Book excerpt: Robert Jacobs has written an intriguing series about his spiritual path, Path to the Awakened Heart. His first book, Journey to the Awakened Heart, follows him as a young seeker in the 1970s, determined to discover more to life than the materialism he found in American culture. He moves to Paris and then begins to explore the world, traveling to West Africa, Morocco, Central Asia and finally to India, where he slowly finds answers to his spiritual search. Ultimately, he meets an illumined spiritual teacher from India and spends most of the next 18 years living in yoga and meditation ashrams in India and the United States, engaging himself fully in cultivating what he comes to understand is an awakened consciousness. His memoir provides an intimate picture of what it was like for a Westerner to live a traditional monastic life in an Indian ashram. More importantly, it shows how living with an enlightened spiritual master transformed the author’s life from being merely mentally spiritual to enabling spirituality to permeate his life. Finally, the book follows the author in his transition to a more normal worldly life as husband and father, applying the lessons he learned from his ashram days to the many challenges of modern life. Together the author’s two books offer a profound picture of how Eastern spirituality has developed and transformed in the past 70 years within a Western context.