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_____________________________________________________________ A Member of CEOExpressSelect - www.ceoexpress.com IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 3613. . . . . . . . . . . . Re: The Traditions/cross talk From: John Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . 7/29/2006 2:51:00 PM IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII It's interesting to note that, as set forth in 12and12, most of the Traditions developed as the result of "cross-talk", whether it was taking a job at Towns Hospital or considering a position as an "AA" spokesman for the liquor industry. Cross- talk has a rich history in the Fellowship. It's been given an undeserved bad name by therapy-based practicioners in the treatment industry. john lee
where the Allegheny meets the Monongahela, to form the Ohio johncseibert I was recently asked about the text of tradition two in the 12x12. Specifically I was asked if I knew who it was Bill was referring to when he wrote: "Almost timidly, one of my friends began to speak." pg 137 Also they were curious as to why Bill mentions this story about being offered a position at Townes Hospital in the text of tradition 2 instead of either tradition 6 (Never endorse, finance, or lend the A.A. name to any related facility or outside enterprise etc.) or tradition 8 (Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever nonprofessional etc.) unless it's to emphasize the point of a "Loving God as he may express himself through our group conscience" being the guiding forcxe of A.A. Can any of you learned folks answer these two questions?
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11th Step? From: jsmaranatha . . . . . . . . . . . . 7/20/2006 8:37:00 PM
meditation? And I don't talk about thinking or the prayer of St. Francis which, incidentally is not really from St. Francis.
known anything about meditation? Not prayer or thinking but real meditation. I asked this question many many times, here in Montreal and all around Canada and nobody could answer with real conviction about that.
and
deepful meditation? I will really appreciate your help. Regards, And excuse my written English, sorry - in advance thank you for your understanding. John S. Montreal, Quebec, Canada jeanst_onge@cgocable.ca ________________________________ A NOTE FROM THE MODERATOR People sometimes tend to forget, and start assuming that there has only been one
early AA author. There were four great AA authors from the early AA period: Bill W., Richmond Walker, Ralph Pfau (Father John Doe), and Ed Webster. ________________________________
http://hindsfoot.org/RWchrn.html ), later moved to Daytona Beach, Florida, and wrote some meditations for himself on little cards which he carried around in this pocket. The Florida AA people persuaded him to publish these in 1948 in a little black book, called "Twenty Four Hours a Day." It was sponsored by the Daytona Beach AA group, printed at the county courthouse, and distributed from Rich's basement. Its use quickly spread over the U.S. and Canada, and there were periods when there were more AA members who owned a copy of this book than
owned a copy of the Big Book. Rich is still the second most published AA author
(only Bill W. has beat him in total sales). The eleventh step says "Sought through prayer and meditation [a] to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for [b] knowledge of His will for us and [c] the power to carry that out.
Rich's
little book told them exactly how to do all three of those things. The fine print section at the bottom of each page is based on one of the old Oxford Group books, "God Calling by Two Listeners," which is still the sixth most popular book sold at Christian book stores. As we all know, AA spirituality was based heavily on Oxford Group spirituality.
"entering into the Divine Silence." In addition to the influence of the Oxford Group, he seems to have been influenced by Hindu meditational techniques, perhaps as mediated through the New England Transcendentalists (notice the quote from a Hindu author at the beginning of his book) and by nineteenth century German idealism (notice all the references to the philosopher Kant's concept of our normal consciousness being boxed up in the box of space and time).
into
contact when we are meditating, may indicate some knowledge of the medieval Catholic concept of the scintilla or divine spark within the soul, although some of the spiritual writers whom the Oxford Group read and were influenced by, also spoke that way on certain occasions. ________________________________
talks
about meditation in his Golden Books and in his tape recordings, all of which
are still available. One of his definitions is that "meditation is thinking
about something that is true." And that is one of the standard things that the
word meditation meant in traditional Catholic spirituality. So reading a short section from one of his Golden Books every morning, and then
thinking quietly about one of the profound spiritual truths which it talks about, would be a form of meditation. I know that you are rejecting this idea, but if you are asking what most people
in the U.S. and Canada meant by the word "meditation" in 1938 and 1939, when the Big Book was being written, it did in fact mean "thinking about some spiritual statement that is true." Look for example at how the Oxford Dictionary of the
Christian Church explains the traditional meanings of the words "meditation" and "contemplation."
"contemplation" (not meditation) in traditional Catholic spirituality. If you are not thinking about words and ideas and thoughts, but merely contemplating something wordlessly (and trying to still all of your thoughts) then this was usually referred to as "contemplation." HINDU MEDITATION (AND THE BEATLES) The word meditation did not start to be used in the way that you are using it until a popular music group called the Beatles (during the 1960's) started telling everyone about a guru in India whom they had met who had a system which
the Beatles called "Transcendental Meditation," which they believed was a safer way of getting into some of the altered states which they had been attempting to get into by taking drugs (and writing songs about it like "Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds," "We All Live in a Yellow Submarine," and "I Get High with a Little Help from My Friends"). But none of the AA people who helped write the Big Book
back in 1938 and 1939 knew anything about the Beatles and Transcendental Meditation. In my own observation, I have known a lot of AA people who played around with
Transcendental Meditation or something like that when they first came in, but I
do not know any good old timers who continued to practice that kind of meditation on a daily basis after they had been in for a while. They all told me that they eventually discovered better ways of carrying out the eleventh step. But it never did anybody any harm, so if you would like to try it, there is a bunch of stuff on that kind of meditation (or contemplation) on the internet, from all sorts of religious traditions: Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, the methods of the Jewish Kabbalah, and so on, and they all use pretty
much the same techniques. In the Roman Catholic tradition, some of the people and works to look at would
be St. Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle, St. John of the Cross, St. Bonaventure's The Mind's Path to God, Meister Eckhart, The Cloud of Unknowing, and Julian of Norwich. However, Father Ralph Pfau thinks that most AA people would be a whole lot better off turning to St. Therese of Lisieux (the Little Flower) and learning about the Little Way, the path to simple sancitity where we learn how to actually practice love in little ways in our relationships with all the people
around us in our everyday lives. You don't need elaborate meditative techniques to learn the Little Way. What you do need to learn is a simple and unquestioning trust in God, and a willingness to call on God for help in all the little details of our everyday lives. And then just go around being GOOD to the other people around you. ________________________________
Book
which deals with the eleventh step. Since Dr. Bob was actively involved in helping Ed write and revise that book, and pushed its use strongly until Dr. Bob's death in November 1950 (sending copies all over the U.S. and Canada, and
insisting that the New York GSO make the book available for sale), I think we can say that The Little Red book gets us as close as we can to understanding how Dr. Bob thought the AA program ought to be taught to newcomers. ________________________________
certainly primarily understood by the term "meditation" was what the Oxford Group called taking a morning "Quiet Time." So if you want to know more about the AA understanding, it would be very useful to read some of the Oxford Group literature. The Oxford Group author A. J. Russell talks about this Quiet Time in "For Sinners Only" and the Oxford Group author V. C. Kitchen talks about it in "I Was a Pagan." So to understand what most of the earliest AA people meant by meditation, read
up on the Oxford Group and see what they meant by having a morning Quiet Time,
and then read the fine print sections at the bottom of each page in Twenty Four
Hours a Day and see what Richmond Walker calls entering the Divine Silence, which was his term for the same thing. (Rich had been a member of the Oxford Group before he joined AA.) ________________________________ VARIETIES OF A.A. SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE But also remember that William James, in his book "The Varieties of Religious Experience," stated that different people needed different spiritual approaches, because different people had different personalities.
to make it clear that we have to work out of own concept of God. So the Big Book does not
lay out a detailed theological system defining "what God is." For the same reason, the Big Book deliberately does not lay out a detailed system for meditating. Different AA members will have to use different ways. The majority of early AA people found that Richmond Walker's Twenty Four Hours a
Day did a far better job of helping them learn to meditate successfully than any
other book they had ever read, but that did not mean ALL the early AA people,
and it is possible that you too might find some other book more useful. But just for myself, I would put the 24 hour book on my short list of the ten greatest books on spirituality and meditation ever written (including Asia as well as the western world). I see more people making more spiritual progress more quickly, when they start reading that book every day, than any other spiritual book I have ever seen. But again, that still doesn't mean that it would be the right approach for you. ________________________________ EMMET FOX and JAMES ALLEN One of the principal goals of meditation is to bring our minds and feelings and
attitudes back into peace and harmony with God. So to help you better understand what this goal is, and to better understand what it is that we are trying to do when we are meditating, it might also be useful to read Emmet Fox's "Sermon on the Mount" and James Allen's "As a Man Thinketh" ( http://hindsfoot.org/kML3rc1.html ). Both of those books were on the list of ten books which early Akron AA advised
every new AA member to read. And Emmet Fox's "Golden Key" explains how to
recite mantras to bring our souls back into harmony with God. They aren't quite
the same as the kind of mantras which are used in Transcendental Meditation, but
in my own experience they actually work better. (I wrote about Richmond Walker's system of meditation in The Higher Power of the
Twelve Step Program, in Chapter 5, "Two Classical Authors of A.A. Spirituality," see http://hindsfoot.org/kHP1.html , and about Emmet Fox's Golden Key at the end
of Chapter 3 in that book.) ________________________________ OTHER KINDS OF MEDITATION And it is also useful to remember that meditation is a pretty broad concept. We are not necessarily trying to "meditate till you levitate" and get into the vision of the Divine Abyss and the Uncreated Light, and all that kind of thing, although that is certainly all right. We have people in the AA program whom I would describe as spiritual adepts, who have experienced all of the extraordinary things that we find talked about in ancient and medieval spiritual literature. I know a woman in the program, for example, who actually experienced the vision of the Holy Grail. But don't fall into the trap of thinking that meditation HAS to be spooky stuff
and "altered states of consciousness" in order for it to qualify as real
meditation. Making a gratitude list, and reading through it every morning, and putting our
minds into an attitude of gratitude, is also a form of meditation. In fact, it is a VERY important form of meditation. Asking God for guidance in morning, and then LISTENING to hear what God wants us
to do, is also a form of meditation. And likewise, this is a VERY important form of meditation. It was a vital part of what the Oxford Group called having a morning Quiet Time. Looking out at the trees and flowers, and becoming aware of the enormous beauty
of the world (and simultaneously aware of the divine power which lies behind it)
is certainly a form of meditation. Remember the Song of the Seraphim in Isaiah
6, which is repeated in so many Christian and Jewish liturgies: "Holy, holy,
holy, Lord of hosts, all the world is filled with your glory." If all the world is filled with God's glory and holiness, then start becoming
aware of it, and appreciating it, and developing an attitude of gratitude towards it, and you are "meditating." Enjoy the flowers and then say "thank you." Marvel at the sunset and then say "thank you." In the Navajo language, there is a word yo'zho' which means beauty, peace, harmony, and serenity. There is an oft repeated phrase in Navajo chants which speaks of "beauty (etc.) in front of me, beauty behind me, beauty beside me." If I can FEEL the sacred beauty, peace, harmony, and serenity all around me, that is meditation.
can
become AWARE of God's presence at the feeling level. That is what the early AA people called developing "God consciousness," or "practicing the presence of God," terms which they borrowed from the early twentieth century Protestant liberals (like the ones who published The Upper Room). From 1935 down to 1948, The Upper Room (which is still published today) was the
standard AA meditational book. It has Bible verses on every page, and is heavily Christian (naturally), but it is still a very good meditational book for people from Christian backgrounds, both Protestants and Catholics alike. If you read that quietly and prayerfully every morning when you first get up, you are "meditating" in the sense in which Dr. Bob and Anne Smith started off their mornings in early Akron AA, because they used that book every morning (or simply read straight from the Bible). There would usually be a group of AA members present in their home, quietly drinking their morning coffee together, while they all meditated in this fashion on what Anne had read to them. ________________________________
for
me wouldn't necessarily work for you. Meditation means "meditation in some way
that works for you," just like AA refers to "God as you understand Him," because nobody can lay out a concept of God or a method of meditation that will work for
everybody. That's why the Big Book doesn't go into more detail on that subject.
So I would suggest that you read some of the things I have mentioned, all of which come from good old time AA, and then start experimenting to see what works for you, and what doesn't work for you. ______________________________ THE BIG BOOK and THE ELEVENTH STEP And remember that the Big Book always gives us our basic framework for understanding what we are trying to do when we work the twelve step program, and our basic criteria for figuring out whether we are working the steps in the right kind of way. The eleventh step says "Sought through prayer and meditation [a] to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for [b] knowledge of His will for us and [c] the power to carry that out.
increase our God consciousness and our sense of the presence of God all around us at all times, [b] we are trying to gain a better understanding of how God wants us to live our lives (including all the little decisions we make throughout the course of the day), and [c] we are turning to God in order to get the spiritual power to stay away from the first drink, and help in overcoming the power of our character defects so that they no longer dominate our lives.
helping us in all three of those areas, then we are using the right methods for us.
AAHistoryLovers IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ++++Message 3615. . . . . . . . . . . . Re: Herbert Wallace From: Doug Hart . . . . . . . . . . . . 7/29/2006 11:53:00 PM IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII The History Detectives episode described is on at 9 p.m. Monday night in Tampa
also, repeating on Aug 1 and 3, so the 9 p.m. time on Monday may be fairly universal, at least for the Eastern time zone. Doug ----- Original Message ----- From: Mel Barger To: AAHistoryLovers@yahoogroups.com Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2006 5:19 AM Subject: Re: [AAHistoryLovers] Herbert Wallace
Herb Wallace was an export lawyer in New York. The letter in question was actually a letter of condolence to Herb's wife, as Herb had just passed on. He appears to have been an Oxford Grouper who remained on good terms with Bill and the other alcoholics who had left that fellowship. I believe Herb's grandson found the letter and must have submitted it to History Detectives. The show is scheduled to appear here in Toledo at 9 p.m. Monday, July 31st. It may be on different times in other places. I was interviewed for the program, though not as an AA member. (I checked with GSO prior to accepting the assignment.) The interviewer was Gwen Wright, who appears regularly on this show. Much of the interview is in front of Bill's former home at 182 Clinton Street in Brooklyn. It will probably be obvious to AA members that I'm in the fellowship, but I was told that this was okay if I wasn't identified as a member. I didn't know anything about History Detectives until this came up and I've seen only two programs. But it is an interesting show and brings in a Download 13.83 Mb. Share with your friends:
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