Welcome back to the Camino Cafe . I'm Leigh Brynn and your host . Well , I'm recording this in the middle of Old Town and you can probably hear a little bit of street noise . It's quiet . It's only four o'clock in the afternoon . People are just enjoying the last of lunchtime A few drinks , maybe some tapas .
But now I want to introduce you to the second in the Docu series with John Brierly . This is titled the Path of Self-Discovery . It's a short listen but packed with powerful wisdom . I hope you enjoy it . Patty Silva and I have really enjoyed doing this project and we are honored to be bringing it to the Camino community . Please share it .
If it moves you , please share it . It was John's hope that as many pilgrims as possible could hear his final messages .
I'm John Brierly . The Camino has a path of awakening From fear to love the Camino is a place where you can find the path of self-discovery .
John , you've always talked about how the Camino can be the path of self-discovery . What do you mean by that ?
Well , I mean , it's about the discovery of a self that we perhaps were not familiar with . I believe it to be our essential nature . We've covered it over with the egoic self . That's our personality , our persona , our life story , our drama that we live out and we think is who we are . But behind that is another self , if you like .
A higher self is the essence of who we are , and part of the Camino offers us an opportunity , in the quietness of the root , to discover that other self . Quote from Thomas Merton , who says beautifully what's the point in traveling to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss to our own self ?
This is the most important journey of discovery and without it , all the rest are not only meaningless but useless . The difficulty of opening up to that self-discovery , the thing that gets in the way , is the egoic self that doesn't want us to discover that other self . Because on some level we cannot know that other self unless we diminish the egoic self .
But like narcissists , we've fallen in love with our ego self , with our drama . However wonderful it is or however awful it is , we just don't want to let it go . And until we let it go , and until we let it subside not go completely . We still occupy the world .
We still need an egoic self to navigate ourselves to extra half K down to the cathedral to do the natural things that we need to do . However , we need to diminish it . We need to quieten that egoic voice , which is loud , is constantly there , always answers first and is almost always one . We need to let that quieten down so that this other self can emerge .
And that's the power of the Camino , because it again brings us away from the familiar lands , us in a place where we're sort of , you know , unknown to ourselves , unknown to the people around us .
We've come into this sort of mystery world and we're more open and ready to say right , let me hear , let me see , let me understand this other self , let me become more familiar with it . There's lots of false guides out there . We don't want to be continually trapped by them , but it's difficult .
This is , you know , as Thomas Merton said , this is the most , in a way , difficult but the most important journeys of self discovery . We need to find that because that other self , that higher self , is the one that will bring us home . It is the one that will awaken us out of the dream of separation into our wholeness , back to unity .
So by walking the Camino it almost gives us that opportunity to kind of strip away these layers , Correct that they're covering this inner light within us Correct , correct , exactly . And so , when we get to this point , have we found our inner self or does the journey continue way past ?
Oh , I think it continues way past .