The usual concept of 'spiritual growth' presupposes a forward movement - from where you are to a more desirable state or goal called enlightenment, God or whatever. The sage in the book will turn your ideas of the spiritual life upside down. He insists that on the spiritual path there is nothing to practice, only something to understand. Indeed, he maintains that there is no such thing as a spiritual path. If a spiritual way has to organise itself into a system or requires practices for its fulfilment, it is no longer the way of freedom. The way of the Divine is a pathless one. If you listen to the sage, we go beyond the mind, beyond mindfulness, beyond dogma and rituals, beyond all the means and paths that are offered to us but are not our own, and walk a path that no one else has walked. So this whole spiritual life and practice is all an immense cosmic joke on us when we realise that, after all our travelling, we come back home to ourselves and find within what we searched without. It is then that we wake up to the tragic comedy of all our efforts and the irony of all our practices, prayers and penances.

Dr. Francis Valloor is an author and international speaker. His life long quest brought him in contact with many wonderful spiritual teachers, friends and several masters and sages such as Anthony de Mello. It was he who set him on the path of Awareness. After de Mello's death, Francis worked as the director of Sadhana Institute in Lonavla, India for fourteen years before spending two years as a visiting scholar at the University of Notre Dame. Currently he lives in Dublin, Ireland where he works as a Clinical Psychologist in private practice and conducts Awareness workshops and retreats. He is the author of "A Dewdrop in the Ocean - Wisdom Stories for Turbulent Times" (2009) and "The Ocean in the Dewdrop - Awakening the Sage Within" (2010).

Francis Valloor's profile page