Getting on the Spiritual Path

Our affluent, technologically advanced society offers more options to more people than were available at any other time in history (—at least before the restrictions of the covid-19 pandemic). We have been able to travel to worldwide to both cities and rainforests, have exotic cuisines delivered to our door, experience the novel sensations of jumping out of airplanes and diving underneath the sea, access the best movies and music from across the centuries at a click of a button from digital archives, and experience the thrill of creating unprecedented new technologies to revolutionize communications, logistics, and defense. With all these choices, why would we take the trouble to concern ourselves with a distant, hypothetical, and immaterial possibility like the spiritual path to God?

Our most advanced knowledge and science cannot say anything definitive about God, perhaps no more than was already written in dusty books millennia ago. This science, with its bombs, data centers, and transportation systems, wields all of its power without the need for any appeal to an omniscient being or supernatural agency. Prometheus needed to steal fire from the Gods, but we unlock the gate to technological power ourselves; though we may need to navigate the obstacle course of advanced science and mathematics to get to it, there are no supernatural guardians at the threshold.

In the face of all these manifold possibilities, what could possibly interest us in God? We are no longer compelled by social pressure to show up at churches or other places of worship or participate in organized religion in any way. The secular world does not reinforce the spiritual path at all either—newspapers, television shows, and celebrities usually don’t prompt us to turn inward, and it’s a curiosity when they do. Only if we feel the call of the spirit will the fruits of the spirit come to us. But what does it take to have this call for the spirit? Is it only the lucky few who feel a need that only God can fill?

The Initial Opening

In truth, not everyone will feel this call. Even those who nominally practice a religion or hold a vague spiritual belief system will not necessarily feel a deep call to seek for and know God. And there are different ways of making sense of this fact—the Calvinists believed that all those who are meant to be found and saved by God are decided in advance, with no role for individual volition; another explanation is found in theories about reincarnation where people spend multiple lifetimes chasing lower, more purely human desires and only in later rebirths do they turn to the spirit. There is no need to consider any explanations here, though as the act of reading this essay probably already indicates at least some interest in spiritual matters. Anyone who gets this far and decides to investigate the spiritual path further has made a deliberate choice. So we’ll just concern ourselves with the question of what exactly it is that makes someone turn to God and how they do so.

For better or worse, one of the major ways that people are drawn into the spiritual life is through misfortune. In times of misfortune, our external means fail, and our internal means—the way we see the world, our methods of coping—fail as well. During trials and ordeals, those who had never thought about praying to a higher being may find themselves entertaining the possibility of a loving God, a source of infinite compassion who would hear and heal their anguish; those who had believed in God but took his support for granted may find themselves deliberately seeking him out where they hadn’t before, wanting refuge. When everything is taken away in the outer life, they may find that God is the only real source of hope, solace, salvation, and stability. God is the great consoler, and this method of finding the call of God does make sense.

Misfortune is not the only route that leads people to God. There is also a positive way—perhaps an individual may not feel that anything is “wrong” with their life, but they have an opening or experience that makes them feel that some greater, vaster, grander possibility opens up than anything they have previously known in normal life—a new intensity of happiness or bliss, a sense of a light or presence. This could be the result of an inspiring concert, seeing the beauty of a national park, or just a deep feeling of connectedness with the world. In truth, these sorts of experiences are miniature spiritual experiences and the right one at the right time can expand our worldview and lead us to the spiritual path.

Then there is also the path of philosophical or existential questioning. For most people engaged with the practicalities of the struggles of life, this does not come up. But for a curious and penetrating mind—one who really questions and wonders—there are not many satisfactory answers to questions like “how did we come to be here having this earthly experience?” and “what is the real purpose of this life?” Why is it that we really need to have the job, the relationship—what is the real significance in the end? Beyond the mere fact of social proof, consensus, and convention, are there any intellectually and psychologically satisfying answers to these questions? The field of philosophy attempts to provide principled answers to these questions. The spiritual path provides one set of answers. Though spirituality is not the only answer to questioning, nor is it proven by any special airtight logic, the path of questioning can still frequently lead to the spiritual path.

But not everyone who undergoes trials and misfortunes feels the need to open up to God—after all, everyone goes through trials in the course of human life, and many atheists feel that their atheism suits them perfectly well to see them through it. By the same token, everyone has peak experiences and not everyone needs to turn to God. And the path of philosophical questioning could lead us to more mental philosophizing, nihilism, or even a recoil from philosophy and a focus on a simple, rational healthy life—it need not lead inevitably to spirituality. All of these situations may provide initial conditions and circumstances, but none of them are absolutely causally decisive. What is ultimately decisive is the call of the soul, and this can happen within any sorts of circumstances at all, be they apparently positive or negative.

In the face of this call, the powers, pleasures, and distractions of the modern world are not enough. But those of us drawn to spiritual seeking in the modern world are actually not the first people to feel this way: the circumstances of life have left many before us asking questions and yearning as well. There has been no absolutely convincing rational argument found that will suffice to answer this yearning or questioning. If we look at the case like a lawyer, casting around for evidence in favor or against, it’s debatable whether there will be an absolute affirmation of God; the structures of logic and thought are not sufficient to prove this on their own.

It is not through the reason, whether pure or applied, that the entry point to the spiritual path can be found. In fact, the only way that the spiritual path will open to you is if there is some sort of opening in one’s consciousness—some experience or intuition that tells you that the claims of a higher spiritual reality might really be possible. We won’t find the true spiritual vision unless we yearn for it, unless we feel it as a deep need of our being. There are material and emotional rewards that come from life: success, relationships, even a feeling of contributing to serving others; these are not enough for someone who has felt the call of their soul. But while the call of the soul may alter our relationship to some of the world’s structures, the call of the soul usually still needs to be met by the world in certain key ways that give the soul the context needed to walk the spiritual path.

The Context of the Spiritual Path

When we enter the spiritual path, we do not do so in a vacuum. We set out on the spiritual path from a determinate place in our lives: the particularities of a life in a certain country on a certain place on the earth, at a time when we are involved with certain relationships, when we are at a certain point in our schooling or career; moreover, these lives are contained within an entire history stretching back from our own life to encompass the history of our culture, the cultures around it, the culture that came before it, stretching all the way back to the entire story of humanity. That means that there is a history and way of understanding that is already known to us before we deliberately enter the spiritual path. And this history will affect how we enter the path.

No matter how modern our thinking, we are led to the question of God at least in part because we have come in contact with a truth that has been passed down from before. In our society we are already embedded in a stream of religious discourse: we have always known that there is a being called God, or at least a hypothesis of such a being, and have known that other people speak about such a being and even take steps to pursue him. We know that it’s a possible aim for people to pursue, regardless if we believed in the truth of that aim. It doesn’t matter how prominently the message is disseminated throughout society or whether we ourselves believed it when we first heard it—the important and relevant part is that the mind is aware that there is some such thing as wisdom or truth of God and the possibility of finding it. This sets up a latent field of possibility in our mind, and when we ourselves have an opening into the possibility and the desire of spirituality through whatever set of circumstances perturb our stasis, we are able to tap into this stream of knowledge that has already been left for us.

One of the things that this field of knowledge lets us do is enable us to classify our initial spiritual thoughts and experiences as having to do with this domain of human knowledge. Without the preexisting framework of spiritual knowledge, it would be difficult to relate our specific experiences at the time of the spiritual opening to even the idea of spiritual knowledge at all. The experiences that occur at the time of the spiritual opening are usually non-ordinary when compared to the events of normal life: there may be unfamiliar thoughts, feelings, and even unusual sensations like visions, lights, or unusual sensations in the body. But when contextualized and structured by preexisting spiritual discourse, these unexpected individual psychological experiences can be connected back to the larger stream of human experience.

The person who turns to God while going through a difficult experience does not invent the concept of a benevolent omnipotent being from whole cloth. Rather, they have heard about God as a possibility in their past, and perhaps are counseled by a friend who has faith that God will hear their prayers. Similarly, the person who turns to spiritual seeking after a peak experience with nature or art knows that others have spoken of the connection between these experiences and the Divine. Without this knowledge to concretely connect their experience to the spiritual quest, it would stay known mostly as a positive experience with nature and not go beyond that. And then, of course, there many people whose first knowledge of the Divine comes from doctrines of organized religion explicitly handed down from the time of early childhood.

Especially when we are starting out on the spiritual path, it is impossible to separate what we personally know about God from what has been said of God; this remains true for a long time until we have more definitive firsthand experience. Even if we do not believe—or even trust—those who have passed their word onto us, the thoughts and experiences they have left in writing and indirectly through the influences on existing human communities already frame the discourse. For most, it will be hard to stake out a new position among the debates of the theists, the mystics, and the nonbelievers stretching back through millennia. Even the great religious reformers, such as Jesus, Buddha, and Luther, had doctrines that were deeply shaped by the doctrines that came before them.

This is not to say that we are bound to the knowledge of the past without the possibility of exceeding it; rather, I simply mean to emphasize the positive function that the knowledge of the past inevitably plays in the spiritual transition. Early in our spiritual quest, we may have a certain indication, an intuition, a perception of voice or a light. How do we know that it means anything? We know because we have access to spiritual discourse that tells us that these are signs of God—we’ve heard before that people have been visited by similar experiences, or we hear about a popular book that discusses them. If it was not for the access to spiritual discourse, we might never know to interpret our inner experiences in a spiritual way at all. Perhaps we’d see them as psychological quirks and hassles; perhaps we’d even view them as totally meaningless sensations. Even the experience of God himself pointing us towards the right path could be disregarded; many rational and scientific people may be inclined to dismiss this as a hallucination.

Structurally, getting on the spiritual path can be seen as navigating a juncture between worlds, where some opening experience joins us to the world of spiritual experience. And once we are in the world of spiritual experience, we are inextricably bound up with the history of man’s spiritual search for our basic concepts and orientation. This does not mean that we are restricted to only the knowledge and experiences that have come before. But it does mean that that knowledge structures the way we think about the spiritual path. When we enter the spiritual path, we need to figure out how to interpret our own experience in the context of the testimony and knowledge left from the past along with all the other possibilities seen around us—cultural attitudes, philosophical ideas, trends, activities and occupations. It’s impossible to disregard this past even if we tried, because our very concepts come from the past. But this past gives us the starting point and context of our possibilities on the spiritual path, rather than serving to simply delimit our horizon.