“All major mystical traditions have recognized that there is a paradox at the heart of the journey of return to Origin. Put simply, this is that we are already what we seek, and that what we are looking for on the Path with such an intensity of striving and passion and discipline is already within and around us at all moments.
The journey and all its different ordeals are all emanations of the One Spirit that is manifesting everything in all dimensions; every rung of the ladder we climb toward final awareness is made of the divine stuff of awareness itself.
Divine Consciousness is at once creating and manifesting all things and acting in and as all things in various states of self-disguise throughout all the different levels and dimensions of the universe.
The great Hindu mystic Kabir put this paradox with characteristic simplicity when he said:
Look at you, you madman,
Screaming you are thirsty
And are dying in a desert
When all around you there
is nothing but water!
And the Sufi poet Rumi reminds us:
You wander from room to room
Hunting for the diamond necklace
That is already around your neck!
We are so addicted, either to materialism or to transcending material reality, that we don’t see God right in front of us, in the beggar, the starving child, the brokenhearted woman; in our friend; in the cat; in the flea. We miss it..
This world is not an illusion, and the philosophies that say it is are half-baked half-truths. In an authentic mystical experience, the world does disappear and reveal itself as the dance of the divine consciousness.
But then it reappears, and you see that everything you are looking at is God, and everything you’re touching is God. This vision completely shatters you.
The Paradox of the Journey
Knowing that we are looking for something we already have (and are) does not, of course, mean that the journey is unnecessary, only that there is a vast and sublime joke waiting to be discovered at its end.
One serious explanation of this joke at the heart of the journey is, of course, that our essential self is hidden from us by what the Sufi mystics call ‘a hundred thousand veils of illusion.’
Placed in this dimension of time and space and matter, we forget who we are; we identify our essential nature with what surrounds us and with what our culture and society and parents and ordinary senses tell us about ourselves.
A massive journey is then needed for us to ‘dis-identify’ with everything we have falsely learned about our selves so that we can experience, with the ‘hundred thousand veils’ burned away, the glory of our true identity….“
~By Andrew Harvey, The Direct Path ~
Creative by Nature 
A Call For Unity, Nanci Danison
The recent presidential election seems to have revealed deep schisms in our national unity. Clearly, elections are the basest form of animal behavior–selecting the Alpha dog–and campaigns generally bring out the worst in candidates. But, this year, the whole election process seems to have brought out the worst in all of us. It’s time for a new perspective.
We are all Source. There is only one divinity, one consciousness, one Creator. Each and every one of us is part of that divinity, consciousness, and Creator.
No matter what our body’s gender, we are Source.
No matter which gender our body loves, we are Source.
No matter what color our body’s skin, we are Source.
No matter where we or our parents lived before coming to the U.S., we are Source.
No matter what our religious beliefs, we are Source.
No matter what our political views, we are Source.
We are now, and always have been, one entity. We are one mind. We are one intelligence. We are one consciousness. We are one Source, indivisible and eternal.
Please, please, try to remember there is no one to hate who isn’t part of us.
Reblogged this on Susannah Hay and commented:
Christopher Chase’s blog is the source of thought-provoking messages on many different topics, often by other authors. Here is one of my favourites:
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Thanks Susannah!!!