When I first read this, I thought it was such a wonderful, yet humorous, description of the struggles a small child goes through to learn the alphabet, the numbers, and to read a few simple words or add one and one to get two. And that is when they are young enough and eager to learn and fill their empty brains like a dry sponge sucking up water.

    As adults, we have learned so much more, and so many far more complicated things and complex ideas, that we have probably forgotten what difficulties we had when we first tried to learn these basics. I can at least remember the struggles I had with learning to write because of being left-handed, yet expected to write much like a right-handed person and, on top of it, to do it with a fountain pen designed for right-handed people (no school was going to provide an expensive fountain pen custom made for lefties). Most of us can probably remember, though, what difficulties we had when we tried to learn to ride a bicycle, or ice skates, or to drive a car.

    We forget sometimes that it took time, sometimes a lot of it, and practice, a lot of it, to learn to do these simple things. Yet, when it comes to the single most important thing in our lives: the awakening and growing of our spirit and soul, we often expect it to be simple and virtually instantaneous. Sadly, many of the popular church/businesses of today take advantage of this false belief by promising they can provide that quick and easy path to enlightenment. None of them have yet succeeded in doing so. And that is a good thing, because to gain access to this great universal knowledge too quickly can drive a person insane. That is why all real spiritual schools teach using spiritual growth techniques gradually, over a period of years, to awaken the soul. And that remains the only way to do it safely and effectively.