Milk & honey

In a world that has endless options, endless teachers, endless interpretations, endless spiritual “menus” it can be hard to find teachings that resonate with your soul. So many teachings and practices can make the soul feel like it’s wandering through aisles of information while still starving for something that nourishes. What the soul needs first isn’t necessarily more information; it needs language that gathers the scattered parts of the human experience and brings us back to center. Something soothing, distilled, and simple enough for the soul to digest. The spiritual path is often less about finding the most advanced truth and more about finding personal resonance; the kind that settles the nervous system, quiets the inner static, and gently returns you to your own inner knowing.

The Bible (for example) is not a single book, it is a library -a collection of writings shaped across time by communities, oral traditions, scribes, and interpreters. Human beings interpreting their connection to God. Since the Divine lives in all things, we seek clarity through the space that allows for us to translate interpretations into modern meaning. In a slower world, revelation had more room to land. People lived closer to silence, to seasons, to firelight and sky, to the ocean’s pull and the guiance of the cosmos; listening was naturally woven into life. Now the modern world hits us with constant empty distracton. We must spend the first part of our spiritual practice taming the body to just sit still and not scroll. So, the path becomes intentional: setting aside space to return to the inner sanctuary, to seek the knowledge beneath the noise, to let the Divine be heard again. Ancient text and scripture were not originally made to control the masses it was an interpretation to guide the soul on their individual mission to the remembrance of freedom.

There’s a reason so many traditions feel like they’re pointing to the same inner doorway. A huge amount of spiritual and philosophical “architecture” crystallized in the late Axial-era centuries (often described roughly as ~800–200 BCE), a window when human beings across different regions were asking the same questions.

Who am I? What is suffering? What is the Self? How does one live rightly?

 In India, many of the Upanishadic teachings focused on the inner Self (Atman), ultimate reality (Brahman), and liberation were composed orally across roughly ~700–300 BCE (with later layers continuing after).

 In the Jewish world, the Second Temple period (516 BCE–70 CE) became a major era of community formation, interpretation, and sacred writing; where traditions were preserved, edited, and expanded. 

What’s powerful here is the pattern, much of this wasn’t a lone mystic writing in a dark cave; it was communities, interpreters, and living traditions refining language for the same perennial experience; how to return to God, how to make sense of the human experience in the bleakest of times.

On the spiritual path we are meant to have community, nourishment, and atonement. This is a huge part of the spiritual awakening process. You reach a very specific realization on the path where you have gathered more than enough information to realize most of the ancient text and teachings are the same message with many interpretations. You go for what is in resonance with your soul, what is simple and reliable to sooth life when it feels overwhelming.

For it is then no longer life but death that is the challenge; unless indeed, the life weariness has already seized the heart, when it will be death that calls with the promise of bliss that was formerly the lure of love. We come ambiguous, enigmatical incursion into a world of solid matter that is soon to melt from us, like the substance of a dream- (myth & dream) Joseph Campbell

 The old tale of King Muchukunda, the battle finally loosens its grip, and the only prayer left in his body is “ grant me sleep without end”. Not sleep as escape, but as reprieve; the kind that comes when the inner war has burned itself out and the soul is ready to be held by something healing. This is the arc of awakening, the gathering of knowledge, the descent into the subconscious, the confrontation with the “demons” that once lived unnamed in the psyche, and then the slow process of transmutation. When that fusing is done, the soul doesn’t crave more information; it craves Milk and Honey. Milk, as the deep soothe of inner knowing. Honey, as the return of sweetness…life becoming fertile and kind again. “Sleep without end” becomes a cosmic exhale: to coast in what’s been learned, to stop bracing, to let the universe carry you in the quiet flow of what has finally come together.

Milk is nutrient-dense to the hero

steady, simple nourishment

 that fills the soul back into wholeness.

Honey is the flow of surrender

what remains when you let God move through you

 heartfelt offerings made manifest

translated into liquid gold.

  Korrin Ellen