A Mystic's View of the Spiritual Journey

It’s 4 A.M. Nasruddin leaves the tavern and walks the town aimlessly. A policeman stops him.
“Why are you out wandering the streets in the middle of the night?”
“Sir,” replies Nasruddin, “if I knew the answer to that question I would have been home hours ago!”

- Rumi -



        For so long the spiritual journey goes on and seldom do I realize that my journey isn’t taking me somewhere that I may recognize before I arrive, not even to a place I won’t recognize but might believe in, like a distant planet where the flora and fauna are new and never before seen but the planet is still round and the colors are still within the visible spectrum. No. It will not be a place that lies within my conscious experience at all.

        I strive to go to a place that lies even beyond those that I can imagine that I can’t imagine. I am going to a place that, ‘tho I have been there and felt it, experienced it and even remember that I have been there at sacred moments in my life, yet it is a place that I can not imagine at all. Having been there I think that I recall my having experienced it and yet I do not recall it with any clarity for my memories are all filtered by my being encased in this limited vehicle. All my memories of the event are visual, auditory, olfactory, but the meat of the experience is of who I AM and how I AM when I AM there. I now recall only what I could accept of it - what I could turn the experience into in my memory so that I could accept it, get a grip on it, what I could bring back when I came into this tiny box of consciousness again - what I could allow myself to vaguely remember without giving up too much of my cherished beliefs about the nature of reality. These beliefs are precious to this lifetimes’ personality. They are the tools by which I juggle my sanity. That recollection is only a cartoon representation of that place done in symbols. It is like Jungian dreams that presents my inner psychology to me in terms I can accept but not comprehend. It is, however, a place that I know of even when I am unable to recall its’ true nature.

        I hesitate to even say that I have been there, not because I am not sure, but because I may then believe that I can imagine it, that I can define it, and that will surely keep me from it for then I will strive to go to the place that I can imagine, a place that I can describe, thinking, this is that place that I was. This is where I have been. But the place that I can imagine, that I can remember, is not the place I have been.

        Yet how can I go to a place that I cannot imagine? If I can’t imagine that place then how can I believe in it? And if I can not believe in that place then how can I go there? How can I go where I can not believe that I can go? How can I stay there if, when I am on the threshold I think, “I can not believe this”? Given this I must practice every day knowing that I can not know where I am going, that I cannot know the goal until I am there, that, in truth, I can not get there at all, that the goal of my striving is the striving itself – to let the striving be the goal so that I can move beyond that which I can imagine as the goal, so that something, some part of me that I am unaware of, can achieve the true goal that I cannot imagine.

        Yet if the striving is my goal then my arrow is misaimed for then I must both strive and cease to strive, having achieved my goal. I must strive without the goal in mind at all but rather I must strive only to be worthy of the goal. I must strive not for that which is without but for that which is within that, when the time comes that I am taken up to the goal through no power of my own, I will be of an energy that can be one with the goal. Then, by God’s grace, I may transcend my own beliefs, my own consciousness, my own programming, my own concepts, my own personality, my own dogma, my own drunkenness, my own mask that I am not even aware that I wear and be pulled through that wormhole leap to divinity, by me undesigned for my design would be flawed, undirected that my personal consciousness not wrestle with the guide, unanticipated, unlooked for, undreamed of - into that consciousness that is God or Truth or whatever word that you use to describe that which you perceive as forever unknowable yet attainable by your inner being to the everlasting joy and release of your consciousness.

        May the guide come and effortlessly take me to the goal. As Rumi says with a poignant sadness that echoes in my heart, “I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.”