I was thinking about the concept of persistence in spirituality, and this might actually be a more layered and important issue than anyone thinks.
You see, I was thinking about my mistakes, about why I made them, whether they were “unforced” or not, to use the tennis analogy, about what I could have done better, how I handled the fallout, and what’s the reason why I could essentially walk away without so much as missing a step.
The reason why I could “fail gracefully”, to use a programming analogy, is because I think like a scientist, which means that I understand that failure is always an option. Once you think you can’t possibly be wrong and all that is needed is persistence and diligence and the attainment of perfection is guaranteed, you are either an omnipotent and omniscient God, or a stupid cultist.
I was a zealot and a fanatic, but I was never a stupid cultist. The difference is, I was absolutely dedicated to attaining the ultimate goal, but I knew better than to assume I know what that ultimate goal is, which is why I could fail an arbitrary number of times and not lose a step – you see, my assumption was that I am lost, in the dark, with everything stacked against me, that everything I know about transcendental realities is based on very powerful experiences that were short, translated very poorly into concepts that can be intellectually processed by the human brain, that all the theory I had to work with is merely someone else’s attempt at making an intellectual system out of something his brain was as poorly suited for interpreting as mine, and even when I discovered mechanisms that work repeatedly and reliably and could be made into “spiritual technology”, I could hardly even attempt to explain the actual theory, the way scientists can tell you everything about how gravity works, but they know nothing about what gravity actually is, and how mass actually bends spacetime.
Sure, I always had some kind of a theory about how things work, what’s going on and where I seem to be heading, but I knew it was a theory; or a working hypothesis, to use scientific terms. You need to have some kind of a roadmap in your brain, and if you don’t, your brain will basically refuse to cooperate. However, the way my personal roadmap works is that I absolutely need to know what my next step needs to be. I need to know what to do at the next intersection. This is where my roadmap works the best. As things get less immediate, I care less about knowing details in any kind of a resolution. I don’t care about things some religious people seem to fuss over – how many wings and eyes does some type of angel have, does God have a throne, and similar nonsense. No, I understand that physical brain has limitations, and interpolating nonsense and pretending it’s resolution doesn’t contribute anything to the probability of actual spiritual achievement and success. What I need to know is whether meditation needs to be separate from all other activities or do I have to extend meditation into daily activities and basically make it the underlying state in everything I do. The latter; good, spend years perfecting that.
That’s why I am annoyed when some supposed Buddhists talk about renouncing Nirvana at the very beginning of their path, as if it were possible for a beginner to even know what Nirvana is and what it feels like, and as if it made any sense to accept or renounce something that might be the ultimate goal, from a position where you can’t even know anything for certain about realities three steps away from your current position.
That’s where we come to the issue of persistence. You can’t know whether persistence on your current path is good or bad if you don’t know your ultimate destination, because you’re in the process of learning. Yes, you are currently moving South, but you don’t know whether South is your ultimate destination, or merely a direction of the next important junction, where you will need to re-evaluate your entire situation because you learned something new and important. Essentially, your entire theory is good if it brings you to your first transcendental experience. Then you will know much more about higher realities, you will have something practical to check your theory with, and you will have fresh understanding that will make possible for you to learn new skills and acquire new abilities, making you into a whole new kind of being that can now understand things your previous version couldn’t even comprehend. When I think about this, I remember myself and other kids in the fourth grade trying to imagine what mathematics in higher education looks like, and all we could imagine was working the same basic operations but with bigger numbers. It turned out that bigger numbers were never a thing, and I learned something about expectations based on experience. Basically, what you need to worry about is the general trajectory, and doing the immediate next step properly, not the ultimate goal, not remaining faithful to the religion you started with. The idea that a religion will take care of you from beginning to end is incredibly naive; you will eventually experience something that will make your religion seem naive and superficial, and you will then either switch to something that explains your new experience better, or simply carve your own path into solid rock, if nothing else works. Sometimes there are no paved paths because you’re on your own, doing something nobody else did before, because that’s the trick with Creation – to believe that God created souls only so that they could all end up in the same place, or at least sorted in several known boxes, is to believe that the whole thing is essentially pointless. Also, since there’s a risk of failure, the reward for success must be something much greater than what you had in the beginning, or it would just not be worth it.
You can now say that making sure that the next step is on a generally positive trajectory is, in a sense that it leads to God, is paramount. Honestly, you’d have to be God in order to know what is on a generally positive trajectory. I’d rather trust God to guide my next step than try to figure out whether a negative present slope of the curve means I’m doing something wrong, or do I need to climb down a smaller mountain top before climbing a taller one, because I learned long ago that being in the driver’s seat while blind, drunk and not knowing how to drive is not the best thing, and in most cases having control over your situation just gives you enough rope to hang yourself. It is much better to just trust God with choosing the path, and take care of the immediate things that you can actually do well if you apply yourself to it.
So, yes, do the immediate next step like your ultimate destiny depends on it, and with absolute dedication and diligence. Also, understand that you’re not a train, you’re a leaf in the wind, and act accordingly – learn what God is trying to teach you and go where He leads you. Don’t be persistent, consistent or right. It’s not about being right, or about always maintaining the upward trajectory, because you’re not in a position to know. You’re in a position to keep your mind on God, and figure out how to make that next step so that you can still keep your mind on God. If you keep your mind on God and focus only on what you need to do, God is your ultimate trajectory. If you try to figure out the path, the trajectory and the ultimate goal, the illusory forces of this world control your path and your outcome. Basically, if you try to be in control of your path, you are ceding control to Satan, and the ego trip of being in control of your situation claims another sucker.
