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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. Well, good afternoon everybody and welcome to the um December 2008 men's spiritual weekend, uh Far Corners.

I wanted to start out with um a comment about you. This uh conference or this spiritual weekend is not advertised locally. We don't tell the people in Tampa that we have this and we don't put any flyers out.

It's all word of mouth. It's all just somebody telling somebody and somebody telling somebody. Somehow you hear about it and as you saw we have two people from overseas.

We've got two from Alaska and about six from California, Georgia, Oklahoma. So somehow you all got assembled here and I find that very exciting and you will find it as you get talking to each other because you have that in common that something told you to do this for yourself. Now it could be that uh you're fairly new and you want to see what something like this is like.

It could be that you are um just trying to refresh your program a little bit, but it also could be that you are becoming a seeker. And a seeker uh in the spiritual world is someone who decides to put a great priority on connecting with the God of their understanding and putting it ahead of a lot of almost everything else in an attempt to see what you can actually accomplish in this lifetime. And as people choose to do that, you serve as an example to others in your area because they will sense something different about you.

They will see a different aura or a different energy or a different light. They will hear answers out of your mouth that inspire them to ask you more questions about it. And I like to think of that as beacons.

It's my favorite word for seekers in AA. My example, of course, was Chuck Chamberlain. And the guys from California know exactly what I'm talking about.

That when you were around him, you just knew he knew something that you didn't know. and that he had something and it inspires others to what is that and how do I get it and so on down. And beacons are as necessary in the in AA and in the spiritual world as lighouses were years ago when ships were trying to navigate on the oceans and as airport beacons.

Mike knows about that. And transponders today. They serve as a navigational reference point.

And if there's anything we need in the spiritual world are more of these navigational uh reference points. And you may find that um you're being called on to be one of those even though you didn't want to volunteer. that circumstances have caused something to happen in your life where you're no longer satisfied with the level that you've been maintaining for however many years.

And so the fir this first lecture when we get to it is going to be directed at um exactly that what that means and so on down. But before we get to that, we have a just a simple little exercise. They put um paper cups on in front of everybody and all we're asking you to do is to take a little piece of paper and on that paper write and you're going to tear it up as soon as you write it.

So don't worry about anything you're going to write. What is the heaviest problem that is weighing on you now? In other words, if we go inside your own head, you already know the answer.

It's been weighing there for a while. And simply write it down, look at it, and tear it up and put it in the cup, whatever it is. And we'll just take a minute and um allow everyone to do that.

Done. Done. Done.

Done. The front is a lot faster. That's why they're sitting in front.

>> Okay. Is everybody pretty well finished? Anybody who hasn't finished, huh?

Okay, what we're going to do, and this is all just symbolic so you can see what it's what it's like. Um Chris is going to come up here with a trash bag and we'll just start with the front row and uh what you want to do is simply take the paper cup with this heavy problem in it and walk up to the bag and hold it over the bag and just let go. And if you're having a hard time walking, Chris can walk back to you.

Okay. Um and so that what we're really doing is just letting go. We just take that cup and just hold it over the bag and let go of it.

There we go. Okay. Start with the front row here.

Just come up. Drop it in. But as you drop it, just let go of it.

Don't push it in. Don't do anything except let go of it. There we go.

That was a heavy one there. Okay, guys. Walk back a little bit.

There they go. We're actually going to take the cups and reassemble the pieces of paper and and identify each person and send it home to your home group. >> That's how you knew we were going to buy.

>> Yeah. >> This will be our first group. >> Yeah.

>> So they call it group. >> Yeah. >> All right.

We're we're getting very close. Dick, you better get rid of that one. >> Oh, there we are.

We're down the last row. Okay. And tie it up.

Can we just tie those ends together? Now, let me have that and we'll >> I get mine back. >> Okay, now we got to get rid of this.

So, we're going to ask Amy to dump this in the trash. >> Can you get it? >> There you go.

Now, Amy's not a weightlifter, as you can see. And yet, with one hand, she's able to hold the 55 of the heaviest problems that you guys brought here. And they weigh heavily on us.

And they're made out of air. They're made out of thought. That's exactly what is weighing so heavily on us as we deal with these things.

And that whole exercise was just to demonstrate one of our sentences in the um big book. It must be there five times. Our problems we think are of our own making.

And the way you make a heavy problem that is weighing heavily on you is to think it that it's heavy, categorize it as it's heavy and it will start feeling very heavy and you will actually be tired carrying that problem around. I'm reminded of um a nightclub show where the hypnotist asked for a volunteer, called the person up on the stage, hypnotized them, and then informed them that the pencil sitting on the table weighed 600 lb and asked them to try and pick it up. Some of you have probably seen something like that.

And they can struggle with both hands and try to pick that pencil up and they can't because they've been told in a hypnotized fashion that it weighs 600 lb. And when the um hypnotist snaps his hand, his fingers, they can pick it up as light as a feather. And it lost all the weight.

and all the weight of it is gone. Which leads me to the topic of our first lecture, back to the basics of awakening. Because certainly the hypnotist snapping the fingers is waking the person up to the fact that the pencil doesn't weigh 600 lb.

And if you look at our program, if we wanted to look at it in terms of is there one result that uh the 12 steps are designed to achieve, it would be called the awakening. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps. So the whole point of doing the 12 steps is to have this awakening.

So the question is if awakening is the answer, what was the problem that awakening fixes? You work backwards and you should be able to come up with the answer. If I told you that the solution was rat poison, you might be able to make a brilliant guess that the problem is people had a lot of rats.

Or if I said the solution is bug spray, please guess what the problem is. You might say somebody has a lot of bugs. But here I'm saying the solution is awakening.

What's the problem that it fixes? Not such not an easy question, is it? Well, it's obvious.

It's sleeping. We're all asleep. Is that it?

We have to be awakened like Snow White or something? Do you think that's it? That you're asleep and everything that you're experiencing isn't real and you're going to be awakened and free from all of that.

What if that was true? Well, the best I could come up with using our literature, self-centeredness is the root of our problems. Self-centeredness, we think, is the root of our problems.

So, instead of saying we're in a dream state, I'll say we're in a self-centered trance. Because of our self-centeredness, we have created a heavy world. We have created a series of problems that are weighing heavily on us because we're the center.

And as the center, as we look around, how could you not be at the center? you're a little kid and you go out and you're you're analyzing everything. You go in the middle of a mall and you look around and there's this and there's Sears and there's that and then there's this over here and from where you're standing you're in the center of the mall and you're out in the schoolyard and you look around there's the football field, there's the baseball there and you're in the center.

No matter where you go, you're the center of it. it. I mean, you couldn't help but conclude using your own little mind that you're the center much as the um early scientists concluded that the earth was the center of the solar system.

The main reason they concluded that was because they lived there. And what else would be the center except where I am? And all the kings and pharaohs and all of them, they agreed with that.

They said, "You're damn right. This is the center cuz I'm here." And then when these astronomers started checking things a little more closely and found out that the sun was the center, there was hell to pay. Great hell.

First of all, we'd have to change our all our maps. We would have to change all our thinking. And it would be a great blow to the ego to realize the center's out there.

We're just one of these things orbiting around it. And so it is for us to become unself- centered, which happens in awakening. And my uh as I said, Chuck Chamberlain was my um greatest teacher of Bill Wilson and all of what he wrote and said.

And Chuck in the new pair of glasses or in a lot of his talks, he always made one statement that he did time after time after time. And the statement was there's only one problem that exists for mankind and it includes all problems and that problem is conscious separation from God, from others and from ourselves. And the solution to that which includes all solutions is conscious contact.

Conscious contact is synonymous with awakening. So he laid it out and it's interesting to I use that and I go and I'll bring it up at a discussion meeting and I'll go why don't we try this? Forget all those other problems.

They don't even exist. There's only one. and that is conscious separation from your higher power.

Why don't we approach um discussion about whatever is going on with that perspective and that lasts about a minute and somebody goes, "Well, my problem is I don't have enough money and my problem is my wife left me and my problem is my health isn't too good and my problem is I'm getting tired. My problem is this. My problem is that.

And we go, I thought we just agreed that there's only one problem. You see, if we agreed that there's only one problem, then we'd never work on any other solution except conscious contact or awakening and improving the contact. Oh god, I'm worried about money.

I have to work on improving my conscious contact. Oh my goodness, I have this problem. I have to work on improving my conscious contact.

It doesn't come naturally. It just doesn't feel like that would be the most productive thing to do. And so when I sponsor people now, it just I started doing this about four or five years ago.

I tell them right up front, you and I are going to sit here and you're going to have a spiritual awakening. That's why I'm here is to show you how to have a spiritual awakening. And when you have that, you're going to see everything differently.

And a lot of the problems you have today, you won't even remember. That's quite a statement. That's quite a mouthful to put on the table right off the bat.

That these steps we're going to take are designed for you to have this. Now, by putting that out up front, it happens every time. Part of um the wonder of the spiritual awakening is the realization that it's going to occur.

And as you trigger that, there's something inside of us that gets very excited about that. There's something inside of us that really connects with the possibility of that happening. And um one of the ways I like to point it out is by making this observation that uh if you went back about 50 years in AA and you went to um any small city and certainly every small town or every town, there was only one AA meeting a week.

One meeting a week. And you go, how the hell do you stay sober on one meeting a week? Well, number one, you really look forward to the meeting.

That is a very popular meeting, man. Boy, two more days I'll be at the meeting. Two more.

So, you that meeting is really cool. The second thing you might do is find another guy who goes to that meeting and halfway through the week, have a cup of coffee with him so you can both go, "Well, three days and we'll be at the meeting." But mostly you prayed like hell. You just keep kept praying.

God, help me to get to the meeting. God, get me through this. God, God, God, God, God.

And then you finally got to the meeting and you went, "Yay! Yay!" And it felt wonderful. you were at the meeting and you shared and then you started through the week again praying like hell.

So now we'll fast forward to today. It's a different picture. It's rare there's only one meeting a week.

In most of our metropolitan areas there's hundreds of meetings. There's meetings at 6:00 in the morning, noon meetings, 5:00 in the afternoon meetings, 7:00 meetings, 8:30 meetings, midnight meetings, women's meetings, men's meetings, gay meetings, pilots meetings, doctor's meetings, dual addicted meetings, um discussion meetings, there's everything. There's conferences, weekends, conventions, uh, dances, clubs, pamphlets on everything.

There isn't one subject that hasn't been covered in the pamphlets. There is such an enormous support system, you don't have to pray at all. Now, just think about that.

There's such an enormous support system. You don't have to pray at all. Now, I'm not saying you don't pray, but it's possible to maintain sort of a halfway semidecent level of sobriety by just taking advantage of the support system, relying on the inspiration of others.

And that is an interesting condition and um it's up to each individual to not allow themselves to just rely on the support system to go beyond that and that's exactly what we're talking about now in preparation for the second lecture which is um contemplative AA which I chose because I knew everybody's ego would like that. Oh, contemplative ed. I like that.

That's reminds me of Plato and all of that. So, it I'm certainly in the right place. I'm certainly glad that that's going to take place.

So, so in looking to get some ideas about that, I ran across a paper on the internet, which you're going to get copies of at the end of this lecture. I just didn't want everybody reading it. And it's by a doctor Dasher, Elliot Dasher, and the name of the paper is contemplation and addiction.

And it turns out he's a really brilliant guy. He's got all kinds of papers on various subjects. and he decided to confront the other doctors with a different way of looking at addiction, all addictions, instead of the physical, the craving and the obsession and um the psychological and and so on down.

He decided to advance the idea that all addictions are attempts to reunite with our original nature uh through an erroneous path, alcohol, drugs, sex, you name it. and he makes the case and he uses as an example Roland Hazard's visit to Dr. Carl Young when Dr.

Young said to him, "I can't help you any further, but I have seen people with your obsessive addictive alcoholism make it by seeking a spiritual solution to that." And then in his letter later later to Bill Wilson which Dr. Natcher references he points out that uh in Dr. Young's um estimation alcohol alcoholism is really a manifestation of a low level thirst for spiritual union.

that the heart of the problem is that we miss God. Don't realize that that's what we miss. And we're trying to fix it on these alternate paths.

It could be greed. If I get enough money, I will once again have that united feeling of being connected to God, which we remember from when we first arrived here in that wonderful connected state. And then as we grow up and start looking around and we become the center, we learn all these other ideas.

And we're all told by those that came before us, these are the rules of life. And no one explains that the problem you're having is that you are getting separated from your creator and you are becoming self-centered. And it's just you out there.

And every one of us is told by our fathers something like, "Son, sit down. Let me explain life to you." It's your life. No one else is going to do your life for you.

It's up to you to understand life and to make something out of yourself. If you make something out of yourself, then you might end up with something that'll make you happy and you'll be married and you have some kids and you study hard and you get high grades and then you can get a good job. And they explain the whole thing which is a very advanced course in self-centeredness.

You you you have to do it. You're the one. You're it.

You're And so we just go, "Okay, me." Well, there's 6.7 billion other people who are trying to accomplish the same goal and we get in each other's way because you're getting some of what I need in order to accomplish this. And so, we are at loggerheads with one another because we're all self-centered. And we're the lucky ones.

We failed to such a degree that we actually became open-minded to the idea that all of our ideas might be wrong and that seeking God would fix it all. And so as he wrote his paper, he's suggesting no matter what the addiction is, seeking God will fix it because that's what the addiction was trying to fix. When I encountered alcohol, something inside of me said, "This is it." I didn't know what it was, but it told me if I follow this hard enough, it'll fix that core problem inside of me, which I didn't realize was conscious separation from my own creator.

And that problem cannot be fixed in any other way. When you get married and now you have some kids, oh boy, now I'm complete. And then you check inside and you go, "No, I'm not.

It's still there. It is still there. Whatever it is, we don't know what it is yet, but it's still there.

And it's been nagging me ever since I was little." And so he suggests that um this would be another way for doctors to look at all addictions. All addictions are erroneous spiritual searches where somebody got the idea that making a lot of money could fix this core problem. Someone said enough sex will fix that.

Enough power, if I could just be president, that will go away. And so we go after it with the assumption that if you do it hard enough, eventually you will get there. and we pursued it into the gates of insanity and death.

That's the commitment we had to the false search. And boy, we went down. And no matter how hard we got out, when we came out, I said, "Well, more I missed the target a little bit.

This time I'll drink warm vodka, but eventually I will get there." And so we just we just made that terrible detour down a path that we thought was going to take us somewhere. And so we're back to um his paper and he makes the same connection and observation that I just made with we have a support system that is so strong that you don't have to pray. you don't ha hardly have to pray and he suggested that early aa in the beginners they had to completely seek God to a degree that we don't have to do today and he suggests I'm not saying I agree with him that we transfer our addiction to alcohol and we become addicted to aa And that AA is the new search.

And that AA attending meetings or whatever it is will eventually give us that union with God. And what it does, it gets us a little more comfortable, but we still haven't achieved the union. And that's what our program tells us once we get past the 10th step or into the 10th step where it says we've entered the world of the spirit.

It suggests what these uh the ground rules are of the world of the spirit. Um this is out of the big book and they comes right after the promises. I'm I'm sure most of you already know this, but I'm just going to re review it.

And the last promise is we suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we couldn't do for ourselves. That is probably as good a definition of a spiritual awakening as you'll ever see. We suddenly realize as an individual that there really is a God and something is happening between me and that God and it's real.

And Bill says, "As a result of that moment, we've entered the world of the spirit because we're now connected to this force in a way that we weren't before." Up until then, it was a theory. We went to a church, they told us there was a God, and here's who the God is, blah blah blah, and there really is a God. Or we didn't go to church, but we came to AA, and we had a sponsor, and he told us about his higher power, and he told him, "Look at the results I got." And we saw him be serene in terrible moments.

We saw him. He's happy all the time. And we go, why the and we all said that same thing.

I want what he has. And he says, well then I'm going to show you how to get what I have. And when you suddenly realize that God is doing for you something, then you have it.

You now have what he what you saw in him and that you want. And so it says in there, um, well, if we're in the world of the spirit, how does that what are the new rules of the world of the spirit? What are the new rules out of the 10th step?

The rules are so simple, we ignore them. Nothing could be that simple. Chuck Chamber, I I remember him saying, I want you to understand something.

For the last 22 years, I just get up every day and get guided by God. That's the end of my whole discussion. That's it.

There's the plan. That's it. Any questions?

And we go, "Oh my god, that's um well, that's for him. He's some guru or something. I got a lot of freaking problems.

I haven't got time to sit around and wait for God to guide me. For God's sakes, I got to make some money. They're looking for me." You know, that's fine for later, but I'm not going to do that.

All right. So, let's look. What does the 10th step say?

Right after it says we've entered the world of the spirit. He said whenever we get upset, we're frightened, we're agitated, whatever it is, we ask God that wants to remove them. Okay, there it is.

Any questions? And we go, oh, that's cool. But I got a lot of problems and I've got to I've got to wait a minute.

The whole plan was if any of those things happen, we ask God and wants to remove them. Yeah, that's cool. But I'll tell you, I've got a situation and and it's like you just go goodbye.

It's very similar to Chuck saying there's only one problem that includes all problem. That's cool, Chuck, but I got a lot of problems. In other words, there's a tendency to dismiss the whole 10th step.

Ask God at wants to remove them. Imagine the how boring discussion meetings would be. all the way around the room.

Well, my wife's leaving me, but I ask God and wants to remove that and I feel good. The next person, well, I'm going through bankruptcy. It has me panicking, but I asked God at wants to remove it and he did.

Everybody would repeating the same solution. No creativity on the part of anyone. So, what do we hear instead?

What I like to do, you ever hear said, isn't that right? >> What I like to do is go running. What I like to do is go home and read a book and watch TV.

What I like to do, what I like to do, what I like to do. And so, we've come up with alternate plans for letting go and letting God. It's just human nature.

After all, who knows me better than me? We're back to self-centered. And that I really should be able to think up something to tailor made for my problems.

And so when I think of back to the basics um of awakening, I try to imagine looking at the steps as they lead to awakening instead of leading to not drinking or leading to sobriety, which is a more traditional way to do it. And if you'll do that in your own thinking and reviewing the steps of the program, you'll it'll it'll all fall in it'll all fall into place. That the steps are designed to unccreate the world that you created to dismantle it.

in effect to take away the dream state to take away the self-centered trance to self-centeredness has many components probably a h 100,000 and the steps one by one dismantle the all of the ideas that we put together in order to survive in a place where we're the center of it and God is something that we're seeking and at the um I remember the first time I saw self-centered is the root of our problems maybe you did the same thing I went you know something but now that I got an open mind I said I think you're right I never would have admitted that before but now I'm in the crowd where it's okay to be wrong once in a Well, other guys are owning up to the fact that maybe they were self-centered. Well, maybe I'll join in and say, "Yeah, yeah, I see that now. I really am self-centered, and I'm going to fix that.

I'm going to go home tonight and do something about being self-centered." Really? What are you going to do? Well, I'm going to I'm going to become unself- centered.

Oh, really? Uh, what the hell is that? I don't know.

But it sounds like the only possible answer to self-centeredness. So, what how do you become unself- centered? You become God- centered.

It's the only way out. Just like the solar system went from earth centered to sun centered. And the second it did, all the mathematical formulas balanced.

Everything was in its place. Everything was right. Everything was at peace.

There was nothing in friction with anything because that is the true center. And the same thing when we awaken to being God centered and then look around the whole place looks different. The problems in again in our 10th step in the big book are removed.

They no longer exist. They aren't solved. They just aren't there.

And I've noticed maybe over the last 10 years that the people I sponsor when they have a problem, I ask them to come over and we're going to talk about the problem. And my job is to convince them that they don't have a problem, that they saw the situation incorrectly. And I got that idea early on with my sponsor when I would run to him.

You know how when you're new, the sky is always falling. And I'd call him up. Sky is falling.

Sky is falling. All right, come on over and tell and then I'm going to get fired. And then the Marine Corps is going to do and then my wife and then he'd go, "Well, okay.

Yeah, I see what you're talking about, but you know, you've got six months sobriety now. And you've made a lot of new friends. Matter of fact, you're the coffee maker now in the group that people are counting on you to go there.

and we're scheduled to talk, you and I, in a week. That's pretty exciting. We're going to be going over there.

And then he starts on this long rattly s story. And when he gets through, I go, "Well, if you look at it that way, it's not so bad." Well, where the hell did my problem go? He just chose to look at it differently.

And I actually was joking around and I said, 'May we ought to have in our home group a committee of three elders who get to determine whether a person has a problem or not. And at the end of the group meeting, we have the those of you with a problem come on up and talk to our old-timers. And you do your best to convince them of the problem.

Now, gentlemen, this is it. And then you go and you lay out your best case that you have a problem. And then the three of them huddle.

On the other hand, sorry, son, that doesn't qualify as a problem. You mean I don't have a problem? No.

Okay. You see what I'm saying? Suppose you just went, "Oh, okay." Then what the hell would you carry around?

What would you worry about? What would you nash your teeth over? They just stole your act.

They just took away something that you created. We all drive ourselves crazy trying to solve problems that we created. Nothing to work on, Fred.

Let me do a little thinking. I know you think life is good, but why don't you and I sit down and think about it? Do you ever go in your room and think about things?

Yeah, now that I think about that, my business isn't doing that damn good. It may look good today, but I've been thinking about it. There's a lot of that could happen.

Economy's kind of going like this. And if you work on that for about an hour, you almost need a drink. And you never left the room.

You nothing happened to you. You just thought about things. And this is how we create problems.

And we create them because we're the center. And the center is what we would call the dream state. That's what that's what I like to think of it.

And that's what awakening fixes. It suddenly is revealed that you're not the center. And you'll notice our literature talks that way all the time.

More will be revealed. It will be revealed. It's not that it's explained.

It just gets revealed what the true picture is and then you you it's just not a problem anymore. So the um the basics of awakening is the basics of becoming God- centered. And the steps as you look at them that way, they're all designed to dismantle.

First of all, we have to give up. And then we have to acknowledge that we can't get it done by ourselves. So that takes us out of the driver's seat.

And then we decide to give this whole new spiritual thing. We're going to abandon the path we were on and go down this thing called a spiritual path. Why are we going to do that?

Cuz we see other people doing it and they look happy. The spiritual path or the beacons in the in your home group, they're the ones that you can hardly wait for them to talk at the discussion meeting. Oh, please.

Oh, please. I please. I hope Harry talks tonight.

Come on, Harry. Please. Please.

And then when he talks, you just go, "Yeah, yeah." Now, it isn't that you intellectually agree with him. It's more down here. You go, "Yeah, that is the path." Because we all are have inside of us a memory of our true home, our true nature and our true connection with God.

It's there. Bill calls it. It's a fundamental part of us.

You remember that discussion about God? We were fooling ourselves for the idea of God is deep down inside of us. It's always been there like the idea of a friend.

That is what we're trying to recapture. Only we don't know it and we go off on all these different tangents. So then we get into the inventory step.

We're inventorying everything that is creating the problems in our world. Resentments and fears and s here it is. It's just we're listing listing all of these things so that we can dismantle them and have God remove this, take this away, take that away.

So all spiritual growth is done by getting rid of things, not by getting anything. We don't need to get anything because it's already there. It already exists inside of us.

Our true spiritual nature, it's just waiting for it's like a gold bar waiting for us to discover it. And as Bill says, we get glimpses. We get glimpse of the ultimate reality.

The ultimate reality is your true nature. It is connecting with the fact that you're a child of God and nothing more. You are a spiritual being having a human experience.

And somehow we forgot that and we think we're a human experience and we're in charge of everything and this is it and there there is no God. Why isn't there a God? I didn't put one in my world.

I put myself in. How can there's not room for a god if I'm the center? And so I we end up with the very common denominator of all alcoholics.

Loneliness. It's very lonely when you're the only one there. And so awakening I I I thought up a Hollywood movie just to make this point, show you how difficult it is to awaken, which would be to go from self-centered to God- centered.

So you'll have to bear with me. In this movie, somebody falls asleep and is having nightmares and they can't wake him up. He's stuck there in a permanent nightmare state of having things come through his mind and screaming at him and all that.

I was locked up in a place like that for quite a while. There were a lot of guys doing that, running around and looking out and I felt superior just being a drunk. in there.

You know what I mean? My only problem is drinking. I didn't realize I was crazier than they were.

Um and so in this um plot, they call on you as his best friend to rescue him. If anybody can talk him out of this dream, you can. But first, we have to get you into the dream so that you can talk to him.

and they invent some kind of a serum where they can dissolve you into a injection needle and you get injected into his brain and you're in the dream with him and he sees you and he goes, "Oh, Fred, I'm glad that you're what are you doing here?" Well, I came here to talk to you. You know, all this stuff that you're seeing and you're scared of. Yeah.

Yeah. See it all around here. It's It's not real.

It's a dream. None of this is real. and I'm here to talk you out of it.

The trouble is you're not going to be able to talk him out of it because it's too real. And we can't believe that there's another world called the spiritual world until we get a glimpse of it or until we see someone else who had it who has seen it. And only then do we do we become willing, as Bill said, we come as as willing as the dying can be to actually think we could be totally wrong about everything.

Isn't that a hell of a thing to do? Grown man, smart person, having the thought that you could be wrong about everything. It's a scary thought, but I find it quite exciting that wouldn't it be great if everything I thought was true isn't true.

I'm not a piece of crap. The world doesn't suck. People aren't rotten.

Life does make sense. There really is a God and I can live there. Imagine what it would be like if you forgave every bad thing that ever happened in your life.

Every unfair thing, every unkind word, everything when you were little, when you were in grammar school, when you were in high school, they did this, they did that. The government, the IRS, politicians, you name it. It's a long list of things that um didn't go right for us.

What would it feel like if we gave a blanket pardon to every single one of those things? I would suggest to you that you would suddenly be light as a feather. That you would practically feel like you're floating.

You would be akin to a spirit. There would be nothing left. You'd go, "Well, who the hell would I be?

I am my problems." That's what I think about when I'm bored. I go back to the people that screwed me over in grammar school just to make sure that I still got them in my um inventory. And I don't know if you're aware of it, but if you don't go back and breathe life into these various problems that are yours, they could dissolve permanently.

And so it's like like a guy spinning those plates. You remember those things? And they got to you got to keep them going.

So every so often you got to go back and think about that girl that left you in college for your best friend and breathe life into it. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh god, I remember how it hurt. Oh god, I could kill that guy. And just sort of and then put it back on a shelf.

But now it'll last. It'll still be there when you come back. And we spend an amazing amount of time running, reviewing, breathing life into those problems because that's the real us.

I am the totality of all these incidents that I judged. Imagine letting it all go. Let it go unattended.

It's been said that the um whole AA program can be reduced to two words. Let go. That's what it says back here.

Simply allow everything to be as it is. Anytime you have any thought or feeling that something should be different than it is, get rid of it. No, that's okay with me.

No, that's fine. That's fine. That's fine.

That's fine. Can you imagine doing that? You would be totally in the present moment like we are now, just enjoying each other here, far away from everything else.

And slowly our true nature, the truth about ourselves and God would be revealed and we'd suddenly see it in all its glory. And that's all we ever wanted in the first place. That's the only point of us being here is to solve that one.

All the rest of it is background music. Because until we have this happen, we're going to be restless, irritable, and discontent. We're going to be keep wondering why I can't quite get it all.

And later on or tomorrow, the Amy will scotch tape up some uh holograms on the wall. And they're simply training aids to show what an awakening looks like where you stand there and you're looking at a certain picture, but you know there's a much deeper picture there that this isn't what you're trying to see. Just like we know there's a greater reality than the one we're seeing now.

And if we pursue it through seeking, it will be revealed. And when you see a hologram, when it booms, it's quite a pleasant feeling. Yo.

And then you go, that damn thing was there all along. I've been up here 15 times and the son of a Now I walk up, boing, it comes. And I tell the story when I first time I ever heard of one of these.

My son had one in Baltimore Thanksgiving and everybody was looking at it in the hallway, kids, everybody. And they all saw it but me. I don't know why, but I and so I went there and I said, "I'm the oldest.

I'm the grandfather. What the hell's the deal here?" And so during the meal, I would excuse myself to go to the bathroom, but I wasn't going to the bathroom. I was going back to that goddamn hologram and I'm staring at it a little this way and cross my eyes.

I'm doing all that. I actually left and went home and I never saw it. And only later did I get a there was a calendar with some of these and after the longest time one day I was standing there and it just went and there it was.

So, I thought about writing a book called Hologram Viewing for Dummies. And I uh and I've thought a lot about this. And I think that the only instructions you can give about seeing a hologram is this.

Stand there till you see it. That's the full instructions. Stand there till you can see it.

Those that scoff about prayer haven't prayed enough. You've been praying an hour a day for a month. Well, pray two hours a day.

You follow what I'm saying? In other words, it's there and you stare at it till you see it and then it becomes real. this seeking.

You haven't seen it yet. Keep seeking. It hasn't been revealed yet.

Keep seeking. Stop getting diverted away from what Chuck said. There's only one problem.

Conscious separation. There's only one problem. You're not seeing it yet.

You're not seeing the truth yet. It's real easy to get diverted from that. It can't be that simple.

That's what my mind said. It cannot be that simple that I simply seek until I see it. I simply continue this until it gets revealed.

And after a lot of years, as I told Steve last time I was out there, I now see what Chuck was talking about, and I love it. It's absolutely wonderful. There's another dimension to a lot of things.

And that's what our literature is telling us that right after the 10th step, it said now we want to go further. You remember that we're coming up on the 11th step. Now we want to go further.

What does it say right off the bat? It's an individual adventure. It's no, nobody's the group doesn't seek together.

You do. What do we do about that? Oh, our libraries are full of books.

Talk to your minister, your rabbi, talk to spiritual advisors. Seek, seek. See where your seeking takes you.

It suddenly isn't a wei program anymore. This is an individual adventure between you and God. I don't it could be yoga.

Whatever it something will speak to you. You'll be going by a bulletin board and you'll see something and you know I ought to try that. Nah.

How many times have we done that? Nah. It's like God's knocking on the door.

Here I I'll give you a hint. Knock. Knock.

Knock. and you look over there. Ah, I'll probably be the only guy in the class.

Nah, I'm not going to do that. Next time you have one of those, do it. Next time something says, next time one of those books back there, take it.

Follow it. See where it takes you. So what we're talking about is um transferring everything to God.

I think I talked about this at the noon meeting today. If we really were, it was necessary in the beginning to depend on God. Remember how necessary it was in the beginning?

Jeez, I got to have a drink of it. Oh, please help me. Please help me.

Please help me. And then one of the things that happens with spirituality is it works. One of the most dangerous parts of spirituality.

It works. And it gives you the feeling that you're much stronger than you used to be. And you aren't.

It all. This is God doing the work. He is making life easier.

You aren't more capable. You're taking advantage of relying on God and the way is made easy, but it feels like you've gotten stronger and you can handle things on your own now. And we end up becoming less dependent on God and more dependent again on ourselves and we're in for a fall, not necessarily back to drinking, but we're suddenly going to be having a hard time.

And so if there's anything that is um progressive about spirituality, it is becoming more dependent on God. So at the end of 10 years, if you're this dependent, at the end of 20 years, you ought to be twice as dependent. Where do we see this?

Step six and seven, we just keep turning more things over to God. More, more. We're entirely ready to have God remove this, God remove that, and then we now are nothing more.

as Chuck said, than an instrument of God. There's no more us. I just get up every day and God moves me around, puts me in different places.

And we get rid of the illusion that we're in control of our lives, which we aren't. I heard a speaker one time say that if that whole wall was a mural of your life and been painted beautifully and there's a little baby over here and here you are in grammar school and here you are playing athletics and here you are and here you are and here you are. Your role in the creation of that whole mural is the brush.

It was being painted by the master. you weren't doing the painting. You were just the instrument that allowed this whole thing to evolve.

And I remember when I heard that, I said, "Well, I had something to say about my life. I made decisions. I was I did this and I did that.

I don't think that's true." Then I don't have anything to say about that. And the question was asked me, and you can try asking yourself this, what could you have done to have gotten to AA two years sooner? Anybody think they could have done it?

We had to hit the freaking bottom that we hit. Do you follow what I'm saying? So, you couldn't have done anything to get here sooner.

Well, what could you have done to get higher grades in college? Well, I could have studied hard, but you didn't. I know, but I No, I was a off.

I was a screw off. I like drinking. I couldn't have gotten higher grade.

Oh, that's right. That's right. What could you have done to not have that terrible girlfriend in high school?

Well, I could have asked her said, "No, you couldn't have." And you start realizing there wasn't anything you could have done to have a different past. And that gets rid of a lot of guilt. It just that's your story.

That's the one. And stories are all epic stories. There has to be the struggle and the go all the way to the bottom and then coming back.

We're all prodal sons. We leave home because we're going to find something better. We leave God controlling our lives because we can do a better job because I'm self-centered and I'm off to prove.

And then we go, can I come home? And our journey back is the great that's what's happening now. We've made the turn and we're coming back home and it's all been arranged and there's God with his arms open and he said, "Let me handle all your problems for you." How about that?

In our big book, it talks about walking hand in hand with the spirit of the universe. My only job is to grab that hand. God will do all the rest.

And I'll get no credit. I like credit. So maybe I'll let God help me part of the time and I'll take over on certain other parts.

And those are the parts that get screwed up royally. And then I run back and take his hand again. And so you can see this what's being offered is the most beautiful thing in the world to be what St.

Francis called make me an instrument. Make me a channel thy peace. And the way we get there is by dying.

What dies? the self-centered world. How does it die?

By awakening. That's the process. And so all we're doing is putting into word, different words, what's already in our literature.

It's simply another way of looking at stuff that we've looked at in a traditional way. That's why I chose back to the basics of awakening because I never saw awakening follow the basics. Whenever you hear, they go, "Let's go back to the basics.

generally go, "Well, what is that?" I rarely hear someone say, you know, awakening. There's a lot of other things that are, you know what I mean? We're just going to read the big book and get that 12 and 12 the hell out of here.

All right, we're getting close to dinner time. Um, there's a couple of points One of them is that the only help that's available is perfect help. We can't ask God to help us to become more honest than we are now.

We're either going to become totally honest or we're going to do it on our own. And the story that I use and Bill remembers this from Washington DC. Um, and Bill, Bill Hatch is the guy that gave me this story.

It's from CS Lewis, and it's the little boy with the toothache. Some of you have heard this. He 12-year-old kid.

He's on the baseball team, the biggest game of the season. And the coach is going, "Okay, you guys are all set. We can beat these guys tomorrow.

The only thing you have to do is get eight hours sleep. So tell your mother, you need the eight hours." So he goes home and he tells mother, "I got to get eight hours sleep. I want to eat dinner now." He's been sleeping about three and a half hours and he wakes up with the beginning of a little tooth ache and he feels it in there and he that little tingling tingling and he knows if he calls his mother she'll give him two aspirin he'll be right back to sleep but he doesn't call his mother instead he decides to wait and see if it'll go away by itself and the more he breathes on it it's still there I don't know and he's agonizing why don't I call her no let's late.

It could go away by itself. And he waits an hour and a half and then he calls her. She gives him the aspirin.

He goes back to sleep. And then the next day, because he's not rested, he makes an error and the team doesn't win. So, well, why the hell's what's wrong with that kid?

Why didn't he call him get the two aspirin and go back to sleep? We have this same problem in AA. You have it in your spiritual life.

And the answer is that he knew his mother very well. and he knew yes, she would give him the two aspirin, but she wouldn't stop there. She would also schedule him for a dental appointment to go see exactly what was wrong with the tooth.

And he also knew his dentist. And his dentist wouldn't just look at that tooth, he would say, "While you're here, I'm going to look at all the other teeth." And then he would write down every problem there was. And you would have a series of appointments until you had perfect teeth.

He didn't want perfect teeth. He wanted two aspirin. And we want two aspirins worth of God's help.

God just cover up this little bit. But don't meddle in all the rest of this stuff. The problem is you can only get perfect help.

And that's what step six is all about. Perfection. Suddenly perfection in the 12 and 12 rears its head.

And Bill says we have to raise our eyes towards perfection. Big book progress not perfection. 12 and 12 progress towards perfection.

The absolutes have snuck their way back in. Phil wrote in a letter said, 'I snuck the absolutes back in in the 12 and 12 and step six. And so I'll finish with this with perfection.

There's no way that you and I can achieve perfection. So we'll we'll settle that right up front. However, there's perfect help available.

Perfect help available. We totally became ready to have God remove the drinking problem. And as he says in step six and the 12 and 12, we were granted a perfect release.

So we already know perfection on a case-bycase basis is available. So the only thing stand what is perfection? Total unity with God.

That that's what we're talking about with perfection. The only thing standing between me and perfection is my resistance to it. Isn't that funny?

I don't want it. There would be no role for me. I would be a servant.

End of story. My business card. Sandy Beach.

Servant. Look at yours. President of the pension company.

Servant. What the hell is that? I want to be something.

And it's the wanting to be. It's what do I want to keep? I want to keep the world I created and I don't want to have it completely eliminated and only live in God's world.

And so that's our choice. But we can't say it can't be done. Once we understand step six, we can no longer say I can't possibly get to that level.

Anyone could get to that level if they were willing to let go. One, and I'll close with this. About five years ago, I started thinking about the Daly Lama and other awakened people that I've listened to.

And all of a sudden, my little brain said, "Why don't you become like the Daly Lama?" Do you want to imagine the backlash I got from myself? Who the hell do you think you are? It was a blah blah blah.

You can't do that. You Who do you think you are? Anyone in this room could become the Daly Lama.

There's nothing different about an awakened person than us. We just choose not to do it. We say it can't be done.

We go, Chuck, you're wrong. There's a lot more problems than being separated. I don't think so.

And so I said to myself, why don't you try to do that? And I'm I don't know if I ever get there, but things have changed more in the last three or four years than the other 39. That's all I'll tell you.

Why? I just said, "Hey, go for it." What did I do? I moved seeking to the absolute top of the list.

It's my favorite thing to do. I can hardly wait to get another new idea. And to just look at this.

Oh, yeah. Maybe I can get this. It's the most exciting thing that I have ever ran run into.

Everything else gets done, but this is the top. This is the top of the list. And I'm suggesting that some of you here are close to making that decision.

It would be the biggest favor you could ever do for yourself is to take awakening and move it up to the to the top of your list. You remember when you took up running and you became obsessed with going to run forever. Then you golf and I golf golf.

take seeking and put it up at that level and see what happens. Okay, we're at the end of the time and uh we don't wrap it up with anything other than to see you at dinner and thanks for your attention. I'll see you back here later.

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.