion experiences that people have, both gradual and and sudden.

And here's a picture of the Water Street Mission. And uh Hadley's there in the front with a stick and the big the big mustache. Some people can really grow mustaches.

Aren't they a joy? Now, James gets tagged with this line, but but it it's a it's a quote that he said that the only radical remedy for dipsomania is religiomania. Is a saying I've heard quoted from some medical man.

A lot of people say that that's a quote that James came out. For those of you who don't know, one of the old terms for alcoholism was dipsomania. Where the little thing about for the older people say don't be a dip.

Well, that's from being a dipsomaniac. Not from dancing poorly in Philadelphia. So, Twice Born.

Now, there are some wonderful other things uh books that that that had to do with this concept of the Twice Born. And one of them is this book called Twice Born Men. It's a clinic in regeneration, a footnote in narrative uh to Professor William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, by Harold Begbie.

And this is a This is a wonderful book. Uh Begbie wrote about the work of the Salvation Army in London. And in it are nine personal stories, which when you read them, read very much like the ones that are in the back of our book.

They're, you know, what it used to be like, what happened, and what they're like now. And the Oh, there's the puncher. And there's the cop basher.

Uh in uh I think the second edition, there's Annie the cop fighter. You know, uh of of our book, Alcoholics Anonymous, there's the criminal. And then my personal favorite, OBD.

Old blind drunk. And his story is just great. And So, and he talks about these people having contact with the Salvation Army, having a conversion experience, and then you know, going on with their lives.

Begbie said on on conversion, he says, "Conversion is the only means by which a radically bad person can be changed into a radically good person." Pretty close, huh? Oh, I know. In Indianapolis, you guys aren't radically bad.

Sorry. Now, a few years later, Begbie came in contact with the Oxford Group. And he got lit up by what went on.

And he wrote a sequel called More Twice-Born Men. Narratives of a recent movement in the spirit of personal religion. Uh And uh in the United States, this was uh introduced as The Life Changers.

Now, James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, and so did Paul, and so did Jesus, they all said that you will know whether or not something is from God or whatever you want to call it by its fruits. By its fruits they will be known, okay? So, and in Varieties of Religious Experience, James brings this home quite clearly that that you know How do we know whether it's true or a true religious experience or not?

What happens out of it? So. Let's talk about the experiences that some of these people from our history had.

Now, Frank Buchman who in Life Changers is called the Life Changer um he has this experience in the uh uh chapel at Keswick where he's convicted of his own sin of of of um hating the people that he thought had wronged him. Uh and what was the what were the results of this experience? Well, he ends up doing some really wonderful work at Penn State University and helping a lot of people to a spiritual experience, coming up with a whole set of steps.

And then he this morphs into what was called the first century Christian fellowship that was an international movement of people that was trying to uh trying to introduce this concept that if you've got a problem in your life, in your home, in your business, in anything, that if you clean yourself up spiritually, that all these other areas will clear up. But you've got to clean yourself up spiritually first. Um they also did a lot of work going around working with missionary communities.

Telling uh you know, folks that were working with others. Again, trying to do the key person strategy, how can they touch the most people? Well, when they went to work with missionary communities, they they'd teach this to them so that hopefully the Christian message that they were able to to transmit would have power to it.

This became the Oxford Group, out of which Alcoholics Anonymous springs. Uh Moral Re-Armament, which uh if you were here earlier today, I spoke about uh and all the great international uh things that have happened out of that. And now it's called Initiatives of Change.

So, I mean, out of the fruits of this one man's experience, how many millions of lives are touched? William Gilliland. Now, his experience was of the educational variety.

He's hanging out with Bookman. They're talking about changing your life. He's kind of going along with it.

It's okay. He gets stuck in a place where he can't get a drink. And has an experience where he stops drinking.

But the thing the reason that I put this as an educational is is he has the ramping up to it. And then bang, it happens. And of course, he went all over the world as part of Bookman's team in different places talking about what happened in his family and about what happened with his drinking problem.

And that's why Bookman and the Oxford Group were not interested in Bill Wilson. They had hundreds and hundreds of people who had quit doing drugs, doing liquor, smoking, doing strange sex, all kind They had people that had all kinds of problems solved. So, when Bill says, "Well, send me a drunk." They're going, "Well, we got people that have drinking problems, but they got lots of other problems besides just drinking." But Bill was obsessed because his experience he had the vision of each sufferer passing on to the next.

Fortunately for us, Sam Shoemaker backed that experience. Now oh, here's spirit Shoemaker on Bookman and this is in more twice born men. He's called Sam is called the Virginian in that book.

They were all anonymous in the beginning. They were anonymous the first the Oxford group was probably anonymous the first 15 years of any publicity about them. Frank would only say, you can write about me but you have to use FB.

Um and anyway, Sam's called the Virginian cuz that's where he was from. And on Shoemaker or Bookman on Shoemaker Stop. Breathe.

Shoemaker on Frank Bookman. The truth is the man is a born mystic. Get him alone and you'll realize this at once.

And you also realize the truth of what James says that we've got to accept the experience of the mystic as a valid experience. FB made a tremendous impression on me. His simple insistence on the power of sin to wall out any vital consciousness of God was irresistible.

He showed me quite mercilessly my spiritual impotence in the lives of other men. This is a picture of Frank at Kuling, China. This is the place I I actually have a one of my treasures that I have I have this the the the notes of Frank's talk that he gave at Kuling and this is the talk that Sam Shoemaker was at.

Sam was there. He was a a from a well-to-do family in Virginia. uh he decided that he was going to go into the ministry because it was a good thing and it would be a wonderful thing to do.

And and he went along and part of the deal was if you were going to be a a man of the cloth, you had to go someplace and he ended up in China cuz Princeton University had a had a uh a school in China. And so he's got a men's Bible study. And for the first time in his life Sam is not being successful.

These guys just aren't getting it. And he's having a real hard time with the language. And he really doesn't like being in China.

Doesn't like the food. Fact that God and pig are very similar sounding, it's very difficult. And it's just awful.

So anyway, he'd started out, he had about 50 guys in his class, he's down to about 12. And he goes and he hears Frank talk. And he walks up to Frank afterwards, he says, "That's wonderful." He said, "Why don't you do this?

Why don't you come I got this one guy back to the key man strategy, got this one guy and if you can get through to him, I know that his change will produce results and everybody will come back and will be successful and be a wonderful thing. Help me out, would you please?" Frank looks at him and said, "What's wrong with you that you cannot transmit a message of power?" Sam was just a little upset. He left in a rage.

I mean, this guy's from Pennsylvania. He's a Lutheran. I mean, No, I mean, it's just and he's telling me that I can't transmit a message of power.

What the heck's wrong with him? And Sam could not get that out of his mind. And all night he thought about it.

And he realized that he'd really probably only given about 65, maybe 70% of himself to God. And he could see that other 30% really, really clearly. And that night he got down on his knees and and he said, you know, not in an emotional desperation, but as a conscious act, "I can't do it.

I need your help." The next day he went and he told Frank exactly what the experience that he had. He and Frank walked and talked and he went back to his class the next day and, you know, Frank said, "Well, you got to go, you know, make restitution." And so he gets up in front of this class of Chinese guy and he says, "I'm really sorry. I've been talking a good game, but I've only been playing it about 70%.

I've been talking down to you because I felt uncomfortable. Will you please forgive me and allow me to try and share all of myself." And the most amazing thing happened. These guys responded.

And the class grew. And out of that period of regeneration, for the next almost 40 years or 30 years, 31 years, Sam and Frank went all over the world. My friend Willard Hunter, who came into the Oxford Group in 1936, who's still alive, said that they really needed both of each other quite badly and that it was very was a shame that they they split in 1941.

A lot of people like to say that it had something to do, you know, with some that that Sam wanted to be something in the hierarchy of the Episcopal Church, but if you've ever been involved in a church, I mean, Sam had given all this time and energy to the Oxford Group. They had the the church, Calvary Church, was the center of the Oxford Group movement in the United States, the clearinghouse for all the uh for all the literature. And when the movement went from the Oxford Group to Moral Rearmament, from being a thing of one informed Christian talking to the next, to an international movement of trying to work in the political arena, Sam couldn't couldn't support that.

He's busy running this place on other people's money. So, that's why there was this this schism between them, but they were really close for about about 34 years. Um So, I like to say that Sam had an educational variety.

Sam wrote a book later on called Twice-Born Ministers, talking about exactly this experience and other people that uh that uh had the had the same uh type of experience. Uh he he asked his friend Harold Begbie if he could use the the title Twice-Born Ministers. And uh the quote that he's got on the front of this uh uh is a quote from James, and it says, "The real deliverance the twice-born folk in insist and must be uh one of universal application.

I've got to give it all up. All of it." So, Sam wrote a lot of a lot of wonderful sermons, and they're collected in different books. And the reason that I like to to acquaint you with him more is to give you more of a feel about the the Oxford Group and the spiritual experiences that that came about in the group.

Uh In confident faith, what Sam said is is that the decision uh that we need to make, that religion is a risk. Faith is not uh sight. It's a high gamble.

There are only two alternatives here. God is or he isn't. You leap one way or the other.

Sound familiar? Again, as God God as you understand him. So, they prayed together opening their minds to as much of God as they understood, removing first the hindrance of self-will, surrender as much of himself as he could to as much of Christ as he understood.

And again, in the beginning we know only a little. I mean, think about how much of yourself that you gave the first time you made a surrender in Alcoholics Anonymous. And think about how much more you know about yourself and how much more you're able to give to your higher power now.

Action. I love this. This is from Realizing Religion, 1928.

Sam wrote, "A moral experiment is worth 10 times an intellectual investigation into apprehending spiritual truth. Obedience is as much the organ of spiritual understanding as reason. Don't drink.

>> >> He got to be obedient first before we can get much anyplace else. So, here are the types of conversion. The sudden or or or or S.

Hadley Frank Buchman, Bud Firestone, Charles Clapp, Rowland Hazard, Bill Wilson, Marty Mann. The gradual or Sam Shoemaker, Harry Hadley, Ebbie Thacher, uh Bob Smith and uh William Gilliland. Now, interesting to me is is that the fruits of the gradual being Sam Shoemaker touch all these other people that are on the uh or most of the other people that are on the left-hand side.

And the other thing that's really interesting is, you know, here he is, he's the he's the minister at this very well-known big Episcopal Church in New York City. So, who's he end up touching? A lot of very wealthy uh guys.

In a wonderful piece which you'll find in aa.grapevine.org uh or uh in uh uh Best of the Grapevine, uh there's an article called the spiritual angle written in my 1955 by Shoemaker. And then he's talking about uh the steps of the program. And uh he says that uh when Bill comes to We Came to Believe That a Power Greater Than Ourselves Could Restore Us to Sanity, he says the basis of this belief is not theoretical.

It was evidential. Before us were people in whose lives the beginning of transformation had taken place. You could question the interpretation of the experience, but you could not question the transformation itself.

We sit in the meetings and we hear all these people that are describing their personal experiences, drinking and not drinking and all that stuff. And we may think, "Well, it's a little squirrely the way they're putting that." But you can't they're not drinking. >> >> Something's going on.

So, here's uh Harry Hadley. Uh he had a sudden experience. Uh, his father, S.

H. Hadley, that that was in the Varieties of Religious Experience, had wanted his son since he had a band in his family at a young age, and there was nothing that he wanted more than for his son to get sober. His son was a drunkard and a gambler and a just a horrible wreck.

And he wanted nothing to do with his old man. But, days after his father died, Harry had an experience. And he quit drinking, and he took up the family business, and he went around being a temperance preacher, and and did a lot of wonderful work, and he was tired of being on the road, and he came back to New York, and Sam Shoemaker was starting the Calvary Mission, and he said, "Come on and join me." And he had this amazing ministry at the Calvary, uh, Mission helping drunks off the street.

He worked with thousands of alcoholics, and, uh, he was especially close to Seabury Graves, Shep Cornell, Dow Textor, Francisco, and Charles Clapp, Jr. All people who were sober in the Oxford Group when a certain stock speculator, he was not a broker, rolls in. Bud Firestone.

Bud Firestone was a sudden experience. He had it as a result of a conversation with Sam Shoemaker on a train from Denver. Uh, he was an Oxford Group, uh, member.

Now, the reason that he's special to us is that he was his family was very close to the rector at St. James Episcopal Church in Akron, Ohio, the Reverend Walter Tunks. The same guy that when the stock speculator's looking for somebody to call instead of going in to get a ginger ale and meet a woman who understands, um, he, uh, he gets a hold of of Walter Tunks.

Uh, Firestone also attended, uh, Oxford Group meetings with Henrietta Seiberling and and and Bob Smith and he was responsible. His change, his conversion experience was responsible for the Oxford Group coming to Akron, getting things rolling there, having an infrastructure of meeting set so that when Bill comes and he's thirsty, he's got someplace to go. He's got friends.

Pretty stunning. This is another one, Charles Clapp Jr. He wrote a couple of great books.

One's The Big Bender. This is written again before Bill's written The Big Book. And I love it cuz he talks about the Oxford Group and drinking and going to meetings and he's he's uh he was a stock broker.

Uh the uh that little illustration in the book is from the chapter gin and religion mixed. >> >> Anyway, uh Clapp's in a Clapp's in a little bit of a jam. His wife didn't really want to get him give him a divorce.

He's going to the meetings, but he's really not that interested. So, he decides to go and see Sam. Has a personal interview with Sam.

Goes to Sam's office. Here's a here's a great uh picture of Sam in his office at Calvary Church. It was really fun when I got this this picture.

It was the one there on the left and I go, "I know that guy." And when I blew it up, sure enough, it's Bill Wilson. It was a little picture of Bill that was in in Sam's office. Uh so in it uh during the whole time he's talking to Sam, what Charlie Clapp's really thinking about is this date he's got with this Dolly.

And so he finally gets himself out of there and he says, "I departed Girl World. Leaning back in the taxi, I lit a cigarette. Phew.

It's a wonder that I didn't make an ass out of myself and surrender my life or some fool thing. And then suddenly the street lights grew dim. The most overwhelming powerful feeling gripped me.

Something inside me said, "You must surrender your life to me." So it's really fun. Uh it's all it's the flip of bills. It's dark.

But yet the the spirit's there. Roland Hazard. I like to say that Roland had the educational varieties hanging out with uh with um uh Carl Jung.

He's tried all these different things and uh he's drinking there there he had two profound changes. He had two different experiences where he where he sobered up uh in the Oxford Group. But uh the one that that uh that I like to refer to is uh uh when he's on the train uh he's been drinking and going to meetings since he's gotten back from Paris and he's on the train and he's reading Vic Kitchen's book.

I was a pagan. And he's reading about, you know, liking every kind of you know, narcotic stimulant and everything else and and he identified in death at at depth and he and he uh he had a surrender on the train. Now, his experience, not only did he help lots of people in the Oxford Group.

I mean, he was a he was a big-time speaker. I mean, people he was a famous man and one of the things that later on as the Oxford Group changed from anonymity to getting the people that had some cachet out and doing the talking because maybe they would bring more people in and and more people would have a chance to change. And of course, we owe him the great uh thing because he helped Ebby.

One of the things that people always say to me is "Did Rowland die sober? Did Ebby die sober? What was wrong with them?

I think it's the height of arrogance for us to view these people who made a surrender and had an experience of change in their lives in the Oxford Group from the Alcoholics Anonymous perspective. They were not in a group that talked about having a sobriety date and permanent abstinence on an all-time basis. They were talking about having their lives changed and living from a spiritual center.

And some of them drank and some of them didn't and this and that and another thing, but we really I think do a great disservice not only to them, but to other members of our fellowship that maybe save our lives that may or may not have been here on an all-time basis. Of course, there's Ebby. His was an educational variety.

He had He had a couple weeks with Rowland running around speaking at meetings and they took him down to Calvary Church. He was there for a month and he went to visit Bill and he had 6 weeks. And Bill knew that clearly this worked.

It was forever. And sometimes you know, do we take for granted this amazing miracle that we have of being sober a day at a time put together. And of course, our friend Bill Wilson he had a sudden experience.

He had a sudden release from his drinking obsession. A co-founder of AAA. He establishes this format for personal change, which he stole basically from the Oxford Group.

Um uh facilitating the moral ripening. Because isn't that what we do when we come to meetings? We're sitting in there.

We don't know where we are. We don't know what's going on. And here are these women and men telling their stories of how it is that they changed.

And in that process, this moral incubation happens. We identify and gradually we stop drinking. Dr.

Bob Bob has the educational variety. He's drinking and going to meetings for a few years. And you know, I I'm fortunate that I did not get sober in only the 164 pages of the big book.

When I got sober, we could read it unsupervised. And Dr. Bob's nightmare is a wonderful part of my life.

And in it, he talks about that unlike the others of of the crowd the thirst never left him for the first 2 and 1/2 years. It was almost always with me. And yet he works with thousands of alcoholics.

Co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. So, again it doesn't matter. Sudden or gradual.

What's the fruits? And with this group, it seems that you know, the people that have the educational variety seem to touch a lot of people. And then Marty Mann Now, if you haven't read a feminine victory again, it's not in the first 164 pages.

Um and there's a marvelous biography out by Marty Mann. And Marty Mann had this incredible uh experience. She was uh this debutante, lots of lots of uh lots of money.

She could drink really, really good. Um she ended up going to Europe and hanging out there and being a socialite. Liquor finally gets to her, so she comes back to America thinking that she's going to get better.

She can't understand what's wrong with her. She can't understand what's wrong with her. There is no concept of alcoholism as a disease in most of the folks.

She's gone to everybody. She's gone to everyone. She can't She's run out of all resources.

She ends up at Blythewood Manor. And the only reason that she was there is a friend burned a favor and got her in with this guy by the name of Harry Tiebout. Dr.

Tiebout was one of the people that got one of the multilith copies of the of the book Alcoholics Anonymous, one of the review copies. And uh he got sick. He's a busy doctor.

He got sick. So, he decides to look through his correspondence. And when he takes a look at this thing, Alcoholics Anonymous, he goes, "Oh my gosh." And he brings it down to Marty and he says, "You read this thing." And so, Marty starts reading it and she can't believe it.

She's She's spent all of her life reacting to this this thing where she was sure she wasn't sane, but people like you just don't ever get it. She's been everywhere and suddenly there are all these people like her. And then there's this God stuff.

Oh. Oh, not that. But she keeps reading and and and she keeps identifying and then all of the sudden um she throws the book away and she goes off and over a couple days she's she's having some conflict with one of the one of the people at the at the the hospital and she's I know what I'll do.

I'll just go out and drink at her. I'll leave the insane asylum, go get a bottle. I'll show her.

And she goes back and she just happens to pick the book up and she starts to read where it talks about you know, drinking at somebody. And how insane that is like hitting yourself with a hammer. And when she has that when she sees that, she has this incredible white light experience.

Now the difficulty for Marty is is that when she has this experience, she's had something like it before and the last time she had it what she did is she walked out of a second floor window. So, she's convinced that she's insane. She goes running back to Tibo.

She says, "Tibo, you know, this is what happened. Everything became clear. Everything became still.

The colors became different. What's wrong with me?" And Tibo says to her, "Relax. That sounds just like something out of The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.

You are sane. Now go back down and finish reading that book." And that was the first woman that kept the gift of sobriety. That was a woman because of the suffering she had in her life went out and founded the National Council on Alcoholism, which changed the way the medical profession and the legal profession view alcoholism.

What are the fruits of that experience? Again, this is Sam Shoemaker talking about the experience. And Sam says, "I believe that it is a relatively sudden manner for many and a combination of suddenness and gradualness for others.

I believe that it is likely to be an experience which takes place at a definite and recognized time. James wrote, "Self-surrender has been and always must be regarded as the vital turning point of religious life." And again, instead of using the medieval religious, we could say of spiritual life. Now, I'd like to wrap up with a little bit about Jung and his analysis of alcoholism.

This disease that that that I have. That that he wrote in the letter in the response to the letter that Jason was kind enough to read earlier. Um Now, Jung's analysis of Rowland was this.

His craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness. Expressed in medieval language, union with God. And I don't know about you, but when I drank, I was complete.

And I'd never been complete before. I had always been a divided self. But when I drank, I became complete.

And it worked for as long as it worked, and then it left. And Jung goes on to say that you might be led to that goal, the path out of alcoholism, by an act of grace, a sudden experience, or through a personal and honest contact with friends. Going to meetings.

Or through a higher education of the mind beyond the confines of mere rationalism. I see from your letter that Rowland has chosen the second way. In other words, he was going to the meetings.

So, I'd like to take a couple of minutes, just a few. Take 3 minutes and we'll meditate together. And what I'd like you to do, if you would, is join me and close your eyes.

And breathe in. And breathe out. And ask yourself these questions about your experience.

Was yours sudden or gradual? When did it happen? Who led you to this experience?

And what are the fruits? >> >> Thank you. Bill Wilson talked on and on in the last years of his life and I highly recommend that you go to grapevine.org or you Google spiritual experience and read the articles that he wrote or the talks that he transcripts of talks that he gave to and I'm sure our taper can get it for us.

It's a talk that he gave on spiritual experience to a group of recovering priests in in 1966. And in it he talks about the fact that too much emphasis is put on the people that have had a sudden experience. That somehow they've been made something special.

When the fact is that the only difference is the time factor. He said, "In me, it all came at once. In other people, it may take years, but the fruits are the same.

We're not drinking and we're carrying a vital message." He said that you will sit there in the meeting and you'll hear some guy get up and say, "I don't know about this spiritual stuff. I've heard about Bill and his hot flash and I don't get any of that. But you know, I got a wife who's happy to see me come home.

I got an employer that trusts me. My children don't shrink when I walk in the room." And Bill says, "We all know that's the deal. There is no more than that." And yet this person says, "I don't get the spiritual angle." We only know that he hasn't gotten to the point that he says the words.

Now, in this room, there's probably at least 20 people that have had one of the sudden white light experiences. Um I was 9 months sober, 8 months sober, 7 months, I don't know. I was sitting in a room and the room left.

And I sat there. It was nothing but white. I could feel the consciousness of the chair underneath me and gradually that there were people around me, but my mind said, "Um this must be an LSD flashback." And my heart said, "No, no, no.

Pay attention." And I did. And what was there was what's called in classical language the peace that passes understanding. There are no words.

There are no ways that you can take these syllables and wrap it around an experience like that. The best I can tell you is is I knew that everything was known. And everything was okay.

But an alcoholic male's involved. So I come up with a question. And I say, "What about war?" in my mind.

And the feeling was wasn't an answer, it was a feeling. Don't worry, I got it. And then I sat there and and for another few minutes, I don't know how long it was, maybe six, maybe eight, maybe 12.

And I started to ask another question. I was going for the abortion card. And uh And and just as I even started to form it, the feeling came again.

Don't worry, I got it. And I sat there in the presence. And then after a time, the the woman who was speaking was Liz La Preste.

And the the moment had come when she was saying that I drank away my soul, that I drank everything away, everything that makes a human being a human being, and I was left nothing but an animal. And at that moment I went poof. And then she was still talking as the room started to come back in.

And at this place, the Westwood Community Church, there are three stained glass windows. And that was the first thing that came into my vision, and it's God is love. And I looked around.

And I was scared. And it was apparent to me that nobody else had been through the door that I'd been through. And so I kept my mouth closed.

And I didn't say anything about it for a while. And uh And a few weeks later I'm it's late at night. I'm talking to an old-timer over coffee and the old-timer said, "Oh yeah, kid, that happens all the time, but but we don't say anything cuz we don't want to scare the newcomer." I said one thing about it at a meeting one time a guy came over there chair at me calling me a liar.

Um so I didn't say anything. We the AA that I came into not only could we read the book unsupervised, but people were coming over chairs and things were flying and stuff. It was It was a great time to get sober.

And uh And I looked up my old parish priest and I said to him, "This is what happened." And what he did is he went back to James and he also told me he said, "I wish that that was my story." He said, "But it's not." He said, "I wish with all my heart that that was my story, but it's not." He said, "But I've had a couple of parishioners over the years and this is what has happened. This is happening all the time." And it's sudden or it's gradual. But it's the same experience cuz what's the fruits of the experience?

I'm still with you and I'm still sober. And I'm doing my best to carry this message. And for me the tragedy in my life is that I lived for 20 years as if the experience didn't happen.

I just kept it tucked away in my heart and I didn't live risking deeply loving fearlessly all the time knowing that all is okay and all is known. Carl Jung ends his letter to Bill Wilson with this formula. He says, "You see alcohol in Latin is spiritus.

And you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depriving poison. The helpful formula, therefore, is spiritus contra spiritum. The spirit of using medieval language, God, against the spirits of alcohol.

Thank you. >> >> Thank you for listening to Sober Sunrise. If you enjoyed today's episode, please give it a thumbs up as it will help share the message.

Until next time, have a great day.