October 1, 2025
Dear Hossein,
Thank you for your latest letter. It pleases me that you are well and more involved than ever with your Congress 60 activities and the Fall demands of your farm. I am doing well also and have a heart procedure scheduled next week that will hopefully reduce some of the fatigue I have experienced in past months.
My congratulations to the travelers (mosafers) and companions (hamsafers) who received their orange DST scarves this past week. Images from those events are always a source of great inspiration and motivation for me to continue our work together. What you and I are doing all boils down to the transformation that can occur in the lives of those men and women.
The invitations for you to speak seem to be accelerating each month. It is good that you are selecting the most potentially influential of these invitations. Your ability to do these presentations virtually makes me think of how much time in my life I could have saved due to all the travel required of me during the years I was making such presentations.
I’m glad you share my view on the positive role of social contagion in the recovery process. The Persian poem about the clay and the flower you shared with me captures this perfectly. I think there is a contagious recovery spirit within Congress ۶۰ that one can “catch”—get caught up in before one chooses it in the same way some of us got caught up in our addictions without conscious forethought. I do worry sometimes that people will see the power of Congress ۶۰ only in the X Theory and DST method while missing the power of the Congress ۶۰ milieu and all the recovery support it contains.
People often think of recovery as beginning with the cessation of drug use, but I think it actually begins in the late stages of addiction in which there is a process of recovery incubation or priming. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this stage, its components, and how that stage could be accelerated to shorten the total span of time addicted. As you know, there are a lot of things that can bring someone to treatment other than a desire for recovery. I think the contagious recovery spirit can infect such people and propel them into recovery in spite of their lack of initial recovery motivation. I think medication can set the stage for that, but the milieu and modeling are what will sustain the changes that will make long-term recovery possible.
Please convey my warmest regards and best wishes to your family and to all members of Congress 60.
Friends and Brothers Forever,
Bill