A Short Guide to Finding Your Spiritual Path: A Researcher's Perspective

By Jane Tilly

Does a Spiritual Presence exist? If so, what is it like? How can I create a meaningful experience with that Presence? True spirituality is often buried in the details of religious tradition or lost in the wake of all-to-human behavior disguised as spiritual practice. But for many, the questions remain. This guide, written by a researcher who specializes in making complex subjects approachable, explores possible answers. Part I examines eight religious traditions. Part II covers common methods people have used to connect with a Spiritual Presence, or create mystic experiences, including meditation, yoga, forest-bathing, and psychedelics. Part III discusses six women who became spiritual leaders in their traditions and describes what you can learn from them about your own spiritual path. Included throughout are questions for reflection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jane Tilly
• Release date: May 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201859480

Jane Tilly

Jane Tilly, DrPH researches and writes about a range of health and aging issues as an independent consultant and author based in Maryland. Her focus is on information people can use to maximize their health and well-being as they age. Health includes a person's physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. During her 10 years at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Jane Tilly focused on healthy aging, public health, dementia, and supportive services. Before that, she worked on dementia policy and practice issues for the Alzheimer’s Association for five years. Earlier, Dr. Tilly did policy research and analysis at The Urban Institute and the AARP Public Policy Institute. Her work has resulted in significant policy and program changes, and major publications and presentations at state, national, and international levels. She received her Doctor of Public Health degree from the University of Michigan in 2000. 

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Introduction

Two sets of experiences caused me to create my own spiritual path.¹ The first was my childhood immersion in evangelical Christianity, which failed me completely as a young adult. This happened at age 19, when my best friend Laura died. My family told me she was in hell because she was Jewish. I couldn’t accept this concept or the religion underlying it. I didn’t discover, until much later, that other versions of Christianity are less strict than this. For example, the Catholic Catechism says that under some circumstances non-believers can be reconciled to God.²

The second set of experiences involves unexplainable mystic events³ that began when I was 9 years old. My mystic experiences generally involve feeling a sense of oneness with the world and a few times have involved a sense of a loved one’s presence. At these times, I’m often in nature by myself. My mind is open and focused on my senses.

I didn’t explore religion⁴ or mysticism until mid-life due to my early rejection of traditional religion, my skepticism about mystic traditions, and lack of time. However, several years ago, I gained strong motivation and the time to start the work of creating my spiritual path. The motivation came because several close friends died early, bringing home how fleeting life can be. Certain other changes propelled me forward. The biggest one was that my children became independent so I lost day-to-day responsibility for them and gained some time.

My exploration resulted in this short guide, which you could use to learn about or create your own spiritual path. Creating my path involved learning more about the wealth of human religious traditions and their mystic aspects. This was important because these traditions form most of humanity’s speculation about a Spiritual Presence.⁵ As I learned more, I also found evidence about the mostly beneficial impact of mystic practices on people’s well-being.

My path involved finding reasonable answers to a few questions that were important to me. Does a Spiritual Presence exist and what could be its characteristics? Also, can you use mystic practices to experience a feeling of a Presence during this lifetime and what happens when you do?

This guide has three parts. Part I explores the questions about a Spiritual Presence, and how to experience it. Part II turns to the basics of mystic experiences, which involve methods of connecting with a Spiritual Presence. This part also summarizes the research evidence about the impact of mystic practices. Part III discusses the common features of the lives of six women who became spiritual leaders in their religious traditions and describes what I learned about my own spiritual path based on their examples. The Conclusion brings all the questions and insights together to describe what I learned.

The guide has an Appendix that provides a more detailed description of the lives of six woman spiritual leaders, most of whom had mystic experiences. You may want to know more about how their spiritual paths developed over their lifetimes.

The guide is designed to help you learn as I did and includes questions for reflection, which you may find useful. You may want to read the guide through or skip to the parts that are of most interest. For example, if you already know a great deal about the Abrahamic⁶ religions that started in the Middle East, you may want to focus on reading about the traditions that began in Asia. Or, you may just be interested in mystic practices and their potential impact. I encourage you to explore and find what is most useful to you.

Part I. The Religious Traditions

My exploration started with learning about major, enduring world religions and their mystic traditions and practices. My thinking was that long-lasting, influential religions or those with large numbers of followers likely have teachings that resonate with people and have underlying truths.

Eight traditions are very influential.⁷ Yoruba is a West African religion that accompanied the African diaspora that resulted from the slave trade to the Americas. Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam have hundreds of millions of followers each. Judaism is influential because Christianity and Islam flow from it. Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism combine to influence people in China, Japan, and many other Asian countries; these traditions have hundreds of millions of followers.

The first chapter describes the history of world religions to provide a context for the eight subsequent chapters that focus on the individual religions. Each chapter describes the basic elements of the religion, how it developed, and my understanding of what its key sacred text has to say about a Spiritual Presence. Next, each chapter describes the religion’s mystic path to a Spiritual Presence. At the end of the chapter I offer what I learned from each tradition, how I applied it to my spiritual path, and questions you could consider as you create your own path. The final chapter in Part 1 provides the answers that work for me about a Spiritual Presence.

Chapter 1. Development of the Traditions

The religions this guide explores build on traditions in existence throughout human history.⁸ Most cultures appear to have at least one religious tradition with beliefs, rituals, and stories. Early religions focused on nature and the human spirit, with hunter-gatherer peoples believing that everything has a spirit.

These peoples likely believed in gods and an afterlife, with shamans presiding over connections with the gods.⁹ ¹⁰ For example, the Aboriginal Peoples of Australia traditionally believe that creation is ongoing and that people can access their gods through rituals, song, dance, storytelling, sacred objects, art, and the human body. The /Xam San people in Africa use a trance dance to access the spirit world and return with healing powers. These examples are relevant because scholars look to current hunter-gatherer peoples’ religious traditions for insights into early human religious history.¹¹ Later chapters of this guide show that the methods you can use today to experience a Spiritual Presence involve some ancient techniques.

Development of Agriculture and Religion

As early peoples developed agriculture, they settled into towns and cities and developed complex religions with many gods. Scribes recorded these traditions.¹² For example, Hinduism is based on the oral traditions of ancient sages in India as recorded in the Vedas, Hinduism’s first set of sacred scriptures.

Among the first major civilizations to develop complex religions were the Sumerians in present day Iraq, Egyptians in the Nile River Valley, Indus Valley peoples in India, and the Yellow River peoples in China.¹³ Their religions involved heavenly and earthly gods who controlled the world according to a cosmic order. The ancient religions centered on what people had to do to preserve that order, which included rituals, sacred dramas, and animal sacrifice.¹⁴ ¹⁵ Some of these rituals and dramas introduced them to another plane of existence via mystic practices.

The Axial Age

Scholars call the next stage in the religious traditions’ development the Axial Age, which ranged from about 900 to 200 BCE.¹⁶ Then, various approaches to religion developed in reaction to the conflicts of their times.¹⁷ Confucianism and Daoism developed in mainland China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, and Judaism in the Middle East.

Sages, such as Judaism’s Moses, Hindu sages, the Buddha, Confucius, and Daoism’s Laozi, developed five of the eight religious traditions I chose to study. Later, two sages—Jesus and Muhammad—developed Christianity and Islam, which grew out of Judaism. Yoruba appears to have developed independently in Africa and its timing is uncertain because this religion has primarily oral traditions.

Most of these religious traditions’ sages taught about how people should live life on earth,¹⁸ ¹⁹ usually calling for people to be kind to one another. The sages said people should have compassion for themselves and others and use prayer, education, and action to engage their deeper levels of consciousness and to experience their version of a Spiritual Presence.²⁰

Personal Observations about the Role of Religion

This brief excursion into religious history shows that early human cultures around the world developed religious traditions that involve worship of or connection to gods, or some type of a Spiritual Presence. This cuts across time and space. So, religion seems to be part of human nature,²¹ often for the greater good. Unfortunately, sometimes it isn’t.

It is easy to get lost in the oppression that people carry out in the name of religion, as I got lost during my evangelical childhood. Wars have occurred, so-called witches burned, and peoples have been interned in camps, and enslaved. No one religion has a monopoly on cruelty and followers of many traditions take the insights of their sages and twist them into unrecognizable knots to promote oppression of all types.

However, my exploration of the origins and basic teachings of eight religious traditions shows that each of them maps out a path for living in harmony with others, and practices for connecting with a Spiritual Presence. Many people follow these paths and religion can be a force for much good. Despite their flaws, religious leaders, like Mohandas Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., have sparked much good in this world. And, evidence shows that, over time, humans have become less violent.²²

Many people now and throughout history share, with the sages, the desire to do good, and to connect with a Spiritual Presence. They have used religion to do so or have created their own spiritual paths. The human development of religion and the healing messages of the sages indicate that