Exract from "Alchemist"

There four obstacles.
First, we are told from childhood onwards that everything we want to do is impossible. We grow up with this idea, and as the years accumulate, so too do the layers of prejudice, fear and guilt.

If we have courage to disinter our dream, we are then faced by the second obstacle: love. We know what we want to do, but are afraid of hurting those around us by abondoning everything in order to pursue our dream. We do not realise that love is just a further impetus, not somehitng that will prevent us going forward, and that those who genuinely wish us well want us to be happy and are prepared to accompany us on that journey.

Once we have accepted that love is a stimulus, we come up against the third obstacle:fear of the defeats we will meet on the path. We who fight for our dream suffer far more when it doesn't work out, because we cannot fall back on the old excuse ,"Oh, well, I dint really want it anyway." we do want it and know that we have staked everything on it and that the path of the Personal calling is no easier than any other path, except that our whole heart is in this journey.

Then we warriors of light must be prepared to have patience in difficult times and to know that the Universe is conspiring in our favour, even though we may not understand how.

Having disinterred our dream, having used the power of love to nurture it and spent many years living with the scars, we suddenly notice that what we always wanted is there, waiting for us, perhaps the very next day. Then comes the fourth obstacle: the fear of realising the dream for which we have been fighting all our lives.

Oscar Wilde said, "Each man kills the thing he loves". vAnd its true. The mere possiblility of getting what we want fills the soul of the ordinary person with guilt. We look around at all those who have failed to get what they want and feel that we do not deserve to get what we want either. We forget about all the obstacles we overcome, all the suffering we endured, all the things we had to give up in order to get this far.

--Alchemist