This post is a selection from the introduction to an unfinished book: Awakening to Boundless Being: The Stages and Steps of the Spiritual Path
The Shape of the Spiritual Life, continued
I have studied and practiced multiple spiritual disciplines in numerous religious traditions, a story that I tell in my memoir, The Light of the Self: A Memoir of a Spiritual Awakening. Over the last six decades, since the spiritual awakening that led me away from my Catholic home to a Hindu ashram, I have developed my own personal understanding and practice of the spiritual life. My focus in the following pages will be on the practices that have guided me up until now. Less important will be attempts to give answers to the major theological and metaphysical dilemmas that all too often become a reason to give up on spirituality. As a philosopher of religion and comparative theologian, I know from long study and experience that these questions lead to theoretical dead ends. I have pursued multiple theological and religious-philosophical perspectives, including semi-dualist and nondualist Vedānta, Theravāda and Mahāyāna Buddhism, and evangelical, Catholic, and liberal Protestant theologies. In each one of these traditions, I engaged traditional answers to the major issues until, as is always the case with humanly generated conceptual systems, they eventuate in contradictions. At the end of each of these roads, the tradition divides into two or more groups of thinkers who insist on defending one of the horns of the contradiction. All too often, each of these parties look down with suspicion on their counterparts who held the contrary positions.
What’s even more difficult is that many of the answers religions give to the major issues of life can be only applied partially because either these answers generate more problems than they solve or the answers force us to choose the answer of the tradition over basic science, reliable common sense, or, in extreme cases, our humanity. So, in these pages, I will take an empirical route, one that relies upon the proven results of spiritual practice rather than the theoretical claims of theologians and religious philosophers. As I hope to show, the fifteen stages of the mystical life suggested in the chapters of this book make up the main stations in the spiritual itinerary, or journey. My own pluralist religious background will necessarily shape the examples that I call upon here, but because each of these traditions witness to general contours of this itinerary, I see it as at least as empirically verified as the most secure scientific theories.
Just as secure a spiritual truth as the general outline of this itinerary is the spiritual reality that undergirds it. As will become clear in these pages, the divine reality—God—is the most reliable reality in life, as anyone who makes the test of calling upon God, or the divine, in a time crisis will infallibly discover.
Someone may scoff at what seems to be the largest and emptiest theoretical claim of all—that God, or the divine, exists. Surely here, they will argue, I have moved away from experience to embrace a mere theory about an invisible being whose existence is a mere posit of religious doctrine, which is a classic instance of non-evidence-based theorizing. If, for example, someone asks me in a time of great tragedy or crisis where God is or how God could allow this happen, my first response is silence. This is a respectful silence because I take the question seriously, and I want to allow the deeper voices within me to answer. I resist the urge to recite standard theological answers, knowing how flawed and even offensive they can be.
If, for example, I were to say that this is God’s will, the conversation will likely end before it even really starts. Who—including theologians—wouldn’t ask why a good God allows people to suffer, especially the innocent? There is no safe place to go from this point, if we want to preserve our humanity. If I were to suggest that suffering is judgment on sin, the questioner might point out that God’s aim is off because in many of tragic events the righteous suffer alongside the unrighteous. Or perhaps some theologian might claim that all of us are deserving of punishment because we have all sinned through the sin of a common ancestor. But only theologians with very stout convictions can follow this argument to its bitter end without blanching at its human cost.
It’s the same with the doctrine of karma. If we attribute misfortune to bad karma, we very quickly arrive at the point where we have to lay the blame for every misfortune solely at the feet of the victims. Again, to insist beyond a certain point that we are fully responsible for every good and bad experience is to sacrifice our humanity on the altar of logical consistency.
My answer to these conundrums is practical: turn within to the divine, or God, especially in a time of crisis or extreme existential need, and you will discover God, or the divine, as a guiding presence. This is not a pious hope nor a greeting-card truism. It is a reality that I have verified countless times in my life—as have billions of human beings over the millennia. This spiritual reality is independent of our theologies and religious philosophies. It is not even dependent upon the use of terms like God or divine reality. This is as much a reality, although ensconced with a non-theistic philosophy, in Buddhism, as it is in nondual Vedānta. This saving experience is open to theists, nontheists, and atheists. The human heart or mind is so made that it opens out at it deepest end into the creative ground of life. Here, no matter how we arrive—and some arrive apart from any sort of religion via serous ethical action or serious aesthetic appreciation—we encounter a space of pure freedom, supreme happiness, reliable practical wisdom, and the breathtaking experience of deathlessness. And when we arrive here, we know that we have found our true home. We have discovered the doorway into the immortal spiritual life, which is the permanent background of our temporary wanderings in the material universe.
It is on this completely true and trustworthy fact that I take my stand as a spiritual person. And it from this standpoint that I will unfold the spiritual journey in the following pages.
thanks for your writings