Does the path always have to be difficult? No matter where you read, it always says: Heaven doesn’t like the easy way. Or something like that. At least in the original texts. (Not in current literature. That is subject to economic considerations. Such unattractive statements would lead to loss of sales).
It may not be a matter of hard or easy at all. It may not be that the path of the soul is difficult because it has to be difficult.
When we close our eyes and plug our ears, and then have the task of recognizing just by the breath of air who is walking past us, isn’t that hard, too? Don’t we then naturally say, „What nonsense! Let me open my eyes and ears, then it will be easy for me to fulfill this task!“ But what we then perceive is something else. Just as the reading of Braille with the fingers presupposes a (heavy) training of the sensory senses, which as a rule is not voluntarily taken up by the normal citizen, it perhaps also behaves with the sense of soul.
For one thing, we are not trained in soul perception. It is difficult. It’s hard for me sometimes, too. I would rather just have a coffee and I get a headache. Despite years of perceiving on the otherworldly plane.
Even harder than learning to make sense of it is letting what you perceive flow into your life. On the one hand, because one is not sure anyway whether everything is so, as one has just put it together and on the other hand, because our world is no longer in the condition for it. It has been shaped by the mind for thousands of years. The rules are based on material aspects. Just like all views. That is why the way of the soul is difficult! It is because of the circumstances. And just as the subjects in the above example make it easy for themselves and open their eyes and ears again, in the same way making it easy in the soul way means to give up the perception with the untrained sense and just surrender to the material flow. To follow the life as it offers itself to us in this society and to despair about it possibly more or less (or to lose oneself in ranting about the possible). That’s why „taking it easy“ from the „old school“ point of view is somehow not the right thing to do. If we lived with our senses intact in a world where things and soul were in balance and we were in both material and spiritual flow: These passages with the hard way (or something like that) would be erased from all scriptures….