How do I find my path? This is a question most people ask. In Taoism, they say if in anything you encounter resistance, it is not it, but yourself. You encounter resistance because you haven’t found the way of your act. The way of your being. This resistance is a good thing. It is like pain. If it still hurts, it means it can still heal. You will find it when you stop looking outside of you and there is no need to be discouraged. When you hear words spoken, your inner self will respond if they are of your path. In Christian Gnosticism, they say the depths call the depths. You need only hear.
For me, bits and pieces of the old lores call. When I read them or examine the relics, they speak to my inner nature. Thus I know my path. You find your path when you accept that small inner voice. As you heed those intuitions, those feelings, you will realize it isn’t random. It’s all coherent and it resonates with you. The way and the walker are one. You likely won’t hear one way. Some hear of one path, one tradition, and it does speak to them perhaps due to past life ties. But the truths of one path don’t belong to that one path. Truth is truth. Have you heard no truth that spoke to you?
A path is often found in steps. They needn’t be on the road you found them. Like stepping stones you can pave your own path. You will discover as you do that you aren’t fabricating anything. The path was in you the whole time. Sometimes finding the heart of the path can be challenging. Do you have any practices? Do you meditate? Use any ritual? Follow any doctrines from recognizable faiths/philosophies?
Many say they try to meditate, but cannot do it. But you can meditate, because meditation isn’t a single experience. It isn’t something to achieve and have to do just that each and every time. Even if you close your eyes and fall asleep, then that is good. Even in falling asleep you are still confronting yourself. Do you feel a deep sense of inner turmoil? That churning in your mind makes you feel like you can find no peace? You can’t shut it down and shouldn’t. Let that inner turbine run. Let your body feel what your mind is doing. Know it for life energy. Don’t resist, immerse yourself, loose yourself in that inner storm. In losing yourself, you will truly find yourself.
An example, if I might perhaps breach a taboo. In the height of sexual ecstasy you are not calm. You are excited. Your mind is filled with response, and yet there is no struggle. It is just what it is. It doesn’t have to be pleasure. This is a meditation on the passions. In embracing them, you can transcend them, pleasurable or painful. You only seem to be stuck because you resist.
For me, I’m what has been labelled autistic, so my emotions work sort of strangely. I behave in ways people consider weird. So to meditate, I don’t still my mind. I immerse. I allow all of the content of my subconscious to emerge and fill my awareness. Getting swept up in lust and rage and frustration and hope and all of it. Just feeling all of those forces. Letting the vortex whirl. In that whirling I tend to fall into center.
There isn’t one way of meditation, there are many ways. If you “fail” at the pure ascetic path it isn’t a failure. It’s just not your path. There are truths that transcend the religious bias and cultural dogma. The “spiritual” prejudice need not be yours.
What calls you to spirituality? Do you feel an overwhelming sense of ennui? A pervasive nihilism that makes your inner being ache? So you seek because you sense this situation is not right? You feel you have lost your light and you seek light? The world is in balance, my friend. Not all truths are brightly lit. You have likely learned more of this spiritual life from your experience then you have ever read.
Have no sense of who you are? Have no passion? You deny what you feel. You feel something and have declared it bad. That declaration is a self betrayal. You can get back on your own side. I suspect you have seen a lot of human insanity? That which they declare to be normal? Hearts whose power gutters like a candle flame? Wills that spin like one of those insects you find nesting among the pond scum? A sense of pain that you can give no name or source to but it’s loud and clear in your head? All because either as a child you cared too much, or you perhaps had a near death experience (nde), or maybe you were just different from the beginning.
I have never subscribed to any path since I abandoned Christianity, but found one anyway inside myself. To find my path took a lot of despair, letting go, shame and embarrassment. It can seem chaotic, but chaos isn’t wrong. The minotaur’s labyrinth was navigated by a single thread. I am confident you can find your thread.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~