Cryin...

In the West we are conditioned to believe that at the beginning of every journey we should know where we are going and how to get there. Caught in this conditioning, we apply it to spiritual life: what is the goal we seek and what are the practices that will take us there? But the real journey of the soul is not of our own choosing, nor can we find our own way. We are responding to a call that will take us beyond the known into the unknown, beyond the world of forms into the formless.The spiritual journey is the most difficult undertaking. It is a voluntary crucifixion in which we die to the ego. Of our own accord we would never turn away from the world with its many attractions and illusions and begin this painful, lonely quest. It is only because He calls us, because He attracts our attention with His love, that we set out upon the path of no return. Like a magnet He draws us to Him with love, for, in the words of the Sufi poet Nizami,

"If the magnet were not loving, how could it attract the iron with such longing?"