Those of us who are attempting to find a spiritual solution to our lives through working Steps 10, 11 and 12 typically love to read. We find books on spiritual issues, we read and enjoy them, and then we talk about them to our friends. We lend them to people, and sometimes we don't get them back; but that doesn't matter, because in a couple of years some new popular guru will arise and publish her book and we can read and enjoy it instead. Or perhaps we dig around the ancient texts of some Eastern religion and start quoting from those.

Some years ago, an Australian doctor published a strange book about "loving one's disease." Towards the back of the book was the most extraordinary section. The author suggested that we tend to do anything to avoid actually working to get well -- including reading books like his. If that was the case, he suggested, we might just as well take his book back to the bookstore. (It is not recorded what his publisher had to say about this recommendation not to buy the book!)

Interestingly, the original version of the AA Big Book manuscript contained this recommendation after the section on the Twelve Steps in Chapter 5:

If you are not convinced on these vital issues, you ought to re-read the book to this point or else throw it away ....

In both cases, the significant call is the call, not to read, but to act. We can read till we're dizzy, but we'll find no magic bullet in some spiritual work or other. The answer to our spiritual malaise doesn't lie in a book, but in the daily practice of Steps 10, 11 and 12. Texts full of ancient -- or modern -- wisdom can only tell us why certain simple actions work. They can never be a substitute for those simple actions.