June 1

June 1 – AM

Page 41-42, More About Alcoholism, Chapter 3

“As soon as I regained my ability to think, I went carefully over that evening in Washington.  Not only had I been off guard, I had made no fight whatever against the first drink.  This time I had not thought of the consequences at all.  I had commenced to drink as carelessly as though the cocktails were ginger ale.  I now remembered what my alcoholic friends had told me, how they prophesied that if I had an alcoholic mind, the time and place would come—I would drink again.  They had said that though I did raise a defense, it would one day give way before some trivial reason for having a drink.  Well, just that did happen and more, for what I had learned of alcoholism did not occur to me at all.  I knew from that moment that I had an alcoholic mind.  I saw that will power and self-knowledge would not help in those strange mental blank spots.  I had never been able to understand people who said that a problem had them hopelessly defeated.  I knew then.  It was a crushing blow.

June 1 – PM

Page 55, We Agnostics, Chapter 4

Actually we were fooling ourselves, for deep down in every man, woman, and child, is the fundamental idea of God.  It may be obscured by calamity, by pomp, by worship of other things, but in some form or other it is there.  For faith in a Power greater than ourselves, and miraculous demonstrations of that power in human lives, are facts as old as man himself.