The symbolic metaphor of a path is such a beautiful way to describe how we experience our spiritual search. The Way of a Pilgrim, The Pilgrim’s Progress and Dante’s Paradisio, all classics of spiritual inspiration, explore the idea of a path, a journey, with all of the people, adventures and lessons we meet along the way to God. (Yes, a little bit like the Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz!)
The idea of a path is a useful metaphor, but like all metaphors, it only approaches the truth. The problem with the idea of a spiritual path, or journey, is that it implies that we need to go somewhere other than where we are in order to find what we are seeking.
It’s like looking for your reading glasses all over the house and when you have finally looked everywhere, you realize that you were wearing them all along! You couldn’t find them because they were so close to you. Finding God isn’t so much a matter of searching as it is a shifting of perception, an awakening.
You can have good teachers and books that help you search, to bring you to the place where you finally stand still and realize that God isn’t hiding from you, God isn’t lost. God is shouting, “Here I Am!” in and through everything around you, everything within you. It’s less of a mystery than it is a trick - of hiding in plain sight!
The Buddha, the Christ and many other spiritual masters have all told us this in many different ways. They speak from their personal experience and they all tell us the same thing. Can’t you just imagine them all sitting around together, shaking their heads and wondering, “What part of ‘Look Within' don’t you understand?”
Truth is within ourselves.
There is an inmost center in us all,
Where the Truth abides in fullness; and to know
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape
Than in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without.
~ Robert Browning
