Hi jerry lynch

Thank you for your comment at Provoketive Magazine (http://provoketive.com). We’re creating a space of rich conversation about life, faith, justice and culture without judgment. Our desire is to provoke the reader’s imagination through conversation and open up spaces of dialogue, learning, and hope.  We want to invite you to come back soon and continue to participate in the conversation. 

Thank you,
Jonathan Brink
Provoketive Magazine

You posted the following comment:
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The sub-conscious in us all is the puppet-master: what we most often think of as choice, is an echoed command from below...righteously and unflinchingly followed.  Any motivation is an impurity. All motivations are so diluted and delusional that our grandest intention is no more than lurking vanity.

Yet this cycle can be broken--and that is the deeper purpose of the Twelve Step Path. To realize this purpose usually means slow torture, the steady and nearly unrelenting "necessary suffering" that comes with self-realization. There appears to be no "easier and softer way." A good 6th and 7th Step translates, usually, into the very worst time of our lives. 

Everything about life is left up in the air and the only thing that we know for sure is how badly we acted. All certainty about the sacred and profane is gone. All comforting support to faith and being is stripped away. The next moment becomes so entirely unknown and strange that we do not have the mind or will to venture a guess. The ground beneath our feet has given way to an unfathomable abyss. We hover, aloft in ambiguity and ambivalence, still only from unknowing. And "unknowing" is the home of the soul.

Many are discouraged from remaining in this place, the well-intentioned throwing ropes, deploying boats, coming in helicopters to take us from this obvious "bad place" to the safe shore of Reason, Tradition, and Principles. Evil seems to be underfoot and gaining yards, so why not desperate measures. A soul appears ready to be lost.  And it is, but not in the way assumed.

Unless intimately experienced, we tend to think it is “alcoholism raising its ugly head”; “the ego looking to take back control”; “faith assaulted”; “the failure to properly work this 'simple program.'" All lies...if we have truly reached the threshold point of fundamental transformation. That point is free-fall.

"Good is enemy of the best." 

We all tirelessly and always work for good, as one's perceptions dictates. It is in breaking this cycle of our estimation of doing “the next good or right thing” that salvation finally comes. 

Nothing that is truly new can be understood by a consciousness that looks to compare, measure, and weigh it by past experience, study, or text books. Give a TV to a caveman and it is firewood or a cutting tool, once broken. The incomprehension of this movement of the soul is similar.