Testing & Proving

"To be humble means to be flexible and free to respond freely. If you have adopted a position your ego will feel obliged to defend it, and so give falsehood a ready access.
"'What is the way forward?' There is no way forward. The road stops here, in the middle of the desert, in the middle of the wilderness. From now on you must depend upon the guidance of your instincts. How you would like to be on the highway speeding towards a hotel reservation and a nice cool shower! But you aren’t, you’re trudging thru the undergrowth, uncertain of your direction in a landscape where there are no distinguishing features. Trust your instincts to be the compass. More particularly, trust your first instinct. Record it to avoid revisionism and trust yourself to follow it. If you chop and change, you’re almost certain to go round in a circle & end up back at the same position — but hungrier and more desperate!
"God speaks first, the devil second. What comes first into your mind is inspired by your inmost psyche — that which connects most completely to the spirit world. Its strong and tough, and durable as a generation of peasant women. Thereafter fear come in like a priest, your intellect overwhelms simple thought with learned responses. And your inner voice drowns in a tide of conventional wisdom. “What have I to offer,” she says, “amid these great ones of the world?”
"My friend, why do you think you’re in the desert in the first place? Its to toughen you up, to teach you to draw nourishment from stones. To be. Your money can buy you nothing here. Its just you and me. And I’ve got as long as you want!
"Of course you’d like it to be faster. You’d like to skip the difficult bits and jump straight onto the platform where you can be adored as a teacher! But if you don’t trust yourself to follow your inner voice when there are no well-meaning spiritual tourists to rearrange your life, how could you cope for 5 minutes when they’re crawling out of the woodwork? If you complete the wilderness experience you’ll gain a shekinah — the glow of one who has overcome, who has resolved hir internal contradictions. That is precisely what all the tourists want. They come to the edge of the wilderness to see if they can spot one of you strange fakirs, you abnormally certain ones. Their cameras are at the ready. Given a chance they will patronise you, maybe offer you a coin or 2, and so return to the city believing they have been transformed by ‘meeting this funny old person’.
"All those who aren’t willing to embark on the path themselves are an irrelevance and a distraction, but it's your duty to treat their footloose minds courteously. You were once as they are.
"Of course if you make it easy for them, they'll overwhelm you with rewards. That was the Christ’s easiest temptation. If your role is to heal/to whole others, you must yourself be wholed. If your role is to teach/to mould others, your die must be cast at a much higher temperature to give durability, or it will fuse with the one it impresses. The sword that is to cut must be tempered: indeed it must never lose its temper.
"Integrity is a bell which rings with clarity and penetration only if its whole and in self-harmony. A cracked bell emits only a dull clang. I am your guide and I know what you need. Trust me and you trust yourself. You can always follow the noise, find the highway, and so hitch a lift to the city. But what was the point of coming? You knew before you started that you needed this experience. Trust it.
"‘God tempts (tempers) noone above that s/he is able.’ How does it feel to be tempered? Not much fun eh? The heat a little too much? How can the constituent elements of your uncertainties be transformed other than by fusing them together at an immense temperature into a single crystalline structure? That’s how all the jewels on earth have been created. And afterwards they’re not even put on display but left buried in the rock! If you had your way you’d be put in a bullet-proof case and paraded around the world. And where would be the freedom or fulfilment in that? All that you set out to find in yourself would most assuredly and permanently be lost. Be content to pad softly thru the wilderness, sounding your authentic note without effort, and afterwards be buried deep in the earth! You believe I exist? Leave the rest to me."