What compels one to sail on a spiritual journey? Fundamentally there is no real answer. It is a mystery similar to that arising when considering the question of why some people climb mountains. If someone who has no interest in mountains asks why I climb, I’m really at a loss to explain. It is obvious to me that often I feel more alive and full of joy on a mountain, seem to feel a sacredness in great mountains, seem to “see” further, and feel a sense of spiritual well-being and insight, indefinable in concrete terms. If a person is immune to such feelings, there is really nothing to be said that would give her or him a real, personal understanding of why one would feel compelled to climb a mountain.
As a child I was fortunate in having parents who were not conventionally religious. Neither ever went to church. There was no attempted brain washing. I was curious about religion and on one or two occasions actually went to Sunday school at Central Union Church in Honolulu. Sunday school there was obviously simply a place to harbor children while their parents were in church. Theology was conspicuously absent. No help there. Later, in high school, we had a Christian non-denominational chapel which I found exquisitely boring. I was already an unthinking atheist. So, later in life, when I felt the need for an understanding that was deeper than that provided by a scientific and humanistic education, I could approach the search, more or less unbiased by childhood experiences. I was open to any spirituality based on beliefs that seemed reasonable to a person who had unconsciously committed to a scientific world view.
In an earlier post I’ve already set out one criterion for my journey: it must be superstition-free and beliefs should not be based on their comfort level. Now, in the years after college as I worked as a mathematician in Pasadena for a branch of the Naval Ordinance Test Station, climbed and skied in the Sierra, and met the friend working on his Ph.D. in physics at Cal Tech, I gradually formed another criterion: Any spiritual outlook should be totally comfortable and compatible with a scientific world view. This is not to say that I thought a scientific world view the be all and end all of knowledge and life. I had heard about logical positivism in college and had taken it to claim (probably mistakenly) that the world of experience outside of science lacked meaning or validity. I felt that this view was ridiculous though I didn’t know enough about positivism to argue against it. I knew that I loved poetry, good poetry and kitchy bad poetry, was carried away by classical music, and felt impelled to try understand all of life, scientific and otherwise. Somewhere along the line I had run into the world of myth in Joseph Campbell’s books and found exciting his ideas about how myth gives meaning to life.
Although I was captivated by the “worlds” outside of science, I decided that any religious claims that attempted to contradict the stories of the scientific world were unworthy of consideration as serious truth, spiritual or otherwise. At the time this left a big question in my mind. Was there already existing somewhere in all of mainstream world religion or in any existing sect, a spiritual path that satisfied the criteria I had developed?
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