Many people hold the strange belief that becoming more spiritual means life will soften, that challenges will fade and everything will become light and effortless. In truth, the opposite often occurs. The more conscious you become, the more challenges arise, not as punishment, but because you are now capable of meeting them. Growth demands strength, and strength invites trial.

One of the great surprises of awakening is not that you float through life in perpetual bliss, but that it becomes almost impossible to fall in love as you once did. The swooning raptures, the feverish anticipation, the little dramas and sentimental spirals begin to feel oddly unconvincing. This does not mean you have lost the capacity to love. Quite the opposite. Love becomes richer, deeper, quieter. Yet the old game of projection and pursuit no longer works. You cannot unsee what you have seen.

You come to recognize that much of what passes for romance is simply two hungry selves arranging a mutual soothing of their emptiness. And once you notice the trick, it is difficult to be enchanted by it again. So there you stand, alive and aware, filled with wonder, and yet strangely incapable of falling in love in the way the world insists you should. What we commonly call “falling in love” is, in truth, a subtle hypnosis. You meet someone, and the mind begins to weave, like a spider spinning threads of memory, desire, and fantasy, until you are no longer relating to the person before you, but to a tapestry of your own imagination. And intoxicated by that creation, you say, I am in love.

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Skeleton Woman

Long ago, in the icy lands of the far North, there lived a girl whose father was a fisherman of terrible temper.
One day, during a violent outburst of rage, he dragged his daughter to the cliff’s edge and threw her into the freezing sea.

She sank beneath the waves.

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The Master loved the solemn silence of the morning—the moment of blessing before the Earth awakens. In those hours, the air is purest, refreshed and cool from the touch of the starry peace. The Master never missed the hours that belong to the great life, never missed the first ray of the rising Sun. During a morning walk, in conversation, the Master said:

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