What Is a Spiritual Path
It’s astounding how much bogus floats in the realms of human discourse on spirituality. I, personally, don’t like that word, because it says absolutely nothing. Except that it has something to do with spirit, which couldn’t be more divorced from reality. Then again, maybe the path I will describe is not spiritual, but simply a path of self-knowledge. In which case, I have no interest in what people usually associate with spirituality. Makes me wonder but also appreciate that the original Christian path was called simply “The Way”.
With that said, what is usually known as a spiritual path is simply a set of tools designed to utilize natural human behavior and propensities in order to answer the big questions. And I do mean the really big ones. Who am I? What is this universe? How was it created? And similar.
The start of that path is usually triggered by a huge mind-blowing event. For some it’s surviving of clinical death, for some it may be a delirium of severe illness, while for the vast majority this encounter with altered states of mind and perception has a more benign form of a trance induced behaviorally, sensorily, or chemically.
After such intense experience only few disregard it completely. In most cases the person is hooked for good and the journey into the unknown begins. A Buddhist would say that one has entered the stream.
Despite the plethora of different traditions, the actual path then consists of applying a certain set of behavioral restrictions (five don’ts are overwhelmingly universal all across the board), observation and concentration “exercises” directed at one’s mind (sometimes combined with deliberate, repeated induction of trances, i.e. altered states of mind, in order to observe the mind in its unusual modes), learning to accept the observations without preferential bias, all in order to be able to find the answers that one is seeking. In Hindu parlance it’s a synthesis of karma, raja, bhakti, and jnana yoga. In normal modern language, basically a scientific inquiry into one’s being.
Thus, notwithstanding the inclinations of masses, burning incenses, wearing tribal clothing, dwelling on woke demeanor, sense of group belonging, rituals, even charity in most cases, together with other similar physical or abstract paraphernalia are not part and parcel of the path. More than anything, they give a false sense of security and misguided notion of doing something worthwhile in terms of advancing on the path.
Alongside with that, one has to be always aware of the cold truth that millennia old interpretations of most insights were already superseded by modern science. That, however, does not detract from the value of their metaphoric meaning. Quite to the contrary — it shows the ingenuity of the authors who were trying to put into words that for which no words are sufficient (although, it spells doom for all kinds of literalists).
Depending on how seriously one takes the whole thing, the entire enterprise then usually takes ten to twenty years in average. Although I expect that with decreasing socio-psychological distortions that are intimately tied to zeitgeist this time will decrease as well.
As everything that has a beginning, also this path has a clear-cut end. Contrary to many popular delusions that insist that the path is endless, the path I’m talking about is over the very moment when one answers the aforementioned questions with no room for doubt. It’s the moment when one does not have to believe or have faith, because one knows. It’s akin to knowing how an ice cream tastes — before the first “lick” one has a lot of ideas, after the first “lick” one knows.
It’s true that this knowledge is not within the reason. However, and contrary to popular belief, it’s also not in the heart, neither in the gut, nor in the balls, vagina, uterus, or elsewhere. Those are quite different things you will find there, but knowledge certainly ain’t that.
And for all those who insist on mystery and who don’t want to know because they either believe that one cannot know oneself, or are afraid that with knowledge the world would become boring and bland — there is no greater mystery than looking here and now at all that may be and being in the thick of it, knowing oneself, undisturbed.
Thus I have spoken :D
