So say you want to be a great basketball player—not just any basketball player, but the best basketball player who ever lived. You want to top Michael Jordan. No—you want to make Michael look like a weenie.

How would you begin? Well, the first thing you would probably do would be to buy a basketball and start shooting hoops. You would shoot and shoot and shoot until you were blue in the face.

(SKS tenet: If you want to walk the spiritual path, start walking it and stop talking about it—pick up that basketball.)

But shooting by yourself is only going to work for so long. Eventually, if you really want to kick Michael's butt, you're going to have to find a team to play on. You can be the best shot around, but until you play on a team, how can you really test your skills? And how could you take on five other players by yourself?

(SKS tenet: Spiritual seeking can be darn hard work. It's easier to work with a group of fellow seekers—teammates—than to go it alone. Besides, you'll never get anywhere if the only person you talk to is yourself.)

So you join the team. The tryouts were tough, but you'd been practicing for so long that the coach recognized you for a hard worker and signed you on.

The coach is a slave-driver. One day you tell him as much. You spout off to him and get into a screaming match, and he finally says, "You know what's going to happen if you shoot in front of Jamison with a two inch vertical like that??? You're going to get DENIED, that's what, you smart-ass. Now you start lifting weights or you're off this team."

Since you want to keep playing, you listen to your coach, and guess what? You start averaging sixteen points-per-game more. You hate to admit it, since sometimes you think coach is just hard-headed, but he was right.

(SKS tenet: One of the best resources we have on the spiritual path is someone who's been at it longer than we have. He can serve as a coach to us by pushing us when we get lazy and advising us when we don't know what to do.)