The Non-Arbiter

Arbiter:  A person appointed, or chosen, by parties to determine a controversy between them.

I'm no arbiter of anyone's personal decisions.

Jesus Nut: The assembly that holds the propeller to the body of a helicopter as coined by pilots during the Vietnam War.  Because if the Jesus Nut was damaged all you could really do is scream "Jesus!"

I was the meeting leader this morning so I chose to read the appendix in The Big Book called The Spiritual Experience.  It does such a great job of explaining that the linchpin, the cornerstone, the Jesus nut, of The Fellowship is finding a Higher Power while making sure we understand that this is about personal spirituality, that we don't follow any organized dogma or religion.

Remember!

Remember: That light at the end of the tunnel might be the locomotive steaming right at you.

"We need to accept the difficulties and disciplines of life so as to fully share the common life of other people.  Many things that we must accept in life are not to be taken so much as being necessary for us personally, as to be experienced in order that we may share in the suffering and problems of humanity.  We need sympathy and understanding.  We must share many of the experiences of life, in order to understand and sympathize with others.  Unless we have been through the same experiences, we cannot understand other people or their makeup well enough to be able to help them."

Remember: Your sole purpose in life may be to serve as a warning for others.

Ah, nuts to that.  I hate the idea that going through painful or difficult circumstances is in my best interest because it is fitting me to be of maximum service to others which is - after all - the whole idea behind a life of service.  My first sponsor drove this great big Cadillac while I was trying to start a Plymouth Belvedere station wagon that my grandpa gave me.

"It has been proved in countless lives that for every day I live, the necessary power shall be given me.  I must face each challenge that comes to me during the day, sure that God will give me the strength to face it.  For every task that is given me, there is also given me all the power necessary for the performance of that task."

Remember: It's always darkest right before it goes totally black.

Pause When Agitated

"What often takes place in a few months could seldom have been accomplished by years of self-discipline.  With few exceptions, our members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power greater than themselves.  Most of us think this awareness of a Power greater than ourselves the essence of spiritual experience.  Some of us call it God consciousness.  In any case, willingness, honesty, and open-mindedness are the essentials of recovery."

The guy who chaired the meeting today is one of my favorite A.A. guys.  I was around when he came in about four years ago.  He sat on the filthy couches in the corner of the room with the street people.  He had a big bandage covering a noticeable cut on his forehead.  He did not have it all going on.  But I was encouraged when I spoke to him after the meeting because I could sense he was all in.  When I walk away from a newcomer my thoughts are often along the lines of "I don't think this guy gets what we're trying to do in here."  People want to get sober but they don't want to do the work.  They throw up a barrage of excuses.  I believe if I had told Frank that he needed to go outside, stand on one foot, and quack like a duck he would have done it.

Part of the meeting revolved around the phrase "As we go through the day we pause, when agitated or doubtful, and ask for the right thought or action. We constantly remind ourselves we are no longer running the show."  This helpful thought is especially helpful when paired with the idea that "Nothing pays off like restraint of tongue and pen.  We must avoid quick-tempered criticism and furious, power-driven argument.  The same goes for sulking or silent scorn. These are emotional booby traps baited with pride and vengefulness."  Look before you leap.  Think before you speak.

Another part of the meeting was a discussion of the words "we" and "us."  It's important for me to remember that if I try to go it alone then I'm shit out of luck.  This is why I'm constantly checking in with other alcoholics.  I'm not always nuts but when I am I don't always know it.

Definitions

Work: Sustained human effort to overcome obstacles and achieve a result.

The format for our Monday meeting is to read a paragraph out of The Big Book and use the reading as a basis for discussion.  Today the guy read the shortest paragraph in the first 164 pages (not verified but there is certainly none shorter): "It works - it really does!"  I find it interesting that the word "works" appears 31 times in the literature with "work" showing up an additional 130 times.  While some of these are in the context of going to a job many of them talk about the effort we have to put into our recovery.  It's work.  It's not leisure which by the way is not used at all . . . in any context . . .  anywhere in our books.

Balance:  Mental equilibrium; mental health; calmness, a state of remaining clear-headed and undisturbed.

The topic included the oh so important A.A. concept of balance, one of my favorite touchstones in my recovery.  I'm not all the way to the left and I'm not all the way to the right and I try to stay in the middle somewhere.  I didn't get sober to hang out in recovery rooms all the time but if I don't hang out in recovery rooms some of the time my mental equilibrium is disturbed.  Everything is no longer simply On and Off.  I can throttle shit up and I can downshift when it seems appropriate.

Isolate: To set apart or cut off from others.

We also dabbled with the idea of living life in our own heads.  If I go up there, in my noggin, I'm all alone in a bad neighborhood.  I need you people.  Even though you can irritate the shit out of me I need you.  I live my life in the real world and not in some dystopian nightmare hallucinated out of my darkness.

Quiet:  With little or no sound; free of disturbing noise; not talking much or not talking loudly.

In Alcoholics Anonymous we should addend this definition to say "or not talking at all."  If someone thinks you're stupid open your mouth and remove all doubt.  The idea is that I rarely make things worse by remaining silent while I often ruin something by talking.  So I keep quiet a lot of the time.  And when I do talk I measure my words carefully because they can have a big effect.  Sometimes, when I'm driven to say something I know I shouldn't say, I'm fascinated hearing to the stupid, inappropriate words coming out of my mouth even while my brain is saying: "This is stupid.  Why are you doing this again?  I told you not to do this and you're doing it anyway.  This is NOT going to work out well for you."

Serve: To be effective; to be useful to; to meet the needs of.

One of my morning Quiet Time affirmations is that I be shown how to be of service to someone.  This effort used to be restricted to alcoholics because that's the only people I was capable of helping.  Today I ask that I be given the strength and wisdom to be helpful to anybody.  We can be nice to everyone we run into.  We can try to make everyone's day better.

Spiritual Experience

"A spiritual experience is something that brings about a personality change.  This personality change is not necessarily in the nature of a sudden and spectacular upheaval.  We do  not need to acquire an immediate and overwhelming God-consciousness, followed at once by a vast change in feeling and outlook.  In most cases, the change is gradual.  The acquiring of an immediate and overwhelming God-consciousness, resulting in a dramatic transformation, though frequent, is by no means the rule.  Most of our spiritual experiences are of the educational variety, and they develop slowly over a period of time.  Quite often friends of newcomers are aware of the difference long before they are themselves.  They finally realize that they have undergone a profound alteration in their reaction to life and that such a change could hardly have been brought about by themselves alone."

I don't know about the idea that the White Light experience is frequent.  I'm not sure I've ever met anyone in Alcoholics Anonymous who had one.  I was talking to a woman in our community who has three sons with alcohol and drug problems - two in recovery and one living outside in an area of Ventura called the River Bottom which, as you may have guessed, is not a high-end condo development.  She knows I'm in recovery so she just kind of casually mentioned that she once had a White Light experience.  Intrigued, I listened as she described an event almost identical to what happened to Bill W in The Big Book.  It was eerie and I'm not making this up.

I believe that if you have acquired a peace and a contentment that you didn't have when you were drinking then you've had some kind of spiritual experience.  I had one and it was separate from my experience growing up in a conservative, religious household.  I did not have any trouble with the God idea or the suggestion that I declare myself powerless but the God I had wasn't very present or effective in my life.  The way I approached my Higher Power was not giving me the strength to stop drinking but because I had so much experience with this church God - who after all had been important in my life - it took me some time to grow into a working relationship with a working God.

No mumbo-jumbo for me - it has to be practical.

Teeth Collection

"In taking a personal inventory of ourselves, we have to face facts as they really are.  We have to stop running away.  We must face reality.  We must see ourselves as we really are.  We must admit our faults openly and try to correct them.  We do not do this once and forget it.  We do it every day of our lives, as long as we live.  We are never done with checking up on ourselves."

"We were not made so that we could see God.  That would be too easy for us and there would be no merit in obeying Him.  It takes an act of faith.  We are in a box of space and time and we can see neither our souls nor God.  God and the human spirit are both outside the limitations of space and time."

"Faith in God should bring you a deep feeling of happiness and security, no matter what happens on the surface of your life."

"Our demand for emotional security, for our own way, had constantly thrown us into unworkable relations with other people.  Though we were sometimes unconscious of this, the result always had been the same.  Either we had tried to play God and dominate those about us, or we had insisted on being overdependent upon them.  It became clear that if we ever were to feel emotionally secure among grown-up people, we would have to put our lives on a give-and-take basis; we would have to develop the sense of being in partnership or brotherhood with all those around us.  We saw that we would need to give constantly of ourselves without demands for repayment."

I've always liked the inclusion of the word "unconscious" when the book talks about our tendencies.  I'm often an asshole with no self-awareness.  Just because I don't think I'm controlling or judging or suggesting or correcting doesn't mean I'm not doing it.

"We discovered the best possible source of emotional stability to be God Himself."

The idea that there is something out there that is collecting teeth from children blows me away.  What is it constructing with those teeth?  What is its problem?

    My mandate is to love people.  I don't necessarily have to like them although that's nice, too.  And I'm good with that coming right back at me.  It's a great relief to not have to be liked by everyone.  It sure has relieved me of the people pleasing thing.

Courage

I heard this definition again today: "Courage isn't the absence of fear but the ability to continue on in spite of it."  And in conjunction with the belief that "Pain is the touchstone of all spiritual growth" we're led inexorably to "One Day at a Time."  The fact for us is that I have all the power and strength I need to meet whatever comes my way today but if I retreat into the past or go future-tripping then I'm on my own.

I try to practice the theory that I don't know what's in my best interest.  I know what I want (more money, more power, more sex) and what I'd like to avoid (pain, discomfort, more pain whether it be of the physical, mental, or emotional variety) but I don't know what's going to be best for me in the long run.  I live in a box of time and space and cannot see what's up ahead.

The Big Book story we read today was about a man at the top of his profession who lost everything but then got it all back.  I enjoy an inspiring story as much as the next person but I'm also careful not to buy into the idea that this is inevitable.  It often happens but sometimes - when we've burned bridges and then bombed the rubble and hired a heavy equipment operator to push the rubble down a mine shaft or into the ocean - we don't get things back.  I was kicked out of a university and they never invited me back to resume my education and I lost that job that meant so much to me and that I was so bad at and didn't really enjoy.  Painful when it was actually happening but everything worked out OK in the long run.  I can see in retrospect that it was the best outcome for me but at the time I screamed in misery.