ORIGINS

A RARE TELLING OF THE ORIGINS OF THE PROGRAM
BY BILL WILSON.

So much has been written about the history of A.A. and of it's amazing beginnings. The GRAPEVINE (the most popular of program publications) once published a wonderful correspondence between Bill W. and Carl G. Jung in which they shared stories of Roland H. This correspondence can also be found in a variety of books compiling the various letters written to and from C.G. Jung. Recently, while helping an elder get their files in order, I came across a collection of notes that appeared to be the hand written transcript of a Spiritual Healing Seminar in which Bill W. attended and was a guest speaker. Medical Professionals and Spiritual Leaders were apparently in attendance. The transcription is dated Thursday, March 25th, 1954. New York. The notes are incomplete, but the best parts are intact. I hope you enjoy the following transcription. Pass it on! - Pat N. (What follows is a RARE treat. The origins of the program in the words of Bill Wilson.)

Thursday, March 25th, 1954. New York.

Chairman: . . . At the beginning of this century we were told as students that the best thing you can do with a patient is to be sure you do nothing that interferes with his natural recovery. (Laughter) you probably know Voltaire's remarks about the art of medicine -- it consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease. (Laughter) One voice we have not heard and would like to hear is Bill Wilson's. Gerald Heard said that Alcoholics Anonymous was a church in itself. Bill Wilson is Co-Founder of Alcoholics Anonymous."

(Applause)

Bill Wilson: I know that the Doctor (the Chairman) said earlier in the session that he felt he was at one pole of this meeting and there were other people at another pole, and I must say that all we in A.A. are folks who feel right at home both in the realm of medicine and, broadly speaking, in the realm of religion because actually our salvation has depended upon a very happy and doubtless providential conspiracy of the two.

Cutting back a way, I might present to you a table which was set in the presence of our our ancient enemy, john Barleycorn, by our friends in the years before this movement had its inception. At the table were people like Carl Jung. There was William James who wrote "Varieties of religious Experience." There was a Lutheran minister who founded the movement called the Oxford group. And there was a doctor who, I think, history will surely account a medical saint who happened to be my doctor.

Let's see how this benign conspiracy of events commenced to set the table from which we drunks have since partaken. I suppose it was sometime in the 30's that a friend of mine, I didn't know him then, went to Carl Jung, and was treated a whole year for his alcoholism. he was a prominent business figure here in this country. He desperately wanted to get well, a necessity in these cases. Jung did his best.

At the end of the year, feeling rather reassured, feeling that the world's greatest resource had lavished on him, our friend left Dr. Jung only to return in a short time in utter despair and in utter drunkenness. So he said to the doctor, "Well, what is there left?" And that very great man said to him, "I must confess, Roland, that your case is of such a kind that I can't do anything about it. None of the resources that I command can expel this compulsion of yours to drink."

"Well," inquired my friend, "Is this the end of the line?" And the doctor said, "No. There is one more resource and that is a conversion experience. I know you are already a man of faith and of belief, but I am talking about a transforming experience."

"Well, " said my friend Roland, "Where do I find such a thing?"

Said the doctor, "those things just happen. the lightning strikes on some people; on others it doesn't. You can't say in advance that anybody is going to have one, but you had better expose yourself to whatever religious resource you can and try to find such a thing."

So my friend Roland found such a release for a while in the Oxford Group of that time under the ministry of Dr. Frank Buchman. It seemed that Roland had a friend in Vermont who was also a friend of mine. At his summer place in Vermont, Roland heard that this friend was in terrible shape; in fact he had just been brought before a judge at Bennington to be put away in an asylum.

Roland went to see him. My friend who I shall call Ebbie was paroled in Roland's care, and Ebbie was brought to New York and again exposed to the Oxford Group where Sam Shoemaker at Calvary Church was holding forth. Then my friend Ebbie, who was quickly but by no means permanently released of his malady, thought of me.

Well, by this time, which was the fall of 1934, I had come to the end of the line. Every resource that I knew had been used. In the summer before Mrs. Wilson, Lois, whom some of you know, was told by the doctor in a drying out place in New York that in his judgment I was like nearly all others who passed his way. The compulsion to drink was just way beyond control. She asked what that meant. She received from him about the same news that Roland had got from Dr. Jung, that there was no medical or psychiatric resource capable of doing the job.

"What does that mean?" Lois inquired. "It means you have to lock him up or he will go mad and die." Such was the sentence pronounced on me in the summer of 1934. Fear kept me sober a little while, but not for long, and by November I was at it again in a big way.

At this juncture my friend Ebbie, second in line of decent from Dr. Jung, and once in line of decent from the Oxford Group, visited me at our house in Brooklyn. The telephone rang one day. I hadn't seen him for years. I had never known him to be in New York sober. I was half drunk.

he said, "Well, can I come over?"  I said, "Sure." I thought of talking about the good old days because, you see, the alcoholic doesn't like to live any place but in the past. So he came in the door, and I sensed, even through my haze, that something had happened to him. I couldn't put my finger on it.

He came to the kitchen table. I pushed over a full tumbler of gin; for that was my style of doing it then. To my surprise he said, "No, thanks." I said, "Are you on the wagon, Ebbie?"

He said, "No, I am just not drinking today."

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