For those of us who believe that God is the pinnacle of being and the ultimate reality, surely an encounter with him would be regarded as supremely Good—perhaps as the one supreme Good towards which our entire lives trend. Perhaps the experience—the reality—of constantly dwelling in his nature would be the final aim of human life, if that could be done. But how are we to reach him or dwell in him? And are we even sure that “reaching” him is the best conception of what we need to do? There have been many proposals for man’s attitude to God over the millennia, and they are not all in agreement that “reaching God” is the proper aim of human life. Even if we set aside those who claim that God does not even exist, there is also another persistent set of claims from the major world religions that argue that we are not supposed to pursue God directly at all, and our aim should rather be to live in accordance with guidelines—and within appropriate bounds—that he has set out for humans to follow.
In this essay we explore the option of growing closer to God by pursuing a “spiritual path” that is independent of outer institutions and structures. This proposal has a few components. We must accept that the entity called God exists. We also accept that our aim is to grow closer to Him—as opposed to us ignoring him and him ignoring us. And then there’s the the method of doing this—via the spiritual path. This implies that there are other methods. What is the nature of this “spiritual” approach and what distinguishes it from the other approaches?
What’s in a word?
By the 21st century, the word “spiritual” has become overlaid with so many different meanings that it is hard to tell what exactly it refers to. Does it refer to the search for meaning in human life in general? Is it a neutral-sounding code word for specific Eastern religious doctrines that are incompatible with Western religious doctrines and attempting to supplant them? Is it a meaningless term that can have no meaning because the realities it purports to describe don’t exist? This vagueness can be offputting to those who value pragmatism and rigor. Though the word shows no sign of declining in usage now, those who value the word and what it means should at least attempt to take care of its usage. After all, we have seen a backlash against the word “religious”, with a trend towards people using the qualification that they are “spiritual” but not “religious” because of the negative connotations from the rigidities and archaic qualities of religions, so it’s not entirely out of the question that if negative associations to the word “spiritual” develop, the word may develop a similar disrepute among serious people.
I cannot claim to give a single watertight definition of “spiritual” or “spirituality” that will match the usage of all people—that would cover, say, all of the senses listed in the previous paragraph. After all, the nature of language is that words change their meanings over time in accordance with human usage. Instead I will make one attempt at tracing out a vision that I believe this concept corresponds to, and will also claim that this use has a certain justification and correctness, even if it cannot claim to be the absolute correct usage of the term for all time.
But even to make an initial definition as to precisely what I mean for this specific context is difficult: spirituality can have many different definitions because we can emphasize different things about it, just as when looking at a diamond from different angles we may see many different gleams, facets, and shapes even though we’re looking at the same object. We could define spirituality in terms of the individual or in terms of God; in terms of actions, or in terms of a worldview; philosophically or from a historical perspective, contrasting it to other concrete choices one may be facing. We’ll start with the idea of “spirit”, which is the Divine essence which lies behind everything in the material world—in the case of man, that Divine essence which lies beyond the external manifestations of the body, mind, and emotions. Our initial definition of spirituality is that it is a way of living with the aim of contacting that Divine spiritual essence and bringing out its expressions in life. And the spiritual life, or the spiritual path, is the life path we walk when we live this way.
This definition may seem quite harmless—who could disagree with the aim of living life with an aim to express the inner spirit? But to better understand what exactly the spiritual approach is, it’s most helpful to contrast it to two other possibilities of life, the religious life and the material life. By doing this, we’ll gain more specificity in our definition of the spiritual life by adding both positive and negative parts to our definition of spirituality. The idea of spirituality might be simple, but following it out to its full potential requires individual independence and an eventual departure from other recognized forms of life.
To a religious worldview, “spirituality” is vague and wishy-washy concept, denoting an overly permissive practice that would seek to avoid the rigors and sound structures of religious tradition. A second criticism might come from a pragmatic and/or secular perspective: to this way of thinking, “spirituality” would denote the pursuit of chimeras and invisible enigmas, a way of living that shies away from the demands and practicalities of real life. In other words, the religious would hold that the approach to God that the spiritual perspective advocates is not possible outside of its institutional structures, while the secular pragmatist would claim that the approach to God is not even possible at all because it contradicts what we know of normal life.
But if there really is a substantive method of approaching God in a more purely spiritual way—that is, if the spiritual path as an approach to God really exists—then it must turn out that these these criticisms have no real force.
The material life
By “the material life” we refer to all possibilities of human life that are not tuned to God or the spirit in any significant way. This would include, for example, the lives of those who are atheist, agnostic, or otherwise secular and don’t profess any active belief in God, but it would also includes the broad swath of people who are formally religious but don’t practice in any significant way. It could even include those who are concerned with the deeper meaning of human life, who seek a life of meaning and purpose and could be said to be engaged with with the “human spirit” in a broad sense, with more emphasis on “human” than “spirit"—for example, artists and philosophers who explore mental and emotional idealism but are not oriented towards pursuit of God or the Absolute.
In the mundane life, there are other objects and goals that are seen as more worthy of pursuit than God: career attainments, sensory pleasures, money, family life, glory of country, support of the community. Even pursuing high ideals like philanthropy and service to humanity, while not incompatible with the spiritual life, are not necessarily spiritual in themselves if they are done with a purely secular attitude. While it is true that all of these things are forms and expressions of God, the crucial difference between the material and the spiritual life is that in the material life these are viewed as ends in themselves and not as so many expressions of God through which to approach him. The spiritual life is actually made out of some of the same ingredients as the normal life: someone following the spiritual path still uses money, still engages with friends and family, still conducts work according various to ideas and human organizational structures, but the difference is just that the spiritual seeker only pursues those activities which bring one closer to God, and sees them as expressions of the spirit rather than ends in themselves.
In practice, one who pursues this mundane life will have some fixed point beyond which they refuse to see, a point past which they stop caring about seeking for the truth of God. It may be romantic love or one’s family, it may be one’s country, it may be artistic expression, or it may be the idealistic service of all humanity, but as long as there is any barrier at which one feels content, uninterested, or indifferent about continuing to seek for God, it is not yet the spiritual life. Once again, this does not mean that the spiritual seeker does not engage with these forms in the outer life: someone with the proper spiritual attitude could be living with their family, doing work that is of national service, and deeply involved with the community, and as long as she sees these as being tools and forms of the spirit, meeting the outer demand with the proper spiritual attitude.
One way to view this is in terms of consciousness and unconsciousness. We could say that people who pursue the material life are still themselves expressions of the spirit in things, but they have not grown not conscious of that fact yet, while those who pursue the spiritual life have reached the point where they are conscious of the spiritual nature of life and want to express and explore it fully. This should not be viewed as any sort of deficiency on the part of those who choose to live the material life—most spiritual philosophies would hold that they are living in the way that is correct for their level of spiritual maturity, and they may be drawn to the spiritual life later at the appropriate stage of spiritual growth (perhaps even in another human lifetime).
Another way to view the difference between the material life and the spiritual life is in terms of the gratification of the ego versus the search for God. The ego is a psychological construct evolved by evolution that causes each individual to view him or herself as the central and most important being in the universe. But the ego is capable of extending itself and incorporating larger forms as well, so that the individual transfers his or her egoic identification to other things: someone could be selfless in one’s contribution to one’s family or country but still be attached to the family or country as an extension of one’s ego, in which case they are engaged with the mundane life as opposed to the spiritual pursuit of God. So long as there is any finite form or object in the universe that the individual identifies their ego with more than the enthusiasm to dissolve the ego into service and devotion to God, they are still living the material life.
The religious life
The religious life is another conception of life that we can contrast better understand the spiritual life. In some ways, the religious life is more similar to the spiritual life than the material life is—the important similarity being that the religious life, like the spiritual life, is directed towards God. One question important we must ask, then, is whether these are really two different things. The primary distinction is that in the religious life, one relates to God specifically through through the rituals, forms, and social institutions of an organized religious tradition. The major world religions—Christianity (in its Catholic and Protestant variants), Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism—each provide their own social and ritualistic structures for doing this. The details vary greatly, and are subject to extensive scholarly and lay commentary study, but some common features include regular worship services that draw the entire community together, an official institutional hierarchy distinguishing between clergy and laypeople, and a system of social norms for living that is suggested by the institution and enforced by the social community.
For our definition of spirituality,—the attempt to contact and bring out the inner spirit—we didn’t specify that the relation to God must take place within an organized religious institution; but we also didn’t specify that it must *not* take place within a tradition. So if these are two ways of relating to God, what is the difference between them? In fact, there is no absolute line between the two, and they are not strictly contradictory to each other. We could say in principle that the religious life is one form of the spiritual life. But it is possible to participate in the structures of an institution while paying little or no attention to the truly spiritual aspects—that is, the possibility of being religious without being spiritual, just as there is the possibility of being spiritual without being religious. One could say that it is possible to pursue a spiritual path either inside and outside a religious tradition, but the religious life isn’t necessarily spiritual.
There is no absolute conflict between the spiritual and the religious conceptions of life. But the purpose of this section is ostensibly to attempt to understand the spiritual life by contrast to the religious life. Where, then, is the problem, contrast, or contradiction? One seed of discord between the two approaches lies in the difference in their goals and purposes. Religions tend to be about organizing the religious life of a community, whereas the spiritual approach is about the relationship between the individual and God, without necessarily excluding the idea of community support. One possible result can that religions can devolve to the point where not much spirituality is involved at all, and adherents meet all of their outward obligations to maintain good social standing in a religious community, making a purely outward show of faith without having a real inner relation to God at all. Or it can lead to outward concerns and priorities overwhelming spiritual priorities; a common pattern is for the institution to become dependent on secular sources for funding and compromise its spiritual integrity. In Christianity, for example, we see the story of Jesus’ anger at the moneychangers at the temple, or the later example of the Catholic Church’s use of indulgences in the middle ages. Usually a religious reform movement arises within the religion itself whenever the inner spirit of a religion fails to meet the spiritual needs of its adherents; at that point it must either change its forms, ossify into a spiritless shell, or fail completely.
While the previous examples show some things that can go wrong with religious approach, they don’t prove that the religious approach will always fail or that the spiritual approach will do any better. After all, if religions sometimes ossified to become too involved with money, they were also often restored to a more spiritual nature by powerful saints and prophets, to the spiritual benefits of many adherents. And of course, so many billions of people have in the past and present found refuge for their souls within these institutions. From a spiritual perspective, there is no reason why a particular set of rituals, spiritual doctrines, and religious community should be inherently in conflict with the spiritual impulse to seek God, especially since the professed goals of the religious approach is to seek God as well. Therefore, in principle, one could still satisfy the spiritual need while working within a religious institutional structures. But, of course, if there was no conflict between the spiritual impulse and religious structures, there would be no reason for any individual to seek out an independent spiritual path we are discussing here.
In practice, we find that the independent spiritual path meets a need that is not satisfied by religious institutions, as there are specific issues that individuals with a spiritual inclination may find when participating in currently existing religious institutions:
-Truth: Organized religious traditions may profess beliefs—and require them to be professed by adherents—that conflict with what intelligent and conscientious individuals know to be true about the world from perspectives and ways of knowing outside religion. One of the most prominent examples over the past several centuries has been science, with the most famous and influential individual conflict being Galileo’s disagreement with the Catholic Church. But religious traditions continue to make claims that conflict with what cutting edge science says about the universe.
This is not to say that science is the highest standard for truth that we have as spiritual seekers. But there are more and less convincing ways for a religious tradition to reconcile its doctrines with those of science, and there are different preferences that one may have for evaluating the reconciliation. If the religious doctrine cannot square itself with the rest of what an individual knows about the world, it can’t be an eventual fit. Science isn’t the only way that religious doctrine can conflict with one’s sense of truth; another possible issue could simply be belief in the religious claims that the religion is making, whether they are about ancient prophesies, supernatural miracles, or interpretations of historical events. Rationality is not the ultimate standard or arbiter in matters of the spirit, but at the same time, if the claims of a religion cause a strong and irreconcilable conflict in the rational mind, it is not likely that it can be a permanent spiritual solution for the soul.
-Ethics: Similarly, if a religion conflicts with what the ethical sense of an individual knows to be right, they may not find alignment with that religion. For example, if a tradition supports overt or tacit discrimination or different treatment against any group or class of people, or institutionally encourages regressive political policies that one does not agree with, that is something that will impair the ability to feel connected to it. The conflict may be about purely religious matters, as well, rather than political ones—for example, some religions profess the doctrine that only adherents of that tradition will receive the ultimate spiritual salvation. For any of these social, political, or religious matters, there will almost certainly be justifications that are given in terms of the religion’s doctrines, but the individual has to evaluate whether they make sense in terms of the individual’s own moral compass.
-Aesthetics/Heart: In some cases, the symbols, rituals, and forms used by a religious tradition may simply cease to fascinate and individual and thus may lose their ability to continue drawing them closer to God. Just as one may have a long and fulfilling marriage, fall out of love, and go on to find love again with a second marriage partner, so is it possible to cease being enraptured by the symbolic system laid out by a religious tradition while still loving God and go on to find another set of symbols that is more resonant. Within the framework and exclusionary claims of a given religion, of course, adherents don’t have the freedom to make choices based on whether they are aesthetically fulfilled by the symbols, as from within the perspective of that tradition, there is simply no other choice available. But if you believe in the potential for individual spiritual freedom and you do not feel inspiration continuing, there is the option to make another choice.
-Restriction: An individual may chafe at the specific restrictions that are advised or required by a religious tradition. Religious adherents may be required to perform rituals according to institutionally prescribed schedules or undertake dietary restrictions that are not desired. There is also generally pressure to participate in social structures that may not be appealing, such as marriage by a certain age and/or restricted to a certain group, childrearing expectations, rigid gender roles, or restrictions on social circles. From within the perspective of the religion, this could be seen as a matter of discipline, of living a well-regulated life in the way that God prescribes. It’s true that some form of discipline is necessary for any endeavor in life, including spirituality, but it needs to be appropriate for the person: the regimented schedule of an army recruit is suitable for those pursuing that profession, but would be inappropriate for someone seeking to be a novelist. The question is whether the discipline that is laid out by a particular religion is suitable to an individual’s mind and nature.
-Spiritual options unavailable within religions: It could be that an individual sees the possibilities for spiritual fulfillment that are not readily accessible within a given religious tradition. All religious traditions have certain practices that are possible, while others are less advised and may even be viewed as heretical. One may find that spiritual development requires techniques that are not supported within the confines of their existing religious tradition. Someone who is embedded within Catholicism may not find that their community is supportive of several hours a day of contemplative meditation; someone who is involved with the American Buddhist tradition may realize that they don’t want to do hours of meditation and want more tactile ritualistic methods but not find that their clergy is able to provide them. In both of those cases, the desire to pursue spiritual practices that are not supported by the organized religious tradition may lead to ways to practice outside tradition. Unfortunately, as with human relationships, it is difficult to go outside the institutional relationship to have spiritual needs met and still remain on good terms with the institution.
-Trust: One of the most crucial needs for an individual’s spiritual framework is a basic trust in organization or religious tradition to be the caretaker of their spiritual development. In fact, all of the above factors could be viewed as relating to an aspect of this kind of trust. Any organized religion claims to be representing God on earth and doing his work. The question for the individual is whether they trust the institution in this capacity. Much can be forgiven intellectually, aesthetically, as to matters of discipline, even ethically if there is a trust that the institution really is representing God . This is similar to a child’s relationship with their parents—it could really be that the institution knows better what it is that God asks, and if you trust them with your heart and soul then that is for the best.
This is why there is no sense in finding out if religions are absolutely true or absolutely false according to some given external scientific or philosophical standard: they are representing God for those who find that representation useful, regardless of whether others do. Do you trust the priest and hierarchy at a personal level as representatives of God—do you trust that God is speaking through them to you? Or is there another way that you find God speaking to you—another person, text, image, or experience? Do you trust the laypeople in the organized religious community is the community through which you want to serve and relate to God? By "trust” here I don’t necessarily mean trust at the purely ethical level, as in whether the organization can be trusted to conduct themselves with ethical financial management and being free from lurid scandals. The trust here is deeper and more profound—whether the organization can be trusted to be your soul’s intermediary to God. Does the organization feel like a way that God is speaking to you, or a way that God is speaking to anyone, or just another work of man?
Authority
The reasons listed above could be generalized to evaluate one’s participation in any organization or activity, not just religion, as they are essentially about seeing whether the soul is aligned with a given possibility or not. But it can be harder to make dispassionate judgements and choices when dealing with the question of whether to participate in a religious organization in particular. One major reason for this is that for many people, religion serves as the foundational source of a worldview—the collection of fundamental beliefs about how the world works, what is right and wrong, how one should act, and so on. Further, religions claim that they have the legitimate authority to be the source of their worldviews; one of the ways to understand what a religion even is is as a worldview and an accompanying social structure. In contrast, the considerations above were discussed from a perspective that assumed the individual would have their own worldview separate from that of the religion that they could use to evaluate the suitability of the religion for their individual spiritual path.
This is not only an individual choice but also the result of a civilization-wide change in the perceived source of authority. In earlier eras, religion itself was the highest source of authority, and it was not possible for individuals to bring their own judgement to the issue of whether a religious doctrine and tradition should be followed. The authority was enforced by more rigid hierarchical social structures, and attempting to circumvent it could lead to the risk of social censure or even violent persecution. At the current juncture in history, though, we hold that each individual has the capability and the right to choose their views for themselves. This change happened over many centuries and has many causes, but one major identifiable turning point was the Enlightenment, a Western philosophical movement from the 18th century. The philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Rousseau and Voltaire stressed the importance of individual reason and liberty against the oppressive authority of the Church and monarchical government. They were largely successful, and these ideals are still held as having paramount importance in the world today.
However, the independent spiritual path existed before the Enlightenment and is not dependent on it; when people were strongly motivated to pursue it, they carved out their own structures like the institution of sanyassi (renunciation) in India, or the underground transmission of hermetic philosophy in Europe, even at the risk of persecution. Therefore the ability to choose one’s worldview is not something that is granted by the invention of particular philosophical ideas but is a fundamental human capability. That doesn’t mean that it is necessarily easy to change one’s worldview— it generally is not. An individual who questions their worldview may go through an intermediate period of teetering between seeing a religion as the fundamental source of a worldview versus seeing a worldview outside of a religion and religion as a choice to participate in. Social bonds, pressures, and emotional attachments an complicate the question further. In the spiritual view, it is ultimately the individual soul that decide what sorts of structures it can best flourish within. And if the soul grows so that a given religious worldview is incompatible with it, they will transfer to a more independent spiritual path.
Religious life is a form of life where the individual relates to God through the rituals, social structure, institutional structure, and ideological worldview of a particular organized religion. The spiritual life is the individual’s search to grow closer to God, the Divine, or the ultimate spritual reality in general. As we have noted, there is no conflict in principle. We could say that for many individuals, their spiritual life and the religious life coincide; or perhaps we could say that they are able to pursue the spiritual life through their involvement with the religious organization. But there is also an independent spiritual path that can be pursued outside of religious organizations. This becomes necessary when the individual’s mind and temperament become incompatible with the structures of religion due to a combination of outside influence, personal evolution, and evolution of the world, and perhaps changes within organized religions themselves, but they still want to continue searching for God. The soul ultimately demands freedom in its search for God, which is why the notion of the independent spiritual path exists at all. But it is not only religious structures that the spiritual path might lead us past: in fact, the spiritual path demands potential freedom from all contrary influences as the soul submits to God.
Freedom as as essential characteristic of the spiritual path
There is one area where the independent spiritual life departs from both the mundane and religious conceptions of life, and this is the area of freedom: the spiritual life requires that we allow absolute freedom to the growing inner spirit. As the lives of saints and martyrs show us, the pursuit of God may lead us to contradict every secular authority, societal convention, and even religious authority itself. The religious life requires adherents to stay within the ideological and lifestyle boundaries set out by the religion; spirituality means that one may feel called to take up practices or live a life that does not fit within those boundaries.
The material life, on the other hand doesn’t seem to offer any lack of freedom, especially in those countries where political freedom is valued. However, the sort of freedom offered by the mundane life is deceptive. The foundation is what is called “negative liberty” in political philosophy: the individual has the power to undertake consensual actions that do not break the laws of the state. But the freedom that the spirit demands is a higher standard: one must be free from societal expectations as well as from the demands of one’s own lower nature. While the “negative liberty” of political freedom assures that there will not be limits on action from the state, the individual may still encounter substantial sub-legal resistance from members of society. In practice, one who follows the spiritual life, choosing to follow God and the dictates of inner spirit, will find themselves in conflict with family members, employers, friends, relationship partners, and others who expect them to continue acting within accepted, conventional structures that do not accord with the callings of the inner spirit.
The spiritual life may require you to take actions that set you at odds with the social body in general, whether we conceive of this social body as the body of the religious community or the secular community at large. One may feel compelled to make changes to one’s diet, personality and comportment in casual conversation, choice of career or hobbies, or social circles in ways that lead to criticism, interpersonal tension, or even ostracism from the religious organization or secular community. One example could be a set of parents who expect their child to go into the family profession of being a lawyer, inheriting their parents’ business and political connections, while the child wants to pursue a career in the healing arts. It would require an act of strength in the child’s spirit to follow that calling in the face of disapproval and possible withdrawal of material support from the parents.
But a the second issue is that spiritual freedom requires going beyond the desires of the lower nature as well. Spiritual freedom does not mean that we should be drawn to libertinism, rebellion or iconoclasm for its own sake: one who follows the whims of the lower nature to indulge in excess is no more essentially spiritual than the one who follows all the conventions of the normal world, never questioning their rightness. An important part of the spiritual life is accepting the restrictions of the world created by God and without chafing at them arbitrarily. The freedom demanded by the spirit is not the freedom to pursue the arbitrary whims and desires of the lower nature.
For example, one degenerate interpretation of secular freedom is the freedom to generate wealth and keep possession of arbitrary amounts of wealth. There is no contradiction with the idea of wealth in a spiritual worldview; wealth is a power of the Divine, especially if it is generated and used responsibly in accordance with an individual’s nature and their highest vision for themselves and others. But if one’s motivations for generating wealth are greed, envy, and the desire to impress others, it’s better to give up those desires rather than continue to believe in this notion of “freedom”; the spirit may be able to find what it needs to survive within even seemingly slight conditions, such as a the pleasures of a modest but well-organized and decorated apartment where one has space to do one’s private devotions.
There is a certain paradox to the nature of freedom: the spirit has the right to decline any circumstance if it finds it too restrictive; and yet the spirit must be able to find the freedom within any circumstance even if outer circumstances don’t change. Spiritual freedom is not, say, the ability to wave one’s wand after a natural disaster and declare that everything should go back to normal by fiat but rather to stay connected to the soul and see what the possibilities of the soul are even within difficult situations.
Direct Experience
But perhaps the most significant difference between the spiritual worldview and a nonspiritual worldview, whether materialist or religious, is the idea of direct spiritual experience: in the spiritual worldview, the experience of a higher spiritual reality is possible and open to all. That is, unlike the mundane life, the spiritual worldview sees that the experience of a higher spirituality is possible and desirable; and unlike the religious life, these higher and ultimate spiritual experiences are not just accessible to the chosen few prophets, priests, or renunciates—they are not restricted to those with a special chosen birth, institutional social position, or those who have waited through multiple rebirths before seeking the experience. This is not to downplay the large amount of effort and commitment nor the possibility of substantial individual differences that may occur in spiritual development. Still, in the spiritual worldview there is no insurmountable separation—neither a religious institution nor simply the impenetrable dullness of reality—standing between human life and the experience of the Divine. In fact, the very purpose of the spiritual life is to seek the fullest possible expression of this experience, rather than being counseled to pursue worldly aims as in the mundane life, or encouraged to follow a regulated life within the boundaries of human experience as in the religious life.
Therefore, the concept of “belief” has a much different role in the spiritual life as well. In the non-spiritual life, great emphasis is placed on what one “believes” about God and about the nature of the universe. These beliefs are mental ideas that individuals hold and debate but never directly experience. In the spiritual life, since direct experience of the content of the beliefs is possible, belief is no longer a mere mental idea that one needs to hold on to tightly; rather, it changes into a matter of provisional guidance. Consider the relationship of a physics student to the laws of physics before and after their university study. Before the university, the student is not aware of the details of physical laws, but trusts that they work on account of the trustworthiness of the professors and the successful demonstrations of science. But they are able to learn the details of physics for themselves in university, and after the university, they know the details and therefore do not need to take them on “faith” any longer.
Similarly, in the spiritual life, we hold a “belief” about God or the nature of the universe fully expecting that one day we will come into contact with the reality that the belief professes; it is not about a mere idea that one is expected to entertain about faraway things. A spiritual person “believes” in God but expects to eventually experience God; this is different from a position in a theoretical discussion or debate about whether something imaginary does or does not exist. In the spiritual life we can accept guidance and teaching of those who have gone farther on the path, but ultimately we don’t need to “take anything on faith” indefinitely, as everything can be experienced for oneself.
Spiritual practice
And because the aim of the spiritual path is to have direct experience of a higher spiritual reality, the idea of the spiritual path is inseparable from the fact that someone on the spiritual path must be actively working towards that potentiality. The actions that one takes to reach this goal are called one’s “spiritual practice”: just as a student of piano has a rigorous schedule of exercises and studies to work towards the goal of proficiency at piano, so does the spiritual seeker have practices that are used to work towards the spiritual goal. As we noted earlier, there are multiple ways to define spirituality depending on the aspect one focuses on—in our initial discussion we used the provisional definition that spirituality is about an individual’s search for God or a higher spiritual reality. Taking another perspective, one can just as easily define spirituality as being about spiritual *practice*—perhaps we could even say that the spiritual path is essentially about the practice one does, as any spirituality that doesn’t involve practice in some form can only be some sort of theoretical speculation. Spirituality is not a mere worldview but rather the act of spiritual practice along with the resulting spiritual knowledge that one holds that grows deeper with experience.
What, then, is this “spiritual practice”? Suppose God lived in another physical city on earth. Then spiritual practice would be a simple, straightforward matter of taking a physical journey to God. But we know that that is not the case; spiritual practice is not as simple as making a physical journey. It’s more confusing because supposedly God is everywhere, surrounding us, making up the very matter that makes us up. Luckily, there are many specific spiritual techniques that have been devised and passed down over the ages. In fact there are potentially *infinitely* many techniques for doing practice. More important than being wedded to any one specific practice, though, is to understand what spiritual practice *is*; for if you understand what spiritual practice is, then any practice becomes possible, or any activity or all of life can be your practice.
One way of understanding spiritual practice is that it is the process of turning one’s energies towards God. In a metaphysical spiritual conception, the human being has a certain amount of cosmic energy flowing through them, and a choice as to how to allocate this energy. No matter what our circumstances might be, there is always a choice of how to direct our energies, towards something lower or something higher, whether towards destruction, pessimism, and hatred or love, peacefulness, and constructive action. Even someone stuck in a locked cell with few apparent outward options is still animated by cosmic energy and can choose to work with the tools of intention, faith, contemplation and prayer as long as they are conscious.
Spiritual practice can be thought of as the act of directing these psychological energies towards God. In the normal, non-spiritual life, as we discussed, psychological energy are turned towards the normal activities of labor, leisure, reproduction, amusement, culture, and so on, but for the essential gratification of the ego rather than God. Spiritual disciplines take these energies and redirect them through concentration, prayer, spiritual service work, ritual, and so on. But even these tools can be seen as ways of training one’s consciousness to have the correct spiritual attitude throughout all activities, no matter what we are doing—the attitude which results in all of one’s life and energy being devoted to God.
And getting to this point, where one’s psychological energies are fully devoted to God, is what ultimately removes the separation from God. So the spiritual path is not a physical journey but the journey of changing one’s psychology so that it is capable of doing this. But this is not an trivial process: while man is a creation of God and made of the substance of God, in another practical sense, man is truly separated from God. We are separated from him by our mind and chaotic life-impulses, the dense and intricate structures that constitute our body and our consciousness. We undertake spiritual practice to remove this separation. The separation can be removed internally by going inside oneself to commune with one’s God-nature. But separation doesn’t need to only stop at inner states. We must be in contact with God in our outer lives as well, when we aren’t absorbed in contemplation, prayer, or meditation; hence the importance of spiritual practices we can work with in our outer lives as well. The process of doing this progressively throughout our whole being while remaining outside of the limiting confines and influences of any fixed religious institution is the independent spiritual path.
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