Full transcript of “Sandy Beach - A Spiritual Malady - AA Speaker”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:11 everybody my name is sandy beach I'm an alcoholic Leah and I are pretty close I've known him a lot of years and I called him about a week ago and I said is there any chance of there's an opening a quarter of 10:00 and he said yeah the coincidentally there was an opening no one else wanted it I'm only kidding I will make this as short as possible I promise you the topic that I wanted to
1:01 discuss a little bit is called the spiritual malady and I was thinking about alcoholism as a three-fold illness mental physical and spiritual and you hear a lot of talk about the physical over the years the medical world has certainly learned a great deal about the physical nature of alcoholism and there's all kinds of descriptions this is exactly what happens when the alcohol hits your system and this happens and that happens and I think there's been a lot of progress in looking at the mental aspects of alcoholism so that if you were asked what they are you could get
1:49 an answer but when we come to what is the spiritual malady I don't remember seeing any specific answer to that question you know we agree it is a spiritual problem but what is the nature of that spiritual problem and when I first started thinking about it I said well we're too far away from God and if that was the nature of the problem would simply move closer to God and there wouldn't be a problem so I started thinking about my own case and so many other alcoholics and not just
2:38 alcoholics there's a sense in almost every human beings life as they go along that there's something missing there just some of us called a hole some of us call it something unexplainable but there's I'm still not there yet and regular people call it the midlife crisis they alcoholics I don't know what we call it we we have a whole different vocabulary but they come to realize that in spite of succeeding and following all the rules of the material world they've
3:24 got the family and the boat and the car and there are very senior vice-president and they're thinking of suicide what is missing and so that is what I got thinking about now alcoholics have the same problem I did I always felt I didn't belong there was something missing somebody didn't tell me they briefed everybody else and what's going on I was the only kid in school that didn't know what was going on I don't know if you had that problem but I didn't want to ask anyone but then they'd know I didn't know what was going on and I felt that would be terrible
4:13 and along came alcohol and alcohol fixed everything that was wrong with me I no longer had the feeling that there was something missing I was finally pleat I remember that sense of sitting at a bar with the third drink kicked in and just sitting there just going it just doesn't get any better than this if I could stay like this all the time wouldn't that be wonderful there is no hole anymore and there's no feeling that
5:00 I'm not complete there wasn't any missing pieces through alcohol I became a complete person bill talks about this in the foreword to the twelve and twelve where he has that little sentence that describes our 12 steps because them a group of principled spiritual in nature which you've practiced as a way of life will expel the obsession to drink and enable the sufferer to become happily and usefully whole so there's the word whole I want to be whole I want to be
5:45 complete I want to be a total person and when I drank that was fixed I did not there was I didn't need anything else I was just there and enjoying it and so in that instance I was absolutely convinced that God was not needed in order for me to be a whole person and to me that's the nature of our spirituality of any spirituality is the idea that God is not needed for me to become whole that this
6:34 can be done by myself and that's what alcohol did and so whenever anyone suggested god to me when I was hungover hopeless everything so Brian said have you thought of God I said I don't need God I need a drink that's what I need because I had this I had total faith that when I consumed alcohol I once again would be a whole person and there wouldn't I wouldn't need anything and so to me the nature of
7:22 this spiritual malady is the sense that God isn't needed that's what I've concluded when I thought about this fortunately for us we get beaten down so far that a good sponsor or someone brow beats us into keeping an open mind enough to say okay I'll try God I'm willing to try this I'm willing to try this I didn't want anything to do with it I grew up with a religion and it didn't work for me so I had a lot of bad
8:08 feelings about it when I first got here the word I hated the most was God I didn't say the Lord prayer didn't want to talk about spirituality and my sponsor would say well that's good you can have all those things but if you don't change your mind you're going to die really yeah okay but don't tell anybody I changed my mind okay because I've been bad-mouthing God for all these years I don't want people to think I changed my mind you all went through the same thing you reached a point where you were willing
8:56 to go against your own set of ideas your own better judgment you were desperate you threw up the white flag and as William James said that when we can experience the real reality of a spiritual experience is in that moment of desperation and that's why it's so important to get new people on the steps right away well they're still desperate and their minds are open to this God idea and so I changed my mind big deal sandi changed his mind about
9:44 God the person that made the happiest was God he was saying God I'm so glad that standing changed his mind about me so that so I can make this those egos hurt aren't they amazing but they so I changed my mind [Music] and I remember that I almost didn't want
10:30 to try praying for fear that it would work and everything I had said all these years about prayer would be wrong it's almost like I'd rather get lousy results but still be right about prayer than have my life transformed and so I tried prayer and I tried everything that the my sponsor told me to do and I made the immense and I did the inventory and several times during that first year I had these experiences of my own creator just awarenesses driving in a car not
11:19 hearing a voice but being aware that something was telling me if I stayed in AAA everything would be fine and I didn't have to worry about a thing and just other things that were signals that this creator was real and was in my life and was making himself known to me that is the point of working the steps is to have that personal experience bill said it perfectly it's the experience we don't need a definition we don't need a history we don't need anything once we have this
12:05 experience that's our understanding of God as it came to us in that experience now as the years go on the desperation kind of fades away we're not as desperate as whom we first got here now we got a job we got a car in our own name phone maybe driver's license and there's speaking well of us at home and at work they just give us a promotion and there's a sense that we don't need
12:52 God as much as we used to when we first got here and I said that's the name of the spiritual malady is we don't need gonna third and it occurs in almost all of us as we first get sober it's a very common thing to get five years sobriety or six or whatever it is and suddenly have the bottom fall out of our peace of mind we don't have to lose our job we don't have to have material things go wrong but there's just a sense that we're all alone again and what happened what happened was I
13:40 started thinking that I was doing a lot of this staying sober that my actions that I thought up and going on the 12th step calling going over here going over there that that's what really counted and that's what was keeping me sober and happy and there's there's a lot of inertia that is accrued when we first have that contact and it will allow us to keep this illusion going that I've got this god I really appreciate what you did for me and I'll never forget it but I'm really
14:28 doing pretty damn good on my own and I will call you with something emergency comes up or something like that conscious contact is kind of optional and it's a meditation isn't that important if you're succeeding and all these things and then all of a sudden there is this sense that the bottom fell out and we have to talk to our home group they see at first what's going on nothing I don't know if what you say but that's what I always say
15:14 how you doing great great fine really fine why don't you tell your face remember that I think I took that from Clancy our friends can see the difference and I think we save each other from a lot of trouble by sticking our nose in other people's business and I tell the people that I sponsor you should get go up to three people that you feel close to and tell them they can stick their nose in your business any time they want because they could save your life someday because there's that thing where you can't just walk up and you know start saying that that would be crossing a boundary or whatever it is
16:01 but you know we got the people in the home group that don't care about that and they cross any boundary there is and and they they're the ones that save us and so and I can think of two or three times where I had that same phenomenon where I just and then I came back and reestablished this contact and followed the slogan first things first first thing is god but it's such a simple thing just keep God first and everything would be fine got it got it well actually today I think I could do okay without him and
16:49 that thinking starts and so you can see how this pattern can repeat itself until there comes an interest in seeking God at a higher level that bill was talking about that now becomes so interesting and so much fun and so important that the phenomenon doesn't seem to repeat itself that God isn't necessary it so my ego has to attack me in other ways egos are amazing they can find more ways of
17:37 screwing up our day God loves you but your group doesn't that kind of really think about it did Carolyn say hello to you tonight no she didn't well what do you think that's all about you don't even have to work hard when your ego kicks in and wants to get and so a lot of years ago by since they got started where do we at 77
18:26 that's a long time a lot of things change since 1935 the stuff that science has learned since 1935 is astounding and the society has changed they see things differently and there's a general sense that God really isn't as necessary to explain the universe as he used to be used to be that that was whenever you
19:13 couldn't answer a question you a little God you know it's a God plan that this is where God now they've got it down to where almost all the answers are in and the great mysteries are getting narrowed down to just a few and then the fourth step bill talks about one of the types of characters that comes to AEA and we all kind of fit that mold was the intellectually self-sufficient you remember that one I felt that was that way intellectually self-sufficient well there's a sense that perhaps that's
20:00 been overlooked as something that's more powerful than we realized and that maybe there is some value in this self-sufficiency and AAA members are trying to share the good news with us there you but they're growing and they're trying to get the word out to the rest of us the secret that they have discovered and they have discovered that you don't need God he gets over and this word is being passed around it isn't being welcomed yet because we're suspicious
20:45 can we go I don't get it but it's there there is a definite voice that is getting louder and it is appearing in the grapevine and pamphlets and speeches and the basic message is we now have proof with year many years of sobriety that God isn't necessary for hopeless alcoholics to get sober in a a well there we have it again the same words that I used in the very beginning the spiritual malady God isn't necessary
21:31 isn't that interesting that it just shows up we had it way back then only instead of alcohol creating this illusion it's the human ego and it is creating the illusion that God isn't necessary sobriety is not the name of the game in a any that's how we measure how long we've been around here conscious contact with God is the only result that is spoken about in the steps having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps step 11 tried to improve our conscious context so that is the jackpot in ane
22:16 and so I think about this and I go isn't it amazing that that same spiritual malady in the with using the exact same words God isn't necessary it's it's there's an arrogance to God isn't necessary rather than I don't like God I don't believe in God it's just well it doesn't matter because he's not necessary in this situation we can do fine without him and I look at that like a wouldn't unusual malady and so I try
23:01 to imagine what this new sobriety looks like and I concede that there is a good deal of not drinking going on and the best I can possibly imagine is that the restless irritable and discontent has been reduced to semi Restless irritable and discontent and that the Four Horsemen of terror bewilderment frustration and despair that were pounding all over us are now circling at a reasonable distance and it's not as good as we'd like it but
23:51 it's not as bad as it was and so we should be grateful for the pretty good life that we have that's what I imagine the alternative might offer this is just my own head imagining this and bill said that the biggest enemy of the best is the good that if something can be presented as pretty good better than it was it's just a tragedy that that is allowed to exist we have I think about
24:41 my own life and how easy it is to get off course all I have to do is tell one lie then I got to tell another lie to cover up that lie and then I got to do this and the next thing you've deviated about this far and you've got to turn around and make a big correction and groups can do that and the fellowship can do that and so I'm trying to suggest that there is a way of navigating a EA's future and it's so simple that it probably won't be used because alcoholics hate simplicity they just eat just remember that dish don't drink damn
25:27 it's got to be more complicated than that [Music] and so I'll offer this and then I'll shut up if anything that we're doing is taking us closer to God that's we're on course if whatever we're doing is taking us away from God we're off course there's only one beacon that will be permanent one anchor that we can hold on to and it has to be the central force it has to be but one thing that never gets changed in a I agree there's all kinds
26:16 of things that we might be able to change but certainly not the anchor of Alcoholics Anonymous so I just wanted to put a pitch in that if we're moving away from God try to stop it we're moving closer to God try to support it thank you all [Music] [Applause] [Music] you
