There is an old story of a wise Sage who was working in his garden one day when a spiritual seeker came to him and asked how to become enlightened. The teacher pulled an onion out of the garden and said dig a hole over there for this onion where the soil is rich and fertile. The student did that and in that moment had an epiphany, an awakening.
I’ll explain this to you in just a minute, but this story is typical of many of the stories like the parables in the Bible that have a meaning that can be understood at different levels.
This short story speaks to the nature of the spiritual path and that is to remove blocks, pain and struggle while revealing the deep truth of love, light and peace within. Digging up the onion is parallel with detaching from the many things that prevent us from discovering and connecting with our inner soul truth, and replanting the onion is learning to grow in the fertile soil of our inner nature.
The complication we experience with life is that we are established citizens of two worlds and we live in both simultaneously. Jesus said you are in the world but not of the world. We interact in an outer world with our physical needs and the demands of our families, friends and careers, and we also have an inner world of emotional experiences, intellectual discoveries, and spiritual awareness.
Our spiritual journey is about learning to effectively live in both worlds, and for this we need methods that support us in both.
> Read part 2 of this article.
