Bo S. - HOME PAGE

6685 Bobby John Road Atlanta, Georgia 30349 - 404.312.5166

Anyone called a chief elder should not crave anything at all, for as soon as one craves anything one is plundered by outside objects. When you indulge in likes and desires, then an avaricious mind arises. When you like getting offerings, then thoughts of striving and contention arise. If you like obedient followers, the petty flatterers will join you. If you like to score victories, then there is a gigantic rift between yourself and others. If you like to exploit people, then voices of resentment will be heard.

When you get to the bottom of all this, it is not apart from one mind. If the mind is not aroused, myriad things spontaneously disappear. Nothing I have ever realized in my life goes beyond this. You should be diligent and set an example for future students. - engraved on stone at Nanning

http://behavioralhealthcentral.com/index.php/20100202190391/Special-Features/common-ground-emerges-in-the-methadone-vs-drug-free-recovery-debate.html

"The article on the link you sent exemplifies the repeated long historical misconception by non-addicts, and profiteering addicts, that addiction can be "treated" with drugs. These "professionals", promoted by their colleagues as "addiction experts" are in truth being compensated for their "work" in the "addiction field". The growing problem now in Narcotics Anonymous, and especially in our World Services, is the proliferation of recovering addicts being employed in and having ownership of businesses, including non-profit entities, that use addicts as their basis of monetary compensation. Addicts suffer when our NA literature is being compromised outside of group conscience to gain favor, and literature sales, to and from the treatment community. There exists clean addicts in NA who still have a basis of income in dope dealing under the guise of treatment and helping others. The 12th step is purely altruistic in the true sense if the word. The spiritual truth that the only solution for addicts is complete abstinence is simply the truth. However, this effort is being compromised in false statements to "help" addicts. The true purpose is to make money, to promote professional stature, and to feel powerful in NA services. Misconceptions of addiction are abundant involving the medical community, big pharmaceutical and government. But there is no substitute for the truth just as there is no substitute drug for drug addicts. The truth will set us free, as it did when we first heard the truth. We can't use and recover. Think about it." - Dale A.

Right on Dale - here's the things laid out in plain language: we come under the care of a physician who sincerely believes in what they are doing. Knowing nothing of the disease concept of addiction, the consider what may help us. Are we depressed? There is a drug for that. Are we too slow? There is a drug for that. Are we cloudy in our thinking? There is a drug for that. Are we hyper and agitated? There is a drug for that.

So, the chemical they prescribe for us does not take into account that we have good reason to be depressed. Our bodies are telling us to slow down, we are headed for disaster, but the drugs speed us up regardless of what the internal witness says. We need time to think about who we are and what we are doing - a drug can snap us out of it, without resolving any issues. Our internal witness is aware that something bad is coming our way and we respond by being jacked up and nervous, but the drugs will calm us down. And they get well compensated for 'helping' us! Oh, we have addiction problems? Guess what, "There's a drug for that." And we pay the bill with our lives.

A few fortunate addicts snapped out of it and started writing NA literature, but guess who took over our service system? Who could afford all the travel, convention and conference attendence? Guess who? People who sell and prescribe drugs and their institutions. They are called counselors and have good jobs in hospitals. When I was on the Board of Trustees, I noticed half of the Trustees drove swanky cars and worked in treatment. The other half ordered cheap omlletes and paid their own bills with jobs and self-employment. Guess who took over WSO and became NAWS? Bingo.

And now, we hear about how addicts in NA take a variety of drugs to speed themselves up, slow themselves down or 'clarify' their thinking. Is total abstinence a dated concept? And these paid employees make public announcements in our name. Is this why we do not lend the NA name to outside enterprises that have other purposes and agendas? - Bo S.

Obsession is losing control of our thinking - Compulsion is losing control of our actions.
Prayer is done with the left lobe. Meditation is right lobe. Recovery is holding still long enough to remember who we are and why we are here. Disease is rushing forward, knowing we are forgetting something. The great thing about NA is not that you believe in me, but that you learn to believe in yourself. - Bo S.

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

Researchers are seeing a troubling trend in deaths involving opioid analgesics – drugs like methadone, oxycodone, and fentanyl. At the National Center for Health Statistics in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Margaret Warner looked over national mortality data:

[Margaret Warner speaks] "The number of poisoning deaths from opioid analgesics nearly tripled in the period from 1999 to 2006. And this is quite a large increase – from about 4,000 deaths to about 13,800 deaths."

Warner’s data don’t explain why more people are dying – for instance, whether there was an increase in recreational use of these powerful prescription drugs. But the study found that in at least half the deaths, more than one drug was involved.

The report is in an NCHS Data Brief. - Learn more at hhs.gov. HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss. Last revised: November, 10 2009

If there is one lesson I have learned, it is that you can't change a corrupt system from the inside. It would be like making a rotten orange whole again. Change has gotta come from the outside. It is not destructive, it is constructive. All systems require maintenance. Where major changes have taken place, there has to come a time when the 'improvements' moved us up or down the scale. Like a tv shop: takes the cover off, assess the damage, fix the broken parts and plug it in to see if it works. Keep this up till repair is complete and call the customer to let them know they are ready to go again. The advertising blurb "change the structure from within" has been used to head off close scrutiny and fact finding and so maintain a status quo that makes our structure an extension of a corporate management system. The NAWS corporation control the organs of NA communication, NA finance, NA publishing, etc. Thought we weren't supposed to lend our name.

Change from within? Hah, that just preserves the status quo. A slave wonders what life would be without their chains. Their chains feed them, protect them and keep them safe. "God, what would we do without our chains!" say the slaves. Those advocating scrutiny and examination are called heretics and damned to the desert - until the changes come. Then the people say, "What took so long?" - Bo S.

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall, always.

    Thinking can produce altered states just like using. Because of the way human beings are hooked up to their bodies, the content and direction of our thoughts trigger body changes including drops of this and that from our endocrine system into our blood stream. Just by thinking about an unpleasant event or circumstance, we can set off moods ranging from tears to white hot anger. We can think ourselves into calm or crazy.
    We can hear a rumor and experience all the unpleasantness that would constitute a real occurrence. So-and-so is making advances on my intended marriage partner. Boom, we go of like an atomic bomb inside. And want to hit old So-and-so the next time we see them, although So-and-so was walking in the park when the alleged improper advance was rumored to occur.
    We can easily become the playthings of our moods in this way. The cure is to be more careful before we allow ourselves to credit what we hear or suspect before setting it on the shelf of real things in out minds. There is one more important and available way to offset this mood tyranny and insanity, it is called simply meditation. Because we are ruled by a vast social dynamic that is spread over our left lobe in a process called education and socialization, almost all people are controlled by their left lobe.
    This explains the extraordinary power of the NA 12 Steps. By carefully allowing a person to progress step by step, from admissions of powerlessness, to finding a higher power and then allowing that power to work miracles in their lives, escape velocity occurs and many step free of their addiction. Like any spiritual path it is not just a matter of finding the right hallway to go down - standing still and letting time slide us back to where we came from is just like a swimmer who stops swimming. That is why desire plays such a big role in recovery: each clean addict has to have enough pain in memory to keep working the steps. When we are clear of some of the obstacles, we are ready to step into a new world, a world beyond anything we have known before. For many years now, there has been little writing on experience with the last three steps. It has seemed progressive to say Steps Ten, Eleven and Twelve are the maintenance Steps but that is not enough. In NA today, we have enough members deep enough into the recovery process to pass along their findings to the rest of the Fellowship. It is amazing what we find. Life without using just keeps getting bigger in a process that never ends. We wake up one day to find itches we couldn't scratch have melted away. Old habit patterns just drop away when they have no place in our new lives anymore. We don't need a sword and shield to enter a grocery store!
    Meditation is the flip side of our minds and allows us to step out of our circumstance and spend real time in a timeless, wordless world where we stand a reasonable chance to calm down and regain that sense of self that ennobles and empowers our real self. Prayer is left lobe and meditation is right lobe.
    The first ten Steps of NA lead to regaining the power of meditation by restructuring our inner world and clearing away obstructions that prevent healthy and natural meditation. There is no wrong way to meditate. It’s ok to fall asleep. Take your time waking up. You will stop blindly rushing forward, trying to keep up for the sake of things you don’t care about. You will regain you equilibrium and recall what and who you really are. Staying centered will become important to you. The things that happen in life will have less power to knock you off balance. You will regain your inner voice and resume a fulfilled life living your destiny. Recovering this is the greatest blessing a person can have. It puts you on the road to your happy destiny. - Happy New Year to come, Bo S.

Think we are alone in the universe?
We have company! This stuff is astonishing!
http://www.theguardians.com/Microbiology/gm_mbm04.htm#rock

When I was a kid, I was into beatniks, poetry and folk music. But when I heard the name Pete Seeger, I cringed because the media had told me that Mr. Seeger was a communist. I had been taught to hate communists. So, I hated and feared communists. I am 64 and sometime in the last year or so I figured out I had been lied to growing up in the impressionable McCarthy era of the 1950's. Today, I am sorry about all this and glad to have lived to finally see the truth. That's the trouble with brainwashing. It makes people feel guilty for not knowing better. To any of Pete Seeger's friends and relatives, you can be proud of Pete's wonderful living testament to music, spirit and love of freedom. And, you can swim in the Hudson River without toilet tissue in your nose! - Bo Sewell

Watched the beautiful and courageous Yoko Lennon IMAGINE over New Year and a friend and I brainstormed the following ideas. Please feel free and encouraged to steal them and make them your own! Tom has some more stuff we'll put up later. Wouldn't it be nice to imagine we live in a free society that is self-correcting and unwilling to go along with murdering people, torture and bombing civilians?

Peace Industries
Note: it is happening - read TIME magazine closely.

"Yes, Bo, Peace Industry! We'll finally start to respect Peace Industry 
instead of respecting War Industry. Love, yoko" - May 14, 2010

Make peace profitable and war unprofitable. Make companies that contribute to war known and unpopular. Make Peace companies profitable and popular. You can change the world but only if you commit to coherent action favoring the things you desire. Feeling helpless only fuels the fire and enables the negative. Make the Peace Label sticker meaningful with your buying power to buy or not to buy. Peace tee shirt, memorabilia, artifacts, Somehow we have to set it up so that no one gains by shutting us up. Generalize, spread the idea out so that for the sake of common sense people will support and fall in line with what we are doing, finally being able to see more clearly and make purchase decisions that have positive, lasting effects.

Many folks are in touch with the replacement of nation state governments by multinational corporations. Now, think ahead - what is over corporations? Perhaps it is families. Make Peace Profitable stickers involves marketing strategies that select for spirited innovations like solar heating, space industry, and hydro cars rather than munitions, poisons for people and the machinery of war.

From Tom J. - Jacksonville, Florida:

Peace Industries will be established to provide vital information to consumers about the products they purchase or intend to purchase. Our main goal is to make the consumer aware of all products and manufactures that support war and suffering world wide. With ongoing investigations we will keep the public aware of the businesses that thrive on the death and destruction of human civilizations in any capacity. It is our intent to give every consumer the power to place personal embargos on the seemingly untouchable corporations that feed on human misery, thus allowing people everywhere to change the world with a simple choice, to save millions of people by simply reaching past one product on a shelf and picking up another. Imagine saving people by shopping in you local mall.

Once the public is made aware of the business’s that are supporting human destruction, it is our goal for them to support those business’s that are peaceful in their endeavors, thus creating a market for such peaceful business to grow. These "peaceful businesses" are to be considered allies and we will work closely with them to keep them in compliance of our definition of peaceful businesses. We will also promote them so that they have an opportunity to reap the benefits of not being involved in making money from human misery. Non compliant business’s will be given opportunity to comply with guide lines set up by Peace Industries with the hopes of changing the way commerce is conducted, thus allowing us to take a proactive approach to rehabilitating companies that thrive on human destruction.

We are a nation of individual consumers. With the creation of Peace Industries we can harness huge amounts of potential power that can be apply on a personal level by all that choose to get involved. Suddenly everyone who participates has the personal power to effect change and free people everywhere from exploitation, as well as the power to influence reform of the corporations that prey upon the weak and the poor all over the world. Imagine what we could do together by simply becoming aware of the power of our personal choice.

JUST FOUND OUT TODAY I AM RELATED TO HOUSTON SEWELL OF MONTGOMERY, AL 9.20.08
NOW WAYNE SAYS RELATION THROUGH THOMAS LIKELY BUT NOT CERTAIN. MICHAEL SAY HE FOUND THREE HOUSTONS - MORE IS BEING REVEALED! EITHER WAY, WHAT A TRIP! - BO

Family History
Levi Francis Sewell,
Confederate Ancestor and Gentleman - I advise anyone to check out their family history.

Anyone interested in changing the way addicts are subjected to arbitrary negation by laws and insurance companies needs to sign up for this organization. Carol McD. informed me about this group at the Hawaii World Convention and they really do a fantastic job. We learn to help those who are helping us. - Bo S.
www.facesandvoicesofrecovery.org

coming soon. Members in Raleigh, NC have digitized Greg Pierce files and correspondence made available on cd's. They will do mine and Page's in near future. These allow you to access WSC, WSO and WSB minutes, etc. It helps inform and give accurate understanding of what went on in the 70's, 80's and 90's. Hey, let's shut down world services for nine years and do an inventory! Wait, that's already been done. Oh well.

Stickers are fun and promote the attraction! Send me your suggestions and get free stickers if your idea is used. - Bo

"Dedicated to complete, creative, freedom . . ."
"There is nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer."

Something new! - Check out Sant Mat, audible life stream Sound Yoga
for those who want to go deeper with Meditation - surprising. - Bo S.
NEW STUFF COMING SOON IN SUMMER/FALL '09
Something new here. A place to care and share, the NA way.

NA Links	NA History	NA Way of Life Loving and Caring the the NA way - "a not so basic text for adults..."
NA Recovery	Bob Stone's *My Years with Narcotics Anonymous*	World War II
History of NA in Australia	History of NA in South Africa	NA History and Jimmy K Scott and Phil at San Diego 1991
Never Alone *Give yourself a break!*	NA Indonesia Part One	Recovery Stories
	Emptiness Essays by Dear Friends

Be sure to check out www.nawol.org and for the outstanding recovery information
- available for the first time in many cases.

This is the greatest clean addict picture book in the world. Also available through the author at addicts@gmail.com

ADDICT: out of the darkness and into the light
52 STORIES OF CLEAN ADDICTS - VERBATIM TRANSCRIPTS WITH FINE ART PHOTOS
by Chris Keeley
Display of ADDICT
Contains newspaper review and other commentaries on this important, one of a kind, breakthrough in writing about clean addicts. While NA is bound by the 12 Traditions, we as members are quite free to share about our recovery and clean addicts we know. If not, we are not free. We don't commercialize recovery, we step beyond boundaries that are only meant to protect the integrity of a spiritual program, not make recovery into a secret cult!

Written at a time when specific events, breakthroughs and details were beginning to fade from my memory, I felt I owed a debt of gratitude to those who wrote the Basic Text. It is their spirit and energy that needs to be respected and known. I am their servant and witness. The members allowed the best in their nature to come forward and take over, if only for a little while. And that is what we must each do on a daily basis for the best of ourselves to come forward, just a little bit at a time, and slowly take over our lives... You will never know the truth until you read this book. It may be the key to the future.

Order book
SOFT COVER NOW IN STOCK!

Lucid Phantasmagoria
by Bo Sewell
The first little book written about the private perceptions I don't expect others to understand. Of course, a few of them do and I can be grateful for those few. You never know until you try or you never try until you know.

43 PAGE - NEW MATERIAL

Clubhouse of the Rising Sun
SPECIAL EVICTION REPORT
Interesting reading if you are planning a clubhouse
where NA Meetings will be held.

Dixieland
Dedicated to my ancestor, twenty-one year old Levi who went
off to fight in a war he didn't start, for a country he loved.

Sewell Family History

Family Unit

Health Issues
Being clean doesn't exempt us from having health problems. Many IV addicts deveop liver disease.
Several of my friends have died from this but most are alive and doing well - because they got help in time.
LIVER

Another illness that affects me:
APNEA
I had an operation September 11, 2001 and it helps. But the CPAP (constant pressure to air passages) machine is my life line that helps me sleep! It is the low oxygen levels in our blood and the lack of REM sleep that do us in. - Bo

Lucid Phantasmagoria, na, nawol, wol, NA history, Grateful Dave, babyblue, sbt, Story of the Basic Text, Basic Text, In Loving Service, webart, murals, Beaux Art, Bo Sewell, Bo S., NA,