The Heart of the Matter

What we often try to say is not always in the words themselves. Sometimes you have to go through strange stuff to get to the heart of the matter, which is always different from the point of departure - to take something and look at it from every angle with a quiet dispassion, which allows the space for something you don't yet know to emerge that is greater than the sum of the parts.

If you get only halfway into it, it can look kind of messy. Not that that matters when it remains internalized, when there is faith in the process. But there is a risk in bringing it outside of yourself.

Exposure is an offer of exchange of trust. How much you can do that with someone depends on a mutual exchange of trust. It is the defining point of friendship: to listen to someone else, not as an affirmation of a point of view, nor as a challenge to your own beliefs, but as a work in progress.

There are sublime places to reach, but you have to pass down thorny paths to get there. From time to time you find a travelling companion. Even so, ultimately you travel alone.

And that incidentally amounts to exactly the same attitude to take between me and myself in the inner world in meditation.