The Story of the Basic Text

It is now February 2011. Our Fellowship has expanded to the point of contraction. Somewhere in the middle of this book it says, "From that point forward, we oriented people going inside the circle and inside the circle they wrote your Basic Text." There can be no more important point than this. With our hippie love for people and other factors like my education and early learning in the Theosophy Society, it made perfect sense to me to serve as the Chairman of the World Service Conference Literature Sub-Committee by praying to be used as an instrument to set the stage for NA members from all over to come together and write the Basic Text. Later I realized most of the good folks in Los Angeles worked in the studio system there and writing for free was an act of insanity! Further, the people with long clean time were members of another fellowship and they had their book. By praying, being faithful and carrying out our mission, we destroyed the idea it could not be done and destruction, even in a good cause, is upsetting to people. Many were nice enough to my face but many were jealous or pigeon holed me as a fool. Without the full story coming out, they had no real way of knowing. By writing the story down while I could  still remember it all, I felt like I was off the hook and that whether people knew it or not, the story was available and would go on to honor the miracle makers who set aside all differences and plunged in to write from scratch at their own expense with no outside help a book that sold one million copies in the first seven years of publication. No one knows how many people it has helped in some way since then. 

The first notion I had was that world services should back me for six months so I could take off from my business and visit with the writers of the Basic Text by phone and in person to bring their input into the book. I was re-buffed and told by the World Service Office, the World Service Conference and the World Service Board of Trustees to get my own publisher, that the could not entertain such a project for a good ten years. I immediately had copies printed and sold them to NA members from then on. The pittance I received in this way helped me survive when computer generated lettering replaced sign painting which had been my business. Today I am retired and realize I was very sick from the 1990's on with sleep apnea which was slowly killing me. I was not diagnosed until 1999 and have been a breather every night since. After two years my short term memory came back. I still do NA all day long and will a day at a time for the rest of my life. I know of nothing as grand and terrific as seeing helpless addicts find recovery and begin to grow spiritually. 

In my youth, we were beatniks and then hippies. Beatniks were artists, writers and musicians and growing up with them enhanced my life. A beatnik lady and I were talking one day while she was washing dishes. She said, "Well, Bo, if you don't set higher standards for yourself, you'd be better off being normal." What a line. Anyway, my lust for God was ignited and it made my using different enough for me to survive and stagger out from active addiction with no jail and no hospital. I remained emotionally and socially crippled in a way until I found NA in July of 1974. Among members of another program, I was told I could get a new life by working the 12 Steps. It sounded good to me, so I have it a try.  A new meeting of NA was held in the cafeteria of a local treatment center and reluctantly, I went just to see what it would be like. I attended that meeting every Friday night for five years. One white chip. After three years, the members of that other program began to ask me what I had done for 'my people?' "What do you mean," I asked. We had newcomers up the kazoo and couldn't get solid answers from the World Service Office, so in 1977 I went to California to find out who was working on our book so we could help them from Atlanta. It is time for you to read the story now. Thank you and God Bless! - Bo S. 

Story of the Basic Text - Title and Introduction

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