The notion of there being a right thought or action (page 87, Alcoholics Anonymous) presupposes that there is one or more wrong thought or action. From this we conclude that there is one set of thoughts and actions (A) and another set (B), and these are pitted against each other. But how are we to discern one from another? What makes right right and wrong wrong? If both right and wrong proclaim themselves to be right (which is the case: wrong never says, ‘I am wrong’), the reports of A and B concerning themselves are poor witnesses. If we set out about judging A and B, without a measure (other than our own desire or immediate benefit), we are quite lost. There must therefore be a reference point, a preexisting and superior base against which A and B are measured. Since wrong is invariably a blight on something, the absence of something, the confounding of something, the failure to achieve something, the something, namely the right, must be the preexisting and superior base. Goodness, light, love, harmony, unity can exist without badness, darkness, lovelessness, disharmony, disunity. But the latter five cannot exist without the former five: they are states in which the former five are impaired, compromised, thrown into disarray. Evil is therefore a perversion of good, not an evenly pitted force. The preexisting and superior base is therefore the right, or, if you will, the Right.
The universality of the notion of right and wrong presupposes the necessary
existence of the right and therefore the Right. This does not and cannot emerge
from nature. Nature knows no right and wrong; it is morally indifferent. And
the purely human, material world does not teach right and wrong as a matter of
course. This world is full of advice, but advice based on purely moral grounds
is scant and often corrupted.
What is right or wrong does not emerge from self-interest or even the good
of the majority. The sense of right and wrong prevails even in spite of
self-interest or the good of the majority. One can act in self-interest or for
the good of the majority and yet be wracked by the awareness that what one is
doing is wrong; one can be lauded by the world and yet know that one is
behaving immorally. This sense is ineradicable. The desire for the right
presupposes that the right and the Right exist, in the same way that hunger
presupposes the existence of food.
To seek the right thought or action therefore means seeking the right as
opposed to the wrong, and the source of the right, the Right, from beyond
the physical and human worlds, which cannot be its origin. The Right can
and, of course does, shine through the physical and human worlds when
conditions (including the condition of the perceiver) so permit, but rainbows
and kindnesses where kindness is to the detriment of the kindly actor—kindness
that is not conditioned by nature or selfish instincts—are transient twitchings
of the curtain in the Upper Room. The Inhabitant of the upper room cannot be
seen directly, but something, Someone, is causing the
twitching.
The Right, not emerging from the material, the human world, is that which the human world (the one of the two domains where will and therefore choice operate) is constantly measured against, the pre-existing and superior base. We are in the examination hall, and the examination is in constant operation. There is no crib sheet up the sleeve. But there is a board showing at least the way to the answers; the examiner is constantly writing on that board, if we look up from our scripts. It is that writing on the board, the writing on the wall, the writing in the air, the array of voices from beyond that we are to hearken to in seeking the right thought of action, whose origin is the Right, the pre-existing force that self-evidently created the forum (the material world, the examination hall) and the examination (the constant multiple-choice testing represented by human life). The answers are available if we want them, enough (page 12, Alcoholics Anonymous).