Welcome to A Forest Path
Living a life devoted to reveal your true nature
A Forest Path is the website of Maa Uma-Parvathi Natha. Here, students can find a range of study opportunities of different scopes and varying levels.
Since ancient times forests were places of refuge and peace. Aranya, one of the Sanskrit words for forest, means a place of no battle. Here all conflicts, inner and outer, find rest in the absorption of the One. Forests are a symbol of our heart, which is a meeting place of the form and the formless. An intersection that becomes the altar for sacrificing the limited and impermanent into the eternal and self-luminous. The heart is not only the seat of pleasant sentiments and personal love but the meeting place with our chosen Beloved (Ishtadevata). It is where the light of the Transcendent and immanent are One. The heart is the source of love itself (antaryamin). Love is the source of wisdom and wisdom compels activity. It has the essential transforming power to break the gravitational force of the conditioned self, and its light is presence that is naturally…present.
A forest path is the way back to our wild and uncontrived self
Forests also imply wildness, not erratic and chaotic activity, but uncultivated. Wild and natural. In the human experience this wildness is the uncontrived and natural quality to not only our consciousness and heart but how it expresses through speech and action. This lack of contrivance arises from an untouched purity. The wild has not been contaminated by the artifices of civilization or the conditioned self.
The light of the heart which is the pure light of consciousness radiates unobscured and natural. The paradox of the forest is that from the periphery it seems mysterious, impermeable and dangerous to the conditioned self. An entangled darkness that hides the light. But enter and tread a forest path and you will reveal in the verdant growth; the inconceivable light of awareness.
A forest path then is the way back to our wild and uncontrived self. It is a path that disentangles the paradox of the play between the One and the many. A paradox that can only be reconciled on the altar of the heart where the fragments of the many are sacrificed to unified knowing. The forest path doesn’t lead outwardly into the projection of the world but follows an ingoing light of consciousness back to its source in the Hrydayam (heart)- “here it is” the source of the I am that I am.
The rasa of the Heart is present everywhere, touches everything and therefore knows all things; so dare to tread on a forest path. Any of your choosing…. all paths lead to the eternal forest of the Heart.
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