Toward an Interior Sun: Awakening by a Master, and the Difficult Journey Toward Discipleship (Stories by Max Reif)

Toward an Interior Sun - Max Reif

$12.95 (paperback)   |   $3.95 (ebook)
256 pages   |   6 x 9″
ISBN 978-1988245645
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Martin is a young man with no conscious spiritual yearning and a dim sense of something wrong deep inside. He almost destroys himself by the time he’s twenty-two, but then has the good fortune to be awakened by Meher Baba, a renowned spiritual figure.

After a honeymoon of feeling divine love, it gradually begins to dawn on Martin that the Master wants not only love, but obedience. The spiritual path is “no game for the weak and fainthearted.” Martin has a difficult go of it, blundering several times over the next decades, suffering precipitous falls–but always, somehow, being given another chance. He comes to realize the journey is a long one.

In this collection of short stories, Max Reif digs deep to offer an entertaining and insightful account of this arduous spiritual trek. The tales lead the reader from epiphanies of youth, to the life of a spiritual seeker, to a deepening awareness of the maturity required for true discipleship. These stories take the reader on a bumpy ride from the dark depths of shock therapy to the soaring heights of seeing God manifest in the world, illuminating the hope we all have for redemption and rebirth.

This is a book not just for Baba lovers but for all who want spiritual growth and want to learn through the challenges of a personal story about the spiritual journey.

To get a sample of Max’s writing, check out his author page. Most of the stories in this collection can be found there.


About the author

Max ReifWriter, artist, musician, Max Reif lives in California and shares his storytelling, music and love of play with the preschoolers he teaches and the adults he entertains. He’s just released The Wake-Up Man music CD and continues to share prose and poetry in The Mindful Word, The Seattle Star, GLOW International, and elsewhere. For more information, visit Max’s website at www.realnothings.com.

Review of Toward an Interior Sun in GLOW International

Reviewed by Naosherwan Anzar

Max Reif in this book of stories and essays, largely autobiographical, has woven his troubled journey from boyhood to a place of love, devotion and joy. His well-worded stories take the reader—nay, the seeker—to attainable spiritual insights.

In his life-long devotion to Avatar Meher Baba, Max combines poetic expression with exploration of the known — and oftentimes, the unknown. He confesses, “in the late ‘60s, many of us were too young or immature to know the stakes.” He experimented with drugs, as did many young people in the sixties, to get a “glimpse” of God through psychedelic drugs. A meeting with an old friend known in the book as “Aldo”, brought Max to the threshold of one who called himself the Ancient One—Meher Baba.

Max was being prepared for a spiritual life. The finest exchange in the book is between Aldo and Max:

“He says everyone and everything is God, but there are very few who are fully conscious of that Divinity and who therefore are really able to guide others.”

It was as T. S. Eliot called it “the timeless moment” for Max. He realized that Meher Baba was not only the Way and the Goal; he was the only Way and the Goal on his spiritual journey. As Max became transformed from a “dangerous pharmacological” past, he was convinced that following Meher Baba and holding onto his hand was the fast track to conscious divinity.

Toward an Interior Sun is a door that opens in degrees to those who are willing to “walk on fire” as did Max. He is honest in his narration of experiences that span a lifetime. The stories and essays in this book reflect a life lived beyond just words.