The Mystical Journey
The mystical path is a very personal one. You can read books on other people’s experiences but these may not be relevant to your own path. In fact, slavishly following the path trod by someone else may seriously misguide you. There is another complication: the person you may wish to emulate may not be any further developed mystically than you are. You only have their own appraisal of their development to go on, and in most cases this is highly suspect. Hints or stories written by mystics are useful if you can engage with them. They can also be useful in that true mystics will often couch their teachings in stories and use other devices in order to stretch the mind in particular ways. The Sufi teaching stories of
Idries Shah are of this ilk: in order to understand the stories you have to change the way your mind works.
However, because the path is a very individual one, the correct course for you may not be the same as for someone else. In fact, the correct course of action for you may be disastrous for someone else and vice versa. This raises the problem that how do you know what your correct course of action is? Few people can travel the path without a guide, though sometimes the guide may be an astral one, that is a spirit who has passed from this Earth.
The key to mystical development is this: self-awareness. If you can observe yourself you can see if your actions take you away from your destination, and you can bring yourself back on course. It’s sometimes said that a jet plane flying from Sydney to Los Angles over the Pacific rarely flies in exactly the correct direction. It flies slightly off one way then the pilot corrects and flies slightly off another way and so on. So it is with progress on the path. If you stray then simply change your actions to bring yourself back on course. The important thing is not that you make a mistake (which is being human), it is that having made a mistake you are able to pick yourself up and go on. Too often people waste their lives on regrets and emotional ‘baggage’ that prevents any real progress.
