'An AA group ought never endorse, finance, or lend the AA name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.'
- Pleasure includes sex, food, comfort, excitement, and entertainment.
- Power includes security and control.
- Prestige includes position, reputation, and self-esteem.
- Property includes things and money.
- Do problems of pleasure, power, prestige, and property (the four Ps) divert me from my primary purpose?
- My primary purpose is carrying the message to other people.
- The responsibility for the four Ps must be surrendered to God as the ultimate authority.
- He then delegates authority back to me to perform tasks in these areas.
- This leaves me time and energy to concentrate on my primary purpose.
- My primary purpose comprises the focus of my thinking and the focus of my activities.
- Carrying the message has two elements: carrying the AA message overtly; and carrying it covertly by treating every action solely as the service of God.
- In both elements: my role is to seeks God's direction and strength then to do my absolute best, focusing solely on the task at hand as God's servant.
- Worry is playing God: concern with outcomes falls within the scope of ultimate authority.
- If I let God take care of me, I become God's primary purpose.
- Service in spirit and action is the antidote to worry.
- All defects come from the pursuit of the four Ps.
- To implement Step Six in Step Seven, I surrender ultimate authority for these in Tradition VI to God.
- My identity is that of a child of God.
- My self-worth is then infinite and stable.
- My valuation of others is then infinite and stable.
- When the four Ps become the source of my identity, my self-worth is limited and unstable.
- When the four Ps become my primary purpose, I am in competition with you for a scarce resource, and your identity becomes that of commodity, competitor, or obstacle.
- For me to have true relationships with others, I must surrender ultimate authority for the four Ps.
- The four Ps are rapacious creditors, demanding perfection that can never be attained.
- The result of pursing them is fear, frustration, disappointment, and despair.
- I exchange the perfectionism of the four Ps for the idealism of serving God.
- I raise my eyes to perfection and am willing to walk towards it.
- My service of God can always be perfect because whatever I am capable of on a given day is always perfectly enough.
- My service of God is always for fun and for free, expecting nothing in return.
- What I do get in return, however, is fun and freedom from care, boredom, and worry.
- External rewards may come, but they may also go: they are not the real rewards.
- External rewards are not a sign that I am doing God's will.
- Doing God's will necessitates acting right, and acting right can but will not necessarily improve earthly results.
- The heavenly promises are always guaranteed.
- Heaven is stable and real.
- The earth is a shifting shadow, because it is not real.
- My reliance must be on heaven, which is real, not on earth, which is not.
- But my actions must be on earth, because my earthly life is the classroom where I learn from God and the domain where God can work through me.
- What I learn here is real.
- What God does here is real.
- The ego as guide always has me pursue the four Ps.
- If I have care, boredom, and worry, the decision-maker within me must have chosen the ego as my guide.
- If I have care, boredom, and worry, I decide I do not like the results of what I have decided.
- That means I must have decided wrong.
- So I unwind my decision and go back to the beginning: will I choose the ego or God?
- If I have an emotional difficulty, I must find a way to carry the message.
- That transports me to a new place: from that new place, everything looks different.
- All of my problems have been solved by applying the Steps, Traditions, and Concepts: the AA programme.
- Part of Tradition VI involves adopting the AA programme at the core of my solution.
- Religion, psychotherapy, and other practices have played different roles at different times but always secondarily to my one solution.
- My one solution is my one solution because my one problem is the tiny, mad idea that I am separate from God.
- The ego is the tiny, mad idea.
- To be separate from God is to deny God's oneness and therefore existence, as God's oneness is the nature of God's existence.
- Once I believe I am separate, I take the ego as my guide.
- The belief in separation produces a feeling of wrongness in me ('sin'), guilt (for 'betraying God'), and fear (of retribution).
- I deny and bury this, then project this out, and see wrongness, guilt, and retribution outside of me.
- The separation never happened: the tiny, mad idea arose and disappeared.
- But when it arose it denied God, and I believed it.
- The solution is therefore to deny the denial.
- I do that by looking the insanity of the ego's thought system in the face and saying: this need not be.
- I look at the insanity by looking at the failure of the ego's plan for my salvation: the four Ps.
- I then say: there must be a better way.
- I then say: what can I lose by asking?
- I then ask.
- The four Ps never work, but the one solution always does.
- If I place something before my recovery and the service of God that flows from that recovery, I become a dry drunk.
- If I stay a dry drunk long enough I will start to act out and sooner or later become a wet drunk.
- A dry drunk is someone who blames others, God, or their earthly self for their perceived woes.
- Instead I am to be a sober alcoholic: my alcoholism is a blessing because it is the way God found a way to reach me.
- I am called to be about God's business, not the business of the world.
Inventory:
Looking at the above ideas:
Where am I currently falling down?
What can I do differently?