When I started this work it was generally understood that it required immense sacrifice, namely the sacrifice of what I call empire: the career, the wife, the brats, the holidays, the pension, the whole fucking shebang. Not because these things are necessarily bad but because they sap too much vital energy, take away too much time. Nowadays students seem to be so brainwashed by the bourgeois dream that they cannot even imagine an alternative, so they take spiritual work to be a mere minor option.