It is common, on meeting with one of these packages with a bonnet on its head, its small body wrapped tightly in a blanket, to marvel at the exceptional beauty and perfection on display.

We look at the tightly closed eyes and wonder what mysterious regions this wizard might be traveling through in its mind. It seems at once to know nothing and everything, as if it contains within itself a trace of the wisdom of all ages; it looks both terribly young and infinitely old, totally naive and boundlessly knowledgeable. It has been pulled as if by magic out of the realm of slumbering souls, it was – only a few months before – in existence only as scattered atoms that might have reached the earth from exploding stars in the early days of the universe. Now it has taken shape as a unique being – with neat, folded eyelids and a soft downy head – that might be extinguished only in a hundred years. 

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Though he didn’t fully realize it at the time, Carl Jung played a very important role in bringing a spiritual awakening to millions. He met with a man named Roland Hazard, a hopeless alcoholic who had tried every means to stay sober — in whom was told had the kind a chronic alcoholism… that was hopeless — and [as Jung advised] ought to commit himself to an asylum. Roland asked is there no exception. Jung told him about a few cases where a spiritual experience/awakening had so radically altered an individual that he never drank again. Although Roland didn’t stay sober, he told a man named Bill Wilson about what he had learned [from Jung]. Bill Wilson and Carl Jung would subsequently correspond on several occasions.

When I was fourteen, my first love was killed, and I turned to God.

It was not some beneficent father figure I was looking for. I had a grandpa who smoked a pipe and taught me complex vocabulary words and another who sang me Irish ballads, replacing the name of the beautiful heroine with my own. But my parents were radical intellectuals who made fun of the divine. They ridiculed devotion. For them, religion was the opiate of the masses: Grandma’s empty ritual of lighting the Sabbath candles and murmuring in perfunctory Hebrew before settling down in front of the television with the National Enquirer and a glass of sherry; the silly, sad grasping of people too boring to stand up and change the world.

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Many people want to know the ultimate nature of the universe, the ultimate reality. Many seek it through science. But mysticism and contemplation may offer the Way that actually realizes that One, which is Love.

A verse in the New Testament reads,

God is Love (1 John 4:8, 16)

It’s repeated twice in the same chapter.

But what does it mean? We usually think of love as some kind of sentimental thing, merely an emotion that we feel with or towards other people. How could it be anything more than this?

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Maurice Frydman is one of most extraordinary people I’ve ever come across and virtually nothing is known about him. And because of his connection with Ramana Maharshi, Krishnamurti, Gandhi, Nisargadatta, the Dali Lama I kind of view him in my own mind as a Forest Gump of 20th century spirituality. He was in all the right places in all the right times to get the maximum benefit of interaction with some of the greats of Indian spirituality… He was a Gandhian, he worked for the uplift of the poor in India, he worked with Tibetan refugees, he edited extraordinary books [like] “I am That,” probably one of the all time spiritual classics.