The Altar of the Heart

Do not look outward.

Not to other people. Not to the sky. Not to the earth beneath your feet. Not to circumstances, to systems, to the arrangements of the visible world.

Turn your gaze inward.

This is the oldest instruction. Older than any tradition that has tried to codify it. Before there were doctrines and practices and prescribed paths, there was this single movement — the turning of attention from the surface of things toward the centre.

The stillness at the centre is always there.

It is not produced by the turning. It does not arise when conditions are right. It is not the reward for a sufficiently quiet mind or a sufficiently disciplined life. It is the ground. It was there before you turned toward it, and it will be there after.

The seed of everything you are looking for resides within you.

Not as potential waiting to be unlocked. Not as a self to be constructed or improved. But as a living reality already present — deeper than thought, beneath feeling, prior to the narratives that rise and fall across the surface of your awareness.

Be still and know.

Not be still and then know, as though the knowing follows the stillness as a reward. But be still and know simultaneously — the knowing is the stillness, the stillness is the knowing, and both are the ground you have been standing on all along without realising it.

You are not looking for something that is absent.

You are recognizing something that has never left.