DEUT436 It is a fact that your life embodies a curriculum. Why? Because life is set up so you will be challenged, and through the experiences you have dealing with the challenges, you will grow as a person ... none of us has a choice about that. LIfe makes us grow. You do have a choice, however, of whether you just let your curriculum play out in any way it will, without preparing yourself through study and with guidance, or whether you will seek to uncover pathways for living and growing that prior generations already marked and illuminated to help you engage with your curriculum and grow in a conscious, directed way. That important choice is in your hands. Because this book tracks a Jewish spiritual path, it is useful to see that the Torah acknowledges this primary choice that confronts us. In the book of Deuteronomy were told: "You shall circumcise the foreskin of your heart" [this verse]. That enigmatic image occurs only one other time in the Torah (in the narrow sense of the Torah as being the Five Books of Moses; the metaphor shows up as well at Jeremiah 4:4), in the variance: "And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart" (Deuteronomy 30:6). I understand circumcision here to be a metaphor for spiritual initiation--removing the obstacles to having an open, sensitive, initiated inner life. In the first quote, we are offered the option of initiating ourselves. The second quote tells us what God will do it. The second verse begins with the Hebrew letter vav, which can be translated "or." Initiate yourself orGod will initiate you. The Torah gives no third option. Unguided in how to initiate themselves, too often people go after the wrong things, or, if they get it right, go about it in the wrong way. They stumble after false answers to the questions on their cirriculum: "If only I were rich." "Nip and tuck by the plastic surgeon might do it." "Defeat that enemy." "Support that cause." "Join that club." Resorts to those sorts of answers to your inner challenges is equivalent to turning yourself over to God to be wisened up, which unfortunately usually happens through bitter experiences of loss, failure, and brokenness. Those experiences do cause us to grow, with certainty. It seems a pity, though, that entire lives are spent fumbling blindly, in personal suffering and at the cost of an increase of evil--yes, evil--in the world, when each of us has another choice as to how we can grow. The Torah states very clearly that you have the option to take steps to initiate your own heart.