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I’ve heard stories of people being called to start a spiritual search in their twenties or even in their teens. I was not one of those, even though my youth in the Osho communes had some very spiritual moments. For me, what happened was I struggled with a life changing physical illness at age 39, and I asked the universe, I will change my life anyway - if there is anything spiritual for me to experience, let me experience it.

You know the saying, be careful what you wish for? Not very long after, I had a vision on the edge of sleep. I was wrapped in a cocoon, together with many coloured swirling flecks of light, and I was approached by a dark black human figure with wings. It examined me closely. Later on waking I thought this was the Angel of Death, but now I am no longer sure of that.

This for me was the start of a spiritual journey. It began with an episode of voice hearing (or was it a shamanic illness), treatment in the mental health system, and a gradual return over years as I started listening to Osho again. One day I was listening to a lecture on the Dhammapadda, and I had a thought: instead of listening to Osho explain snippets of the Dhammapadda, why not go to the source and look at the original Buddhist text?

This was the start of a good six years of Buddhist study and practice. I feel it was very wholesome for me, it purified me in a way. It was a path back to silence and health. I would highly recommend it, to combine a course of study at a Western Buddhist temple with reading of the sutras and vipassana meditation. You get to keep good company and immerse the mind in the words of the Buddha.

During this period a lot of things started to drop away from me. Life long enthusiasms with science fiction and fantasy, computer games, even television and the news disappeared. Instead I meditated and spent time walking on the beach and in the dunes.

Eventually I started reading the works of other teachers, and I found that for me - and perhaps others like me - the search for enlightenment was not the sine qua non of the spiritual journey. I once asked a spirit on the edge of sleep about it, and was told, perhaps for you it happened very early in life. Perhaps it did, but I have no memory of such an event. In any case nonduality teachers may be right to say it is not a very huge occurrence, just a moment of ‘ah this’.

In any case, spirit voices and visions on the edge of sleep have stayed with me. It seems to lead me away from my mistakes towards the paths of wisdom, and for that I am grateful.

Hi I started meditating and reading about Buddhism with a faith component maybe 24 years ago? I was in graduate school studying chemistry and I started having a psychotic episode. I remember seeing thumb tacks on the bulletin board of the chemistry building. To me the thumb tacks were sending me messages by their formation. They would change and then I would reinterpret them. Quite a lot of variety to my mental changes but the thumb tacks were one occurrence that I still recall.

After I got my diagnosis my brain kind of shut down relatively and it was hard to even read a paragraph of my mail. As I got stronger again I sought out ways to cope with he shut down or depression. Meditation was one and I started buying spiritual or Buddhist books.

Life events triggering a spiritual search

Thus have I experienced:

When one starts asking the question why?, when a major life event or crisis happens, this is, in a sense, the beginning of one of many spiritual paths, the journey of (no) self-discovery, the search for understanding and meaning. This can happen at any age, at any time.

Take, for example, the flower power era of the '60s and '70s, when ganja and psychedelic drugs set many off on the spiritual journey of (no) self-discovery. But it could just as easily be grief, depression, anxiety, fear, the list goes on. Life has many ways of shaking us awake.

This search often begins not with the expectation of answers, but with the need to make sense of the ever-changing world we live in. It’s not always a loud or dramatic shift, but more often a quiet turning inward. Sometimes it’s grief, sometimes shock, or simply the stillness that follows disruption, something opens the door.

And from there, the journey takes shape. Why? is, in itself, a way of reaching for something more than what is immediately visible.

And in saying all this, here on a Buddhist forum, the nutshell answer might be: “When the student is ready (karma ripens), the master will appear”, in whatever form it takes. For example: daily Dharma practice, meditation, the Eightfold Path…

The thing is, there is a whole area of human experience which modern life has excised. Humans used to live in tribes or villages, small community groups where you worked with and knew people, where there were Elders and Curanderos as people in charge.

In a modern suburb, everybody goes off and does their own work, you hardly speak to the people you live next to, and you spend your evenings in front of the television too tired to do anything else. The only person you know who is in charge is your boss at work, and he hardly has your best interests at heart.

It strikes me that the original, tribal way of living was a lot more social, a lot more human, than the post Industrial Revolution setup designed for us by engineers.