Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening

From this perspective, life is more like a series of lessons, cleverly curated as if by a benevolent universe that is seeking to bring us more into alignment with its truths, or its “implicit order”—in physicist David Bohm’s phrase, the “order” by which it manifests and functions. We are coming to know this other order more intimately. And sometime

So I noticed that there were some images in my mind and some inner talk, and I labeled them: Image and Talk. Then I noticed a light contraction in the left side of my diaphragm and noted, Feel. And quickly, I then noticed the sensations of my lower legs and feet on the meditation mat and the quiet sighing of wind outside. So I labeled them all acco

The strangest thing here is the sense that the moment has been just waiting for us to notice it. What took you so long? it seems to ask. I’ve been here waiting for you all this time. . . .

If gratitude isn’t accessible, then pivot and see if it’s possible to feel a certain kind of humility. Recognize how all that you have in life may, in some areas, be a result of your own efforts, but so much more exists by virtue of forces far outside your control. Your life depends on a trillion contingencies. Yet it’s happening. And not just thro

Logos and science seek to know through hypothesis, experiment, and evidence. Their straight gaze will never know the soul. Mythos, which is the soul’s territory, knows through glimpses and refracted glances out of the corner of its eye. It is attuned to hints and hunches, yet what it knows, it knows deeply.

seat. And the struts hold the floorboards,

we might start to ask how much our life is really our own at all, and to what extent it is more like a constellation of a million dependences.

The suffering many of us have lived with as a vague background condition—a sense of lack, of deficiency, or a hunger, a hankering after things not yet here—has come to the fore, and we are getting to know it more clearly. As a result of allowing it to be as it is, it is starting to dwindle and at times release itself.

By contrast, as long as we follow our urges, we stay, as it were, on the same level on which they occur. But once we allow them, and offer them a home, then we see that we don’t actually need what they tell us we need. That’s growth and it’s a beautiful thing. It touches and opens our hearts when it occurs. And it affirms what Simone Weil meant whe