Gururaj: The spiritual path is for heroes. It is not all bread, butter and jam. There are beautiful roses, but there are also thorns. Because without the thorns, the roses can't exist. So sometimes the path becomes a bit difficult. But that difficulty is needed as a cleanser. The whole object is for a person to face himself. And as soon as a person starts admitting his or her faults, the cure has begun; you're half-cured.

People don't want to face themselves, they don't want to admit their weaknesses. And you can only cure or alter the fault if you admit that, "I'm at fault and should do something about it." So with these spiritual practices, a great measure of self-help is necessary. Some little effort is necessary. It's no use coming home and quarreling with your husband every night over the most trivialized things and then say, "oh, I'll sit down and meditate and fix it all up." No.

Many people think, "let's go to the guru and do meditation, and like a magic wand he'll just wave all our problems away." Then they try it for two or three weeks and all their problems haven't disappeared. Then they think, "oh, the guru is no bloody good." They don't realize that their problem could stem back to ages past and they themselves have to work it out. The guru only gives the medicine, but they have to drink it. The guru shows them the path but they have to walk the path. And people don't want to do that.

There's a lovely parable which Ramakrishna quotes: a camel eats thorns and although its mouth bleeds from the thorns, the camel still keeps on eating thorns. And human beings are like that - they just don't want to get out of the rut, or out of their miseries because they find it so comfortable. For example, in the Himalayas you would find many deaths for one reason: if there is an avalanche or you fall into a groove of ice, after awhile it becomes so comfortable because you feel a beautiful warmth that you don't want to get up. And because you don't want to get up, you die. So the person must get up and start running around a bit to get his blood circulating so that the person would live. In the same way, people are caught up in their own meshes and do not want to get up. Like a silkworm they spin and spin and spin and then find themselves entrapped in their own spinning. The idea is to get out. And after all, the spiritual path is like impregnation, You get impregnated by your husband, but the husband is not going to make the baby grow in you. He plants the seed but you've got to look after the pregnancy period and suffer all the inconveniences that a woman would go through with giving birth to a baby. But when the baby is born, isn't the reward totally exhilarating?

(US 83-103)