Fate is how your life unfolds when you let fear determine your choices. A path of destiny reveals itself to you, however, when you confront your fear… - Caroline Myss

I remember clearly the professor who introduced me to Buddhist and Hindu thought. As a final exam, she took all five of us students to a remote weekend retreat facility and issued the rules: no speaking allowed, and no clocks or wristwatches. During the night she would awaken a student, ask the student to assume a yogic position, then ask questions: How does a Christian speak about the nature of God? How does a Buddhist speak about the nature of reality? What is the truth of eternal life? What is the purpose of this life? The questions were deep and penetrating. It wasn’t the quality of our responses that she
was evaluating; rather, it was our attachment to any particular school of thought. If she sensed that we were attached to one form of truth more than another, we had failed to learn the lesson of her class: All truth is the same at the level of truth itself. That it becomes “enculturated” is an illusion. For her, this was the essence of what it means to become conscious: to seek truth that is detached from its social or cultural form. In looking back at her influence upon me, I credit her with laying the groundwork for my own abilities in symbolic sight.

To enter your Castle (soul) is not a journey that takes you away from the world; rather it brings you directly into the world. It brings you fully into your soul, and into your power in the world...Mystics change the world around them more dramatically and more positively than can ever be measured. The mystic works on the invisible plane, relying on God, prayer and grace.

Muhammad’s followers have not always maintained his reforms or abided by his teachings, just as followers of other great mystical leaders, including Jesus, have not.