Aa history Lovers 2010 moderators Nancy Olson and Glenn F. Chesnut page



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had our votes swayed at the Area. The Chair asks for Minority Opinion, then

the


Chair asks if anyone's vote was swayed. If yes, then the Chair asks for a

vote


to re-open discussion, then after discussion, we vote again. That vote is

final.
- - - -


From: "rvnprit"

(rvnprit at hotmail.com)


I had the privilege of observing the minority opinion swaying the majority

at

the 2008 General Service Conference. An amended recommendation from the



Conference Public Information Committee to insert the following Questions

and


Answers on posthumous anonymity into the pamphlet "Understanding Anonymity"

was


intially passed by the Conference by a substantial majority of 93 in favor

and


35 opposed:
"Q. In general, what is the feeling of the Fellowship in regards to

posthumous

anonymity?
A. In 1988 the General Service Conference recommended that: The 1971

Conference

Advisory Action be reaffirmed: 'A.A. members generally think it unwise to

break


the anonymity of a member even after his death, but in each situation the

final


decision must rest with the family.'
Q. Why do obituaries sometimes state that the deceased was a member of

Alcoholics Anonymous?


A. There are many reasons why this would occur. Family members and funeral

directors sometimes write the obituaries and are not aware of A.A.'s

Traditions.

On the other hand, the deceased person's A.A. membership may have been

revealed

due to a conscious decision made beforehand by the A.A. member, or it may

have

been made by the family. A.A. members may wish to make their personal wishes



on this matter known to their families ahead of time."
After the minority spoke, in part expressing the difficult position in which

this language would put the grieving family, a motion to reconsider was

passed

and after further discussion, the amended recommendation failed on a vote of



7

in favor and 121 opposed. The language was not added to the pamphlet.


This was but one of a number of times I have seen the minority opinion sway

a

hasty or mistaken majority. It is a vital part of A.A.'s collective



decision-making with respect for the minority.
In love and service,
Newton P.
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++++Message 6234. . . . . . . . . . . . Re: life of Jack Alexander

From: Baileygc23@aol.com . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/16/2010 2:59:00 AM


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Jack Alexander was one of three brothers, who

were all involved in journalism:


< < Jack Alexander wrote for the New Yorker

< < and the Saturday Evening Post.
< < Roy Alexander was managing editor of Time

< < Magazine from 1949 to 1960.
< < The Rev. Calvert Alexander, S.J., was for

< < 25 years editor of Jesuit Missions.
Time Magazine "Letter From The Publisher:

Jul. 8, 1966" talks about brother Roy:


http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,835920,00.html#ixzz0chqjigm

A
WE take the occasion this week to pay tribute to a man whose name has

appeared

on this page for 27 years, and who during that time made an incalculable

contribution to what was printed in the pages of TIME—and thereby to U.S.

journalism. After serving as reporter, writer, senior editor, managing

editor

and editor of TIME, Roy Alexander last week, at 67, retired.


His eleven years as managing editor, the key editorial post on TIME, from

1949


to 1960, add up to the longest period anyone has held that demanding

position.

He brought to the job an array of talents and interests that humble most

men.


His Latin is a bit rusty now, but he used to read the classics in that

language


and in Greek as well. He is a serious student of philosophy, theology and

history; he flew airplanes until a few years ago, and still drives sports

cars

in the manner of Jimmy Clark. He appreciates an efficient carburetor as much



as

a great performance at the opera. His essential commitment is to the pursuit

of

knowledge.


Roy Alexander was born in Omaha, graduated from St. Louis University, broke

into


journalism on the St. Louis Star, then was a reporter and assistant city

editor


on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. A cover-to-cover reader of TIME (usually in

the


bathtub, he once recalled) since its launching in 1923, he came to work for

this


magazine in 1939 at a time when one of his many interests turned out to be

of

special value. A Stateside marine at the end of World War I, he had



maintained

an active interest in military affairs, particularly aviation. For 18 years

he

flew with the 110th Observation Squadron of the Missouri National Guard; he



was

mustered out, when he moved to New York, as a major and squadron commander.

His

experiences in military matters made him eminently fit to edit TIME'S WORLD



BATTLEFRONTS section in World War II. Some of the best and most

knowledgeable

writing about that war appeared there, and as a result, TIME became must

reading


from the beaches of Peleliu to the desks of the Pentagon.
As managing editor, Roy had a much-admired knack for quick decisions,

unimpeded

by any fear of making a mistake. He also had a great rapport and a mutual

confidence with the staff. Accepting cheers from all hands at a staff

farewell

party last week, he responded with characteristic warmth, modesty and

brevity.

"I think I realize now that I have meant something to all of you," he said.

"You

have all meant a great deal more to me."


As Roy ended his service to TIME — now to spend his time largely with his

wife,


seven children and 19 grandchildren — his longtime colleague, Editorial

Chairman


Henry R. Luce, paid him a tribute to which all of us subscribe: "We are all

in

debt to Roy Alexander for his outstanding performance. I salute him as a



grand

master of the great game of Who, What, When and Why. As managing editor, he

combined an innate sense of fair play with the clear courage of his own

convictions."


*Two brothers of Roy's made their own mark in journalism. Jack Alexander

wrote


for The New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post; the Rev. Calvert

Alexander,

S.J., was for 25 years editor of Jesuit Missions.
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++++Message 6235. . . . . . . . . . . . Re: Requirement for time sober for

people running meetings?

From: Tom Hickcox . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/17/2010 10:06:00 AM
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> From: James Blair

>(jblair at videotron.ca)

>

> In the early years people were not considered



> members until they had 90 days. Early membership

> surveys excluded the people with less than 90

> days.

>
Jim, these are pretty general assertions covering a wide area.


It is my impression that membership qualifications varied widely and

depended entirely on the group.


Can you back them up with citations and include the time frame they were

valid?
Thanks,


Tommy H in Baton Rouge
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++++Message 6236. . . . . . . . . . . . Re: Requirement for time sober for

people running meetings?

From: Michael Oates . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/16/2010 10:28:00 PM
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My home group encourages member with thirty days to run for meeting chair

when


we hold elections, those who get elected seem to stay sober longer than

those


who don't run. We still try to help others achieve sobriety rather than have

an

informative and good meeting.


Michael S. Oates

D.O.S. 09-23-1993


- - - -
From: Charlie C

(route20guy at yahoo.com)


In upstate NY the approach I have seen over the years is to expect that a

person have one year sober before chairing a meeting, or serving as

secretary

etc. It is a "rule" occasionally "bent," but is the common group "rule".


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++++Message 6237. . . . . . . . . . . . Re: Recovery rates: do you mean

Duffy''s Tavern?

From: J. Lobdell . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/16/2010 10:28:00 PM
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Duffy's Tavern? After the radio program?
- - - -
> From: ricktompkins@comcast.net

>

> Knickerbocker cost much less than Towns' rates, and Dr. Silkworth effected



a

> partnership with the AAs of NYC for their nonstop visits there.

>

> On a lighter note, in case you've ever heard of a place named "Dusty's



> Tavern" it refers to the name of the ward's Day Room.
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++++Message 6238. . . . . . . . . . . . Swedenborgian influences on Jung,

Kant, and William James

From: bbthumpthump . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/16/2010 11:26:00 PM
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William James's father, Henry James was a

Swedenborgian, which I'm sure influenced young

William James, and in turn Bill Wilson.
Carl Jung was also influenced by Swedenborg,

as were Kant, and of course Lois Wilson and

her family.
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++++Message 6239. . . . . . . . . . . . Re: Swedenborgian influences on

Jung, Kant, and William James

From: Glenn Chesnut . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/17/2010 3:07:00 PM
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The following article in a Jungian journal is useful for getting an idea of

what


Swedenborg's writings were about: his hearing angels speaking to him, his

speaking with the spirits of the dead, his having clairvoyant knowledge of

events many miles away at the very time when they were happening, and so on.

In

this article, we can also see the philosopher Kant rejecting Swedenborg's



insistence that we can communicate with spirits, but the psychiatrist Jung

eagerly reading Swedenborg's books to find out more.


This is the world in which Lois Wilson had been brought up, and the world in

which she taught Bill Wilson to live: Bill's frequent attempts to speak with

the

spirits of the dead -- in which he felt that he was often quite successful



--

did not seem odd at all to a Swedenborgian. And Bill's White Light

experience at

Towns Hospital c. Dec 12, 1934 would again have seemed perfectly

understandable

to a Swedenborgian.


The important thing is to get rid of the idea that we can make sense of Bill

Wilson and the God of the Big Book in terms of modern Protestant

Fundamentalist

cults and televangelists. I am not trying to speak against those religious

groups, simply attempting to make the point that they do not help us at all

in

understanding Bill Wilson or early AA. That was not at all the world that



Lois

and Bill Wilson lived in.


To put it crudely, for Lois and Bill (at least when Bill was sober), you did

not


gain salvation by getting down on your knees and accepting Jesus Christ as

your


Lord and Savior (there is nothing in the first 164 pages of the Big Book

about


that) -- you gained salvation via visions of White Light, experiences of the

Transcendentalist Over-Soul in the wonders of the starry heavens overhead,

and

Swedenborgian conversations with angels who were simply the spirits of human



beings who had once lived upon this earth.
I'm not trying to attack conservative Protestants here, nor (in particular)

am I


trying to suggest that we should hold seances at A.A. meetings where we

attempt


to converse with the spirits of the dead! I'm just attempting to give an

accurate picture of the actual religious beliefs which Lois and Bill Wilson

had.
And maybe help us all to better understand that there are "a variety of

religious experiences" which A.A. members are allowed to draw on, and that

we

shouldn't get into the business of saying that one religious approach and



one

alone is the ONLY correct way of practicing "real" oldtime A.A.


But anyway, here's the article:
- - - -
Eugene Taylor, "Jung on Swedenborg, Redivivus," Jung History: A Semi-Annual

Publication of the Philemon Foundation, Volume 2, Issue 2. Philemon

Foundation,

119 Coulter Avenue, Suite 202, Ardmore, Pennsylvania, 19003 USA


https://philemonfoundation.org/newsletter/volume_2_issue_2/jung_on_swedenbor

g
[In his autobiography] Memories, Dreams, Reflections, the Swiss psychiatrist

Carl Gustav Jung recounted that his turn toward psychiatry while in medical

school was accompanied by voracious reading in the literature on psychic

phenomena. In particular, he was drawn to Kant's Dreams of a Spirit Seer and

the


writing of various eighteenth and nineteenth century authors, such as

Passavant,

Du Prel, Eschenmayer, Görres, Kerner, and, he said, Emanuel Swedenborg.
For man in his essence is a spirit, and together with spirits as to his

interiors, wherefore he whose interiors are open to the Lord can speak with

them. -- Emmanuel Swedenborg, Earths in the Universe
.... But at that moment in medical school what psychiatry lacked, Jung

thought,


was a dynamic language of interior experience. He was, first of all,

intrigued

at the time, he said, by Kant's Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, first published in

1766, four years before Kant's own inaugural dissertation.2 Kant made a

radical

separation between the senses and the understanding and then debunked



communication with spirit entities. Sense impressions are all that we can

know,


even though they are only impressions of outward things. The interior life

of

the ego we cannot know, Kant said, even though this is all that is actually



real. He stated the outlines of his philosophy and then attacked the

reigning


metaphysicians of the time, such as Leibniz and Wolff, by focusing on one

particular case, that of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), eighteenth

century

scientist, philosopher, and interpreter of the Christian religious



experience.
Swedenborg had spent the first half of his life mastering all the known

sciences


of his day. Eventually, he would write the first Swedish algebra, introduce

the


calculus to his countrymen, make major modifications on the Swedish hot air

stove, design a flying machine, and anticipate both the nebular hypothesis

and

the calculation of longitude and latitude. He also studied with the great



anatomist Boerhaave, learned lens grinding, made his own microscope, and

assembled a physiological encyclopedia, in which he wrote on cerebral

circulation, and identified the Thebecian veins in the heart.
By the time Swedenborg was forty, he had written numerous books on

scientific

subjects and been elected a member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. In

his


own personal quest, however, he had begun in mineralogy, geology,

mathematics,

and astronomy, and then proceeded to anatomy and physiology, before turning

his


attention to sensory and rational psychology, all in search of the soul.

When he


reached the limits of rational consciousness, he turned within and began an

examination of his own interior states. In this, he combined techniques of

intensive concentration and breath control with a primitive form of dream

interpretation.


The effect became evident in 1744, when he claimed he experienced an opening

of

the internal spiritual sense, and God spoke to him through the angels,



saying

that He would dictate to Swedenborg the true internal meaning of the books

of

the Bible. Swedenborg began immediately to work on this dispensation and set



out

to write what came to be known as the Arcana Colestia, or Heavenly

Doctrines. It

took him a dozen volumes of his own writing just to cover the first two

books of

the Bible. The project came to an abrupt halt in 1757, however, when

Swedenborg

had another vision, this time of a totally transformed Christianity, in

which

there was a falling away of the denominations and the arising of the Lord's



New

Church, as described by John in Revelations, which would come upon earth.


For the rest of his life, Swedenborg wrote about the new dispensation,

publishing more than thirty volumes. His works were studied throughout

Europe

and had a particularly strong influence on the course of French and German



Freemasonry, and occult groups among the intelligentsia variously involved

in

mesmerism, esoteric Christianity, Gnosticism, and the Kaballah.3 On his



death,

however, instead of a transformed Christianity, a new Christian denomination

called The Church of the New Jerusalem sprang up, with principal centers in

London, Philadelphia, and Boston. To this day the ecclesiastical history of

the

New Church places them as a small, conservative Christian denomination with



regular church parishes, weekly Sunday services, ordained ministers, and

study


of the King James version of the Bible .... The transcendentalists read

Swedenborg avidly, as did the brothers Henry and William James ....

Paralleling

these developments, Swedenborg's ideas permeated the nineteenth century

American

scene and became closely allied with spiritualism and mental healing through

the

works of such men as Thomas Lake Harris, the utopian socialist, and Andrew



Jackson Davis, the clairvoyant healer.
In any event, during his own later lifetime, after retiring from Parliament,

and


from service to the King of Sweden, under whom he had served as the Royal

Assessor of Mines, Swedenborg contented himself with gardening and writing

about

the New Jerusalem. As a member of the Swedish aristocracy, he had numerous



encounters with the Royal family and their associates. On several occasions,

it

had become known that he alleged he could speak with spirits of the dead,



and

was called upon by a friend of the Queen to locate lost articles of

significant

value. While he himself tried to keep out of the limelight, Swedenborg drew

national attention to himself when Stockholm broke out in a great fire.

Swedenborg was 200 miles away at the time, but reported on the exact details

of

the fire nonetheless to residents of Goteborg, with whom he was staying.



When

word came two days later corroborating the details, he was briefly

investigated

as somehow being involved in setting the fire. His exoneration, however,

caused

unwanted notoriety for his alleged powers.


Eventually, Kant heard these stories and wrote to Swedenborg, but Swedenborg

was


too absorbed to answer his letters. Eventually, Kant sent a messenger, who

spoke


with Swedenborg and interviewed others. When asked why he did not answer

Kant's


letter, Swedenborg announced he would answer him in his next book. But when

his


next book came out, however, there was no mention of Kant. We can only

imagine


Kant's fury, half Scottish and half German, which might account for the

harshness of his criticisms of Swedenborg in Dreams of a Spirit Seer ....

Kant,

in fact, devotes an entire section in Dreams of a Spirit Seer to debunking



Swedenborg's philosophy. In particular, he takes Swedenborg to task for his

absurd descriptions of heaven and hell, the planets and their inhabitants,

and

the fantastic impossibility of communication with angels. The angels,



Swedenborg

believed, were the souls of departed human beings once alive, who live in

Heaven

in the form of their old bodies, and consociate with those whom they have



most

loved on earth but who now dwell in heavenly societies, the sum total of

which

was the Grand Man.


In a previous report, it was stated that, while we know Jung read

Swedenborg's

works at around the same time he was reading these other authors, we also

had no


idea which ones.5 Now, due to the investigations of Sonu Shamdasani, we have

a

list of the books on Swedenborg that Jung, in the middle of his medical



training, checked out of the Basel Library during 1898.6
.... The first work Jung checked out was The Arcana Coelestia, Swedenborg's

multivolume compendium giving the true internal spiritual meaning of the

first

two books of the Bible and the first major work of Swedenborg's visionary



era

after the original revelations of 1744. The importance of the Arcana is

that,

referring to the opening of the interior spiritual sense, Swedenborg



maintains

that the images of the Bible must be read symbolically and metaphorically

according to the level of spiritual self-actualization of the person. The

Bible


is fundamentally a map indicating the stages of spiritual consciousness one

must


go through to reach the final stage of regeneration. One sees, however, into

one's own interiors to the level of one's ability. To the literalist, for

instance, God created earth and man and woman in seven days. For Swedenborg,

each day of creation is the expression of a different stage of consciousness

that must be mastered in the process of self-realization. The crucifixion of

Jesus and his resurrection is the death of the personal, self-centered ego

and

the arising of the spiritual dimension of personality, expressed as the



purification of the soul, which is our link to the Divine while alive and to

heaven upon our death. Revelation is not the end of the physical world, but


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