“In the city of your dreams you found nothing lacking except a noble person.”[1] In a city where you find all the beauties, pleasures, delights, and various adornments of nature, yet you didn’t find one intelligent person, it would have been better the other way around! That city is the human being. If it has a hundred thousand accomplishments but

If Adam and Eve had been able to take counsel with a wise guide, they might not have fallen, uttered their excuses and self-justifications, but Adam and Eve had to make this mistake and learn from it. They were alone, without spiritual elders.

The ego’s strategies attempt to avoid reality, but obviously there is a price to pay for denying reality. In the end, the ego will prove to be its own worst enemy. The harm the ego does, it does mostly to itself.

To acquire this kind of being is to become illuminated, to be connected to a greater Intelligence that will guide us step by step on the way. The developed soul, instead of living in fear and uncertainty, becomes more and more able to trust the unfolding of life.

Where have you dimmed the luster of your eye?

Assuming responsibility for ourselves will begin with wresting attention from trivialities and distractions, and reconnecting it with the soul.

To connect oneself to that charge requires a certain emptying of self: letting go of one’s preoccupations, agendas, and complexes. This rarely happens on one’s own. A spiritual community, a group of people who recognize a higher Source and who honor their own interdependence can become a vehicle for this higher energy and help. Through the rituals

This perception of the condition of humanity is not elitism. In this view there is no judging others as inferior and imagining oneself to be superior. That would be just another aspect of this state of sleep we are referring to. The presence of the soul is beyond such judging.

Having described the interrelationship of ego, soul, and Spirit,