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For part four of the discussion of step five, I would like to speak about admitting the exact nature of our wrongs to ourselves. Once again, I recall asking myself why this was necessary. After all, did not just do ¼ step that went over all of the gory details that I thought were appropriate and/or necessary to include in that writing.

When I had finally decided to be honest, (or at least as honest as I could be at the time), I tried to be as fearless as possible when digging up those incidences from the dregs of my mind. Even though I had decided that I wanted to be “fearless and thorough from the very start”, I remember having a difficult time with step four. Some of the incidents from my past showed up in my brain and very foggy way, and I had to fight to bring them to the front. I had a problem with other memories, not because they were foggy, but because they were just too painful to look at again. This is one of the reasons why I believe this God-given program was given to us in the order it is. It is implied that I definitely need to do the first three steps before tackling the action steps of four through nine. Once I was secure in the first three steps and I knew that I had the actual power of God to help with my day to day life, I was able to look at my past in a different light. I knew that some of the things I had done were downright bad, or at the very least, inappropriate. However, with the strength I was given through the first three steps, I was able to face my “self” in the action steps, four through nine. But according to this part of step five, I was certainly not ready to completely let go of those incidences of which I had become painfully aware.

Now, the fifth step was asking me to look into that mirror one more time. This time it wants me to admit to myself the exact nature of my wrongs! Come on! Give me a break! How many times so I have to go through this? Garbage? It turned out that it really help me to sit down in a quiet place and read my fourth step as if it were being read by a bystander or stranger. It helped me to reinforce the fact that I had become some kind of entity that was absolutely out of control. It helped me to realize that, if I wanted to have some degree of happiness in this world and this life, I needed to reach out to God for help.

So, this part of the fifth step that asks me to admit to myself the nature of my wrongs, was actually right on. But, it didn’t just become a litany of my failures. It was, even more importantly, an awakening to my potential and possibilitie. I had surrendered my way of doing things to God. That in itself was like a huge weight off of my shoulders. Now I got another chance to become aware of exactly what that weight was that was about to, for the most part, leave me. I was becoming aware of a whole new outlook on my life. I realized for the first time that I did not have to do those things that beat myself down. I became no less than, and no more than, any other human being. I was the same as them, with the same heartbreak in the same happiness. The difference was, however, that I had a plan to listen and follow my spiritual self. I have a plan to follow God’s direction.

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In this third part of the topic of step number five, I would like to speak about how I admit to God the exact nature of my wrongs. On first blush, my thought was, “this is crazy, God already knows everything about what I’ve been what I am and what I’m going to be. Why do I need to tell him what he already knows?”.

Well, I believe that the above question is correct. I truly do believe that God knows all there is to know about me. Once again, in case you’re not aware or don’t remember, I believe that we all are, in our essence, God. Now I know that some of you still believe that we find God through whatever particular religion or group that we are involved with. Well, I’m certainly not advising that you give up your relationship with whatever group it is. It’s just that my relationship with God starts from within. It is not really even debatable how many times Christ referred to God as being within us. His words were not some kind of mysterious doublespeak, that you had to be in a club to understand. No, his words were simple and straightforward. Sometimes I think that we must throw some kind of a switch in order to hear those words in their true meaning. I think we have to really, (I really don’t know how many times I can say this), follow the steps as they are presented to us. If I truly believe the first step I know that I just can’t seem to handle life on my own. This leads me to decide whether my belief system will allow me to believe that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity. This is step two, step I am talking about here. What I am trying to get you to believe, or I should say, to look within yourself for that belief, is that God has always been within the last, simply waiting for us to become aware of that fact. This might be the most giant leap, other than saying “yes,” I surrender, but I take in my whole life.

Getting back to my reason for including God in this fifth step, well, it doesn’t really have a lot to do with what I just mentioned about car being within us, but I just have to spread that word whenever I can. Anyway, I believe we are urged to include God in this fifth step, not because he does not know about our character defects and shortcomings, but because by talking to God about them we reinforced two things within us. First is just the nature of all those things that we are referring to from our fourth step. Secondly, and I think most importantly, I am reinforcing my belief in God, as well as my belief that God can help me get my life in order.

I have already, in step number three, surrendered to God’s direction for my life. In this step I kind of think of it as getting the record straight. It’s kind of laying all my cards on the table for me to look at them once more, and to believe that I have this union with God that, with our partnership, my life can once again become the beautiful reflection of God’s love that it was meant to be.

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To begin, I would like to make a short detour in order to mention the first words of this step”, admitted”.

In Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), "admitted" means to confess, recognize, and accept the reality of one’s alcoholism, powerlessness over alcohol, and the unmanageability of life. It is the foundation of Step One, moving from denial to acknowledging facts, and in Step Five, it refers to vocalizing the exact nature of one's wrongs. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Key Aspects of "Admitted" in step five of AA:

·     Step Five ("Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being..."): In this step, "admitted" means confession and sharing the "exact nature of our wrongs" to break down shame and build accountability.

This overview from Googles Copilot AI program is mostly directed to alcoholics with references to the Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous. Of course, this book highlights the 12 steps as being for alcoholics, but in this podcast I recognize, (and hope you do to), that these 12 steps are for everyone.

Anyway, my understanding of the word admitted is to reveal something that we already know the true. Admitting it is a way of reinforcing that truth within ourselves. It may or may not be a reasonable distance within us between the word admission and the word acceptance.

Personally, I was willing to admit this, nature of my wrongs, to God, myself, and other human beings all of my life until I honestly found this 12-step program. It was another way of putting myself down! Mea culpa… Mea culpa!

It wasn’t until I became honest in looking at myself and working this program, that I admitted that all of these things were saved by me as a huge amount to baggage with which to complicate, and hence, destroy my life as much as possible.

Now, with my newfound honesty in truly looking at “me”, I began to see this baggage as something I could let go of or, with God’s direction, accept the things that were left, and easy to do something to make them right, or if that was not possible, leave them in God’s powerful hands.

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Step number five is the second step of our action steps. I have to admit that the first few times that I did step four, I did it with the expectation of doing step number five. In other words step five was kind of hanging over me as I thought of which of the things I had done that I was willing to tell someone else about.

When I finally reached the end of my rope, it became important to me to do step four with complete honesty, (well, as much as I could muster in those early days), with no expectations of doing step number five. I tried to be as honest as possible, and I was going to say it was easier than ever before, but that would be untrue because I had never before our out myself to be seen for the real me. But now, now I had the feeling and knowledge of having real power, (the Power greater than myself from the second step), and I felt I could say anything without fear because God was truly within me.

 I would like to talk today about my life leading up to the fifth step. In other words, the preparation that includes honesty and willingness, coupled with a dash of courage, that would lead me into a fitful fifth step.

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So here we are at the ( sometimes dreaded) fourth step. Once again, please allow me to remind you of what the fourth step is:

I made a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself.

I have italicized what I consider to be the most important words in this fourth step. I know I’ve spoken about the word fearless, both when I have discussed the steps in the past, as well as last week’s episode. I also know I sound like a broken record at times because I want to keep reminding you how important it is to have the steps become a way of life (as we do them!). Each step really does builds on the previous step.

This means, simply, that I am really led through the steps, once I earnestly want to become honest, in a natural way. Because I found myself truly unmanageable in the first step, well, then I had to look for help. The steps tell me that I can find help in step number two if I come to believe that a power, greater than myself to restore me to sanity. Once I come to believe in that power (God) I will find a strength with which to continue working the rest of the steps. I can only ask you to believe me when I say that this is true. In my earlier years of “fooling around” with this program, I never got to the point where I honestly thought I needed help from anywhere else. I could do it myself. I could get myself well, not drink, get a job and a car, and be on top of the world. That was all fine, but it never lasted very long. I never sought the internal presence of God that could help me and give me strength and power. Now, as I honestly continue this program, I have admitted my powerlessness. Once I did that, I automatically start a power outside of myself. It was there, within me, as it had been there forever. I needed only to become aware of it and make it part of my existence. It was so big and important that in the third snap there was no question in my mind about turning things over to God. Once that happened, my spiritual responsibility wide elsewhere. The only thing I was responsible for, from then on, was to listen for the direction of my spirit.

Now, the fourth step became much easier, as well as much more honest. My Spirit (God) would guide me, and help me, to identify those things I had done in my life that have become the baggage of the present. Now I could begin my list, which would still be difficult, but with the help of my Spirit to honestly look at my past.

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I would like to start by reminding you of a couple of things. First, I am telling you about working the steps from the points of view that I believe is the way the original program was meant to be. That original program, and the 12 steps were designed as a way of life that works with God, (as we, individually, understand God).

You will find that this spiritual program depends, quite often, on using the strengths obtained from the previous steps to do the current step. In other words, the power and support gained from God and doing the first three steps helps me with strength to do this fourth step. As a reminder, that fourth step is:

         I made a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself.

This is not an easy thing to do, at least not from our purely human standpoint. When I saw the word searching I thought, okay, I can handle that, but fearless, well I just wasn’t in that position yet. I could never have handled the fearless with so little power that I had. I had to depend on that power greater than myself, in order to get back on the roots of sanity. This is what I would like to speak about in this first episode of the fourth step.

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In our last podcast I ended with speaking about duality and how it is now considered to be passé in both sciences and philosophy. I truly do not understand how educated people can look at our makeup and decide that we are ultimately of one substance. The so-called hard problem of what our consciousness is or where he came from, still exists. Many scientists and philosophers seem to brush it off saying, “sure, it’s a problem, but it’s same substance as our physical self and will figure it out at some point”. I think not!

My belief in God begins with my belief that I cannot look outside of myself to find Him. The essence of my “self”, both physically and spiritually is my Spirit/God. I might say that this is the beginning, as well as the end, of me. Without this essence of God, I believe we would be just some lump of flesh, existing much like the wild animals of the earth. What makes us human beings is our indescribable qualities of consciousness and spirituality.

That leaves me in a quandary. What is the purpose of religions in our society? If God is to be found within, as an inseparable part of us, then what are we looking for in churches, synagogues, mosques, etc.? What I see them as, are places to share the knowledge of our possession of God with others. They are places where we can support each other with our experience, strength, and hope both for living a life as is requested by God, thereby helping each other to a final end of joy. Exactly what that looks like, no one seems to know. I am, however, looking forward to this wonderful discovery.

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Let’s imagine for a moment, leaving the place that we live in the morning, soon after having breakfast. Our breakfast may have been cornflakes, a bowl of grits, French toast, or what we could call the “Full Monty” of bacon and sausage eggs and home fries. What we decided to have for breakfast wasn’t what I would consider something that would need our consultation with our Spirit. What I believe, and what I would like to tell you about, is our duality. The trend amongst philosophers and scientists (and even geologists) these days is to kick duality out the window in favor of non-duality. In my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth.

One of the things to look at is the philosophy of  Occam's Razor, which basically says that of all possible solutions to a particular issue, the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one. Look around you, and also look at yourself, maybe in the mirror. Can you really believe from theory or hypothesis that what you see, feel, taste, smell, and touch, is not real, but an illusion! My feeling is similar to that of the philosopher Richard Swinburne, who just said, “That’s just crazy!”.

I know that when I look around and take everything in that, for me it is all real. I also know that besides all that, there is some sort of ethereal situation that I am somehow aware of. I prefer to call it a sense of consciousness, coupled somehow with Spirit. This is my simple, yet rich, duality. This duality is something that I believe has to be accepted in order for us to truly discover that which is part of us as the source of everything. I call it my Essence. Some may call it our Spirit or Spark. What it is called makes no difference. It is always the same thing. The human part of our duality, as much as we may try, cannot change or alter the truth. That truth is our duality. That truth is the constant choice we have two either follow our human desires, or follow our spiritual intuition.

Of course, many of these things that we need to decide for ourselves are a result of the question presented to us in the second step. That is, simply, do I believe in higher power or for the purposes of my podcast, God?

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As a reminder, the third step is: (my version)

I made its decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God, as I understand God

For me, this is arguably the most important step in this program. From a purely psychological aspect, one could argue that the first step, fourth step, eighth and ninth steps, and the twelfth step, hold equal importance as far as getting our bodies well. I have mentioned before that this program certainly does work as a solution to overcoming our lives difficulties and allows us to live a relatively comfortable, nondependent, and socially acceptable lifestyle. However, these physical and psychological changes and improvements are not what this podcast is all about! The name of this podcast is Steps To The Spirit.

Using this program to get by in life, is not the preferred solution for us. Our solution is to use these steps to discover and work with our Essence or, if you will, Spirit. The fact that after completing the steps in such a way that we are able to function in our job or profession, care for our families, and discover those things within us that have led to any of the life enhancers we had become accustomed to, is certainly good progress on the human scale, but not the goal of this podcast. If you look at the steps in this program there are, overall, six steps that either directly or indirectly involved a higher power. The higher power that this podcast refers to, is always God. There are many ways to get around this, and I personally believe that many, if not most,

folks who become involved in this program, do not put themselves in the hands of God.

So, this is what my podcast is all about — to show that the most important part of recovery in this program is our relationship with God and our Spirit in order to turn our lives over to his care and direction. As is noted in the book, of us do not achieve anything like perfect adherence to these principles. The point is that we look for spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection. It is this goal that I hope to help you achieve.

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In this second part of step two, I want to talk about a crucial ingredient that was necessary for me to be successful with this 12 step program. Last episode I spoke about our individual belief in either a higher power (God) or the police in the possibility of the existence of a higher power. Now that I think of it, it may have been better for me to talk about second part of step two first.

Maybe some, it’s a no-brainer that we are, of course, insane. After all, after doing the first step and admitting I was powerless and that my life had become unmanageable, well, that insured the need for help outside of myself. I believe that in the 12-step program, that health is recognized as a power greater than ourselves, or God. There are also adjuncts to God, I think, in the form of helpers, such as a sponsor or a mentor. Now, brace yourself, because here it comes! I personally believe, (know), that my primary higher power can only be God. It is not someone or something that I have conveniently picked up along the way. No, I have discovered that this power has been with me, (as been me), all along.

In retrospect, I had to have become aware of my insanity from the very beginning of my recovery. I wish, for simplicity sake, that I could find a term to refer to this genuine recovery, as compared to all those other, previous, false starts. Maybe I could borrow something dramatic from, say, Star Wars! Maybe I could call it my final frontier! Actually, now that I think of it, recovery seems to fit just fine. The thing that is built into all of those other attempts is that they were not to recovery. They were attempts at going through the motions of doing a program that I knew worked for others, hoping that somehow, by osmosis, it would work for me. I had no honesty. I had no true introspection into my true self. I did not recognize my insanity. In short, I was simply not ready to say yes to God, or to surrender.

Maybe, as I looked at the insanity of step number two before looking at the need for a belief, I would have surrendered sooner. There is no way of knowing. It is what it is.

So, in this episode, I am going to talk about our insanity. Please be vigilant. You may discover yourself somewhere in here.