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Old 10-25-2013, 04:39 PM
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nandm
Life the gift of recovery!
 
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Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Home is where the heart is
Posts: 7,061
I have attended Big Book studies on and off for the past 12 years and to be honest the ones I found most useful were the ones where there was actual discussion about the passages rather than blind agreement. Far too often the passages are not delved into any further than a first glance when there is so much more that can be found when the passages are put in context, background is added, how they inter-relate with other passages in the Big Book is studied, how they relate to a person's sobriety today is shared, etc...

To me the whole point of a Big Book study is to broaden and deepen the reader's understanding of the simple yet profound spiritual concepts described in the Big Book. Even after 12 years of sobriety and a lot of Big Book meetings and a lot of personal Big Book study I still find so much that I learn every time I pick up the Big Book. Even this year I found a passage that I finally realized I had been understanding entirely wrong for the past 12 years and it was enlightening to finally understand the deeper meaning in the passage.

There are some good tools available to get a discussion going on passages in the Big Book. One that I really like and actually use on a regular basis to help me understand the Big Book better is called "The Annotated AA Handbook, A Companion to the Big Book" by Fank D. Basically it includes the entire text and personal stories from the 1st edition of the Big Book along with hundreds of explanatory paragraphs and thousands of cross-references. I found my copy on Amazon a few years ago.
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