Hello. My name is Tom P., Jr., and I am a recovered alcohol addict, sex addict, and caffeine addict. I got off the booze in 1964 — clean from the dirty sex in 1969 — and (finally!) off the caffeine in 1980. For these recoveries, I am wholly indebted to All Addicts Anonymous.  As everybody does in AAA, I have been trying to help others, and as part of that effort I have written several books — the AAA God Book — the AAA Health Book — and the AAA Politics Book. (The book you have in your hands [which serves as the source for this excerpt] is the God Book.)

Why pick on God, health, and politics to write books about?  Because in All Addicts Anonymous, the winners all go through the same experiences — they establish a new and radically practical relationship with Almighty God — they establish a new and radically practical relationship with health and healing — and they establish a new and radically practical understanding of their duty as citizens of their country and of the world.

In writing these books, I, Tom P., Jr., have had some assistance from my father, Tom P., Sr., who got into AAA in 1941. In All Addicts Anonymous they call that kind of fellow an old-timer.

Everybody knows that — generally speaking — there are two ways of life open to human persons: (1) the ego trip, and (2) the God trip. The All Addicts Anonymous Program is based on the Twelve Steps, which are a God trip from beginning to end {….}

It needs saying at the outset that in the pursuit of the way to God, books can be well used or abused. Reading is helpful and in most cases necessary, but it is no substitute for doing the work of the Way (or, as we say in All Addicts Anonymous, for working the Program) in obedience to the will of God. This is a serious matter. Hear what a great master of the spiritual life (DE Caussade*1) says: “The divine influence alone can sanctify us. . . . Without it reading only darkens the mind. . . . All reading not intended for us by God is dangerous. It is by doing the will of God and obeying his holy inspirations that we obtain grace, and this grace works in our hearts, through our reading or any other employment. Apart from God, reading is empty and vain and, being deprived for us of the life-giving power of the action of God, only succeeds in emptying the heart by the very fullness it gives to the mind. This divine will, working in the soul of a simple ignorant girl by means of sufferings and actions of a very ordinary nature, produces a state of supernatural life without the mind being filled with self-exalting ideas; whereas the proud man who studies spiritual books merely out of curiosity receives no more than the dead letter into his mind, and, the will of God having no connection with his reading, his heart becomes ever harder and more withered.”

All that having been said, it needs to be quickly added that books have always played a major, and indispensable role in helping people in the Twelve Step fellowships grasp and develop the spiritual part of the Program. When Bill Wilson had the overwhelming God experience that freed him from alcoholic addiction and led to the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, he did not at first know whether what had happened to him was for real. He feared it might be an illusion symptomatic of the advancing alcoholic psychosis his doctors had been warning him about. To put his mind at ease, his friend Ebby Thatcher brought to the hospital where Bill was detoxing two books with full descriptions of a wide range of God-illuminations, The Little Flowers of St. Francis *2 and William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience *3. Reading those books greatly reassured Bill — and was the beginning of his lifelong study of the science of spiritual awakening.

When Bill and AA’s other co-founder, Dr. Bob Smith, were developing their Twelve Step Program for sobering up drunks, they tirelessly studied and discussed related passages from the Bible, especially from the Epistle of James. A certain class of key books has always been known to be crucial to growth in understanding and practicing the spiritual part of the Twelve Step way of life. These are the kinds of books presented in this volume [ and extracted for the Gunlap70 readers].

In almost all instances we open with a brief sketch of each author’s life, and how they came to write their key books. Coming at the book through the author’s story positions the message almost like an All Addicts Anonymous beginners meeting, where speakers tell what they used to be like, what happened when they contacted the Program, and what they are like now as a result.

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The ellipsis, {….} indicates the removal of text that was specific to the environment in which the original printed catalog was developed and are no longer reasonably applicable.

*1 Father J. P. DE Caussade, S.J., Self-Abandonment To Divine Providence

*2 The Little Flowers of St. Francis, The Little Flowers of Saint Francis (Dover Thrift Editions)

*3 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, The Varieties of Religious Experience