What You Actually Know Yourself. This exercise is from a passage in A Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield, another highly recommended book. It comes from a story of a widow who was grieving the loss of her husband and was told by different people in different spiritual traditions that his soul was making progress…in a bewildering variety of ways.
Confused and upset, trying to sort out what was true, she came to see me (Jack Kornfield). I asked her to consider carefully what she actually knew herself. If she put aside the Tibetan teachings, the Sufi teachings, the Christian mystical teachings and looked into her own being and heart, what did she already know that was so certain that even if Jesus and the Buddha were to sit in the same room and say, “No, it’s not,” she could look at them straight in the eye and say, “Yes, it is.” I was asking her to put away all her philosophies and beliefs, the maps of the past and future lives and more, reminding her that what she knew might be very simple. (Kornfield 158)
This disarmingly basic activity is always available to us and in the age of information overload, we really need it. Plumb the depths of your soul and find out what is true.
The human heart is the most sensitive instrument – William McKibbon
Life can get so much more simple, honest and sensible in the clarity of following the compass of your own heart.
On your journey to awakening, you will have to discover for yourself what is true. In the process, you may come across your inner Being, your essential self, your heart of hearts, your true teacher, the center of your being and the Universe. Maybe the paradoxes will cease to puzzle you. Maybe you’ll find there are no answers, there might be no questions. (Christiane Wolters)
