From: Rdeneve670@...
(Rdeneve670 at cs.com)

My name is Linda and I am an alcoholic, by the
Grace of God sober 14 years.

I am trying to find where the pink cloud is
referenced, probably before the printing of the
big book, would it be? Because it is just in
little quote marks in the Big Book, as though
they were referencing some other material.

What does it mean? What is 'the pink seven'
and is that still the same topic or a different
one?

- - -

From the moderator:

I checked in the two online concordances to the
Big Book which I use:

http://www.royy.com/concord.html
http://www.anonpress.org/bbindex/

The only place I could find the word pink used
is in the famous and well known passage on
p. 304 in the fourth edition of the Big Book
(p. 348 in the third edition), in the story
"Physician Heal Thyself!"

The author was trying to get sober by reading
and studying books ALONE, partly because he was
a highly educated surgeon and did not think
that the ordinary everyday people at the AA
meetings (the butchers and bakers and carpenters)
had anything to teach him. But they were
spiritual books that he was reading, he said
to himself, so that meant that he was working
the program. And HE was an intellectual, and
MUCH smarter than all these ordinary people
in the program.

(Lord help us, we ALL think we're smarter than
everybody else in the meeting room when we
first come in!)

He said that, for a while, "I was way up on a
pink cloud which is known as Pink Seven," but
that he eventually started to feel miserable
again, and started yearning to go back out
and start drinking again in spite of all his
reading.

I don't see any quotation marks around the
phrase, so I'm not sure what you mean by that
part of your question. But I still think you're
talking about the same passage I'm looking at.
Maybe you saw it reprinted in an intergroup
bulletin where somebody put quotation marks
around it.

At any rate, the message in this story was that
the author didn't start getting a genuinely good
new life in the program until he started ALSO
paying attention to what the ordinary everyday
people at the meetings had to teach him about
leading a good life, and until he started actually
working the twelve steps, and putting what he
was learning into action in simple little everyday
changes in his behavior (such as the way he acted
about washing the dishes at home and that kind
of thing).

- - -

In American slang back then, when you said that
someone was "on a pink cloud," you meant that
the person was in a state of temporary artificial
euphoria. Being "on a pink cloud" meant that you
had turned off all of your critical faculties
and were temporarily living in this marvelous
fantasy world where nothing ever went wrong or
could go wrong.

If you went out on a date with some guy, and
came back feeling all romantic and starry eyed,
and convinced that you had found "Mr. Wonderful,"
one of your friends might laugh and say, "well,
you're on a pink cloud now, but wait and see
what the guy looks like after a month or two
of going out with him on a steady basis. Wait
and find out how much you end up seeing him
after football season starts in a couple of
weeks!"

Being "on a pink cloud" meant that you were
living in a dream world, as opposed to living
in the real, everyday world.

It is easy to work ourselves up into a temporary
"pink cloud" by reading spiritual books that
talk about loving all humanity, or "feeling one
with the all," or loving Jesus, or by standing
around reciting the responsibility pledge with
our eyes all starry. And there are people who
try to work the AA program by hyping themselves
up in that way, without doing a single thing to
change their basic character, or to change their
ways of actually behaving in everyday life.

CHANGED BY GRACE is the mark of true twelve step
spiritual progress. Real "life changing" as the
Oxford Group put it. We have to start working
on using the power of grace (freely given to us
for our use) to heal all of our character defects.

These are the character defects which make us
angry all the time, have us attacking other people
all the time and trying to bully other people
into doing things our way, criticizing everybody
else in the program and starting arguments all
the time, refusing to help out on washing dishes,
moving chairs and tables, shoveling snow, going
to the grocery store to get milk or a loaf of
bread. When we begin real spiritual growth, we
start to heal these character defects, and then we
start actually treating other people differently
in all phases of our ordinary everyday life.

I've seen people spend years trying to artificially
hype themselves up onto a pink cloud by reading
the Bible (or the Torah or the Koran), talking all
the time about Jesus (or Moses or Mohammed or
Buddha), or reciting the Four Absolutes with
pious looks on their faces. The message of this
story in the Big Book was that these things are
NOT good things to do, if the only reason why we
are doing them, is to artificially put ourselves
into a temporary "pink cloud" euphoria.

Or to put it all in five simple words,
"faith without works is dead."

- - -

In ancient and medieval spirituality, when someone
had a spiritual experience, it was believed that
the soul had been transported up to one of the seven
crystal spheres which they believed surrounded
the planet earth. Each of these seven crystal
spheres was called a "heaven."

So somebody who had had a really ecstatic spiritual
experience would say that "my soul was transported
up to the seventh heaven," this being the best
and most vivid kind of spiritual experience.

In this passage in the Big Book, the writer is
jokingly combining the two ideas and saying,
in effect, "I wasn't just up on a pink cloud,
I was up on the highest and most euphoric
kind of pink cloud: Pink Seven!!!!"

- - -

On the seven heavens, see for example the last
part of Dante's Divine Comedy, the part called
the Paradiso, where his soul climbs up level
by level until he has arrived at the seventh
heaven (presided over by St. Bernard, the great
medieval mystic), and he is granted a brief
overpowering vision of the divine Love and
Light which illumines and moves the entire
universe:

l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle

(the Love which moves the sun and all the
other stars)

But you see, Dante's vision is the right kind
of spiritual experience. That is because he paid
his dues first! He had first journeyed through
his own personal inner hell in the Inferno (the
first section of the Divine Comedy) and had
learned that, surprisingly enough, God did not
make any human soul stay in hell. All the souls
in hell are allowed to leave the moment that
they want to. The only requirement is that they
admit that they were wrong! As long as they keep
on giving alibis and excuses for their behavior,
and blaming it on other people, they will never
get out of hell.

And then Dante had some more dues that he had
to pay. In the middle part of the Divine Comedy,
he had to climb the mountain of Purgatory,
which he envisaged as a seven step recovery
program, based on healing the character defects
described by the Seven Deadly Sins.

(The Mountain of Purgatory means "the Cleansing
Mountain," from the Latin word purgo which
means to clean, cleanse, wash off, purify.)

Only after he had done the spiritual work which
was necessary in order to heal his Anger, Pride,
Envy, and so on, could he begin rising up through
the Seven Heavens and arrive at the kind of
authentic spiritual experience that he describes
at the end.

- - -

What the little story in the Big Book is doing,
is warning us that we can fool ourselves into
believing that spiritual experience is gained by
artificially hyping ourselves into "pious"
emotional states, and singing hymns about how much
we love Jesus (or Moses or Buddha or Mohammed),
and talking all the time about how spiritual
we are (in order to pridefully impress other
people). The most we can get that way is
artificial "pink cloud" spirituality.

It is easy to get on a pink cloud by going to
church for an hour on Sunday morning (or
synagogue or a Buddhist temple), where I can
get into an artificial emotional state, using
the stained glass windows and pious music.
But there are 168 hours in a week. It is in
the other 167 hours that I need to learn how
to start changing my behavior, where there
are no stained glass windows and no solemn
organ music playing in the background.

Twelve step meetings force us to learn how
to develop a spirituality which will work
when there are no stained glass windows and
no organ music and no chanting of beloved
religious texts going on in the background:
when the kids are screaming, the boss is
criticizing my work, and the other people
in the AA committee which is setting up the
picnic aren't acting like I want them to act!

And real spiritual experience can only be
gained by FIRST journeying down into the
hellish regions of our own minds and ferreting
out all the anger and selfishness and self pity
and fear, and taking responsibility for doing
something about these character defects, and
THEN by putting these new insights into action
by changing the way we live every aspect of
our daily lives.

When I first learn how to help out with washing
the dishes, when I first learn how to stop bullying
other people and starting up quarrels and arguments
all the time, when I learn how to stop attacking
other people and putting them down all the time,
when I learn how to start treating everyone around
me (without exception) with the kind of real human
respect with which I would wish to be treated,
then and only then will I become fit someday
(perhaps if God is willing) to ascend to the
seventh heaven and obtain the vision of the true
divine Light and Love which illumines and moves
the entire universe.

"Pink Seven" isn't real. That's me using my own
fantasies to create an artificial and temporary
illusion.

The numinous reality of the divine Light and Love
and Glory spreading through all the world IS real.
But I have to CHANGE ME to obtain that.

Glenn C. (South Bend, Indiana)

- - -

P.S. USING THE SEARCH FUNCTION ON THE MESSAGE BOARD

If you go the Message section of
the AAHistoryLovers at

http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/AAHistoryLovers/messages

there is a box at the top where you can search
through all the past messages for particular
words or phrases.

If you put quotation marks around a set of words,
it will search for those words in that order.

A lot of the standard questions have already been
asked in past years, so it can save a lot of time
if a search is done first, to see if the question
may already have been answered.

So I'm trying to encourage people to use the
search function, so they can get a quick answer
(when one is already available) instead of having
to wait around for several days.

In this case though, when I did a search for
"pink cloud" and "pink seven," the messages that
were posted gave part of the explanation, but
not all of it, so I'm filling in a few of the
missing gaps in my response to your question.




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