[an article I wrote, originally published in Parabola Magazine]<\/p>\n
We often speak of spiritual paths and journeys; of figurative mountains that must be climbed, as in Rene Daumal\u2019s classic Mount Analogue. The spiritual path is an ascent fraught with rigors. The word path, in a spiritual context, indicates a definite course. It assumes the danger of getting lost, losing the path up one\u2019s particular \u201cMount Analogue.\u201d Our trek is in many ways an inward one, using outer indicators. For seekers, there are outer maps, and inner maps. And it\u2019s possible to get stuck with an outer map that distorts our inner map.<\/p>\n
In the days of the American frontier, trails to the west were sketchy. Information could be distorted by entrepreneurs wishing to sell goods to the pioneers. The distances were underestimated; the risks understated. Travelers on the Oregon Trail could be preyed on by bandits, and con men. Spiritual travelers have parallel risks.<\/p>\n
There are many valid paths to the top of the mountain. There is Islamic mysticism, and Christian mysticism; there is Zen and there is Taoism; there are Vedantic traditions; there is the Fourth Way of Gurdjieff; there is Africa\u2019s Ifa, and there are aboriginal traditions. There are many other paths that can take us to the yearned-for destination. But the same obstacles are presented along the way; some by outsiders, some by our own nature.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the most recurrent cause of losing the way, is the risk of self-deception. One \u201ccons\u201d oneself. We insist that the shiny crystal we\u2019ve found is a diamond. We\u2019re hunting diamonds, of a sort; as in the Diamond Sutra, if you like. However\u2026<\/p>\n
Look there, a crystal glitters! A diamond! It is more likely mere quartz. No, I insist, it is a real diamond! I\u2019m no fool! My own vanity is the first lure to draw me off the path, wherever my path to the top of the mountain may originate.<\/p>\n
The outer world abounds with lures of all kinds. There are limitless roadside attractions on the path, featuring self-appointed \u201clife coaches\u201d, and would-be gurus with poorly understood meditation techniques. There are venal channelers, personality enumerators, persons of high charisma and low morals \u2014 and worse. There is also our desire to see egoic selves in the world; to find mirrors that seem to draw us to gaze adoringly into them; mirrors that draw us off the path, so we can keep preening in the looking glass\u2026<\/p>\n
So many distractions \u2014 and many of them are there right at the very beginning of our journey, when the only surety we have, at first, is an unusual wish \u2014 a wish to know why we\u2019re here; to know how we can have a more fulfilled life; to know if God exists, and if inner freedom is possible.<\/p>\n
It is possible to go a long way on a real path, only to stumble off into the wilderness. I know of spiritual teachers who started out as insightful and kindly and who even developed siddhis powers, only to be seduced and destroyed by their own vanity; who wandered blindly after that retreating mirror, towing others with them in the slipstream of their glamor.<\/p>\n
How to find one\u2019s way past all this? What\u2019s the best way to separate the wheat from the chaff?<\/p>\n
There is skepticism. According to B. Alan Wallace, author of Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic, \u201cThe Buddha himself embraced the value of skepticism, for he counseled others not to adopt beliefs on the basis of hearsay, legend, tradition, scriptural sources, logical conjecture, probability, or a teacher\u2019s authority. He encouraged us to learn through our own experience which theories and practices are wholesome and which are unwholesome.\u201d Wallace points out that \u201cthe Greek term skeptikoi means seekers or inquirers.\u201d<\/p>\n
But skepticism alone has been known to shoot itself in the foot. Some skeptics doubted the germ theory of Pasteur; some people are mistakenly skeptical of vaccines, even now. Back in the day, skeptics said we would never fly, and never reach the moon. Skepticism per se is too broad a term for our needs, evoking pictures of people snorting and rolling their eyes. Rather unfairly, the term has taken on a tang of negativity. Let us then engage a more thoughtful form of lively inquiry, critical thinking. I would argue that critical thinking is a necessary tool to bring to any spiritual search. And it is a tool with two points; one is aimed outward, one is aimed inward.<\/p>\n
Critical thinking underlies the scientific method. I have a friend whose writings in spirituality I value highly; he\u2019s grown angry with science, and never misses a chance to denounce it. But ironically, a scientific attitude can profoundly enhance a spiritual path. Those who want to include science in spirituality can point to subatomic physics and its breaking down of all things into wave-forms, and to quantum physics phenomena like \u201cspooky action at a distance.\u201d Our appreciation of these phenomena is complicated by opportunists who reference those discoveries to promote quackery and cults. \u201cJust three hundred dollars for my quantum-energy youth-restoring bracelet!\u201d Still, real scientists, like the physics-mathematician Roger Penrose, proffer intriguing theories on the sublime nature of consciousness. The Dalai Lama has a deep interest in science, and has cooperated in experiments. Gurdjieff said, \u201cI ask you to believe nothing that you cannot verify for yourself.\u201d So don\u2019t kick science out of bed.<\/p>\n
But can we test our spiritual experiences, as scientists test out their theorems?<\/p>\n
I maintain that we can. Although with a deep spiritual search, we must couple critical thinking with another kind of tool, the lens of attention itself, and its application to gnosis.<\/p>\n
Socrates offered \u201cthe disciplined practice of thoughtful questioning\u201d to determine the validity of an idea. That\u2019s basic to critical thinking. First, critical thinking asks, are we subject to some front-loaded preconception? To get at the truth we must be unbiased toward a positive or negative conclusion. We don\u2019t assume that every shiny crystal is a diamond, and we don\u2019t assume that a rough piece of crystal is not a diamond. But we consider what could bias us into thinking a bit of quartz is something it\u2019s not. We recall the man who advised us that diamonds could be found on this hillside, and he charged fifty dollars for the information. We wanted to find diamonds badly enough we were willing to pay, and no one likes to disappointed, nor admit to gullibility. Thus there is indeed reason to suspect we have some bias toward believing that these objects are, dammit, real diamonds. Then we consider whether the data leading one here could be corrupted. Logically, if a man is charging to direct us to diamonds, he needs money. If he needs money, why can\u2019t he dig the diamonds out himself? The more we pause and think about it, the more we see the illogicality of his claims.<\/p>\n
If we\u2019re thinking about pursuing a certain path, critical thinking suggests we research it outside the parameters offered by its proponents. Has anyone associated with it been accused of fraud, of deception, in the past? Are there well-substantiated, or even frequent reports of predatory behavior, or malfeasance?<\/p>\n
Certainly, this due diligence to some degree slows down our approach to spirituality. But the truth about why we\u2019re here, who we are, and the meaning of life, is more important than the excitement of rushing into something. It\u2019s a serious matter and it needs serious research. What, after all, is more important? The flashy outward reports of a guru levitating \u2014 or that person\u2019s insights and practices? If we don\u2019t apply critical thinking, we\u2019re liable to lose far more time getting diverted onto a long road that leads only to a dead end.<\/p>\n
But the great obstacle to a seeker of truth, is myself. We\u2019re biased to believe \u2014 it\u2019s so much more exciting than the alternative \u2014 and that can lead us to blindly follow some charlatan. Fears, too, make us vulnerable to losing our way, like the fear of death; some doctrine promises immortality; caught up in fear, we take it up without really thinking it through. If we\u2019re insecure, we may lean into believing whatever a flatterer tells us. If we\u2019re prone to seeking attention, we may choose to interpret life\u2019s ordinary patterns in a way that makes us feel we\u2019re the Chosen One. Critical thinking employed on a spiritual path involves awareness of our own psychological vulnerabilities. We all need to borrow Diogenes\u2019 lamp, and look at ourselves with it.<\/p>\n
There are obvious applications of critical thinking in spirituality, and there are less obvious. Once we\u2019re on a real path, the less obvious application of scientific method is the most vital. The late Jacob Needleman, in his short but powerful book What is God? speaks of two sides of empiricism. On one side, \u201call knowledge must be rooted and tested by actual observation and objections in the external world.\u201d But, he points out, the doctrine overlooks \u201cthe existence of the discipline of inner experience, experience of the inner world that is precise and undeniable as the facts brought to light by sensory experience of the external world\u2026\u201d He points us to an \u201cinner empiricism\u201d, accessed through \u201cpure attention\u201d.<\/p>\n
Inner empiricism involves bringing two forces to bear to produce a third force. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. We learn how to meditate from a real expert; we learn how to engage in mindfulness, and then deep mindfulness; we learn how to open up to what we see, within our body and our mind and our spirit, revealing a picture of a possible truth about the higher reality. That\u2019s thesis. Then we test it, with real objectivity, being a bit\u2013dare I say skeptical? \u2014 about what we\u2019re taking in. We use our \u201ctaste for things that are true\u201d as Henri Tracol put it. We expose it to pure attention, from the vantage of non-identification. That\u2019s antithesis. We then welcome in what is unquestionably real, what is undeniable. And that is synthesis.<\/p>\n
An important aspect of the scientific method is peer review. In esoteric traditions, there are often groups that meet to discuss their experiences. They work together to vet each other\u2019s experiences. Together they separate imagination from real experience, vanity from progress. Seeking out peer review from really trustworthy peers is a great way to keep from getting lost along the Way.<\/p>\n
Another means of staying true to a spiritual work is a discipline found in Buddhism, Christian mysticism, and in the Fourth Way: self-observation. Learning to see ourselves through the basic method of separating some attention for objective self-observation clears away the fog, shows us where we\u2019re going wrong, and sets us right again.<\/p>\n
Eventually these purification processes become second-nature. We\u2019re still digging for diamonds, in a way. But the right hand is doing the digging, the left hand is rubbing away the coating of soil to see the stone more clearly. And \u2014 having researched what real diamonds are like \u2014 we subject the stone to the pure light which tells us if it\u2019s a real diamond.<\/p>\n
Along the Way, we have spiritual experiences \u2014 or are they? Some may be realer than others. We\u2019re prone to imagination, after all. Everyone is. We want to believe; we know that too. To be free of these tendencies, we have to consciously set aside eagerness to believe, and all presumption, and rely instead on pure attention to reveal the experience as real, or a distortion of imagination. If we find that it was all about our desire, and our imagination, we don\u2019t take it personally, anymore than we do if we\u2019re on a long freeway drive and we see that the offramp isn\u2019t the one we\u2019d hoped it was. We simply keep to our course.<\/p>\n
As J. Krishnamurti says, we try to \u201cfree the mind from all conditioning\u201d to see \u201cthe totality of it without thought.\u201d He directs us to pure observation \u201cwithout any shadow of the past, or of time.\u201d<\/p>\n
What may start as uncertainty, becomes questioning, a process of sorting-through, to find the essential; of cleaning the lens of fingerprints and dust, so that light passes through at its purest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[an article I wrote, originally published in Parabola Magazine] We often speak of spiritual paths and journeys; of figurative mountains that must be climbed, as in Rene Daumal\u2019s classic Mount Analogue. The spiritual path is an ascent fraught with rigors. The word path, in a spiritual context, indicates a definite course. It assumes the danger…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n