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12 Steps 1.

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable
She had me read the forward and first step from the 12 x 12 and then read the preface, the forwards, the Doctor's Opinion, Bill's Story, There is a Solution, and More About Alcoholism from the AA book. The last of these, where the first step is found and starts 'we had to fully concede to our innermost selves that we...', is where she probed for my acceptance of my alcoholism and illustrated that this is where the first step is located in the AA book. She had me discuss my experiences and other ways in which I knew that I was powerless over alcohol.

A) Reactions (listen with love). B) Write down where you identified by writing down the situation you had and what it relates to in the book. C) List moments where you couldn't stop drinking once you started or where you planned to drink a certain amount and somehow drank more. D) List reasons why you drank. E) pg. 30 is the first step.
2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
For the second step she had me read it out of the 12 x 12 and We Agnostics in the AA book. She was relatively hands-off about this step unless I had questions or things I wanted to discuss with her after reading. In fact, I remember wondering how I would know if I was finished and asking her about it, to which she responded by asking me if I was ready to move on to the third step. I am guessing that she thinks this is a personal step. Have sponsee write down what kind of qualities a higher power would have.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
Read the step out of the 12 x 12 and the AA book On p. 60 where it starts, 'Being convinced, we were at Step Three... there are 5 requirements to have completed the third step and they are encompassed from this point and ending on p. 63 with 'was felt at once.' Liz would not help me with finding them, but would only acknowledge whether the ones I'd found were correct or not. Once I found all five, we discussed whether I'd met all of the requirements. Here they are: p. 60 'The first requirement' p. 62 'Above everything' p. 62 'We had to have' p. 62 'First of all' p. 62 'Next, we decided that hereafter, in this drama of life, God was going to be our Director.'

One thing that Liz pointed out to me is that this scavenger hunt pronounces the fact that doing the third step prayer on your knees is not doing the third step. The requirements are what is necessary and, if fulfilled, allow you to formalize this decision with a higher power in whatever way works for you. The second to last paragraph in the AA book talks about this.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.


PREPARATION: Before you start the Fourth Step, read pages 63-71 in the Big Book and the Fourth Step in the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Then complete the following steps: A) INVENTORY WORKSHEET: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.step12.com%2Faafiles%2F4th-step-resentments-x.pdf -Add a fifth column to the right of the fourth column ("Where was I to blame?"). Title this fifth column "The Seven Deadly Sins," and below that list create a checklist for lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride. When you look at your part -- where you were to blame -- check the sin/s that correlate to your faults. If you feel as if the seven deadly sins are too Christian, the following interview frames the sins in a biological and Buddhist perspective: http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2011/12/26/biologist-michael-soule-on-the-seven-deadlysins/ B) FEAR INVENTORY: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.step12.com%2Faafiles%2F4th-step-fears-x.pdf C) SEX INVENTORY: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.step12.com%2Faafiles%2F4th-step-sex-conduct-x.pdf

If you have any questions along the way, feel free to ask them. And don't feel as if you have to finish all of this inventory before we discuss it. It's often helpful for a sponsee to review a few of his resentments with a sponsor to make sure he's on the right track.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
The fifth step is read from the 12 x 12 and AA book and then share the inventory findings with your sponsor. Sponsor discusses impression of sponsees third and fourth column openly and redirects sponsee if he is missing the mark.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
This is Liz's forte. She opened my eyes to this step that in the 12x12 they speak of as a defining step. She had me read the AA book and 12x12 for the step. After that she didn't say what to do other than observe myself. I kept calling her and asking if I was ready to move on to the 7th step. She'd say something along the lines of knowing when I was ready and it didn't sound like it. She asked me to be aware of my defects of character playing themselves out in my daily life. After a while I came to understand that I had no control over them and also wanted to be rid of them, sick of seeing myself do them over and over even though I wanted them gone. When I brought this to her attention she said that I had 'become entirely ready' as it talks about in the 6th step. I was on this step for probably a month before I found this portal.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.


In the 7th step, again she had me read both books, then do the prayer in the AA book. She said that after this I was to act as if they'd been removed. I knew what the right action in accordance to the removal of the defects of character looked like and was to act accordingly.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. 10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it. 11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. 12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Biologist Michael Soule on the Seven Deadly Sins


By Michelle Nijhuis | December 26, 2011 | 7 Comments

Dearest readers, we hope you had a gluttonous, slothful, greedy and lustful holiday, with only the tiniest touches of wrath. Here at the Last Word on Nothing, were celebrating the season with a series of posts on the Seven Deadly Sins. Beginning tomorrow, each of our crack writers will tackle his or her favorite (or perhaps least favorite) sin, inspiring we hope pride on our part and envy on yours. Today, though, well consider all of the seven deadlies with conservation biologist Michael Soule, the founder of the Society for Conservation Biology and The Wildlands Network and a professor emeritus of environmental studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In recent years, in pursuit of an ultimate explanation for human reluctance to protect biodiversity, Soule has turned his attention to the seven deadly sins, examining their history and evolution as both a scientist and a longtime Buddhist practitioner. I spoke with Soule at his home in western Colorado. LWON: From a biologists perspective, what is sin? Soule: Sin is about the most primitive emotional elements of survival and reproduction. If you look at the seven deadly sins, you see that each of them concerns a major component of fitness how we survive, and how we succeed in courtship and reproduction.

So in that sense, theres nothing biologically bad about any of the sins. All of them are necessary for survival and reproduction. LWON: So the reproductive purpose of lust is obvious. What about the other sins? Soule: Well, lets start with greed, which evolutionarily is by far the oldest sin as old as life itself. All organisms have to seek resources, and in our species this desire for energy leads to the sin of greed, because our awareness of selfishness lets us choose to be greedy or not. Competition for resources is also ancient, and with competition comes aversion, or anger, toward ones competitors. So the second-oldest vice is anger. Then you have the ancient visceral impulses, those that arise from the animal needs to sleep, eat, and mate: in humans these become sloth, gluttony, and lust. Gluttony is just the inherited desire to eat when food is available, because its never certain when the next meal is going to show up. Sloth is simply the need to rest. Lust is clearly essential for sexual reproduction. These five sins are all in the limbic system theyre primitive. The two remaining sins are envy and pride, the only so-called sins that are nearly uniquely human. Theyre by far the most recent ones, located in the young neocortex, according to functional MRI scans. They require theory of mind the capacity to understand that other people have minds and they can only exist in highly social animals. Envy motivates a person to get more stuff, status, or sex. Pride is based on ego, which can be attractive to potential mates and friends. LWON: Does every culture have a concept of sin? Soule: Every major spiritual tradition does. The Torah, the five books of Moses, doe snt talk about sins, but it talks about behaviors and impulses that are bad for the group. Its a different typology, but it overlaps a lot with sin. As far as I know, sin the concept of the seven deadly sins was invented by Horace. The seven sins were adopted by the early Christians as a typology for explaining the obstacles to becoming one with Jesus. In Buddhism, you have the three poisons: greed, anger, and ignorance. So different spiritual traditions have different typologies of sin, but they all end up being about self: too much self, too much me and my cognition. LWON: Have these concepts changed over millennia? Soule: The emphasis has changed. For example, the major sin in early Christianity was greed. Then Pope Gregory St. Gregory, the fifth Pope in the Roman tradition decided that pride was the mother of all sins. He decided that self-centeredness, self-bias, was the root of all of our sins, just as the Buddha had believed. Its a wonderful convergence. LWON: Do you see us shifting that emphasis once again, or even developing new sins or a new set of sins? Soule: In the modern world, I think the ranking of the sins is shifting again. Greed is such an overt factor in the destruction of the world. I mean, greed is killing nature, and causing global warming. Its bringing us down, thats essentially what Occupy Wall Street is about. So I think that over time, we will shift the ranking of greed and pride again. On the other hand, greed has of course come to be perceived as a virtue. We certainly reward people who are conspicuous consumers in this society. LWON: Were all really good at justifying our sins, right?

Soule: Yes. And that gets back to your other question about modern sins, whether there are any sins that are left out of the old typology. I think there are a lot of them, but my favorite is denial, which in a way is a form of mental sloth. Denial is really an example of an immature mind. Were the youngest species of mammal I know about, and were just so capable of deluding ourselves, so good at not thinking about things that make us a bit uncomfortable. When I go to a restaurant with people, I often say, Theres not much I can eat here, because its all factory-farmed meat, or kinds of seafood that are ecologically problematic. So my companions say, Well, why dont you get the shrimp? I say, Do you want to know why? and I go into this elaborate story about all the ecological harm caused by shrimp collecting. Im a professor, so of course I go on and on. And I get about halfway through my lecture, and people say, Okay, thats enough. And then they tell the server, Ill have the shrimp. LWON: Is that denial, or rebellion? Soule: I dont know. But rebellion is also denial, I think. Were capable of infinite levels and degrees of denial. LWON: You said earlier that from a biologists perspective theres nothing wrong with sin, but of course weve evolved all these ways to help people resist sin systems of confessing, systems of making people feel ashamed. Why do cultures try to control our sinful behavior if theres nothing particularly wrong with it biologically? Soule: Everything changed with civilization. Instincts and impulses that were adaptive for an individual or a family have, when expressed on a large scale, become highly nonadaptive for the world, the climate, and even civilization as a whole. Anger, for instance, comes out of the need to compete and reproduce. But anger, when its magnified by civilization and war and the kinds of weapons we have now, destroys the planet. Also, excessive self-bias is harmful to the group, and were a social species. The efficient functioning of a social group, whether its a war party, a Girl Scout troop, or a town, requires a certain amount of self-control. Its often believed, and quite often true, that religion is a way of limiting the harm people do to the group. LWON: Youve said that neuroscience is changing the way we understand sin. Can you tell me about that? Soule: Sin was kind of a mystery behaviorally and biologically until about the last 20 years, when people started looking at human behavior under the lens of functional magnetic resonance and electroencephalography and other forms of visualizing what the brain is doing when it is feeling or thinking about certain things, or when the person is behaving in certain ways. Almost all of the sins have been looked at and been located in the brain. Its pretty crude at the moment. But still, we know the sins are in the brain, which means that the biological basis is clear. Were hard-wired to behave in self-biased ways. Over the last several hundred thousand years, weve also become hard-wired to behave in a social way. Which means that the self has to submit to the group in some way, to subordinate

its greed and envy and gluttony and so forth to what the group needs to survive. Because we depend on our groups to survive and prosper. LWON: I want to ask you about E.O. Wilsons recent comment about virtue and sin in The Atlantic. He says that group selection brings about virtue, and individual selection creates sin, and that in a nutshell is an explanation of the human condition. How do you respond to that? Soule: I think hes more or less correct about sin, that sins are self-biased behaviors. But the virtues are also probably sexually selected. That is, theyre about looking good in the context of a highly social group, or actually elevating your status in the group. Patience, tolerance, and compassion are things that make you attractive as a mate. So the virtues are not just good for the group, theyre good for the individual, too, indirectly. The virtues, to me, are no different than the sins. Theyre just another way o f benefitting the individual. LWON: Okay, so where does that leave us? If were so hard-wired for self-bias, but yet self-bias is causing other people and other things so much suffering, is there a solution? Soule: Were in deep doo-doo. Thats why were destroying the world. Thats why were wiping out life on this planet, and why we cant deal with big problems like climate change. Our self interest gets in the way. Thats why Im so pessimistic. But like all human beings, Im an optimist at the same time. I just started this new initiative through the Wildlands Network, a National Corridors Campaign, to protect corridors between wildlife habitats and create potential for movement of flora and fauna as the climate changes from Mexico to Canada. LWON: So where did your motivation for that initiative come from? Soule: (Laughs) From being an alpha male. Being an alpha-type person, I want recognition, I want to be known as somebody with vision and big ideas, so theres greed and all that stuff wrapped up in my work. But religious and spiritual practice helps me dampen those motivations a little bit, helps me identify them so you can buffer and moderate them. People on spiritual paths generally know when theyre fucking up. LWON: How else has thinking about sin helped you, on a personal level, contend with your own sins? Soule: A lot. Its subtle, but understanding yourself is the key to growth. The spiritual path, to me, has been really important in tempering and moderating my sinfulness, and reminding me to focus on what is needed for the world, for society, not just for me. Unless you are truly a saint, you really cant overcome your greed and anger and ignorance. But you can file off the sharp edges, and focus your ambition on projects that are good for society and the world. You can change ambition into aspiration sometimes.

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