There is a Solution (Continued)
J: So they put an Appendix in the book, in the back of our book on page 569, to explain to us: what are they talking about, when they say spiritual experience? It would be very difficult to continue on if we had the wrong conception of the term, spiritual experience. An appendix-when we see an appendix--means something that has been added to the book since it was published to make it more complete. This appendix was added--and if you would continue from here with the wrong idea of spiritual experience the whole book would totally collapse.
C: Remember, a textbook is used to transfer information from the mind of one person through the written word to the mind of another. If our understanding of the words are different, then the information we
receive will be the wrong information. I think most of us had a conception of a spiritual experience before we ever came to A. A. I know I did. I was raised in a good old Southern Baptist church.
I don't knock my Southern Baptist church. I loved it then. I love it today. But it seems as though in my Southern Baptist church as I was raised up, about the only thing I ever really heard about God was hellfire and damnation. That you go to hell for lying, and cheating, stealing, and drinking whiskey, and committing adultery. By the
time I got to A. A., I'd been doing that for about twenty-sex years. (laughter) And I knew God wasn't going to have anything to do with me.
I knew he'd already told Saint Peter, when that little four-eyed sucker gets up here, send him downstairs. Also in the Baptist church I had seen a spiritual experience, or what I thought was one. In our Southern
Baptist church, we have revival meetings. Normally we go to church on Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. But during revival week, you go every night of the week. The whole purpose of the revival meeting is to bring as many souls to Christ as you possibly can, through saving them through the church.
During the revival meeting, you don't trust your own preacher. You go out and you get the best one you can find anywhere in the county. I'll never forget, during this one particular revival meeting night, they'd brought in a preacher from another part of the county, and he was good. He was so good you could actually feel the heat and smell the smoke as he was doing his preaching. (laughter)
At the end of the sermon, you then had what are called, alter calls. Anybody that wishes to be saved, they come to the kneeling bench in front. They kneel. They pray, and everybody prays, and hopefully they're saved. I'll never forget this particular night. After the preacher was through, my aunt Molly, who was a long tall slender lady-fine, fine lady, bless her soul, she's gone now--but she decided that night that she wanted to be saved. She came to the kneeling bench, and she kneeled. She was praying.
The preacher was standing there with his hand on her head, he was praying. Everybody else was praying. All of a sudden, Aunt Molly just fell over sideways on the floor. She began to kick. She began to jerk and tremble all over. Suddenly she began to speak in a language that I'd never heard before. It sounded just like gibberish to me. The next
thing I knew she jumped up. She began running back and fourth through that church house jumping over the pews, shirttail never touching the back of the pew. Here I am eight, nine, ten, eleven years old; just sacred the living hell out of me. I turned to my Dad, and I said, what's wrong with Aunt Molly?
He said, well son, I believe she's having a spiritual experience. (laughter) When I read on page twenty-five in the Big Book that I'm going to have to have one of the. things, I said there ain't no way. (laughter) Thank God they recognized this. That people would not have the same understanding of those words that they had. So when the second printing of the Big Book came out, they put the appendix in the back, and explained to us what they mean by spiritual experience.
Without that appendix, I don't believe I could have gone any further than page twenty-five. If we got to have one, maybe we ought to go back there and see what one of them is. Let's go on page 569, and take a look at what they mean by spiritual experience.
J: Okay, he says, the terms--there's a plural there, two terms-we're going to be looking at, "spiritual experience" and "spiritual awakening." So right away we see there are two ways that we can do this. (p. 569, par. 1) 'The terms "spiritual experience" and "spiritual awakening" are used many times in this book which, upon careful reading, shows that the personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism has manifested itself among us in many different forms.'
I love where he says careful reading. We drunks don't do a lot of careful reading. But if we read this carefully, we can see that it says that this spiritual experience brings about the personality changes
good enough, sufficient, to recover from alcoholism. This is what it does. (p. 569, par. 2) 'Yet it is true that our first printing gave many readers the impression that these personality changes, or religious experiences, must be in the nature of sudden and spectacular upheavals. Happily for everyone, this conclusion is erroneous. '
(End of Side A of Tape 3)
(Appendix II, p. 569, par. 2) 'In the first few chapters a number of sudden revolutionary changes are described. Though it was not our intention to create such an impression, many alcoholics have nevertheless concluded that in order to recover they must acquire an immediate and overwhelming "God consciousness followed at once by a vast change in feeling and outlook.'
The first readers that read the book, and many people yet today who don't read Appendix II, get that impression from the book, because of Bill's sudden change in Bill's life. There are a number of sudden spiritual experience mentioned in the book. The reader who reads this without reading the appendix, he comes up with the idea that the only way I'm going to recover is have the same sudden thing that Bill had. He said, they're trying to diaper this.
This is not true. It says: (p. 569, par. 4) 'Among our rapidly growing membership of thousands of alcoholics such
transformations, though frequent, are by no means the rule. ' People, still yet today, have sudden spiritual experience. in A.A. But this is very rare. And this is by no means the rule.
