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There are detours on the spiritual path. When someone is first drawn to the spiritual path, there is, no doubt, a burning love for God. And to the degree that this love consumes consciousness determines the progress on the path.

The problem, however, is that in the beginning of the spiritual endeavor, the spiritual aspirant has, with rare exceptions, a multitude of loves. These loves that impede the progress on the path are the attachments and addictions to the world.

It is true that we have to live in the world, and that we have responsibilities. We have to earn a living, etc. But that is not the problem. We can live in the world, as Meher Baba suggests, but not be of it.

The problem is when our joy and happiness, and even our meaning of life, are at the mercy of external events in the world. For example, someone’s favorite football team loses in the Super Bowl and he gets depressed. He might even be angry with the coach, or the official whom he thinks made the wrong call. He gets so caught up in the importance of the game and the result that he loses his focus on the inner reality of God.

Instead of experiencing oneness and bliss, he experiences division and anger. What was truly important has become, in his agitated mind, unimportant. And what was really unimportant, has assumed fantastic proportions. Instead of experiencing the infinite treasure of the divine life, he experiences excitement or sorrow, based not on who he is, but on the outcome of a football game.

That is the principle of maya at play. Maya is not illusion, as some people believe. It is the principle that makes illusion seem real. It comes into play when we have a lack of perception or excessive attachments.

To the person who has not tasted the inner sweetness of the path, and who have no clues to its existence, it is understandable that the events of the world are the only reality. But that person is not my concern here. My concern is for the individual who has tasted the inner life, but gets pulled down. It’s like the swimmer at the beach who gets pulled down by an under-current, or pulled out to sea by a rip-tide.

The old attachments, when reactivated, act like magnets that keep pulling the aspirant into the heaviness of gross consciousness. It’s like you are taking a trip in your car and you get car-jacked and you never reach your destination.

When we keep our focus on the inner realities of the spiritual path, the love we experience acts as a purifying fire. This inner fire actually burns the impressions of old attachments. This burning is both a process of dying and a process of inner awakening. It’s both painful and blissful. The love is not only the goal, but the process and the path.

When our focus is on the highest spiritual values of oneness, love, knowledge, or when we engage in selfless service, or when our focus is on God and the higher spiritual realities, then the gross impressions start to wither from the effects of the inner fire. But a withering weed is not a dead weed, and a little sprinkle of water will bring it back to its old state. And similarly, a refocus on the old loves of the gross world will enable the gross impressions to strangle the spiritual consciousness that was just beginning to blossom.

You will see this clearly in a recovering alcoholic. One little drink is all it takes for the recovering alcoholic to fall off the wagon and fall into a drunken stupor that perhaps destroys him. The pattern, the mental impression of drinking, was still there. It was like a withering weed that wasn’t quite dead.

But since we are speaking of alcohol, let’s consider a wine connoisseur. The connoisseur has developed a taste for the finest wines, the wines with the great subtlety of flavor. And the non-connoisseur of wine can’t tell the difference.

Ask the non-connoisseur the difference between a $5.00 bottle of wine and a $100.00 bottle of wine and he will tell you the difference is $95.00. But ask the connoisseur, and you will get a sermon on subtleties of fragrance and taste that will convince you that he is crazy.

You could say that the connoisseur has a consciousness of the subtle world of wine. And this consciousness is so developed that you could say that he has no consciousness of wines of lower quality.

To him they don’t even exist. He can’t imagine that someone would drink anything but the best. To him, any bottle of wine, other the the finest wine, is of total insignificance. He doesn’t drink them; he doesn’t think about them; and he certainly doesn’t desire them. He doesn’t even want to be in the same room with them.

It reminds me of the movie, Sideways, when the character, Miles (a wine connoisseur played by Paul Giamatti), says, “If someone is bringing Merlot, I’m leaving.” It is safe to say that Miles could never be tempted to take a drink of Merlot.

It’s all about perception. Perceive the higher realities and they become your reality. The more real your inner reality becomes, the more insignificant illusion becomes. It fades away. The more the illusion fades from consciousness, the greater the scope of consciousness to perceive Reality.

Become blind to illusion and illusion becomes what it really is — nothing. Ultimately, when all illusion becomes nothing (what Buddha called Nirvana), then Reality becomes Everything.

The soul becomes what it always was from the beginningless beginning (infinite and eternal), but because of illusion and limited perception (born of ignorance and finite imagination), that realization, prior to this, was not possible.