The Choiceless Path to Illumination

"People seeking mystical attainment expect it on their own terms, and hence generally exclude themselves from it before they start. Nobody can hope to arrive at illumination if he thinks that he knows what it is, and believes that he can achieve it through a well-defined path which he can conceive at the moment of starting."

- Shaykh Idries Shah - The Sufis

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE…
During my life-long search for the elusive truth or the "perfect" religion I traveled some well-known highways and often went down blind alleys hoping to find what I was seeking.
Ultimately I came to the realization, which I would hope everyone would come to sooner than I did, that TRUTH is not a choice – it is a reality.

SALAD BAR SPIRITUALITY
Very early on in my spiritual life I had decided what truth looked like. As I researched the various different religions and philosophies that purported to contain the truth. I developed a kind of “salad bar spirituality”. I would take a little bit of that, a little bit of this, and come up with a kind of religious potpourri. The biggest draw for me was to the mystical elements of spirituality and so I tended to favor that element in whatever I read.

Here are just a few of my favorite quotes and/or verses from my years of spiritual wayfaring:

“Man must be a lover of the light no matter from what day-spring it may appear. He must be a lover of the rose no matter in what soil it may be growing. He must be a seeker of the truth no matter from what source it come. Attachment to the lantern is not loving the light.”

- `Abdu'l-Bahá - Foundations of World Unity

“O SON OF MAN! Veiled in My immemorial being and in the ancient eternity of My essence, I knew My love for thee; therefore I created thee, have engraved on thee Mine image and revealed to thee My beauty”

- Bahá'u'lláh – The Hidden Words

“Realisation of the Self should not be confused with the intellectual understanding of the Divine Theme. Exceptional exercise of the intellect makes one a philosopher, a poet, a scientist or an artist. But Self-realisation is undeniably the special privilege of those who are mad for God.”

- Meher Baba – Sparks of the Truth

“Religion is a cage and the people who follow it are all birds locked up inside. It is meaningless to leave one's religion to adopt another. It is like going from one cage to another. The wire binding the wings of the bird must be cut.”

- Meher Baba – Lord Meher Vol 3

"Be patterns, be examples, in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one."

- George Fox, Founder of Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) 1656

“Abandon all varieties of religion and just surrender unto Me”

- Lord Krisha, Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 18 vs. 66

FINDING THE LID TO THE PUZZLE BOX
What I came to realize as I built up this litany of spiritual relativism, was that Truth has always existed behind and beyond anyone’s interpretation or experience of it. When I discovered Orthodox Christianity just a few years ago, all of the puzzle pieces that I had assembled from all the religions and philosophies of the world suddenly fit together.

I had finally found the lid to the puzzle box.

YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
Ultimate truth is not something we can decide on – like a lighthouse on a rocky coast, it doesn't appear where we want it to be, it appears where it is supposed to be, a constant on the horizon.

Truth always exists in a prior pure state – it manifests itself to us according to our receptivity.

We don’t always like the truth. In fact, I’ve found that one of the ways that you can know something is really true is that what it reveals to us is something we often do not like and do not want to agree with it. Likewise I’ve found that when I pursue the truth with the attitude of openness and discernment it will lead me deeper into itself.

Truth is not contained within a religion. Religion is a means whereby we try to codify truth and package it, and sadly it often falls short. Orthodoxy teaches about God using apopathic or negative theology. In other words, because God is unknowable and beyond our understanding, our knowledge of God can only grow through abandoning all preconceived ideas of who or what God is. This is a very deep subject, but my point here is that in Orthodox Christian teaching there is great care taken to eliminate all the “typical” ideas or conceptions of God that limit or replace the truth. So, in the practice of Orthodox Christianity, it is not a practice of empty rituals or actions based on momentary emotions, but reverent entry into a real relationship with something far greater than we can understand.

The Truth is there for the finding – I can’t really give it to you, no one can. Truth belongs to its Creator – Just ask.

For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened

- St. Luke 11:10