Caroline Myss interview re: Teresa, of Avila

A Message From Caroline Myss


THE COMPELLING POWER OF TERESA OF AVILA:
An interview with Caroline Myss conducted by Andrew Harvey


Dear All:
It is with great pleasure that I share this interview with my good friend and colleague, Andrew Harvey. ENTERING THE CASTLE, my new book, will be released on March 6th, which is also the day I begin my book tour, opening with a lecture in Chicago. The schedule for the cities and venues is attached to the end of this interview and I warmly invite all of you to join me at the launch of this book.
Thank you so much,
Love,
Caroline
THE COMPELLING POWER OF TERESA OF AVILA:

An interview with Caroline Myss conducted by Andrew Harvey

Introduction

All Caroline Myss's work is characterized by a forensic clarity and pioneering courage and brilliance. In her superb new book, "Entering the Castle," out from Free Press, Simon and Schuster, March 6, 2007 http://www.myss.com/ for her calendar of events. Caroline enters new territory that of the divinization of the human through mystic devotion, passion, rigor and illumination. Her guide to this most demanding and complex of territories, is the great Catholic mystic, Teresa of Avila; Caroline does a near-miraculous job of helping the modern reader imagine and enter the seven mansions of Teresa's "Interior Castle" of the soul. In Caroline's hands perhaps the greatest of all Christian mystical classics is reinvented and re-imagined for contemporary seekers of all kinds and paths.

Caroline and I sat together on a luminous day in January 2007, in her dining room in Oak Park, IL, and, as the winter sun danced around us, embarked on the wild, rich, exploratory conversation that follows. I pray that all of you who read this will share the holy joy that flowed between us.

Please read our interview slowly, and with your deepest attention. May it bring you what Teresa of Avila called "the inspiration of the loving soul." May it take you into your own "interior castle" and invite you to become "mystics without monasteries" and "Sacred Activists" beings who fuse sacred wisdom and passion, with clear wise radical action, in an endangered world. In St. Teresa's words:

"The Divine has no body on earth but yours,
no hands but yours,
no feet but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which the Divine compassion is to look out to the world
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good;
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now."
Andrew Harvey:
Why at this moment in your great career did you choose to write a book about a 16th century nun and her map of the mystical path?

Caroline Myss:
When I was writing Invisible Acts of Power, I was absolutely broken wide open. I took a look at the nature of service and why people were drawn to be of service after surviving a crisis. Somehow, a "resurrection Force", like a primal light from the soul, gets ignited in people who undergo a life transforming crisis, such as loss or disease. This light is the underlying grace that activates personal transformations and specifically the transformations that I noticed included a fundamental need to be of service. These people no longer wanted to take from life; they wanted to give to life. That fascinated me. Something had shifted their interior compass. A passion was awakened in them that gave them a new appetite for life that was made up of an entirely new interior alchemy that was lying dormant before, combining gratitude for their own survival, an appreciation for the simple things of life, and a genuine awareness that the meaning and purpose they were searching for in life was to be found in improving the lives of others. So, I did a mailing on my website and I asked people, "What does the concept of service mean to you?" and "Who have you served?" and, "Who served you?"

Caroline Myss:
As a result of that inquiry, I received over 1,200 responses within ten days. I did not expect that the responses of these people would have the soul-opening affect on me that they did, but I have to say that these responses broke my heart wide open. To this day, I'm not sure that I can communicate exactly how or why the stories of those wonderful people had that effect on me. Maybe it's because I read all 1,300 in such a short period of time, although I don't think so. I think it's because I had the realization for the first time of how profoundly powerful the force of love, generosity, compassion, kindness, and the nonjudging heart truly is. These letters were filled with accounts of people who literally decided to not commit suicide or pulled themselves out of the despair and broken-spirited crisis of being homeless because one human being smiled at them with respect or held a door open for them. That single act was enough to breathe life back into the soul of another human being. I was stunned by how little it took on the part of one human being to do so much for another.

Caroline Myss:
The more I read these stories, the more I thought, "Do human beings have any idea what power they have at all?" I thought they don't go anywhere near this power because they can't see it, and I thought what is it they can't see? Why isn't that power even seen? And then I realized that that is the soul, and we don't see that power because it is so profoundly humble, it's such a sweetly humble light.

Caroline Myss:
I decided that these stories had to be shared, which is why I wrote, INVISIBLE ACTS OF POWER. In gathering all these stories of how a human being resurrects another human being through such simple means, I turned to sacred literature, thinking that I would weave the teachings of all great sacred traditions in between these wonderful accounts as they were living, breathing, proof of the miracles of grace that the great saints and mystics and the greatest holy beings like Jesus and Buddha, said occurred when human actions were blended with the power of Divine grace. But, as I was saturating myself in the sacred literature again, just thinking I was on an academic mission to find the right pieces of sacred literature to put into my book, I thought, "Uh, oh I've put myself on a retreat." My spiritual instincts were awakened immediately with that realization as I knew I had in the language of Teresa of Avila, crossed over the drawbridge and entered into my Castle, only at the time, I had no idea what that meant in terms of the profound depth of the journey that had just begun. I sat in my office one day and thought, "This peace I¹m feeling, this rich delicious peace where am I?" I realized I'd crossed something and I'd gone into a deep, deep retreat space, and I felt for the first time in my life that I had become soft in the sacred. I can't say it any other way.

Andrew Harvey:
Melted into the sacred?

Caroline Myss:
Melted, yes, I guess that would be a better way to say it. I had melted into God. I began to merge into the meaning of Divine language instead of the definition of it. The light from the language of the Divine felt but only for the briefest second as if it was coming right through me. I felt a mystical fire enter into my entire body. Shortly after that, I had a grand mal seizure. And when I came to, I realized that I had drifted into a space of hell, I knew that my wiring - my interior wiring was different - I knew that. I also knew my interior life was different. A passageway had opened up within me that I could sense vibrationally, energetically, spiritually. I could feel it through silence, through prayer. The seizure had blown open the door to my Castle.

Andrew Harvey:
I would love you to talk about the timeless relationship with Teresa that began after the grand mal seizure. This is an extraordinary story, Caroline, and you must share it.

Caroline Myss:
You know you cannot return to your base of power from which you feel safe once you¹ve had a mystical crisis, and it is a crisis. And, what I mean by that is I have an Institute and I was teaching a class and I very much wanted to teach my course on how intuition inevitably evolves to the mystical bridge. And I was going about it mind you as a scholar. It's all I knew but I approached this subject with great reverence because I deeply believe in what I teach. And, so there I was, prepared to teach how we naturally progress from creatures of instinct to a yearning for self-awareness to a desire for consciousness guidance to a passion for a mystical connection. I intended to show on this day the archetypal evolution of the soul through all the great traditions. I was actually going to begin with St. John of the Cross but I grabbed THE INTERIOR CASTLE by Teresa of Avila accidentally and didn't feel like looking through my stack of books to find THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL. And I thought, "What difference does it make anyway?"

Caroline Myss:
Earlier that day, someone in the audience had asked about my personal spiritual history and my spiritual life, which I had always kept private. And perhaps opening up to this wonderful group of individuals created the atmosphere for my encounter with Teresa of Avila, I really can't say for sure. But that morning, after I shared my history with this group more openly than I have ever discussed with any group of people, I returned to the class after break prepared to plunge right into a lecture. No more personal stuff. Suddenly, instantly, I felt something near me, someone near me. And I paused for a moment as I could feel something in my field and that something had an exquisite field of grace. I thought, "Who's with me?" and then I heard, "Follow me, daughter." And I knew it was Teresa. I knew it was her.

Andrew Harvey:
I want to suggest something and that is that one of the things that you discover on this journey into the soul is that you are capable of having the most passionate and powerful and exquisitely empowering relationships with divine human beings from another epoch. Rumi wrote in one of his poems that the relationships between the divine beings of the past and the divine human beings who are trying and struggling to realize themselves are part of the mystery of the godhead and one of the most exquisite of those mysteries.

Andrew Harvey:
I myself have had a very profound soul friendship with Rumi who is more vivid and more alive to me than any other person in my life, and with Jesus. And what I've discovered in my relationship with Rumi and Jesus is that there are definite aspects of my own all to human nature that are fulfilled divinely in their nature, and in a way that constantly works to transform me. I want to suggest to you that there are three aspects of the person I know as you which are close to the personality, divine and human, of Teresa.

Andrew Harvey:
The first is that Teresa is both sublime and extremely practical, and your nature has that wonderful marriage of great elevation and very keen, sometimes fierce, down-home truthfulness.

Andrew Harvey:
The second element that I think links you and her is your extraordinary gift for honest self-revelation. Both Teresa and you are people who are faithful and rigorous to the truth of your own experience and very naked about the realities of that experience, what it costs, what it demands, what it means, what it entails.

Andrew Harvey:
The third aspect that I think links you is that you both have a genius for synthesis and clarifying very complex information into luminous and simple diagrams. What I'm suggesting Caroline is that Teresa knew who she was choosing and she chose you because of these resonances between your nature and hers - so that her divine nature could communicate its essence to yours because yours was - in such remarkable ways - so prepared to mirror hers.

Andrew Harvey:
The other thing that I think is essential in this extraordinary relationship that you've had with Teresa is that your very extensive Catholic education, including your graduate work in theology, prepared you from the earliest part of your life for this mystical experience.

Andrew Harvey:
I would like you to talk about what you feel you derived from that education, and how you feel it has influenced you and sustained you in this mystical partnership that you've had with Teresa.

Caroline Myss:
First, I would like to clarify in great detail exactly what my very delicate and subtle relationship with Teresa was like during the writing of ENTERING THE CASTLE, lest I give the wrong impression. Working with Teresa did not involve episodes of her grabbing my hand and writing through me, as if she or some other secondary spirit had possessed me. It was none of that kind of nonsense. Working with her also did not involve hearing her every day as in that very extraordinary first encounter. Rather, it was subtle, what she would call intellectual revelation and that¹s her name for it - as described in the 6th mansion of her great classic, THE INTERIOR CASTLE.

Caroline Myss:
I experienced a dialogue of intellectual revelation and it required that I, myself become a vessel that required a great deal of preparation. I had to attain a certain state of tranquility, a certain height of interior clarity. This required prayer and silence, which I had to maintain as much as possible within me as well as within my home. My office space became a sanctuary that began to feel like an embodiment of the sacred. This was the only way I could attain the altitude necessary to perceive or receive perceptions that I knew were not mine. The way that I would explain that is that any parent who knows his or her child recognizes when the thinking of someone else has influenced that child. The parent then asks the child, "Who have you been talking to?" They know how that child thinks, and the parameters of that child's perceptual systems, so they recognize immediately when their child has been exposed to a new way of thinking.

Caroline Myss:
And in that same way, you know the way you think and you know the parameters of your thinking, and when you have been given an idea or infused with a perception that is outside your realm of thought. Then you observe how that single perception reorders an entire cluster of thoughts and perceptions that are familiar to you or that are in the formative stages within your sensory system. That is, they are perceptions that you have sensed but not yet given language or structure to, yet these perceptions incarnate into clear form almost instantly as the result of being given one core truth. Teresa¹s guidance was one truth at a time and each one ordered an entire chapter in the book, for example.

Andrew Harvey:
You could only really receive her divine instruction and be receptive to the images of perceptions of her divine instruction if you become like a mirror, cleansed of all your false self impressions.

Caroline Myss:
Exactly. I had to know where I stopped and where she began.

Andrew Harvey:
So, your job was to stay in that state of radiant nothingness so that the everything could flash messages on to the screen of your mirror mind, mirror heart that's the truest meaning of humility, isn't it? To stay in that silent receptivity, that silent, grounded, divinely tender, divinely prayerful receptivity so that into that ground the divine can pour it¹s truth and its brilliance.

Caroline Myss:
First, Andrew, let me say that no one can describe the experience I had more exquisitely than you. Just the phrase, "radiant nothingness" is something I would never have thought to say. On a more grounded level, I had to maintain my inner tranquility, to the best of my ability, given the daily struggles with my own life. But the effort is so worth the rewards. I think it is appropriate to ask about the relevance of the teachings of this Carmelite nun from the 1600's in today's society whose great work was a treatise on mystical illumination through prayer. At first glance, the ordinary mind would be inclined perhaps to dismiss her work as too Catholic or just for Catholics or just for nuns or monastics. But nothing could be further from the truth. We are living in a world gone mad, but not just mad in terms of war and chaos. There is a madness in this world that is the result of living too fast, forcing yourself to function without time to reflect upon the cause and effect of your choices and the quality of your relationships and the consequences of your actions. People live so scheduled, so pressured, so bound up in this nonsensical adoration of doing things faster and faster and faster among other superficial values that this adoration of speed has transferred to what they expect from their spiritual life, if you want to call what they have a spiritual life at all. A yoga class and a vegetarian diet is not a spiritual life, nor is therapy and learning about self-empowerment and how to get what you want in three easy lessons. What on earth does that have to do with the soul?

Caroline Myss:
Small comments are great indicators of what people really believe as opposed to what they say they believe and the following example, which is among the most common that I hear, positions the matter of faith as the last empowered option that people turn to. When a crisis occurs and everything "humanly possible" has been done to rectify or treat the problem or illness, people will always say, "All we can do now is pray". Prayer is seen as a last option or the tactic one turns to when the really effective things that they were counting on have failed. The statement is really a symbolic admission that says prayer is the caboose on the train of life for people and not the engine. If people truly understood the power of prayer and the power of grace, they would pray as their first step in every thing that they did and not as a last resort because everything else on the human level failed. But that is not how most people truly and authentically relate to the power of prayer it is not a real power for them, at least it is not as real as a power they can touch.

Caroline Myss:
It's more than appropriate at this critical stage in our spiritual, social, and political climate, that the work of Teresa of Avila be re-introduced into the mainstream of our culture. People need to discover the profound power of their soul. We need to discover the power that the mystics uncovered when they fell in love with God. We need to discover that more than needing to be healed, that we have the capacity to heal others and that our deepest calling in life is to move beyond needing to have more and more and more. We need to step beyond ourselves and discover what it means to be of service, beyond the experience of taking care of others in such a way that it leads to self-exhaustion, resentment, and burn-out. That's not spiritual service; that's self-pity and working from the motivation of the ego. The soul doesn't exhaust from serving others, regardless of the arena, but one has to learn how to merge service with wisdom, self-reflection, and the management of grace.

Caroline Myss:
As odd as this may strike the reader upon first glance, the fact is that the call to be a "mystic out of a monastery" and to serve humanity through acts of the soul is now falling upon the shoulders of the ordinary human being. Mystics have long been associated with being recluses, running away to monasteries in order to keep their own company. But they were wild, strong, stubborn, powerful, and rebellious personalities who lead rebellions and wrote great books and turned their worlds up-side-down. They became the healers of their day and the educators and the ones who withdrew into prayer in order to receive Divine revelation about what the society should do next in times of great change. The last thing Teresa of Avila or Francis of Assisi or John of the Cross or Eastern mystics such as Rumi or Rabindranath Tagore were recluses. They were profound and powerful leaders of eras of transformation, not unlike the times we face right now.

Caroline Myss:
What they knew is what many people are now discovering in their own way: the more the outside world spins out of control, the more your interior world must assume full control. Acquiring material goods will not help you to make sense of the massive changes occurring in this world and you have to be blind to think that America or the rest of the world is headed toward peace. We are headed toward more and more chaotic change and we must rise to face that change with courage and not denial. That is why I feel compelled to lead people across cross the drawbridge and into their inner Castle. Each person is born with a passion to connect with the sacred. We have a yearning for that. We have an absolutely passion to be brought to our knees before the Divine, to witness a miracle, to see the waters part, to see the blind recover their eyesight, to see people healed from incurable diseases. We long to see the presence of God among us in these ways, which is why people make pilgrimages to sacred spots or even go on nature outings and swoon over a sunset. They will reach to anything to be near God, or as close to a version of God as they will allow themselves to go near. Teresa's teachings are perfect for this time. They are perfect for the modern sojourner. I know because I have worked with people for twenty-five years and I have come to the conclusion that this search for highest potential that drives the contemporary spiritual seeker is really a search for the drawbridge into the Castle. It's really a search to find a way not to be afraid of your own life, or to hear guidance that tells you to help a homeless person. It's tragic to live in fear of your own life. Tragic.

Andrew Harvey:
Lets get back to the influence that your Catholic background had on you. I thinks it's crucial.

Caroline Myss:
Well, I'm no devotee of the Vatican, so let's just say there¹s a difference between religion and the soul path. And the religion, any religion, is an expression of the politics of God, so all religions have that in common therein lies the politics of God, so whether your dealing with Judaism or Islam or Catholicism, all of them are a manifestation of the power of God reduced to tribalism and tribal masks and tribal myths. But, Catholic mysticism absolutely intrigues me, the tradition of the saints, the tradition of the mystical experience, the tradition of being passionately drawn to the soul's journey. I believe I would be a mystic no matter what tradition I had been born in because that is the nature of my soul. I happen to have been born a Catholic, which is the most mystical tradition of the Christians. So, the ground rules were set for me to walk this path within the Christian tradition.

Caroline Myss:
So I have this tradition in my bones that says, "Heaven walks next to you." Not above you, within and next to. It breathes with you. The Madonna is not some imaginative force she's not some goddess, I can't use that word very comfortably, actually, as it's not natural to me. But she is very much a Divine Mother and she appears when this Earth is in trouble. And you know what, she does, like her famous apparitions at Lourdes, Fatima, and now Medjugorje. Her messages are consistent in all apparitions, messages calling for prayers, conversion not to Catholicism, by the way, but to prayer and to peace. In return, places of profound miracles are left behind, such as the healing water of Lourdes. In none of her apparitions has she urged people to convert to Catholicism. She urges conversion to acts of love, prayer, and compassion so that all of humanity can cease its unnecessary suffering.

Caroline Myss:
Now, the concept of what mysticism is very much a mystery. It is a deep and profoundly conscious mystery that beckons one to tamper with the very structure of his or her cosmic compass. A person that says I don¹t think I want heaven to be way up above me. Rather, I think I want it next to me, indeed, I want heaven to exist within me. What would happen, for example, if I shifted the location of my idea of God and decided that the Divine did not exist in some sort of cosmic distance above or beyond the celestial bodies of light. What if I lowered that equation and breathed the Divine next to me and within me, surrounding myself with the presence and power of God. That shift in compass would mean the end of all boundaries between this physical world and a Divine world as the two would merge into one.²

Caroline Myss:
Our five senses want immediate gratification. We want to see the cause and effect of our actions right now, and it¹s very hard to compete with the speed at which our five senses want a cause and effect. Like money, we want to see a cause and effect on the interest of our investments immediately. It¹s very difficult to compete with that reality. So, when you say to someone that prayer is far more powerful than any force in the physical world, I realize that to the five sensory driven individual, that remains incomprehensible. People often ask, "Well, which prayers work?" They treat prayers as magical spells.

Andrew Harvey:
I think that is true. I think you were saved from what I call "the marzipan mysticism of our time" by being schooled in this clean, clear, fierce, rigorous school of Catholic mysticism. There are five aspects of this schooling that have actually been penetrating your work from the beginning, and that are now coming to fruition in Entering the Castle.

Andrew Harvey:
The first thing that you got, I believe, from this amazing education that you had was what you describe as the feeling that heaven is walking in you and beside you - a profound sense of the sacred and of the cosmos as sacred, which is the essence of the great Catholic mystics from Eckhart to St. Francis to Teresa, herself.

Andrew Harvey:
The second thing I believe that you have derived from the Catholic mystical tradition is a profound sense that the core of the relationship between the soul and the Beloved is a great passion, a great holy, divine passion. You have this in your personal life, in the way you teach and in the way you speak about Teresa but, it¹s one of the things that has deeply intoxicated you when you speak about Teresa, you speak about her with a great holy passion of the soul and it¹s this holy passion of the Christian mystics, for Jesus or for the Madonna that has actually ignited the great stream of Christian mysticism, and it¹s something that you share and transmit.

Andrew Harvey:
The third thing that I believe you derive from your Catholic schooling is a very deep discipline of devotion. All of the great mystics of the Catholic tradition speak again and again in different ways of the necessity for a daily, down-home practice of deep contemplative devotion as a profound means of uncovering the inner life of the soul. And, one of the things I love deeply about your book is your constant emphasis on the unending need for this sacred discipline.

Andrew Harvey:
The fourth thing that I believe that you have inherited from this tradition is one of it¹s greatest contributions to world mysticism - an absolutely no-nonsense psychological realism.

Andrew Harvey:
And one of the great strengths of the book that you¹ve created is how again and again you help people see how their fears, fantasies and illusions are blocking them.

Andrew Harvey:
Finally you have inherited, I believe from the Catholic mystical tradition, a deep belief in sanctity. You deeply believe in the divinization of the human through the disciplines of mystical rigor. You truly believe that through these exercises, through this discipline, through this devotion, through following this rigorous road map of the soul that all of the Catholic mystics have and Teresa, of course is the supreme teacher of it that the human being can go to a completely new level of self-empowerment, radiance, humility and unconditional compassionate action in this world. This is a very powerful transmission that's come through to you from your tradition.

Andrew Harvey:
What is going to make this book so helpful is that you have separated the essential jewels of the tradition from the dogma and the authoritarian aspects of the tradition, which are clearly destructive. Now, these jewels - of a profound sense of cosmic sacredness, of a deep sense of holy passion, of an absolute commitment to true discipline, of a profound psychological realism that is absolutely unsentimental and of a vision of the potential sanctification of the human can now through Teresa and your work together be given to any seeker on any path of any religion to be used in the core of modern life.

Andrew Harvey:
I am so moved by the way in which you have been able to universalize and rescue these truths from all of the excretions of the tradition, which you nevertheless celebrate with such profound humility and gratitude.

Andrew Harvey:
What you're looking at in our world, is an overwhelming, even demonic triumph of the false self, in all the different aspects of human endeavor. This is why your enterprise in this book is so important. Through Teresa's grace and with her help, you are bringing back an authentic mysticism which is deeply rigorous, which shines a divine, clear, fierce light on all illusions, all agendas, all fantasies and helps people enter the truth and the peace and the real self-empowerment of the soul.

Andrew Harvey:
What is especially exiting to me about what you¹re saying is your insistence that the demands of this time have ended the privileged vision of the mystic as a person who withdraws into a monastery or an ashram. I agree deeply with you that our time of vast and challenging change is inviting all of us to become what you call mystics without monasteries, and to act from the deepest spiritual wisdom in all the arenas of our burning world.

Andrew Harvey:
Am I characterizing your thought?

Caroline Myss:
Yes, absolutely. And within that context of transformation that you described, again the question needs to be posed, "Why would someone want to enter his or her Castle?" I bring this up again because the fact is this journey is one of great power. No one makes this journey and continues to live an ordinary life. The Castle is the deep metaphor for the soul. Why would someone want to enter the journey of illumination? What's in it for them? When a mystic speaks about how painful the journey into the soul could be, for example, what are they talking about? And that is an appropriate question, among the many we could bring up, because as I have discovered in my work, most people are terrified of an intimate experience with God. They fear that they will lose their worldly goods and suffer illness, loss, and poverty an image that we can thank Catholic history for fostering.

Caroline Myss:
But what I explain to people again and again is that a mystics¹ pain is not ordinary pain, not at all. It¹s the pain of seeing clearly, a pain that comes from waking up and seeing that life could be other than the way it is. It's the pain of recognizing that humanity does not have to struggle the way it's struggling or to see clearly, that there is a cost to seeing truth and living within a culture of deception.

Andrew Harvey:
T. S. Elliott puts it beautifully when he says that the choice is between fire or fire. The fire of being destroyed by a culture of negation, irony, desolation, cynicism and a total addiction to lies; or the fire that is the divine fire that purifies and that can sometimes feel like agony and death.

Caroline Myss:
Rightly so. A person should say, "What do I want this for?" What do I want this for? And it's like what you face when you motivate people in sacred activism. Why do I want to become active with the sacred? Why? When in fact I could indulge myself and continue to indulge myself. What do I care about the next generation I'm not going to be here?

Andrew Harvey:
The chaos and deceit that is occurring all around us today can be so overwhelming as to lead to complete denial like in ancient Rome, where they turned to a culture of bread and circuses.

Andrew Harvey:
The thing that does motivate people, I've discovered -and this I believe is what all mystics discover- is that the radiance and power and joy and ecstasy and deep health of the heart that come to those who undertake the mystical journey, intoxicates them with a real promise that their life can be a transfigured life.

Caroline Myss:
What ultimately I have hope in, as I talk to people about this mystical renaissance that we are in the midst of right now, is that people are being called, just like they were in the old days of the classic mystics who were called into monasteries. They difference is these individuals are not meant to be recluses mystics without monasteries. They are being called to fall in love with God in an impassioned way wherever they are and they are given a ferocious appetite to discover that power of prayer, to discover that force to hold a door open and watch that simple act of respect give a man back his will to live. Nothing is more profound than to awaken your power to channel grace at a distance and know that the grace that flows through you is a source of healing. That they can access what the mystics did, that they can become a vessel of transformation through the power of their soul that is what the journey of illumination within one¹s Castle is all about. That's when a person discovers for the first time what the real meaning is of knowing he or she was truly born for a higher purpose. That higher purpose has to do with a Divine calling and not an earthly occupation. Therein lies the seduction of God.

Andrew Harvey:
I believe that this book represents your own transformation as well as a transmission from Teresa to your heart. I believe that you¹ve been taken into the profound and fiery crucible of a mystical transformation. I believe too that the process of the writing of the book and getting all the different mansions of the soul clear for other people, have also been a tremendous process of self-reflection and self-transformation for yourself.

Andrew Harvey:
And I wonder on this morning, as we sit with the winter sun streaming through into your dining room - where are you in your journey now? Where has this sublime and harrowing journey with Teresa taken you?

Caroline Myss:
Where I once felt that I didn¹t have any active spiritual life, I feel completely alive spiritually. I feel alive, whereas before I felt like an outsider, looking in. That¹s the best way I could put it.
"May God let you taste
the incredible joy of complete union.
Nothing the world can give us
Not possessions, not riches, not delights or honors, not great feasts or
festivals
Can match the happiness of a single moment
Spent by a soul totally united to God."

Teresa of Avila

(copyright myss/CMED 2007)
Andrew Harvey is an internationally acclaimed poet, novelist, mystical scholar, spiritual teacher and a pioneering architect of Sacred Activism. He is the author of more than 30 books, including "Son of Man"; "The Mystical Path to Christ" (Tarcher 1999) which sets out in detail his vision of Jesus's revolutionary mission and the Christian mystical tradition, and The "Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi" (Tarcher paperback 2000) which explores his long love for Rumi and Rumi's message for our time. Andrew Harvey is now dedicating his life to what he has called "Sacred Activism" that fusion of sacred knowledge, passion, and energy with clear wise radical action in all arena's that he believes essential both to the transformation of humanity and it's survival. His DVD Sacred Activism is available fromthe Hartley Foundation at 800-937-1819 info at http://www.hartleyfoundation.org Information about his biography, schedule and workshops can be obtained from his website:
http://www.andrewharvey.net/



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Link to: Caroline Myss (BOOK TOUR) Entering The Castle
(OPEN TO THE PUBLIC)
Chicago, IL 3/6/07
New York, NY 3/8/07
Boston, MA 3/10/07
Washington, DC 3/12/07
Phoenix, AZ 3/19/07
Los Angeles, CA 3/21/07
San Francisco, CA 3/23/07
Seattle, WA 3/25/07
Denver, CO 3/27/07
Phladelphia,PA 3/29/07
Tulsa 3/31/07


Free Audio/Video Streams myss.com
Andrew Harvey - July 2005 CMED Guest http://myss.com/CMED/media/



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Andrew Harvey - Nov 2005 CMED Guest http://myss.com/CMED/media/