Direct Path: Creating a Journey to the Divine Using the World's Mystical Traditions

The Map The soul grows by its constant participation in that which transcends it. --Gregory of Nyassa You have to climb the stairs and rest your feet firmly on each step in order to reach the summit. --Sri Aurobindo Between me and You, there is only me. Take away the me, so only You remain. --Al-Hallaj Why We Are Here Take courage. The human race is divine. --Pythagoras The first thing we must understand if we are to take the Direct Path in full awareness is why we are here in the first place and who and what we really are. The great mystical traditions are astonishingly united in their answers to these questions; they each claim, in different ways, that we are essentially sparks of Divine Consciousness, emanated by the Divine out of itself, and placed here in this dimension to travel back to conscious union with the Godhead. Thus, for the Buddhist mystics, the purpose of being incarnated here is to unfold our innate Buddha nature and enter into conscious possession of its timeless peace, bliss, power, and all-seeing knowledge. For the Hindu mystics of the Gita and the Upanishads, the whole meaning of human life lies in realizing the essential unity of our individual soul, the atman, with Brahman, the eternal reality, that timeless and spaceless and placeless bliss-truth-consciousness that is at once manifesting everything in all the worlds and beyond all manifestation. Sufi mystics claim that the human being has a unique relationship to God because God fashioned us with his own hands, while creating all other things by the Divine Word and its fiat; they believe that God, while making us, breathed into us his own being, sowed in our innermost core a memory of our origin in him, and ordained that the whole purpose of our lives on earth should be to return in full awareness to the Origin, whose children we are. For Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Teresa of Avila, the soul is placed in a body and in matter to undertake the immense journey to a living aware "marriage" with the inner Christ and his divine love and knowledge. For Taoists like Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu, the whole of the universe is a manifestation of the the mystery of the Unnamable--which for convenience's sake they name the Tao--and the one who realizes his or her own nature realizes his or her own essential unity on every level with this Tao in its original peace, harmony, and boundless fecundity. When you look past the different terminologies employed by the different mystical systems, you see clearly that they are each talking about the same overwhelming truth--that we are all essentially children of the Divine and can realize that identity with our Source here on earth and in a body. Although each of the mystical systems expresses it in subtly different ways, this realization that we can all have of our essential identity with the Divine is always described as a nondual one--that is, as a relationship in which we wake up to the overwhelming and glorious fact that our fundamental consciousness is "one" with the Divine Consciousness that is manifesting all things, all worlds, and all events. In other words, we are each of us parts of Godhead who, when we are aware of it, enter into a naked, nonconceptual identity-of-consciousness with the Source from which all things and all events are constantly streaming. Each of the major systems has a different way of characterizing this astounding truth. Jesus in the Gospels says; "The Kingdom is within you." The seers of the Hindu Upanishads describe the awakening in three interrelated short formulas: tat tvam Asi, aham Brahmasmi, and sarvam Brahmasm, which mean "You are That," "You are Brahman," and "Everything that is is Brahman." A Tibetan Buddhist, Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche, describes this nondual realization of essential unity with all things in the foHarvey, Andrew is the author of 'Direct Path: Creating a Journey to the Divine Using the World's Mystical Traditions' with ISBN 9780767902991 and ISBN 0767902998.