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My name is Ron.

I'm an alcoholic.

There's a joke there which a lot of people know about my Alfred Hitchcock moment a few months ago.

Rick was talking a lot about the interconnectedness of alcoholism and ego, and that's certainly true.

I remember talking to my first sponsor, Ted, way back when, and we were looking at

alcoholism, ego and self, and specifically ego. He said, one of your problems is you think that you're somebody, you are not.

And you think you're this wrong guy and you've got this wrong body and this wrong personality and you,

and you've got a job and you've got relationships and you buy into

this human experience and in fact the society that we grow up in teaches us that we are a product

of our human experience and what Ted said was in, who I am and who we all are is a spiritual

being, a God-created being, who is having a human experience. But who and what we really

are is the essence of who we are is the spiritual being.

And you said that's really critical to know, because to live successfully and to live happily and usefully whole,

we have to be real to who we really are. That a lot of our dysfunction comes from trying to be something we are not.

So if I'm a fish and I have to fly like a bird to be happy in the life that I'm in, I'm not going to be,

and I'm not going to accept the world the way it is.

That may be a somewhat simplistic example,

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