The Basic story 3

[dalin]

Chapter Five

HOUSTON WORLD CONVENTION

As the days of summer shortened and the 1978 World Convention approached, Bo continued to write responses to various topics relating to N.A. recovery. 'Resentments Kill', 'Facing Problems', and 'Spiritual Principles' were some of the topics. He was not so concerned about the quality of the writing as the statements contained being true to the N.A. spirit and were things you would say or expect to hear in a meeting.

Bo packed his bags and left a week early for the World Convention in Houston. He flew to New Orleans to spend some time with Greg and Lois at her parents in Algiers. New Orleans was one of his favorite cities anyway so he looked forward to the trip. The idea of clean addicts meeting in the New Orleans French Quarter was fascinating.

With his mustache and dark hair, Greg looked right at home with the people you saw around that city. Lois looked at home also as, of course, she was. Her parents were a lively older couple and were very proud of their daughter and son in law. They didn't much understand recovery but whatever it was it had helped their family. Lois was involved with a parallel program for people who had a dependence on addiction in others, Naranon.

They went to a Bingo club one night in the old city. On the weekend, they got out to the countryside and had a barbecued chicken dinner with Lois' in-laws who all seemed to work on the big tug boats on the Mississippi River. They were the old river boat people brought forward in time to the age of the CB radios and the huge diesel motors that powered the barges up and down the Mississippi. And of course, they went over the most recent material Bo was writing.

Bo tried to get Greg to tell him what he thought of it and Greg tried to be noncommittal. It was so new. Parts were tortured and unfinished. There were a few great moments in the work. The great thing about it was that an addict had produced it. Both men agreed that once others got on the bandwagon, momentum would develop that might carry them through to completion. Even if it didn't, they agreed in their talks, it was a step in the right direction.

Even with hours of plain talk, Bo had no way of completely sharing the truth about his past with Greg and could only hope that Greg's personal experience with addiction allowed him to see how burned out he had gotten. He had shot crystal and acid until his dope shooting buddies thought he was weird. At the end he had been unable to speak on any serious subject for about two years after he had quit using. Failure was nothing to him if it would help others. People had laughed at him before.

Before they left New Orleans, they went to a photocopy store and played out a scene shared by addicts clean in N.A. tens of thousands of times since then. They made copies of the new liter- ature...

After several days had passed talking and going around the City of New Orleans, they left for Houston.

As they came into the Shamrock Hilton in Houston, the excitement of seeing old friends and meeting new ones filled the old hotel with a spiritual electricity. They were early. In one of the downstairs rooms outside where the main hall for the convention was to be, they saw a tall, beautiful young girl. She had long blonde hair and walked by the glass door several times. Finally, she came in and asked if anyone knew of any drug addicts in the building. Greg and Bo laughed and asked if she was looking for the World Convention. The girl brightened instantly and yelled to her friends, "Hey everybody! We're here!" Her name turned out to be Julie and she was from Wichita, Kansas.

During one of the workshops on the history of N.A. one of the N.A. Trustees was sharing from the podium to a large room full of addicts. Towards the end of his story, he mentioned the N.A. Book. He said, "Maybe one of you newcomers out there will write the Book! You know how we are. We write something, submit it and then act like the house is falling in if someone wants to change a single word. The first thing I say to someone when they ask me about the Book is: what have you done to help!"

Moments after the meeting closed with the Lord's Prayer, Bo caught the speaker in the hallway outside the conference room. He said he wanted to talk with him about the Basic Text. Bob B. looked at him and sure enough said, "What have you done to help?" Bo look right back at him and said, "That's just it. I have about a hundred pages up in Greg's room I want to show you."

Bob paused a moment and said, "I've got to wash up first. I just got in." Bo asked if he could wait with him and then they could go up together. Bob said sure and they went to Greg's after the quick shower.

Greg and Lois and little Clay were all in the room when they got upstairs. Greg pulled out the papers from another of his auspicious black cases and handed them to Bob. Lois actually took a picture of the moment. Bob just sat there, looking down at the documents. It had been so long. There had been so much talk and now he was holding a substantial amount of writing in his hands. He wasn't sure what but something was a hell of a lot better than nothing.

Bob had been on the Board since it had formed. WSO had been in his home in the beginning. He had sat in on the work that had gone into the "White Booklet." He had seen a lot of addicts come and a lot of addicts go. By working with Greg, he was in tune with the changes within the Fellowship and had surely heard of the work. Still, this was something.

The World Convention that year had less than two hundred people show up, most of them from California. The Convention Committee had worked hard and those who came were the very serious members who were to build N.A. in the East. Some members who are still around date their recovery from the Houston World Convention. They live in Atlanta, Wilkes-Barre, Old Forge, Miami, Wichita and Lincoln. The Californians showed a lot of love and affection and spiritual friendships were born which still endure.

Atlanta got the bid for the next World Convention. Bo went home and kept writing.



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[dalin]

Chapter Six

TRUSTING GOD

During this holy period, Bo had to deal with some very worldly thoughts. He was an avid reader of science fiction and spiritual books from India, China and Japan. He also read about the spirituality of Europe and America. He had taken a history course at Georgia State College and along with the incredible political experiences of the sixties, he had two years running a nonprofit corporation on the Strip in Atlanta. All this went into the thoughts he had to deal with privately. He had only Greg and a few others to help. Only they were able to discuss and evaluate the options as they unfolded while the stack of written material continued to grow.

What about the karma changes of thousands of human beings who were not going to die? Instead, they would be walking and talking, adding to humanity in increasing numbers. After initial recovery, they would be capable of making changes in the world by the sheer weight of their numbers.

Bo knew a lot of people made fortunes off the suffering of others knowingly, consciously and above all legally. It is ille- gal to prey on the weakness of others in the instance of prostitution and other so called victimless crimes. Stealing minor sums of money is also illegal but if the sums are great enough, there is no way for the injured to have legal recourse. The distance between these crimes may be measured in billions of dollars. War for instance involved incredible, deliberate killing and the destruction of whole populations along with their cities.

Bo had been a draft dodger. He had simply asked his friends who had already been drafted if he would really be serving his country if he joined or allowed himself to be drafted into military service. They said what he learned would take him the rest of his life to get over, if he ever did. There were other ways to serve one's country. So after dodging the draft in a sadly effective manner, he put in his two years on the Strip in Atlanta. He still wound up carrying a gun but he never had to shoot anyone.

One of his college professors (who initially he hadn't liked because the guy looked so business like and stuffy) had amazed him one day. He told the class that the real basis for all effective revolutions is to succeed in finding an original precedent in the experience of a country and base the revolution of a return to those simpler times and simpler values. Clean, a member had asked him to read a book called Fire on the Lake and he had reluctantly done so. It had put the Viet Nam War into a different perspective for him, especially how the religious belief of a land worked in the lives of its peoples. Another book, again forced on him by a N.A. member who later helped write the Basic Text was Holocost on the experience of Jews in the concentration camps of Europe. Bo knew it was unbelievably obvious that cruel and horrible things could and did happen even in these modern times; addiction was a disease where the chief enemy was lies and ignorance.

Even in an individual, the fabrication of lies is the way an addict uses and it is what cuts them off from the rest of humanity justifying terrible acts and ending in death for the individual. Bringing the truth to the clear light of day was historically one of the main routes that noninjurious correction has been possible in countless other instances. Because, he thought, simple clear writing provides an opportunity for each individual reader to complete their basic information on a subject and draw more accurate, real and functional conclusions. So, a N.A. book would do this and being descriptive of an undeniable reality would allow no one the opportunity to attack or defeat the material.

An inevitable part of the process were the personal attacks and efforts to discount the work.There is no way for an individual to change the way people live without being examined and scrutinized from every angle. The writing and the concurrent discussions had already revealed several tough items. One was what would the N.A. Fellowships position on staying clean in illness turn out to be? Would the Basic Text even get into the discussions of alcoholism vs. addiction?

Certain things were known. Addiction is a disease that does not discriminate types of drugs in addicts, once the addiction pattern is present. So how could anyone be addicted to just one drug like alcohol? By denying the basic fact of their addiction, alcoholics were accepted as alcohol addicts in what is for N.A.'s a normal pattern called denial. Denial is the funny mental trick we played on ourselves where we debate or question our addiction until we ourselves admit the problem.

We knew we were getting some support from members of A.A.

Newcomers would show up in N.A. meetings saying A.A. members recommended they come to N.A. Other times, A.A.'s would show up in our meetings saying that N.A. didn't have real recovery to offer and that we should go to A.A. if we wanted the lasting benefits of sobriety.

As a Fellowship, N.A. was unable to answer some of these questions. Until we had added to our meetings and long term membership, these allegations would continue to apply. Unpleasant experiences of this sort were one thing that helped motivate our members to the supreme effort they put forth to write their Basic Text.

The other problem involving prescribed medications in recovery was two fold. On one hand there were debates over what would we do in a car accident. Would medication given to us while unconscious constitute a relapse? How about members taking medications prescribed for mental or physical problems outside their addiction? How about methadone addicts participating in our meetings?

These questions were of the hardest type to answer. Bo had sent out a request to the members on the WLC mail list asking for the experience of members staying clean in illness. The two responses came from Flint, Michigan and Sydney, Australia. They were almost identical in content and dealt with the approaches carried out during recovery for members who fell ill. This was experience, not ideas. They recommended telling both sponsor and home group about the illness if there was opportunity, telling our doctor and trying to get a doctor who had some knowledge of addiction as a disease. Prayer, minimal dosages, visits by members if we were convalescence and a willingness to go through detox if necessary before resuming our lives were chief among the items mentions in the responses. The similarity of the responses and the vast geographical distance between the groups responding were impressive to Bo. They came from N.A.'s on opposite sides of the planet.

He felt at the time that no addict can take prescribed medication as prescribed if they are in the grip of an active addiction. He did not try to force this idea on others. There were a lot of ideas about this. Each member might have to face this matter on a personal basis at any time without notice with their new lives and recovery on the line.

The first matter was more difficult and harder to resolve. Because of our Tradition against having any opinion on outside issues, there was no way to bring the discussion about alcoholism vs. addiction out into open discussion or in the written materials. Those who submitted the input and did the processing were just stating their feelings and experience about the disease and recovery. Let those who took time to read our message decide the truth by which they could live and stay clean.

While it was a clear matter among us, the strange mental block that allows a person to admit alcoholism but not addiction was a sensitive matter which only time and compassion would be able to overcome. The important thing for N.A.'s was not to be confused by any of this. For them to think they could safely use some drugs but not others was the insanity of their addiction. The Basic Text adequately developed this position.

*** *** *** ***

There was another problem about sharing recovery experience in writing. Writing involves definition. Spirit is illimitable and wouldn't the act of putting an infinite process into the restrictions of language sort of diminish the spiritual experi- ence members had in recovery? Like putting god in a box? The only thing that helped him with this was the material written so far. The simple descriptive, nonjudgemental material was similar to the open atmosphere of a good meeting. It freshened the reader and didn't saddle them down with labored or contrived concepts and beliefs.

Other dark assassins came late at night. One of the trustees on the twentieth anniversary tape had mentioned the little voice of his disease that lived inside his head and always said, "Jack W., you're a **** up." No matter how good he was doing. No matter if he went to school and passed courses with good marks. No matter if he was a good person and consistently helped others, the little voice was always there, looking for ways to bring him down. Bo had his own little voice.

It said: "You're an ego tripping fool. You can't get away with this. Who do you think you are, Bill W.?" Bill was the hero and co-founder of A.A. Working on the Basic Text had always been seen as self indulgent and this all by itself had been one reason the work was so long in coming. Bo prayed for the ability to keep it simple and just do the work at hand. Look neither to the left nor the right and back not at all. Just do the next simple thing put before him and pray his ass off. In a dream he had a vision of an old man on a park bench with his head down on his chest. He thought it was his grandfather but when he came close the man raised his head and it was Bill W. The old man looked him in the eye and said, "Just keep doing the next thing."

All the while he was working, these kinds of thoughts kept coming. He was able to push them out of the working parts of his mind and keep to the task at hand. God would have to handle outcomes. Others might see his actions differently and judge him. If so, so be it. Maybe they would care to write something. Another man had told him that there would be critics of the work but not to worry, they would almost surely be illiterate!

Whenever he would slow down or get distracted from the writing and encouraging others to write, he could feel the screams of the dying. It sounds creepy and it was. The only thing that would help was the writing. Like many who write, he had little choice. Whenever he backed off, even a little bit, he experienced depression. Here was a chance to do something lasting and good to make up for the balance of his life that had been spent in active addiction. For his friends who had died, for his own life and for those who might still have hope, he kept writing.

And then, after all these matters were dealt with, came the really hard ones. There is a lot of important stuff that recovering addicts have to learn about not projecting into the future or the past too much because of their tendency to loose today. They will agonize over the past that cannot often be changed or allow themselves to be paralyzed into inaction by arrays of possible outcomes until they built up multiyear strings of days in which they have thoroughly and completely done nothing whatsoever which turns out to be the worst of all.

What will it be like if we succeed? Won't some money and power hungry bums show up and try to steal control of the Fellowship from the members? Things are going great right now because we have a dream to unite us and there is universal support for the Book. Won't people start making rules and complicated procedures for themselves and as many others as they can get to buy into their games? Will the price of growth be a death of the spirit?

Bo had read something of the beginnings of A.A. and many other spiritual groups. He knew he would have to let go of all this and simply trust to the Loving Spirit if the work was to proceed at all.

He had said the prayers to be granted the ability to do this work. He had spent long hours on the phone with Greg learning how the Fellowship procedures for this and that went. He had attended his own young area and watched members deal with the growing bureaucracy of N.A. It was still small but his eye was schooled and he would catch the potentials for conflict.

He did everything he could to communicate information and ideas that had the effect of keeping him free of feeling powerful. He had learned that knowledge is power and that if he shared whatever was not generally known, he felt anonymous and one among many instead of the 'one'. He wanted to stay clean too. He knew he could still succumb to the disease as he began his long walk on this written razor's edge.

One thing kept it simple for him. Given time and enough accurate information, he trusted in group conscious. He had studied crowd behavior in the streets of Atlanta and learned that crowds liked to be entertained. They look for interest and excitement as a way of growing.

He was careful therefore to stay structurally correct. He intuitively knew that as the work went forward, he would be protected from the negative envy and petty jealously that the work would necessarily arouse in others. The weight of the personality issues set aside to do the work would all fall in on him personally on completion of the Basic Text. He knew better than anyone his imperfections. God freed him from fear and egotism by showing him these things early on. He was prepared to die for the Book if necessary. He knew most people weren't. The world steps aside for someone who knows where they are going. Few are willing to die for what they are doing. He loved these people doing the impossible by staying clean and helping others. They were his constant inspiration.

All the odds and ends he had learned about spirituality took on a new and immediate meaning and value for him as he saw them in application through daily N.A. recovery. Surrender, belief, faith, inventory, relief and amends preceded prayer, meditation and the application of spiritual principles on the base of a personal spiritual awakening. He was learning again and felt alive and growing. He was getting to learn the parts of life he had not covered and recovered missing parts.

God was taking out the fears and doubts that had kept him locked up for most of his adult life. Getting to read, study and scrutinize the works of others accelerated the process and en- couraged him to write more. He was finally good for something.



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