A few years ago (in 2023), I walked away from my tech career with the intention of spending more time to focus on my family and on my spirituality. A friend and co-worker asked me, “When you say ‘focus on spirituality,’ that can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. What does that mean for you, specifically?”
I thought I might write my answer up here in case it’s useful more generally. Please note, however, that I don’t consider myself a spiritual teacher or guide—just a student who seems to be making adequate progress! There is perhaps nothing more personal than spirituality, and I’m pretty convinced that there are many heavens and many endpoints we strive towards. The spiritual world is by far more vast than ours! So please do not take any of this as gospel, just as one seeker’s experience.
My own spiritual practice is a sort of three-legged stool, where each leg supports the other two. Removing or replacing any one would undermine the entire structure and the whole thing would fall apart. These three are meditation, study, and prayer.
Even though I’m not a Buddhist, I practice what I suppose is Zen-style meditation, following the instructions I picked up from one or another of Alan Watts’ books years and years ago. What this does is peel back the constructed layers of experience that we all build up around ourselves. Most people identify closely with their bodies and sensory experiences, but in reality this is only the outermost layer of the thing that you really are: the first goal of meditation is to bypass the senses to get to the part of you that lies beyond them. Once you’ve quieted the senses, you experience the mind and it’s incessant, chattering thoughts and ideas. Some people, like intellectuals or the infirm, identify with this part of themselves—once you’ve experienced this, your body seems superflous and the mind essential; but again, it’s only a shell around your true self: the second goal of meditation is to bypass the thoughts. Once you’ve quieted the thoughts, you experience a pinpoint center of awareness or consciousness that does not sense or does not think, rather it experiences and knows. Once you’ve experienced this, it is hard to think of your mind or personality as “you,” and the notion of reincarnation starts to seem obvious. This is as far as I’ve gotten, but twice I’ve brushed up against the level beyond it, though I haven’t yet properly broken through. Nonetheless, by practicing meditation regularly, it gets easier and easier to peel these layers back, and gain perspective on who (or what) you really are, and free yourself from the confines of a petty society’s herd mentality.
Study, of course, exists in order to allow you to benefit from the experiences of others. The need for this is apparent even in the material world which we all readily and easily experience, so how much more is it necessary with spiritual worlds, which most of us have only very dim experience of, if any! So by studying, one can train their mind, learn to double-check one’s experiences to see if they are real or imagined, and gain useful models by which to contextualize their experiences. I have pretty severe insomnia and read a lot, but if I had to pick the texts that have been most valuable to me to date, they would be:
I encountered the the Taoists in 2009, the Zennists in 2011, and the Orphics/Pythagoreans/Platonists/Plotinists in 2022. In my experience they all agree exactly, though they have different emphasis. I warn you, of course, that these are not for everybody! They’re just what has worked for me.
If one is exploring a foreign country, it is useful and appropriate to have a guide to show you around. This is no less true for the spiritual realms, since while you are technically a native of those places, you’ve been in exile so long that you’ve forgotten the customs and ways. So it is very good to pray for guidance and help in finding your way! Many people have many preferences on who to pray to, and appropriately so; personally, I spend most of my time with my “daimon” or “guardian angel,” who finally managed to consciously get in touch with me after many years of meditation (though, of course, they were always unconsciously available), and I recommend the practice, but your mileage may vary!
And as I have said, each of these reinforces the others:
Meditation has a tendency to empty the mind, and just like a freshly-cleaned table has a static charge and tends to attract dust, a freshly-cleaned mind tends to attract ideas and thoughts. Study improves meditation by making the void more likely to be filled by something worthwhile. Prayer improves meditation by moving your mind to a cleaner space: there is less “dust” near divinity, keeping your mind clearer for longer before it needs cleaning again.
Study is only as valuable as what you study. Meditation improves study by helping you focus and decide on what is what is really important to you. Prayer improves study because divinities know what is good for you and can lead you to material worth your time. I have also found that study can help you to make sense of the sometimes-strange experiences one has in meditation and prayer.
Prayer is usually considered to be a one-way phenomenon, where one speaks but doesn’t get a response, but this is not my experience at all. Usually, however, we humans are so invested in our sensory and mental experiences that we are unable to hear divinity over all the noise! Meditation improves prayer by clearing out the noise so that the signal comes through easier. Study improves prayer by expanding one’s perspective so that one has useful things to pray about.
It is important to note that one doesn’t shift gears all at once: you can’t simply magically become excellent at meditation, or just force yourself to study the best material, or instantly connect with a deity in prayer. Rather, I tend to think of all of this as a gradual ripening process: by simply engaging with the practices, all these things naturally come about, little by little. It is said that “what you contemplate, you imitate:” so if you want to be more loving, don’t force yourself into lots of various activities or try to make intense promises at the altar of Aphrodite or whatever; rather, simply take such steps as are around you, and the little things will become second nature, and when you no longer have to think about the little things, the bigger things will develop all on their own.
All well and good, but my friend—who was also interested in studying philosophy more deeply—asked about what my process is when I’m studying a work. I don’t claim any special knowledge or anything, just doing what makes sense to me; I’m a computer programmer, and we computer programmers take everything in steps:
Select a work to read. Sometimes a work is selected for you, but usually one gets to select something themselves. If it’s a multi-part work, try to commit to regularly doing the whole thing in parts. If the parts are really small, try to group them into coherent sections: the idea here is to bite off work in digestible units. If you find that you hate a work halfway through it—too bad; that’s life, stick it out until the end. Usually you’ll get something out of it anyway.
Set a time limit on reading it. Try to be reasonable when considering whether you’re the kind of person who needs the bridle or the whip! If you set a goal too aggressively, you’ll hurt yourself; if you set a goal too conservatively, you’ll dawdle. When I was reading the Enneads, I tried to commit to an average of one essay a week. This was a little aggressive, but was actually a fairly good time limit for me; but what if you pick your time limit badly? Stick with it for this essay, but revise it on the next.
Personally, I like to only formally commit myself to a single work at a time: as I write this, I’m studying the Elements of Theology, and before that I did the Enneads, and before that I did On the Gods and the World; but of course I’m promiscuous and like to read lots of things at once. I don’t like to alternate between different works, say Plotinos this week and Platon the next; rather, I will instead formally commit to Plotinos but leave myself enough time in each segment to read other things, too.
Read the work! I don’t have any particular strategy here: sometimes a work is short and easy and I just read it all in a single pass, while other times I’m need to really take it paragraph-by-paragraph, and still others I’ll read it quickly the first time and then again with more care. The goal is to try and understand what the author is saying and why; and different authors, different works, different motivations driving the author, different historical contexts all seem to require their own handling to understand. It’s important to try and understand the author, though: try to suspend judgement on whether the work is good or bad or whatever until after you understand it.
Write a page-long summary of the work. (I say “page-long,” but to be honest, I’m usually writing on a computer. Figure about three paragraphs for an “average-sized” work, and if something needs more or less, go ahead and recalibrate.) It’s been said that you don’t understand something unless you can teach it, so attempt to summarize the most salient points of the work. If you don’t understand it well enough to do so, read it again—and again if necessary! When I was working through Plotinos, only the shortest and simplest essays could I get in a single pass; usually it took me two or three reads. (The hardest ones took five!) This is why you set yourself a time limit; sometimes a work is just beyond you, and if you bump into the time limit, just call it, do your best, and make a mental note to revisit the work some other time. (And don’t feel too bad about doing so! I’m in very poor health and a lot of times my brain is simply too fogged over to engage as deeply as I’d like in the material. But Providence is just, and I’m inclined to think that if one makes an honest effort, one will be blessed by it.)
Write commentary on everything that stood out to you about the work. Did something surprise you? Did something upset you? In trying to reconcile the work with things you already know, does everything fit or were there things that seemed incongruous? How can you apply the work to your life?
I like to write my commentary in a very free-form way. As you’ve all seen by now, I also like to publish my summaries and commentaries: I write them for myself, but I publish them in the hopes that somebody finds the notes helpful. Naturally, I edit my commentary down when I do so to those that aren’t private—but, of course, much (most?) of my notes try to grapple with what the material means to me and how it fits with my experiences, and I think it is especially important to think about one’s relationship to a work.
Repeat from step 1. This is, intentionally, an infinite loop. You’ll have plenty of time to rest when you’re dead; for now, work.
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