Hari Dass, my yoga teacher at the ashram in India, once wrote on his chalkboard, “If a pickpocket meets a saint, all he sees are his pockets.” In The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment, Thaddeus Golas says, “You never have to change what you see, only the way you see it.” Gurdjieff, a great spiritual teacher who taught in Europe and America in the early decades of the twentieth century, noted that if you think you’re free and you don’t know you are in prison, you can’t escape. Gurdjieff saw us as being in a prison of our own habits of mind. Unless we understand how we are conditioned by our
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