Relieved of the alcohol obsession, their lives unaccountably transformed, they came to believe in a Higher Power, and most of them began to talk of God."

Religion says the existence of God can be proved; the agnostic says it can't be proved; and the atheist claims proof of the nonexistence of God.

How we loved to shout the damaging fact that millions of the 'good men of religion' were still killing one another off in the name of God.

Loved ones, upon whom we heartily depended, were taken from us by so-called acts of God.

It was the beginning of true kinship with man and God.

When we are honest with another person, it confirms that we have been honest with ourselves and with God.

It is worth noting that people of very high spiritual development almost always insist on checking with friends or spiritual advisers the guidance they feel they have received from God.

Many an A.A., once agnostic or atheistic, tells us that it was during this stage of Step Five that he first actually felt the presence of God.

This is a riddle of our existence, the full answer to which may be only in the mind of God.

No matter how far we have progressed, desires will always be found which oppose the grace of God.

So the difference between "the boys and the men" is the difference between striving for a self-determined objective and for the perfect objective which is of God.

The moment we say, "No, never!" our minds close against the grace of God.

During this process of learning more about humility, the most profound result of all was the change in our attitude toward God.

We now clearly see that we have been making unreasonable demands upon ourselves, upon others, and upon God.

The Seventh Step is where we make the change in our attitude which permits us, with humility as our guide, to move out from ourselves toward others and toward God.

It is the beginning of the end of isolation from our fellows and from God.

Prayer and meditation are our principal means of conscious contact with God.

We well remember how something deep inside us kept rebelling against the idea of bowing before any God.

Prayer, as commonly understood, is a petition to God.

Almost any experienced A.A. will tell how his affairs have taken remarkable and unexpected turns for the better as he tried to improve his conscious contact with God.

And, worst of all, we forgot God.

True ambition is the deep desire to live usefully and walk humbly under the grace of God.

The group was right and I was wrong; the voice on the subway was not the voice of God.

The longer he kept dry, the louder he talked -- against God.

He said, "Why don't you choose your own conception of God?"

For a brief moment, I had needed and wanted God.

What seemed at first a flimsy reed, has proved to be the loving and powerful hand of God.

The distinguished American psychologist, William James, in his book "Varieties of Religious Experience," indicates a multitude of ways in which men have discovered God.

Each individual, in the personal stories, describes in his own language and from his own point of view the way he established his relationship with God.

And it means, of course, that we are going to talk about God.

We found that as soon as we were able to lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, we commenced to get results, even though it was impossible for any of us to fully define or comprehend that Power, which is God.

Much to our relief, we discovered we did not need to consider another's conception of God.

When, therefore, we speak to you of God, we mean your own conception of God.

When we saw others solve their problems by a simple reliance upon the Spirit of the Universe, we had to stop doubting the power of God.

Actually we were fooling ourselves, for deep down in every man, woman, and child, is the fundamental idea of God.

"Who are you to say there is no God?"

In a few seconds he was overwhelmed by a conviction of the Presence of God.

But there is One who has all power -- that One is God.

First of all, we had to quit playing God.

For we are now on a different basis; the basis of trusting and relying upon God.

They trust their God.

We never apologize for God.

We don't use this as an excuse for shying away from the subject of God.

If the man be agnostic or atheist, make it emphatic that he does not have to agree with your conception of God.

The minute we put our work on a service plane, the alcoholic commences to rely upon our assistance rather than upon God.

Some of us have taken very hard knocks to learn this truth: Job or no job -- wife or no wife -- we simply do not stop drinking so long as we place dependence upon other people ahead of dependence on God.

It is dependent upon his relationship with God.

Time after time, this apparent calamity has been a boon to us, for it opened up a path which led to the discovery of God.

But it was a silly idea that we were too good to need God.

His sanity returned and he thanked God.

Abandon yourself to God as you understand God.

Though he could not accept all the tenets of the Oxford Groups, he was convinced of the need for moral inventory, confession of personality defects, restitution to those harmed, helpfulness to others, and the necessity of belief in and dependence upon God.

In the fall of 1939 Fulton Oursler, then editor of Liberty, printed a piece in his magazine, called "Alcoholics and God."

For nature and God alike abhor suicide.

God alone can judge our sex situation.

But it is better to meet God alone than with one who might misunderstand.

We'd have to have outside help if we were surely to know and admit the truth about ourselves -- the help of God and another human being.

We knew we would have to quit the deadly business of living alone with our conflicts, and in honesty confide these to God and another human being.

From great numbers of such experiences, we could predict that the doubter who still claimed that he hadn't got the "spiritual angle," and who still considered his well-loved A.A. group the higher power, would presently love God and call Him by name.

The only condition is that he trust in God and clean house.

No man, we saw, could believe in God and defy Him, too.

Either we had tried to play God and dominate those about us, or we had insisted on being overdependent upon them.

But he had found God -- and in finding God had found himself.

Of course, it is reasonable and understandable that the question is often asked: "Why can't we take a specific and troubling dilemma straight to God, and in prayer secure from Him sure and definite answers to our requests?"

Prayer is the raising of the heart and mind to God -- and in this sense it includes meditation.

This is our gift from God, and its bestowal upon others like us is the one aim that today animates A.A.'s all around the globe.

This feeling of being at one with God and man, this emerging from isolation through the open and honest sharing of our terrible burden of guilt, brings us to a resting place where we may prepare ourselves for the following Steps toward a full and meaningful sobriety.

The love of God and man we understood not at all.

As an insurance against "big-shot-ism" we can often check ourselves by remembering that we are today sober only by the grace of God and that any success we may be having is far more His success than ours.

Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and the people about us.

Quite often, however, the thoughts that seem to come from God are not answers at all.

"For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority -- a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience.

These practical folk then read Tradition Two, and learn that the sole authority in A.A. is a loving God as He may express Himself in the group conscience.

Two -- For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority -- a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience.

Two -- For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority -- a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience.

2. For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority -- a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience.

There I humbly offered myself to God, as I then understood Him, to do with me as He would.

But when I became willing to clean house and then asked a Higher Power, God as I understood Him, to give me release, my obsession to drink vanished.

And even those who had faith already often become conscious of God as they never were before.

With it we can broaden and deepen the channel between ourselves and God as we understand Him.

Can we now, with the help of God as we understand Him, handle them as well and as bravely as our nonalcoholic friends often do?

We said, "Why can't 'God as we understand Him' tell us where we are astray?

"Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him."

In fact, the effectiveness of the whole A.A. program will rest upon how well and earnestly we have tried to come to "a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him."

Consequently, in Step Three we turned our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

At the start, this was all we needed to commence spiritual growth, to effect our first conscious relation with God as we understood Him.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

Being convinced, we were at Step Three, which is that we decided to turn our will and our life over to God as we understood Him.

"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."

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.

The persistent use of meditation and prayer, we found, did open the channel so that where there had been a trickle, there now was a river which led to sure power and safe guidance from God as we were increasingly better able to understand Him.

Abandon yourself to God as you understand God.

Surely there could be no justice in this scheme of things, and therefore no God at all.

When these crop up, we ask God at once to remove them.

Counsel with persons is often desirable, but we let God be the final judge.

So to you out there who may soon be with us -- we say "Good luck and God bless you!"

May God bless you and keep you -- until then.

To others, the word "God" brought up a particular idea of Him with which someone had tried to impress them during childhood.

He's sure he still believes in God, but suspects that God doesn't believe in him.

At this stage, the difficulties of trying to deal rightly with God by ourselves are twofold.

Of course, the often disputed question of whether God can -- and will, under certain conditions -- remove defects of character will be answered with a prompt affirmative by almost any A.A. member.

Religion says the existence of God can be proved; the agnostic says it can't be proved; and the atheist claims proof of the nonexistence of God.

We would like to be assured that the grace of God can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

As they are humbled by the terrific beating administered by alcohol, the grace of God can enter them and expel their obsession.

We hope you are convinced now that God can remove whatever self-will has blocked you off from Him.

If God can solve the age-old riddle of alcoholism, He can solve your problems too.

God comes to most men gradually, but His impact on me was sudden and profound.

To some extent we have become God-conscious.

Our more religious members call it "God-consciousness."

Though it was not our intention to create such an impression, many alcoholics have nevertheless concluded that in order to recover they must acquire an immediate and overwhelming "God-consciousness" followed at once by a vast change in feeling and outlook.

I was to test my thinking by the new God-consciousness within.

(c) That God could and would if He were sought.

The fact was we really hadn't cleaned house so that the grace of God could enter us and expel the obsession.

More often, though, we had met up with some major calamity, and to our way of thinking lost out because God deserted us.

God didn't do it.

So we let God discipline us in the simple way we have just outlined.

He will also report that out of every season of grief or suffering, when the hand of God seemed heavy or even unjust, new lessons for living were learned, new resources of courage were uncovered, and that finally, inescapably, the conviction came that God does "move in a mysterious way His wonders to perform."

We found that God does not make too hard terms with those who seek Him.

He's sure he still believes in God, but suspects that God doesn't believe in him.

Somehow, being alone with God doesn't seem as embarrassing as facing up to another person.

God either is, or He isn't.

Instead of regarding ourselves as intelligent agents, spearheads of God's ever advancing Creation, we agnostics and atheists chose to believe that our human intelligence was the last word, the alpha and the omega, the beginning and end of all.

This was true even when we believed that God existed.

Some of us won't believe in God, others can't, and still others who do believe that God exists have no faith whatever He will perform this miracle.

We have seen A.A.'s ask with much earnestness and faith for God's explicit guidance on matters ranging all the way from a shattering domestic or financial crisis to correcting a minor personal fault, like tardiness.

God fashioned us that way.

Refusing to place God first, we had deprived ourselves of His help.

Here we ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision.

The A.A., or indeed any man, who tries to run his life rigidly by this kind of prayer, by this self-serving demand of God for replies, is a particularly disconcerting individual.

Having so considered our day, not omitting to take due note of things well done, and having searched our hearts with neither fear nor favor, we can truly thank God for the blessings we have received and sleep in good conscience.

But his face falls when we speak of spiritual matters, especially when we mention God, for we have re-opened a subject which our man thought he had neatly evaded or entirely ignored.

After making our review we ask God's forgiveness and inquire what corrective measures should be taken.

We thank God from the bottom of our heart that we know Him better.

Under these conditions we can employ our mental faculties with assurance, for after all God gave us brains to use.

So these desires -- for the sex relation, for material and emotional security, and for companionship -- are perfectly necessary and right, and surely God-given.

We remembered always that our sex powers were God-given and therefore good, neither to be used lightly or selfishly nor to be despised and loathed.

Pride lures us into making demands upon ourselves or upon others which cannot be met without perverting or misusing our God-given instincts.

The power of God goes deep!

That is the spiritual climate in which A.A. was born, and by God's grace has nevertheless flourished.

Our basic troubles are the same as everyone else's, but when an honest effort is made "to practice these principles in all our affairs," well-grounded A.A.'s seem to have the ability, by God's grace, to take these troubles in stride and turn them into demonstrations of faith.

In all times of emotional disturbance or indecision, we can pause, ask for quiet, and in the stillness simply say: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, Courage to change the things we can, And wisdom to know the difference.

But my friend sat before me, and he made the point-blank declaration that God had done for him what he could not do for himself.

But he had found God -- and in finding God had found himself.

Had not people said God had reserved this privilege to the birds?

God had restored his sanity.

Lacking both practice and humility, they had deluded themselves and were able to justify the most arrant nonsense on the ground that this was what God had told them.

If a repetition is to be prevented, place the problem, along with everything else, in God's hands.

He saw that he had to place the outcome in God's hands or he would soon start drinking again, and all would be lost anyhow.

Cling to the thought that, in God's hands, the dark past is the greatest possession you have -- the key to life and happiness for others.

When we look back, we realize that the things which came to us when we put ourselves in God's hands were better than anything we could have planned.

God has abundantly supplied this world with fine doctors, psychologists, and practitioners of various kinds.

While grateful that he drinks no more, they may not like the idea that God has accomplished the miracle where they failed.

These very deviations created a vast process of trial and error which, under the grace of God, has brought us to where we stand today.

So far as we know, it is nowhere on the record that God has completely removed from any human being all his natural drives.

God has either removed your husband's liquor problem or He has not.

His own character may still be gravely defective, but he somehow knows that God has enabled him to make a mighty beginning, and he senses that he stands at the edge of new mysteries, joys, and experiences of which he had never even dreamed.

There will be those who have drifted into indifference, those filled with self-sufficiency who have cut themselves off, those who have become prejudiced against religion, and those who are downright defiant because God has failed to fulfill their demands.

Sometimes it's because God has not delivered us the good things of life which we specified, as a greedy child makes an impossible list for Santa Claus.

And God has proceeded to do exactly that.

Try to remember that though God has wrought miracles among us, we should never belittle a good doctor or psychiatrist.

Our friend's gorge rose as he bitterly cried out: "If there is a God, He certainly hasn't done anything for me!"

No matter how much one wishes to try, exactly how can he turn his own will and his own life over to the care of whatever God he thinks there is?

It is a step in the development of that kind of humility that makes it possible for us to receive God's help.

We had to have God's help.

All this should be very encouraging news for those who recoil from prayer because they don't believe in it, or because they feel themselves cut off from God's help and direction.

Do we lay the matter before our sponsor or spiritual adviser, earnestly asking God's help and guidance -- meanwhile resolving to do the right thing when it becomes clear, cost what it may?

Valiantly he tries to fight alcohol, imploring God's help, but the help doesn't come.

Service, gladly rendered, obligations squarely met, troubles well accepted or solved with God's help, the knowledge that at home or in the world outside we are partners in a common effort, the well-understood fact that in God's sight all human beings are important, the proof that love freely given surely brings a full return, the certainty that we are no longer isolated and alone in self-constructed prisons, the surety that we need no longer be square pegs in round holes but can fit and belong in God's scheme of things -- these are the permanent and legitimate satisfactions of right living for which no amount of pomp and circumstance, no heap of material possessions, could possibly be substitutes.

Here we need only recognize that we did act or think badly, try to visualize how we might have done better, and resolve with God's help to carry these lessons over into tomorrow, making, of course, any amends still neglected.

When, with God's help, we calmly accepted our lot, then we found we could live at peace with ourselves and show others who still suffered the same fears that they could get over them, too.

The notion that we would still live our own lives, God helping a little now and then, began to evaporate.

So it's not strange that lots of us have had our day at defying God Himself.

When we developed still more, we discovered the best possible source of emotional stability to be God Himself.

Without unity, the heart of A.A. would cease to beat; our world arteries would no longer carry the life-giving grace of God; His gift to us would be spent aimlessly.

I listened, and -- thank God -- I obeyed."

Many of us said to our Maker, as we understood Him: "God, I offer myself to Thee -- to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt.

But the God idea did.

With that rejection we imagined we had abandoned the God idea entirely.

He may demand that the family find God in a hurry, or exhibit amazing indifference to them and say he is above worldly considerations.

Judging from what I had seen in Europe and since, the power of God in human affairs was negligible, the Brotherhood of Man a grim jest.

This dream world has been replaced by a great sense of purpose, accompanied by a growing consciousness of the power of God in our lives.

To watch the eyes of men and women open with wonder as they move from darkness into light, to see their lives quickly fill with new purpose and meaning, to see whole families reassembled, to see the alcoholic outcast received back into his community in full citizenship, and above all to watch these people awaken to the presence of a loving God in their lives -- these things are the substance of what we receive as we carry A.A.'s message to the next alcoholic.

We had tried to bombard our problems with it instead of attempting to bring it into agreement with God's intention for us.

Thus was I convinced that God is concerned with us humans when we want Him enough.

We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

When we became alcoholics, crushed by a self-imposed crisis we could not postpone or evade, we had to fearlessly face the proposition that either God is everything or else He is nothing.

When many hundreds of people are able to say that the consciousness of