anyone who knows the alcoholic personality by firsthand contact knows that no true alky ever stops drinking permanently without undergoing a profound personality change.”
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We thought “conditions” drove us to drink, and when we tried to correct these conditions and found that we couldn’t do so to our entire satisfaction, our drinking went out of hand and we became alcoholics. It never occurred to us that we needed to change ourselves to meet conditions, whatever they were.
1. LETTER, 1940
2. TWELVE AND TWELVE, P. 47
2
In God's Hands
When we look back, we realize that the things which came to us when we put ourselves in God’s hands were better than anything we could have planned.
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My depression deepened unbearably, and finally it seemed to me as though I were at the very bottom of the pit. For the moment, the last vestige of my proud obstinacy was crushed. All at once I found myself crying out, “If there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything, anything!”
Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness. All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence, and I thought to myself, “So this is the God of the preachers!”
1. ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, P. 100
2. A.A. COMES OF AGE, P. 63
3
Pain and Progress
“Years ago I used to commiserate with all people who suffered. Now I commiserate only with those who suffer in ignorance, who do not understand the purpose and ultimate utility of pain.”
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Someone once remarked that pain is the touchstone of spiritual progress. How heartily we A.A.’s can agree with him, for we know that the pains of alcoholism had to come before sobriety, and emotional turmoil before serenity.
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“Believe more deeply. Hold your face up to the Light, even though for the moment you do not see.”
1. LETTER, 1950
2. TWELVE AND TWELVE, PP. 93-94
3. LETTER, 1950
4
Can We Choose?
We must never be blinded by the futile philosophy that we are just the hapless victims of our inheritance, of our life experience, and of our surroundings—that these are the sole forces that make our decisions for us. This is not the road to freedom. We have to believe that we can really choose.
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“As active alcoholics, we lost our ability to choose whether we would drink. We were the victims of a compulsion which seemed to decree that we must go on with our own destruction.
“Yet we finally did make choices that brought about our recovery. We came to believe that alone we were powerless over alcohol. This was surely a choice, and a most difficult one. We came to believe that a Higher Power could restore us to sanity when we became willing to practice A.A.’s Twelve Steps.
“In short, we chose to ‘become willing,’ and no better choice did we ever make.”
1. GRAPEVINE, NOVEMBER 1960
2. LETTER, 1966
5
Maintenance and Growth
It is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness. To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that might have been worthwhile. But with the alcoholic, whose hope is the maintenance and growth of a spiritual experience, this business of harboring resentment is infinitely grave. For then we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the spirit. The insanity of alcohol returns and we drink again. And with us, to drink is to die.
If we were to live, we had to be free of anger. The grouch and the sudden rage were not for us. Anger is the dubious luxury of normal men, but for us alcoholics it is poison.
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, P. 66
6
All or Nothing?
Acceptance and faith are capable of producing 100 per cent sobriety. In fact, they usually do; and they must, else we could have no life at all. But the moment we carry these attitudes into our emotional problems, we find that only relative results are possible. Nobody can, for example, become completely free from fear, anger, and pride.
Hence, in this life we shall attain nothing like perfect humility and love. So we shall have to settle, respecting most of our problems, for a very gradual progress, punctuated sometimes by heavy setbacks. Our oldtime attitude of “all or nothing” will have to be abandoned.
GRAPEVINE, MARCH 1962
7
The Realm of the Spirit
In ancient times material progress was painfully slow. The spirit of modern scientific inquiry, research, and invention was almost unknown.
In the realm of the material, men’s minds were fettered by superstition, tradition, and all sorts of fixed ideas. Some of the contemporaries of Columbus thought a round earth preposterous. Others came near putting Galileo to death for his astronomical heresies.
Are not some of us just as biased and unreasonable about the realm of the spirit as were the ancients about the realm of the material?
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We have found that God does not make too hard terms with those who seek Him. To us, the realm of spirit is broad, roomy, all inclusive, never exclusive or forbidding to those who earnestly seek. It is open, we believe, to all men.
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
1. P. 51
