Step One and Beyond Daily Topics 2026 Q2

30 June 2026: Enlarge

“but he failed to enlarge his spiritual life.” (Page 35)

I enlarge my spiritual life by attending diligently to my daily tasks under the direction of God and seeking to make the most of being alive.

Books are helpful for answering questions thrown up by the process, but I can get the cart before the horse: sitting there thinking spiritual thoughts does not butter any parsnips.

What’s your experience?

29 June 2026: Sunlight

“For when harboring such feelings we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the Spirit.” (Page 67)

Resentment cuts me off from God, but being cut off from God creates the conditions propitious for resentment.

A plant that is kept in the dark grows wrong, develops diseases, and eventually dies.

When it is put in the light, it clears up automatically.

The plant does not need to analyse itself.

What’s your experience?

28 June 2026: Helping others

“To watch people recover, to see them help others” (Page 89)

A lot of sponsorship processes don’t work out, but some do.

Once someone has made at least one amend, all of the effort up to that point has been well worth it.

Even if things subsequently break down, at least that was done.

What’s your experience?

27 June 2026: Better out than in

“We must be entirely honest with somebody if we expect to live long or happily in this world.” (Page 73, Big Book)

Way before Step Five, I spent a lot of time talking to people, to get everything inside me out onto the table.

I don’t think it’s possible to stay sober for long holding anything inside.

What’s your experience?

26 June 2026: Choosing a sponsor

“Having had the experience yourself, you can give him much practical advice.” (Page 96, Big Book)

How have I chosen a sponsor?

I have quite a few sponsors over the years, and quite a number in the first ten years. I would pick someone I already knew, with whom a relationship had already developed organically, where the interaction was already reciprocal and cordial. Just because I have heard someone speak in meetings does not mean that I know them.

One does not propose marriage to a stranger, and one does not ask people on dates who have never shown the slightest interest. When I was new, I approached quite a lot of people to chat at meetings. Some responded well. Others less so. Were the ones who responded less so wrong? No. People have good instinct. There’s always a good reason for aversion, even if it’s impossible to put one’s finger on it. There is such a thing as compatibility, and that compatibility is best determined by experience. Incompatibility is not a judgement on either person but a brute fact.

When such instincts are not followed, and the potential sponsor reluctantly agrees to ‘help’ someone who has fixed their sights on them, the incompatibility usually scuppers the process further down the line. Then the individual is back where they started.

What’s your experience?

25 June 2026: Sunbeam

“At long last I saw, I felt, I believed. Scales of pride and prejudice fell from my eyes. A new world came into view.” (Page 12, Big Book)

“I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

But this is only a very simple example of the difference between looking at and looking along. A young man meets a girl. The whole world looks different when he sees her. Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember all his life, and ten minutes casual chat with her is more precious than all the favours that all other women in the world could grant. lie is, as they say, “in love”. Now comes a scientist and describes this young man’s experience from the outside. For him it is all an affair of the young man’s genes and a recognised biological stimulus. That is the difference between looking along the sexual impulse and looking at it.” (C. S. Lewis, Meditation in a Toolshed)

It is very hard to convince someone with no experience of God to believe in God.

Part of the problem is this:

They are looking ‘at’ God from the outside, trying to understand the ideas presented, and judging the ideas as true or false in the same way that a physicist and neurologist might describe precisely what is going on when someone is watching a sunset. The physicist’s and neurologist’s descriptions would yield no valuable information about what watching a sunset is like. Moreover, without implicit trust in the reliability of the scientists and the veracity of their theories, the notion of one particular combination of light effects—and not another—producing particular psychological effects and emotions would seem quite implausible.

An external understanding of the appreciation of a sunset has its own value, but the thing itself is the appreciation.

Thus with God. The theologian, unlike the scientist, is not implicitly trusted. The person with no experience of God takes the theologian’s explanations of God to be fantasies. Someone who simply does not have the retinal apparatus to see colour will simply dismiss others’ appreciation of colourful sunsets as moonshine and will view the theologian’s explanations as hooey. If you had never seen a sunset and had never appreciated one, the physicist’s and neurologist’s explanations might appear logically sound but fundamentally specious, untestable against ‘reality’ and not grounded in any observable experience.

It is only when the retinal apparatus is adjusted and a sunset can finally be appreciated that everything falls into place.

The job with someone who does not believe in God is therefore to convince them that they are actually presently lacking a perceptual faculty. This is virtually impossible to do, however, without patronising and mortally offending the individual. I wouldn’t respond well to that approach.

We are left in an impossible situation. Only someone who is utterly desperate will ‘take our word for it’ and be willing to demonstrate for themselves that what we say is true by undergoing, as it were, the retinal rectification procedure.

Then they will see.

That’s what happened to me.

And I felt a little silly, afterwards.

What’s your experience?

24 June 2026: Fair fight

“We found, too, that we had been worshippers. What a state of mental goose-flesh that used to bring on! Had we not variously worshipped people, sentiment, things, money, and ourselves? And then, with a better motive, had we not worshipfully beheld the sunset, the sea, or a flower? Who of us had not loved something or somebody? How much did these feelings, these loves, these worships, have to do with pure reason? Little or nothing, we saw at last. Were not these things the tissue out of which our lives were constructed? Did not these feelings, after all, determine the course of our existence? It was impossible to say we had no capacity for faith, or love, or worship. In one form or another we had been living by faith and little else.” (Page 54, Big Book)

When necessity arose, I had to believe. I had no other option. If I was to live, I needed a supernatural power, and I took the actions necessary to contact that supernatural power. The result: I accessed that power, and the question of belief was swept from the table forever. I went from not believing to knowing, which presupposes belief.

How does someone who does not believe in God approach the question?

The first point to note is that there are far too many people who are thoughtful, sensible, educated, and even scientific who believe in God for belief to be dismissed as a fiction of the primitive, dim, or brain-washed. There is a definite case to answer.

Secondly, the argument is not an equal one. The assertion that something exists, in this case the metaphysical realm and everything that goes with it, is of a fundamentally different nature than the assertion that such a realm does not exist. To prove that a batch of strawberry jam jars contains at least one jam jar in which there is a stray blueberry requires only one blueberry to be found; to prove that no blueberries are contained in the batch requires the contents of all jars to be thoroughly examined. Now imagine that there are endless strawberry jam jars. The non-believer’s job is never complete. However, one genuine experience of the metaphysical realm would show all non-believers to be wrong. The aggregate experience of all non-believers by contrast proves nothing, any more than a hundred blueberry-free jars of jam prove that there is no blueberry in any of the other, infinite jars. It’s not a fair fight, and, from the side of the believer, one feels almost reluctant to engage in the question, because the opposing side is so heavily disadvantaged.

Before I believed in God, I took the conclusion that there was no God as the starting point of the investigation, crossed my arms, and challenged ‘the world’ to prove me wrong. However, I skewed the game by insisting that, if there were a metaphysical realm and a being in it, it ought to be somehow measurable with physical means, and, if no physical proof were furnished, well, there was no metaphysical realm. This is like attempting to prove that there is no infrared light using an ordinary camera, when what one needs is an infrared camera. Even in the material realm, you have to use the right tool to detect the presence of something.

The only way to detect the presence of God is internal: one has to use internal, in other words metaphysical, tools. Do you love Marjory? Can you prove it scientifically in the ordinary sense? Absolutely not. One has to rely on the subjective observation that one loves Marjory to conclude that one does indeed love Marjory. Numerous other states of affairs are subject to the same reliance. It turns out that, to live, one cannot live by scientific proof alone, and, in fact, scientific proof furnishes an extensive array of essentially trivial truths. The really important truths, the ones that create the warp and weft of the fabric of life, are determined subjectively. The physical truths are imprints on the surface of the fabric. They are not its substance.

Daniil Kharms tells a story of a gentleman who sees a man in a tree shaking his fist at him, but his eyesight is poor and he can see the man only when he is wearing his glasses, so he concludes that the man in the tree is an optical illusion. In this example, the use of a particular device, namely glasses, to perceive something does not mean that the means have produced the thing perceived, any more than a Geiger counter is creating the radiation it is measuring. The means for detecting the presence of the metaphysical realm and indeed of God is introspection. But introspection is not a blunt tool that can be used like a chimpanzee might use a rock to hit an orange. Even if introspection in an intellectual or psychological sense is highly developed in a person, the introspection required for metaphysical investigation is of quite a different nature. A clever person beginning a spiritual journey finds themselves at the beginning of an entirely new process, even though they may have sophisticated introspective tools in another department of their life. The failure to ‘find God’ by first introspection on the matter is like turning on a radio and hoping it immediately to be tuned into an orchestra playing Mahler Five. One has to know how to tune the radio, where to look on the spectrum, and when the particular station is going to be playing Mahler Five. Hearing white noise in your Chevrolet does not prove that Mahler was not born on 7 July 1860.

The only way, therefore, to acquire a belief in God, short of a bolt from the blue, is to acquire the means of detection, to develop one’s spiritual faculties. If you had no experience of music and were presented with a piano plus a recording of someone playing some dazzlingly virtuosic piece of piano music, say Gaspard de la Nuit, and you were then told that that player was using a piano just like the one before you to produce the sound, and then you were told that the player was a child of seventeen, and then you sat down at the piano to see how far you could get, you would conclude that you’re being fibbed to. It would simply not be credible that anyone could produce Gaspard de la Nuit by sitting down at a piano and striking the keys. The proposition would be preposterous. Yet you would be quite wrong.

That, however, was my protestation when I first ‘looked inside to see if I could find God’. I was expecting to see the face of God straight off the bat, like sitting down at a piano and expecting to play Gaspard de la Nuit. That’s not how it works. It takes instruction and practice, and both require humility.

Does God exist? I’m afraid I won’t convince anyone by argument. The most I can do is to show that the assumptions on the basis of which an individual has concluded that there is no God are untenable.

What’s your experience?

23 June 2026: 24-hour-a-day employment

“We had a new Employer.” (Page 63)

“Faith has to work twenty-four hours a day in and through us, or we perish.” (Page 16)

My employer is my employer twenty-four hours a day.

I can’t have another employer. I don’t have a job apart from working for God. Sometimes God seconds me to work for a human being or a company or agency. I don’t care. It’s all the same to me. I’m paid by God, not by the human being, company, or agency. God delegates the payment to them, so it looks like they’re paying me, but they’re not; God’s paying me.

I do not need to worry about anything in relation to work or money. All I need to do is ask God for my assignment today. What that is: I am indifferent to. It’s all the same to me, because I’m fully employed come what may.

What’s your experience?

22 June 2026: Reborn

“We were reborn.” (Page 63, Big Book)

The programme really does require one to have died first. I pretty much gave up when I was eleven years of age. I didn’t have much of a system left to rely on when I got sober, so I took what was offered.

People could carry the message to me, but not the death that was antecedently required. I had to die all by myself.

What’s your experience?

21 June 2026: Direction of thought

“Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking” (Page 86, Big Book)

Does God talk to me in Step Eleven?

To come at the role of God in Step Eleven, let’s look at the bigger context of Step Eleven.

What I am asked to do in Step Eleven is think. That’s the ‘meditation bit’, which, in 1939, did not denote transcendental meditation but deliberate, directed thought.

How do I know? According to the Book itself, I’m to ask God to direct my thinking.

There might be an inspiration, an intuitive thought, or a decision, but these are also categories of thought, elements of a thought process, or nodes in the thought process. They’re not a substitute for thought. I’m not asking God to think for me and present me with the results, like cook who has made the dinner and had the footman bring it up. One conceit is that I am going to receive direct revelations from God, on a silver platter. Occasionally, perhaps, but this is not the rule.

I’m not a high priest. I don’t have a special relationship with God. I do not have a secret door to the secrets of the universe.

99.9% of what I need for the day, I actually know already: it is a matter of retrieving knowledge, experience, and understanding and bringing them to bear on the situation at hand to generate the right attitudes and actions of the day. God is the guider of this. God does seem to cause me to make connections between this and that, to apply particular observations in unexpected ways, but the raw material is already there. God’s helping me select from the warehouse rather than dropping down fresh pearls from heaven.

After I had taken the Steps, which, in the Big Book, on pages 67 and 68, gave me full and final solutions to all resentment and fear forever, I would still ‘have’ resentments and fears and brandish them as unsolved, unsolvable, knotty problems, gammy legs, war wounds, the inevitable curse of fallen man. The truth is, the answer was there already. Drop the charges and the resentment goes; drop the demands and the fear goes. ‘Thy will be done!’ is not a complicated idea: it means ‘my will not be done’; it means renunciation. I did not need therapy, shadow work, or the clairvoyance. I needed to drop my petulance and drop my entitlement. God gave me the answer in 1939.

Another conceit is that, if I write, God will write through my pen, so I had better not edit it. It’s rare that the inspiration, intuitive thought, or decision should be applied immediately, without further consideration, without articulation with other inspirations, intuitive thoughts or decisions, without consultation, without adaptation to the circumstances. When I have a good idea, I usually sit on it for a while. When there is a decision to make, three to six months is my usual timeframe.

What’s your experience?

20 June 2026: Wanting vs willing

“If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it—then you are ready to take certain steps.” (Page 58, Big Book)

Wanting is about desiring an outcome.

Willing is about being prepared to pay the price (effort, sacrifice, pain, uncertainty) to bring about that outcome.

Willing is about putting up with things I don’t want to get something more important or durable I do want.

Wanting and willing are not the same.

What’s your experience?

Footnote for French speakers:

The translation into French of the Big Book conflates the two with the verb ‘vouloir’, which covers both.

“Si vous avez décidé que vous voulez ce que nous avons et que vous voulez tout faire pour l’obtenir, alors vous êtes prêts à prendre certaines mesures.”

To make the distinction between wanting, willingness, and readiness, once could instead say:

“Si vous avez décidé que vous désirez ce que nous avons et que vous êtes disposé à tout mettre en œuvre pour l’obtenir, alors vous êtes prêt à franchir certaines étapes.”

19 June 2026: Funny ha-ha

“7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.” (Page 59, Big Book)

The comedian Tommy Cooper started out as a magician, but things kept going wrong, and people would laugh at him, so he decided he’d just be a comedian instead, a comedian for whom everything goes wrong. It worked.

Most ‘removal’ of shortcomings involves a restructuring of how I live so that the assets are capitalised on and the defects are either capitalised on or worked around.

I don’t change. How I live changes. I haven’t changed one bit.

What’s your experience?

18 June 2026: Mechanic

“7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.” (Page 59, Big Book)

Step Seven is like calling a mechanic to change a tyre, only to have the mechanic turn up, hand me a jack, and give me instructions.

God removes my defects not instead of me but by directing me to believe, think, and do differently.

What’s your experience?

17 June 2026: Why?

“Here we ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision.” (Page 86, Big Book)

When I ask for a decision and get one, I do not ask ‘why?’

I might be able to work it out, but that’s just speculation and of no value.

If someone asks me ‘why?’, I no longer give an explanation.

Why?

Because all I was told was what to decide.

If you want to know the explanation, you’ll have to ask God yourself.

What’s your experience?

16 June 2026: Scaffolding

“Here we ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision.” (Page 86, Big Book)

The best way to live is to rely simply on God providing one of these three, each step of the way.

Until the building is built, scaffolding is required to keep it up.

That means following rules, systems, procedures, and others’ advice, for a while.

But at some point that has to stop.

What’s your experience?

15 June 2026: Ants

“Here we ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision.” (Page 86, Big Book)

When I ask God for guidance, I don’t expect an instant reply. If I’m asking what to do next, I need an instant reply, and I’ll get one then. If I have a more general question or am out of whack spiritually, the answers come slowly, usually bit by bit.

It’s like sending out a thousand ants, and they come back one by one, in their own time, with a leaf or twig.

My job is then to pay attention generally for the rest of the day.

What’s your experience?

14 June 2026: Pause procedure

“As we go through the day we pause, when agitated or doubtful, and ask for the right thought or action.” (Page 86, Big Book)

When I’m agitated or doubtful (in other words, in any mental distress whatsoever, or in any uncertainty), I need two things: right thought and right action.

I ask God.

And if I set my mind to looking at the situation constructively rather than destructively, I will be given the right thought(s) and right action(s).

It’s important to take God’s side against the ego rather than taking the ego’s side against God.

If the situation is simple and the distress is minor, then the problem can often be dealt with straight away with a single thought or a single action.

If the situation is complex or the distress is great, a more robust approach is needed.

First I write out, using simple phrases, the precise nature of the difficulty: frightened of this; angry at that; guilty about the other (those are the only three negative emotions), or the specific questions I’m facing practically.

Then, having asked God for the right thought or action, I write out the solution, again using simple phrases.

I usually find that I already know the answers. I’m retrieving and applying existing ideas rather than inventing new ones.

I write out the right thoughts and actions until all of the difficulties have been addressed.

If there is something that will not yield, and I cannot see how something is OK or what can be done, I call someone.

What won’t do is appraising the situation from the point of view of complaint, fear, or artificial helplessness.

In that position, no one can help me, not me, not others, not God.

I have to be the one to take the initiative to look at the situation rationally and constructively and in an adult, detached way.

Once I’ve written it out, my job is to forget about it and get on with the day, taking whatever the indicated action is, if any.

If God needs to input, He will, but in His time.

God’s there not to wave a magic want but to double my investment in the solution and to strengthen me in my resolve not to be overwhelmed by the ego.

What’s your experience?

13 June 2026: Unreasonable demands

“We now clearly see that we have been making unreasonable demands upon ourselves, upon others, and upon God.” (Page 76, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions)

I don’t own anything. I don’t have anything. I’m not owed anything. I’m not due anything. There’s nothing to legitimately demand or expect.

If I didn’t stick my nose where it didn’t belong, it wouldn’t get out of joint.

All I need to do is ask (God) and act, and I’m given what I’m given.

What’s your experience?

12 June 2026: Change

“He goes on to explain that any person capable of enough willingness and honesty to try repeatedly Step Six on all his faults—without any reservations whatever—has indeed come a long way spiritually, and is therefore entitled to be called a man who is sincerely trying to grow in the image and likeness of his own Creator.” (Page 63, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions)

It’s no good just repeatedly doing the Steps. One has to change the beliefs, thinking, and behaviour. God gives me the direction and strength to do it, but I have to do it. It’s not done for me. I’m not changed by God. I do the changing under His direction.

What’s your experience?

11 June 2026: Willingness

“Upon a foundation of complete willingness” (Page 12, Big Book)

“2 Do not deceive yourself in this. 3 Unwillingness can be most carefully concealed behind a cloak of situations you cannot control. 4 Learn to distinguish situations that are poorly
suited to your practicing from those that you establish to uphold a camouflage for your unwillingness.” (ACIM)

There’s always a way to do everything God asks me to do.

What’s your experience?

10 June 2026: Malady

“When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically.” (Page 64, Big Book)

Alcoholism = a sober compulsion to have the first drink + a drunk compulsion to continue drinking.

If the first compulsion is blocked, the second will never be activated.

God blocks the first compulsion.

What role does the spiritual malady play?

The spiritual malady is what blocks God.

When the spiritual malady is overcome, God becomes available, and God blocks the compulsion.

The spiritual malady is thus not part of the problem but a block to the solution.

Taking the example of a bacterial infection, not being able to get the cap off the antibiotic bottle is a block to the solution, not part of the problem of bacterial infection.

What’s your experience?

9 June 2026: Regulate

“Just for today I will be agreeable. I will look as good as I can, dress becomingly, talk low, act courteously, criticize not one bit, not find fault with anything, and not try to improve or regulate anybody except myself.”

If I was busier improving and regulating myself and stopping trying to improve or regulate anyone else, my problems would be over.

Imagine if everyone did that …

What’s your experience?

8 June 2026: Catch-22

“And there often seems no way of entirely getting rid of self without His aid.” (Page 62, Big Book)

Untreated alcoholism is a condition in which I am blocked from God.

Self is in the way.

This appears to be a Catch-22 situation.

It is not.

Imagine a mansion and a porch.

I’m on the porch.

I need to get into the mansion.

I need the key to get in.

God pushes the key out through the letterbox.

And I take the key, turn it, and enter the mansion.

What’s your experience?

7 June 2026: Governed vs ordained

“All these, and many others, have one symptom in common: they cannot start drinking without developing the phenomenon of craving. This phenomenon, as we have suggested, may be the manifestation of an allergy which differentiates these people, and sets them apart as a distinct entity. It has never been, by any treatment with which we are familiar, permanently eradicated. The only relief we have to suggest is entire abstinence.” (The Doctor’s Opinion)

Why can’t God remove the physical craving and render us normal drinkers?

Why does God intervene at the level of will?

In a chess game, the moves are governed by the rules of chess but ordained by the decisions of the players.

In life, events are governed by the laws of nature but ordained by the decisions of people.

To ask God to help me play chess is to ask God to help me make better decisions, to effect better plays.

It is not to ask him to allow me to move a bishop from a white square to a black, or for a pawn to execute the move of a knight.

If I acquire a crown, I want to be shown how to earn it. I don’t want one merely to be placed on my head.

I don’t want to be fixed—by an alteration of the laws of physics, by a change in the rules of the games, by a drug that removes my need for agency—I want to be shown the truth, and I want to be shown how to live.

What’s your experience?

6 June 2026: Fishing for pleasure

“These men had found something brand new in life. Though they knew they must help other alcoholics if they would remain sober, that motive became secondary. It was transcended by the happiness they found in giving themselves for others.” (Page 159)

Passer-by: What fish are you fishing for?
Fisherman: I’m not fishing for fish; I’m fishing for pleasure.

It’s not about the outcome; the process is the point.

If I asked God for help with my book of sudoku puzzles, I would not be pleased to discover that all of the puzzles had been solved. That would ruin the game.

If you could give me a pill that made me feel better without me having to change my beliefs, thinking, or behaviour, I would not take it.

If I picked up the ball and placed it in the goal, the game I’m playing is not football.

What’s your experience?

5 June 2026: Shelf-stacker

“Giving, rather than getting, will become the guiding principle.” (Page 128, Big Book)

Sometimes people who have got well don’t like meetings. They don’t get anything out of them.

If I’m well, I’m not a customer, I’m a shelf-stacker. I spend 57 minutes working out which shelf needs stacking, and with what, and then I spend 3 minutes sharing, which is to say, stacking the shelf.

As a shelf-stacker, I leave not with products but with a pay packet in my pocket.

What’s your experience?

4 June 2026: Sick

“When a person offended we said to ourselves, ‘This is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry. Thy will be done.’”

The problem with the word ‘sick’ in modern English is that it is laden with senses other than merely being unwell. There’s also a considerable intolerance, contempt, and fear of sickness itself, which does not help matters.

The point of saying, ‘this is a sick man’ is that we are supposed to develop compassion and understanding in response to this.

In order to preserve the substance of this phrase now the language has changed, I have taken to substituting one of the following, which generates the right response in me:

• This person (like me) is innocent
• This person (like me) cannot see
• This person (like me) does not understand
• This person (like me) is not doing well
• This person (like me) I should have understanding and compassion for
• This person (like me) is having a tough time
• This person (like me) is going through a lot
• This person (like me) is muddling through the best they can
• This person (like me) is not playing with a full set of cards

What’s your experience?

3 June 2026: Function and reality

“Is not our age characterized by the ease with which we discard old ideas for new, by the complete readiness with which we throw away the theory or gadget which does not work for something new which does?” (Page 52, Big Book)

If you’re navigating through territorial waters to a port, and there are perils such as shallows, shoals, reefs, etc., if you (a) have a good map and (b) navigate in accordance with it, you will navigate safely.

If you hit something, you ask yourself firstly whether you navigated in accordance with the map. If you did, there is a problem with the map.

When living according to the self-centred and materialist outlook and philosophy, one collides constantly with reality, fails to reach satisfactory destinations, and generates considerable unhappiness.

When living according to the God-centred and spiritual outlook and philosophy, one navigates reality without collision, reaches satisfactory destinations, and generates considerable happiness.

Presuming one is living consistently in accordance with one’s system, one can therefore draw conclusions about whether the map accords with reality.

If one lives successfully, and collision-free, the map must be held to accurately reflect reality.

I therefore conclude that the metaphysical realm is real, God is real, God is powerful, God is good, God has a purpose and a role for me, and God will look after me if I seek that purpose and discharge that role. This, I conclude, is reality.

I also conclude that the materialist’s view of reality is quite wrong.

What’s your experience?

2 June 2026: Plenty O’ Nuttin’

“Finally, when all our score cards read ‘zero’, and we saw that one more strike would put us out of the game forever, we had to look for our lost faith. It was in A.A. that we rediscovered it.” (Page 29, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions)

When I find myself with a problem yet refusing to go to God or reluctant about going to God, it is because I still believe I can find my own way out of my problems.

This is the case when I am thinking about my problems to generate a way forward, to acquire philosophical comfort, or to resolve some riddle.

When I find myself going to God or observe that I am single-minded in my going to God, it is because I’m in the position of ‘Mother Hubbard’ with the bare cupboard, I’m at the end of the line, the tank is empty, the last of the pie has been eaten, I got plenty o’ nuttin’, I ‘don’t got this’, the land is parched, and the hens have stopped laying. In other words, I go to God only as the last resort when every other option has been exhausted.

This is why one can’t help people who are not going to God or are resisting going to God. Such people are still working through their own arsenal of ‘tools’; they have Ideas and Thoughts and Beliefs and, worst of all, Convictions and Values. They’re still eating from their own imaginary box of chocolates. They’ve got Notions.

People who are out of ideas, thoughts, beliefs, convictions, and values can be helped, but the help consists in showing them the ropes of developing a relationship with God, not in directly helping them with their problems.

What’s your experience?

1 June 2026: Abandoned

“To others, the word “God” brought up a particular idea of Him with which someone had tried to impress them during childhood. Perhaps we rejected this particular conception because it seemed inadequate. With that rejection we imagined we had abandoned the God idea entirely.” (Page 45, Big Book)

“If we would gain any real advantage in the use of this Step on problems other than alcohol, we shall need to make a brand new venture into open-mindedness.” (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 68)

For a long time, I did not believe in God. That appeared to be a statement about God. But really it is a statement about me and my belief. I didn’t believe in God, but I did believe in the person who was making the statement. I was sure I know who the ‘I’ was, that the ‘I’ in question was capable of addressing such questions, and that the ‘I’ had reliably answered this question. But was my belief in my existence, my capability, and my accomplishment valid? When one starts to address the question of who or what the ‘I’ is, one runs into trouble. Is one one’s body, one’s formative influences, one’s upbringing, one’s thoughts, one’s ability to observe one’s thoughts? As soon as one addresses these questions, it becomes unclear who is actually making the statement about the existence or non-existence of God. Was it really me who did not believe in God or was that the received wisdom of my background, class, and education, the simple view adopted arbitrarily by listening to this or that person? I, after all, had not generated the thoughts supporting the conclusion that God did not exist but I had merely chosen this commentator rather than that commentator. On what basis had I made that choice?

I thought I was open-minded but in truth I had unwittingly and involuntarily painted myself into a witless corner.

I moved from witless to witness and started to observe the actual facts around me in AA and my own experience.

This entirely different approach swiftly brought me to a firm belief in the existence and power of God.

What’s your experience?

31 May 2026: Belief vs faith

“They flatly declare that since they have come to believe in a Power greater than themselves, to take a certain attitude toward that Power, and to do certain simple things, there has been a revolutionary change in their way of living and thinking.” (Page 50, Big Book)

I’m asked to believe that God has saved Marjorie not merely by observing that she used to be a terrible drunk and is now sober and inferring the accessing of a Higher Power from these two facts.

I’m asked to believe that God has done so by hearing Marjorie report on her own experience. The human example thus provides a greater body of evidence than chemists enjoy when producing chemical reactions: chemicals can’t talk, but people can.

What three things am I asked to believe? Well, nothing very abstract and theological. I’m asked to believe:

(1) God (who is good and powerful) exists
(2) God is accessible
(3) If I adopt an attitude (of surrender) and take certain actions (the Steps), my problems will be solved.

That’s belief, and one arrives at those principles inductively from the facts, being the facts of what has happened to others, as observed and as reported.

Belief is thus rational and certainly not blind: quite the reverse.

What is faith?

Faith is the faculty that allows one to muscle through fear based on belief.

I’m told by the diving instructor that, if I jump off the diving board, even if I muff the manoeuvre entirely, whilst I might feel a sharp smack, I cannot possibly hurt myself. Faith is the ability to dive.

What’s your experience?

30 May 2026: Like

“Not many people can truthfully assert that they love everybody. Most of us must admit that we have loved but a few; that we have been quite indifferent to the many so long as none of them gave us trouble; and as for the remainder—well, we have really disliked or hated them. Although these attitudes are common enough, we A.A.’s find we need something much better in order to keep our balance. We can’t stand it if we hate deeply. The idea that we can be possessively loving of a few, can ignore the many, and can continue to fear or hate anybody, has to be abandoned, if only a little at a time.” (Page 92, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions)

When I don’t like someone, I’m usually committing a category error. The fact is I do not like something about them, or I do not like something they have said or done. I’ve then generalised this to the person.

If I express this dislike, it seems like I’m saying something about them. I’m really saying more about myself, namely that I have notions of how they should be, and that I think they’re a rotter for breaching my rules.

To like people can be the inverse of this: I like something about them, or I like something they have said or done. I’ve then generalised this to the person.

If I express this like, as with dislike, I’m really saying more about me than them: I have notions of how they should be, and I think they’re jolly good for complying with my rules.

That’s only one type of liking—a selfish liking that really takes no account of the other person except in as far as they reflect my values or wishes.

There’s a different type of liking, however. To understand this, dogs and cats are a good example. One likes them before they have exhibited any characteristics or done anything useful, interesting, or admirable. One likes them from fifty feet away. The liking is instinctive and represents an apprehension of the whole creature, not of some part of the creature, and not of how it relates to me. Its usefulness or lack of to me is irrelevant in this assessment.

This is the approach that I think the programme is asking me to take to others: to appreciate them simply as they are, as a whole, rather than looking at parts or rating their relation to me.

What’s your experience?

29 May 2026: Programmed

“But did not we, ourselves, set the ball rolling?” (Page 67, Big Book)

When something happens, and I am tempted to be frightened, this is what is going on:

I have previously trained my physical brain to equate certain events with danger.

All my brain is doing is applying the algorithm and churning back out to me the output I programmed it to churn out in response to a particular occurrence. I am not processing the event that is actually happening; I’m simply receiving the goods I ordered in the past. In other words, the fear that presents is not a response to this situation but a response to a previous situation.

If I then accede to this fear, effectively I’m adopting the proposition, ‘This situation is as perilous as the last’, without assessing whether the fear response to the previous situation was reasonable, whether the last situation genuinely corresponds to this one such as to constitute a valid precedent, and whether this situation reasonably commands fear.

This represents a circumvention of thought. It is non-thought. It is the acceptance of a sub-routine’s output in the place of thought.

Fear is literally mindless. It’s brain-ful mindlessness.

What’s your experience?

28 May 2026: Infinite regress

“The trouble is that this kind of thinking takes no real account of the facts.” (Page 36, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions)

When something happens, and I think about it, I’m thinking about the thing.

The next time I think about it, I’m thinking about my previous thinking about it. I’m no longer thinking about the thing itself. I’m not accessing new data. I’m reworking the previous analysis of the data.

The third time, I’m thinking about what I thought about what I thought.

This regress is infinite.

If I’m thinking about something from forty years ago, I’m not.

I’m thinking about thoughts.

No wonder one goes quite mad with all such thinking: I am divorced from the facts.

What’s your experience?

27 May 2026: Fortune

“All of us spend much of our spare time in the sort of effort which we are going to describe. A few are fortunate enough to be so situated that they can give nearly all their time to the work.” (Page 19, Big Book)

In other words, people who are working only part-time or who do not have a job because of retirement or unemployment are more fortunate than people who work full-time.

This means that God is looking after them more directly than those to whom the task is delegated to earn their living that very day.

If I’m short of paid work, I’m fortunate! God might well continue to direct me to find paid work or increase the volume of paid work I am performing, but I now trust that the time is being allocated to me to perform work for God rather than work for money.

What’s your experience?

26 May 2026: Broken record

“But it is clear that we made our own misery. God didn’t do it.” (Page 133, Big Book)

If I’m upset, I ask myself: “Is anything bad happening literally right now?” It never is. I must therefore conclude the feeling bad is caused by my thinking (the only two causal candidates being a present condition or my thinking).

That means, when I’m upset, my thinking is broken. It is telling me something is wrong when nothing is wrong.

If I am to find a way out, my first action is therefore to disavow my thinking, to laugh at it.

I say, “I obviously do not know how to think. God, please give me a replacement thought.”

PS I met someone who said they were upset because they were in the middle of a divorce. I looked around the room, but I could not see the divorce. I concluded that the poor person was subject to some sort of optical illusion. One must beware those, as well.

What’s your experience?

25 May 2026: Validation

“We have no desire to convince anyone that there is only one way by which faith can be acquired. If what we have learned and felt and seen means anything at all, it means that all of us, whatever our race, creed, or color are the children of a living Creator with whom we may form a relationship upon simple and understandable terms as soon as we are willing and honest enough to try.” (Page 28, Big Book)

Technical validation is the process of confirming that a technology, product, or system functions reliably, meets specified requirements, and operates correctly within its intended environment.

If I am performing work, it is valuable periodically to have one’s work reviewed by others in order to determine whether it is up to scratch and to identify improvements.

This form of validation—the objective establishment of value—is occasionally warranted.

Seeking validation from another person is quite another matter: it is not really validation in the technical sense I’m after but attention or praise, as an ego hit for its own sake or a short-acting antidote for ‘low self-worth’.

I experience low self-worth when I measure myself by material values (which can never be fully lived up to) or am falling short morally.

Rather than seeking validation, my job is to adopt the right values and then bring my behaviour in line with those values.

That removes the ‘need’ for ‘validation’.

What’s your experience?

24 May 2026: Agency

“To duplicate, with such backing, what we have accomplished is only a matter of willingness, patience and labor.” (Page 163)

I’m not powerless over people, places, and things. I can help Marjory, clean the kitchen, and make buttered-toast.

I have considerable, although not absolute, power over people, places, and things.

I have a far larger part in the conditions I find myself in than I realise.

Someone was blaming other people or factors for their circumstances.

The response came, “You’re thirty-one. I’m pretty sure things become your fault, soon.”

My life is what I’ve created, because it’s what I want, whatever my protestations.

I have to change what I want, deliberately, then work towards that objective.

The agency I have is considerable; therefore, what I’m asked to do by God is considerable.

The crosswinds are fierce, but one must continue.

God then doubles the stake.

What’s your experience?

23 May 2026: Gamble

“Simple, but not easy; a price had to be paid. It meant destruction of self-centeredness.” (Page 14, Big Book)

Imagine you’re in a building, and you have a hundred thousand pounds in cash.

You want to leave the building.

There is a staircase up to the roof, where a helicopter is waiting to take you away.

But the way is barred by a man demanding your hundred thousand pounds.

You say, “But how do I know you’ll fulfil your promise?”

He says, “That’s the nature of a promise. You’ll have to take my word for it.”

That’s quite a gamble.

Now imagine the building is on fire.

If the building burns, so will your hundred thousand pounds in cash.

The hundred thousand pounds is now effectively worthless.

This is no longer a gamble.

God says, “Give up materialism. Give up self. Give up yourself.”

This is a gamble only if the building isn’t burning.

But it is.

What’s your experience?

22 May 2026: Tyranny

“We began to see that the world and its people really dominated us. In that state, the wrong-doing of others, fancied or real, had power to actually kill.” (Page 66, Big Book)

When I tyrannise others by having covert or overt demands of them, I ironically become a victim: how they act governs how I feel.

I then accuse them of tyranny.

As a victim, I see tyrants, overlords, oppressors, persecutors everywhere. I’m really seeing myself. I’ve forgotten I am the one who is responsible for my situation and condition. It’s my failed attempt at dictatorship that has placed me in this position.

What’s your experience?

21 May 2026: Party

“For when harboring such feelings 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.” (Page 66, Big Book)

Why does resentment cut me off from God?

Imagine God throws me a birthday party, and I say, “I don’t like any of the people you have invited.” I then pout, stamp my foot, complain, throw the cake at the walls, and refuse to play with the other children. I won’t have a very good time at the party, and I won’t have much of a relationship with the person who threw the party, because that’s who invited the other people.

What’s your experience?

20 May 2026: Big

“I have since been brought into a way of living infinitely more satisfying and, I hope, more useful than the life I lived before. My old manner of life was by no means a bad one, but I would not exchange its best moments for the worst I have now. I would not go back to it even if I could.” (Page 42, Big Book)

Having a spiritual awakening means adding a new dimension to the material life, namely the spiritual dimension. This infinitely expands one’s life.

This is what having a ‘big life’ means.

If having a ‘big life’ means simply filling the material life with more things (work, career, family, interests, people), then all one has done is made the same material life with the same, unchanging and unchangeable dimensions more varied but essentially fuller.

This is why street drunks often seem happier than the grey-faced commuters rushing past them. The latter have got the same material lives as the tramps, but their rooms are stuffed and they have no room to move around in them. They haven’t got bigger lives; they’ve got more constrained, cramped lives, pushed around by endless targets and obligations.

You can give yourself more space either by getting rid of things from your material life or expanding into new premises, the spiritual life. And the more time you spend in the spiritual life, the less the material life matters, and the more things drop out of that too.

What’s your experience?

19 May 2026: Con

“Whatever the precise definition of the word may be, we call this plain insanity. How can such a lack of proportion, of the ability to think straight, be called anything else?” (Page 37, Big Book)

The lack of proportion: the pros appear to outweigh the cons, but the cons actually outweigh the pros. That’s the con. That’s the conning. That’s the cunning. That’s the trickery.

What’s your experience?

18 May 2026: Devil ex machina

Read Fred’s story (pages 39 to 43).

It reveals that Fred’s alcoholism and each episode of drinking is not due to:

• Bad circumstances (he has none)
• Bad character (his character is good)
• Mental illness (he is not mentally ill)
• Physical illness (he is not physically ill)
• Weakness (he is not weak)
• Incompetence (he is competent)
• Lack of willpower (he has considerable willpower)
• Lack of information (he has information)
• Having bad feelings (his feelings are good)
• Having bad prospects (his prospects are good)
• Having a bad day (his day is good)

Fred exemplifies someone whose alcoholism and whose drinking cannot be attributed to any circumstance or quality of the person.

Alcoholism is thus extraneous to the person but someone buried within them, like an alien presence.

It is the devil on the shoulder, whispering compellingly in the ear, persuading the person to do wrong.

The devil’s existence and motivations have nothing to do with the person.

The devil is the entire explanation for the actions.

Alcoholism is the entire explanation for the alcoholism and therefore the drinking.

Any attempt to explain it with reference to the person’s outer or inner world will fail.

What’s your experience?

17 May 2026: Mindlessness

“Or perhaps he doesn’t think at all.” (Page 24, Big Book)

The impulse to drink is normally accompanied by an insane rationalisation.

But sometimes one knows exactly what one is doing it and does it anyway: there is no mental insanity at play.

And sometimes there is no thinking at all: there is no mental insanity at play.

The behaviour is indeed insane, as it were a behavioural insanity, but is not prompted or even enabled by insane thinking, either because such thinking as there is is not insane or because there is no thinking at all.

Most of the time, a resumption of drinking is due to the duo of compulsion plus mental insanity.

But when the mental insanity is not present, one realises that the compulsion never needed its sidekick, the mental insanity. It was always perfectly capable of doing the job on its own.

What’s your experience?

16 May 2026: The third thought

“Suddenly the thought crossed my mind that if I were to put an ounce of whiskey in my milk it couldn’t hurt me on a full stomach.” (Page 36, Big Book)

Jim’s having a perfectly ordinary day. He then ‘suddenly’ has this thought. In other words, there are no prior thoughts of which he is aware. However, the proposition is not an opening gambit. It is a response to the tacit proposition, ‘whiskey will hurt me’. No one would say, ‘Don’t worry, I have a torch’ unless there were a dark passageway ahead, and someone had proposed walking down it. The real question, therefore, is why there is the tacit proposition, ‘whiskey will hurt me’. The reason is because the impulse to drink has arisen. The impulse has arisen, but he is not aware of it. His defence system has been activated and said, ‘whiskey will hurt me’. He is not aware of this either. He is only aware of the response to the defence, namely ‘it couldn’t hurt me on a full stomach’. In other words, the first thought that crosses his conscious mind is not the first thought he has had. He has had two prior thoughts: (1) I want to drink whiskey and (2) whiskey will hurt me. He is merely unaware of these.

In other words, the decision to drink has been made before we are aware it has been made.

It is already too late.

The perception of reality is then warped to eliminate the defence.

And we drink.

What’s your experience?

15 May 2026: Conditions

“All of us spend much of our spare time in the sort of effort which we are going to describe.” (Page 19, Big Book)

Is there such a thing as simply being in a bad mood, going through a bad phase, suffering ups and downs?

Are such dips or lows to be passively accepted like weather systems?

If they solidify into a permanent state, must that be accepted?

Possibly, but that’s the conclusion only if everything else is ruled out.

There is a lot I can do to rule that out.

To be happy and stable, I need to create the conditions for happiness and stability.

If I do not, I will never know whether my lack of happiness and stability is due to me or due to physiological, societal, or other factors beyond my control.

What are the conditions?

Firstly, the past must be cleared up. I need to enter each day a tabula rasa.

Five things have to be eliminated: grievance (page 67), fear (page 68), harmful conduct (pages 69 to 70), secrets (page 75), and unamended past harms (pages 76 to 84).

These have to be eliminated, in full, to create the tabula rasa.

There is then the question of how I am living today.

This question boils down to three aspects:

1. Philosophy
2. Practical affairs
3. God’s will

If I have a depressing philosophy concerning the nature of being, my nature, my position in the universe, my value, identity, and purpose, I cannot escape the consequences of that philosophy. They will catch up with me eventually.

If my practical affairs are not in order, I am ordering mental and emotional disorder. Sleep, diet, exercise, mental hygiene, relationship with technology, an ordered schedule, being on top of administration and chores, having an effective daily routine, etc., all impact baseline mood and outlook.

Lastly, there’s the content of my life. The dynamic equilibrium needs to be right between the maintenance of my life, the fulfilment of obligations, and personal interests. Where is enjoyment in this? In all activities well accomplished. Activities that are there solely for enjoyment are rarely enjoyable in any durable sense. In particular, in the context of the programme, there’s the mother of all conditions, inferred from on page 19 of the Big Book: spending much of my free time sponsoring.

The above is a tall order, and it takes a while to get the above system in place, but as soon as I’m moving towards that, the energy generated by the progress is enough to turn the light on before I reach the Light.

What’s your experience?

14 May 2026: Myths and fairy tales

“… indeed miraculous. He has commenced to accomplish those things for us which we could never do by ourselves.” (Page 25, Big Book)

Sometimes people dismiss religion or spirituality as a myth or a fairy tale, using the two terms interchangeably. These are two entirely distinct categories. Fairy tales are entirely fabricated. Myths are conceptual structures invoked to explain present, demonstrable phenomena. Fairy tales are grounded in nothing. Myths are grounded in reality. You can dismiss a fairy tale. But if you dismiss a myth, you have merely eliminated the analogy. Whatever the analogy explains remains and now demands a different explanation.

What is the phenomenon in AA? Why people who were powerless have acquired power; why people who were heading for destruction suddenly change direction, without such change being consciously or deliberately activated by the person themself or by third parties. Sure, destroy a myth, but there is still a case to answer.

If there is no God (and there might not be), there is a mechanism that has godlike powers to transform an individual life in a way that is indeed miraculous. In other words: a God-like thing that is not God, an inverted tautology, something that is not itself. In other words: a logical nonsense.

What’s your experience?

13 May June 2026: No more, no less

“If what we have learned and felt and seen means anything at all, it means that all of us, whatever our race, creed, or color are the children of a living Creator with whom we may form a relationship upon simple and understandable terms as soon as we are willing and honest enough to try.” (Page 28, Big Book)

The more identity I have, the less myself I am.

That applies to personal identities (‘I like Heidegger’) or to group identities (‘I’m male, I’m British, ...’)

These are all trivial fictions, abstracted from trivial facts.

Who am I?

Unspecified spirit.

What do I do?

Whatever God asks me to do.

What’s your experience?

12 May 2026: Angle

“We found the Great Reality deep down within us.” (Page 55, Big Book)

One could tour Oxford, view the colleges, the libraries, the lecture halls, the administrative buildings, the chapels, and ask, ‘But where is the university?’ This would be what Gilbert Ryle calls a category error: the university is an abstraction that represents the aggregate of all of these things and their internal relations. The university is not one further aspect of the list starting with colleges and chapels but the whole shooting match that includes those.

Similarly, the ‘spiritual angle’ of AA (Page 228, Big Book) is not a further item on a list that includes reading, written step work, AA meetings, meetings with sponsors, phone calls, etc. but is in a different category. God is the power operating through all of these things; God suffuses every aspect of AA.

Where is God in AA? God is not a component but an infiltrating force and flavour of the whole experience.

Similarly, the AA programme is not something that I add to the list of things to do but the entire basis, method, and procedure for doing all things, as well as providing specific things to do in addition to my ordinary tasks.

What’s your experience?

11 May 2026: Long haul

“Now about health: A body badly burned by alcohol does not often recover overnight nor do twisted thinking and depression vanish in a twinkling. We are convinced that a spiritual mode of living is a most powerful health restorative.” (Page 133)

When I decided to really work the programme properly, I was disappointed when I continued to encounter problems. I thought that, as soon as I made the decision to do so, my problems would vanish, I’d not have challenges, I’d not have difficulties, I’d not have bad days, I’d not have negative emotions, I’d not have setbacks, I’d not have to work at it, I’d not have to exercise discipline and vigilance, sometimes exerting myself considerably to avoid self-indulgent thinking and to engage actively and constructively in the world.

I finally learned that I was in this for the long haul.

When adopting a system wholeheartedly, it’s a good idea to give it a year or two before assessing ‘whether it’s working’. A watched pot doesn’t boil.

The devil wants to get in there and suggest, like he would to someone who has been to the gym for a week, that it’s a waste of time because he has not lost four stone and does not look like a body builder.

When I was mentally flabby and decided to shape up, I was frankly going to have to put up with remaining mentally flabby until I had learned the skill of being mentally disciplined about junk-thinking and mental training. That’s the job of years, not minutes. The system takes a long time to rewire.

In addition, when, after X years, I fully gave myself to the programme, I was resetting the clock at zero. Five minutes into the new way of life, I was five minutes in, not X years plus five minutes. This took the pressure off.

What’s your experience?

10 May 2026: If not insanity, then what?

“It did not satisfy us to be told that we could not control our drinking just because we were maladjusted to life, that we were in full flight from reality, or were outright mental defectives.” (The Doctor’s Opinion)

Since I was not compelled by another person to drink, my excessive drinking must be attributable to something internal.

What could that be?

Not unhappiness or happiness: individual drinking episodes often went wrong, and it caused considerable unhappiness the next day, and over time gradually reduced the baseline happiness in my life, leaving me at a level of almost constant desperation. The idea I was drinking (and drinking too much) because I was running from unhappiness or running towards happiness was simply untrue, unless I was insane in the sense of not being able to appreciate these facts. I could appreciate these facts all too well. So unhappiness and happiness are ruled out as causal.

What about insanity? I was not generally insane. But what about momentary insanity? That would be plausible were it not for those many occasions towards the end when I saw clearly the horror of what I was doing but was quite powerless to stop the process; I had the sense I was on a merry-go-round doing so fast I could not get off. I was drinking, and drinking too much, wishing I were not drinking, and wishing I were not drinking too much, and perfectly clear about what was going on. Even as I was heading off for a drink, I had an awful dread. I had no illusions. Insanity is not causal.

[Why does the book talk about insanity? I think because alcoholic drinking runs utterly counter to reason, because it is so harmful, not because insanity per se is causing it. It’s an informal description of the state of affairs, not a clinical description of the condition that activates the drinking.]

What about stupidity? This is ruled out for the same reason as insanity. I was neither stupid generally, nor did I stupidly believe that drink was some sort of saviour or boon, although I had thought that in the early days. So stupidity is ruled out, too.

What about masochism or having a death wish? Possible in some cases, but not in mine. Both traits were present but were not dominant enough to be the overall guiding forces. I deeply regretted the harm I was doing myself and did not want to die, at least not in that way, drunk, sprawled on the floor, drooling.

There’s only one other possible explanation: senseless compulsion, which is the core of powerlessness.

Looking at the system from the outside, it looks insane, but the cause is compulsion.

I am powerless > I cannot manage my life [= make rational decisions and put them into action consistently] > my life is unmanageable.

What’s your experience?

9 May 2026: The fallacy of agency

“Despite all we can say, many who are real alcoholics are not going to believe they are in that class. By every form of self-deception and experimentation, they will try to prove themselves exceptions to the rule, therefore nonalcoholic. If anyone who is showing inability to control his drinking can do the right- about-face and drink like a gentleman, our hats are off to him. Heaven knows, we have tried hard enough and long enough to drink like other people!” (Page 31, Big Book)

I thought I was drinking on purpose, so, when I suffered ill effects, I naturally though I could solve the problem by making ‘ACME’ adjustments: abstinence, containment, moderation, elimination. I thought I could abstain. Or contain my drinking to certain times and places so that it would not affect other areas of my life. Or moderate the quantity to avoid the worst of the effects. Or eliminate the problem drinking by sorting out the other problems in my life, which I thought were the cause of the problem drinking.

If you have a pot boiling over, you turn down the heat. Nothing could be more natural. But I did not have access to the knob to turn down the heat, because I did not have access to the cooker at all. This was the delusion. I was not drinking on purpose. I was acting under compulsion, deluded by the parasite alcoholism into thinking I was acting under my own free will.

The delusion of agency is there for alcoholism to protect itself. If you realised there was a parasite stuck to your arm telling you to harm yourself, you would get the parasite off. If you could not see the parasite but were mesmerised into thinking you really wanted to harm yourself, you would harm yourself until you died and never realise you had a problem.

AA smashed through the delusion, and it was only then I was willing to go to any lengths to get well.

What’s your experience?

8 May 2026: Bigger not smaller

"Our next function is to grow in understanding and effectiveness." (Page 49, Big Book)

The ego will always remain as it is. The job is not to shrink the ego but to become bigger, to develop the human, spiritual, intellectual, and social potential, under the direction and supervision of God, so that the ego is no match for us. The problem is not that we are too big. It's that we are too small. We need to grow.

What's your experience?

7 May 2026:

“I personally know scores of cases who were of the type with whom other methods had failed completely.” (The Doctor’s Opinion)

“Many types do not respond to the ordinary psychological approach.” (The Doctor’s Opinion)

“Then we have a certain type of hard drinker. He may have the habit badly enough to gradually impair him physically and mentally. It may cause him to die a few years before his time. If a sufficiently strong reason—ill health, falling in love, change of environment, or the warning of a doctor—becomes operative, this man can also stop or moderate, although he may find it difficult and troublesome and may even need medical attention.

But what about the real alcoholic? He may start off as a moderate drinker; he may or may not become a continuous hard drinker; but at some stage of his drinking career he begins to lose all control of his liquor consumption, once he starts to drink.” (Page 20 et seq., Big Book)

Alcoholics are people who persistently drink way too much. They fall into two broad categories, according to Dr Silkworth. The first category responds to ordinary interventions (at the medical, psychiatric, psychological, social, and practical levels). The second does not: these methods fail. The individual reverts to drinking.

Bill refers to the ‘real’ alcoholic, implying a different category, an alcoholic who is an alcohol of sorts, but lacks some required characteristic.

To square all of this, I think we can map Dr Silkworth’s helpable vs hopeless onto Bill’s certain-type-of-hard-drinker and real alcoholic. Thus, the certain-type-of-hard-drinker is an alcoholic of sorts (persistently drinks too much, harms themselves, and may even die early), just lacking the baffling fear of ‘real’ alcoholism, namely the individual’s inability, despite a full range of human interventions and their own maximal efforts, to stay permanently stopped. This stubborn resistance to recovery is the hallmark of Bill’s ‘real’ or ‘true’ alcoholic.

I was that type. I had all the ingredients: good interventions, full knowledge, and considerable effort on my part, but I seemed to lack the glue to hold myself together in sobriety. I repeatedly disintegrated and found myself drunk.

The glue, the integrating, centripetal force, the actuating power, the current in the circuit, the heat below the pot, the crystal seed in the saturated solution, the penny in the slot, the battery in the toy drummer, is God.

And God is activated by people.

What’s your experience?

6 May 2026: Half buckets avail us nothing

“Half measures availed us nothing.” (Page 59, Big Book)

If you’re making a bucket out of interlocking parts, all parts must be locked in place. If one is missing, the bucket won’t work at all. That’s why half measures avail us nothing. Half a bucket does not carry half the water.

What’s your experience?

5 May 2026: Step ladder

“I now remembered what my alcoholic friends had told me, how they prophesied that if I had an alcoholic mind, the time and place would come—I would drink again.” (Page 41, Big Book)

Imagine being in a room at the top of the tower. Below the room is a chasm extending to the bottom of the tower. Now imagine there is a room above the room, which can be accessed with a rope ladder and trap door.

Now imagine you’re told the floor of the room you’re in could give way at any moment.

Your only hope is to get onto the step ladder.

You do so, because, even if the floor has not given way yet, it could give way at any moment.

Note you do not need to go all the way up the step ladder to be safe: you need merely be on the step ladder.

This is the precise position of someone alcoholic who is newly sober. The floor could give way—one could drink at any time, and, if one drinks, that might well be curtains; one might well not survive the drop. One does not need to clamber all the way up the step ladder to be safe: one need only have stepped off the floor onto the step ladder.

4 May 2026: Personal welfare requires common welfare

“1. Each member of Alcoholics Anonymous is but a small part of a great whole. AA must continue to live or most of us will surely die. Hence our common welfare comes first. But individual welfare follows close afterward.” (The Twelve Traditions, Short Form)

Tradition One might seem to favour a collectivist philosophy, with a willingness to sacrifice the individual for the common God. This is not true. ‘Our common welfare comes first’ is not a primitive condition but an entailment: since the individual is part of the great whole, if the individual is to survive, the whole must survive. Antecedent to common welfare is the philosophy that the individual matters, and the individual’s survival matters. That’s the primitive value from which all else stems. The paradox is that, for the individual to survive and thrive, the common welfare must be maintained and prioritised over individual welfare. In those rare occasions that there is a conflict between common welfare and personal welfare, common welfare wins, but only for the sake of each individual.

In short, you matter, and I matter, and because you and I matter, the collective ‘we’ matters.

What’s your experience?

3 May 2026: Truth

“While the internal difficulties of our adolescent period were being ironed out, public acceptance of A.A. grew by leaps and bounds. For this there were two principal reasons: the large numbers of recoveries, and reunited homes.” (Foreword to the Second Edition)

Imagine a warship navigating a minefield based on sensors and software processing the sensor data, and it successfully reaches its destination without incident, one concludes that the sensors and software are perceiving and processing reality correctly.

Imagine another warship in the same minefield, hitting mine after mine, even though the sensors and software are telling it that its course is safe: one has to conclude that its systems for perceiving and processing reality are not working.

When I navigate based on cool observations of objective reality rather than hot observations of my own feelings and based on the extra channel of insight afforded by a working relationship with God, I note I reach my destination (achieve good results) and have remarkably few collisions with ‘people, places, and things’.

When I’m not achieving good results and when I’m colliding with people, places, and things, in practice or even just in my mind, I can conclude that my sensors for perceiving and processing reality are not functioning properly.

Short version: if I’m failing and sad, I’m not seeing things right.

What’s your experience?

2 May 2026: Reality

“They had visioned the Great Reality—their loving and All Powerful Creator.” (Page 161, Big Book)

Seven principles:

(1) There is an objective reality
(2) It can be discerned
(3) It was here first
(4) It is intelligent and active
(5) It cares about me
(6) It’s great!
(7) Let’s get in contact with it

What’s your experience?

1 May 2026: Knowing me, knowing you, knowing Him

“We thank God from the bottom of our heart that we know Him better.” (Page 75, Big Book)

I asked someone what that meant for them. They said: “I completed my Step Five and I wasn’t struck by lightning. I concluded God loves me.”

What’s your experience?

30 April 2026: Judgement and control

“If the owner of the business is to be successful, he cannot fool himself about values.” (Page 64, Big Book)

“At the moment we are trying to put our lives in order.” (Page 77, Big Book)

In AA, people say that judgement and control are necessarily bad.

The book itself, however, suggests that we have values, which entails judgement, and order, which entails control.

Judgement is required. If you do not judge between someone with a good command of the programme and a bad command of the programme, you cannot judge who to ask to be your sponsor. If you do not judge right from wrong, you cannot write inventory in Steps Four and Eight and you cannot contribute constructively to group conscience discussions on what the group should do and how.

Control is required. One controls one’s bladder. One controls one’s temper. One controls one’s finances. One controls who can and cannot come into one’s house. One controls a thousand things. To go further: one controls the action of subordinates, students, children, and others under one’s care. One does not control them exclusively: agency is allowed to the degree appropriate. But it is nonsense to say it is somehow morally virtuous to let our lives descend into chaos or to permit anyone in our orbit to do whatever they want under all circumstances.

In other words: we need values, which entails judgement; and we need order, which entails control.

The question is not whether to judge and control and how.

Clearly we must judge and control ourselves, where this is constructive and reasoned.

Judgement and control does not stop there. Judgement and control of others is required, where this is constructive and reasoned.

The problem arises which I judge shrilly, without good purpose, in an unreasoning way, when I control unkindly, without good purpose, or in an unreasoning way.

These are the defects to watch out for and eliminate. The question, in all cases, is where the boundary lies.

Defects and virtues lie on opposite ends of scales, and the question is not what is a defect and what is a virtue but where the line between the two falls, generally and in each specific case.

Unconditional kindness spoils. Unconditional love condones. Both kindness and love need to be tempered with sanity and with numerous other virtues.

What’s your experience?

29 April 2026: Failure

“Above all, Bill believed that his depressions were perpetuated by his own failure to work the A.A. Steps. … Many A.A.’s agreed. Not a few of them suggested to Bill that he try working the Steps.” (Pass It On: The definitive biography of A.A. co-founder Bill W.)

The programme works. Completing the first nine steps produced recovery. The last three steps maintain the recovered condition and as a bonus do wonders for all sorts of other things.

When I don’t work the programme exactly as outlined, I lapse back into old ways: depression, anxiety, ill temper, conflict, gloom, cynicism.

When I start working the programme properly again, everything clears up, and amazingly quickly.

Where to start? Pages 84 to 88 for the daily programme. Page 67 for resentment. Page 68 for fear. Page 69 for problems. Pages 98–99 for relationships. Pages 117–118 for disputes.

That combined with a quarterly survey of my character defects in all my affairs with the attendant confession, surrender, and amendment does the trick perfectly well.

Would that I had learned that lesson early on! Instead, I had years, almost decades of ‘easier, softer ways’. What do I conclude from these?

I—and I stress ‘I’—don’t need special spiritualities, esoteric knowledge, superstition, or voodoo; I don’t need to spirito-hack the universe to unlock its secrets, to harness its powers, to actualise my potential; I don’t need healers; I don’t need analysis or therapy; I don’t need pills or potions for the mind; I don’t need syntheses of the programme with other beliefs, rituals, or practices; I don’t need exercises, elaborations, embellishments, extended third columns, pre-AA Oxford Group prayer and meditation practices, gilded lilies, or bells and whistles; I don’t need new experiences, deep dives, shadow work, or family-of-origin work; I don’t need special postures, breathing, cushions, or candles; I don’t need apps; I don’t need psychedelics, microdosing, or Adderall; I don’t need to go to Nepal, Thailand, or the Costa Rican jungle; my extensive forays into ‘easier methods’ (page 62) were fun and interesting and sometimes valuable in their own right, but they’re not necessary: the programme has been sufficient without them, for me.

At the end of the day, when all of that brouhaha dies does, there was me in a dark room with the ego still nagging at me in my own voice. It turns out the ego cannot be destroyed with any of the ‘easier methods’. It actually loves those methods. When I’d tried everything else, there was only this: stop trying to solve my own problems through practices and procedures, stop trying to work my way to heaven like the Pelagian heretics, abandon myself to God, busy myself with being constructive and useful in the day, and enjoy what I see around me at the still point of the turning world.

On comes the light and the ego’s show is over, for today.

What’s your experience?

28 April 2026: Potato

“But it is clear that we made our own misery. God didn’t do it.” (Page 133, Big Book)

If you want to understand why a potato is in the condition it is in, a couple of things must be understood. First of all, the condition is not due to a single causal factor. A particular causal factor might be a sine qua non, but so are thousands of other causal factors, extending through time, each of which is in a network of its own causal factors. Thus no causal factor is an absolute primitive beyond which chains of causation cannot be traced. It is no good, therefore, saying that the potato is in the oven because Susan put it there. Why are potatoes grown in England? Why are they sold in Waitrose? Both would require a book to explain the fact. They are part of the reason the potato is in the oven.

So much for potatoes. What about human beings? The first observation is that human beings are not potatoes and are fundamentally different than potatoes. A human being who is entirely passive might appear to be pushed around by the world, and their condition might appear to be explicable with reference to particular causal factors or circumstances, but human beings are not passive. Even if they appear passive, they are actively adopting that passive position. In a Swedish novel I read whose name I have forgotten, a pale Swede commits suicide by sitting in the hot summer sun until they die of sunburn and heatstroke. Apparent passivity is really a form of activity.

The reason for anyone’s practical circumstances and emotional condition is really a combination of upstream factors, the cards that are dealt, and the playing of those cards through the exercise of agency, moment in, moment out. Everything is chosen. Even if one simply stays put, to stay put is a choice. Even if one continues to believe some claptrap one was ‘taught’ as a child, that lesson was taken on board, and then adhered to, when other lessons could have been sought out and followed.

The truth is that one’s consciousness is continuously active, producing the picture of reality one finds oneself in and the action predicated on that picture of reality.

Why are my circumstances the way they are? My narrative plus my actions.

Why are my feelings the way they are? My narrative plus my actions.

I can choose a different narrative, and I can choose different actions.

No one and nothing can exercise power over my consciousness, and therein lies freedom, as succinctly put by Viktor Frankl:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

What’s your experience?

27 April 2026: Emotion

“They appear to be in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements. Ideas, emotions, and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of the lives of these men are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them.” (Page 27, Big Book)

I thought that emotion was freestanding or self-originating.

It’s not. It comes from thought and action.

This is why talking about emotions per se is a waste of time.

The emotions are the access point to the causative factors: the thoughts and the behaviours. Let’s talk about thoughts and behaviours.

This means no one has ever made me feel anything. No one has ever hurt my feelings. No one has ever offended me.

You know what bugs me? I bug me!

Whenever I think about something, I start to feel things about it, I start to become attached.

When I think about the subject matter of what I am doing, that I start caring about it, that produces diligence, and diligence produces good results. That’s good.

When I think about other people and the world, that produces attachment.

That attachment needs to be snipped, and I need to rinse off the residue.

This is like taking a shower after mucking out the stables.

How? Turn to God and be with God.

What’s your experience?

26 April 2026: Courage

“The verdict of the ages is that faith means courage. All men of faith have courage. They trust their God.” (Page 68, Big Book)

The future cannot be handled.

The future is not handle-able in great part because it does not actually exist.

All there is is an eternal present in flux.

The flux is carved into fragmentary and deceptive memories only for those who experienced a particular moment of that present, and futures are tree-like fantasies speculated out of carved memories, two stages removed from the present they threaten to—but can never—become. For the future is made of the past, and the past cannot return, so the future never arrives.

It is too slippery, too elusive to be dealt with at all.

Common sense suggests buffers, storm cellars, seawalls, and other precautions.

But one cannot warm oneself now against cold in a year’s time.

One cannot blow a future runny nose.

I am given the courage for now but not for later or tomorrow.

I am given confidence that, tomorrow, courage for the now will be provided, and with that confidence I can forego morbid contemplation of the future.

This is what trusting God means: trusting that the flow of courage to face the now will continue uninterrupted, the only certainty extending into the future, because God is eternally present, the substrate of reality. Whilst reality prevails, That Which created and sustains it in existence is axiomatically present, all-encompassing, and entirely available.

What’s your experience?

25 April 2026: Butcher

“A notable in medical circles from coast to coast, Dr. Earle flatly stated that despite his medical knowledge, which included psychiatry, he had nevertheless been obliged humbly to learn his A.A. from a butcher.” (Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age)

Initially, biographical similarity helped identification.

Swiftly, that fell away as a necessity for identification.

But there can still remain an instinctive understanding when there is significant similarity in particular in background, education, and age, and it can be gratifying to sometimes hear the story of someone one identifies with beyond the mechanical nuts and bolts of the addiction.

One should perhaps guard against narrowing one’s focus or attention to such individuals, however, or allowing special cliques to form.

As a 21-year-old, I learned recovery from a herbalist and a middle-aged housewife. I was neither of these things.

I like meetings with a mind-boggling variety of people.

What’s your experience?

24 April 2026: Psychopath

“There are, of course, the psychopaths who are emotionally unstable. We are all familiar with this type. They are always ‘going on the wagon for keeps.’ They are over-remorseful and make many resolutions, but never a decision.” (The Doctor’s Opinion, Big Book)

“‘God ought to be able to do anything.’” (Page 158, Big Book)

When I flip-flop between firm resolve on a matter and caving to appetite, impulse, or temptation, I can fear that I am irredeemable.

What does one do then?

Go to God and ask for help.

Someone asked his sponsor, “Can’t you give me something else, something more concrete?”

The sponsor said: “There is nothing else.”

What’s your experience?

23 April 2026: Demonstration

“A much more important demonstration of our principles lies before us in our respective homes, occupations and affairs.” (Page 19, Big Book)

“Furthermore, how shall we come to terms with seeming failure or success? Can we now accept and adjust to either without despair or pride? Can we accept poverty, sickness, loneliness, and bereavement with courage and serenity? Can we steadfastly content ourselves with the humbler, yet sometimes more durable, satisfactions when the brighter, more glittering achievements are denied us?” (Page 112, Big Book)

“And what can be said of many A.A. members who, for a variety of reasons, cannot have a family life? At first many of these feel lonely, hurt, and left out as they witness so much domestic happiness about them. If they cannot have this kind of happiness, can A.A. offer them satisfactions of similar worth and durability? Yes—whenever they try hard to seek them out. Surrounded by so many A.A. friends, these so-called loners tell us they no longer feel alone. In partnership with others—women and men—they can devote themselves to any number of ideas, people, and constructive projects. Free of marital responsibilities, they can participate in enterprises which would be denied to family men and women. We daily see such members render prodigies of service, and receive great joys in return.” (Page 120, Big Book)

The demonstration of God’s goodness and power lies not in the achievement of material objectives (spouse and children; money; ‘career’ ‘success’; position; power; prestige) but in one’s adjustment to reality and surrender to the service of God.

What’s your experience?

22 April 2026: Occupation, livelihood, purpose, job, career

“Every day is a day when we must carry the vision of God’s will into all of our activities.” (Page 85)

“7. Every AA group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.” (Tradition Seven)

Livelihood: Tradition Seven suggests I be fully self-supporting through my own contributions, which can be interpreted to mean I should have a livelihood: something I do that generates income. It is not axiomatic, however, that that need be temporally matched, in other words today’s sustenance need not come from today’s work; I’m not failing in having a livelihood as long as across my life, over the decades, I am fully self-supporting. I’m not back at square one each morning, obliged to earn the day’s wages that day to cover that day’s needs. One needs to develop considerable flexibility in this regard. There are going to be periods of preparing for the future or diversion onto non-earning activities, when there is less earning, little earning, or no earning. These must be accepted. The link between the receipt of resources and the expenditure of time might also not be obvious in the material realm (see below).

Occupation: something constructive to spend my time doing. I believe God wants me to be fruitfully occupied for a good chunk of my time: creation (in contrast to recreation, though recreation is required as well, for regeneration purposes, for appreciation of God’s kingdom on earth, and to recognise the value of existence as opposed to productivity). What I am occupied with is my occupation. There will be several or many occupations, even in one day. The notion that one has one occupation only, in the form of a single, paid job, must be discarded. It is a fiction, a conceit, a function of the perception of the individual as a resource to be deployed in a commercial system whose purpose is merely to propagate, enlarge, entrench, and amplify itself until there is nothing left but itself and its components. One of one’s occupations might also be the source of one’s livelihood, but these could be quite separate for considerable periods of one’s life. There are individuals who are given a stipend or a financial source of sustenance and who are entirely occupied in activities that do not generate income but are considerably beneficial to the world. This is what is meant above, in terms of the link between income (the money received) and expenditure (the time spent) not being obvious in the material realm: you can bet your bottom dollar, literally, on there being a link in the realm of the spirit, however.

Job: a particular form of paid (self-)employment. This is merely a technical term for an instance of an occupation that happens to be paid. It has no significance in the structure of occupation, livelihood, and purpose.

Career: this is merely a plurality of jobs extending over time, in which a course, a progression might or might not be discerned. This, also, has no significance in the structure of occupation, livelihood, and purpose. A career will consist of jobs, and jobs entail both occupation and livelihood. But it is possible to have a career whose purpose is questionable, negligent, exiguous, or undiscernible or to have a career that works against purpose, either by being harmful or by keeping me from purposeful activity. A career can be a nuisance, a placeholder, a monstrous parasite that consumes all of one’s energy merely to perpetuate its own existence. The notion one even has a career—beyond the technical considerations of strategically working to acquire particular skills to deploy one’s energies in particular, useful ways, particularly if identity or value is tied up in it—is a sign that something has gone radically wrong. Self is on the throne.

The notions of both job and career can therefore be set aside as mere technical terms of art.

This leaves us with purpose.

There is immediate purpose and ultimate purpose. Immediate purpose—to make or help something happen in the world that is of benefit or is perceived to be of benefit. Each such benefit, however, exists within a chain of benefits that extend in perpetuity, both materially and temporally. The ultimate purpose might be construed as the aggregate of those chains of benefit. Whilst immediate purpose can be discerned, ultimate purpose cannot: one would need omniscience, including temporally, to see this. It is best not to even try. What is more, the immediate purpose of an activity may seem to be of no or negligible benefit. A sense of pointlessness and worthlessness might set in. But is this legitimate? Since one cannot discern ultimate purpose, and ultimate purpose dwarfs immediate purpose, the apparent lack of utility of immediate purpose is irrelevant. An event or condition could even be manifestly harmful—such as alcoholism—but be infinitely useful in terms of ultimate purpose. The entire good that flows from recovery in AA necessitates the upstream condition of alcoholism. The deployment of events, conditions, circumstances, activities in the Grand Scheme of Things, to achieve God’s ultimate purpose, lies outside the individual bailiwick and need not concern the individual. The individual, therefore, need not be concerned with purpose at all, either immediate or ultimate. What matters is the entrusting of self to God in order that one cooperate with and not confound God’s ultimate purpose (although God is quite capable of folding one’s resistances and rebellions back into the dough). God’s ultimate purpose cannot be jeopardised: submission to God will, however, produce a much more felicitous experience for the individual, including occasional revelations of one’s particular place in the patchwork.

To sum up:

I need only consider how I should occupy myself today. The bulk of this will be overtly constructive activities—creation. Some of this will be recreation—this should be high quality; no activity-equivalent of junk food; the best recreation is active or interactive, rather than the passive receipt of sensory, dopamine-spiking slop. Taking care of activities takes care of occupation. This also takes care of livelihood. Those who are fruitfully occupied will have a livelihood, usually with an obvious connection to occupation, but sometimes without. This must be left in God’s hands. Since purpose is axiomatically taken care of, I need not worry about it. Cooperation with God will significantly improve my perception of purpose, and this will give me a more comfortable ride. But God is not mocked: my life is purposeful whether I like it or not. I will be an example to everyone at all times, including to myself. The question is only whether I am a good or a bad one, and that boils down to submission to God. Surrender to the revealed path makes a good example, and being a good example is considerably more fun and satisfying than being a bad one. My life will be satisfactory one way or another, but only if I surrender will it be satisfying to me. And one can entirely ignore the concepts of job and career beyond the pure technicality of describing how one disposes of one’s time.

What’s your experience?

21 April 2026: Unlosable gamble

“When we became alcoholics, crushed by a self-imposed crisis we could not postpone or evade, we had to fearlessly face the proposition that either God is everything or else He is nothing. God either is, or He isn’t. What was our choice to be?” (Page 53, Big Book)

Once one’s decided that the world’s goals are empty—which is a no-brainer—one isn’t losing anything by gambling on God, because if one’s wrong and there’s no God, then one’s no further back than the people who haven’t tried, and the journey will be more pleasant anyway.

If God is nothing, then nothing is anything.

That is why no fear is necessary.

What’s your experience?

20 April 2026: What did alcohol do for me?

“Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. … They are restless, irritable and discontented, unless they can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks” (The Doctor’s Opinion)

The ease and comfort it gave me was the same ease and comfort it gave everyone.

Ease and comfort are a cheap commodity if you have them liberally purveyed by many activities. They are premium goods if there’s only one provider.

Some people were in ease-and-comfort deficit before they ever drank. The ease and comfort were nothing special in themselves, but they were special to such people, like those remarkable films of Muscovites eating a Macdonald’s for the first time in January 1990. Our fast food was their gourmet experience.

Other people started out like regular folks, but alcoholic drinking gradually switched off all of the other sources of ease and comfort, leaving alcohol the snorkel providing the only source of air to someone who would otherwise drown.

Lastly, an imperious urge, if resisted, will torture the individual. Cough when you want to cough and you do not notice anything. You often do not even notice you are coughing. Try to suppress the cough and then become aware of what is going on in one’s consciousness, and one discovers panic and suffering during the experience, yielding to ultimate failure. It’s impossible not to cough. One is tortured until one coughs.

I experienced the restlessness, irritability, and discontentment of not drinking only when the impulse to drink hit and I did not immediately yield. They were the poison pumped into the system by the parasitic creature of alcoholism to ensure it would get its own way.

The pleasure thus provided was the pleasure of taking off wet clothes or tight shoes. There’s no great pleasure in being dry unless one’s been wet, or of being discalced unless one’s been wearing tight shoes.

The pleasure of a smoker who has stopped for two days and suddenly starts again in order to beat the torture of the cravings (the restlessness, irritability, and discontentment) is not experiencing an inherent pleasure in the nicotine (your first cigarette probably made you feel dizzy and sick) but relief from the sudden disappearance of pain.

The restlessness, irritability, and discontentment of a thwarted smoker are not signs of a chaotic life, incompetence, emotional maladjustment, childhood trauma, or any other external or internal mental or emotional cause; they are the function of a physical system trying to impose a particular course of action on a resisting subject.

Thus with alcohol.

What’s your experience?

19 April 2026: Once and for all

“We were now at Step Three. Many of us said to our Maker, as we understood Him: “God, I offer myself to Thee—to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of life. May I do Thy will always!’’ We thought well before taking this step making sure we were ready; that we could at last abandon ourselves utterly to Him.” (Page 63, Big Book)

The temporal scope of the Step Three decision is the rest of my life.

The substantive scope of the Step Three decision is the whole of my life.

This is a one-off decision, and I say the prayer only when I am formally retaking Step Three.

I used to repeat it, sometimes daily, sometimes frequently, but I found that gave me the impression its effect was wearing out, that it was expiring and had to be topped up.

I remind myself of it. But I pray in the present for the present. I pray for the day about the day.

My life is taken care of.

What’s your experience?

18 April 2026: Macduff

“As we felt new power flow in, as we enjoyed peace of mind, as we discovered we could face life successfully, as we became conscious of His presence, we began to lose our fear of today, tomorrow or the hereafter.” (Page 63, Big Book)

If you’re Gavin, playing Macduff in rep, but forget you’re Gavin, you’ll have a rotten time and fear for the future. After all, Macbeth has Macduff’s family killed, and there is no certainty that Malcolm will prevail over Macbeth. Macduff will be frightened, and Gavin, who has confused himself with Macduff, will be frightened.

As soon as Gavin remembers he’s an actor living in Primrose Hill just playing Macduff, his fear goes.

We’re spirit playacting roles in the theatrical realm of the material. When I confuse myself with the roles, I am going to be frightened. The material is frightening.

When I remember I’m spirit, I’m no longer frightened of what happens in the material, because it’s happening to the roles not to me, and I’m not longer frightened of what happens when the play is over.

What’s your experience?

17 April 2026: Empty

“More and more we became interested in seeing what we could contribute to life.” (Page 63, Big Book)

When I feel empty, I need to give, not receive.

The more I empty out the emptiness by giving, the less emptiness there is.

What’s your experience?

16 April 2026: Meditation

“On awakening let us think about the twenty-four hours ahead. We consider our plans for the day.” (Page 86, Big Book)

I heard someone say, “I didn't have time for meditation this morning. I was too busy considering what I have to do today and how I was going to handle everything.”

Ironically, this is precisely what the meditation is supposed to be.

What's your experience?

15 April 2026: Agents

“intelligent agents” (Page 49)

When I’m living based on ego, I obey the thoughts that are the output of my inner drives. I am bound.

When I’m living based on God:

• God’s the director
• I’m the manager
• I check in with God in the morning and in the evening
• I check in with God whenever I need to
• God outlines the principles
• God makes the final decision on large matters of general policy and finance
• I execute (act, ask, consult, report back)
• I exercise intelligence and discretion in this

The servants in Downton Abbey are not automata: they are intelligent agents.

So with us.

What’s your experience?

14 April 2026: Ideals

“their ideals must be grounded in a power greater than themselves” (The Doctor’s Opinion)

When my ideals are grounded in the world:

• Value—depends on how well I’m doing in a worldly sense
• Identity—my body, my assets, my position, my image
• Purpose—to have a good body, to be rich, to have status, to be well-regarded

These are volatile, uncertain, and unreliable and make me a miserable slave.

When my ideals are grounded in God:

• Value—incalculable
• Identity—child of God, spirit, roaming around in a body
• Purpose—to do my best to do God’s will today.

These make me a happy servant.

What’s your experience?

13 April 2026: AAE

“and performed His work well” (Page 63, Big Book)

What does that mean?

Allocation
Attention
Effort

If I allocate my time well, pay attention, and make an effort, all will be well.

When I judge myself based on that, I can have a good day any day, because success lies in my hands.

Results are what they are but are not a measure of my success.

What’s your experience?

12 April 2026: All powerful

“Being all powerful, He provided what we needed, if we kept close to Him and performed His work well.” (Page 63, Big Book)

I need a God who can do anything, solve any problem.

I need a God who is all-powerful.

I tried having vague notions of spirit or the AA group or AA as a whole as a Higher Power, but I found myself either drunk or frightened, because I knew these were not all-powerful.

Once I recognised God as all-powerful, my problems were solved.

What’s your experience?

11 April 2026: Grumbling

“We found the Great Reality deep down within us.” (Page 55)

If someone asks me if I’m happy or if I’m OK or if things are going well, and I feel awful and I’m not OK and things are not going well, what do I say?

If I complain about my feelings, my experiences, my circumstances, or events that are happening around me, or my life in general, people might generally say I’m being honest.

I’m certainly being candid. If I’m unhappy, it is true that I’m unhappy, but the mental narrative attached to the unhappiness is untrue. If I recount that mental narrative, I’m actually being dishonest: I’m not recounting the Great Reality. In other words I’m being candid but dishonest.

What would the truth be?

Long version: I’m happy, I’m OK, things are going well, but I can’t see it today, because I think bad thoughts and am conceited enough to believe them. That’s now perfectly candid and perfectly honest.

Short version: I’m happy, I’m OK, things are going well. That’s not candid but it is honest.

When I start to affirm the truth rather than the lies of the ego, I start to realise that only the truth is true.

What’s your experience?

10 April 2026: Fire

“What with our ultra-modern standards, our scientific approach to everything, we are perhaps not well equipped to apply the powers of good that lie outside our synthetic knowledge.” (The Doctor’s Opinion)

If you put the ingredients for a stew in a pot and stir, you will not end up with a stew unless you have heat.

Professionals couldn’t help me.

Why?

No heat.

AA could.

Why?

Heat.

What’s your experience?

9 April 2026: Slap

“but we invariably find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt.” (Page 62, Big Book)

If someone slaps me, that’s on them.

If I recall they’ve slapped me, that’s on me.

I can’t blame them for my recollection.

But then, what did I do to elicit the slap?

Dash it!

What’s your experience?

8 April 2026: Class

“Sometimes we think fear ought to be classed with stealing. It seems to cause more trouble.” (Page 67, Big Book)

If I were stealing, or engaging in animal cruelty, vandalism, or other manifest wrongs, I would pull myself up short and do something about it.

But, oh how different with fear! How one indulges it!

To class it with stealing is to treat it with the same contempt and impatience, to not put up with it a moment longer.

The same goes for the other chief mental pests:

Resentment, envy, jealousy, grumbling, gloom, contempt, condemnation, cynicism, conceit.

To indulge these is really to be outside the programme, to have not signed up seriously to the overarching principle of living morally, starting with how one occupies one’s mind.

The programme is not something bolted onto a dissolute life, or a dustpan and brush to clean up its worst excesses.

Rather, it is the alternative to such a life.

This means everything, everything, that forms part of that life must go, regardless of my habitual or sentimental attachment to it.

One need not horse-trade over the merits or ills of particular types of belief or thought or mental activity: if they fall within the category of defect, off with their heads.

What’s your experience?

7 April 2026: Blame and responsibility

“Admitting he may be somewhat at fault, he is sure that other people are more to blame.” (Page 61, Big Book)

Blame is one of the chief tools of the ego.

Sometimes it is other people who are blamed.

Sometimes, the blame is accommodated ‘in-house’ but attributed to some internal characteristic beyond the scope of the individual’s responsibility. Other people are then given the job of taking up the slack or picking up the pieces.

I used to cite psychological symptoms or disorders as explanations for my behaviour. In a sense, I wasn’t wrong, as the symptom or disorder really was there, but I was treating the fact of a psychological symptom or disorder as something in the order of a mole or a defective heart valve, in other words an immutable feature that I—and others—simply had to get used to.

The symptoms and disorders were really my responsibility, though, and with patience and labour remarkable change is possible.

I can’t change my first response to a situation, but I can change my response to that response. In other words, I can change what I do next. As my habits change, my first response also changes. It turns out the first response is not neurologically conditioned but merely an approximation of all my prior choices, the way typing software will sometimes make a guess based on what you typically type.

In other words, it’s remarkable what can change.

What’s your experience?

6 April 2026: Twinkling

“nor do twisted thinking and depression vanish in a twinkling.” (Page 133, Big Book)

I thought my depression was due to:

• A biological curse
• A neurological inevitability
• An astrological predetermination
• An external concatenation of facts
• A cumulative heredity

I appeared to seek help, but every time I was lifted out of the swamp, I found myself back there.

The game I was playing—although I wasn’t aware of the game at the time—was this:

I wanted to be depressed but not have it be my fault.

Why did I want to be depressed?

Because, when I am depressed, I fill my own universe, and that makes me terribly important. I also don’t have to do anything or make an effort, because I’m busy being depressed, and there’s ‘no point’, anyway. I don’t have to disappear into the banality of the everyday like everyone else. I’m the tragic hero, sitting on the sidelines. What’s more, my distress can make me the centre of your attention, as well.

When I finally had enough, I learned that the reason I was depressed was not because of any external or prior factors but because I was presently having depressing thoughts.

I also believed the depressing thoughts, because they were mine, so, of course, they were true. This gave them power.

Now, they were not true. Even if they were built on selected incontrovertible facts, the depressing structures built on top of such facts were optional fictions.

This licenses me to convict all depressing thoughts based on their depressing nature: I need not try each one individually in a court of law; they have no human rights, and they have no right of appeal.

That makes the job easier: shoot to kill and ask questions later.

The forum thus cleared, I can fill my consciousness with either constructive or creative thoughts.

Of course, this is all hard to get the hang of, but so are Bulgarian split squats and French irregular verbs. That’s no reason not to learn.

No better day to start than today!

What’s your experience?

5 April 2026: What is meditation in the programme (3)?

When I meditate in the morning and the evening, I can get it wrong either by not doing it at all, or by altering it, or by doing too much.

Here’s an example of doing precisely the right amount, not too little, not too much, and without variation.

“When we retire at night, we constructively review our day. Were we resentful, selfish, dishonest or afraid?” (Page 86)

The Book suggests that I ask myself whether I was resentful. To do this, I review the day. Review > re-view > see again. I think through the day and see whether I was resentful. If so, the answer is ‘yes’. No analysis. I then move on to ‘selfish’, in the same way. No pencil or paper. No perfunctory sharing or sending.

Noting the ‘yeses’, I then ask God for corrective measures. The wrong is touched upon; the solution is asked for. Nothing more. Nothing less. Just that.

What’s your experience?

4 April 2026: What is meditation in the programme (2)?

We meditate in the evening, too.

“When we retire at night, we constructively review our day. Were we resentful, selfish, dishonest or afraid? Do we owe an apology? Have we kept something to ourselves which should be discussed with another person at once? Were we kind and loving toward all? What could we have done better? Were we thinking of ourselves most of the time? Or were we thinking of what we could do for others, of what we could pack into the stream of life? But we must be careful not to drift into worry, remorse or morbid reflection, for that would diminish our usefulness to others. After making our review we ask God’s forgiveness and inquire what corrective measures should be taken.” (Page 86, Big Book)

Thus, meditation is a constructive review, punctuated with two prayers, and constrained by one caution. It is consideration and thought.

What’s your experience?

3 April 2026: What is meditation in the programme (1)?

Here’s the morning element (from pages 86 to 88 of the Big Book):

Content / subject matter:

• “On awakening let us think about the twenty-four hours ahead. We consider our plans for the day.”

[In other words, meditation, in the programme, is thinking and considering. It is not posture, breathing, focusing on the body, or detachment from thought. The meditation is punctuated by prayers. Religious devotion and spiritual reading also fall under the heading of meditation.]

Topping, tailing, and trouble-shooting:

• “Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives.”
• “… we may face indecision … Here we ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision. We relax and take it easy. We don’t struggle.”
• “We usually conclude the period of meditation with a prayer that we be shown all through the day what our next step is to be, that we be given whatever we need to take care of such problems.”
• “We ask especially for freedom from self-will, and are careful to make no request for ourselves only. We may ask for ourselves, however, if others will be helped.”

Bolt-on activities:

• “… we ask our wives or friends to join us in morning meditation.”
• “If we belong to a religious denomination which requires a definite morning devotion, we attend to that also.”
• “If not members of religious bodies, we sometimes select and memorize a few set prayers which emphasize the principles we have been discussing.”
• “There are many helpful books also. Suggestions about these may be obtained from one’s priest, minister, or rabbi. Be quick to see where religious people are right. Make use of what they offer.”

During the day:

• “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, humbly saying to ourselves many times each day ‘Thy will be done.’”

From elsewhere in the book:

• “In meditation, we ask God what we should do about each specific matter.” (Page 69)
• “So we clean house with the family, asking each morning in meditation that our Creator show us the way of patience, tolerance, kindliness and love.” (Page 83)
• “Ask Him in your morning meditation what you can do each day for the man who is still sick.” (Page 164)

What’s your experience?

2 April 2026: Guilty as charged!

“First of all, we had to quit playing God.” (Page 62, Big Book)

Where does generalised guilt come from?

Playing god (small g).

To play god is to assume responsibility.

If I see mess in the world, and I’m god, I’m responsible for the mess.

That’s the root of generalised guilt.

If I charge myself with the responsibility of god, I will be guilty as charged for what I see in the world.

What’s your experience?

1 April 2026: Inner child?

“Since defective relations with other human beings have nearly always been the immediate cause of our woes” (Page 80, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions)

Someone said, “Work on my inner child? No, I need to work on my outer adult.”

When I work on the outer adult, how I interact with others, everything else sorts itself out.

What’s your experience?