THE COMPELLING POWER OF TERESA OF AVILA:
An interview with Caroline Myss conducted by Andrew Harvey
Introduction
All Caroline Myss's work is characterized by a forensic clarity and
pioneering courage and brilliance. In her superb new book, "Entering
the Castle," out from Free Press, Simon and Schuster, March 6, 2007 http://www.myss.com/
for her calendar of events. Caroline
enters new territory that of the divinization of the human through mystic
devotion, passion, rigor and illumination. Her guide to this most demanding
and complex of territories, is the great Catholic mystic, Teresa of Avila;
Caroline does a near-miraculous job of helping the modern reader imagine and
enter the seven mansions of Teresa's "Interior Castle" of the soul. In
Caroline's hands perhaps the greatest of all Christian mystical classics is
reinvented and re-imagined for contemporary seekers of all kinds and paths.
Caroline and I sat together on a luminous day in January 2007, in her dining room in Oak Park, IL, and, as the winter sun danced around us, embarked on the wild, rich, exploratory conversation that follows. I pray that all of you who read this will share the holy joy that flowed between us.
Please read our interview slowly, and with your deepest attention. May it bring you what Teresa of Avila called "the inspiration of the loving soul." May it take you into your own "interior castle" and invite you to become "mystics without monasteries" and "Sacred Activists" beings who fuse sacred wisdom and passion, with clear wise radical action, in an endangered world. In St. Teresa's words:
"The Divine has no body on earth but yours,
no hands but yours,
no feet but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which the Divine compassion is to look out to the world
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good;
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now."
no hands but yours,
no feet but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which the Divine compassion is to look out to the world
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good;
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now."
Andrew Harvey:
Why at this moment in your great career did you choose to
write a book about a 16th century nun and her map of the mystical path?
Caroline Myss:
When I was writing Invisible Acts of Power, I was absolutely
broken wide open. I took a look at the nature of service and why people were
drawn to be of service after surviving a crisis. Somehow, a "resurrection
Force", like a primal light from the soul, gets ignited in people who
undergo a life transforming crisis, such as loss or disease. This light is
the underlying grace that activates personal transformations and
specifically the transformations that I noticed included a fundamental need
to be of service. These people no longer wanted to take from life; they
wanted to give to life. That fascinated me. Something had shifted their
interior compass. A passion was awakened in them that gave them a new
appetite for life that was made up of an entirely new interior alchemy that
was lying dormant before, combining gratitude for their own survival, an
appreciation for the simple things of life, and a genuine awareness that the
meaning and purpose they were searching for in life was to be found in
improving the lives of others. So, I did a mailing on my website and I asked
people, "What does the concept of service mean to you?" and "Who have you
served?" and, "Who served you?"
Caroline Myss:
As a result of that inquiry, I received over 1,200 responses
within ten days. I did not expect that the responses of these people would
have the soul-opening affect on me that they did, but I have to say that
these responses broke my heart wide open. To this day, I'm not sure that I
can communicate exactly how or why the stories of those wonderful people had
that effect on me. Maybe it's because I read all 1,300 in such a short
period of time, although I don't think so. I think it's because I had the
realization for the first time of how profoundly powerful the force of love,
generosity, compassion, kindness, and the nonjudging heart truly is. These
letters were filled with accounts of people who literally decided to not
commit suicide or pulled themselves out of the despair and broken-spirited
crisis of being homeless because one human being smiled at them with respect
or held a door open for them. That single act was enough to breathe life
back into the soul of another human being. I was stunned by how little it
took on the part of one human being to do so much for another.
Caroline Myss:
The more I read these stories, the more I thought, "Do human
beings have any idea what power they have at all?" I thought they don't go
anywhere near this power because they can't see it, and I thought what is
it they can't see? Why isn't that power even seen? And then I realized that
that is the soul, and we don't see that power because it is so profoundly
humble, it's such a sweetly humble light.
Caroline Myss:
I decided that these stories had to be shared, which is why
I wrote, INVISIBLE ACTS OF POWER. In gathering all these stories of how a
human being resurrects another human being through such simple means, I
turned to sacred literature, thinking that I would weave the teachings of
all great sacred traditions in between these wonderful accounts as they were
living, breathing, proof of the miracles of grace that the great saints and
mystics and the greatest holy beings like Jesus and Buddha, said occurred
when human actions were blended with the power of Divine grace. But, as I
was saturating myself in the sacred literature again, just thinking I was on
an academic mission to find the right pieces of sacred literature to put
into my book, I thought, "Uh, oh I've put myself on a retreat." My
spiritual instincts were awakened immediately with that realization as I
knew I had in the language of Teresa of Avila, crossed over the drawbridge
and entered into my Castle, only at the time, I had no idea what that meant
in terms of the profound depth of the journey that had just begun. I sat in
my office one day and thought, "This peace I�m feeling, this rich delicious
peace where am I?" I realized I'd crossed something and I'd gone into a
deep, deep retreat space, and I felt for the first time in my life that I
had become soft in the sacred. I can't say it any other way.
Andrew Harvey:
Melted into the sacred?
Caroline Myss:
Melted, yes, I guess that would be a better way to say it. I
had melted into God. I began to merge into the meaning of Divine language
instead of the definition of it. The light from the language of the Divine
felt but only for the briefest second as if it was coming right through
me. I felt a mystical fire enter into my entire body. Shortly after that, I
had a grand mal seizure. And when I came to, I realized that I had drifted
into a space of hell, I knew that my wiring - my interior wiring was
different - I knew that. I also knew my interior life was different. A
passageway had opened up within me that I could sense vibrationally,
energetically, spiritually. I could feel it through silence, through prayer.
The seizure had blown open the door to my Castle.
Andrew Harvey:
I would love you to talk about the timeless relationship
with Teresa that began after the grand mal seizure. This is an extraordinary
story, Caroline, and you must share it.
Caroline Myss:
You know you cannot return to your base of power from which
you feel safe once you�ve had a mystical crisis, and it is a crisis. And,
what I mean by that is I have an Institute and I was teaching a class and I
very much wanted to teach my course on how intuition inevitably evolves to
the mystical bridge. And I was going about it mind you as a scholar.
It's all I knew but I approached this subject with great reverence because I
deeply believe in what I teach. And, so there I was, prepared to teach how
we naturally progress from creatures of instinct to a yearning for
self-awareness to a desire for consciousness guidance to a passion for a
mystical connection. I intended to show on this day the archetypal evolution
of the soul through all the great traditions. I was actually going to begin
with St. John of the Cross but I grabbed THE INTERIOR CASTLE by Teresa of
Avila accidentally and didn't feel like looking through my stack of books to
find THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL. And I thought, "What difference does it
make anyway?"
Caroline Myss:
Earlier that day, someone in the audience had asked about my
personal spiritual history and my spiritual life, which I had always kept
private. And perhaps opening up to this wonderful group of individuals
created the atmosphere for my encounter with Teresa of Avila, I really can't
say for sure. But that morning, after I shared my history with this group
more openly than I have ever discussed with any group of people, I returned
to the class after break prepared to plunge right into a lecture. No more
personal stuff. Suddenly, instantly, I felt something near me, someone near
me. And I paused for a moment as I could feel something in my field and
that something had an exquisite field of grace. I thought, "Who's with me?"
and then I heard, "Follow me, daughter." And I knew it was Teresa. I knew
it was her.
Andrew Harvey:
I want to suggest something and that is that one of the
things that you discover on this journey into the soul is that you are
capable of having the most passionate and powerful and exquisitely
empowering relationships with divine human beings from another epoch.
Rumi wrote in one of his poems that the relationships between the divine
beings of the past and the divine human beings who are trying and struggling
to realize themselves are part of the mystery of the godhead and one of the
most exquisite of those mysteries.
Andrew Harvey:
I myself have had a very profound soul friendship with Rumi
who is more vivid and more alive to me than any other person in my life, and
with Jesus. And what I've discovered in my relationship with Rumi and Jesus
is that there are definite aspects of my own all to human nature that are
fulfilled divinely in their nature, and in a way that constantly works to
transform me. I want to suggest to you that there are three aspects of the
person I know as you which are close to the personality, divine and human,
of Teresa.
Andrew Harvey:
The first is that Teresa is both sublime and extremely
practical, and your nature has that wonderful marriage of great elevation
and very keen, sometimes fierce, down-home truthfulness.
Andrew Harvey:
The second element that I think links you and her is your
extraordinary gift for honest self-revelation. Both Teresa and you are
people who are faithful and rigorous to the truth of your own experience and
very naked about the realities of that experience, what it costs, what it
demands, what it means, what it entails.
Andrew Harvey:
The third aspect that I think links you is that you both
have a genius for synthesis and clarifying very complex information into
luminous and simple diagrams. What I'm suggesting Caroline is that Teresa
knew who she was choosing and she chose you because of these resonances
between your nature and hers - so that her divine nature could communicate
its essence to yours because yours was - in such remarkable ways - so
prepared to mirror hers.
Andrew Harvey:
The other thing that I think is essential in this
extraordinary relationship that you've had with Teresa is that your very
extensive Catholic education, including your graduate work in theology,
prepared you from the earliest part of your life for this mystical
experience.
Andrew Harvey:
I would like you to talk about what you feel you derived
from that education, and how you feel it has influenced you and sustained
you in this mystical partnership that you've had with Teresa.
Caroline Myss:
First, I would like to clarify in great detail exactly what
my very delicate and subtle relationship with Teresa was like during the
writing of ENTERING THE CASTLE, lest I give the wrong impression. Working
with Teresa did not involve episodes of her grabbing my hand and writing
through me, as if she or some other secondary spirit had possessed me. It
was none of that kind of nonsense. Working with her also did not involve
hearing her every day as in that very extraordinary first encounter.
Rather, it was subtle, what she would call intellectual revelation and
that�s her name for it - as described in the 6th mansion of her great
classic, THE INTERIOR CASTLE.
Caroline Myss:
I experienced a dialogue of intellectual revelation and it
required that I, myself become a vessel that required a great deal of
preparation. I had to attain a certain state of tranquility, a certain
height of interior clarity. This required prayer and silence, which I had to
maintain as much as possible within me as well as within my home. My office
space became a sanctuary that began to feel like an embodiment of the
sacred. This was the only way I could attain the altitude necessary to
perceive or receive perceptions that I knew were not mine. The way that I
would explain that is that any parent who knows his or her child recognizes
when the thinking of someone else has influenced that child. The parent then
asks the child, "Who have you been talking to?" They know how that child
thinks, and the parameters of that child's perceptual systems, so they
recognize immediately when their child has been exposed to a new way of
thinking.
Caroline Myss:
And in that same way, you know the way you think and you
know the parameters of your thinking, and when you have been given an idea
or infused with a perception that is outside your realm of thought. Then you
observe how that single perception reorders an entire cluster of thoughts
and perceptions that are familiar to you or that are in the formative stages
within your sensory system. That is, they are perceptions that you have
sensed but not yet given language or structure to, yet these perceptions
incarnate into clear form almost instantly as the result of being given one
core truth. Teresa�s guidance was one truth at a time and each one ordered
an entire chapter in the book, for example.
Andrew Harvey:
You could only really receive her divine instruction and be
receptive to the images of perceptions of her divine instruction if you
become like a mirror, cleansed of all your false self impressions.
Caroline Myss:
Exactly. I had to know where I stopped and where she began.
Andrew Harvey:
So, your job was to stay in that state of radiant nothingness
so that the everything could flash messages on to the screen of your mirror
mind, mirror heart that's the truest meaning of humility, isn't it? To
stay in that silent receptivity, that silent, grounded, divinely tender,
divinely prayerful receptivity so that into that ground the divine can pour
it�s truth and its brilliance.
Caroline Myss:
First, Andrew, let me say that no one can describe the
experience I had more exquisitely than you. Just the phrase, "radiant
nothingness" is something I would never have thought to say. On a more
grounded level, I had to maintain my inner tranquility, to the best of my
ability, given the daily struggles with my own life. But the effort is so
worth the rewards. I think it is appropriate to ask about the relevance of
the teachings of this Carmelite nun from the 1600's in today's society whose
great work was a treatise on mystical illumination through prayer. At first
glance, the ordinary mind would be inclined perhaps to dismiss her work as
too Catholic or just for Catholics or just for nuns or monastics. But
nothing could be further from the truth. We are living in a world gone mad,
but not just mad in terms of war and chaos. There is a madness in this world
that is the result of living too fast, forcing yourself to function without
time to reflect upon the cause and effect of your choices and the quality of
your relationships and the consequences of your actions. People live so
scheduled, so pressured, so bound up in this nonsensical adoration of doing
things faster and faster and faster among other superficial values that
this adoration of speed has transferred to what they expect from their
spiritual life, if you want to call what they have a spiritual life at all.
A yoga class and a vegetarian diet is not a spiritual life, nor is therapy
and learning about self-empowerment and how to get what you want in three
easy lessons. What on earth does that have to do with the soul?
Caroline Myss:
Small comments are great indicators of what people really
believe as opposed to what they say they believe and the following example,
which is among the most common that I hear, positions the matter of faith as
the last empowered option that people turn to. When a crisis occurs and
everything "humanly possible" has been done to rectify or treat the problem
or illness, people will always say, "All we can do now is pray". Prayer is
seen as a last option or the tactic one turns to when the really effective
things that they were counting on have failed. The statement is really a
symbolic admission that says prayer is the caboose on the train of life for
people and not the engine. If people truly understood the power of prayer
and the power of grace, they would pray as their first step in every thing
that they did and not as a last resort because everything else on the human
level failed. But that is not how most people truly and authentically
relate to the power of prayer it is not a real power for them, at least it
is not as real as a power they can touch.
Caroline Myss:
It's more than appropriate at this critical stage in our
spiritual, social, and political climate, that the work of Teresa of Avila
be re-introduced into the mainstream of our culture. People need to
discover the profound power of their soul. We need to discover the power
that the mystics uncovered when they fell in love with God. We need to
discover that more than needing to be healed, that we have the capacity to
heal others and that our deepest calling in life is to move beyond needing
to have more and more and more. We need to step beyond ourselves and
discover what it means to be of service, beyond the experience of taking
care of others in such a way that it leads to self-exhaustion, resentment,
and burn-out. That's not spiritual service; that's self-pity and working
from the motivation of the ego. The soul doesn't exhaust from serving
others, regardless of the arena, but one has to learn how to merge service
with wisdom, self-reflection, and the management of grace.
Caroline Myss:
As odd as this may strike the reader upon first glance, the
fact is that the call to be a "mystic out of a monastery" and to serve
humanity through acts of the soul is now falling upon the shoulders of the
ordinary human being. Mystics have long been associated with being
recluses, running away to monasteries in order to keep their own company.
But they were wild, strong, stubborn, powerful, and rebellious personalities
who lead rebellions and wrote great books and turned their worlds
up-side-down. They became the healers of their day and the educators and the
ones who withdrew into prayer in order to receive Divine revelation about
what the society should do next in times of great change. The last thing
Teresa of Avila or Francis of Assisi or John of the Cross or Eastern mystics
such as Rumi or Rabindranath Tagore were recluses. They were profound and
powerful leaders of eras of transformation, not unlike the times we face
right now.
Caroline Myss:
What they knew is what many people are now discovering in
their own way: the more the outside world spins out of control, the more
your interior world must assume full control. Acquiring material goods will
not help you to make sense of the massive changes occurring in this world
and you have to be blind to think that America or the rest of the world is
headed toward peace. We are headed toward more and more chaotic change and
we must rise to face that change with courage and not denial. That is why I
feel compelled to lead people across cross the drawbridge and into their
inner Castle. Each person is born with a passion to connect with the
sacred. We have a yearning for that. We have an absolutely passion to be
brought to our knees before the Divine, to witness a miracle, to see the
waters part, to see the blind recover their eyesight, to see people healed
from incurable diseases. We long to see the presence of God among us in
these ways, which is why people make pilgrimages to sacred spots or even go
on nature outings and swoon over a sunset. They will reach to anything to be
near God, or as close to a version of God as they will allow themselves to
go near. Teresa's teachings are perfect for this time. They are perfect for
the modern sojourner. I know because I have worked with people for
twenty-five years and I have come to the conclusion that this search for
highest potential that drives the contemporary spiritual seeker is really a
search for the drawbridge into the Castle. It's really a search to find a
way not to be afraid of your own life, or to hear guidance that tells you to
help a homeless person. It's tragic to live in fear of your own life.
Tragic.
Andrew Harvey:
Lets get back to the influence that your Catholic background
had on you. I thinks it's crucial.
Caroline Myss:
Well, I'm no devotee of the Vatican, so let's just say
there�s a difference between religion and the soul path. And the religion,
any religion, is an expression of the politics of God, so all religions have
that in common therein lies the politics of God, so whether your dealing
with Judaism or Islam or Catholicism, all of them are a manifestation of the
power of God reduced to tribalism and tribal masks and tribal myths.
But, Catholic mysticism absolutely intrigues me, the tradition of the
saints, the tradition of the mystical experience, the tradition of being
passionately drawn to the soul's journey. I believe I would be a mystic no
matter what tradition I had been born in because that is the nature of my
soul. I happen to have been born a Catholic, which is the most mystical
tradition of the Christians. So, the ground rules were set for me to walk
this path within the Christian tradition.
Caroline Myss:
So I have this tradition in my bones that says, "Heaven
walks next to you." Not above you, within and next to. It breathes with
you. The Madonna is not some imaginative force she's not some goddess, I
can't use that word very comfortably, actually, as it's not natural to me.
But she is very much a Divine Mother and she appears when this Earth is in
trouble. And you know what, she does, like her famous apparitions at
Lourdes, Fatima, and now Medjugorje. Her messages are consistent in all
apparitions, messages calling for prayers, conversion not to Catholicism, by
the way, but to prayer and to peace. In return, places of profound miracles
are left behind, such as the healing water of Lourdes. In none of her
apparitions has she urged people to convert to Catholicism. She urges
conversion to acts of love, prayer, and compassion so that all of humanity
can cease its unnecessary suffering.
Caroline Myss:
Now, the concept of what mysticism is very much a mystery.
It is a deep and profoundly conscious mystery that beckons one to tamper
with the very structure of his or her cosmic compass. A person that says I
don�t think I want heaven to be way up above me. Rather, I think I want it
next to me, indeed, I want heaven to exist within me. What would happen,
for example, if I shifted the location of my idea of God and decided that
the Divine did not exist in some sort of cosmic distance above or beyond the
celestial bodies of light. What if I lowered that equation and breathed the
Divine next to me and within me, surrounding myself with the presence and
power of God. That shift in compass would mean the end of all boundaries
between this physical world and a Divine world as the two would merge into
one.�
Caroline Myss:
Our five senses want immediate gratification. We want to see
the cause and effect of our actions right now, and it�s very hard to compete
with the speed at which our five senses want a cause and effect. Like
money, we want to see a cause and effect on the interest of our investments
immediately. It�s very difficult to compete with that reality. So, when you
say to someone that prayer is far more powerful than any force in the
physical world, I realize that to the five sensory driven individual, that
remains incomprehensible. People often ask, "Well, which prayers work?" They
treat prayers as magical spells.
Andrew Harvey:
I think that is true. I think you were saved from what I
call "the marzipan mysticism of our time" by being schooled in this clean,
clear, fierce, rigorous school of Catholic mysticism. There are five aspects
of this schooling that have actually been penetrating your work from the
beginning, and that are now coming to fruition in Entering the Castle.
Andrew Harvey:
The first thing that you got, I believe, from this amazing
education that you had was what you describe as the feeling that heaven is
walking in you and beside you - a profound sense of the sacred and of the
cosmos as sacred, which is the essence of the great Catholic mystics from
Eckhart to St. Francis to Teresa, herself.
Andrew Harvey:
The second thing I believe that you have derived from the
Catholic mystical tradition is a profound sense that the core of the
relationship between the soul and the Beloved is a great passion, a great
holy, divine passion. You have this in your personal life, in the way you
teach and in the way you speak about Teresa but, it�s one of the things
that has deeply intoxicated you when you speak about Teresa, you speak about
her with a great holy passion of the soul and it�s this holy passion of
the Christian mystics, for Jesus or for the Madonna that has actually
ignited the great stream of Christian mysticism, and it�s something that you
share and transmit.
Andrew Harvey:
The third thing that I believe you derive from your Catholic
schooling is a very deep discipline of devotion. All of the great mystics of
the Catholic tradition speak again and again in different ways of the
necessity for a daily, down-home practice of deep contemplative devotion as
a profound means of uncovering the inner life of the soul. And, one of the
things I love deeply about your book is your constant emphasis on the
unending need for this sacred discipline.
Andrew Harvey:
The fourth thing that I believe that you have inherited from
this tradition is one of it�s greatest contributions to world mysticism - an
absolutely no-nonsense psychological realism.
Andrew Harvey:
And one of the great strengths of the book that you�ve
created is how again and again you help people see how their fears,
fantasies and illusions are blocking them.
Andrew Harvey:
Finally you have inherited, I believe from the Catholic
mystical tradition, a deep belief in sanctity. You deeply believe in the
divinization of the human through the disciplines of mystical rigor. You
truly believe that through these exercises, through this discipline, through
this devotion, through following this rigorous road map of the soul that all
of the Catholic mystics have and Teresa, of course is the supreme teacher
of it that the human being can go to a completely new level of
self-empowerment, radiance, humility and unconditional compassionate action
in this world. This is a very powerful transmission that's come through to
you from your tradition.
Andrew Harvey:
What is going to make this book so helpful is that you have
separated the essential jewels of the tradition from the dogma and the
authoritarian aspects of the tradition, which are clearly destructive. Now,
these jewels - of a profound sense of cosmic sacredness, of a deep sense of
holy passion, of an absolute commitment to true discipline, of a profound
psychological realism that is absolutely unsentimental and of a vision of
the potential sanctification of the human can now through Teresa and your
work together be given to any seeker on any path of any religion to be used
in the core of modern life.
Andrew Harvey:
I am so moved by the way in which you have been able to
universalize and rescue these truths from all of the excretions of the
tradition, which you nevertheless celebrate with such profound humility and
gratitude.
Andrew Harvey:
What you're looking at in our world, is an overwhelming,
even demonic triumph of the false self, in all the different aspects of
human endeavor. This is why your enterprise in this book is so important.
Through Teresa's grace and with her help, you are bringing back an authentic
mysticism which is deeply rigorous, which shines a divine, clear, fierce
light on all illusions, all agendas, all fantasies and helps people enter
the truth and the peace and the real self-empowerment of the soul.
Andrew Harvey:
What is especially exiting to me about what you�re saying is
your insistence that the demands of this time have ended the privileged
vision of the mystic as a person who withdraws into a monastery or an
ashram. I agree deeply with you that our time of vast and challenging change
is inviting all of us to become what you call mystics without monasteries,
and to act from the deepest spiritual wisdom in all the arenas of our
burning world.
Andrew Harvey:
Am I characterizing your thought?
Caroline Myss:
Yes, absolutely. And within that context of transformation
that you described, again the question needs to be posed, "Why would someone
want to enter his or her Castle?" I bring this up again because the fact is
this journey is one of great power. No one makes this journey and continues
to live an ordinary life. The Castle is the deep metaphor for the soul. Why
would someone want to enter the journey of illumination? What's in it for
them? When a mystic speaks about how painful the journey into the soul
could be, for example, what are they talking about? And that is an
appropriate question, among the many we could bring up, because as I have
discovered in my work, most people are terrified of an intimate experience
with God. They fear that they will lose their worldly goods and suffer
illness, loss, and poverty an image that we can thank Catholic history for
fostering.
Caroline Myss:
But what I explain to people again and again is that a
mystics� pain is not ordinary pain, not at all. It�s the pain of seeing
clearly, a pain that comes from waking up and seeing that life could be
other than the way it is. It's the pain of recognizing that humanity does
not have to struggle the way it's struggling or to see clearly, that there
is a cost to seeing truth and living within a culture of deception.
Andrew Harvey:
T. S. Elliott puts it beautifully when he says that the
choice is between fire or fire. The fire of being destroyed by a culture of
negation, irony, desolation, cynicism and a total addiction to lies; or the
fire that is the divine fire that purifies and that can sometimes feel like
agony and death.
Caroline Myss:
Rightly so. A person should say, "What do I want this for?"
What do I want this for? And it's like what you face when you motivate
people in sacred activism. Why do I want to become active with the sacred?
Why? When in fact I could indulge myself and continue to indulge myself.
What do I care about the next generation I'm not going to be here?
Andrew Harvey:
The chaos and deceit that is occurring all around us today
can be so overwhelming as to lead to complete denial like in ancient Rome,
where they turned to a culture of bread and circuses.
Andrew Harvey:
The thing that does motivate people, I've discovered -and
this I believe is what all mystics discover- is that the radiance and power
and joy and ecstasy and deep health of the heart that come to those who
undertake the mystical journey, intoxicates them with a real promise that
their life can be a transfigured life.
Caroline Myss:
What ultimately I have hope in, as I talk to people about
this mystical renaissance that we are in the midst of right now, is that
people are being called, just like they were in the old days of the classic
mystics who were called into monasteries. They difference is these
individuals are not meant to be recluses mystics without monasteries. They
are being called to fall in love with God in an impassioned way wherever
they are and they are given a ferocious appetite to discover that power of
prayer, to discover that force to hold a door open and watch that simple
act of respect give a man back his will to live. Nothing is more profound
than to awaken your power to channel grace at a distance and know that the
grace that flows through you is a source of healing. That they can access
what the mystics did, that they can become a vessel of transformation
through the power of their soul that is what the journey of illumination
within one�s Castle is all about. That's when a person discovers for the
first time what the real meaning is of knowing he or she was truly born for
a higher purpose. That higher purpose has to do with a Divine calling and
not an earthly occupation. Therein lies the seduction of God.
Andrew Harvey:
I believe that this book represents your own transformation
as well as a transmission from Teresa to your heart. I believe that you�ve
been taken into the profound and fiery crucible of a mystical
transformation. I believe too that the process of the writing of the book
and getting all the different mansions of the soul clear for other people,
have also been a tremendous process of self-reflection and
self-transformation for yourself.
Andrew Harvey:
And I wonder on this morning, as we sit with the winter sun
streaming through into your dining room - where are you in your journey now?
Where has this sublime and harrowing journey with Teresa taken you?
Caroline Myss:
Where I once felt that I didn�t have any active spiritual
life, I feel completely alive spiritually. I feel alive, whereas before I
felt like an outsider, looking in. That�s the best way I could put it.
"May God let you taste
the incredible joy of complete union.
Nothing the world can give us
Not possessions, not riches, not delights or honors, not great feasts or
festivals
Can match the happiness of a single moment
Spent by a soul totally united to God."
the incredible joy of complete union.
Nothing the world can give us
Not possessions, not riches, not delights or honors, not great feasts or
festivals
Can match the happiness of a single moment
Spent by a soul totally united to God."
Teresa of Avila
(copyright myss/CMED 2007)
Andrew Harvey is an internationally acclaimed poet, novelist, mystical
scholar, spiritual teacher and a pioneering architect of Sacred Activism. He
is the author of more than 30 books, including "Son of Man"; "The Mystical
Path to Christ" (Tarcher 1999) which sets out in detail his vision of
Jesus's revolutionary mission and the Christian mystical tradition, and The
"Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi" (Tarcher paperback 2000) which
explores his long love for Rumi and Rumi's message for our time. Andrew
Harvey is now dedicating his life to what he has called "Sacred Activism"
that fusion of sacred knowledge, passion, and energy with clear wise radical
action in all arena's that he believes essential both to the transformation
of humanity and it's survival. His DVD Sacred Activism is available fromthe
Hartley Foundation at 800-937-1819 info at http://www.hartleyfoundation.org Information about his biography, schedule and workshops can be obtained from his website:
http://www.andrewharvey.net/
http://www.andrewharvey.net/
(OPEN TO THE PUBLIC)
Chicago, IL 3/6/07
New York, NY 3/8/07
Boston, MA 3/10/07
Washington, DC 3/12/07
Phoenix, AZ 3/19/07
Los Angeles, CA 3/21/07
San Francisco, CA 3/23/07
Seattle, WA 3/25/07
Denver, CO 3/27/07
Phladelphia,PA 3/29/07
Tulsa 3/31/07
Chicago, IL 3/6/07
New York, NY 3/8/07
Boston, MA 3/10/07
Washington, DC 3/12/07
Phoenix, AZ 3/19/07
Los Angeles, CA 3/21/07
San Francisco, CA 3/23/07
Seattle, WA 3/25/07
Denver, CO 3/27/07
Phladelphia,PA 3/29/07
Tulsa 3/31/07
