Alcoholism: The who,what,and why of it all.

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Types of Alcoholics and Binge Drinkers. From Buddy T, (SHARE) :281:

One way that love ones of alcoholics and addicts can help themselves is by learning more about alcoholism and addiction. This edition of the Alcoholism / Substance Abuse newsletter may help you understand who alcoholics are, how they become alcoholics, they types of drugs that addicts abuse and how they come to settle upon a drug of choice.

Types of Alcoholics
http://alcoholism.about.com/od/about/a/types.htm?nl=1
You may be surprised to find that young adults with no family history of alcoholism make up the largest group of diagnosed alcoholics, while chronic severe alcohoics are the smallest group.
See More About: alcohol dependence definition of alcoholism co-occurring disorders

Nine Types of Binge Drinkers Identified
http://alcoholism.about.com/b/2008/09/24/nine-types-of-binge-drinkers-identified.htm?nl=1
British researchers have studied the social and psychological characteristics of drinkers who regularly consume twice the recommended amount of alcohol and have identified nine types of heavy drinkers.

How Do They Choose a 'Drug of Choice?'
http://alcoholism.about.com/cs/drugs/a/blnida031206.htm?nl=1
Drug abuse has a strong hereditary component. However, new research suggests genetics and shared environment have little impact when it comes to selecting a particular illegal drug.
See More About: drug abuse frequently asked questions

The Drugs Most Abused in the U.S.
http://alcoholism.about.com/od/sa/a/common_drugs.htm?nl=1
Almost 20 million people in the Unites States use or misuse drugs. What are the most commonly abused drugs? How do those drugs affect those that abuse them?
See More About: commonly abused drugs effects of drug abuse

*Identifications and causes are important components to recognize. :234:

Clinical Depression Symptom Test
Could You Be Clinically Depressed?
http://alcoholism.about.com/od/tests/a/depress_test.htm?nl=1

Does your genetic inheritance determine whether you will be susceptible to depression?
http://alcoholism.about.com/z/js/o.htm?k=Genetic%20Depression&d=Genetic%20Depression&r=Genetic%20Depression&nl=1

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Progress/contentment-Serenity, the goals of all.:D

Their are two ways to approach any recovery program, thou the choice is always yours, did you gain maximum benefit? or is it time to re-think, take another direction and leave the rest? :162:

*THINGS WE ARE
A place to share.
A refuge.
A place of belonging.
A place to care for others and be cared for.
A place where respect is given to each member.
A place where confidentiality is highly regarded.
A place to learn.
A place to demonstrate genuine love.
A place to grow and become strong again.
A place for progress.
A place where you can take off your mask and allow others to know who you are.
A place for healthy challenges and healthy risks.
A possible turning point in your life.

*THINGS WE ARE NOT
A place for selfish control.
A place for therapy.
A place for secrets.
A place to rescue or be rescued by others.
A place for perfection.
A place to judge others.
A dating service.
A long-term commitment.
A quick fix.
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Alcohol Ups Aggression in Present-Focused Drinkers
By JANICE WOOD Associate News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on December 21, 2011
Lynyrd Skynyrd Freebird w/ Lyrics - YouTube

► 9:08► 9:08
www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9sGd-JLvNA
Oct 25, 2008 - 9 min - KingPelleasOfDaien
Welcome to Lynyrd Skynyrd - Free Bird w/h lyrics! Alright an awesome song that can go to so many situations ...

Getting drunk increases aggression in people who have one particular personality trait: the inability to consider the future consequences of current behavior, according to new research.
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“People who focus on the here and now, without thinking about the impact on the future, are more aggressive than others when they are sober, but the effect is magnified greatly when they’re drunk,” said Brad Bushman, Ph.D., lead author of the study and a professor of communication and psychology at The Ohio State University.
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“If you carefully consider the consequences of your actions, it is unlikely getting drunk is going to make you any more aggressive than you usually are.”

Bushman said it makes sense that alcohol would make these people more aggressive.

“Alcohol has a myopic effect — it narrows your attention to what is important to you right now,” he said. “That may be dangerous to someone who already has that tendency to ignore the future consequences of their actions and who is placed in a hostile situation.”

Dr. Peter Giancola, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, co-authored the paper with Bushman and led the experiments used in the study.

The study involved 495 adults, with an average age of 23, who were social drinkers. Before participating, the participants were screened for any past or present drug, alcohol and psychiatric-related problems. Women were tested to ensure they weren’t pregnant.

All participants completed a measure of how much the person considers future consequences when thinking about current behavior. They indicated how much they agreed with statements like “I only act to satisfy immediate concerns, figuring the future will take care of itself.” Scores on this measure determined how much participants were present-focused or future-focused.

Men were more aggressive than women overall, but the effects of alcohol and personality were similar in both sexes. In other words, women who were present-focused were still much more aggressive when drunk than were women who were future-focused, just like men.

Half the participants were put in the alcohol group, where they received alcohol mixed with orange juice at a 1:5 ratio. The other half were given orange juice with just a tiny bit of alcohol. The rims of the glasses were also sprayed with alcohol so that they thought they were consuming a full alcoholic beverage.

Participants in the alcohol group had a mean blood alcohol level of 0.095 just before aggression was measured and 0.105 following, meaning they were legally drunk and that their alcohol levels were rising during the measurement of their aggressive behavior.

Those in the placebo group had mean blood alcohol levels that didn’t exceed 0.015, meaning they had very little alcohol in their systems and were well below standards of intoxication.

The aggression measure used in this study was developed in 1967 to test aggressiveness through the use of harmless but somewhat painful electric shocks. The researchers measured the participants’ threshold to the electric shock pain before the experiment began to ensure that no one received a shock that exceeded what they could take.

Each of the participants was told that he or she was competing with a same-sex opponent in a computer-based speed reaction test, with the winner delivering an electrical shock to the loser. The winner determined the intensity and the length of the shock delivered to the loser.

But there was actually no opponent, researchers said. There were 34 trials, and the participant “won” half of them (randomly determined). Each time they “lost,” the participants received electric shocks that increased in length and intensity over the course of the trials, and the researchers measured if they retaliated in kind.

“The participants were led to believe they were dealing with a real jerk who got more and more nasty as the experiment continued,” Bushman said. “We tried to mimic what happens in real life, in that the aggression escalated as time went on.”

Results were clear, Bushman said. “The less people thought about the future, the more likely they were to retaliate, but especially when they were drunk,” he said. “People who were present-focused and drunk shocked their opponents longer and harder than anyone else in the study. Alcohol didn’t have much effect on the aggressiveness of people who were future-focused.”

Bushman said the results should serve as a warning to people who live only in the moment without thinking too much about the future.

“If you’re that kind of person, you really should watch your drinking,” he said. “Combining alcohol with a focus on the present can be a recipe for disaster.”

Their results appear online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and will be published in a future print edition.
Source: The Ohio State University

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This is a help to study the Big Book, to fill in some of the "missing facts," answering some questions. Have your big book open to check these out.
http://www.aa.org/bigbookonline/


Roman Numeral Section

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1. - Page xiii –- Foreword to the First Edition

"We, of Alcoholics Anonymous, are more than one hundred men and women who have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body." was a total experience of 74 members from 1935 through 1938 as the original manuscript went to press, 41 known to have achieved permanent sobriety, a slight "alcoholic exaggeration," unless the wives were counted also. Florence Rankin, the first woman to achieve a considerable period of sobriety, and the only woman sober at that time, went back to the bottle and died an apparent suicide in 1939. See Pioneers of A.A.

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2. - Page xvii -- 3rd paragraph -- "Very first case..."

The very first case that Bill and Bob worked on was Eddie R. They were not successful with Eddie. He was from a prominent Youngstown, Ohio, family, had lost his rented house and was about to lose his job. At Doctor Bob's funeral in 1950, Eddie R. was there with one year of sobriety.

The first "successful" case was Bill D., AA member number three. Bill D's sobriety date was June 26, 1935, 16 days after Dr Bob's.

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3. - Page XXVI -- 1st paragraph -- "We believe and so suggested a few years ago..."

This was stated in an article in the "Lancet Journal" published in 1937.

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4. - Page XXIX -- 2nd paragraph -- "man was brought in to be treated for chronic alcoholism ..... gastric hemorrhage ..... Pathological mental deterioration."

Hank P. -- His story in the first edition of the big book was titled "The Unbeliever". Hank was a high-pressure kind of guy. He was called a "promoter among promoters". Hank had worked for Standard Oil of New Jersey. He was the 2nd member in New York. Hank wrote chapter 10 "To Employers." He subsequently relapsed in September 1939, and never again gained any degree of sobriety.

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5. - Page XXIX -- 3rd paragraph -- "and deciding his situation was hopeless, had hidden in a deserted barn determined to die."

John Henry Fitzhugh M. His story is in all of the editions of the big book, titled "Our Southern Friend". Fitz was from Hancock, Missouri and got sober in November 1935. He was 12 stepped by Bill from Towns Hospital and was considered AA number 3 in New York. He attended the Rockefeller Dinner given on February 8, 1940 in New York.

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The First 164 Pages

1. - Page 2 -- 1st paragraph -- "Night Law course."

Brooklyn Law School classes at the time were held in the offices of the Heffley School of Commerce in the historic Brooklyn Eagle [old newspaper] Building.

This was located less than half a mile from Bill and Lois's home at 182 Clinton Street. Bill would walk to the Law School.

2. - Page 3 -- top of page -- "...but we once worked on a farm for a month..."

Mid April – mid May 1925. They worked on the Goldfoot family dairy farm in Scotia, New York near Schenectady. Mr. Goldfoot's two sons worked for General Electric.

3. - Page 4 -- 2nd paragraph -- "Friend he telephoned in Montreal."

Richard O. "Dick" Johnson of Greenshields and Company, a medium sized brokerage firm in Montreal. (November 1929)

4. - Page 4 -- 3rd paragraph -- "Wife's parents"

Doctor Clark Burnham -
Born in Lancaster, PA the middle child of ten children. His father, Nathan Clark Burnham, practiced both law and medicine and was a minister in the Swedenborgian Church. Clark graduated from Franklin and Marshall College with honors and studied medicine at the Hahnemann School of Medicine in Pennsylvania. His specialty was genecology.

Matilda Hoyt Burnham (Spelman) -
Her parents were Congregationalists and Lutherans. Her cousin Laura Spelman was married to John D. Rockefeller Sr.. Clark was invited to her "coming out" party. They married in 1888.

5. - Page 7 -- 1st paragraph -- "Brother-in-law the Physician"

Doctor Leonard V. Strong Jr, the husband of Bill's younger sister Dorothy. Dr Strong attended the Rockefeller Dinner, February 8, 1940. He was one of the first trustees on the first board of the Alcoholic Foundation in April 1938. He died April 24, 1989. Leonard and Dorothy are both buried in the East Dorset Cemetary only 150 feet from the Wilson Family plot.

6. - Page 7 -- 1st paragraph -- "nationally-known hospital"

Charles B. Towns Hospital located at 293 Central Park West, New York, New York. Established in Manhattan in 1917.

7. - Page 7 -- 1st paragraph -- "Belladonna Treatment"

Belladonna is the name of a poisonous Eurasian perennial herb whose alkaloid extract or tincture was used as a sedative-antispasmotic drug in the early treatment of alcoholism. It is also known as "Deadly Nightshade."

8. - Page 7 -- 1st paragraph -- "Kind Doctor"

Dr William Duncan Silkworth. "Silky" was chief physician and psychologist at Towns Hospital. Graduated Princeton University in 1896 and from New York University, Bellevue Medical School in 1900. He arrived at Towns hospital in 1930 with his theory on alcoholism as a combination physical allergy and compulsion to drink. He used a holistic approach to treating disorders. Author of "The Doctors Opinion" in the big book. He attended the Rockefeller Dinner on February 8, 1940.

9. - Page 9 -- Top paragraph -- "Details of the airplane charter to complete a jag."

There was a new airfield by the Equinox House in Manchester, Vermont. Ebby and Bill drank all night and then decided to hire a plane. They radioed ahead that they would be coming. A high school band and complete fanfare was there to greet them when they landed. After they landed, they both got out of the plane only to fall flat on their faces. They were so drunk that they couldn't even stand up.

10. - Page 9 -- Bottom paragraph -- "The two men who appeared in court with Ebby"

Rowland Hazard and Cebra G., both were from the Oxford Group at the time. Rowland was never a member of AA. Cebra later joined AA while living in France.

11. - Page 15 -- Bottom paragraph -- "The Western city"

Cleveland, Ohio

12. - Page 16 -- 1st paragraph -- "Poor chap who committed suicide in Bill's house"

Bill C., was a "guest" for nearly a year. He was a lawyer and gambler (professional bridge player). This happened in the summer of 1936 at their home at 182 Clinton St. Upon returning home from visiting Fitz M and others in Maryland, Bill opened the door to the strong smell of the natural gas that had ended the "poor chaps" life. Over the next few months, Bill and Lois discovered that he had been selling off all of their good dress clothes to finance his drinking and gambling.

13. - Page 26 -- 1st paragraph -- "The certain American businessman"

Rowland Hazard of the Oxford Group. He never joined AA but never drank again and died at his desk at work, sober.

14. - Page 32 -- 2nd paragraph – "The man of thirty"

"The man of thirty who was ambitious in business and remained bone dry for 25 years only to die after 4 years of drinking."

This story was probably adapted from the chapter "First Steps" in the book "The Common Sense of Drinking" by Richard Peabody. There is one story on page 37 that speaks of a man 36 years old that had been drinking for 16 years and another story on page 123 regarding a man who gave up drinking to make a million dollars.

Neither one of these actually match the story in the big book. The story on page 123 is the one that most closely matches the story in the book. The big discrepancy in the story is the amount of sobriety this man had (full text below). The big book speaks of 25 years of sobriety and the other states he had 5 years sober.

"Some years ago there lived a man who decided to give up drinking until he could make a million dollars, at which time he intended to drink in moderation. It took him 5 years of sobriety to make the million; then he begins his "moderate" drinking. In two or three years he lost all his money, and in another three he died of alcoholism."

15. - Page 35 -- 2nd paragraph -- "Jim the Car Salesman"

Ralph F. author of "Another Prodigal Story" in the First Edition Big Book.

16. - Page 39 -- 2nd paragraph -- "Fred the Accountant"

Harry B. author of the first edition big book story "A Different Slant". Harry later sued AA for money he loaned to print the big book.

17. - Page 43 -- 2nd paragraph -- "Staff member at a world renowned hospital"

Percy Pollick. He was a psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital in New York.

18. - Page 50 -- 3rd paragraph – "American Statesman"

Alfred E. Smith, four time governor of New York and was unsuccessfully the first Roman Catholic presidential candidate.

19. - Page 55 -- Bottom of page -- "Minister's son and atheist"

"Minister's son and atheist who asked himself 'Who are you to say there is no God?'" was Fitz M. author of the big book story "Our Southern Friend."

20. - Page 80 -- 2nd paragraph -- "Accepted money from bitterly hated business rival. Got up in church and explained. Now a pillar of society"

This is believed to be an Oxford Group story passed along through the groupers.

21. - Page 96 -- 1st paragraph -- "One of our fellowship who failed entirely with his first half dozen prospects."

Our co-founder, Bill W.

22. - Page 102 -- Bottom of page -- "Many of us keep liquor in our homes"

Our co-founder, Dr Bob. He said "I was adamant on having liquor. I said we had to prove that you could live in the presence of liquor. So I got two big bottles and put them right on the sideboard and that drove Anne wild for awhile."

23. - Page 124 -- Bottom of page -- "We know of Situations . . . Love affairs"

Eddie R. the very first prospect approached by Bill and Bob before they helped Bill D, AA number three, "the man on the bed." Eddie was sober for a short time when his wife told him of an affair she had had and Eddie got drunk. Eddie was present at Dr Bob's funeral, 15 years later in 1950, with about 12 months sobriety.

24. - Page 135 -- 2nd paragraph -- "heavy smoker and coffee drinker"

Earl T. from Chicago. His story is titled "He Sold Himself Short" in the second edition of the big book.

25. - Page 136 -- 1st paragraph – "The member who spent most of his life in big business"

Hank P. from New Jersey. Hank's story was in the first edition of the big book entitled "The Unbeliever".

26. - Page 138-139 -- 1st paragraph -- "Executive of a bank who was undoubtedly alcoholic. Eventually on the road to recovery."

Clarence S. from Cleveland, Ohio. (880 Euclid Ave), Sobriety date: February 11, 1938. Died Sober: March 22, 1984. His story was in the first through third editions of the big book entitled "The Home Brewmeister." Clarence led a revolt to separate from the Oxford Group and announced a special meeting of alcoholics, starting the Cleveland group, May 18, 1939 at the Cleveland Heights home of Abby G.. This was the first group to be called "Alcoholics Anonymous." He attended John D. Rockefeller's A.A. dinner February 8, 1940. He was also the leader of a group of dissident anti-Conference and anti-General Service Office members.

27. - Page 140 -- 2nd paragraph -- "Prominent Dr in Chicago"

Dan Craske, M.D., (Additional references in the story "he Sold Himself Short") 3rd edition - Page 294 last paragraph, 4th edition - Page 265 last paragraph.

28. - Page 149 -- Bottom of page -- "The little company and the two employees"

Honor Dealers Company, Auto Polish Dealership. Jimmy B., whose story is "The Vicious Cycle", first appearing in the 2nd edition, and Bill W. co-founder of AA. Additional references in the story "The Vicious Cycle", 3rd edition on page 246 - 1st paragraph, 4th edition on page 227 - 1st paragraph.

29. - Page 154 -- Bottom of page -- "Clergyman"

Reverend Walter F. Tunks, Rector at St Paul's Episcopal Church in Akron, Ohio.

30. - Page 156 -- 3rd paragraph -- "The head nurse they called and the local hospital she worked at."

Mrs. Hall, admissions nurse at Akron City Hospital.

31. - Page 156-157 -- Both pages -- "The man on the bed"

Bill D. from Kenmore, Ohio, Sobriety Date: June 26, 1935. AA member number three, the "Man On The Bed." Bill was a lawyer and the first to stay sober in AA without a slip.

32. - Page 158 -- 3rd paragraph -- "Campaigns and speeches - How did he ever do?"

Bill D. ran for city councilman but lost the election.

33. - Page 158 -- Bottom of page -- "Devil may care young chap"

Ernie G. was 30 years old. He later married Dr. Bob's daughter Sue against Bob's wishes. Sue liked Ernie, but he later turned out to be a less than likeable man. Ernie's story, "The Seven Month Slip" was in the First Edition of the Big Book

In Akron, there was another Ernie G. who got sober later and who was a very good AA member and much was written about him. Don't get these two Ernie G's mixed up in your history.

34. - Page 159 -- Bottom of page -- "Who were the 'seven more'?"

Here is the list of the next 10 members. Note: Some of these had slips and came back right away. We are not certain who Bill counted or in what order. See Pioneers of A.A.

Ernie G. - Akron, 8/1935 (the Seven Month Slip)
Hank P. - New York, 9/1935 (The Unbeliever)
Phil S. - Akron, 9/1935 (the 1st AA court case)
Tom L. - Akron, 11/1935 (My Wife and I)
Fitz M. - New York, 11/1935 (Our Southern Friend)
Walter B. - Akron, 2/1936 (The Backslider)
Joe D. - Akron, 4/1936 (the European Drinker)
Myron "Jack" W. - New York, 4/1936 (Hindsight)
Paul S. - Akron, 7/1936 (Truth Freed Me)
J. D. H. - Akron, 9/1936

35. - Page 160 -- 1st paragraph -- "One man and his wife place their house at AA's disposal"

T. Henry and Clarace Williams, 876 Palisades Drive, Akron, Ohio. T. Henry was an engineer at the company where Bill W. was waging a proxy battle to gain control of National Rubber Machinery in May of 1935. The company was founded in 1928 and located at 917 Swietzer Ave, Akron, Ohio. In 1942 they switched from making machinery for the rubber industry to machinery for the plastic industry.

36. - Page 161 -- 1st paragraph -- "The community is thirty miles away."

Cleveland, Ohio

37. - Page 162 -- Top of page -- "Well known hospital for treatment"

Charles B. Towns Hospital, 293 Central Park West, New York City, New York

38. - Page 162 -- Top of page -- "One of our member's was a patient there."

Our co-founder Bill W.

39. - Pahe 162 -- Top of page -- "Dr. at the hospital"

Dr. William Duncan Silkworth

40. - Page 162 -- 1st paragraph -- "Eastern City"

New York City, New York

41. - Page 163 -- 2nd paragraph -- "AA member living in large community"

Hank P., Montclair, New Jersey

42. - Page 163 -- 2nd paragraph -- "Prominent Psychiatrist and his clinic"

Dr. Howard of Montclair, New Jersey

43. - Page 163 --3rd paragraph -- "Chief Psychiatrist of a large public hospital"

Dr. Russel E. Blaisdell, Rockland State Hospital near Orangeburg, New York. He attended the Rockefeller Dinner on February 8, 1940.

In Dr. Bob's Story

1. - Page 171 -- 1st paragraph -- "Small New England villiage of about seven thousand souls"

St Johnsbury, Vermont

2. - Page 172 -- 3rd paragraph -- "One of the best colleges in the country"

Dartmouth University from 1899-1902

3. - Page 173 -- 1st paragraph -- "One of the largest universities in the country"

University of Michigan From 1905-1907

4. - Page 174 --Top of page -- "Another of the leading universities"

Rush Medical University. Dr Bob graduated from Rush in 1910

5. - Page 174 -- 3rd paragraph -- "Western City"

Akron, Ohio

6. - Page 175 -- Top of page -- "Local Sanitariums where Bob committed himself"

Fair Oaks Villa, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio -

7. - Page 175 -- Top of page -- "Scylla and Charybdis" (Sil'la and ka-rib'dis)

Scylla is the name of a small finger of land on the Italian coast, which projects into the Strait of Messina, and sits opposite the Sicilian coast. In between is a very destructive whirlpool named Charybdis. The reference is often used to describe being in a life threatening situation. In the context used here, the statement is made as an analogy: "I was between Scylla" implies he was out in deep water "and Charybdis" implies if he went one way, he would die by drowning in the whirlpool. If he went the other way, he would die by being smashed up on the rocky coast.

When Ulysses tried to make his way through this narrow passageway, in the "The Odyssey" by Homer, Scylla, a female monster with twelve feet and six heads, managed to kill six of his sailors.

Shakespeare used this expression in his "Merchant of Venice"; "When I shun Scylla your father, I fall into Charybdis your mother."

Today we say things like "I was between a rock and a hard place" and "between the devil and the deep blue sea". Bill's reference has fallen from popular usage, but is occasionally used in academic circles.

8. - Page 175 -- Top of page -- "Local hospital"

People's Hospital

9. - Page 175 -- 1st paragraph -- "Dr. from Dr. Bob's hometown"

This occurred in 1914. The doctor was from St. Johnsbury, Vermont. The doctor was able to get Dr. Bob back home to the house on Summer Street where he was born. He remained in bed for two months. It took another two months before he returned to Akron.

10. - Page 178 -- 1st paragraph -- "The crowd of people Dr Bob was thrown in with"

The Oxford Group

11. - Page 179 -- 1st paragraph -- "Lady who called on Anne S. Saturday afternoon on the day before Mothers Day"

Henrietta Seiberling

12. - Page 179 -- Bottom of page -- "The friend at whose home Dr. Bob woke up"

Lilly. She was Dr Bob's receptionist in his medical practice in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio and her husband's name was Everett.

As in so many things, especially with we alcoholics, our History is our Greatest Asset!.. We each arrived at the doors of A.A. with an intensive and lengthy "History of Things That Do Not Work" .. Today, In A.A. and In Recovery, Our History has added an intensive and lengthy "History of Things That DO Work!!" and We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it!!

(SHARE) Barefoot's World. :281:

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For the newcomer or member doing a yearly review of the basics. :170:

Step One
Admitted we were powerless over our alcoholism-addiction-dysfunction - that our lives had become unmanageable.

1. Admitting you're powerless over your alcoholism-addiction-dysfunction is one of the most powerful actions you can take, even though it doesn't seem that way in the moment.

2. The admission of powerlessness over an alcoholism-addiction-dysfunction is NOT an admission of powerlessness over everything in your life, although sometimes you'll hear people say that.

3. By and large, the unmanageability of your life is because of your alcoholism-addiction-dysfunction.

Step Two
Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

4. Believing that something has more power than you do isn't hard when you look at your alcoholism-addiction-dysfunction.

5. How you define, or even if you don't define, your definition of Higher Power isn't very important in the beginning, and it will change over time.

6. Sanity is much more about balance than it is about anything like mental illness or madness - to be restored to balance makes a lot of sense.

Step Three
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood God.

7. Make a decision.

8. Turning our lives over doesn't mean we give up personal responsibility. In fact, it's a way of taking responsibility.

9. You are responsible for how you understand God... It's truly a personal decision and journey.

Step Four
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

10. Write your Fourth Step - use pencil or pen and paper, or a computer, but write it down - there's magic in writing.

11. Start with those things that are bothering you the most right now. This list provides many clues about the details your inventory should include. Work from the top down, going backward in time. As we write down something we remember, it will jog into place an earlier happening.

12. Expect to feel some fear writing your inventory... Fearless is about what you write, not what you feel. Total honesty is the key.

Step Five
Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

13. Admitting your wrongs to yourself is about accepting yourself as you are right now, with your flaws and faults.

14. Reading your inventory to someone you trust is really about getting honest with yourself and one other person. It's about not hiding and discovering how human you really are.

15. Choose the person to hear your Fifth Step carefully, but choose someone.

Step Six
Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

16. Look deeply inside yourself to discover if you're truly willing to let go... and if you're not, ask for the willingness.

17. Spend some time with this Step; it's often more difficult than it first appears.

18. Acceptance of the defect or shortcoming usually precedes the willingness to let it go.

Step Seven
Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.

19. If a defect or problem seems to be sticking, look again at how willing you are to let it go. Try the little prayer over and over again.

20. Humility is also about accepting yourself - all of you, the good, the bad and the in-between. There's usually more in-between than anything else.

21. Humility has nothing to do with humiliation.

Step Eight
Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

22. You made a list of at least some of the people you had harmed when you did your Fourth Step - start with those.

23. "All persons" means just that, everyone you can think of.

24. Keep your list handy so you can add to it when you remember additional people you have harmed.

Step Nine
Made direct amends to such people wherever possible except when to do so would injure them or others.

25. Becoming willing to make amends isn't always easy, but it's always possible.

26. If you're afraid making amends will harm the other person or someone else, talk over you fears with someone you trust - it's really easy to fool yourself in this area.

27. The goal here is to tell the truth, not to be forgiven by the other person. If an old relationship can be set right, so much the better.

Step Ten
Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

28. Step Ten helps us stay honest with ourselves, and helps to keep the "wreckage of the present" down to a "dull roar." Most often I found that it was my attitude that was wrong, it was just my head putting it on me one more time, and therefore an admission of wrong was to myself.

29. Being self-honest includes being aware of the good things we do as well as the bad.

30. An apology at the moment of need is best, but it's better to apologize later than never. "It is easier to eat crow while it is still warm."

Step Eleven
Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out.

31. It seems our Higher Power, however you define that, is always available - it's up to you to stay in contact.

32. Experiment with your spiritual practices. It's important to discover what works for you.

33. Expect your beliefs and relationship to your Higher Power to change over time.

Step Twelve
Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to (name your alcoholism/addiction/dysfunction), and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

34. The spiritual awakening is automatic if you work the Steps.

35. Carrying the message is often subtle and more by example than anything else.

36. Practicing the principles takes lots of practice; it's hard to get worse at something we practice, especially if we do it every day (and all night too), one day at a time.

I hope these tips are of help to you.
(share) Barefoot's World. :281:

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This is a transcribed talk that Bill Wilson gave back in 1944. It can be found in a book called "Alcohol, Science and Society" that came out in 1945 which contains 29 lectures with discussions as given at the Yale Summer School of Alcohol Studies. This is the only talk by Bill in the book. I love the fact that there is a question and answer part at the end!

THE FELLOWSHIP OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
By W.W.
As Given at the Yale School of Alcohol Studies, June 1944

My first task is a joyous one; it is to voice the sincere gratitude that every member of Alcoholics Anonymous present feels tonight that we can stand in the midst of such an assembly. I know that in this assembly there are many different points of view, that we have social workers, ministers, doctors and others - people we once thought did not understand us, because we did not understand them. I think right away of one of our clergyman friends. He helped start our group in St. Louis, and when Pearl Harbor came he thought to himself, "Well this will be a hard day for the AA's." He expected to see us go off like firecrackers. Well, nothing much happened and the good man was rather joyously disappointed, you might say. But he was puzzled. And then he noticed with still more wonder that the AA's seemed rather less excited about Pearl Harbor than the normal people. In fact, quite a number of the so-called normal people seemed to be getting drunk and very distressed. So he went up to one of the AA's and said, "Tell me, how is it that you folks hold up so well under this stress, I mean this Pearl Harbor?" The A.A. looked at him, smiled, but quite seriously said, "You know, each of us has had his own private Pearl Harbor, each of us has known the utmost of humiliation, of despair, and of defeat. So why should we, who have known the resurrection, fear another Pearl Harbor?"

So you can see how grateful we are that we have found this resurrection and that so many people, not alcoholics, with so many points of view, have joined to make it a reality. I guess all of you know Marty Mann by this time. I shall always remember her story about her first A.A. meeting. She had been in a sanatorium under the care of a wonderful doctor, but how very lonely she felt! Somehow, there was a gap between that very good man and herself that could not quite be bridged. Then she went to her first A.A. meeting, wondering what she would find; and her words, when she returned to the sanatorium, in talking to her friend, another alcoholic, were: "Grenny, we are no longer alone. " So we are a people who have known loneliness, but now stand here in the midst of many friends. Now I am sure you can see how very grateful for all this we must be.

I am sure that in this course you have heard that alcoholism is a malady; that something is dead wrong with us physically; that our reaction to alcohol has changed; that something has been very wrong with us emotionally; and that our alcoholic habit has become an obsession, an obsession which can no longer reckon even with death itself. Once firmly set, one is not able to turn it aside. In other words, a sort of allergy of the body that guarantees that we shall die if we drink, an obsession of the mind that guarantees that we shall go on drinking. Such has been the alcoholics dilemma time out of mind, and it is altogether probable that even those alcoholics who did not wish to go on drinking, not more than 5 out of 100 have ever been able to stop, before A.A.

That statement always takes me back to a summer night at a drying out place in New York where I lay upstairs at the end of a long trail. My wife was downstairs talking with the doctor, asking him, "Bill wants so badly to stop this thing, doctor, why can't he? He was always considered a person of enormous persistence, even obstinacy, in those things that he wished to achieve. Why can't his will power work now? It does work even yet in other areas of life, but why not in this?" And then the doctor went on to tell her something of my childhood, showing that I had grown up a rather awkward kid, how that had thrown upon me a kind of inferiority and had inspired in me a fierce desire to show other people that I could be like them; how I had become a person who abnormally craved approval, applause. He showed her the seed, planted so early, that had created me an inferiority-driven neurotic. On the surface, to be sure, very self confident, with a certain amount of worldly success in Wall Street. But along with it this habit of getting release from myself through alcohol.

You know, as strange as it may seem to some of the clergy here who are not alcoholic, the drinking of alcohol is a sort of spiritual release. Is it not true that the great fault of all individuals is abnormal self-concern? And how well alcohol seems temporarily to expel those feelings of inferiority in us, to transport us temporarily to a better world. Yes, I was one of those people to whom drink became a necessity and then an addiction. So it was 10 years ago this summer that the good doctor told my wife I could not go on much longer; that my habit of adjusting my neurosis with alcohol had now become an obsession; how that obsession of my mind condemned me to go on drinking, and how my physical sensitivity guaranteed that I would go crazy or die, perhaps within a year. Yes, that was my dilemma. It has been the dilemma of millions of us, and still is.

Some of you wonder, "Well, he had been instructed by a good physician, he had been told about his maladjustment, he understood himself, he knew that his increasing physical sensitivity meant that he would go out into the dark and join the endless procession. Why couldn't he stop? Why wouldn't fear hold such a man in check?"

After I left that place, fear did keep me in check for 2 or 3 months. Then came a day when I drank again. And then came a time when an old friend, a former alcoholic, called me on the phone and said that he was coming over. It was perhaps right there on that very day that the Alcoholics Anonymous commenced to take shape. I remember his coming into my kitchen, where I was half drunk. I was afraid that perhaps he had come to reform me. You know, curiously enough, we alcoholics are very sensitive on this subject of reform. I could not quite make out my friend. I could see something different about him but I could not put my finger on it. So finally I said, "Ebby, what's got into you?" And he said, "Well, I've got religion." That shocked me terribly, for I was one of those people with a dandy modern education which had taught me that self-sufficiency would be enough to carry me through life, and here was a man talking a point of view which collided with mine.

Ebby did not go on colliding with me. He knew, as a former agnostic, what my prejudices were, so he said to me, blandly enough, "Well, Bill, I don't know that I'd call it religion exactly, but call it what you may, it works." I said, "What is it? What do you mean? Tell me more about this thing?" He said, "Some people came and got hold of me. They said, "Ebby, you've tried medicine, you've tried religion, you've tried change of environment, I guess you've tried love, and none of these things has been able to cure you of your liquor. Now, here is an idea for you." And then he went on to tell me how they explained, they said, "First of all, Ebby, why don't you make a thorough appraisal of yourself? Stop finding fault with other people. Make a thoroughgoing moral appraisal of yourself. When have you been selfish, dishonest? And, especially, where have you been intolerant? Perhaps those are the things that underlie this alcoholism. And after you have made such an appraisal of yourself, why don't you sit down and talk it out with someone in full and quit this accursed business of living alone? Put an end to this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation into which you have fallen. And then, why don't you continue this policy of abating the disturbance in yourself? Why don't you take stock of all the people among your acquaintances that you have hurt - all of the people who annoy you, who disturb you. Why don't you go out to them and make amends; set things right and talk things out, and get down these strains that exist between you and them? Then, Ebby, we have still another proposal. Why don't you try the kind of giving that demands no reward? We don't mean the mere giving of money, though you once had plenty of that. No, we mean the giving of yourself to someone who is in need. Why don't you try that? Seek out someone in need and forget your own troubles by becoming interested in his." Ebby said, "Where does religion come in?" And his friends went on to say, "Ebby, it is our experience that no one can carry out such a program with enough thoroughness and enough continuity on pure self-sufficiency. One must have help. Now we are willing to help you, as individuals, but we think you ought to call upon a power greater than yourself, for your dilemma is well nigh insurmountable. So, call on God, as you understand God. Try prayer." Well, in effect, that was the explanation my friend made to me. Those of you who know a little of the A.A. are already able to see a little of the basic idea.

You see, here was my friend talking to me, one alcoholic talking to another. I could no longer say, "He doesn't understand me." Sure he understood me. We had done a lot of drinking together, and gone the route of humiliation, despair and defeat. Yes, he could understand. But now he had something. He did not shock me by calling it the resurrection, but that's what it was. He had something I did not have, and those were the terms upon which it could be obtained.

Honesty with oneself and other people, the kind of giving that demands no return, and prayer. Those were the essentials. My friend then got up and went away, but he had been very careful not to force any of his views upon me. In no sense could I have the feeling that he was moralizing with me or preaching, because I knew it was not long ago that he was no better than I. He merely said that he was leaving these ideas with me, hoping that they would help.

Even so, I was irritated, because he had struck a blow at my pet philosophy of self-sufficiency, and was talking about dependence upon some power greater than myself. "Ah yes," I thought, as I went on drinking, "yes it's this preacher stuff. Yes, I remember, up in the old home town where my grandfather raised me, how the deacon, who was so good, treated Ed MacDonald, the local drunk - as dirt under his feet; and more than that, the old son of a gun short weighted my good old grandfather in his grocery store. If that's religion, I don't want any of it." Such were my prejudices. But the whole point of this was that my friend had got onto my level. He had penetrated my prejudices, although he had not swept them all away.

I drank on but I kept turning this thing over in my mind, and finally asked myself, "Well, how much better off am I than a cancer patient." But a small percentage of those people recover, and the same is true with alcoholics, for by this time I knew quite a good deal about alcoholism. I knew that my chances were very, very slim. I knew that, in spite of all the vigilance in the world, this obsession would pursue me, even if I dried up temporarily. Yes, how much better off was I than a cancer patient? Then I began to say to myself, "Well, who are beggars to be choosers? Why should a man be talking about self-sufficiency when an obsession has condemned him to have none of it? Then I became utterly willing to do anything, to try to accept any point of view, to make any sacrifice, yes, even to try to love my enemies, if I could get rid of this obsession. First, I went up to a hospital to ask the doctor to clear me up so I could think things through clearly. And again, came my friend, the second day that I was there. Again I was afraid, knowing that he had religion, that he was going to reform me. I cannot express the unreasonable prejudice that the alcoholics have against reform. That is one reason that it has been so hard to reach them. We should not be that way, but we are. And here was my friend, trying to do his best for me, but the first thought that flashed across my mind was, "I guess this is the day that he is going to save me. Look out! He'll bring in that high powered sweetness and light, he'll be talking about a lot of this prayer business." But Ebby was a good general, and it's a good thing for me he was.

No, he did not collide with those prejudices of mine. He just paid me a friendly visit, and he came up there quite early in the morning. I kept waiting and waiting for him to start his reform talk, but no, he didn't. So finally I had to ask for some of it myself. I said, "Ebby, tell me once more about how you dried up." And he reviewed it again for me.

Honesty with oneself, of a kind I had never had before. Complete honesty with someone else. Straightening out all my twisted relationships as best I could. Giving of myself to help someone else in need. And prayer.

When he had gone away, I fell into a very deep depression, the blackest that I had ever known. And in that desperation, I cried out, "If there is a God, will He show Himself?" Then came a sudden experience in which it seemed the room lit up. It felt as though I stood on the top of a mountain, that a great clean wind blew, that I was free. The sublime paradox of strength coming out of weakness.

So I called in the doctor and tried to tell him, as best I could, what had happened. And he said, "Yes, I have read of such experiences but I have never seen one." I said, "Well doctor, examine me, have I gone crazy?" And he did examine me and said, "No, my boy, you're not crazy. Whatever it is, you'd better hold onto it. It's so much better than what had you just a few hours ago." Well, along with thousands of other alcoholics, I have been holding on to it ever since.

But that was only the beginning. And at the time, I actually thought that it was the end, you might say, of all my troubles. I began there, out of this sudden illumination, not only to get benefits, but also to draw some serious liabilities. One of those that came immediately was one that you might call Divine Appointment. I actually thought, I had the conceit really to believe, that God had selected me, by this sudden flash of Presence, to dry up all the drunks in the world. I really believed it. I also got another liability out of the experience, and that was that it had to happen in some particular way just like mine or else it would be of no use. In other words, I conceived myself as going out, getting hold of these drunks, and producing in them just the same kind of experience that I had had. Down in New York, where they knew me pretty well in the A.A., they facetiously call these sudden experiences that we sometimes have a "W.W. hot flash." I really thought that I had been endowed with the power to go out and produce a "hot flash" just like mine in every drunk.

Well, I started off; I was inspired; I knew just how to do it, as I thought then. Well, I worked like thunder for 6 months and not one alcoholic got dried up. What were the natural reactions then? I suppose some of you here, who have worked with alcoholics, have a pretty good idea. The first reaction was one of great self-pity; the other was a kind of martyrdom. I began to say, "Well, I suppose that this is the kind of stuff that martyrs are made of, but I will keep on at all costs." I kept on, and I kept on, until I finally got so full of self-pity and intolerance (our two greatest enemies in the A.A.) that I nearly got drunk myself. So I began to reconsider. I began to say, "Yes, I found my relief in this particular way, and glorious it was and is, for it is still the central experience of my whole life. But who am I to suppose that every other human being ought to think, act and react just as I do? Maybe we're all very much alike in a great many respects but, as individuals, we're different too."

At that juncture I was in Akron on a trip, and I got a very severe business setback. I was walking along in the corridor of the hotel, wondering how God could be so mean. After all the good I had done Him - why, I had worked here with drunks for six months and nothing had happened - and now here was a situation that was going to set me up in business and I had been thrown out of it by dishonest people. Then I began to think, "That spiritual experience - was it real?" I began to have doubts. Then I suddenly realized that I might get drunk. But I also realized that those other times when I had had self-pity, those other times when I had had resentment and intolerance, those other times when there was that feeling of insecurity, that worry as to where the next meal would come from; yes, to talk with another alcoholic even though I failed with him, was better than to do nothing. But notice how my motivation was shifting all this time. No longer was I preaching from any moral hilltop or from the vantage point of a wonderful spiritual experience. No, this time I was looking for another alcoholic, because I felt that I needed him twice as much as he needed me. And that's when I came across Dr. "Bob" S. out in Akron. That was just nine years ago this summer.

And Bob S. recovered. Then we two frantically set to work on alcoholics in Akron. Well, again came this tendency to preach, again this feeling that it has to be done in some particular way, again discouragement, so our progress was very slow. But little by little we were forced to analyze our experiences and say, "This approach didn't work very well with that fellow. Why not? Let's try to put ourselves in his shoes and stop this preaching. See how we might be approached if we were he." That began to lead us to the idea that A.A. should be no set of fixed ideas, but should be a growing thing, growing out of experience. After a while, we began to reflect: "This wonderful blessing that has come to us, from what does it get its origin?" It was a spiritual awakening growing out of painful adversity. So then we began to look the harder for our mistakes, to correct them, to capitalize upon our errors. And little by little we began to grow so that there were 5 of us at the end of that first year; at the end of the second year, 15; at the end of the third year, 40; at the end of the fourth year, 100.

During those first 4 years most of us had another bad form of intolerance. As we commenced to have a little success, I am afraid our pride got the better of us and it was our tendency to forget about our friends. We were very likely to say, "Well, those doctors didn't do anything for us, and as for these sky pilots, well, they just don't know the score." And we became snobbish and patronizing.

Then we read a book by Dr. Carrel. From that book came an argument that is now a part of our system. (How much we may agree with the book in general, I don't know, but in this respect the AA's think he had something.) Dr. Carrel wrote, in effect; the world is full of analysts. We have tons of ore in the mines and we have all kinds of building materials above ground. Here is a man specializing in this, there is a man specializing in that, and another one in something else. The modern world is full of wonderful analysts and diggers, but there are very few who deliberately synthesize, who bring together different materials, who assemble new things. We are much too shy on synthetic thinking - the kind of thinking that's willing to reach out now here and now there to see if something new cannot be evolved.

On reading that book some of us realized that was just what we had been groping toward. We had been trying to build out of our own experiences. At this point we thought, "Let's reach into other people's experiences. Let's go back to our friends the doctors, let's go back to our friends the preachers, the social workers, all those who have been concerned with us, and again review what they have got above ground and bring that into the synthesis. And let us, where we can, bring them in where they will fit." So our process of trial and error began and, at the end of 4 years, the material was cast in the form of a book known as Alcoholics Anonymous. And then our friends of the press came in and they began to say nice things about us. That was not too hard for them to do because by that time we had gotten hold of the idea of not fighting anything or anyone. We began to say, "Our only motive as an organization is to help the alcoholic. And to help him we've got to reach him. Therefore, we can't collide with his prejudices. So we aren't going to get mixed up with controversial questions, no matter what we, as individuals, think of them. We can't get concerned with prohibition, or whether to drink or not to drink. We can't get concerned with doctrine and dogma in a religious sense. We can't get into politics, because that will arouse prejudice which might keep away alcoholics who will go off and die when they might have recovered."

We began, then, to have a good press, because after all we were just a lot of very sick people trying to help those who wanted to be helped. And I am very happy to say that in all the years since, not a syllable of ridicule, or criticism, has ever been printed about us. For this we are very grateful.

That experience led us to examine some of the obscure phrases that we sometimes see in the Bible. It could not have been presented at first, but sooner or later in his second, third, or fourth year, the A.A. will be found reading his Bible quite as often - or more - as he will a standard psychological work. And you know, there we found a phrase that began to stick in the minds of some of us. It was this:

"Resist not evil." Well, after all, what is one going to think? In this modern world, where everybody is fighting, here came someone saying, "Resist not evil." What did that mean? Did it mean anything? Was there anything in that phrase for the AA's?

Well, we began to have some cases on which we could try out that principle. I remember one case, out of which some will get a kick, and I imagine some others here may be a little shocked, but I think there is a lesson in it, at least there was for us, a lesson in tolerance. One time, after A.A. had been going for 3 or 4 years, an alcoholic was brought into our house over in Brooklyn where we were holding a meeting. He is the type that some of us now call the blockbuster variety. He often tells the story himself. His name is Jimmy. Well, Jimmy came in and he was a man who had some very, very fixed points of view. As a class, we alcoholics are the worst possible people in this respect. I had many, many fixed points of view myself, but Jimmy eclipsed us all. Jimmy came into our little group - I guess there were then 30 or 40 of us meeting - and said, "I think you've got a pretty good idea here. This idea of straightening things out with other people is fine. Going over your own defects is all right. Working with other drunks, that's swell. But I don't like this God business." He got very emphatic about it and we thought that he would quiet down or else he would get drunk. He did neither. Time went on and Jimmy did not quiet down; he began to tell the other people in the group, "You don't need this God business. Look, I'm staying sober." Finally, he got up in the meeting at our house, the first time he was invited to speak - he had then been around for a couple of months - and he went through his usual song and dance of the desirability of being honest, straightening things out with other people, etc. Then he said, "**** this God business." At that, people began to wince. I was deeply shocked, and we had a hurried meeting of the "elders" over in the corner. We said, "This fellow has got to be suppressed. We can't have anyone ridiculing the very idea by which we live."

We got hold of Jimmy and said, "Listen, you've got to stop this anti-God talk if you're going to be around this section." Jimmy was cocky and he said, "Is that so? Isn't it a fact that you folks have been trying to write a book called Alcoholics Anonymous, and haven't you got a typewritten introduction in that book, lying over there on that shelf, and didn't we read it here about a month ago and agree to it?" And Jimmy went over and took down the introduction to Alcoholics Anonymous and read out of it: "The only requirement for membership in Alcoholics Anonymous is an honest desire to get over drinking." Jimmy said, "Do you mean it or don't you?" He rather had us there. He said, "I've been honest. Didn't I get my wife back? Aren't I paying my bills? And I'm helping other drunks every day." There was nothing we could say. Then we began secretly to hope. Our intolerance caused us to hope that he would get drunk. Well, he confounded us; he did not get drunk, and louder and louder did he get with his anti-God talk. Then we used to console ourselves and say, "Well, after all, this is a very good practice in tolerance for us, trying to accommodate ourselves to Jimmy." But we never did really get accommodated.

One day Jimmy got a job that took him out on the road, out from under the old A.A. tent, you might say. And somewhere out on the road his purely psychological system of staying dry broke wide open, and sure enough he got drunk. In those days, when an alcoholic got drunk, all the brethren would come running, because we were still very afraid for ourselves and no one knew who might be next. So there was great concern about the brother who got drunk. But in Jimmy's case there was no concern at all. He lay in a little hotel over in Providence and he began to call up long distance. He wanted money, he wanted this, and he wanted that. After a while, Jimmy hitchhiked back to New York. He put up at the house of a friend of mine, where I was staying, and I came in late that night. The next morning, Jimmy came walking downstairs where my friend and I were consuming our morning gallon of coffee. Jimmy looked at us and said, "Oh, have you people had any meditation or prayer this morning?" We thought he was being very sarcastic. But no, he meant it. We could not get very much out of Jimmy about his experience, but it appeared that over in that little second-rate hotel he had nearly died from the worst seizure he had ever had, and something in him had given way. I think it is just what gave way in me. It was his prideful obstinacy. He had thought to himself, "Maybe these fellows have got something with their God-business." His hand reached out, in the darkness, and touched something on his bureau. It was a Gideon Bible. Jimmy picked it up and he read from it. I do not know just what he read, and I have always had a queer reluctance to ask him. But Jimmy has not had a drink to this day, and that was about 5 years ago.

But there were other fruits of what little tolerance and understanding we did have. Not long ago I was in Philadelphia where we have a large and strong group. I was asked to speak, and the man who asked me was Jimmy, who was chairman of the meeting. About 400 people were there. I told this story about him and added: "Supposing that we had cast Jimmy out in the dark, supposing that our intolerance of his point of view had turned him away. Not only would Jimmy be dead, but how many of us would be together here tonight so happily secure?" So we in A.A. find that we have to carry tolerance of other people's viewpoints to very great lengths. As someone well put it, "Honesty gets us sober but tolerance keeps us sober."

I would like to tell, in conclusion, one story about a man in a little southern community. You know, we used to think that perhaps A.A. was just for the big places; that in a small town the social ostracism of the alcoholic would be so great that they would be reluctant to get together as a group; that there would be so much unkind gossip that we sensitive folk just could not be brought together.

One day our central office in New York received a little letter, and it came from a narcotic addict who was just leaving the Government hospital down in Lexington. Speaking of intolerance, it is a strange fact that we alcoholics are very, very intolerant of people who take "dope," and it is just as strange that they are very intolerant of us. I remember meeting one, one day, in the corridor of a hospital. I thought he was an alcoholic, so I stopped the man and asked him for a match. He drew himself up with great hauteur and said, "Get away from me you dammed alcoholic." At any rate, here was a letter from a narcotic addict who explained that once upon a time he had been an alcoholic, but for 12 years had been a drug addict. He had got hold of the book Alcoholics Anonymous and thought the spirit of that book had got hold of him, and he wanted to go back to his own little southern town that was, Shelby, North Carolina, and start an A.A. group. We were very skeptical of the offer. The very idea of a narcotic addict starting an A.A. group, even if he had once been an alcoholic! And here he was going to try to start it in a little southern town in the midst of all this local pride and gossip.

We began to get letters from him and apparently he was doing all right. He was a medical doctor, by the way, and he told us modestly, as time went on, about getting a small crowd of alcoholics together and having his trials and tribulations. Mind you, we had never seen him all this time; he had just been writing. He said that his practice had come back somewhat. And so 3 years passed. We had a little pin on a map showing that there was an Alcoholics Anonymous group at Shelby, North Carolina. It happened that I was taking a trip south to visit one of our southern groups. By this time the movement had grown and I had gotten to be kind of a big shot, so I thought, and I wondered, "Should I stop off at Shelby? You know, after all, that's kind of a small group." It is a great thing that I did stop off at Shelby, as you will soon see. Down the station came a man, followed by two others. The two in back of him were alcoholics, all right, but one looked a little bit different. I saw, as he drew near, that his lips were badly mangled, and I realized that this was the drug addict, Dr. M. In the agony of his hangovers he had chewed his lips to pieces. Yes, it was our man, and he proved to be a wonderful person. He was really modest, and that is something you seldom see in an ex-alcoholic. He introduced me to the others, and we got into his car and went over to the town of Shelby. I soon found myself sitting at a table in one of those delightful southern ancestral homes. Here was the man's mother - and his wife. They had been married about 2 years and there was a new baby. The practice had begun to come back. Still, there was very little shoptalk at that meal; and there is no such thing as an A.A. meal without shoptalk. I said, "Indeed, this fellow is a very modest man, I never saw an alcoholic like him." He spoke very little of his accomplishments for the group. And then came the meeting that night. Here, next to the barber shop in the hotel, on the most prominent corner in Shelby, was the A.A. meeting room, with "A.A." looming big up over the door. I thought, "Well, this chap must be some persuader."

I went inside and there were 40 alcoholics and their wives and friends. We had our meeting; I talked too much as I always do, and the meeting was over. I began to reflect that this was the largest Alcoholics Anonymous in all America in proportion to the size of the town. What a wonderful accomplishment! The next morning, my telephone rang in the hotel. A man was downstairs and he said, "I'd like to come up. There are some things you ought to know about Dr. M. who got the A.A. group together in this town."

Up came this individual, and said, "You know, I too, was once an alcoholic but for 22 years I've been on dope. I used to meet our friend Dr. M. over in Lexington, and when he got out of there and came back here, I heard he'd beaten the dope game. So when I left, I started for Shelby, but on my way I got back on morphine again. He took me into his home and took me off it. Yes, I used to be a respectable citizen of this state, I helped organize a lot of banks here, but I've heard from my family only second-hand for many years. It's my guess you don't know what southern pride is, and you haven't any idea what this man faced when he came back to this town to face the music. People wouldn't speak to him for months. They'd say, "Why this fellow, the son of our leading doctor, goes away, studies medicine, comes back, and he's a drunk, and after a while, he's on the dope. The townspeople wouldn't have much to do with him when he first came, and I'm ashamed to say that the local drunks wouldn't either, because they said, we aren't going to be sobered up by a dope addict. But you see, Dr. M. himself had once been an alcoholic, so that he could get that indispensable bond of identification across. Little by little, alcoholics began to rally around him."

My visitor continued, "Well, that was the beginning. Intolerance, misunderstanding, gossip, scandal, failure, defeat, all those things faced our friend when he came into this town. And that was 3 years ago. Well, Bill, you've seen his mother, you've seen his wife, you've seen his baby, and you've seen the group. But he hasn't told you that he now has the largest medical practice in this whole town, if not in the county. And he hasn't told you hat he has been made head of our local hospital. And I know you don't know this - every year in this town the citizens have a great meeting at which they cast a ballot, and last spring, at the annual casting of the ballot, the people of this town almost unanimously declared by their ballot that Dr. M. had been the towns most useful citizen during the 12 months gone by." So I thought to myself, "So you were the big shot who planned to go straight past Shelby." I looked at my visitor and said, "Indeed, What hath God wrought!"


DISCUSSION
Potts: Mr. W., is it possible for someone who hasn't been drunk, or ever been an alcoholic, to do what an alcoholic has done? Have you found any possibility that laymen or preachers could begin to do such work? Is there anything in your experience that might lead to that possibility?
Lecturer: Yes, there is a great deal in our experience that leads to the idea that our friends of the nonalcoholic world can participate. While it's true that the core of our process is the transmission of these things from one alcoholic to another, it is a fact that very often a minister or a doctor can lay the groundwork for our approach. Then, too, there is a class of people that we alcoholics flatter by calling them "dry" alcoholics. In other words, they're neurotics of our description who don't drink, and we recognize them as more or less kindred spirits; sometimes they approach our group and are well received. On the other hand, sometimes people who, from their life experience, just couldn't get the pitch or couldn't make the identification would be regarded by some of the groups as complete outsiders. You know, one of our other faults is that of snobbishness. We AA's have become extremely snobbish, strange as that may be. But it is true that this is a synthesis and we draw upon the resources of both medicine and religion. Of course, the doctor helps us on the physical side of the treatment. He can often prepare the groundwork with the potential by pointing out that he has the symptoms of a well-nigh fatal malady. The preacher, or the friend, would do well to emphasize the idea of sickness rather than of immorality. The alcoholic knows he's a louse in most cases, even though he won't admit it, and to be told so once more by someone who never took a glass of beer seems to annoy him greatly. That is not because the other fellow is wrong; we're wrong, but we're just built that way and it's a matter of taking things as they are.

Stoneburner: What can ministers do to cooperate with A.A.?

Lecturer: Of course the approach to the alcoholic is everything. I think the preacher could do well if he does as we do. First find out all you can about the case, how the man reacts, whether he wants to get over his drinking or not. You see, it is very difficult to make any impressions upon a man who still wants to drink. At some point in their drinking career, most alcoholics get punished enough so that they want to stop, but then it's far too late to do it alone. Sometimes, if the alcoholic can be impressed with the fact that he is a sick man, or a potentially sick man, then, in effect, you raise the bottom up to him instead of allowing him to drop down those extra hard years to reach it. I don't know any substitute for sympathy and understanding, as much as the outsider can have. No preaching, no moralizing, but the emphasis on the idea that the alcoholic is a sick man.

In other words, the minister might first say to the alcoholic, "Well, all my life I've misunderstood you people, I've taken you people to be immoral by choice and perverse and weak, but now I realize that even if there have been such factors, they really no longer count, now you're a sick man." You might win the patient by not placing yourself up on a hilltop and looking down on him, but by getting down to some level of understanding that he gets, or partially gets. Then, if you can present this thing as a fatal and progressive malady, and you can present our group as a group of people who are not seeking to do anything against his will - we merely want to help if he wants to be helped - then sometimes you've laid the groundwork.

I think the clergyman can often do a great deal with the family. You see, we alcoholics are prone to talk too much about ourselves without sufficiently considering the collateral effects. For example, any family, wife and children, who have had to live with an alcoholic 10 or 15 years, are bound to be rather neurotic and distorted themselves. They just can't help it. After all, when you expect the old gent to come home on a shutter every night, it's wearing. Children get a very distorted point of view; so does the wife. Well, if they constantly hear it emphasized that this fellow is a terrible sinner, that he's a rotter, that he's in disgrace, and all that sort of thing, you're not improving the condition of the family at all because, as they become persuaded of it, they get highly intolerant of the alcoholic and that merely generates more intolerance in him. Therefore, the gulf that must be bridged is widened, and that is why moralizing pushes people, who might have something to offer, further away from the alcoholic. You may say that it shouldn't be so, but it's one of those things that is so.

Robinson: Would local A.A. groups be interested in preventing the development of alcoholics by giving cooperation to local option movements or other programs to that end?

Lecturer: I don't think so. That may be a very hard thing to explain. I'm sure that many people who are in the reform movement are very, very much disappointed with AA's because they don't seem to want to cooperate. Now I make haste to say right away that on this question of reform, this question of prohibition or moderation or what have you, there are just as many points of view among the AA's and their families as there are among the next thousand people who walk by this place. Therefore, no A.A. group can very well say, "We have a particular view about prohibition, or this or that degree of prohibition, or about any educational program that involves controversial issues." You see we AA's are of particular and unique use to other alcoholics, therefore we have to be very careful about anything that is going to get between them and us. In other words, we can't do anything that is going to arouse prejudice. For example, if I were to make the statement here that I believe in prohibition, or that I don't believe in prohibition, and either of those points of view were quoted publicly, I would inevitably arouse prejudice. If I said, "Well I don't believe in prohibition and that's my personal view," then a great many good people who do believe in prohibition would get annoyed; they might go out and say to the alcoholic's wife, 'Well, I don't like that crowd of AA's because they don't believe in prohibition and look what liquor has done to your husband." So she doesn't suggest A.A. to her husband and he eventually dies because we have been foolish enough to arouse prejudice in somebody's mind.

Likewise, if we said, "Well, we believe in prohibition," and that were quoted, every alcoholic, almost without exception, reading that in the newspapers, would say, "Why, that's a bunch of reformers! And none of that for me." He shouldn't react that way, but he does. Since ours is a life and death job, you can understand why, as a group, we are very careful not to express any opinions on controversial questions. As a group we have no opinion on any kind of controversy regardless of the merit of either side, because if we show such an interest, as a group, then we cut down our own peculiar usefulness.

It isn't that there aren't bonds of sympathy between us and a great many points of view. It isn't that individuals among us don't have points of view. But I wouldn't for the world, in a place like this, express my personal views about any controversial question lest my opinion be imputed publicly to the group, to A.A. Then we would be thrown into a controversy that could only prejudice our efforts and not help anybody very much. It isn't a lack of understanding or lack of sympathy; it's a matter of policy about which we have to be unusually careful.

Question: How many drug addicts are there in the A.A. and in the organization similar to A.A., which operates among drug addicts?

Lecturer: We have quite a number of drug addicts who were once alcoholics. So far, I don't know of any case of pure drug addiction that we have been able to approach. In other words, we can no more approach a simon-pure addict than the outsider can usually approach us. We are in exactly the same position with them that the doctor and the clergyman have been in respect to the alcoholic. We just don't talk that fellow's language. He always looks at us and says, "Well, those alcoholics are the scum of the earth and besides, what do they know about addiction?" Now, however, since we have a good number of addicts who were once alcoholics, those addicts in their turn are making an effort, here and there, to transfer the thing over to the straight addict. In that way we hope the bridge is going to be crossed. There may be a case here and there that has been helped. But in all, I suppose, there may be around 50 cases of real morphine addiction in former alcoholics who have been helped by A.A. Of course we have a great many barbital users, but we don't consider those people particularly difficult if they really want to do something about it, and particularly if it's associated with liquor. They seem to get out of it after a while. But where you have morphine, or some of those derivatives, then it gets very tough. Then you have to have a "dope" talk to a "dope," and I hope that we can find, some day, a bridge to the addict.

Rogers: How many members do you have in A.A.? How many A.A. groups are there?

Lecturer: I might have made that point, although, I suppose that the A.A. 's here would have advertised it from the housetops. We have, I think, about 15,000 members, and A.A. groups are in about 367 places. A.A. is showing a capacity to spread by way of literature and correspondence even outside of the United States. We have a very successful group now in Honolulu and until recently they had had no contacts with us except by mail.

Question: If an alcoholic comes to an A.A. meeting under the influence of alcohol, how do you treat him or handle him during the meeting itself?

Lecturer: Groups will run usually run amuck on that sort of question. At first we are likely to say that we're going to be supermen and save every drunk in town. The fact is that a great many of them just don't want to stop. They come, but they interfere very greatly with the meeting. Then, being still rather intolerant, the group will swing way over in the other direction and say, "No drunks around these meetings." We get forcible with them and put them out of the meeting, saying, "You're welcome here if your sober." But the general rule in most places is that if a person comes for the first or second time and can sit quietly in the meeting, without creating an uproar, nobody bothers him. On the other hand, if he's a chronic "slipper" and interferes with the meetings, we lead him out gently, or maybe not so gently, on the theory that one man cannot be permitted to hold up the recovery of others. The theory is "the greatest good for the greatest number."
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(SHARE) Barefoot's Domain :281:
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As in so many things, especially with we alcoholics, our History is our Greatest Asset!.. We each arrived at the doors of AA with an intensive and lengthy "History of Things That Do Not Work" .. Today, In AA and In Recovery, Our History has added an intensive and lengthy "History of Things That DO Work!!" and We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it!!

[saved1]

The Names of God
1636
How to find a God of our understanding
GLENN F. CHESNUT

(SHARE) :17:© Copyright 2005 by Glenn F. Chesnut. Taken from Chapter Seven of Changed by Grace: V. C. Kitchen, the Oxford Group, and A.A., Hindsfoot Foundation Series on Spirituality and Theology (New York: iUniverse, 2006). From the Hindsfoot Foundation website at http://hindsfoot.org/ This material may be copied and reproduced by others subject to the restrictions given at http://hindsfoot.org/copyright.html


In the search to find a God of our understanding, there are four traditional paths in western spirituality, going all the way back to ancient Christian and Jewish thought, all of which are firmly founded in the Bible itself. They have always been an intrinsic part of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox spirituality.

All four of these are recognized and acknowledged in modern evangelical theology (from its beginnings in the eighteenth century), in the Oxford Group literature of the 1930's, and in the A.A. tradition. Using the traditional terminology, we call these the four basic "Names of God," although it is the one God, who reigns over all the universe, to whom they all four point.

1. The divine Glory and the experience of the Sacred: Bill W.’s conversion experience

2. The Spirit

3. The Good Itself and the Moral Law: the moral law as the face of God unveiled

4. The Truth Itself and Being Itself



Most of the world's religions and spiritual movements insist that people must first have a conversion experience, or first have faith in certain beliefs, before they can begin walking the path to salvation. In nineteenth century American frontier revivalism, for example, people were told that they had to accept Jesus Christ on faith as their personal Lord and Savior before they could take any other meaningful steps along the spiritual path.

The A.A. program is quite peculiar in that regard. The only thing it requires of us at the beginning is absolute honesty. "Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves." We are not required to believe anything, or have a conversion experience, or go through any initiatory ritual like baptism or circumcision or sitting in a Native American sweat lodge.

In sorting through the Four Absolutes taught by the Oxford Group, the majority of early A.A.'s quickly begin to see problems with the other three absolutes, and any attempt to require absolute unselfishness, purity, or love. Or if not the A.A.'s, ask the Al-Anon's how much trouble the attempt to practice absolute unselfishness got them into before they came into the Al-Anon program, and started learning about the principle of detachment with love! But the early A.A. people saw that absolute honesty had to be dealt with in an entirely different way. Until people became honest with themselves, they could get nowhere.

Now when we speak of Absolute Honesty, we should give warning here that we are only concerned with the conscious levels of the mind, and with areas of our lives which we know we have been told to look at by the program and by our sponsors. There are forms of denial involving subconscious components, however, which will require us to spend years in the program slowly working down through "the layers of the onion." We will need to work downward progressively through each more deeply hidden stratum of denial, raising materials to conscious awareness which we had never been truly conscious of before. In that sense, in this world and this life, we will always be blithely unaware of the existence of some things in our mental makeup, so that our goal must be progress, not perfection.

But Absolute Honesty is in fact achievable at the conscious level of our minds, and twelve step people have to be warned that there can be no healing in their lives until they begin looking at themselves sternly, and asking themselves repeatedly the same simple question. Is what I am saying to you and to myself really true? Is the belief upon which I am basing this decision an honest description of what is really so? Acting upon the basis of ideas which I know are not true is treachery to the principle of Absolute Honesty, but of equal importance, failure to even ask the question of truth in matters which are obviously of formative importance in my decision-making is culpable negligence that will prevent my recovery.


The four Names of God

The early Christians of the first five centuries recognized that there were different names for God. We could say that God was (1) the glory and the holiness revealed in the world of nature and in sacred places, (2) the holy spirit which was present "when two or three were gathered" in the divine name, and (3) the Good Itself. When twelve-step people refer to their higher power as the power of Nature or as the kind of feeling of the divine presence which Bill W. felt in Winchester Cathedral, or when they refer to their higher power as the spirit of the tables or as the principle of Good Orderly Direction, these words (taken in the context in which these terms are used in A.A. and Al-Anon) are simply modern translations and adaptations of those three early Christian names of God. In terms of the doctrinal standards of orthodox Christian belief during the early centuries, the A.A. versions are all three theologically correct and completely appropriate ways of practicing God consciousness and being immediately aware of the divine presence.

And there is one additional ancient traditional name for God which is especially important, because this one explains why Absolute Honesty plays such an essential role in twelve step spirituality: (4) God is Truth Itself. We are told in the scriptures that "God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." It also gives us the solemn promise that "you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Augustine, the great African saint, put this idea at the very center of his thought. His spiritual and philosophical writings were the most influential source of ideas (after the New Testament itself) for all of western Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant. Those who cannot be honest will never find the truth, and will never find the path of life.


1. The divine Glory and the experience of the Sacred

Before discussing Augustine's concept in any detail, however, let us first look briefly at the other three Names of God, beginning with the idea of the glory and the holiness of God. In the Hebrew Bible, in the book of Isaiah (6:3), the prophet described a vision which he had had in King Solomon's Temple, where he saw the mighty angels who were called the Seraphim (the Burning Ones) flying about the Throne of God and singing the thrice-holy anthem:


Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory.
Different variations of this angelic song appear in a vast number of Jewish and Christian hymns and liturgical passages.

In this hymn we are told that God is holy (qadosh) and that his glory (kabod) fills all the earth. By the glory of God, we mean the holiness of the divine presence which shines out in all created things. When we look at the starry heavens above or at the beauty of the spring flowers and feel a sense of something infinite and majestic somehow present, we are perceiving the glory of God. When we walk through the woods and hear the birds singing and feel the soft earth under our feet, and somehow feel our souls being restored to peace and harmony, we are allowing the glory and the holiness of God to heal us spiritually. When we look though a telescope at a distant galaxy, thousands of light years away, and realize that these stars and galaxies extend out for as far as we can observe, and suddenly feel a sense of incredible awe at this extraordinary universe we live in, we are sensing what the Bible called the glory of God. When we marvel at some of the extraordinary discoveries of modern science, such as what we now know about the strange world of atoms and atomic nuclei and the fundamental particles of which the universe is made, this sense of wonder which we feel is yet another way of sensing the glory of God.

When we are beginners in the spiritual life, let us not argue about what name to put on what we are sensing (such as whether we should call it God or Nature). The only question we should be asking at that stage is, can we feel the wonder and the awe and the majesty and the sense of the infinite?

Rudolf Otto, one of the two greatest Protestant theologians in the period right after the First World War, wrote a book called The Idea of the Holy in which he showed how the intuitive perception of what he called the holy (which he also referred to as the sacred or the numinous) lay at the basis of all the world's religions. It was a kind of feeling (German Gefühl), a kind of immediate awareness (Greek aisthêsis), an intuitive knowledge (German Ahnung) which was in some ways more like an aesthetic sense. It was of fundamental importance to note that it was not an intellectualized concept (German Begriff). Otto's work is still used as the basis of a good deal of the scholarship in comparative world religions to this day. He said that the awareness of the sacred had to be added to the philosopher Kant's list of the fundamental categories of the human understanding, because it spoke of something real which human beings have been able to sense in the world around them at all times and in all cultures, and because it referred to a specific category of perceptions which could not be explained in terms of anything simpler. Otto said that this fundamental Kantian category (the numinous) could be schematized in three different ways: as the holy in the realm of spirituality and religion, as the sublime in the realm of aesthetics (matters concerning art and beauty), and as the transcendent good in the realm of ethics.

The important thing was that Otto demonstrated that this was what all religion was about, all over the world: teaching people how to encounter the sacred. Even religions which had no concept of God, such as we see in some of the religions of Asia and in certain Native American religions, nevertheless had a well developed concept of the holy or the sacred or the numinous.

The concept of the holy was an extremely important idea in eighteenth century evangelical thought. John Wesley in particular emphasized the need to learn how to become aware of the sacred dimension of reality in his sermons on spirituality. One of his most interesting comments in this area came in his discussion in one of his sermons of the Prayer Without Ceasing, which Christians are supposed to pray at all times (1 Thessalonians 5:17). The nature of this prayer had been much disputed within the Christian tradition. The Hesychast monks on Mount Athos in Greece, for example, had said that it was the Jesus Prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner"). That has continued to be one of the major traditions in the Eastern Orthodox Church. John Wesley however said that it was the Prayer of Moses in the book of Exodus (33:18), a simple prayer to God which said: "I beseech you, show me your glory." Several verses earlier (in 33:11) it said in Exodus that "the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend." Wesley said that developing this kind of God-consciousness was the goal of the spiritual life. We must learn to see God's glory shining through in all things, and we must learn how to stand in the light of that glory and simply talk with God every day, in the way that we would talk with our best friend.

We often encounter people in the twelve step movement who have an impressive amount of serenity who say that they like to go out into the world of Nature and spend a quiet time as a kind of healing meditation. They say that they are using as their Higher Power what they feel when they are out in the woods and fields, surrounded by the trees and flowers and birds and animals.

John Wesley said that Nature was one of the important places where we could see the Glory and the Sacredness of the divine shining through with impressive clarity, and he also said that we should try to be aware of this at all times, because it would strengthen our spirits and comfort us and bring us peace. Jonathan Edwards also pointed out that learning to see the Sacred in the world of Nature would produce a fundamental change in the way we reacted to the world around us. Edwards said that he had once been afraid of thunderstorms, but that after he came to a deepening of his faith, he began to understand that this was an expression of the majesty of the sacred. From the perspective of a new and deeper understanding of God, he came to regard the blazing bolts of lightning and the mighty rumbling of the thunder as a glorious tribute to the infinite power of God, and as a result, he came to delight in the same thunderstorms which he had once feared.

So using Nature as our higher power (in this kind of way) is a perfectly acceptable understanding of God, going back thousands of years in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This is simply listening to the Song of the Seraphim and taking it seriously.


Bill W.'s conversion experience

We can also sense the presence of the sacred in other kinds of contexts. Bill Wilson actually had two profound spiritual experiences at the end of 1934. One was the ecstatic vision of the great white light which Bill had in Towns Hospital in December, where he felt as though he was standing on a mighty mountain peak where the wind of the spirit blew. But Bill said nothing at all about any kind of vision of light in the Big Book, although he did mention having an important spiritual revelation and feeling the wind of the spirit in the hospital while he was going through detoxification. Instead he put the major emphasis upon an experience which happened to him shortly before that, in October of 1934. Ebby Thacher had come to visit Bill in his apartment, and Bill had been going on at great length about how foolish any kind of belief in a good and loving God seemed to him. Finally Ebby said to him, "Why don't you choose your own conception of God?" Bill says that his reaction to that apparently simple question was extraordinary: "At long last I saw, I felt, I believed. Scales ... fell from my eyes."

Most Americans used to read the Bible regularly in those days, or at least hear stories and sayings read from it in church and Sunday school, so most of the early readers of the Big Book would have immediately understood the reference Bill made to scales falling from his eyes. This was from the story of the apostle Paul's conversion experience on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:18). The use of this phraseology -- "the scales fell from my eyes" -- indicates that Bill Wilson is telling us that this was his truly important conversion experience. This was unambiguous and unmistakable to biblically knowledgeable readers from Protestant backgrounds in 1939.

We need to look carefully at what was going on at the feeling level in what Bill W. regarded as the crucial part of this experience. He tells us that right after Ebby spoke those words, "the real significance of my experience in the Cathedral burst upon me." Years before, when he was a young soldier in England, standing inside Winchester Cathedral, he had encountered God and felt "the sense of His presence." He suddenly remembered that feeling in the church sanctuary and understood that it had been something real. And it had been he who walked away from God at that point, not vice versa.

What he had felt in that Cathedral was the awareness of the holy. He also remembered feeling that sense of the holy or the sacred -- although in a different kind of way -- when he had sat as a child outside the church building and heard the voice of the preacher from a distance. The point Bill was making there was that it was not necessary to be inside a church building and be a church member in order to intuit the presence of the sacred dimension of reality. He spoke also about his grandfather, who had always insisted that this sense of the sacred which one could feel listening to the service in a little New England Congregationalist church was the same thing that he felt when he looked up at the stars at night, and became aware of the marvelous harmony of nature. And the advantage of doing it that way, outside the church, as his grandfather had pointed out to him, was that the preacher could not tell you how you were supposed to interpret what you were feeling!

This concept was so important to Bill W. that he introduced it into another story in the Big Book. He told about the alcoholic who was totally hostile to all spiritual concepts, and who was getting nowhere in the program until he was suddenly hit with a thought, "Who are you to say there is no God?" With this there came to him, Bill said, "a conviction of the Presence of God" which was an immediate and direct intuitive awareness of the sacred realm, similar to Bill's experience in Winchester Cathedral. This story goes on to say that the man, using this human ability to sense the presence of the sacred and the holy, finally "stepped from bridge to shore," and was able to set foot upon the land of faith.

Bill W. also introduced this idea at an early point in the chapter to the agnostic. Even the most skeptical atheists and agnostics who came into the early A.A. program had to admit that there had been moments when they were, for example, "enchanted by a starlit night." And for a moment, "there was a feeling of awe and wonder," even if "it was fleeting and soon lost." That was the primordial awareness of the sacred and the holy, upon which is built, in one way or another, all the religions of the world. That is because this kind of experience is one which is common to the entire human race, and has been sensed and felt in all the nations of the world at all points in human history. Everyone can learn to feel it and be aware of it.

So we need to be very much aware that in what Bill Wilson said was his real conversion experience, what finally brought him to faith was learning how to sense the feeling of the sacred and the holy and use it to strengthen and empower his soul. This was what was meant by "God-consciousness." The angels had sung that the glory of the divine holiness filled all the earth, so practicing continual God-consciousness (as the early A.A. people stressed) was an attempt to be aware that all of reality was sacred. I am surrounded by the sacred right this moment, wherever I am, just as though I were standing in a church or temple. The ultimate sacred dimension of reality is right here with me, and all around me, and if I pay attention, I can feel this numinous presence in everything I can see and hear and touch.

It does not matter whether we call it "God" or the holy or the sacred or the numinous. All human languages have had a word for it: it was qadosh in ancient Hebrew, hagios in ancient Greek, sacer or sanctus in Latin, tabu in Polynesian, and manitou in the Algonquian language spoken by the Potawatomi tribe who live in my part of the United States, just to give a few examples. The name we put on it is not terribly important. Intellectual theories about it are not all that useful. What is vital however is that we learn how to actually feel it and experience it.

This is good eighteenth-century evangelical theology. This is what John Wesley called learning to pray the Prayer Without Ceasing, and what Jonathan Edwards called learning to feel "the excellency of the things of God," which he described as the heart of the conversion experience. Learning to sense the infinite power and majesty of the sacred -- whether in the world of Nature, or in a church or mosque or temple, or while attending a deeply spiritual A.A. or Al-Anon group meeting -- is at the very core of traditional A.A. and Al-Anon spirituality.


2. The Spirit

What twelve step people call the spirit of the tables is what the Hebrew Bible calls the Spirit of God (God's power in action, breathing life into Adam, and calling up leaders like Deborah and Saul to save the people of Israel, and speaking through the prophets), and what the New Testament calls the Holy Spirit. In the ancient Catholic and Orthodox creeds, the section which speaks of the work of the Holy Spirit links it especially with "the communion of the saints," that is, with the divine spirit which binds the hearts of believers together and transforms them into a holy fellowship capable of transcending space and time and even death itself. The Father is God in his infinite transcendence and unknowability; the Holy Spirit is the same God, the one God, active here on earth in ways that we can immediately sense and feel within our hearts.

In the twelve step program, learning to feel the spirit of the tables means developing an awareness of the powerful spiritual reality which is present in a good twelve-step meeting, a kind of spiritual current running through all the people gathered together, connecting their hearts and spirits into a unity, and creating a spiritual force far greater by many magnitudes than the additive sum of the prayers of the individual people present could ever accomplish. The three greatest gifts of the spirit -- faith, hope, and love -- are obtainable only when the spirit truly fills our hearts, for good Catholic theology and good evangelical theology both teach us that these are not natural human abilities but gifts of grace.

John Wesley especially stressed this point and went on to say that whenever we saw people (of any religious background or no religion at all) who had learned to genuinely love others, and who had demonstrated that they could teach other people to love their fellow human beings, this was proof positive that the grace of God and the Holy Spirit had been at work. In this fallen world, there was no other way that they could have learned how to do that -- this ability was totally lost to the human race as a natural power after Adam and Eve's fall from grace -- so our job as servants of God was to honor these love-filled people and defend them against attack, as fellow servants of the true God. And Wesley insisted that this applied, whether they were Protestants or Catholics, Jews or Muslims, or even skeptics and freethinkers. We had to respect them and come to their aid if other people attacked them, or we ourselves were fighting against God and rejecting God's decision as to where he wished to send his grace.

Although the fourth chapter of 1 John did not show up explicitly on any of the early A.A. reading lists, it was nevertheless (just like the Sermon on the Mount, the letter of James, and 1 Corinthians 13) frequently quoted from by early A.A. spiritual teachers. 1 John 4 speaks very powerfully about the relationship between God, Love, and the Spirit:


Love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love .... No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.
Even newcomers who cannot sense the divine presence in any other kind of context can often feel the spirit of the tables. One of the great old timers in my part of the country, Ellen Lantz, said that "you can just feel love." And so the twelve step people tell these beginners that if they wish to, they can take the spirit of the tables -- the love which they can feel within the fellowship -- for their higher power.

This was St. Augustine's contribution to the development of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity: when we talk about real love and when we talk about the presence of the divine Spirit, we are talking about the same thing. The spirit, Augustine said, is the Love which binds the other two members of the Trinity together, the dynamic energy and will which empowers the Godhead. It is the infinite divine well of energy from which all the other energy in the universe derives its being.

When the great Italian Renaissance poet Dante describes his vision of the eternal sunlight of the spirit in the concluding lines of his Paradiso, he follows this Augustinian concept of God, and says that the divine Love (which shines forth in that eternal light) energizes and gives guidance, not just to the souls of good men and women, but in fact to all the universe:


Ma già volgeva il mio disio e'l velle,
sì come rota ch'igualmente è mossa,
l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.

But already it turned my desire and my freely given will,
like a wheel evenly put in motion:
the Love which moves the sun and other stars.
So even in the most impeccably orthodox traditional Christian theology, it does no harm at all for laypeople who are new to the faith to take as their God the holy spirit which is showering them with all-accepting love and creating the first new glimmers of real love within their own hearts. God is love, and the spirit of the tables is God's love in action: l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle, "the Love which moves the sun and all the other stars."


3. The Good Itself and the Moral Law

What A.A. people call living in the sunlight of the spirit is exactly the same as the ancient concept of living in the sunlight of the Good Itself. This idea went back to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato who wrote at the beginning of the fourth century B.C. In his Republic, he told a tale called the Parable of the Cave. Imagine, he said, a group of human beings who had been chained from birth in a dark cave, so that they could only look in one direction, towards one wall. Behind these prisoners was a large fire, and walking between the flames and the captives' backs were other people holding up various pieces of wood and other materials shaped like human beings and animals and ducks and trees and so on, so that the shadows of these objects were cast as black silhouettes against the wall the prisoners were compelled to gaze at.

Since all they had ever seen were the shadows of these objects (and their own shadows intermingled with them) the people in chains believed that this was the real world which they apprehended. If somehow two or three of these prisoners managed to free themselves from their chains and discover a way out of the cave, it would take time for their eyes to get used to the intensity of the light outside the cave, but they would gradually begin to realize that the real world was not the sad, two-dimensional world of black and white stereotypes which they used to live in, but this marvelous realm they now saw, made up of three-dimensional objects in brilliant colors and textures. Now they was no longer looking just at shadows of models of real things, but at the real things themselves.

In Plato's explanation of this extended metaphor, the world of the shadows is the place where most human beings live. It is a realm of doxa, mere "opinion" -- a Greek noun that comes from the verb dokeô, which means to suppose or imagine, to seem so, or merely appear so. And we also must not forget another Greek noun which came from the same verbal root, the word dogma, meaning an arbitrarily decreed doctrine set forth by some authority figure whom we were never allowed to question or challenge.

The shadow world is therefore the mental realm of denial, illusion, and introjected parental admonitions (Freud's superego) simply accepted as dogmatic truths about the world: "Good boys always do this, and good girls never do that." "Are you going to let him get away with talking to you that way?" "You're stupid and clumsy, you'll never make good." We perpetuate the shadow realm when, as a member of a dysfunctional family, we maintain the family lie by refusing to talk about or acknowledge in any way what really happens in our family. We strut about pompously trying to make our shadows appear bigger than other people's. We torture ourselves about shadows from the past, or throw ourselves into frenzied panic as our overactive imaginations project baleful shadows into the future. Some of the shadows are truly nightmarish boogiemen, with long teeth and claws and knives and instruments of torture. In the real world, we fail over and over again to accomplish what we set out to do, because no matter how carefully we analyze the shadows and no matter how hard we try to control these fleeting images, we end up grasping nothing, and we cannot discover why.

The shadowy realm of the cave is a world of black and white, like one of the old black-and-white American cowboy movies where the hero (who is absolutely pure and can do no wrong) always wears a white cowboy hat, while the villain (who is absolutely bad through and through) always wears a black cowboy hat. The leaders among the cave dwellers enjoy inventing hundreds of complicated so-called moral and religious rules, and telling the other people in chains that if they violate even a single one of these rigid dogmas, that they will be automatically blackened by sin to the core and become completely evil. All the dogmas invented by these authoritarian leaders -- all their legalistic "shoulds" and "oughts" -- are regarded as absolute and their followers are ordered to follow them to the letter, blindly and mechanically, and without a single failure or omission, no matter how small.

Up above in the real world, on the other hand, we behold things by the light of the sun up in the sky. Plato said that the sun stood metaphorically for "the idea of the Good," that which enables us to see what is right and beautiful, to recognize truth and intelligible meaning, and to act in a manner which is sane and sensible. We observe the vision of the Good being apprehended in a very pure (although extremely primitive) fashion in very young infants, who see the world around them with awed and delighted fascination, and attempt to grasp it and taste it in eager curiosity and sheer joy.

The goal of good education is to inform this primitive vision of the Good while still retaining its openness and spirit of eager delight in the world. In some areas the infants' parents do need to teach them that certain things are dangerous to explore (for example, no matter how fascinating the electrical plug is, trying to pull it out of the wall outlet may seriously injure or kill a crawling child). In other areas, children need to learn about levels of goodness that require more knowledge and intellectual structuring in order to be appreciated, which is one of the things that higher education accomplishes (in literature, art, music, science, and so on).

Plato pointed out that young people particularly find it especially difficult to rise above the gross physical level when it comes to appreciating goodness, and then only in rather spotty fashion in certain restricted areas of their lives. Johnnie wants to go out with Margie because Margie has beautiful hair and a good figure; Margie in turn wants to go out with Johnnie because he has a nice car, and clothes that match all the current teenage fads. This is a crudely materialistic approach to life, which will never bring ultimate happiness, because it is blind to all the higher kinds of goodness. Even as adults, many people never rise much above the ability to appreciate the goodness of certain kinds of material things like automobiles, houses, clothes, and so on. So they are consciously aware of only tiny fragments of the goodness which surrounds them. At the very least, this gravely limits their lives and their enjoyment. Unfortunately, it is also usually apt to cause them to act in ways which are both self-destructive and destructive to others, because they fail to see the higher kinds of goodness in the world around them, and go around destroying good things without ever being consciously aware at the time of all the horrendous damage they are doing. At the end they are left crying out piteously, "Why is my life so terrible? I never did anything wrong."

But good education, along with experience, can teach us to expand our horizons and learn how to enjoy kinds of goodness that we were previously blind to. We can learn to appreciate good music and art and literature, and the fascination of ideas, and we can learn how to delight in the pure joy of learning itself. We can above all learn how to recognize what Plato called "justice," the difference between right and wrong at a higher level, which appears only when we look at issues in the Light of the Good.

The Platonic tradition particularly stressed one aspect of this metaphor of the sun and the cave. If we try to look directly at the sun, its light is so intense that it blinds us. The way we ordinarily determine whether we are outside in the sunshine (rather than being someplace in the dark) is not to look directly at the sun, but to look around and see if we can clearly distinguish other objects around us. If we look around and see green trees, and blue ripples on the surface of the nearby river, and red geraniums growing in a flowerbed nearby, then we know that we are in the sunlight. If we see only darkness around us, then we know that we have lost the sunlight.

In medieval Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theology all three, it was believed that the Good of which Plato spoke was the supreme higher power whom the people of the book call God. His goodness is so bright that no human being can gaze on it without being blinded, so that it is impossible to paint a picture of what God looks like, or form any image in our minds of exactly what he is. But I know that God is present in my own personal mental world, first of all, whenever I can look around me and see a world filled with things that are so good and beautiful that I am overcome with gratitude.

Those on the other hand who have left the sunlight of the spirit, and instead gone as far as possible into the darkness, see a world around them that is full of evil, failure, futility, hate, resentment, pain, and confusion. They are no longer able to feel true good-hearted joy and delight at anything. The closest they can feel to this is an evil delight at defeating someone else, or doing someone else harm -- a sick kind of pleasure (Schadenfreude in German) which will only lead us further and further into the realm of darkness.

Ancient and medieval Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers were therefore in total agreement that the transcendent divine power which Plato called the Good Itself was the one whom they called God or Allah. Anyone who looked carefully could see that Plato, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed were all talking about the same higher power. God IS the sunlight of the spirit and the Light of the Good, for this has been -- for well over two thousand years now -- one of the traditional orthodox Names of God.

In the eighteenth century, the founders of the modern evangelical movement simply continued this orthodox Christian tradition. John Wesley, for example, taught Greek and Roman classics and early Christian theology at Oxford University, and was not only intimately familiar with all of these traditional orthodox ways of talking about God, but continually made reference to them in his works. Wesley's own stated definition of faith, based on Hebrews 11:1 and repeated over and over in his writings, was that faith was an intuitive awareness (partly analogous to but different from sense perception) of God himself in his light, glory, grace, forgiveness, and love. One of Jonathan Edwards' most important works was a little piece called "A Divine and Supernatural Light," where he says that salvation comes from an intuition (an immediate moral/aesthetic awareness or "sense" rather than a rational demonstration) of the divine "excellency." This is exactly what an ancient Platonist would have called the transcendental intuition of God as the Good and the Beautiful. It was simply a rewriting, in eighteenth century language, of St. Augustine's medieval Catholic doctrine of illuminationism, the idea that we come to see the truths which save our souls only when God shines the sunlight of the spirit on us and in our lives and hearts. God's act of grace suddenly breaks through the darkness and spotlights a vital insight (about the nature of life and love and good and evil) which I needed to learn in order to be saved and grow spiritually.

"The divine and supernatural light" which saves us (in eighteenth century evangelical theology) is exactly the same thing as "the sunlight of the spirit" in the language of the modern twelve step program, that is, it is God himself shining his eternal light on us and showing us what is truly good. So people in A.A. and Al-Anon and the other twelve step fellowships who wish to take this as their way of thinking about their higher power are perfectly justified in doing so.


The Moral Law as the face of God unveiled

One of the things which the divine light reveals is the universal moral law, which people in A.A. and Al-Anon call the principle of Good Orderly Direction. John Wesley in the eighteenth century described that universal moral law as "the face of God unveiled." It was at the very center of his evangelical theology, as we can see from his sermons on the law in his Standard Sermons. This law, he said, was the revelation to human beings of God's heart. It was a picture of God, and it described who God really was: God was the one who created a universe in which human beings find their greatest fulfillment in acting morally and with love towards one another. In ancient Greek this universal principle was called the Nomos or Logos, that is, the divine Law or Meaning of life.

Wesley learned Spanish when he came to Savannah, Georgia, so he could discuss theology with the members of the Spanish Jewish community there, and was fully aware that what he was calling the moral law (the face of God unveiled, God as he may be known by human beings) was what the Jewish rabbis called the eternal Torah which the Holy One created before he began creating any of the rest of the universe, and used as a sort of architectural blueprint for its design. It was the Meaning and Purpose of the universe. This meant that when we were living in harmony with the eternal Torah or universal moral law, we were automatically living in harmony with the universe as God had created it to be, and also living in harmony with ourselves and the way that we would find our own greatest human fulfillment, because we were created by God too.

The Law of God (the true meaning of the universe) was therefore not an externally imposed rule which was laid upon us by an external authority figure, but the true principle of our ownmost being, that which lay within us at the core of our being and made us authentically human. Each human being is a unique hypostasis or personification of the meaning of the universe, so each of us has his or her own natural focus in life, representing our own highly individualistic roles within that universal context of meaning. A young woman in A.A., Trina D., puts this very simply by saying "I am an extension of God's intention." Therefore, as St. Maximus the Confessor taught back in seventh-century Africa, the natural unfallen human will always automatically wills God's will, because it is our own true will also. (We are using the term "will" here in the sense of the Greek word thelêma, which means the human ability to want, wish, desire, intend, mean, decide, or choose one thing rather than another.)

Therefore all I really need to do to please God is just to be myself -- but to be myself as I truly am, not the way my dysfunctional family or the corrupt civilization around me tells me to be. All I genuinely have to do to follow God's will in my life is to find once again the true inner core of the human personality, the little Child of God within me who is made in the Image of God, and then simply do what comes naturally and follow my true inner self.

Now as John Wesley in particular attempted to make especially clear, the universal moral law (Good Orderly Direction) is not itself God. It is part of the created realm. It is merely an image of God, not God as he is in himself. It exists only in the human mind, as an attempt by my mind to form an image of God. But we must remember that all good philosophical theologians in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions have always agreed that the finite human mind cannot grasp or understand what God is in himself in any literal sense, because God in his essence is infinite and above all human concepts and attempts to rationalize the universe. Therefore we are forced to use symbols, images, and metaphors if we are to speak of God at all. What Wesley insisted however -- and I believe that he is completely correct in this -- is that the universal moral law (Good Orderly Direction) is the most profound and the most helpful image of God which we possess.

If I were asked how I would try to describe some other human being (such as my wife or my father or a close friend) in the fullest and deepest kind of way, I would not waste any time on describing that individual's physical attributes, such as how tall the person is, or the color of the person's hair, or the shape of the person's nose or chin. I would attempt to describe that person's moral character, using phrases like "kind and decent and has a heart of gold," "dependable and trustworthy and someone you can count on when you're in a jam," "treats everybody with equal respect, from the highest to the lowest," and other statements like that. This gives us the true shape of that man's or woman's personality, who that person really is down at the core.

So when we say that "all" we can know about God is not a scientific explanation of how God creates things or where God is or what God looks like -- that is, even if we were to say that "all" we can learn to know about God is the universal moral law (the principles of Good Orderly Direction) -- this means that what we do know about God is who God is in the most important way of all, that is, who God is in terms of his personality and character. God is he who asks us to treat other human beings with dependable, trustworthy, compassionate loving kindness. And that is a truly extraordinary higher power, one to whom we can turn without fear, and call upon to heal our spirits and lead us into the realm of the Eternal Love and Light "which moves the sun and all the other stars."

Now someone might ask, when we speak of this sort of moral law as something which we should strive to follow, are we not falling into legalism and works righteousness once again? The answer to this is no, on two different grounds. God loves us just as we are, so we are not being told that we have to act this way in order to earn God's love. If we want to be happier, then the universal moral law describes the kind of life that we need to start leading, but we will be doing that for ourselves -- because we ourselves want our lives to be more enjoyable, and are tired of being angry and miserable -- and not because we are afraid of God rejecting us. God will then help us lead that higher and finer kind of life, because he loves us and wants to see us happy, and delights in giving us gifts.

And furthermore, we are not being asked to follow hundreds of mechanical rules, but to study such things as the spirit of Paul's description of love in 1 Corinthians 13, as well as some of the stories which Jesus told, like the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37) and the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), and the story of the way God guided Abraham through the trackless desert and later sent Moses to lead the Israelites out of captivity in Egypt, to give a few examples from the Christian and Jewish traditions. We are then being asked to try to bring this general spirit of love, faithfulness, tolerance, forgiveness, and helpfulness into our own lives. This kind of love can and will break any legalistic rules which stand in the way of giving compassionate help to others.

This is what the letter of James calls the Law of Liberty (James 2:12). Following the Law of Liberty, the apostle James says, is the oppposite of being diakrinomenos, which means being judgmental towards other people, where I show partiality towards some (the wealthy and successful and well-dressed and "proper" people, perhaps) on the basis of some kind of discriminatory and condemnatory set of principles, while criticizing everybody else and putting them down (James 2:2-4). Complicated legalistic law codes are always set up to mechanically condemn certain groups of people while paying no attention to them as individuals, and showing no feeling for their pain and suffering, and making no recognition of their limitations and what they really are (and are not) able to do at this point in their lives. The Law of Liberty however is the royal law -- God's own law -- of showing kindness, tolerance, forgiveness, and above all, mercy. "Judgment is without mercy towards the one who shows no mercy; mercy however turns judgment to ashes" (James 2:13).

When newcomers to the twelve step program take the idea of Good Orderly Direction as their higher power, and interpret this concept with tolerance, compassion, and mercy towards all, they are taking the highest and greatest image of God as the focus of their lives, which is not only good evangelical theology, but would have been recognized for the past two thousand years, by the best theologians and philosophers among the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims all three, as an extremely good and effective starting point when beginning the spiritual life. Taking the idea of Good Orderly Direction as our higher power means truly turning our eyes towards God, even if at the beginning of our path we do not recognize him yet as God. That is perfectly all right. He recognizes us, which is all that is important, and delights in his heart at our salvation.


4. The Truth Itself

Now we come to the Name of God which is the most important one for the purpose of this chapter: God is the Truth Itself. St. Augustine in particular made this central to his understanding of God. In ancient Greek, the verbal root lêthô meant to escape, to go unseen or unnoticed. The noun lêthê, which came from this same root, meant forgetfulness or oblivion. The Greeks put the privative prefix a in front of this root, equivalent to putting "un" or "not" in front of a word, to produce their word for truth, which was alêtheia. So the Greek word for truth literally meant "no longer allowed to go unseen or forgotten." It was an action word, which meant the uncovering of that which was hidden.

Augustine said that it was this word which described God's saving act, which snatched us back from the path to destruction. The truths that would save us were invariably buried under denial, lies, and confusion. When the divine light shone, the coverings were stripped away, and the truth of our lives (and the fundamental truths of the universe) came into view in a moment of saving insight. This is referred to in books on the history of philosophy as Augustine's doctrine of illuminationism. As we have already seen, the co-founder of the modern evangelical movement, Jonathan Edwards, put this doctrine at the very center of his system also, as seen particularly in his little piece called "A Divine and Supernatural Light," where he said that the conversion experience itself, where we are changed by grace, is an act of illumination by God's eternal light, the sunlight of the spirit.

Sgt. Bill S., the best spokesman from the early A.A. period for that branch of the movement which preferred to interpret the twelve steps in mostly psychological terms, said that "alcoholism is a disease of perception," a phrase which we still hear in A.A. today. Alcoholics look at the world around them from a perspective which distorts everything they see and feel and hear. Alcoholics seethe with injured feelings as they say things to themselves such as: "This person deliberately did that to hurt me." "Because my spouse does not cater to my every demand instantly and unfailingly, and does not read my mind in advance as to what I will want, my spouse is a terrible person." "It was totally unfair for the boss to fire me simply because I was coming to work drunk all the time." They fall into unbelievable grandiosity when they say to themselves: "I am a great genius who is going to make a million dollars with this marvelous scheme I have." "The only reason I am not a world famous musician [novelist, race car driver, movie actress, or what have you] is because I have just had a little bit of bad luck." They can get in especially bad trouble when they begin telling themselves: "I can lick anybody in this bar." Or they fall into total despair as they say to themselves: "I am no good. I am a failure. I will never achieve anything. I will fail at everything I try to do. Life is not worth living any longer." Fearful and resentful phrases like these all arise from a distorted perception of the world.

In order to perceive the world around us at all, the human mind has to construct a cognitive framework, which takes every piece of information coming in through the five senses, and assigns each piece of information to one or another of the pigeonholes created by that framework in the person's mind. In other words, the new piece of information is given a label of one sort or another. This mental framework can make very prejudicial judgments, because all too often it tells us, prior to any investigation, that it is "obvious" that this kind of information is vitally important, but this other kind of information can be totally ignored. And it can do even more dangerous things. This cognitive framework also prestructures each piece of information in advance in terms of the way it will be fit in with the other things we know, or think we know. So the boss simply says, "you need to put those screws in a fraction of an inch deeper," but if I have an alcoholic perception of the world, my mind may label this instantly under the category "deliberate insult," in a cognitive framework where I believe that if I do not respond with instant anger and aggression at any "attempt to insult me," I will be labeled a spineless wimp and stomped into the ground by all the people around me who sense my weakness and vulnerability.

Alcoholics look at the world around them through a cognitive framework which not only distorts everything that they hear and see, but also blocks out any possibility of hearing or seeing anything that might make them aware of how wrong their ideas about the world are. They live in continual denial because the cognitive framework of their minds will usually not allow any negative counter information to pass through to the judgment centers of their brains. On the rare occasion when a piece of information manages to get through which would raise questions about the truth of their preconceived ideas about the world, this same cognitive framework supplies them with a ready made set of alibis and excuses for "explaining all that away."

One of the reasons alcoholics have to "hit bottom" is because the weight of counter information must finally become great enough to force that distorted cognitive framework to totally collapse. The realities of the mess I have made out of my life have to finally become huge enough to cause all the alibis and excuses to collapse and fall apart. And Al-Anons and people in all of the other twelve step programs likewise have to do some version of hitting bottom, of getting to the point where their lives are falling apart, and they finally realize that they can go on no longer, because their old ways of thinking about the world do not work any longer.

But then we must receive a new vision of life, built on new principles of perception and behavior. We have to "reframe" our perceptions of the world, as the cognitive therapists put it. Otherwise we will simply commit suicide or go hopelessly insane at that point. And that is where the divine illumination comes in. The Light of God, as the Truth Itself, has to shine on our souls and show us how to form a different kind of cognitive framework to structure our thoughts and perceptions. As it says in the letter of James (1:5), "If any of you are lacking in wisdom, ask God who gives to all, without lying to you and without blaming you, and it will be given to you." And how does God give us this gift of his grace? As it says in James 1:17-18,


Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of Lights, with whom there is no change [in his light] or turning away into shadow. In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the Word of Truth [logô alêtheias].
Being Itself

There is another Name of God which at first glance appears to be yet a fifth and different name. St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century said that the only literal statement we could make about God was that he was Being Itself, and he built his great theological system on this idea. But what Aquinas meant by the term "Being Itself" was almost identical to what St. Augustine called Truth Itself. Aquinas argued that his terminology was more accurate, but what was mostly going on here was that he was using the word truth in its Latin sense (verum), where truth was the adequation of the mind of the knower to the thing known, while Augustine was using the word truth in its Greek sense (alêtheia), where truth was the unveiling of that which had been hidden or forgotten or buried in pathological denial. If one used the word "truth" in the way that Aquinas did, one could argue that it was better to choose Being rather than Truth as the central theological focus, but this seems to me to have been more an argument over words than anything else.

In the early twentieth century, Thomas Aquinas's theology was used as the basis of all Roman Catholic education, from parochial schools to universities. Two Roman Catholic scholars from that century give us particular help in understanding Aquinas's concept of Being Itself. The works of the Thomistic scholar Etienne Gilson are especially useful in explaining the concept in its original medieval context, while the philosopher Bernard Lonergan, in his book Insight, does an especially good job of showing (in modern English and American philosophical terms) what the connection is between Being Itself and the act of insight in which the human mind discovers truth.

Although we run into the idea of Being Itself in the modern period primarily in Roman Catholic theology, there have also been Protestant versions. The Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich, who was one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century, took the Thomistic concept of God as Being Itself and put it into the context of modern existentialist philosophy. In his theology, the act of Being Itself is that act of new insight in which I learn to reframe the world around me in a new and different way, which will give new meaning to my life when everything I held dear seems to have been destroyed or to have ended in futility. This gives me a new mental framework for deciding what is true and what is false, and allows New Being to appear when my life seems to be plummeting into the abyss of Non-Being. It is of interest to note, from an A.A. perspective, that Tillich taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City at the same time as Reinhold Niebuhr, the author of the Serenity Prayer.


Truth and Absolute Honesty

Since understanding what is meant by the concept of Being is usually not part of the intellectual framework of people in the modern English-speaking world, it seems to me however that it is far more useful to go back to St. Augustine's original formulation, where God was linked to the unveiling of truths which had been hidden.

This is especially so because the spirituality of the Big Book owes more to the theology of St. Augustine than to almost any other source. In fact, for western theology of all sorts, both Roman Catholics and Protestants of all varieties (including the eighteenth century evangelicals and especially Lutherans like Frank Buchman, the founder of the Oxford Group), St. Augustine has been by far the most important source of spiritual concepts outside of the Bible itself. So we see the great Augustinian catch phrases and technical terms appearing over and over again in the A.A. Big Book.

Why do people find it so hard to admit the truth? Augustine pondered this at the end of his Confessions. If this is what would save our lives, why did people struggle so hard to resist knowing the truth? He came to the conclusion that it was because they were so filled with pride that they could not stand to admit that they had been wrong, even literally to save their lives. So we human beings find ourselves in a position where foolish pride will put us in chains, while the truth will set us free.

Again and again we read in the Big Book that pride is at the root of most of the things we human beings do when we are engaged in the deeds which load our minds with unbearable fear and resentment. The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions likewise says that there may be Seven Mortal Sins, but pride is by far the most important of them, and tends to become worked into the fabric of the other six vices in ways that make them far worse and even more difficult to remove.

Pride leads us to destruction, St. Augustine said, but the truth will save us and put us back on the path to healing and the saving of our souls. Therefore, as we read in the Big Book, before we can work the twelve step program effectively we have to give up our foolish pride and surrender to the truth. We have to begin by admitting that we had been wrong, in terms of the principles upon which we had tried to live our lives. We have to make a fourth step, as a beginning exercise in confronting hard truth. A fourth step in which I gloss over some of the most embarrassing things in my life with various kinds of dishonest attempts at self-justification is totally useless. (But we must give a warning here: it is also true that listing only the bad things in my self-inventory does not become the truth, the full truth, and nothing but the truth, until I also include an honest account of my genuine good points also. Partial truth is often not truth at all, but the most destructive of all lies.)

When we begin to understand that God is Truth Itself, it makes it so much clearer why the Big Book said that honesty was the gateway which led into the true spiritual path, and why it said that failure to be honest with ourselves would inevitably doom us. We remember the ringing words from the beginning of the chapter on "How It Works":


Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves .... They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty.
Notice the unequivocal nature of that statement. This is a spiritual way of life "which demands rigorous honesty." It breaks with the way the Big Book usually speaks, and does not "suggest" but demands. It does not say that we can be halfway honest, but that we must practice rigorous honesty -- strict, exact, uncompromising honesty. The truth shall set us free. God is the power of truth, while the Devil is the father of lies. Honesty is the gateway through which we must pass before we can begin walking the path that leads to salvation. The attempt to practice absolute honesty at all times is also what will keep us from wandering off that path further down the way.


A.A.'s great debt to the Oxford Group

What did A.A. inherit from the Oxford Group? Many things, but let us especially note the importance of this principle of Honesty as the gateway to the path to glory. The place where V. C. Kitchen was forced to change his attitude about the Oxford Group was the point, during the first house party he attended, where he and another member sat down in the hotel lobby to talk, and the other man told Kitchen honestly about himself. And Kitchen was ashamed, because he could not make himself speak the truth about himself that evening. But he came back for a second house party, and after it was over, he sat down on a sofa with his wife and began speaking the truth to her for the first time in their marriage. He talks about the incredible sense of release and freedom which this brought: it felt, he said, as though "some forty thousand pounds had rolled from our shoulders."

The idea of making restitution or making amends was central to Oxford Group spirituality. If we look at the lives of both Frank Buchman (the founder of the Oxford Group) and Father Samuel Shoemaker (the head of its American branch) we see that the act of going to the people against whom they held such great resentments and apologizing and admitting their own wrongdoing, was the great spiritual breakthrough which brought them into the new way of life. A basic part of making amends in this way is simply admitting the truth, not only to God, but even more importantly to ourselves, and most importantly of all, to those whom we had so deeply resented. The truth we try to evade is that, regardless of what the other person did, we too were in the wrong before it was all over. But until we do that, we are not practicing absolute honesty. We are not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We are telling ourselves the partial truth which can so often be the greatest of all dishonesties.

What did A.A. and the later twelve step movement inherit from the Oxford Group? Perhaps the most important thing of all was the recognition that trying to practice absolute honesty in all things was the only way that a real soul change could ever be produced. But this meant that those who were willing to surrender to the truth, and to get honest with themselves and with other people, would receive as their reward a kind of soul change which brought with it "a new freedom and a new happiness," the life of heaven brought down to earth, surpassing anything they could ever have imagined experiencing in this world and this life. This most especially is what the Oxford Groupers gave to the twelve step movement, and for that all those whose lives have been saved by the steps must be eternally grateful.

:281:

[saved1]

From Buddy T,
SAMHSA's Working Definition of Recovery

Still today many people believe that if they are abstinent they are in 'recovery.' But research has shown it takes more than just abstinence to maintain a long-lasting sober... Read more
http://alcoholism.about.com/b/2012/01/19/samhsas-working-definition-of-recovery.htm?nl=1

Teen Myth: Everyone Is Getting High
Sometimes teens can get the impression that "everyone" is drinking, smoking or doing drugs if most of their friends are doing so. The truth is the majority of teens... Read more
http://alcoholism.about.com/b/2012/01/18/teen-myth-everyone-is-getting-high.htm?nl=1

CDC: Binge Drinking Bigger Problem Than We Thought
Binge drinking in the United States is a more widespread problem than previously thought with more people drinking more alcohol more often than originally estimated. According to a new... Read more
http://alcoholism.about.com/b/2012/01/17/cdc-binge-drinking-bigger-problem-than-we-thought.htm?nl=1

Alcoholism 101
What exactly is alcoholism? Is it inherited? Find answers to these and other frequently asked questions about drinking problems.
http://alcoholism.about.com/od/about/Alcoholism_101.htm
Amos Milburn - Bad Bad Whiskey - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDPPvsErNQY)
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The information given in this post about alcoholism is enough to know the people about what is exactly alcoholism and how it will affects on our body and health. Many people have a habit to drink daily but after some time it will resulted in the number of health diseases.

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From Buddy T,
April is the beginning of prom and graduation season for high school juniors and seniors and because an estimated 63 percent of them admit they have already tried alcohol, this month is Alcohol Awareness Month. Many communities conduct anti-drinking campaigns during the month aimed at curtailing alcohol use before, during and after these special events.

Alcohol Awareness: Keeping Prom Night Safe
http://alcoholism.about.com/b/2012/04/04/alcohol-awareness-keeping-prom-night-safe.htm?nl=1
One of the reasons Alcohol Awareness Month is held in April is because it is the beginning of the prom and graduation season, a time when celebrations can turn dangerous for underage drinkers.

National Alcohol Screening Day
http://alcoholism.about.com/od/problem/a/blquiz1.htm?nl=1
National Alcohol Screening Day is always a part of Alcohol Awareness Month. Do you or someone you know have a drinking problem? How does their drinking stack up to the recommended guidelines for safe alcohol consumption?
See More About: alcohol screening harmful drinking diagnostic test

Alcohol Awareness Is For All Ages
http://alcoholism.about.com/b/2012/04/03/alcohol-awareness-is-not-just-for-teens.htm?nl=1
Many of the efforts associated with Alcohol Awareness Month each April are targeted at preventing underage drinking, especially during the prom and graduation celebration season. But there are other groups that are also practicing harmful alcohol consumption but may not be aware of the risks :281:
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