Traveling the Spiritual Path

by Shaykh Ibrahim Spiegel

At a certain time in your life you decide that you wish to know more about the great questions Your heart becomes thirsty for Truth. You yearn for answers that truly satisfy. You experience a great dramatic shift of awareness and you want to understand it. Perhaps a Spiritual Path will lead you where you wish to go. You examine some spiritual traditions, do some window shopping, and perhaps you are trying to decide which is the right one for you. Perhaps you've already made a commitment to one and now, after traveling for a while, find yourself confused. Is it still the right one? Why do you feel these things about the teacher? Is anything happening inside? Maybe spiritual paths should be different for Americans?

What exactly is a Spiritual Path? Do you really need a teacher or can books teach the basics?
A spiritual path is a commitment between an individual and a spiritual teacher and community. Its basic intention is to help advance the student towards unity. Within that intention is also the experience to help you avoid the traps that are part of any path. A spiritual path cannot be traveled without inner and outer discipline. Through the spiritual path the student learns deeper interactions within the community. The practice deepens awareness of God's manifestations. The spiritual education can and most likely will last one's entire life. Most disciplines assume that to be a True human being means that one undertakes a lifelong pursuit of Truth to be experience and lived, not read about.

A spiritual path should be a healthy balance of the internal and external, social and personal, humility and self-esteem, humor and seriousness, compassion and wisdom.

The student's job is to continuously scan the internal world and see if there are actual, true shifts occurring. If you experience emotional reactions to the teachings, track the source down. Source-tracking should be uppermost in the student's focus. "Where did this come from?" could be asked continually about everything until you receive a satisfactory answer.

How do we determine what a satisfactory answer is?
When the heart is content.

What is a true shift of awareness? You can tell when a shift of awareness is occurring because you begin to see everyday things and events in a new way, when there is a new awareness of how things fit together. A growing feeling of inclusion and unity indicates the path and practices are working.
A path isn't working if the student or the teacher becomes arrogant, interested in acquiring power, money, sex, psychic powers, or a desire for death, or is depressed.

A path is working if a student observes and becomes dissatisfied with his/her habits and negative personality traits. It is working if emotions arise that have been dormant; if you become thirsty for Truth; and you begin to gain a new awareness of abilities not even known or previously aware of.

The teacher, at certain stages of the student's development, will apply tests and instructional experiences to help the student evaluate his/her progress. The ability to sustain personal attacks, for example, by the teacher assists the student to see beyond the personal self. This experience itself has sometimes sent a student into unity-awareness.

As personal problems arise, the teacher and student will meet to discuss problems objectively through the teachings, and the teacher will give advice and suggestions and practices.

The teacher should be able to trace the teaching lineage to a master who will most likely attribute the source of the teachings to God, Allah, The Creator, Buddha, or some aspect of Divine Knowledge. The teacher is in a state of service to help others to achieve unity, to know themselves and their relationship with God and other people. There is no other gain for the teacher except that it is the right thing to do for him or her.

The teacher, working within the spiritual system, uses everything at his/her command to provoke the student into questioning the student's opinions, ideas, habits. The student, while undergoing this undressing and unlearning, sometimes realizes that surrender is the only way.

What is the Goal of the Spiritual Path?

The goal is to bring the participant to an awareness of unity, a desire to serve others, perhaps a better understanding of how to fit into this world, and answering the deepest questions of life, giving the practitioner the long sought-for goal of all humans: Contentment.

Within the spiritual tradition, there is a map of the terrain held within the writings and the teacher's memory. Books, stories, discussions, and direct experience are all part of the map. As one transits the path, understanding of various teaching methods becomes clear.

The teacher's job is to take the student to the curtain of Unity. Beyond the curtain is the student's destiny. There is no way you can take "You" through that curtain. There is no room. After passing that check point, the teacher becomes a friend and guide. Before that the student must humble his/herself to the observations of the teacher, examining those aspects of "you" that cannot pass through the curtain.

The teacher should represent your model and goal as a human being. In some ways it doesn't matter if the teacher gets angry or presents unpleasant characteristics. The intention is to make that person your highest ideal, and to look for those aspects you desire and admire. Of course this is only practice so you can look for those things in those around you as well.

• In Sufism, the Shaykh should:
• Follow the Prophet Mohammed
• Act from Sunnah
• Point to Allah and not himself
• Doesn't force students to give money
• Doesn't have sex with students, but has a
• parent/child relationship
• Must be a Wali- receive knowledge from the unseen
• and the lineage of Shaykhs
• Practices what he preaches
• Speaks what's in your heart
• You feel your troubles lifted
• Your heart is content and you want to hear more from him

The teacher is there to deliver the teachings. Don't get stuck in thinking that the teacher is the teachings. The teacher is a human being who has studied and practiced the teachings longer than you.

And yet- what you project on the teacher is part of the process. If you practice imagining the highest form of human being is your teacher, you create that within yourself. You are initiating the real teaching and growth. Imagining that the teacher embodies the teachings will lift you beyond your own limitations, and form a bridge to your own higher self. You cannot do it on your own because of the hard shell of opinions and adaptations that surround you. By making that shell permeable and flexible, we observe who we truly are, and that which we have accumulated.

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