How do you know that you're on the right path? Because it disappears, that's how you know. How do you know that you're really doing something radical? Because you can't see where you are going, that's how you know. But everything you have lent on for your identity has gone. And so you're going to enter the black contemplative splendors of self-doubt at the same time as you're setting out on this radical new path. So you need to know how you know where you are. Poetry shows how incredibly precise it is in there. It was a story that will be told to a young boy or girl that would ask the question, "What do I do when I'm lost in the forest?" Here's the answer that the elder gives—you can feel from this how precise the teaching is. The elder says, "Stand still the trees ahead and bushed beside you are not lost. Stand still. What do I do when I'm lost in the forest? Stand still, the trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is called here and you must treat it as a powerful stranger—must ask permission to know it and be known, listen. The forest breathes it whispers: 'I have made this place around you, if you leave it you may come back again saying Here.' Stand still the forest knows where you are, you must let it find you." See what's astonishing about that poem you can say there are three things in that poem that are absolutely clear. First of all the elder says, "You cannot sleepwalk you way into your destiny. You must wake up and pay attention. Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost. You must pay attention." The second stage is that in this teaching from the elders, this incredible feeling of silence. That unless you have this silence in your life—and you feel the silence in the poem where he says, "If you leave it you may come back again saying Here." And I think what the elder is saying is that if you pay real attention unless you have silence, an ability for silence in your body to do that, then you will get too frightened because all the voices inside you will drown out any real change. You'll have 100 reasons not to make any real change, you see? And you've got all the voices and all the reasons not to do it. And so the ability for profound silence is being called on here, and then that attention can flower into something else. And then this amazing last line, "The forest knows where you are; you must let it find you."

Revolution begins with the self, in the self. The individual, the basic revolutionary unit, must be purged of poison and lies that assault the ego and threaten the heart, that hazard the next larger unit—the couple or pair, that jeopardize the still larger unit—the family or cell, that put the entire movement in peril. We make many false starts because we have been programmed to depend on white models or white interpretations of non-white models, so we don’t even ask the correct questions, much less begin to move in the correct direction. Perhaps we need to face the terrifying and overwhelming possibility that there are no models, that we shall have to create from scratch.

When stumped by a lifechoice, choose “enlargement” over happiness. I’m indebted to the Jungian therapist for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?”

There will always be too much to do – and this realisation is liberating. The only viable solution is to make a shift: from a life spent trying not to neglect anything, to one spent proactively and consciously choosing what to neglect, in favour of what matters most.