Creating A Path

by Stephen Batchelor

"As we learn to play this complex instrument of bones, flesh, nerves, impulses, thoughts, and feelings, we trace a path that weaves its way like a channel through the landscape of our experience. It is guided by an intuitive yearning for what we value most deeply; its space is the openness we are able to tolerate within our hearts and minds; it is sustained by the networks of friendship that inspire us to keep going. The path follows the contours of our life as one day turns into the next. It is found amidst the most mundane of circumstances as well as the most sublime...
To create a path is to become intimate with the space opening up withing, around, and before us. This intimacy comes from the mindful awareness of what is unfolding in our body, feelings, minds, and worlds from moment to moment. We get used to the taste, the feel, the texture of the path. It ceases to be something to which we self-consciously aspire.. When we stray from it, we feel its loss as an act of self-betrayal."

~ Stephen Batchelor, Living With the Devil, p.79-80