Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Secret Book 12: The Original Path

Arden and Wall's Epistle to the Journey

1. You don't take the journey. The journey takes you.

2. Life… is not an entertainment. Life is a task, a holy task.

3. There's a path you follow and there's a set of Original Instructions for following that path. Our journey, our life's work, has been an unfolding of those Instructions….

4. It can be hard to find and difficult to follow, at times even dangerous to your being, both physical and spiritual.

5. Unless it's your path, it's pointless to follow. But if it is your path, then, alas, it's pointless to follow any other.

6. We cannot tell you where this path leads. Perhaps only to itself. It may be simply an endlessly-looping circle of meaning that is self-evident only to those who travel along it.

7. Indeed, that could be a definition for any belief system… metaphorical constructions devised to explain the inexplicable, to give meaning to the otherwise meaningless, to make humanly accessible the fathomless Mystery….

8. Every path has its signs, its signposts. If you can't read them, or refuse to acknowledge them, they're certainly not going to help you find your way. Those signs are as much within yourself as they are "out there."

9. Dismiss them with a skeptical sneer and, in the end, you're left with the ashes of your own disbelief. But open your eyes to their possible meaning, to their soul-charging poetry, and you may suddenly find yourself "on the wind…."

10. They come when they come, and when they do they're always intensely personal and specific…. Sometimes they're hopeful, sometimes foreboding; sometimes they're harbingers, sometimes confirmations, sometimes warnings, sometimes seemingly cosmic jokes.

11. For any and all such "signs" we make no claims beyond the ordinary. Indeed, we've learned that the ordinary is, at times, the most visionary state of all.

12. The ordinary, this very passing moment, this holy unstoppable Now, is the entry-point, the gateway, to… the Great Reality.

13. Wisdom isn't something you believe. It's something you do. The Instructions for doing it may not come to you until the last possible and least expected moment--sometimes just as you've abandoned all hope and stopped trying.

14. You can't think your way to the Truth. Truth, like Beauty, isn't something you think, it's something you feel. Just as you can't think the wind, you can only feel it.

~Harvey Arden and Steve Wall

see the complete The Secret Book of Son Rivers to date

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