A Path by the River

[Guest guest]

A Path by the River

 

by D. Patrick Miller

 

reprinted with permission from the syndicated column " SENSE &

SPIRITUALITY: commentary and opinion on the modern spiritual search "

 

 

As a journalist and reviewer in the field of contemporary

spirituality, I receive an almost daily deluge of books and other media that

promise me accelerated enlightenment, total wellness, and sure-fire, karmically

sanitized methods to achieve personal wealth and power. If even a fraction of

these spiritual nostrums delivered the goods, my life would be a series of

ever-brightening explosions of greater consciousness, finally culminating in the

full flowering of affluent guruhood. That seems to be the American way of

spiritual evolution these days.

 

Yet my spiritual life has never felt like a fireworks display of

enlightenment-bursts building to a grand finale. When I picture it, my spiritual

life looks like something completely different.

 

Imagine that you've spent years building a house to shelter you from

the inevitable storms, deep freezes, and hot spells of life. The house is far

from perfect; in fact most of the rooms seem to need remodeling as soon as

they're finished. But at least you've got a home of your own. Call this home the

ego, or your normal sense of self, arduously constructed from the raw materials

of the psyche following a haphazard blueprint based on your personal beliefs and

experiences, your likes and dislikes, your hopes and dreams.

 

One day you're sitting comfortably in the living room of your

ego-home and the floor suddenly drops out to reveal a rushing river where you

thought you had laid a firm foundation. Hanging on for dear life to a shuddering

wall mantel, you realize that the house crashing down around you has become a

mortal danger, likely to snuff you out at any moment with a flying shard of

window glass or a tumbling timber. Your only hope of survival is to let go of

your familiar home, drop into the river and literally " go with the flow. "

 

This river is the onrushing life of the soul, which cannot be long

hidden or confined even in the most spacious of homes built by the ego. Falling

into the inner life of the soul is commonly called a spiritual awakening, and is

usually precipitated by a profound crisis that shakes apart our usual

self-serving foundations, the conventional ethos of " looking out for number

one. "

 

But few of us can swim for long in the soul's turbulent waters.

Sooner or later you manage to struggle to the bank of the river and pull

yourself onto solid ground, gasping for breath and wondering how you'll survive

in a strange new territory. After a while, you may notice that the scenery ain't

bad from this new vantage point. You get to thinking that this might be just the

place to build a new, finer house than before, in sight of the magnificent river

but wisely removed by a few hundred yards. Who knows - you might even start a

school here to teach river rafting.

 

If you do stop here to rebuild a home for your ego, it will simply

never occur to you that rivers tend to flood every now and then. If you're not

focused on rebuilding a shelter immediately, you may notice that a footpath runs

by the river where you dragged yourself onshore. In one direction the path will

lead to the river's source; in the other direction, to its destination. Without

knowing how you know, you realize that the source and the destination of this

river are the same, and it doesn't really matter which way you head. And so you

start walking. As the days stretch into months and then years, you learn to live

a life in the wild following the river.

 

Sometimes the going is rough; you get lost in the underbrush, losing

sight of the river and discovering that you've walked in circles just to get

back to where you were days before. Sometimes the path turns muddy and steep,

and you fall back two steps for every three you climb. Sometimes you slide into

the river and get swept away again for a while. All these trials are part of the

spiritual journey toward selflessness, the placeless destination that you

started heading for the moment you fell out of the house of ego.

 

If you're handy, you may learn how to build yourself a canoe out of

tree bark. But after a few days of coasting along the soul's river - justifiably

proud of your ingenuity and your determination to get ahead spiritually - you

realize that it's not really the speed of this journey that matters.

 

What matters is the seriousness with which you are following the

route of the river. If you're really serious, you'll find yourself laughing

pretty often at how ludicrous your situation is. Because regardless of your

station in life in the everyday visible world - and no matter what anyone else

thinks of you, whether they call you genius, guru, or fool - you know that you

are truly an inward, homeless wanderer following a river without end for no

reason you can practically explain. On this journey, you'll certainly never get

ahead of anyone!

 

This is how I picture my spiritual life nowadays - stumbling

uncertainly along a rocky path somewhere between the devil and the deep blue

sea, pausing occasionally for attacks of helpless hilarity. Despite the wild

rigors of following my path by the river, I don't miss that old house I once

built. When I think back, I remember how alone I usually felt within its walls.

Sitting out by the river and watching its complex, ceaseless flow, I know that I

am flowing there too, my soul inseparably mixed with all the souls who create

the water of life.

 

 

 

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