Finding a Way

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step

Just another writer starting a Substack.

I’ve been blogging for sixteen years over at Blogger, a little thing called “Thinking Through: Philosophy, Mythology, Spirituality, and Transformational Wisdom.” A bit wordy I know. That blog was comprised almost entirely of my already-published magazine columns from the San Diego Troubadour and Unity Magazine. I stepped away from both of those writing jobs, as wonderful as they were, full of gratitude to my readers, editors, and publishers, (in that order), and grateful for the opportunity to share ideas with scads of people for all those years. When I stopped writing columns, my blog naturally dried up.

At the same time, I was writing a book called The Seven Stone Path: An Everyday Journey to Wisdom. That book came out in August 2023. You should read it.

Then I noticed that all of my writer friends were leaving their blogs behind and migrating to Substack. So why not?

I’ve been a philosophy professor for 33 years, teaching a wide range of courses in the philosophy and humanities departments at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, California, a few miles south of San Diego. I live in San Diego with Lori, my unusually charming and brilliant wife of 39 years, and our latest dog, a reasonably well-behaved Irish terrier-God-knows-what mutt named James Fenimore Cooper. But he mostly goes by, “Hey! No!”

So what’s this Substack going to be about? Today I’m thinking of it mostly as a spiritual memoir, traveler’s tales from the long road through the landscape of the world’s wisdom traditions.

Here’s what’s been moving through me lately, so I’ll start here.

All my life I’ve been a student of the world’s wisdom traditions. You know, philosophies, religions, and mythologies, and all the myriad ways those insights filter into our lives through literature, poetry, essays, scripture, plays, movies, short stories, painting, sculpture, music, architecture, choreography, cuisine, design, you know, pretty much the entire human endeavor. And through the grandeur of the natural world of course. I’ve adopted and taught insights and practices from all of them. I do yoga, I meditate, I practice mindfulness (as well as I can), I pray, I study and teach the world’s scriptures, and so on. I’m head over heels in love with Hinduism, especially Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, especially Zen, and all of the world’s mystical traditions. And all of the world’s pantheistic, animistic primal traditions too. Then something began to bloom in me these last few years. I started reading a lot of Thomas Merton, Rachel Held Evans, Brian McLaren, Richard Rohr, and other voices from the thoughtful, reflective, questioning edge of Christianity. And despite our very different backgrounds, I began to recognize their voices as my own.

But mostly it was the Christian mystics who finally softened my heart to the gifts of the Christian path and the wonder-full mystery at the heart of this oh-so-dominate world religion—a religion I had studiously kept at arm’s length my whole life. (More on that later).

I love my life of wandering around through all of the world’s wisdom traditions—I still do. But I knew that as a tourist I was missing out on the treasures of residency, of settling down—not settling, but settling down. Of resting in one place. Of sitting quietly and letting the beauty of the mystery come to me. Less chasing, less meandering, less stumbling—more stillness.

Then the words of one my greatest Advaita Vedanta teachers, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, in his essential classic I Am That, pierced my heart: “The desire for truth is the highest of all desires, yet, it is still a desire. All desires must be given up for the real to be… Playing with various approaches may be due to resistance to going within… To find water you do not dig small pits all over the place, but drill deep in one place only.”

When I was baptized at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in San Diego four years ago, I didn’t replace my Hindu-Vedanta-Buddhist-Zen-Daoist-Sufi-agnostic-heathen spirituality with Christianity. I simply added Christianity to the list. I still don’t call myself a Christian. But I follow Christianity. Christianity is something I do.

I don’t know what I “believe.” I’m more interested in actions than beliefs, in behaviors than concepts. The writings of Father Richard Rohr introduced me to the distinction between orthodoxy and orthopraxy—right beliefs vs. right actions. Then it hit me—this was a key to unlock the prison cell into which I’d sentenced Christianity, mostly for the crime of staggering hypocrisy. Any school boy can, by heart, recount the atrocities committed in the Church’s name, right down to this very day. But once I learned how to separate the wheat from the chaff, the belligerent noise from the nurturing silence, something shifted in me. Now it’s simple. By their fruits you shall know them. Don’t tell me what your religion is—show me.

This is a big subject, and I intend to explore it with you through upcoming essays. For now, let’s just say that I have a lot to unpack—my resentments outrun my gratitude most of the time. But I didn’t come here to complain—I came here to cultivate, namely, my own evolving spirituality.

So I never argue about religion. I don’t know what God is. I certainly hold no claims about the divinity of Christ, or whether any of the alleged miracles happened or not. I’m permanently shaped (some might quip misshapen) by the interpretative model of Joseph Campbell, namely, that all of our God concepts are masks, and we made the masks. And that when you read scriptural metaphors as facts, you not only lose the deeper meaning—you destroy it. (More on this later). It’s what’s behind the many masks of God, across all of the traditions, that interest me, that call me, that fill me with powerful longing. But here’s the rub—the mystery behind the masks, behind all of the concepts, images, doctrines, and conflicting truth-claims remains ineffable, beyond all thoughts and forms. You can’t name it, talk about it, or even turn it into a concept, let alone a doctrine. I like it that way. That’s the only way that works for me. As Laozi wrote in the Dao De Jing, “The unamable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things.” It’s the One I’m after. I’ve seen the Many.

In other words, I’m convinced that all religions are human constructions. They are creative systems of signs, symbols, metaphors, narratives, and images—all of which signify something. And our rituals, Joseph Campbell reminds us, are renactments of our myths.

Mythology and religion, Campbell teaches us, are the penultimate stage. The ultimate stage is the unknowable Being beyond all of the forms. Religion and mythology, at their best, are never the destination—they are the jumping-off platform. They get us almost all the way there. The final leap, the embodiment of the realization, is an experience one cannot receive second-hand. Oh, and this. All religions true. They all work. I’m sure of that now.

So welcome to our little chat. Come back as new entries appear. Help me figure out how to put one foot in front of the other, never knowing where the road goes, but drawn ceaselessly along its confident line, and trusting Rumi: “Let yourself be silently drawn by the pull of what you really love.”