On Knowing Ourselves and Others

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There's a lot of obsession in our times with spiritual programs. Meister Eckhart seems very Celtic when he said, "There is no such thing as a spiritual journey." I find that a little bit shocking, but also refreshing. In other words, if there is a spiritual journey, it's about a quarter of an inch long, and it's about coming into rhythm with your deeper nature and presence.

But you don't have to go outside yourself to come into real conversation with your soul and with the depth of the spiritual world. There's a lovely Celtic phrase in Gaelic, which translated means "the land of the eternal young is at the back of the house, a beautiful land scattered into itself." This means that the eternal and the mortal worlds are neither parallel to each other nor far away from each other but the two are completely fused into each other. There's another lovely Irish phrase that says these worlds are woven in and across each other. That means that behind each human face is something eternal. Behind the façade of our normal lives, there is an eternal destiny finding its way and opening us up and opening us out.

I love the idea of the awakening of the human spirit and the coming into rhythm with the depth and presence of our souls. But one of the things that militates against that is our sense of familiarity with the world. In a certain way when we are familiar with something, we lose the energy and edge and excitement of it. Hegel used to say that a thing because it's familiar remains unknown. That's a very powerful sentence because it means that behind the façade of what is familiar, the strangest things await us.

That's also true of relationships and friendships. In a wonderful book of conversations with the poet Pedro Mendoza, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was asked about his relationship with his wife Mercedes, and he said, "I know her so well now, I haven't the slightest idea who she really is."

One of the difficulties for people, in awakening to their inner world is the familiarity of their lives. They find it hard to find something that is really new and interesting and adventurous in themselves and yet everything that we really need for our journey here has already been given to us. So there's a great strangeness in the shadows of our soul world, that we should become more conversant with and closer to.