Each step promised to bring me closer. Closer to the cave.
I was walking up the long and steep path, not losing the sight of the stone cave with a dimm light in the entrance. I knew it was fire I saw, and I knew he would be sitting in front of it.
Each step promised to bring me closer. Closer to my master.
I could not remember ever meeting him, but I knew he would be very familiar to me. Climbing up this hill in this greyish cold night was a Capricorn-like feeling of coming back home.
Each step promised to bring me closer. Closer to the truth.
With heavy breath and pain in my legs I was slowly approaching the entrance of the cave. Meeting him was to be a very special event. An event of receiving an answer to a question that would not leave me in peace. A moment of facing the truth.
–
A small and slim body was sitting on the floor facing the flames of the fire place. His deep dark eyes fixed on the fire, he would not move nor look at me. But under his long white beard there was a gentle and warm smile acknowledging my presence.
When I sat on a piece of blanket on the other side of the fire in front of him, he nodded and smiled. “What is the heavy stone on your heart that brought you to me?”
The question that would not leave me until answered… the question I came for… “Will I be able to find peace in this life?” I said.
The master glanced at me like a father looking at his little daughter asking silly questions little girls ask. He started laughing and I smiled, understanding that my question was nothing new to him. Who would not like to find peace?
“Of course you are able to find peace.”- He replied. “But you don’t want to. You are still too much in love with the world outside, it absorbs you. You’re not yet prepared to find the way back home into your inside world, your real essence. Once you take the decision to find peace, and you commit to this decision, you will find it.”
He got up and walked towards a box in a corner. When he opened it, I saw it was full of small greenish black stones. And somewhere in the middle of them I could see a beautiful transparent crystal. The wise man took a black stone and the tiny crystal, opened my hand and let the two stones fall into my palm.
“You think these are two different stones,” he said and I smiled, knowing he was reading my mind. “One is bigger, black and dirty, it stains you with its black colour like coal. It can also hurt you with its sharp edges. The second is small, round, transparent and pure.”
“However, both are the same stones. The first is the stone in its raw nature. When you clean and brush it it every day a little bit, when you are committed enough to take care of it every day, when you clean it from the layers of dirt it accumulated over time… then … one day it will transform itself into the pure crystal – into its real essence. I will give you both, so you remind yourself every day what you can transform yourself into…. once you’re ready to do so. You will find peace then.”
I left the cave with my two stones in the pocket. The two stones that represented two states of myself. The first was me now. The second was what I would become, once I really wanted.
I was walking down the hill again. Back to the outside world.
Each step promised to bring me closer. Closer to myself.
—
This post is dedicated to Charan. Without his masterful guided visualisation I would not have been able to carry my two stones in the pocket now.
Gracias. Te quiero.