Right at the end of the Second Step comes the secret of Program -- the "restoration to sanity."

The words sane and sanity have two meanings in the AA Big Book. In general, they refer to an attitude towards alcohol (or to the source of our presenting addiction). "By this time sanity will have returned," says the Big Book about Step 10 -- if confronted with alcohol, "we recoil as from a hot flame." In the Fourth and Fifth Steps we are urged to frame "sane and sensible" sex lives for ourselves.

But the Second Step is talking about much more than this. It is talking about a restoration -- a return to some archetypal state of One-ness which in some sense we once knew. If this seems to be a mystical concept to us, it also has a very practical side. For this restoration does not occur in the first nine Steps, but in the last three. It is a life of good conduct, of constant prayer and meditation, of ongoing practice of these principles in all our affairs, which is the gateway to that restoration.

And that idea of restoration is something that many of the world's religions have in common -- the nirvana of Buddhism, the escape from the Wheel of existence in Hinduism, and perhaps most notably in Christianity. Even the heedless, agnostic flower-power 1970's sang of it:

We are stardust, we are golden,
And we've got to get ourselves back to the Garden.