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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 Alphard Hitchcock moment, months ago. Rick was talking a lot about the interconnectedness

of alcoholism in ego, and that's certainly true. I remember talking to my first sponsor

Ted way back when 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 Ron guy, and you've got this Ron body, and this Ron personality, and you've got a job,

and you've got relationships, and you buy into this human experience. In fact, the society

that we grow up in teaches us that we are a product of our human experience. And then what

Ted said was in reality, 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 he 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, and 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, but I will

speak for myself, acceptance has been one of my challenges in sobriety, accepting everything

exactly as it is. So ego, in very simple terms, I mean, it can be, this is, be feeling better than

you are, or worse than you are. In my case, mostly it was the underside, be feeling worse than

...