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The path of the Buddha
Mystical vs spiritual: a quest for the Truth
How do we tell the difference between illusion and reality ?
There are at least two very different types of spiritual quest, heading in very different directions
The best thing would to be able to start off by drawing a clear distinction between two very different types of religious quest, and explaining from there. Black on this side, white on the other. But one of the two items we are looking at is so radically different from the other, and so unfamiliar as well, that most people will have no idea where the contrast lies, and it will look as if something is being compared with nothing at all. Black on this side, and no identifiable colour on the other ? What kind of a comparison is that ? This is the essential difficulty with trying to characterise the ‘spiritual path’: it sounds like nothing anyone can relate to, so it might as well not exist. We might as well not bother talking about it at all.
But then again, why not have a go ?
A genuine spiritual path is never going to attract a mass following; it is always going to be of interest only to a tiny minority, if it can manage to generate any interest at all. Yet this has nothing to do with elitism, or exclusivity, as there is no exclusive elite to appeal to: it is all about pursuing a certain rare kind of thinking, which usually isn’t even to the liking of the person having to think it, and which comes about as the result of a very unusual crisis or series of crises, leaving the person who has been experiencing them with nowhere else to go. And the person having to face these difficult thoughts, even though they’re not much enjoying it, can intuit, or sense, that facing facts is probably is the direction they should be heading in, and that somehow, one day, sooner probably than later, they will have to dust themselves down and head off along the ‘facing facts’ road, to god knows where.
