I am passionate about what is possible for a human being, and I am totally committed to acting as an agent for human transformation and the transfiguration of the world. I have a facile mind and can be very articulate when speaking about the spiritual path; I strive for precision in what can be spoken, and I try for poetry to point to what cannot.

But there is a fundamental problem with being articulate… it can give the illusion that there is something to understand.

Dear Friends: There is nothing to understand.

“Understanding” is the booby prize of life. At the end of your life, you will have lived it fully, passionately, fearlessly — as only a spiritually-free being can live — or you will have a list of totally plausible reasons why you did not. The only worthwhile thing is awakening from the trance of the personal ego.

That is the core teaching of all the paths. This is not “understanding” but a change of perspective, a “seeing-through” the identifications with what is fundamentally false about us and the view of our personal history that supports those identifications. If you really understand spiritual teachings but your life and being do not transform you unrecognizably from your former self, you have won a very credible booby prize.

The portal to this change-of-perspective opens when we have the support and courage to first become really empty, to give up our arguments with the universe about how it is, AND give up our finely-honed strategies for getting what we think we want. This portal opens into a great ambiguity, not one of anxiety but one in which there is enormous freedom and possibility.

The spiritual path — and our life itself — totally restarts when that happens.