A Path With Heart

...Lily in our patio pond...

In undertaking a spiritual life, what matters is simple: We must make certain that ours is a path with heart. Many other visions are offered to us in the modern spiritual marketplace. Spiritual traditions offer stories of enlightenment, bliss, knowledge, divine ecstasy, and the highest possibilities of the human spirit. Out of the broad range of teachings available to us in the world, we are often first attracted to these glamorous  and most extraordinary aspects. While the promise of attaining such states can come true, and while these states do represent the teachings in one sense, they are also one of the advertising techniques of the spiritual trade. They are not the goal of spiritual life.

In the end, spiritual life is not a process of seeking or gaining some extraordinary condition or special powers. In fact, such seeking can take us away from ourselves and from awakening. If we are not careful, we can easily find the great failures of our modern society - its ambitions, materialism, and individual isolation - repeated in our spiritual life.

In beginning a genuine spiritual journey, we have to stay much closer to home, to focus directly on what is right here in front of us, to make sure that our path is connected with love and a simple, compassionate presence. Listening with the heart to the mystery here and now is where meditation begins.

- Jack Kornfield, adapted from A Path With Heart:

A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life