Walking a path is a popular expression people use to describe their spiritual journey. It is a nice image that implies that there is a destination, and a way to get there. When we walk a path in the physical realm, we usually have an idea of our destination. If it is a path we have walked before we know pretty much what to expect along the way. And if we are very familiar with the path, or if we simply do not care about the environment that surrounds us, we may focus only on our destination and pay little or no attention to what we might regard as simply background.
"Keep your eyes on the prize." It is popular in many settings for people to adopt these words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a motto when they are striving to achieve a difficult or long term goal. Slogans and mottos are fine as motivational devices, but we must not mistake them for the entire message. There is more to walking a path than keeping your destination in mind.
Many times I have walked a path in a park or in the woods and seen others who were intent only on reaching the end--walking or jogging quickly with their eyes trained forward, often listening to a tape player or radio through headphones or earplugs. I don't know what their reasoning was: perhaps they viewed the path as a personal challenge. Some of these people were obviously walking or jogging for exercise. Maybe the rest simply thought that is how one is "supposed" to do it. Some of these people did not seem to be in a hurry or just out for exercise, but they walked in a swarm of endless chatter.
These people are traveling on a path, but they are not traveling the path. Certainly they will reach the end, but they will miss the journey, and in nature and spirituality the journey is as much a part of the process of path walking as the goal.
We missed something along the line in the evolution of Western civilization. Whatever the cause, Westerners are almost strictly goal oriented. "Keep your eyes on the prize." They are also concerned with outer presentation, frequently without regard to inner substance. "Appearance is everything." These and countless other aphorisms saturate our schools and workplaces, and many people take the attitudes these saying express into their personal lives and their religion.
Dissatisfied with their jobs (or school), running in an almost constant state of anxiety and exhaustion, worrying over the bills, insurance, maintenance on the house or the car and a host of mundane details, a great number of people in our society feel empty and depressed. The demands of work create stress in their personal relationships, and the demands of their relationships and family life create conflicts with work. Often they are too busy to have personal relationships or a family life. The Job, the endless striving to make more money, to get to the next rung on the corporate ladder, becomes an obsession.
However it came to be, we have created a culture that entrains people to be addicts. We grow up steeped in a cultural myth that soaks into our very bones from the moment of our birth, if not before. Two of the more prominent names this myth goes by are The American Dream and Progress. Both of these monikers are centered on other myths, but the meta-myth, the one that drives them all is called Security. We are taught all our lives that if you work hard you will be rewarded, that each generation surpasses the accomplishments of its forebears and Progress marches on, providing a higher standard of living and a better life for everyone.
We must keep in mind that every myth contains a kernel of truth. Hard work usually does provide benefits--but not always. And generally speaking, generations tend to supply new knowledge and innovations that improve the standard of living for some, if not most, people. But everyone does not benefit from such Progress. Knowledge is appropriated and reserved for those who can afford to pay for it, and most innovations and inventions create sub-classes within our society, namely those who have them (or who have access to them), and those who don't.
The meta-myth of Security lies at the root of our economic system, and the economic system dominates most of our lives. This domination has created an advertising industry that contains as one of its cardinal principles the purpose of creating a sense of need in people for products or services that they, in fact, do not need. Over the years the advertising industry has become very good at using the discoveries from psychology to create an extremely sophisticated technology of manipulation. One example of the myriad abuses of this knowledge by the ad industry is that we have on the shelves of our grocery stores dozens of brands of cereal that are marketed to our children and which are literally less nutritious than the colorful cardboard boxes they are packaged in. We are so inured to the ubiquitous bombardment of advertising that we take its gross abuses of our psyches for granted. We don't have the time or the energy to consider what this economic and cultural brain-washing is doing to us, to our children or to our society.
The advertising industry (as well as the political system, which runs on the same principles and supplies the "image consultants" that give us an endless parade of indistinguishable candidates) counts on this. As long as we are too busy or tired to notice what they are doing to us, or as long as we are too apathetic to care, they will prosper and grow in power while the rest of us run in circles, wasting energy and work and wondering why our lives are so empty.
This emptiness is a symptom, and the people who are aware of it are the lucky ones, for they are the ones who embark on a search for meaning and fulfillment. The people who are not aware of the emptiness of their lives become slaves to the status-quo and spend their lives, as Thoreau said, in quiet desperation.
Many people who embark on a quest for meaning turn to religion because religion is the traditional font for spirituality in Western culture. Unfortunately, the churches of organized religion have become, to paraphrase Jesus' description of the scribes and Pharisees in the gospel of Matthew, whitewashed graves, full of the bones of dead dogmas. Instead of giving people spiritual food, they give them pre-packaged doctrines that are like the hundreds of boxes of cereal on the grocery shelves, devoid of nutritional value.
Organized religion in the West has almost succeeded in completely driving spirituality out of the churches, and spirituality is even less evident in mainstream culture.
Reading the Bible out of a sense of duty, repeating prayers and memorizing passages, participating in dead rituals in dead churches and naively following empty doctrines and often hateful and shame-inducing dogmas without questioning them will never lead to fulfillment or a spiritual awakening. By doing these things, many are lost, walking on a religious path, but not walking a spiritual path.
So, what does it mean to walk a spiritual path?
Walking a spiritual path is very similar to walking a path in nature. Even if the destination is known and assured, the journey is at least as important as arriving at the end. When we walk a path, as opposed to simply walking on a path, we pay attention to the environment. Not only is there much beauty to be admired along the way, but there is an inexhaustible treasure-house of knowledge and wisdom that will sustain us and help us grow as individuals and as a people. All that is required for us to receive these wonderful gifts of Spirit is to pay attention and to be willing to let go.
Let go? Of What? Everything. To walk a path one must be committed to change. If we pay attention to the journey we will be changed by it, though we may have no idea how. That is the essence of faith--to trust that change will happen, and that it will be beneficial. If we travel the entire path, but we are not changed by it, we have not gone on a journey. We have merely taken a trip. The journey is change.
Change requires that we let go. This is the essence of sacrifice on a spiritual path. We must let go of something, an attitude--fear, guilt, shame, pride, etc.--or perhaps something more tangible, like possessions that have become obstacles on our path. We must let go to make room to receive a gift from Spirit. If, as most of us claim, we wish to truly become one with Spirit (or God or whatever), we must finally let go even of our desire to reach that ultimate goal.
The fourteenth-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said he prayed for God to rid him of God, for only when we give up our addiction to God does God truly fills us. Not only does God fill us--residing in us, as it were--but we then live in God. When this happens, we do not work for God, but rather God naturally and without effort works through us. And, I might add, in us. Such experience inevitably changes us in the most profound ways and wakes us to the reality of Spirit and the ultimate spiritual nature of the universe and all within it.
So walking a spiritual path consists of an ongoing process of moving forward, paying attention, learning and letting go, being filled with God. Then, as Eckhart said, being full of God, we give birth to God in the world.