"In my childhood, I expected that church was the place where I would learn about the deep mysteries of existence and have some truly eye-opening, otherworldly experiences. After all, church certainly looked more mystical than my home, my school, or the shopping mall. But the older I got, the more boring and stultified church came to seem. By the time I quit going, in my early teens, I was convinced that religion was little more than hypocrisy and lingering superstition.
Still, I always held on to a kind of wistful feeling that there must have been something wonderful hidden away in the recesses of my childhood church — some inner secrets that I had never discovered and that no one in charge had bothered to show me...
An acute paradox confronts anyone who dips into today’s spiritual literature. Currently it is de rigueur to stuff books with elaborate promises about how a spiritual path will lead you to enlightenment while showing you how to get along with your family, enhance your sexual performance, and become a hard-charging executive to boot. Yet if we turn to much of the traditional literature, we find it devoid of such promises. It insists on the opposite:
The spiritual way demands great personal sacrifices and promises no visible rewards."
~ Richard Smoley is an author and philosopher focusing on the world’s mystical and esoteric teachings, particularly those of Western civilization.
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