OUR COMMON JOURNEY
Stone: Depends on the subject, but all Centering stones help.
The Mantra: Om
The Key:
The only real Journey is the inward one to discover
who we really are, all others are merely
preparations for it at best.
Rainer Maria Rilke agrees:
The only journey is the one within.
Are you on any other journey?
Why?
Don’t be deceived.
a) Rumi introduces the issue with a question not easy to answer:
Oh you who’ve gone on pilgrimage – where are you,
where, oh where?
and then asks:
And you? When will you begin your long journey into yourself?
One day you too will have to enter your final journey.
It will be the longest journey you have ever taken.
It is the journey to find yourself.
Have you begun your long journey into yourself?
To which extent?
If not, what are you waiting for?
However, not everyone agrees: for example, according to the Course in Miracles:
There is no journey, but only an awakening….What need have we
but to awaken in Him?
Wu Hsin agrees
There is no journey, as such.
It may not seem so, but we are always back where we started.
What we were in essence, and what we will be
in essence, is what we are in essence.
The key word is “as such”
What he means is that
Our essence, the Atman, is already at the end of the Journey
and has always been.
The Journey is real only for the surface self.
This is why
once we have recognized our false self as such
and achieved our inner rebirth our Journey
is already accomplished.
Wu Hsin also said that:
The journey from self consciousness to Consciousness itself is a reversion
of the natural movement toward the object, toward other,
and it shifts the direction toward the subject,
toward the Knowing.
Matsuo Basho adds:
Every day is a journey and the journey itself
is our own home
Is the journey itself your own home?
b) First or later, in this life or a next one,
you also will have to begin your ultimate Journey on an unknown road beyond
all you ever imagined, for all too familiar roads ultimately
lead nowhere at all, or to yet another death.
You the traveler and at the same time
also your destination.
Of course you are.
But are you aware of it?
The accomplishment of our Journey means becoming
what in our essence we already are:
This is the highest conundrum of our lives.
Strangely, very often what usually happens at the beginning of the Path is that when we realize that
all the roads that we have taken so far, even those passing through very pleasant landscapes are really dead ends.
It is when we feel utterly lost that we begin
our real Journey at last.
This is what St John of the Cross meant when he said that:
If a man wants to be sure of the road to journey on, he must
close his eyes and proceed in the dark.
How so?
St Teresa of Avila made a very fascinating observation which opens the vista to infinite possibilities:
The feeling remains that God
is on the journey, too.
To which extent can you feel the wonder of this?
That’s all?
Well, what really matters is that you are on the journey.
Ever those who are not aware of it are.
But then it will take them much longer to reach our destination.
Mooji warns that:
Sometimes we are more attached to the journey than we are to the discovery. Because the journey happens in the mind.
The discovery happens in the heart.
Mind and body have taken the journey, but the real home place
is your own heart. It is infinite and so wherever you go,
you are always Home.
c) The Course in Miracles goes to the core of the issue:
As you perceive the holy companions that travel with you,
you will realize that there is no journey
but only an awakening.
Rumi had the right attitude:
The soul’s Journey time and place involves not.
From my soul how to journey my body learnt
but now such way of journey renounced:
secretly and without forms travels,
though with a form still.
Of course,
the end of our Journey isn’t a physical place the realization
of the ultimate Reality which we secretly ARE.
Which is your vision of the ultimate Reality?
Why?
How does it make you feel?
Najm al-Din Kubra adds that:
Each time a light ascends from you
towards you a light descends…
It is the substance of light in Heaven
longing for you, to your light drawn
and towards you descending. This is
the mystical Journey’s secret.
d) The I Ching hexagram FU, the Return means to reappear, to restore,
to recover a path to our Source through Enlightenment.
Part of the main sentence reminds us that:
they don’t go anywhere because
their Journey is within.
At those times the gates were closed at noon; merchants did not move about, and none went anywhere outside.
Noon is the peak of the day, and the merchants are those who sold all they had to buy the Pearl of great price mentioned in the Gospels:
The lines speak also of a new beginning, innocence, passing from the darkness to the light, coming back to the Path and separating chaff from the wheat, that is, the superficial from the essential, which leads to a progress by a return to the ‘right Path.
One of the lines
warns about the tendency to be easily distracted
from our Journey.
Abdul Khaliq Gayadwani reminds us that:
Your Journey is towards your homeland. Remember that you
are traveling from the world of appearances
to the world of REALITY.
When Burhanuddin was asked if the road has any end or not he replied that:
The road has an end, but the stations have no end,
for the Journey is twofold, one to God
and one IN God.
The Kabuli:
When the Kabuli was asked by a prospective pilgrim which provisions he should take for his Journey to Mecca and Medina he replied:
Provisions? In my own pilgrimage I brought with me as many
as twelve peacock feathers, but I gave them all away
to other pilgrims on the road!
What does this tell you?
Which provisions do you bring on your pilgrimage Journey?
Why these and not others?
Are they REALLY necessary?
The Veil:
The Veil is the very antithesis
of our Journey.
The Dreamgame:
In the Dreamgame, our common Journey is the best possible OPPORTUNITY.
Keep in mind that the time that you have to reach your destination in this lifetime is limited, therefore
do not waste time, like most do, in distractions and unnecessary
activities that distract you from your aim.
In one of Vijay’s poems there are these comforting lines:
Ever certain your journey was:
even when so alone felt you and lost
every your upward striving drop by drop
into the secret cavern of your heart gathered
transmuting into Light…
The Devil’s Advocate:
The “Journey”, the “Path”, the “Way”….are just mirages, empty DREAMS all!
The Khdir:
One day you too will have to enter your own ultimate journey,
the most interesting you can ever embarked upon,
the journey to find yourself.
Now is time for us all to come home
back to the Divine.
Words of Power:
The only true journey is
the inward one.
It is never whatever we do or not do that matters,
but the Journey.
You have chosen your own infinite Journey
long before starting it.
How?
“Do not embark in useless journeys, for they are
indeed in vain.” Course in Miracles
On how many useless journeys have you embarked so far in vain?
Why?
What did you learn from them, if anything?
“The journey is the reward.”
Tao saying
“This is how you came here, like nameless star. Journey across
the night sky with those anonymous lights.”
Rumi
“The only journey is the one within.”
R. M. Rilke
Living it:
Vijay’s own Journey began when he left his native town at the age of fifteen and for many years traveled around a lot.
Upon reaching a town that he had never visited before he walked its streets all day, all night, as if forever, stopping only sometimes for a coffee or to eat something, as if wishing to exhaust all streets to their end, or perhaps to find the only one which leads elsewhere, outside the labyrinth of the world, perhaps a way to INDIA, which was still just a name to him, walking all night towards a faraway light or another which always turned out to be merely the neon sign of some hotel, cinema, restaurant or bar…
Only when everyone will realize that the only real journey
is the inward one there will be
peace upon Earth.
From The Quest:
An instant only may such Journey take or many eons
during which the Heavens may shift, the Waters’ tides
beyond recognition change, but without such Journey
truly nothing are we, a thin smoke in an high wind,
a lonely cry in an unending Night, darkness
unto an even deeper darkness lost….
Still, ever certain our journey was: even when so alone
felt you and lost, every upward striving drop by drop
into the secret cavern of your heart gathered,
transmuting into Light…
From such a long journey giddy still,
looking back all his past strivings
absurd, impossible now seemed:
so many tangents,
false bypaths and dead ends to reach at last….
…where he had always been!
the Wheel slowed down then was utterly still
all was forgiven and he forgave himself as well
across a stupor immense, his heart a star going nova
the Great Awakening.
Question/Ko’han 1 to 3:
Are you enjoying your own Journey?
If not, why not?
If not, how will you change it?
Question/Ko’han 4 to 7:
According to the Buddha it is better to travel well than to arrive.
Why?
Question/Ko’han 5:
Our ultimate Journey begins when we ask ourselves
this most basic question:
How important is to you to find it out?
Question/Ko’han 6:
Lo Tzu said that
Good travelers have no fixed plans
and are not intent on arriving.
Do you have any fixed plans?
Why are good travelers not intent of arriving?
Lao Tzu never spoke nonsense, don’t take this “not intent on arriving” too literally.
Question/Ko’han 7:
Good travelers not intent of arriving because
in their concern to arrive most tend to forget
the journey itself.
Do you often forget the Journey itself?
Mahavira has the last word and it is a very comforting one:
If you have started the Journey
you have already reached.
In which sense have you already reached?
Practice:
1) Consider these words from the Quest:
The destination of the Journey is yourself,
the spiritual healing of yourself,
for you cannot reach such a destination while still carrying the heavy burden
of your suffering, discontent, regrets, countless desires, etc…
this Journey requires to fearlessly letting go of all that you have ever been
which is not in the Truth, and can feel like dying at first
but then being reborn in peace and bliss.
Be prepared to leave everything behind you, for none can discover new horizons without leaving behind one’s familiar spaces,
and a certain point leave behind
even the journey itself.
2) Meditate on these words of Ahmad Hatif:
You will journey beyond the narrow limitations of time
and place and will pass into the infinite
spaces of the Divine World.
What ear has not heard, that you will hear, and what no eye has seen, you shall behold. Finally, you shall be brought to that high Abode, where you will see One only, beyond the world and all worldly creatures.
To that One you shall devote the love of both heart and soul until,
with the eye that knows no doubt, you will see plainly
that there is nothing save God alone.
3) Meditate also on these words of E.J. Gold:
Unknowingly we voyage in a labyrinth, a macro-dimensional maze
of living electrical force, cloaked by a thick layer
of ordinary life.
Our most serious obstacle is the uncontrollable urge to convert everything to the familiar, to reduce it all to the level of the primate brain; to reject the living, breathing reality of the totality of all possible attention.
Contemplate:
1) These verses from the Quest:
Something that Virgil omitted not to discourage travelers
is that upon his return to Ithaca disappointed Ulysses was:
faithful Penelope had been to him, true enough
but couldn’t compare to the fascinating women
that in his travels he had known; his vineyard’s grapes
a bit sour tasted, not like he remembered them at all:
the ocean’s endless horizons he now missed
and soon boredom set in.
What he hadn’t understood is that our Journey
will never end.
2) These verses of Tolkien
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way…
3) This Invocation of Rumi:
Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshipper, lover of partings.
it doesn’t matter: ours isn’t a caravan of despair.
Come, even if a thousand times you broke your vow, come, yet again,
come, come. To the Sky we go, you coming with us?
To Heaven we went, friends of the angels and now there to our Native Land
return; higher of the sky are we, of the angels nobler:
why not to go always beyond?
Do you have any good reasons not to accept his Invitation?
If yes, which ones?
Ha ha ha ha!
Haiku:
In such an infinite, mysterious Journey
with no maps or road signs I see myself
its final destination the Divine is,
the most wondrous Journey of all!
