Authentic heart - Excerpt by Andrew Harvey

You cannot live in the authentic heart without being open to what the authentic heart is open to — the great ecstasy and the great heartbreaks. They come together in any real mystical awareness and any real mystical opening. The purpose of being opened to the great suffering--the great heartbreak--is to make real love's authentic task in the world, which is to respond constantly, actively, to the reality of the extreme of life's suffering. The other initiation that only heartbreak can give you is an initiation into radical humility because so many people use the spiritual path as a way of hiding from suffering, bypassing suffering, using transcendence as a refined form of heroin so as not to experience suffering. What heartbreak does is show you that you are human and that you are implicated in the great suffering of humanity. And the spiritual path is not about escaping from that implication, but about being strong enough to embrace it and act on it.

~Andrew Harvey

SOURCE: https://www.andrewharvey.net/