We’ve heard about choosing a spiritual path so much of late that we may forget what a radical concept it is. Throughout most of history, religious truth was presented as a given. It was not for us to choose a path. Usually there was thought to be only one right path — Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or whatever — and people had no choice but to live by it as well as they could.

But today we realize that while religious truth is universal, it can take many forms and express itself in innumerable ways. It then becomes a matter of finding a path that resonates the most with one’s own experience.

My own spiritual path has taken a wide number of twists and turns, and yet as I look back over the years it has a strange harmony to it. The journey began, at least consciously, in 1978 when I was doing postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford. Soon after I arrived I joined a small group studying the esoteric teaching known as the Kabbalah. The Kabbalah is in part centered around a diagram called the Tree of Life. It sets out a kind of map of the visible and invisible worlds — the levels of the divine, the spiritual, the psychological, and the physical — in a way that I found surprisingly intelligible and accessible. The people I met through this group gave me an introduction not only to Kabbalistic theory but to meditative practices that I still use to this day.

If you look up Kabbalah (sometimes spelled "cabala" or "Qabalah") in a dictionary, you will usually see it defined as the mystical tradition of Judaism. Well, it is and it isn’t. It is in the sense that Kabbalistic ideas have suffused Jewish life and thought for millennia. It isn’t in the sense that non-Jews (like me) have practiced, studied, and taught it for just about as long.

When I came back to the U.S. in 1980, I tried to find some group equivalent to the one I knew in England, but I had no luck. Moving to San Francisco, I somehow got hold of the phone number of a Kabbalistic rabbi, whom I called. No one should study Kabbalah unless he is first familiar with the Talmud, he sternly told me. So that was that. Several months later I took a course from another Kabbalistic rabbi at a school of transpersonal psychology. He was a decent man, but when the course was over he told me that his main work was with Jews. Fair enough.

Around this time I came into contact with a peculiar set of books known as A Course in Miracles, which teaches a means of undoing false perception so that one may have a full awareness of God’s love. I bought these books mostly as a curiosity, but when I brought them home I found that the Course offered something I deeply needed. Kabbalists are concerned with balancing mercy and severity, or, if you prefer, love and judgment. I knew I was heavily inclined toward the severer side of my nature, toward judgment. The Course, which teaches that all judgment is to be relinquished to the Holy Spirit, provided the perfect counterpoint for this imbalance. Through the years I still find myself returning to the Course and finding new lessons in it.

Soon I became acutely aware of another imbalance in myself. The Kabbalah teaches that one needs to be well-grounded in earthly reality; otherwise any attempts one makes to ascend to higher planes is likely to be disorienting and dangerous. For my part I was like the character of whom James Joyce wrote, "Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body." To remedy this, I began to do various forms of bodywork, such as Reichian breathing, massage, and Rolfing. I also started going to yoga classes and took up a Tibetan movement practice known as Kum Nye. All of these were tremendously beneficial to me, but I don’t think I had a really solid connection with the physical level till the early ’90s, when I started going to a group practicing the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, a spiritual teacher from the Caucasus who lived in the early part of this century.

Gurdjieff taught that the ordinary waking state that we live in is in reality sleep, literally a low-grade hypnotic stupor. Students of his teachings focus on awakening from this sleep in part by making conscious efforts at sensing the body as often as possible. For example, while you are reading this article, you might try to simultaneously sense the hand or the foot or your back against your chair. This sounds simple, but if you try it, you’ll find it isn’t. Chances are you’ll be able to do it for only a second or two before you become distracted. Gurdjieffians practice these efforts of conscious attention for years, and in my experience they really do help one to integrate the body, mind, and emotions. But I don’t know that Gurdjieff’s teachings can take one much further than this, and after about seven years I felt I’d learned about as much as I was going to from this path.

To be spiritual, we’re told, also involves integrating one’s practice into daily life. For me that has had a strong professional component. I’ve worked as a writer and editor for some twenty years now, and over the past decade more and more of this work has had to do with spirituality. In 1986, when I was still living in San Francisco, I came across a new magazine called Gnosis. It had just been started by a former underground cartoonist named Jay Kinney, and it was dedicated to the mystical and esoteric teachings of the West (Western civilization, that is).

I sent Jay my résumé, and I ended up doing some work for Gnosis, mostly book reviews at first. About four years later, after various professional twists and turns of my own, Jay asked me to become Gnosis’s editor, which I did for over eight years.

Gnosis was a remarkable magazine. It was quite small — its circulation never went over 16,000 — and it was poorly capitalized. But the fact that it was a shoestring operation, with no ties to churches or organizations, gave us a tremendous amount of freedom in exploring subjects ranging from Sufism, Gnosticism, and Freemasonry to dreams, bodywork, and meditation even the relation of psychedelics to religious experience. As a summation of our work, Jay and I wrote a book, Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions, which is an introduction to the subjects Gnosis covered over the years.

All creative enterprises have their natural lifecycles, and by 1998 it was clear to both Jay and me that the energy behind Gnosis was starting to wind down. Jay was tired of the financial headaches of the magazine; for my part I was simply tired of California. At the beginning of 1999 I decided to go back to the East Coast, where I’d grown up, and Jay decided to close the magazine. Although Gnosis was a great project and we’d always worked well together, I sensed that in a way it was a relief for us both. Since then, I’ve been involved in projects ranging from editing an art magazine to writing astrological forecasts (a rather curious art) to Faith.com.

Over the past decade I’ve also moved more in the direction of teaching. I’ve never been able to stand the thought of marketing myself as the sort of New Age celebrity whose toothy countenance beams out at you on conference catalogues, but it does seem to me that beyond a certain point you don’t learn any more unless you start sharing what you’ve learned. Much of spiritual development is essentially a matter of serviceability: you will be taught what you need to know to do your job. At the outset, you’re like a kindergartener. There’s not much you can do except grow and absorb. But after a while the path becomes more like professional training. You show certain talents and skills, and you are subtly but clearly guided in ways to use them. So for the past ten years I’ve led Kabbalah groups in the cities I’ve lived in — small ones, meeting usually in someone’s home, advertising little and making no attempts to proselytize. (I must add that the trendy version of Kabbalah that is currently attracting various movie stars holds out little appeal for me.) I have no magnificent sermons to preach as a result of my experience. It seems clear that the courses people take on a spiritual path vary wildly, and what worked for me may prove disastrous for you. But I am convinced that life — including spiritual life — has a strange appropriateness to it. As I look back on my own past, I become more and more certain that the events and circumstances that befall us are not random; they are as carefully arranged as the plot in the greatest of plays. I don’t know who the great craftsman is that shapes the pattern that is a human life — perhaps it is God, the universe, or the Self that lies behind us all and serves as the ground of our consciousness. Most likely we don’t know and cannot fully know. But this being, whoever it is, is indeed the greatest of artists.