Many of us come to the spiritual path to be freed from our suffering, bringing with us a bag full of personal wounds or traumas, illusions, assumptions, and naïve expectations about the promise of transformation, enlightenment, and liberation. The call to surrender to a traditional path, or to a guru or teacher, and ultimately to the Divine, does not absolve the individual of responsibility. In fact, it puts greater responsibility upon our shoulders. It is said that God or Grace does ninety-nine percent of the work for us, and we do only one percent, but we must do one hundred percent of that one percent—a daunting task indeed.

Spiritual authority is a big issue today as the guru principle falls again and again into shadowy behavior on the part of individuals in the role of teacher, priest, sheikh or rinpoche. That’s one vital and pressing reason why we must take full responsibility as individuals for ourselves, to test and verify for ourselves, to cultivate direct experience. I was blessed to live and travel for twenty years in the intimate company of American Baul Khepa Lee Lozowick (1943-2010), during which time he guided my sadhana on a daily basis. Traveling with Lee, I had opportunities to spend time in the company of his guru, the revered south Indian saint Yogi Ramsuratkumar (1918-2001) and many other persons of profound spiritual essence. My gurus have departed from their physical forms, and yet they remain with me as a guiding presence or guru tattva. The decades I lived as a companion of my teacher were times of intense concentration and attention to traditional forms of practice. In the Baul way, these were years of learning how to “gather honey” through tapasya (spiritual effort); they were thick with direct, personal experiences that contained the seed form of my teacher’s poignant instruction, given in the last months of his life, “Make the Path your own.” Finally, this must be done on all spiritual paths, or we become blind followers caught in the web of charismatic personalities or the strictures of religious forms, dogma and creeds only to discover, in the crucial end moment of our lives, that we are strangely empty-handed.

This calls us to a lifelong process of individuation, the term coined by one of my great teachers, CG Jung. A commitment to self-knowledge and whole-being integration is vitally necessary, whether we engage a sadhana based on nondual teachings, inner inquiry, karma yoga through service (seva), bhakti, or the challenge of tantra. Regardless of one’s particular journey, a true alchemical spiritual Path demands our courage, discipline, vision, honesty and a great deal of faith. All this rests upon our integrity as an individual. In return, the Path often blesses us. In my case, I was blessed with a creative Muse that does not let me rest but keeps me busy with writing, singing, playing the piano, and reveling in the beauty of the world as Great Nature. As the poet Rilke once wrote: “This edge is what I have.”

On the Baul path, the burning alchemy of tantra, with its radical approach to an accelerated evolution of the individual, is tempered with the softening and opening of the heart in bhakti through devotion to Deity and chanting of mantra or the Divine Name. These powerful practices are based upon the assertion of nonduality (Just This, what is as it is, here and now) as the underpinning of Reality and blended with a deep, vigilant inquiry that creates, over time, a mandala of integrated awareness within the practitioner. One learns to make acute and powerful distinctions about what is Real and what we truly want. As we tune our instrument to an individual sense of purpose and grow to accept all of life as the playground of transformation, we begin to cultivate mastery in many domains while at the same time the heart is steeped in gratitude, love, compassion and good will toward all beings. Eventually, the Great Path becomes the tacit ground of our experience, each breath, moment to moment, fueled by an inner wellspring of inspiration to dedicate our lives for the benefit of all beings.