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i think my voice may get people to sit down um so by the time by the time i've got step one, the position I'm in is that I get up in the morning and I don't know if I'm going to drink that day, even though I'm going to A.A. meetings.

And if I drink, I don't know if I'm going to be able to come back to A.A. tomorrow, and I've started to see at this point other people drink and try to come back and not be able to.

So everything it says in the book suddenly starts to become crystal clear. This is reality. This is not a theory, as it says later on in the book.

However, what I see around me is all sorts of people who are two weeks, two months, two years, 20 years, 40 years sober,

who seem to have found a solution to this problem. Now, when I came to AA, I was very much impressed by these remarkable scrolls that you would have on the wall, which listed the steps and the traditions.

I had no idea they really had anything to do with AA when I first got here.

I thought we're in church basements. There was something to do with the church. And certainly in London, I imagine

Switzerland is very similar. Unlike the country in which AA was invented, we're not a religious

lot in London. Far from it. There is a lot of hostility towards

religion. There is a lot of skepticism about anything spiritual whatsoever. I certainly was

brought up an atheist, and I was militantly so.

And so when I came to step two, and as I've come to step two, repeatedly in increasing depth over the years, in some ways I've had to sidestep the God question because in a position of someone who has no contact with a power greater than oneself,

how could one conceive of what that power might be?

If you've never been to a country, someone's description of it is going to be totally inadequate.

You have to go and experience the country to really know what anyone means.

If someone describes alcohol to you and you've never drunk,

you couldn't describe it adequately.

You'd have to go and drink to understand it.

And I believe it's the same with the power greater than myself. I'd have to experience it to understand it. And I believe it's the same with a power greater than myself.

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