Gregory David Roberts - The Spiritual Path

When I started to write this, I realized that in part I was writing it to my younger Self that always-searching but often selfish, frustrated, angered or even harmful Self. If my younger Self had read this book or one like it, it mightve helped to spare some of my harm and negativity from the worlds and people I knew, and from my Self. And it mightve helped me to set the compass to my own true North, just as walking the spiritual Path saved my much older Self from the downward spiral of grief, guilt and depression. So, this is for all the searching Selves we are, or were, or will become.

Everyone is spiritual. Everyone is on the spiritual Path.

Whether we know it or not were all on the Path, we all find our ways to spiritual connection naturally, and many of us connect without ever striving for it. But its also possible to walk the Path consciously, with awareness and active commitment.

Six years ago, I had the motive, the means and the opportunity to walk consciously on the spiritual Path.

The motive was that I wanted to know after decades of research into theology, mystical traditions and the spiritual, I wanted to know: is there something there? Is there some kind of Spiritual Reality, or not?

The means was a conch shell my spiritual teacher had assured me that blowing the conch shell with utmost Innocence and sincerity in active, physical Devotion could, and would, connect me with the spiritual.

The opportunity came at a time in my life when I could go off the grid and focus a great part of my attention and energy to the attempt at active connection.

So, I did.

I took the steps that personal studies and my spiritual teacher had informed me were necessary in the sincere, authentic journey on the spiritual Path: Acknowledgment, Surrender and Devotion. I went off the grid and stopped going to lunches, dinners, parties, events, festivals, concerts, cinemas, theatres and just about everywhere else. I renounced many of my favorite things and focused on trying to be worthy of walking the Path. And then I blew the conch shell with my utmost sincerity twice a day, every day, in active and strenuous Devotion, for six years.

This is what happened.

GDR

March 23rd 2020

Oracabessa, Jamaica

I had to have a system. My mind works that way. I had to have a logic system that could bring me to a cliff-edge of reason where I could somehow, sensibly make the leap of Faith.

I know now that striving for sense in the spiritual experience doesnt actually make sense, and I smile to think of those early days and all the philosophical heavy lifting I tried to do. Ive come to see that the logic of the Material Reality, the everyday world around us, is as different to the logic of the Spiritual Reality as it is to the logic of the Quantum Reality, the microcosmic world of atoms and electrons. The rules are different, the ways of thinking about each one is different, and I discovered that the leap, in the leap of Faith, is more like floating than jumping. Its a letting go.

The logic that I needed at the beginning, and that I followed into active Devotion, went like this:

First, I took it as accepted that the atheist position didnt make any sense: if theres even one thing in this universe that has metaphysical, or beyond-physical, characteristics, it makes no sense to deny the metaphysical altogether.

As it happens, there actually is something in our Universe that has both physical properties and metaphysical properties, and that is a photon of light.

Every scientist agrees that a photon of light has no mass, meaning that it doesnt weigh anything, and that it has no volume, meaning that it doesnt take up any physical space. A photon of light also has a unique relationship to time. So, a photon is there, but its not there not in the way that everything else with mass and volume are there. These are metaphysical characteristics.

Of course, the photon of light is really there, and we can bounce photons of light off mirrors and feel the energy effects when we concentrate them, but when it comes to describing what a photon of light is, the language of the metaphysical is the only one that applies: its really there, yes, but, er, it doesnt weigh anything and it doesnt take up any space. Its also travelling at the speed of light, which nothing else can do. And, oh yeah, any two of those photons can react to one another simultaneously even when separated by the entire width of the observable Universe.

We can list those characteristics, and make calculations and theories based on them, but explaining how something is there but not there, travelling at impossible speed and changing in tandem across cosmic distances, requires an understanding that is beyond-the-physical, or metaphysical.

And even if just one thing in our Universe has metaphysical properties, such as a photon of light, it doesnt make sense to deny the metaphysical altogether. We just have to do a better job of defining it.

So, I recognized that the metaphysical is real, at least when it comes to photons of light, and began with an open mind.

Secondly, I wasnt thinking in terms of religion, but in terms of the spiritual.

Ive prayed with believers in synagogues, mosques, temples, churches, gurdwaras, stupas, fire temples, caves and stone circles. I learned religious prayers in three languages and had the innocent joy of reciting them with friends when they invited me. I was an altar boy serving in the Catholic mass, my spiritual teacher is a Brahmin tantric Hindu, and Ive studied at the feet of other religious teachers, but Im not religious and I dont belong to any religion.

For my purpose, religion is what we believe and accept to be true, and the spiritual is what we experience as true.

Similarly, I didnt set out to investigate or study God. I dont know anything about God, and Im always cautious whenever I hear someone say: God wants you to do this or God says this or that

God is by definition so huge, so immense beyond imagination, that I dont think anyone can know anything about God directly. It would be like matter and antimatter colliding, so to speak, leading to our annihilation.

How can we hope to see or directly experience the Divine source of all the Suns in all the Universes, when we cant stare at our own Sun for five minutes without destroying our vision?

So, if its accepted for argument that such a Divine Perfection exists, I didnt think it would be logically possible to know that perfection, God, directly, but I reasoned that it might be possible to know such a Divine Perfection tangentially, indirectly.

For my purpose, the spiritual is not God.

The spiritual is the spirit of God in this worldly, material Universe.

Although God, if existing at all, is far beyond our limited human capacity to comprehend and know directly, there are some things that we can legitimately conjecture about our humble, human concept of such a Divine entity.

If we are to accept for the sake of argument that God exists, then that Divine entity would by definition be perfect, and would do everything perfectly. In fact, it would be logically inconsistent for God, or the concept of God, to be imperfect in any way, or to do anything imperfectly. All the major religions agree on this point, though they may differ on many others.

For this reason, in the logic system I developed for my Self to make the leap of Faith, I used the term the Divine Perfection