A Surprising Way to Start Healing Your Soul
Key Lesson: Any blow to your vanity, received consciously, is a healing touch to your soul.
Treasure the Truth About Yourself
In this world, it's possible for you to find physical gold, but without winning the war within yourself, this wealth could not do anything for you other than perhaps produce a more comfortable place in which to continue your struggle with old conflicts. However, there is an inner gold you can find whose possession fulfills you, regardless of your external circumstances. We can call this inner gold "real self-knowledge": truths you know about yourself, for yourself and from yourself through your self-study. It's yours because you've visited the world where this new kind of gold exists; you've mined it yourself, and you've put it in your pocket. This gold can never be taken from you. Its goodness is yours forever. This new inner wealth enriches you by transforming your very own ideas about who you are and what you really want from life. With it, everything gets simpler. And the nicest thing about this special spiritual gold is that you can have as much of it as you're willing to pay for.
On the other hand, and it warrants this short warning, nothing is as easy, and even secretly flattering as it can be, than to read certain books that build our self-images as being wise and "spiritual." These books, however, contain a subtle sort of spiritual "fool's gold" that keeps us trapped in an imaginary world. By contrast, real self-knowledge can be a little difficult to take at first, delivering well-aimed blows to our vanity as it shows us how limited and artificial our self-created thought-world has been. But it also provides a glimpse of the expansive world that awaits us... if we will treasure the truth about ourselves that it alone can reveal.
