Removing The Veils
Veil upon veil,
thought upon thought…
Let go of them all,
For they only hide the truth.
~ Rumi
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No one knows what is within himself until it is unveiled to him instant by instant…
~ Ibn al Arabi the Great Shaykh
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After tragedies, one has to invent a new world, knit it or embroider, make it up. It’s not gonna be given to you because you deserve it; it doesn’t work that way. You have to imagine something that doesn’t exist and dig a cave into the future and demand space. It’s a territorial hope affair. At the time, that digging is utopian, but in the future, it will become your reality.
~ Björk
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Many people are being dragged toward wholeness in their daily lives, but because they do not understand initiation rites, they cannot make sense of what is happening to them.
They are being presented with the possibility of rebirth into a different life.
Through failures, symptoms, inferiority feelings and overwhelming problems, they are being prodded to renounce life attachments that have become redundant.
The possibility of rebirth constellates with the breakdown of what has gone before.
But because they do not understand, people cling to the familiar, refuse to make the necessary sacrifices, resist their own growth. Unable to give up their habitual lives, they are unable to receive new life.
~ Marion Woodman
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This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.
~ Mary Oliver
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We hold fast to what we know, even if we are no longer inspired by it, even if it’s keeping us small and hidebound. Only when it becomes too painful to endure another minute will we summon the courage to abandon it. Old cultures knew about initiation and how to break away from stasis, but we’ve lost touch with the old ways.
The soul requires us to abandon our moribund past and venture into the adventure of exploring and creating something new. We avoid it because it requires heightened aliveness and attentiveness. If we’ve been educated away from what inspires us we’ve lost the ability to be truly attentive. We find ourselves lost among the well worn paths and can’t find our way out.
In this situation life will give us an emergency. Suddenly it’s out of our hands and everything collapses. If we continue to look in the rear view mirror and regret the past we can’t find the wherewithal to create something new. We’re stuck.
Artists and creative people practice heightened aliveness every time they practice their art. Attentiveness is the point in creativity, regardless of the material outcome. I think it’s important to follow nudges wherever they come from that point us toward whatever is trying to manifest through us.
We may not know what it is or where it leads, but it does know. It has been waiting and plotting to grow into an entirely different garden. The seeds were there all along but we didn’t know it. Nobody knew it, probably.
It’s true that it’s an upheaval. There may be a divorce, a change of work or country. It may be wrenching and disorienting. It’s a time of unveiling. We may discover a truer being in the process. But those seeds were always there, planted in us before birth, patiently waiting and preparing our eventual failures and roadblocks that upend all our carefully laid plans.
Even if we refuse initiation, life can create its own, tailored to our specific requirements. That’s the initiation we can’t refuse, aided by our own cluelessness we can only see in retrospect. But if our consciousness hadn’t grown we would never see it. Life wants more consciousness. It wants more understanding, more vision. We may think we can resist it but we can’t.
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Here are three reviews of my writing:
David Price has become one of my favorite writers once I discovered his work on the Medium site a few years ago. I’m amazed at how he continually is able to spark my consciousness with thoughts, ideas and observations of our world and the range of possibilities in the human experience. The best way to sum it up might be to say that through his words and images, Mr Price has a knack for providing rich sustenance for the human soul.
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Insightful and eloquent musings on the human condition
A regular contributor on Medium, David Price’s articles caught my attention a couple of years ago. Combined with stunning artwork — some of which is his own — and often wonderful quotes from celebrated sources, his daily submissions became a fixture with my morning coffee. He combines an almost poetic prose with razor-sharp insights into the state of humanity and the world we’ve created. Time and again I’ve been thoroughly impressed by his views of the state of things, both the good and the bad, views that will often follow me around all day. This book is a collection of a number of his articles, and I highly recommend it.
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This book encourages in the true sense of that word as no other I have known the creative process in oneself as spiritual necessity. David Price’s writing is beautifully alive, articulate, kind. The form is prose; the feel is poetic, flowing, metaphoric. There is not a dry line in it. I heartily recommend it to anyone who longs to crack the shell around their own creativity, to become more sensitive, creative, and alive themselves.
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Plus this comment:
There is something about your writing, an ineffable quality I can’t quite place. It’s brilliant.
— Shain Thomas
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It is this version:
