The Dissociation of Knowing and Being

I really enjoy the interviews at Buddha at the Gas Pump by many random spiritual/non-dual teachers. But I do take one issue with what I've observed there, and through my exposure to some of the spiritual communities I have engaged with: realizationism.

As I've come to understand it, realizationism is another reductive phenomena that happens with esoteric seekers. They privilege subjective experience at the expense of Truth. But I've always wondered why would the idea of being itself and knowing something be mutually exclusive?

Yes, you can't read your way to God. I was told this once on the subway as an evangelical believer was looking over my shoulder at the metaphysical book I was reading. My response should have been, “but maybe God can write himself to me.” So while I agree that thinking with the ordinary mind can be an obstacle to true nature, it can also be in service of it.

I recall Ken Wilber wrote about this phenomena in Integral Spirituality...

“Notice individuals who have been practicing one path for a decade or more, and you will often see a gradual closing of their minds, a narrowing of their interests, as they go deeper into spiritual state experiences but don't have an integral Framework to complement their plunge into Emptiness, or Ayin, or Godhead, or Holy Spirit. The result is that they become closed off to more and more parts of the world, which can actually lead to a regression to amber [mythic stage of development] or fundamentalism or absolutism. They become both deep mystics and narrow fundamentalists at the same time.”

Deep and narrow isn't always bad. The Sufi ad-Darqāwī said, “like a man who tries to find water by digging a little here and a little there and who will die of thirst; whereas a man who digs deep in one spot, trusting in the Lord and relying on Him, will find water; he will drink and give others to drink.” But I think Ken's point is that God permeates every part of our being, and to privilege any aspect of the self is a house divided against itself. 

Western Buddhists are often most guilty of taking non-conceptualism too far. Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche agrees and says, 

“Buddhism states that our normal views inhibit us and chain us to the limited condition of samsara, whereas the correct view can lead us to our ultimate spiritual destination. We should not conclude from this—although modern Western Buddhists often do—that meditation is all about getting rid of views, or that all views will hinder us from attaining our spiritual goal. This assumption is based on the legitimate premise that Buddhist teachings emphatically identify the need to develop a nonconceptual wisdom mind in order to attain liberation and enlightenment. However, many people mistakenly think that this implies that we do not need to believe in anything [nobody tells me what to do] and that all forms of conceptuality must be dispensed with right from the beginning. It is only incorrect views that we need to overcome. The correct and noble view is to be cultivated with great diligence.”

So while some Buddhists confuse no concepts with no intellect, I do believe this is also due to the fact the Buddhism is soteriological (a system for liberation). As such the emphasis in western circles is more psycho-spiritual than metaphysical. So most people coming to Buddhism are looking for happiness over Truth. Where we can recover a more complete picture of deeper inquiry is in some Greco-Roman and Christian circles by reintroducing the concept of nous. I'm currently reading A.H. Almaas' terrific book Inner Journey Home where he states, 

“Here, instead of ordinary knowledge obscuring our basic knowledge, the nous uses it to reveal and unfold the infinite potentials of basic knowledge. The essential nous can also operate in conjunction with reason and logic, applied to spiritual experience in all its dimensions and subtlety. The essential nous is one of the natural secrets of the wisdom teachings; it was mentioned and discussed a great deal, but most contemporary investigators miss it for they do not understand it. They cannot understand it because they are subject to the dissociation of knowing and being. We can mention one more thing about the functioning of the nous: it can combine with ordinary thinking to the extent that thinking becomes the flow of essence and its aspects, in a stream that scintillates with insight and understanding. Thinking becomes objective thinking, intentional, truly rational, steady, focused, and to the point. It is the operation of true nature in the process of discerning wisdom.”

I realize (without realizationism) that some serve Divinity better with their hearts and hands than with their minds. We are not all meant to be metaphysicians or theologians. And yet, understanding the context to any path can only enhance it, for it gives us deeper meaning, purpose, and significance to some of the most pertinent questions to life and existence. So let's think about that, along with our no-thinking. 

A Loveless Story

I don't write as much about music as I'd like, but there was a period in my life when it meant almost everything to me. (Sadly, internet culture may have changed this by turning music into a highly accessible commodity.) Before I began on my adult spiritual/metaphysical quest, music was my scared experience. Sure, there was the adolescent awakening to sex, drugs (not so much), and rock n' roll, but I was also drawn to music than transcended my shallow states to bring me somewhere higher (even if it just touched some Romantic notions I had around life).

Being a product of early-1980's music, I got interested in the post-punk and new wave movements that started to permeate mainstream radio during that time. There weren't any interesting college radio stations in southern Maine back then, but every so often something cool would emerge on the airwaves. For instance, take the minor hit of the Flock of Seagulls' Space Age Love Song...

I remember being swept up by the ethereal chords and melody that revolved around the song. The lyrics were stark, but this allowed plenty of room for interpretation. Sometimes less is more, and the music itself dominated the experience allowing me to be taken away in reverie to something that felt beautiful and real.

I began to write this post because I ran across Pitchfork's 50 Best Shoegaze Albums of all Time. Shoegaze is a form of music that captured me in the 1990's, as it further elaborated the ethereal sounds that I fell in love with through a song like Space Age Love Song. As wikipedia states, shoegaze “is a subgenre of indie rock, alternative rock, or neo-psychedelia that emerged in the United Kingdom in the late 1980s and reached peak popularity in the early 1990s. The style is typified by the blurring of component musical parts—typically significant guitar distortion, feedback, and obscured vocals—into indistinguishable mixture of sound.” But what that definition doesn't get at is all that distortion, feedback, and obscurity often created something angelic. It was like a new form of Church music landing in secular, indie world. 

The album that came in Pitchfork's #1 position is no surprise to anyone. My Bloody Valentine's Loveless still stands as one of my favorite albums of all time. When I first heard it, it was literally a spiritual experience for me. Let's see what Pitchfork has to say... 

Loveless is a guided meditation on love and its absence that conjures an emotional reality instead of merely depicting one. At the album’s core is a succession of super-sweet melodies filtered through the softly psychedelic subjectivity of a mind engulfed by thirst. Shields’ bent notes are that introspection made sonic, their familiar guitar sounds so dramatically distorted, you might start to suspect that it’s your ears twisting them. The glide guitar on opening track “Only Shallow” contains the same creeping violence as the onset of passion; “Loomer,” which comes next, speeds into the childhood origins of longing.

The album isn’t just romantic, though. It’s also Romantic in the 19th century sense, a work so grand that it connects us to the limitless universe and reminds us how small we are as individuals within it. Coleridge and Turner used nature to access the infinite, but the internal landscape Shields locates is just as expansive. The radical inclusiveness of these songs even evades the specificity of gender by mixing Shields’ and Belinda Butcher’s vocals into androgynous foam on soaring monuments to the lover's gaze like “When You Sleep.” Just audible beneath the halo of fuzz that surrounds “Sometimes” are lyrics that express a frustration we’ve all felt: “I don’t know how you could not love me now.” Loveless is the defining statement of shoegaze because it discovered, in layered guitar sounds and submerged singing, a language that serenely overwhelms as it distills the universal human experience.  

Yup. What more can I say, except post a couple songs that delight me...

Well, actually I did have something to say. Back in 2007, I read the 33 1/3 book about making the Loveless record and left a review on Amazon. Here's what bombastic Ted had to say back then...

Brilliant overview of my favorite album of all time. So despite my bias toward MBV's effort, my intent was to read this book with an eye toward disinterested formalism. And the result for me was quite pleasing. McGonigal gave several perspectives that overrided some long standing myths, and maybe gave us a couple new ones to ponder. Bottom line, he gets it. He gets the fact that this CD goes beyond the overused ethereal descriptors, and touches the listener in a deep spiritual way. It's not about lyrics, melody, production, sounds...it's about the whole. The poignant philosopher Schopenhauer stated that great art will always dissolve the subject from the object, and he always placed music on top of the hierarchy of art forms. Loveless always had that experience for me, so when I read McGonigal's book I was happy to see that he never swayed from his lofty view, yet remained grounded as well. After all, the process of making great art is never quite as lofty as the outcome. We learn of the painstaking process Shields and others went through to make something that always seemed to be on the brink of demise. McGonigal made this struggle an enjoyable read, and he has given us a perfect literary companion to one of the most perfect musical experiences.

Okay, not my best review and the book was probably more mediocre than I led on back then. Another mediocre thing was seeing My Bloody Valentine live in 2013. I left halfway during the show. It was too loud and musically a let down. Sometimes the mystique should remain a mystery.

The Maladies of Evolutionary Spirituality Part 2: Does God Evolve?

In a continuing discussion around the principles behind Evolutionary Enlightenment, we now look into the nature of God and whether or not He evolves along with creation. Now, some would ask why does this matter? I always go back to the Hermetic first principle: “as above, so below.” Hence, metaphysics do matter, as what we believe God to be will always influence how we live everyday life in relationship to Him. Atheists may argue differently, but by denying God they have to create a new one which has its own metaphysical principles that guides their lives. As Etienne Gilson famously observed: metaphysics will always bury its undertakers.

A couple Process philosophers who gravitated toward an evolutionary framework of the Divine were Alfred North Whitehead and his student Charles Hartshorne. In attempt to create a lineage for his teachings, AC used these thought leaders, along with Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin and other Integral thinkers, to add credibility to Evolutionary Enlightenment.  

And most of these Process thinkers did enrich the classical theistic notion of God as omniscient, omnipotent, and static by considering Creative Evolution. The idea here being that the God is transcendent and immanent, and the immanent evolves (a.k.a. Panentheism). If you add into the mix that the transcendent is impersonal, which AC did coming from an Advaita path, and that Becoming should take precedence over Being because it's all Process, then you've got the latest and greatest in evolutionary spirituality. Yet, while culturally relevant and somewhat sexy, one has to question if such a metaphysical notion is logically consistent and internally coherent. It would seem to me that all those cracks that led to fall of AC's community could possibly go beyond AC himself, and be coming from the fact that the teachings themselves are also problematic. But how so?

First, In the case of permanence and flux, if you come down on either side, you are going to privilege a side to God in an unhealthy way. It would be like approaching the Trinity by saying the any of the three Persons of God is higher than the other. When there is no Father in the absence of the Son, and no Son in absence of the Holy Spirit, and vice versa. This is complementarity that can not be compartmentalized. By giving Becoming more credence than Being, AC was able to make God whatever he wanted Him to be according to the flux in culture and science. But what if science got it wrong, or culture is heading in bad place? Is God wrong then? No, but AC sure was. As Chesterton quipped, “How is the evolutionist to know which Beyond is the better; unless he accepts from the past and present some standard of the best?” In AC's case, it came down to his vision which was also co-opted by his egoic fallibilities.

Next, a God seen as Process will always be seen as contextual, relational, and impersonal. And there is some Truth to that. But what about the absolute, individualistic, and Personal side to God? Can we truly worship an impersonal God? I would argue most likely not. Love is relational, and in that regard, our relationship to Him is very Personal. And while there may be an impersonal dimension to God, there is most likely a Personal one too (look at it as two sides of a coin). So by making his God an impersonal process, AC became the flawed devotional vessel for his followers. While this what the guru model represents, it is incomplete if done outside of the context of something higher to worship in relationship. Robert Neville claimed that Process theism, based on Whitehead's doctrines, is “incoherent, superfluous, and descriptive of an alleged reality that would not be worthy of worship even if it existed.” So if you can't worship that God, then AC is all you got.

Moreover, AC was always weak in his metaphysical skills. He could not distinguish between the power of ontological self-creation; in that God creates man and nature; while man has cosmological self-creation, or self-determination. The freedom for us consist of determining our own character relative to the determinate character we bring to decision, but not creating our own determinateness (which can only be done by God). In essence, we are fractals of God that are given freedom to express our idiom. We can worship and align with the Creator both transcendent of us and creatively present in us. But we are not Him. And if we reduce God to a cohort of ours, then we have no sacred Absolutes to measure ourselves against. 

In one respect, AC was right that we influence God, but we can not change Him. As W. Norris Clarke said, “God in his eternal NOW is cognitively and actively present to all that goes on in our changing world, his intentional consciousness with respect to us is eternally contingently different because of what he and we do, but not changing — a distinction constantly missed by Process thinkers such as Whitehead and Hartshorne. “Different” means “could have been otherwise”; “changing” means “now one way, later another” — two quite different concepts. God can rejoice eternally, but contingently, in free responses we make to the gifts and inspirations he has already freely given us — which are all limited participations in his own infinite goodness and power, never rising higher than the original source. For God to rejoice in his own freely given, but eternally decided participations is not to change.” Again, this is metaphysically crucial as God remains a mystery above and beyond man to be worshiped in relationship beyond the collective, the holon, and the guru.

Next, by placing any scientific theory (like evolution) as an integral part of theology exposes it to the risk of collapse should the theory prove to be false or is replaced by another theory. Even if valid, AC did not even understand that evolution is not a straight arrow, but comes about in fits and starts and often needs stability prior to another leap in complexity. By pressing on his students to constantly evolve (because the Process demands its), it places too much emphasis on the strive to grasp in place of the allowance for receptivity. Grace has its place, and it may not always require one to evolve. 

Lastly, what if it's not about all this increasing complexification of Process, but more a unification of the Personal? We know from systems theory, the cosmos is a deep movement from simplification to complexity. But this “assertion of the increasing 'complexification' through mind necessarily implies its unification around a personal center, for mind is not just an undefined something or other; where it exists in its own specific nature, it subsists as individuality, as person (Ratzinger).” Therefore, this “implies that the cosmos is moving toward a unification in the personal,” and “confirms once again the infinite precedence of the individual over the universal.... The world is in motion toward unity in the person.” AC made it all about the sake for the whole, when the whole draws its meaning from the Personal. As such, in AC's world, the Personal is lost to a mere idea when “person always takes precedence over the mere idea (Ratzinger).”

Peter Kreeft says, “God is infinite love, and what is infinite does not increase. This would only assume His Love is not complete. It through His love that we create with God, which changes our relationship to Him but does not change God... But how can there be a relationship between the changing and unchanging. Much like there is with the unchanging sun and changing world. There is also a changing relationship between unchanging moral principles and changing applications of them to changing situations.” While the relationship to the Divine changes, it may not be in the way envisioned by AC or any other utopian notions we can come up with immanently. God's telos is more mysterious than that, and the emphasis should always be on Unity in Person over the mere ideas around the Progress of Process. Otherwise, we may end up selling our souls short of our True Potential.

The Maladies of Evolutionary Spirituality Part 1: Does Culture Evolve?

In world of human fallibility, spiritual teachers often fall from grace. And some come back for a second act. One such teacher, let's call him AC, is attempting to recreate himself in the postmodern spiritual marketplace. Yes, I was influenced by him at one time (some of which was very positive), but after his fall I had to reexamine my notions around him and his teachings. And there are legitimate concerns around his character which has the internet abuzz. But right now, I want to tackle his metaphysics: Evolutionary Enlightenment.

First, it's important to note that Evolutionary Enlightenment came out of an Advaita path that informed AC initially. From there it was seen as augmentation to a path that denied world and soul, and to some extent even God. For many former non-dualists, it seemed the AC was bringing something new into the world: reconciling the one with the many (all of which are evolving with purpose).

Nevertheless, many aspects of a postmodern evolutionary spirituality are not new at all. The notion of a person spiritually evolving goes back to the days of Orthodox Christianity. The Church did not use the word evolution, but it was understood that there were levels to sanctification. They were seen as purification, illumination, and then deification. Other paths also have levels to an individual's spiritual evolution, whether it be attainments of Bhumis in Buddhism or Patanjali's Yoga Sutra's in Hinduism.

(It should be noted that we have many lines of development that can evolve in time, however, we are focused on the spiritual here since that is core to a spiritual teaching. Certainly, I can become more emotionally intelligent, cognitively intelligent, and kinesthetic without being spiritually orientated. And some who are spiritually evolved, can be lacking in all these areas. Human beings are complex.)

When Darwin's theory began to make a cultural impact, it was then seen that material evolution has been happening all along all the way back to the big bang. While the theory of material evolution still predominates in science, it still has challenges with some of the punctuated leaps that can not be easily explained. Nevertheless, it made sense for religion to absorb a more credible theory than Bible doctrine that said God created the world 6,000 years ago. (David Bentley Hart mentions that even in Biblical terms, “creation is seen not as a one-shot, once-and-for-all event at the beginning, but as an ongoing process throughout cosmic history, God working with nature from his eternal Now outside of time.”)

The area where things go off the rails for Evolutionary Enlightenment, is not that person and material world evolve, but now it's seen that culture evolves and more importantly, God evolves. Hence, all contradictions in Reality gets reconciled in one working principle-belief: the progress of process.

So let's first take a look at culture. Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature makes a significant point (with lots of evidence) that we have become more civilized (or less prone to warfare). So while this may be true, does it demonstrate that human nature has truly evolved or has civilization just kept it in check? You can also look at Gebser's work (which heavily influenced Ken Wilber) that there are cultural stages to evolution. Gebser was not overly firm on his structures, and certainly didn't have the evidence to back it up, but I often wonder if he was trying to fit certain cultural patterns into a model that he already preferably intuited? Personally, I have a hard time defending postmodern culture as a higher stage of development with all the secularization and relativism it has wrought. While some claim that civil and environmental rights came from this era, it could also be said the seeds of these principles were already in place in high modern culture. And taking some virtues too far to the extreme, like tolerance (which permeates our pluralistic postmodern culture), can eventually negate the benefits of it. 

One anonymous poster from a message board made the interesting point that, “We're not evolving in time or in history. The Omega is pulling us upward and it appears that we are progressing in a forward direction... In fact, right now, we are regressing as far as the spiral of history goes. "Surgical" drone strikes are about as barbarous a method of warfare as I can imagine. No rattles on that flying serpent. Normally I don't feel too sorry for backward, bloodthirsty jihadis who happen to be in the vicinity when a missile lands, but I would have a hard time arguing that it was a noble or heroic business. Are we really a better people than my grandfather's generation? Sure they had fist fights for entertainment, and we prefer football, but there sure is a lot of senseless violence. Not to mention stupidity -- Rap music? All those people on "reality" television? We are a lot more vulgar than we used to be.”

When Ratzinger was asked why hasn't religion brought fruits to culture, he said, “I think that we must say first that salvation, the salvation coming from God, is not quantitative, hence, not the sum of an addition. In technical discoveries there is a growth that may proceed by fits and starts but is nonetheless somehow continuous. The purely quantitative is measurable, and one can ascertain whether there is now more or less. A quantifiable progress in mans goodness, however, is impossible, because every man is new and because in a certain respect history begins anew with every man. It is very important to learn this distinction. The goodness of man, to put it like that, is not quantifiable. We therefore cannot assume that a Christianity that in the year zero begins as a mustard seed ought to be a huge tree at the end and that everyone ought, to be able to see how much better things have gotten century by century. There can be collapses and repeated ruptures, because redemption is always entrusted to the freedom of man, and God will never annul this freedom.”

While I agree that technological developments in medicine and lifestyle have made our lives more comfortable and lasting, have we used this benefit to look into the significance of life more deeply or do we just celebrate that we have more of it?  The question will always come back to what we mean by progress? Ratzinger mentions goodness, and goodness needs to be measured against something Absolute, or it becomes progress for the sake of progress.

It would seem when we look at history, there have been periods of advancement in man. But to pin it down to one period is tricky, as there are always countervailing forces in every period of culture. Some believe progress is not a positive concept, as progress can also be seen as a progression away, a distancing and withdrawal from something pure and perfect in origin (see the Fall). I am not sure I completely agree with that, as I don't necessarily believe in a Golden Age that we can point to. Some would say traditional man is higher, and some would say modern man. I would say it depends on the day you ask me. But I don't feel it is this day.

So while Evolutionary Enlightenment posits we are culturally evolving and it is up to those of us on the "leading edge" to cultivate that further, and if even true to some extent, this also can be a point of contention from a certain perspective. As Bob notes, “the entire concept of Evolutionary Enlightenment is misguided, misinformed and mistaken. [And] it's worse than that. If the evolutionary paradigm is correct, it means that people of the past were just the means to arrive at us, and hence less than fully human. This is a monstrous doctrine, for it dehumanizes anyone short of... AC? Please. On the positive side, it implies that AC is just a stage on the way to something better, so we can ignore him.”

So by saying we are more evolved we may be dehumanizing our progenitors. And “how do you feel about being a mere stepping stone to future humans who will dismiss your ideas as mythic and irrational postmodernism? The point is, the human station is a mirror of the absolute, and that any human, at any time, may access it. To suggest that AC, or Ken Wilber, or Deepak Chopra, or Tony Robbins, or Oprah Winfrey are somehow "higher" than Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas, Meister Eckhart, or Denys -- and that's just in the West -- is absurd.  You can't tell truth by a calendar” (Godwin).

Lastly, if our ideas around cultural evolution were to be seen as the raison d'être of the cosmos, and then privileged over the cultures that are geared more towards homeostasis, would this undermine something very fruitful in the world? Healing and agape should be foundational and antecedent to eros, however, in Evolutionary Enlightenment it will always be seen as secondary since process and cultural progress takes center stage.

So maybe progress should not be seen as some culturally defined vision and evolving metric in time, but a motion toward unity in Person (in terms of growth in wholeness; including aspects of love, truth, virtue, beauty, creativity, and sanctity). In Part 2 of this blog post, I look into the notion of whether or not God evolves? And what this means as a metaphysical foundation.

The Labyrinth to Heaven

Ratzinger was once asked how many ways are there to God? His reply: “As many as there are people. For even within the same faith each man’s way is an entirely personal one.” Keep in mind he was a Cardinal at the time, and eventually became Pope Benedict of the Roman Catholic Church. For a future Pope to say this, it is quite a big deal, and yet it gives me hope around my own spiritual idiocyncratic nature.

My ways to God (thus far) have been a challenging one, and I sometimes do envy the ones who find their home and hold steadfast. I mean, I was raised Catholic (very loosely), came to some agnostic/hedonistic adolescent stage (that lasted through my twenties), got interested in philosophy which led me to the eastern wisdom traditions, became engaged with the Integral community, participated on the edges of an "evolutionary" cult, studied with a Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher for a decade, and recently took on some shamanic plant medicine. What a mess!

But that's a product of my own idiom. I've never felt good at resting anywhere that didn't feel completely True to me. Or it could be commitment issues. Or maybe I'm just too damn stubborn.

I also resonate with the notion of the Raccoon: Bob Godwin's clever labeling of us misfits, and that's why I love his blog. He says, “the word "raccoon" is actually derived from the Algonquian word aroughcoune, "he who scratches with his hands," in our case, our heads. Raccoons veritably come into the world "scratching our heads," and for many, the itch is never satisfied.”

So it must be this itch that keeps me going. I also call it the omniscience impulse, mixed in with a little spiritual dissonance. 

Raccoon's also have an “ability to simultaneously stand "within" and "above" tradition -- but only above because within.” So we are not of the spiritual, but not religious ilk. Nor do we care to jump around the postmodern spiritual buffet. We believe in tradition and want to recapture the fruits of it. But we understand there a multitude ways of expressing it that may be more culturally relevant without being dictated by culture at large. 

“The Raccoon has one natural enemy who takes many forms, and many supernatural friends who reflect one form. A "coongregation" occurs when any two Raccoons meet "in His gnome." The Raccoons can be from any tradition, but will nevertheless joyfully recognize each other as "brothers under the pelt." Naturally, they will often find that they have more in common with each other than with the human members of their own traditions. Thus, there are Christian Raccoons, Jewish Raccoons, and esoteric Vadantacoons, but the opposite is not true -- there is no doctrinal "Raccoon Christianity," for example.”

This probably means that you can take many trails, but you should stay on (or at least near) the well traveled ones. Anyone who hikes, knows there are many different routes to getting to the top (then the bottom) of a mountain. But why blaze an entirely new trail when several decent ones have already been laid out by those who have traveled so well before?

My recent Divine experience was a recognition that ultimately it's all about Love, and it's personal. And Love can only happen in relationship. God is not solipsistic, but allowed creation to ensue to know itself through us. And in that communion of Love is the foundation for this cosmic adventure: Spirit became flesh, so that flesh can become Spirit. Call it sanctification, transformation, divinization, or theosis. It's all about communing with Divinity, and integrating that into our lives. And that's a lot more fun and compelling than just finding happiness or liberation. It's also radically human! It's a wild ride, where the dynamic tension will always lie between transcendence and immanence.     

As such, the trail I stay near is a Christian one. It's not only because I want all those catechism classes and the sacraments I took part in go to waste. It's really because it speaks to me as a deeper Truth for personhood. Yes, it has sort of an esoteric slant for me. And it's definitely less doctrinaire than espoused by the Bible thumpers I come across. It's also a tad syncretic since I see value in all those other paths. But at its essence, it's still Christian. 

Even Ratzinger qualified his response noted above and said, “there is ultimately one way, and everyone who is on the way to God is therefore in some sense also on the way of Jesus Christ. But this does not mean that all ways are identical in terms of consciousness and will, but, on the contrary, the one way is so big that it becomes a personal way for each man.” So while on my labyrinth to heaven, I keep coming back to the Anointed One. It may not lead me to being affiliated in any way, and I may continue to zig here and zag there, but there is always a deeper recognition of what He represents for me on this quest.