It’s June 6, 2012, and as usual I am happily hitting the mean streets of my Mac. I began this essay when the phrase “a voice for the heart” popped into my consciousness. Last night I had one of my dreams where the Higher Self speaks. At the end, I was washing the hands of my baby girl, a toddler. In the dream her hands were very, very tiny. I think that means that I see what I do as very insubstantial and undeveloped. Perhaps that is where I need to place my full attention.

I have been writing essays for a long time now. I have written under the banner of nonduality, but I come from the background of The Work as taught by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Some call it The Fourth Way. It is a teaching that will never die because it conveys a primal truth. We are the Self. As I continue online, I see more and more that nonduality is only a banner, an umbrella for a certain point of view. I am now ready to step out from any umbrella. Just me standing in the rain and sun. Puts me in mind of Leonard Cohen’s “A Thousand Kisses Deep.” Nonduality seems to lack the necessary heart, the requisite humility that one needs to take the final step into one’s Own.

I see my place online now as an important one, if a tiny one. I hold heart space here. Not the sentimental heart, but the One Heart beating in the One Self. The mind has its place, but it must be jettisoned at the beginning of the journey up the mountain of God. It has done its work. That is why I simply cannot participate in online parsing of the heart. The heart is wounded by such silliness. I no longer subscribe to group think, to gurus that pop newborn and begin to set up pulpits in the marketplace. I have my own work to do.

I delight in making people laugh, in making people feel themselves a bit softer and more open. Wisdom does not have to be organized, cut and dried. I write between the lines.

Vicki  Woodyard