Remember Your Path

A friend said that, when she first went to India, she was horrified to see people touching the feet of their gurus. Like most Westerners, she was repulsed by the idea of worshipping another human. But then someone told her, “Touching your guru’s feet isn’t about bowing down to the person. It’s about bowing down to how far they’ve walked on their path.” That made her realize how important it is to have a path, and to learn from people on it who have gone further.

Life is not just about having a string of nice experiences. Luang Pu used to give this thought-experiment: Think of a moment in your life when you were most happy, he said. Then ask whether what you experienced then had anything more in it than any other moment. The birth of your first child. Your wedding day. Didn’t these moments just arise and pass, like every other? Where are they now? Without a path, life is just loss after loss.

There are many ways to think about what a spiritual path is, but they all have to do with going against the stream of ordinary time. So much of how we live is for the literal future, as though death weren’t the only literal future for us all. And then we make things worse by comparing our lives to the lives of others, as though the person who got that job or relationship instead of you isn’t also going to have to lose it later on.

A spiritual path, on the other hand, is a journey into the present. It’s a way of finding a sense of enough right here. That sense of enough doesn’t just happen through luck or pondering. It comes from slow, steady practices that purify the way you think, speak, and act over time.

There’s so much fear in the world right now. Some of it is a natural response to the eroding of society and its institutions. But a lot of fear comes from people not having a path. They wonder, “Will my job, relationship, standard of living be taken from me?” And the answer is: yes, absolutely yes. It will all be taken from you. You have to find something else to hold on to, before it’s too late.

Claude Monet, "The Sheltered Path" (1873)