Does the Path have a Heart? - Carlos Castaneda

You must always keep in mind that a path is only a path.
Each path is only one of a million paths.
If you feel that you must not follow it,

you need not stay with it under any circumstances.
Any path is only a path.

There is no affront to yourself or others in dropping a path
if that is what your heart tells you to do.
But your decision to keep on a path or to leave it
must be free of fear and ambition.

I caution you: look at every path closely and deliberately.
Try it as many times as you think necessary.
Then ask yourself and yourself alone this one question:
Does this path have a heart?

All paths are the same.  They lead nowhere.
They are paths going through the brush or into the brush
or under the brush of the Universe.
The only question is: Does this path have a heart?

If it does, then it is a good path.
If it doesn't, then it is of no use.

Carlos Castaneda

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Inverted color

 

Questions for the Quest - Misc.

 

From the Web Telescope

[spiritually speaking:]

What is the deepest longing of your Heart -
that which is more important than anything else?

What in you is being called forward, seeking attentions?

What is the pull, what calls to you?

What is your own inner resource,
sanctuary, refuge?

What is it that you call upon
that helps you connect
with [the inner feeling of stillness]
and being at ease?

What wants to be felt,
acknowledged?

Be open to what reveals itself...

Kathleen Knipp
excerpts from a Yoga Nidra meditation

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As we embark on a "new" year -
I'm questioning again,
things like these...

why are you questing?
Or - why did you start questing so long ago?

What drew you to the Quest?
What are you trying to pursue?
What calls to you still and
compels you to keep questing?
What speaks to your Soul?

~

I know from my own experience

not to let others determine my "path"
out of obligation or obedience,
no matter what others may tell me the truth is -
or isn't.

I must follow my own "invisible" path
that only I know; the one that is true for me...

That will intuitively lead me Home...

Blessings to us all for a safe passage in the year ahead...

_/\_

MM

~~~~~~~

 The pilgrimage is one that each must make alone...

to that boundary of space and time where
the mind and heart encounter the
"ultimate  mystery",
the known unknowable...

The quest will perhaps require more courage
than you or I can bear...

Chet Raymo
from: The Soul of the Night

Hold Steady - HAEVN

Sunrays touch the coastline
On the cutter shows the dust
Long nights are gone with the river
The water has been waiting long enough

We float on the river of time
Hold steady, hold steady
The sea comes 'cause the summer forced out the cold
The boat fought the change of tides
Hold steady, hold steady
Storm for hours, and rainy days

And all our lives we"re told
the stream will take us home

Sunrays touch the coastline
Warm our feet, show the glare
We walk through the sand in the warm night
The water will take the weight from us

And all our lives we're told
the stream will take us home
And all our lives we're told
the stream will take us home

[.....]

HAEVN

Symphonic Tales

To listen to this song beautifully sung
with symphony
click on this You Tube link

https://youtu.be/KpxFLMKXzBk?si=syofoFB377o-idxe

with thanks to Love Is A Place

~

Photo from the Internet

 

Homecoming - Mirabai Starr

I don't know about you, but I have grown weary of the 
self-improvement project.  The endless quest to uncover
and slay the host of inner demons who have been messing up
my plans for enlightenment, which I have imagined as some
pure land of perfect equanimity in which I hover over my
worldly concerns like a cartoon yogi, forever free from
narcissism and other embarrassing inclinations, reliably
dispensing compassion to the vulnerable, wisdom to the
ignorant, and a kind of sexy psychic luminescence to
anyone who comes into proximity with my purified and
 perfect (no)self.

Matt Licata's compassionate book, A Healing Space...affirms
that each of us has access to 'the outrageous intelligence and
bravery of the broken human heart' and the heart's ability to
return home.

This homecoming, as Matt shows us, is probably not what we
thought it would be when we signed up for the enlightenment
track.  We have been conditioned by our spiritual communities -
whether traditional religious institutions or alternative practice
spaces - to conquer certain feeling states in favor of some 
idealized realm where we are unmoved by these "lower
vibrations"...  Instead, he encourages us to share the truth of
our shattering so that we can become our own alchemists -
and learn to love reality however it is appearing in this
moment.

The ancient alchemists did not view the "base material" - as 
Matt calls our difficulties, our thoughts, our darker feelings
and emotions - to be transcended, but as 'the substance of the
gods' - Sacred, Beautiful and Loveable...  Matt's invitation is
to enter and inhabit those abandoned parts of ourselves and
our unlived lives as holy ground.

It's a revolutionary approach.  Rather than muscle our way
through spiritual disciplines, and therapeutic interventions,
we fall in love with our brokenness and welcome all the
orphaned parts of ourselves home.

Mirabai Starr
from the Forward to
A Healing Space:Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times

Matt Licata, PhD

~

Photo from the Internet

 

Which Door? - Aurelius Symmachus

 We all look up to the same stars;
The same heaven is above us all;
The same universe surrounds us all.
What does it matter by what
system of knowledge
we seek to know
the truth?

Not by one path alone
may we attain to
so great a secret.

Quintus Aurelius Symmachus

A Roman Statesman

~

Photo from the Internet

Soul Windows - John O'Donohue, Ram Dass & D.H. Lawrence

When your soul awakens,
you begin to truly inherit your life.
You leave the kingdom of fake surfaces,
repetitive talk and many weary roles,
and slip deeper into the true adventure of
who you are,
and who you are called to become.

The greatest friend of the soul is the unknown...

Yet we are afraid of the unknown because
it lies outside our vision and our control.
We avoid it or quell it by filtering it
through protective barriers of
domestication and control.

The normal way never leads home...

John O'Donohue

~

The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal.
It can't be organized and regulated.

It isn't true that everyone should follow one path.
Listen to your own truth...

Ram Dass

~

However smart we may be,
however rich and clever or loving and charitable
or spiritual or impeccable,
it doesn't help us at all.

The real power comes to us from the beyond,
the unseen, the unknown.

D. H. Lawrence

~

Photo from the Internet

Step Through - Fred LaMotte

Painting by Joe-Maccer, Deviant Art

As you fall asleep tonight,
do not take this inhalation
for granted.
Honor her like a royal guest.
Make a spacious tent
of your flesh,
for She who contains
the galaxies
has come to dwell in you,
pouring her gift from the stars
down your backbone.
Each expiration will lead you
through a silver door,
a mirror of moonlight.
The key is silence.
Step through.
Follow her rainbow into the void
where wings of astonishment
will carry you from death to death.

A scent of blossoms
from the garden in your body
will guide you home,
enlarged by a memory
of stillness.
Neither come nor go
and She will lead you
from the mind to the Heart.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

Original title "Shekinah"

Trust Your Solitude - Rainer Rilke

.....in the great silence of these distances, I am touched by your
beautiful anxiety about life...  Here, where I am surrounded by
an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they
come from the seas, here I feel that there is no one anywhere
who can answer for you those questions and feelings which,
in their depths, have a life of their own; for even the most
articulate people are unable to help, since what words point
to is so very delicate, is almost unsayable.  But even so, I
think that you will not have to remain without a solution if
you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small
Things; if you have this love for what is humble, then everything
will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more
reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays
behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness,
awakeness, and knowledge.

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and
try to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked
rooms or books written in a very foreign language.  Don't
search for the answers, which could not be given to you now,
because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is,
to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps then,
someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even
noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in
the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you
will find all your paths...

Rainer Maria Rilke
Excerpt from: Letters to a Young Poet #1

What Draws You? - Rumi

Artist: Puisi - ambua.id

There are two types on the path, those who come against
their will, the blindly religious, and those who obey
out of love...

The former have ulterior motives.
They want a midwife near because she gives them milk.
The other love the beauty of the Nurse.

The former memorize the proof-texts of conformity
and repeat them.  The latter disappear into
whatever draws them to God.

Both are drawn from the Source.
Any motion is from the Mover.
Any love from the Beloved.

Rumi
From: The Book of Love
translations by Coleman Barks

~

Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull
of what you love...

Rumi

~

A baby pigeon on the edge of the nest hears the call
and begins her flight...
How can the soul not fly
when a message arrives saying,
"...come, come back to me!"

What is the secret that opens the door?

The key is the flutter of the heart's wings
and its endless longing.

When the door opens,
walk on the path...
where everything old becomes new,
and never look back...

Rumi

~

On Dec. 17, 1273 the great Sufi poet and mystic, Rumi,
died in Konya Turkey.  He was universally loved by
Muslims, Jews, and Christians.  It was called his
"wedding night" because death to him (and the Sufis)
was the ultimate union with God.

May it be so for all of us, when the time comes,
no matter "who" we know God to be...

Listen to Trees - Hermann Hesse

Trees are sanctuaries.  Whoever knows how to speak to them,
whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.
They do no preach learning and precepts, they preach
undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

[.....]

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer,
then a tree has something to say to us: Be still!  Be still!  Look
at me!  Life is not easy, life is not difficult.  These are childish
thoughts.... Home is neither here no there.  Home is within you,
or home is nowhere at all.

If one listens to them silently for a long time, it reveals its kernel,
its meaning.  It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's
suffering, though it may seem to be so.  It is a longing for home....,
for new metaphors for life.  It leads home.  Every path leads
homeward, every step is birth, every step is death...

When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and
the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve
an incomparable joy.  Whoever has learned to listen to trees no
longer wants to be a tree.  He wants to be nothing except what he is.
That is home.  That is happiness.

Hermann Hesse
Trees: Reflections and Poems

via: Love Is A Place