The founding legends of the spiritual traditions — the lives of Jesus, the Buddha, the Baal Shem, Muhammad — portray a struggle of heroic proportions, requiring not only goodwill but extraordinary intelligence, humility, strength of purpose, and courage. And though the inner struggle is neither easy in a way that we might dream of, nor difficult in the ways we might fear, it is first and last a struggle, and principally a struggle with oneself, with certain aspects of our own minds, hearts, and bodies.
— Jacob Needleman, A Little Book on Love