The Substance-career, the Bottom, and the Miracle: Starve the Spider, surrender the will

pivotal · 8 Nov YDAU

• When: 8 November YDAU (same White Flag meeting)
• What: The disease-and-recovery arc rendered as the universal AA narrative: fun with the Substance → gradually less fun → need, Losses, Denial → the mirror at midnight where the Substance's smily-face mask comes off ("the Face In The Floor") → the cliff Boston AA calls your Bottom, where "you are in a cage and can see only bars in every direction" and have exactly two options (eliminate your own map for keeps, or make the blubbering 0200h. call). Then the improbable second discovery: it works. Nobody can say How (ask the Crocodiles and they smile and say "Just Fine"); you Hang In on Blind Faith born not of belief but of having no faith left in your own will — the will being "the web your Disease sits and spins in," and "The bitch of the thing is you have to want to": "You have to Starve The Spider: you have to surrender your will." This is the thread's canonical statement of the surrender-of-will node (echoed at events 13, 17, 22). Gately's banally-trite conversion dream literalizes the enforcement: AA's real Sergeant-at-Arms is the yellow-smily-faced angler waiting "Out There," trolling for anyone who drifts. This is the thread's core spiritual mechanism.