“Giving, rather than getting, will become the guiding principle.” (Page 128)
“happy in their release, and constantly thinking how they might present their discovery to some newcomer.” (Page 159)
“if a business occasion, go and attend to your business enthusiastically.” (Page 102)
Once I was at a meeting, and someone said that they hadn’t got much out of the reading (it was Steps Six and Seven in the Big Book).
Fair enough. If he was looking to receive something from the reading and he hadn’t received it, well, there it is: he’s quite right that he hadn’t got much out of the reading. I’m not sure what he was looking for, and he didn’t elaborate. An insight? A new idea? A tip for the day?
The funny thing is, the reading, even though it is short, will yield an awful lot of insight if one thinks about it, and an awful lot of material one can work with. The problem then is not having received something but not having made something of what one has received.
One has to want to, however: the consumption ethic replaces the brain with a digestive system that just consumes but doesn’t know what to do with what it consumes but bloat itself until everything and everyone in sight is eaten (cf. the character 顔無し or Kaonashi, literally ‘no face’, in Spirited Away). Rather than merely swallow, one must interact with what is received. Sometimes I have called another person for input or insight when I already have enough input and insight available to me for seven lifetimes.
To go back to the original point: my aim at a meeting where the book is read is not to get something out of the reading but to find something in it I can use to help carry the message in the meeting.
Ideally, the reading was previously read, and any action set out in it, previously taken; then, there is something to give.
A Big Book study (probably a bad term for it) is not a book club where one gives one’s opinion on the book or the passage read (e.g. when people say that they don’t like the language, or it’s outdated or sexist or something) but an opportunity for the reading to elicit accounts of actions, experiences, and related insights, so others will be helped.