No, Not All Paths Are the Same

. . . and they don’t all lead to the same reward

There’s an idea floating around the spiritual marketplace, soft and warm and sweet, that goes like this: Every religion is really saying the same thing. All paths lead up the same mountain.

Strip away the costumes and the chanting and the dietary rules, and underneath it’s all just Love, all just One, all just the same cosmic light wearing different guises.

I understand the appeal. It’s generous and peaceable and encourages us to love everybody.

But it’s not close to being true.

+

Here are the facts, ma’ams and sirs and every gender in between: The traditions are very different. Not cosmetically different, but different all the way down and in. They ask different things from you, and they make you into different kinds of people.

Jesus of Nazareth tells you to love the people who want you dead. The Vedantic sage wants to dissolve into the one Reality behind all appearances. The Buddhist has no use for an all-knowing creator God and wants to entirely extinguish the fire of craving.

Hindu goddess Kali is the ecstatic force of creation and destruction intertwined, loving us enough to annihilate everything false. The devout Muslim submits to the will of God in every detail of life, finding freedom in disciplined surrender rather than self-invention. The Wiccan celebrates the turning of the seasons as sacred, finding the Goddess not beyond the world but pulsing through the earth, the tides, and the body.

These aren’t mild variations of the same teachings. They are completely different ways to live. Walk one of them all the way to the end, and you become a person the other paths would barely recognize.

Let’s dig in and explore the various paths’ vision of the individual self.

The Buddhist sage spends years training to see that there is no permanent self at all. The “you” that you keep honoring and trying to feed is a rumor, a process mistaken for a thing. The Vedantic sage trains just as hard to realize the opposite: that your deepest Self is eternal, unborn, identical and merged with the ground of all being.

The Western Hermetic approach says, hell, yeah, there’s a gorgeous, robust self, and a key part of the spiritual work is to nurture it.

The Eastern Orthodox Christian: Your self isn’t meant to disappear but to become radiant through participation in God’s life, without ceasing to be uniquely you.

For Jains, your soul is real, eternal, and irreducibly individual. Liberate it from karmic bondage rather than dissolve it into a universal Self.

The Confucians say your self is a lifelong cultivation project, taking shape through how thoughtfully and humanely you live with other people.

The Wiccan says your self is real and divine, a spark of Goddess and God wearing a particular face. You’re not meant to transcend it or dissolve it, but to consecrate it, body and desire included.

They all disagree about the most basic questions we can ask: whether your self even exists, and if so, in what form. They’re not describing one summit in various dialects. Some are climbing toward a Self; others are wriggling all the way out of one.

+

Or take the body. The Christian creeds promise you’ll get yours back: raised, glorified, and yours forever. Much of the Indian tradition is laboring to free you from ever having to wear a meat suit again. One says the goal is to be resurrected into flesh; the other says the goal is to stop being reborn into it.

Wicca agrees with India that we reincarnate, then reverses the verdict. Many Wiccans regard rebirth not as a sentence to escape but as a homecoming: another chance to return to this beloved Earth and the people and animals we love. In the Charge of the Goddess, She declares that all acts of love and pleasure are Her rituals.

These various views are central quarrels about what a human being is for.

(You can probably guess which side my incarnate heart leans toward, and that’s exactly the point. I’m not neutral. And neither will you be if you actually pick.)

I find this thrilling. I don’t want a beige, tasteless God or Goddess. I want the specific, weird, demanding, gorgeous particularity of an actual living tradition that might ask me for something really interesting and demanding.

+

The most sophisticated lovers of “all is one” will tell you they already know that the rituals don’t match. Of course the outer forms differ wildly, they say. But at the mystical peak, where the great contemplatives fall silent, all the climbers finally meet in the same light.

It’s a well-meaning claim. I just don’t think it survives contact with the peaks themselves. The theist dissolving in love into a beloved Other is not having the same experience as the Buddhist arriving at a profound and absolute cessation where even the One drops away. Those are two different summits.

Here’s the stranger thing: Even if I granted them an identical mountaintop, it wouldn’t rescue the idea. Because you’re changed by the climb, not the views at the top.

And the climbs run in opposite directions, through wildly different country, demanding dissimilar disciplines. The journey through the desert teaches you what the path through the urban jungle never could. You become whoever the walking makes you, not whoever or whatever is allegedly waiting at the end.

+

I’ll go a step further.

I’m suspicious of any spirituality that tells us suffering isn’t real and that good and evil are just “categories of mind.” Everything I’ve learned this time around tells me that realizing we’re infinite consciousness doesn’t mean that all our efforts are meaningless and immaterial.

Out here in the real world, from my perspective, teachings that float above it all look less like enlightenment and more like a comfortable seat far from the action. Meanwhile, people are going hungry, communities are getting decimated, and actual human bodies are breaking and grieving and burning.

I want a spirituality we can do with our hands dirty. I want practice that makes me more present to reality—all of it, the beautiful and the challenging.

The point isn’t to escape the world, but to fall so fervently in love with being incarnate that we’re willing to be diverted and even disturbed by it.

The art above is by Beyond the Abysmal

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

SYNCRETISM?

But wait a minute. What about the practice of borrowing from and integrating ideas from a variety of spiritual disciplines? Some critics say that is or verges on cultural appropriation, though it has a long and hallowed tradition under the name of SYNCRETISM.

If I resonate deeply with the Indigenous Australian understanding of the Dreamtime, do I have any right at all to love and abide with and exult in the Dreamtime?

In my present incarnation, I have recorded and worked with my dreams since I was a child. I have become as familiar with the realms we travel in while we sleep as it’s possible for a human to be. But I haven’t visited Australia, and none of my biological ancestors were Indigenous Australians.

Before addressing that question, I’ll ask a related inquiry: If an American resonates deeply with Buddhism and its teachings about Pali and Sanskrit terms like anatta, skandhas, anicca, dukkha, and related doctrines, do they have a right to live their lives in accordance with those precepts—despite the fact that Buddhism originated in India and evolved in Asia for 2,000 years before establishing a presence in America and Europe?

I say yes, they do.

+

Though some may accuse me of being a cultural appropriator, I freely admit that my own spiritual path, while primarily rooted in Western Hermetic Magick, also exuberantly borrows from Tantra, Wicca, mystical Christianity, Fourth Way teachings, Goddess worship, the Dreamtime, and Sufism.

None of those paths lead to precisely the same goals as Western Hermetic Magick, and some even have contrary teachings, but I regard them as crucial adjuncts to my core practices and theories about life.

So how does this practice of mine jibe or not jibe with the first part of my essay here?

+

Here’s how I’ll answer it: Pretty well, actually, and better than the “all is one” view does.

The whole case I’ve been making is that the traditions are different, not cosmetically but all the way down. If that’s true, then borrowing from them can’t mean pouring them into a blender and calling the gray paste Truth. That’s the move I’ve been arguing against.

If I believed Sufism and Tantra and Wicca were all secretly saying what Hermetic Magick says, there would be nothing worth borrowing. I’d already have it. I go to the Sufis because they theorize something my core tradition doesn’t emphasize, or emphasizes in a different key: the drunken, heartbroken, praise-singing ache for the Beloved.

I go to the Fourth Way because Gurdjieff’s ruthless insistence on self-observation is a corrective that my more exuberant tendencies need. The value comes from the difference.

So I don’t think of my path as a merger. I think of it as a household. Western Hermetic Magick is the hearth, the place where I live, the language I dream in, the discipline I’ve committed to walking all the way to wherever it goes.

The other traditions are honored guests at my table. Some of them argue with each other. Some of them argue with me. A Sufi teacher who speaks of fana, the annihilation of the self in God, is sitting next to a Hermeticist who wants to polish that same self into a nonperishable jewel.

I let the quarrel ramble on freely, because the quarrel teaches me things that a forced consensus never could.

That’s the difference between syncretism as mush and syncretism as conversation. Mush says: It’s all the same, so take what you like. Conversation says: These are different, so take them seriously, including the parts that rebuke you.

+

That brings me back to where I began. The reason I won’t accept a beige God or Goddess is the same reason I won’t accept a beige eclecticism that pretends every tradition is interchangeable raw material for my personal growth.

The path of fervent incarnation inspires me to be intimate with specifics: this body, this place, this lineage, this teacher, this tradition with its strange demands and its sharp edges. Borrowing well means honoring that specificity even in the things we didn’t grow up with.

Goddess Wheel White Buffalo Woman — by James Roderick: Durga, includes Pele, Artemis, Baba Yaga, Nut, Ishtar, and White Buffalo Woman

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Hear my song, “Beak the Law:

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthly Selves in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality is available at online stores, and you can get a 25% discount here: tinyurl.com/SacredEarthySelves

Also available as a cheap e-book: https://tinyurl.com/REBELSebook

+

Check out my NOTES: newsletter.freewillastrology.com/notes

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of October 29

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): This is your high holy season, Scorpio, which also happens to be the time when the veil is thinnest between this world and the other world. Others find this eerie, but you’ve always been at home here. You know how to explore the deepest depths, how to abide with what’s buried and hidden, and how to find treasure in the dark. In the coming weeks, your natural power to perceive what’s concealed will be amplified. For Halloween, be a psychopomp: a keeper of the threshold, a soul-guide draped in shadow and starlight who walks comfortably between the living and the dead. (PS: What secrets would you like to uncover? What spirits of the departed would you like to commune with? What seemingly impossible knowledge could you gain access to?)

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Early balloonists had little control over the direction of their flights. They couldn’t steer horizontally. But they found that changing altitude allowed them to catch different winds moving in different directions. The smartest way to change course was to rise or descend. Keep that image close, Sagittarius. If you can’t alter external circumstances directly, shift your perspective or your social environment. A new current may be waiting higher or lower than where you’ve been drifting. For Halloween, be a hot-air balloon pilot, comet rider, sky pirate, or bird god like the Hindu Garuda.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Life must both perpetuate itself and surpass itself. Capricorn philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said that. We need continuity, but we also need transcendence. This beautifully encapsulates your assignment in the coming months. Your fun job will be to continue honoring the commitments that anchor your life while also making room for an exhilarating experiment or two. Make stability your launching pad rather than your destination. For Halloween, be the person you will be three years from now.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Inventors often describe breakthroughs arriving after weeks or months of seemingly unproductive tinkering. Clearly, their subconscious minds kept working on the puzzles even while their conscious minds felt frustrated. Eventually, a fresh arrangement appeared as if by magic. I suspect you’re approaching a threshold like that. Your experiments have been subliminally educating your intuition. The solution that’s searching for you may be cleverer than the one you’ve been searching for. For Halloween, be a time traveler, benevolent extraterrestrial, or eccentric professor.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Travelers crossing dark marshes on foot may report eerie, flickering lights hovering over the bog. Science explains these will-o’-the-wisps as gases from decaying matter that ignites in the night air. Folklore provides other theories: They’re spirit-lanterns, fairy lights, the lamps of the dead, or beckoning wanderers. I believe you’re in a similar liminal zone these days. Science and magic are both at work. Truth may take the form of both inexplicable mystery and fascinating anomalies that light your way. Be open to both! For Halloween, be a will-o’-the-wisp made flesh: a glowing spirit of the marsh draped in mist and lantern-light, beautiful and uncanny.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): For centuries, Japanese craftspeople have cultivated an ethos called shokunin kishitsu: a devotion to skilled work, lifelong learning, and continual refinement. The pursuit of perfection is less about reaching a final state than about bringing ever greater care and precision to the work. In traditional carpentry, this can mean years of learning to make joints whose quality resides in their strength and durability even though no customer will ever notice. I suggest you try out this attitude, Aries. Pour extra focus into details, regardless of whether anyone will applaud them. Be your best and brightest self not to impress anyone but yourself. For Halloween, be a blacksmith, artisan, or eccentric inventor.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

If you’d like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

and/or

becoming a paid subscriber to my Free Will Astrology Newsletter

and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): How do the oldest trees live for so many years? What’s their secret to longevity? They’re very adaptable. During storms, they bend without breaking. During droughts, they slow down their growth. Cultivating alliances with fungi is one of their brilliant tactics. You’re in an opportune phase to favor this approach to strength and endurance, Taurus. Here’s what I propose: Weave gleaming strands of buoyant resilience into your fervent willpower. Experiment with yielding strategically rather than resisting reflexively. Boost your soulful power through flexibility and adaptability. For Halloween, be an ancient oak tree, forest guardian, or mushroom spirit.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): When archaeologists unearth a fresh batch of ancient artifacts, they never find a complete civilization in one dramatic moment. Each object or bone fragment helps explain another. A piece of pottery illuminates the meaning of an inscription. A broken staircase reveals why buildings were constructed as they were. Through educated guesswork and chains of association, knowledge accumulates. I invite you to wield your curiosity in the same way, Gemini. Treasure the sequence of little discoveries that gradually reshape your overall understanding. Have eager faith that every clue will lead you to further clues. For Halloween, be an archaeologist, paleontologist, or investigator of crime scenes. PS: I suspect you’re close to a metaphorical version of discovering a lost civilization.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Researchers studying wolves have found that play remains essential to them throughout their lives. Mature wolves wrestle, chase, and invent games that strengthen trust and sharpen cooperation. They never graduate from joyful experimentation. I hope their friskiness inspires you to remember, dear Cancerian, that serious responsibilities don’t require a terminally serious personality. That’s especially crucial to keep in mind now. I invite you to bring maximum amounts of playful intelligence into everything you value. Laugh during challenging conversations. Invent rituals that nobody else would think of. Observe the true rule: Amused delight generates an atmosphere where meaningful work may become exceptional. For Halloween, be a playful wolf. And before sleep for the next few nights, ask your subconscious to send you dreams of being a playful wolf.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Peacocks’ extravagant feathers are beautiful displays that also communicate health, vitality, and genetic resilience. They’re excellent role models for you. You should never apologize for expressing your charisma with style and theatrical flair. As long as your outer brilliance reflects inner vitality, your radiance will nourish rather than intimidate others. Authentic glamour is a public service. For Halloween, be a sun deity, lion monarch, or glamorous ringmaster.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “Dear Oracle: I am obsessed with improving things. I tinker with systems that already work fine. I wake at 3 a.m. and catalog details I could have done better. My results are never ultimate enough. Please offer tips to help me find rest. —Drooping Purist.” Dear Drooping: The autumn season is your teacher. The harvest is in; the fields are meant to lie fallow. Nothing more can be improved by force. Growth happens underground, invisibly. In that spirit, I invite you to practice the radical art of leaving at least one thing gloriously alone so it can work its magic outside the reach of your conscious awareness. For Halloween, be a scarecrow who stands serenely in the harvested field, watching over everything, accomplishing its whole purpose by being present.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): If you’ve spent years regretting the moment a friend took credit for your best idea, that sting may finally lose its hold on you. If an opportunity you earned was handed to someone else, you may soon receive recognition in a form you never anticipated. And if an ancient family legend claims you were doomed to repeat the same mistake forever, you can now break that pattern. The days ahead favor overdue adjustments. Watch for turns of fortune that don’t erase what happened, but change what it means, and what becomes possible next. For Halloween, be an exorcist.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •