One step forward, three steps back and falling down a staircase

The Nonlinear Spiritual Path

Gary Larson

The spiritual path for me these days feels like one step forward and then three steps backwards, falling down a staircase, slipping on marbles that were spilled on the ground, tumbling outside the front door, slipping on dog shit on the sidewalk, being hit by a truck and having the piano it was carrying fall on top of me. Sometimes you can’t help but laugh at how unexpectedly miserable it can get.

Whatever happened to the "love and light and joy and positivity" that I was hoping the spiritual path would offer me? What happened to those beautiful dreams and visions I had of achieving peace, enlightenment and happiness? Why don't I feel any closer to that goal? Why is all my dedication and hard work not bearing fruit?

It's like that scene in the Monty Python film Life of Brian where they ask the prisoners, "Crucifixion or freedom?" I thought I was choosing freedom but it feels like it was just a trick; I'm learning that the only way to experience true freedom is through crucifixion - the death of the seeker.

The seeker only wants to take steps forward, it only wants happiness, it has its agendas and ideas of how things should go and isn't interested in being open to anything else.

But eventually the realization unfolds that there are no forward or backward steps, no separate happiness to arrive at, no enlightenment to discover. That was just a dream, a projection.

It can be so painful to see this, to lose my dream of a happy future. All of the repressed feelings that I had been working so hard to manage and control start coming to the surface in such a messy way, my identity as a “spiritual person” begins to unravel, everything I thought I knew falls to pieces. It seems like the complete opposite of what should be happening. To be consumed by pain, doubt, confusion, anger, fear and suffering seems wrong, this doesn't align with the inner-seeker's vision of what "should" be happening.

Yet perhaps there is intelligence to this cacophony of uncomfortable experiences. Perhaps all is not lost, like the mind is imagining. Perhaps there is a profound truth being revealed through this process of everything falling apart. Perhaps the spiritual path is not linear, contrary to what the seeker expected.

Perhaps a realization may arise when I least expect it, without any effort from the imagined seeker, that sees that happiness is found in no steps forward, no steps backward. Just here. Now. The freedom of nowhere to go and nothing to get.