7.2.1. THE CALLING or INVITATION to go on the spiritual path

There are many people who know nothing of the spiritual world, but who nevertheless, via various events get involved enough to want to follow the spiritual path.

In effect, there always seems to be a trigger of some sort which spurs the person into going this route and the trigger may either be a very minor spiritual experience or a series of truly severe set backs that force the person to evaluate their life.  Overload

Deliberate or accidental

Some people deliberately seek spiritual experience and the call may come from this route.  In this they are deliberately doing things which will give them an experience - actions.

Sometimes the experience is completely unexpected and unwanted.  Here the person may:

• Be involved in some event - like childbirth or a car accident
• Have eaten something unwise - food - like mad honey!
• Become ill - illnesses and disabilities - with measles or chicken pox, the flu ot gout!
• Have taken pharmaceuticals - medicines - that had an unwanted effect.  This has become one of the biggest means by which unwanted experience has been obtained. See Being mis-prescribed pharmaceuticals 

The call via experience

One way to be ‘called is via a very minor spiritual experience – synaesthesia, or an improvement in your perceptive abilities. 

• Synaethesia is the most common form of experience when you use drugs and simply involves the person seeing patterns or hearing music, for example, in response to other sensory stimuli.  For someone totally unused to the existence of the spiritual world, however, it provides their first introduction to the existence of spirit, even though the effects are more a malfunction of the brain than a true spiritual experience.
• Improved perception - A sudden improvement in our ability to see things or a distortion of the images with improved colours or improved appreciation of music can achieve the same thing. 

Spiritually both sorts of experience  are minor, but in terms of their effect they can have a major impact on someone, getting them interested, helping them to enter the world of spirit and reject the dogma of ‘physical is all there is’.  What else may provide the trigger?

• Near death experience - The person may have a near death experience, which as we all know is not at all trivial to the person involved, but by being [hopefully] a one off experience it can change their whole perception of the existence of the spiritual, acting like an invitation to learn more.
• Dream, vision, hallucination  - a person may simply find themselves intrigued by a dream, or perhaps via an illness or pharmaceutical they get an hallucination.  Or there may be some other event, a car accident or a shipwreck or a fall - of which many are listed on the website -  that gives them a vision or hallucination.
• Basic inter composer communication - Finally, a person may find themselves intrigued by the forms of very basic inter composer communication such as telepathy or the sort of mind reading done by mediums.  They may even find themselves to be slightly telepathic themselves and this acts as a spur to further investigation.

Or they may never go further than this, happy to watch pretty patterns with their recreational drugs, happy to watch the telepath, happy to believe the medium, happy to have avoided death.  And they carry on with life as before and never go further.

The trigger via trauma

The alternative to a spiritual experience is some form of traumatic experience or even a series of experiences all together, which break down your confidence and thus leave you open to finding out more about you and the true path on which you should be travelling.

If the website observations are any indicator of the major causes the biggest push by far comes from grief.  Lost husbands, lost wives, lost partners , lost sons, lost daughters, lost children, lovers, dogs, cats – loss …. uncontrollable heart wrenching grief – a cry of emotion that tears the universe in half and the angels come running.

Then we find a large number of people who have been propelled onto the path by love followed by unrequited love. Perhaps an emotion that can also in its way be called grief.  Failed love affairs can be extremely effective at setting you off down this path. 

Then there is trauma - divorce, the loss of a business [so bankruptcy for example], destruction of the home by fire or vandalism by burglars,  financial traumas [loss of pension or investments] or a serious illness.

I have also come across people who blew themselves up by accident, who started off on this route.  In children, the loss of parents and the divorce of parents can also have this impact.

Every one of the activities within the section on overload started someone somewhere off on this path.  Some were called, some didn’t understand, some never answered

Thus it is often when we are at our lowest, our most vulnerable that we start this process.

It appears that the spiritual world can only get through to us by kicking the door of perception open for us – even then we don’t always notice it is open and it gradually drifts back and closes again.

The composer ‘calling’ us

It is very clear that much of the activity revolving around trauma or the more eye opening experiences is ‘engineered’ by our own composer.  In effect we do not seek the spiritual world, the spiritual world seeks us, occasionally because we have ignored our ‘destiny’, at other times, because it is time for a change in our ‘destiny’.

In the poem the Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson, Francis describes not his quest for a spiritual life, but the unrelenting pursuit by his composer [the hound] or higher spirit ‘down the nights and down the days’ of him.  Dogged pursuit!

In all cases, it is your composer that makes contact.

Hesitation

The journey on the spiritual path is quite a life changing one and it is natural that there is both great reluctance and a certain amount of hesitation on the part of the person receiving all these indicators to start along the route.

Once you set out, there is no going back – this is a personal observation – you do not appear to be able to stop and it is not because of some obsessive urge, but somehow you do get swept along.