The Universal Spiritual Path

A friend once asked me, “What is a spiritual path? How do I begin a spiritual path?”

I want you to know that you are a spiritual being, and you always have been. The spiritual path begins even before we are born, and it continues with us through death into every life and beyond Heaven.

You are the spiritual path, and the Path is You.

I know of a wonderful business woman. She’s a young go-getter, just started her own company, and she has run into obstacles. She has sought out mentors older than her and wiser to gain wisdom and experience that she might do better at growing her business. As a person in a leadership role, she must learn how to handle her employees. She must learn how to balance her work with her personal life. She must find meaning in every day that she goes into the office, and she must find a way to motivate others even when she is not motivated. And this is a spiritual path.

I know of a man who spent years in darkness. He lost years of his life to addiction. Yet somewhere along that road, something happened that made him realize he needed to make a change. And more importantly, he found the strength of will to change. And this is a spiritual path.

I know a man who was born in a religious country far overseas. He grew up praying everyday with his family. He read from the holy books day after day, and learned them inside and out, and he recited prayers in school. And then when he left that country, and he took on a science major, he decided he didn’t really see the point in believing in anything, because it didn’t make sense to him anymore, and so he became an atheist. And this is a spiritual path.

I know of a great musician who loved knowledge and wisdom and was very philosophical. He pursued his music from the very bottom rung all the way to the top, from performing in dive bars, to touring the world, all the way to getting a doctorate in academics. But he left academics to begin his own business because at the end of the day, he didn’t really like the ego that was in academics, and for him, his devotion was to Music and Music alone. And this is a spiritual path.

I know a young woman with a social work degree. She is a healer who works with the public trying to help people recover from the situations life has dealt them. She goes to work every day, where she deals with people dropping into her office to demand her time and attention and her patience. She is always tending to the needs of others, and in all of this sacrifice, she looks at her social work degree and she wonders if she was truly called to serve in this capacity, and if this job was meant for her. She seeks a deeper reason why she is doing this work, because the stress and the demands of the job have become overbearing. And this is a spiritual path.

I know of a child who lost a parent, and I know of parents who have lost children, and their grief destroyed them. They are still stumbling through it even years or decades afterwards, trying to figure out a way to resolve a relationship with a person who has left this life. And this is a spiritual path.

I know of great intellects who study various fields of Science, who are just right now poring over the mysteries of the Universe and discovering incredible things about the nature of trees, the nature of light, the nature of psychology, and even if they do not have faith, and they cannot allow themselves to really believe that there is a greater unifying force in nature, still they seek it through Science and they look for evidence. And this is a spiritual path.

You have always been on a spiritual path, and no event in your life that has happened to you has been wasted. It is all towards the purpose of spiritual growth. Life itself is a spiritual path that you are on, whether you knew it or not, whether you agreed to it or not. Whether or not you were aware of it, you have been practicing spirituality since the moment you came into a body, and you will be practicing until the moment you leave. The only choice really is to understand that this is a spiritual world in which we live, and embrace your practice with open eyes, humility and a willing heart, or to remain oblivious to it and continue to live without intention.

We engage with our spirituality through our intention. The first stage is humility, which is realizing we cannot do this alone and we need something greater than ourselves to make sense of the world in which we live, whether that means we have faith, or we adopt a meditation practice, or we simply begin to cultivate virtues and serve the highest good. When we have come into this realization, a great mentor or spiritual teacher will come into your life. They might not be a priest, a pastor or a monk. They might be a friend, a mother, a boss, an employee, a colleague, or a child. We’ve reached the crossroads, and the turning point is realizing that all along this world has been spiritual, and all along you have been learning spirituality, and now perhaps it is time to take the blinders off and to get down to the true work of your soul, which you came here to do.

All of life is resonating to a pure and perfect vibration of unity. We seek this vibration whether we realize we are seeking it or not, because naturally we yearn for peace. So we look for answers intellectually when what we are yearning for is the peace that comes from bringing ourselves into this pure and holy indwelling oasis in the heart. The attainment of this goal, this inner knowing, is liberation, or salvation, or enlightenment.

We are all looking for the reason why we are here. We are all, on some level, quietly afraid of death. True peace is hard to attain, yet it dwells inside of you. And that is the purpose of engaging with a spiritual practice. For inside of you, you have been living in a shadow, and you are looking for that illumination. Because inside of you has been a chaos that is dark and tumultuous, an inner duality that pits you against the true nature of yourself, dragging you under the waves, and you are tired of living in doubt. You want security. You want confidence. You want to stand on the true ground that never shakes. You want to know the nature of the storm. You wish to know why we are here. And you can know. The answer lies within you. It is within your reach. But realize the path that lies before you is not for the faint hearted, for it will ask you to disengage with certain aspects of your life that you might find difficult to leave behind.

All this time, you have been looking externally for an answer. Maybe through religion. Maybe through knowledge and research in Academia. Maybe through art, through creativity, through music, through performance, through dance. Maybe through your family and your marriage. Maybe through teaching in a school or serving a community, you have been looking for a reason to make sense of this chaotic life. But I will give you a seed of Truth: it is not actually an answer that you are seeking, it is peace.

You have been looking for that unity, that one thing that makes everything else make sense. It’s there within you. It exists. But it’s not external. It is dwelling in your heart. It is the nature of the pure Self. And to know this nature, to know the true self, is to illuminate the entire reality that we live in, and to realize — — this world is spiritual. All of life is Spirit. This world we live in every day is an ocean. It’s an ocean of Consciousness, Spirit and primordial light, and you are One with that. All along, you have been seeking it. And all along, you’ve been trying to remember it. Because we came from it, and when you see it again, you will remember it. The flood of peace and knowledge that will ignite within you will illumine everything, and you will have the truth, and you will know it from your soul outward, because it is you.

How do we attain this knowing? How do we attain this peace?

By seeking.

We begin by seeking outward, and we end by seeking inward.

Some of us come into this knowledge through sudden sacrifice of the internal ego. Some of us are very methodical and we shift through layers and layers of ourselves, seeking internally through meditation. But the only answer you will have to your question lies within you, and it is up to you to find it. And I don’t mean this as a platitude, I mean this as a Divine goal. This is the work of your soul to come into this illumination, this unity, and this peace, and from that, you will understand everything.

So your question was, when do I begin a spiritual path, and how do I know that I’m on a spiritual path? You are. Because you are a child of god, a child of this universe, and this is your inheritance, to be spiritual. It needs no justification. It is your true nature, this great love and unity that was meant for you from the beginning. It is yours to grasp and yours to attain. You have been fumbling towards it since the moment you were born, and what you are beginning to realize is that everything in the external reality we dwell in is an illusion until you find the truth within. You are seeking the unity of becoming one with the Higher Self, and entering the Tree of Life. And it is by seeking that you will find it. By intention, you will know it. Through Divine will, you will manifest it. And this is the spiritual path.