Once I was trav­el­ling in a for­eign coun­try, and the people there offered me a fine tea, with honey to go with it. Or rather, arti­fi­cial honey… I had never heard of such a thing, so I asked: what might it be? It was yel­low­ish and runny, sweet and full of prom­ise to the taste, and yet one could sense that this was not real honey after all… Then it came out: they had boiled the yel­low flowers of the dan­deli­on in a thick sugar syrup – that was what made it yel­low­ish and sweet. Like the real thing, only it isn't.

In the spir­itu­al realm, cheap enlight­en­ment is the arti­fi­cial honey: it holds out the prom­ise of res­ults, it even seems sweet, attract­ive and easy to come by, or at least so it is said. Some advert­ise them­selves as hav­ing reduced the aeons that enlight­en­ment once took to eight seconds… Be it unto each accord­ing to his faith.

Valu­able things have their price – the makers of cop­ies and shoddy goods know this too, of course, and some­times rub­bish costs a great deal as well. So it is with intel­lec­tu­al val­ues: shoddy, mass-pro­duced advice often costs more than an ori­gin­al thought. The ori­gin­al has a smal­ler mar­ket any­way… it is junk that enjoys a seller's mar­ket, and tabloid-grade spir­itu­al­ity is what is truly pop­u­lar. But cheap enlight­en­ment is only an ersatz, an imit­a­tion, a stand-in.

Her­ac­litus asserts: ‘The soul of man is a dis­tant coun­try, inac­cess­ible and unex­plor­able.’ Now, to seek out a dis­tant region takes toil. It is not enough to read the Baedeker, not enough to gath­er a scrap or two of inform­a­tion – what is needed is real trav­el­ling and exper­i­en­cing. The ordin­ary man sees the world with ordin­ary eyes, and who today is will­ing to make a sac­ri­fice, even for the sake of his own spir­itu­al growth?

And let us not con­fuse the soul of man with the psy­cho­lo­gising so fash­ion­able these days. Such emo­tion­al fuss­ing is a psych­ic drug: some­thing seems to be hap­pen­ing, but in real­ity noth­ing hap­pens at all. What is more, it eas­ily leads to emo­tion­al para­lys­is. Rum­ma­ging in the psyche, pick­ing at the wounds of our men­tal self, is not the same as the spir­itu­al level, the soul-nature of man. Let us not mis­take our psych­ic self for our meta­phys­ic­al self! Excess­ive psy­cho­lo­gising often goes hand in hand with a crippled self-know­ledge and emo­tion­al inval­id­ism, and the rum­ma­ging can turn into a kind of psych­ic depend­ence. Such an inner alter­a­tion of con­scious­ness works just like psy­che­del­ic sub­stances – man believes he is mak­ing pro­gress, when in real­ity he stays where he is. The wrong road leads nowhere, but it lasts a very long time.

And yet: water flows down­ward, and man clam­bers upward… The sages of old say that by study of the scrip­tures, by sac­ri­fices, alms­giv­ing, pen­ance and fast­ing, man should strive to under­stand the ulti­mate essence. And if you are in trouble, two things help: pray­er and fast­ing. And if even these do not help, then only one thing helps: pray­er.

So does everything depend on my resolve alone? With that we would merely be pro­claim­ing the apo­theosis of human effort, and might eas­ily leave the mys­ter­i­ous work­ings of the uni­verse unex­plained. Effort, sac­ri­fice, striv­ing… these are not fash­ion­able words, and for that very reas­on they are worth try­ing, but that is not yet enough. This is what man can do, and if he per­severes he may reach his spir­itu­al goals, and two factors make this pos­sible: either it was in his book of fate, and so what is writ­ten for him comes about, or the bless­ing des­cends upon him that can over­ride not only the stun­ted human will but even fate itself. A sur­rendered soul and an almighty God – an invin­cible pair.

Then the say­ing holds true bey­ond all doubt: The starry sky is the limit! Cheap mes­sages are no help towards real res­ults. Know­ledge, asceti­cism, love – these lead into a subtler world of exist­ence and real­ity, from dis­trust to the realm of love. Back, to the stars.