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From: [email protected]
Category: Category 1
Date: 12 Jul 1999
Time: 17:31:25
Remote Name: ip22.atlanta15.ga.pub-ip.psi.net
Our NA service structure predicated on active, informed and involved membership. There are assumptions having to do with America and the rich variety of freedoms we enjoy that are imbedded in the way NA developed in the seventies and eighties. Democracy, the involvement of individuals with the system that alternately controls them and needs their active support, has been a guiding light to us. It has allowed individuals to feel secure in their support because the system is totally dependent on them. So, it makes a equitable exchange all around. We attend NA, we support NA, we create and enlarge the program along lines that fit well with what has gone before and at any point the NA system depends on us. This seems simple and straightforward. Perhaps one would wonder why such basic building blocks would be listed or considered important more than natural assumptions. Complications come in when competiveness between paid workers and volunteers sets in as a result of book sales. The NA World Service Office was set up before we understood what would happen if we had our primary service center change into our publisher. Before long, book sales are the index to guage the health of the organization and the complex feelings and emotions of members are ruled expendible or at least too volitatle to be taken seriously. Oposition to the business managers were treated as pariahs who breached the NA faith by oposing business matters. Talk of Traditions and structural propriety were deemed subtrafuges for intrigue and power struggle. Many, many fine members withdrew from the structure in dismay and remain as witnesses to this day. Their desire to help was given no outlet and they would not attack our system at any rate. Time, faith and the desire to help would endure. Still, a time must come when all things are called into account.
The mind is like a lens, it takes health and the ability to see clearly and focus on objects in view to begin to understand and interpret accurately what is seen into useful patterns and information. Many of the matters presented to the Fellowship in the past fifteen years were not adequately presented and polling ranged from extreme, perhaps obscuring, attention to detail to misdirection and disembling facts to sway votes. Members following closely the emergence of Fellowship group conscience were horrified to discover these dsyfunctions within our system. Only over time did it come out that NA really is a spiritual Fellowship and that no machinations could distort or take precedence over that fact. The Office can be no more than an office and the Fellowship is the great repository of spiritual experience and wisdom. Only the spiritual nature of NA saves us from the tyranny of business mechanics. Our office workers are fine people but they are not priests. NA is not a religion where service representatives are the elite and the members mere peasants. We have a group conscience because we are highly conscious and because we want to help things get better. We care what happens in NA. Our lives and the lives of those we care for depend very much on how things go.