The Diagonal Path

A field guide for the modern mystic

There are two trajectories a human life can take.

The first is the horizontal path of material progress. This is the path of accumulation. A life is built by accumulating knowledge, skill, social status, power, recognition, property, wealth, relationships, and influence over a lifetime. This is the path that most people in the world are on. Even many seekers who claim to be on a spiritual path, are in fact also on the path of accumulation. They acquire ‘spiritual knowledge’ through study, learning practices, and consuming books, seminars, and online content.

The second is the vertical path of spiritual discovery. This is the path of dissolution. Here, Life (not ‘a life’, but the universal lifeforce) is unveiled by a gradual falling away of the very scaffolding of the identity - all those things that were accumulated along the material path. It is the reason why this path is so often associated with renunciation. When awareness, that was previously oriented to the horizontal path, shifts its attention to the vertical - its motivations shift as well. Rather than seeking answers it begins to search for deeper questions. Rather than seeking more wealth, more power, more property - it begins to seek less. Rather than seeking relationships - social and intimate - it begins to seek solitude and isolation. Rather than orienting to utilizing time and space - it begins to orient more to timelessness and stillness.

The two paths are largely incompatible - because the very energy that drives one compromises movement in the other. It is difficult to accumulate knowledge while unraveling it at the same time. It is hard to amass wealth while wanting it less and less. It is challenging to build social relationships while actively seeking solitude. It is particularly hard to build a life structured upon the efficient utilization of space and time while being increasingly oriented to timelessness and stillness.

Which is why in the Hindu tradition, these two movements are very practically mapped to the stages of a person’s lifetime - whereby the first two-thirds of a person’s life are dedicated to movement along the horizontal plane while the final one-third is oriented to movement along the vertical. The idea is that the vitality of youth is best served in engagement of material pursuits - building and establishing a family, social contribution, wealth and resources - to build a stable foundation for one’s dependents. Then, as one moves into the twilight years of one’s life, there is a natural shift in that vitality. A gradual inner cessation occurs which creates the ideal conditions for a shift in awareness - away from the material and towards the spiritual. The individual moves fully into a process of renouncing, whether gradually or immediately, all they have accumulated over a lifetime - both materially and psychologically.

However, the modern world with its incessant demands and voracious appetite has shifted that balance. The opportunities for cessation no longer exist. The horizontal path has been reengineered to drive a person till the very end of their lives. Those twilight years are now spent accumulating even more experiences - investments, trust funds, properties, vacations. And for the greater majority - it involves continuing to work and accumulate resources to pay off debts well into their senior years. This rapidly accelerating demand, combined with the absence of social institutions that once supported the renunciate lifestyle - the monasteries and ashrams that were funded by alms, public contributions and patronage by a citizenry that believed in the necessity of this way of life - has created a huge imbalance in the collective psyche.

When fewer portals into the vertical exist, when even spirituality becomes captured by the system and commoditized - co-opting it as just another variation of horizontal movement - something within the collective psyche begins to push back. It gives rise to anomalies that seem to defy the traditional trajectories a human life takes.

The modern mystic is just such an anomaly.

---

It was mid-afternoon and I sat in a living room with my parents and three other couples who were their close friends. I was fifteen years old at the time. These couples had kids around my age who were all somewhere on the property playing videogames. But I had no interest in videogames. I always found the living room conversations between the adults far more interesting. Fortunately, they did not mind my company and often welcomed my participation in their discussions.

On this particular afternoon, the conversation had taken on a spiritual flavor. And before long, I found myself holding court expounding on the false self, the nature of pure consciousness and some other things I had both read and pondered upon - while the adults in the room sat listening to me, somewhat transfixed. At the end of the impromptu sermon, some of parents’ friends marveled at how “wise beyond my years” I was. Yet, one gentleman sat looking at me with a curious look in his eye. And then he simply said,

“Be careful of going too far down that path. You’re still too young. Focus on your life right now. There will be plenty of time for this later.”

Looking back in hindsight now, some thirty years later, I understand exactly what he meant. And were I to meet my adolescent self today, I might say the same. Except for something that my fifteen year-old self had already unconsciously intuited: the way the world was heading, there simply wouldn’t be “plenty of time for this later”.

Yet, his words were certainly portents of the challenges I would face in the years to come. As I emerged from puberty, while most kids my age were focused on developing vocational skills for the future, I was investigating the trauma that my psyche had adapted to and built a sense of identity around. Through college, while most of my peers were busy trying to land internships in prestigious companies - I had already experienced my first awakening and was sitting on my meditation cushion for hours a day attempting to stabilize that perspective. And when we graduated, while most of my friends were busy dating, jumpstarting their careers, building their wealth to secure a down payment on their first property - I had already quit my first consulting job merely 10 months in and soon after began my ‘one-year on the balcony’ - a yearlong process of reclaiming my shadow and the beginning of my individuation journey.

Then a few years later, when those same friends had all begun families, and were upgrading to bigger homes - my wife (we weren’t married at the time) and I sold all our possessions and moved to a rural town in Northern Japan that no one in our lives had ever heard of. Away from the pressures of our own culture, we began the process of intimately exploring what being in relationship was like. We spent all our hours together, we explored together, we worked together - we fought, we made up, we triggered our deepest fears and insecurities, we released them together. What emerged was a bond and depth of trust I had never experienced with another human being. That I had never imagined possible. I felt safe to speak my mind - to be completely honest and transparent. For the first time I felt seen - and loved as I was.

We spent nearly a decade in that remote part of the world. We had our children and raised them through the early years. When we finally returned to North America, my peers had traveled far along their career ladders. I dedicated the next five years to catching up - and I did very quickly. I quickly rose up the corporate ladder leaping multiple rungs at a time - and within just a few years had quadrupled my earning potential. I finally bought my first home. It felt grown up to have a mortgage at 40. And then, just when things had begun picking up pace - I began to experience this strange blackness within my being. It was like a shadow that began spreading out from my gut, it encompassed my heart - and then consumed my mind.

I entered one of the darkest periods of my adult life. All motivation drained from me. The motivation to work, the motivation to spend time with my family, the motivation to move or even eat. I began to see all that I had accumulated over the past five years - the wealth, the reputation, the status, the prestige - being wrenched from my grasp. A force had begun pulling me back into the vertical exactly at the time when my life was finally gaining horizontal momentum. And I was powerless to resist. Over a period of a year, it deconstructed all I had built. It laid bare all that was false in my life and allowed me to hold on only to what was true.

When I emerged from that darkness, yet another layer of identity had been unraveled. Yet another aspect of my conditioning - the one that had always secretly compared me to my peers and had reminded me of how insufficient I was - had fallen away. And I found myself faced with a stark reality.

I could not renounce the world entirely. I loved my family and wanted to continue sharing experiences with them. I loved human beings and wanted to continue to relate to society. Yet, this force of gravity that pulled me towards the vertical would not relinquish me either. It would sabotage any movement along the horizontal if that led to a stagnation along the vertical.

---

Imagine an open-water swimming race - where hundreds of swimmers are attempting to cross a great channel of water tens of miles wide. This is generally how most people orient towards living life - as an expanse of space and time to be crossed until they arrive at their final resting place. They begin swimming in the shallows at first, over time moving into deeper and deeper waters but always keeping to the surface. Stopping kills forward momentum and wastes energy. Sinking, even for brief moments, is especially counterproductive and could sabotage the whole effort.

Then there are the divers. A much smaller group of individuals who have no interest in getting across the channel and are instead drawn to exploring the depths. These divers are supported by lifelines - long breathing tubes that connect to boats on the surface through which air is constantly pumped. This allows these divers to sink to unexplored regions of the ocean floor and remain there for extended periods bringing back vital information about this terrain to the world.

Now imagine that over time these boats start withdrawing their lifelines and instead begin to shift their focus towards supporting and encouraging more of the swimmers across the channel. Without these lifelines, the small subset of divers have no option but to switch to swimming instead. Yet, the impulse to explore the depth remains even while the pressures to keep up with the swimmers persist.

And so a few of the divers begin to develop an adaptive approach. Whereby they move in a diagonal direction - swimming for periods and diving for periods - creating a sort of stepped transition. This way they can still try and keep up with the boats that provide the lifelines.

Yet, this adaptive approach requires a quality of attention and focus neither the swimmers nor the divers of the previous generation ever required. The capacity to move in two directions at once. It is an entirely new form of movement.

Horizontal movement relies on belief, ambition, social bonding, survival and idealism to generate momentum. Vertical movement relies on absorption, surrender, the relinquishing of will, desire, and volition to allow the gravity of the inward pull to generate momentum.

The diagonal path utilizes both in combination.

---

Sidewinding, is a specialized form of movement seen amongst only a handful of varieties of snakes - especially those living in hot and arid desert conditions. While most snakes use lateral undulation (S-shaped slithering), sidewinding involves a snake moving in a diagonal direction relative to the orientation of its body, creating a series of J-shaped tracks in the sand.

While moving, only two or three portions of the snake’s body make contact with the ground at any given time, while the rest of its body is suspended in air. Each contact point remains stationary as the snake’s body lifts and shifts laterally, then places another section down in front of the previous contact point. This generates a wavelike rolling motion that propels the snake forward while preserving energy and minimizing contact with hot surfaces. Sidewinding is one of the most complex movement patterns in the animal kingdom, requiring precise neuromuscular coordination throughout the snake’s entire body.

The diagonal path of the modern mystic is no different. It is an adaptive evolutionary response to the civilizational conditions of our times - one of technological acceleration, inner alienation, and fraying social bonds.

It requires a unique simultaneous awareness of both surface and depth. Of momentum in the material and the spiritual. Of investment in both the relative and the absolute.

And like the sidewinder, it requires a precise sequence of alternating surface contact and suspension to propagate it. A sequence that cannot simply be stumbled upon by accident - but rather is learned through trial and error.

One cannot move so far along the horizontal that one feels consumed by the gravity of unexplored vertical potential. One cannot sink so deep along the vertical that one’s survival along the horizontal becomes compromised. Nor is it as simple as mechanically alternating focus from horizontal to vertical and back at regular intervals.

This kind of movement cannot be chosen. It emerges organically as an intuitive evolutionary impulse. Just like sidewinding requires precise neuromuscular coordination throughout the snake’s entire body - this diagonal movement requires a full awareness and coordination of body, heart and mind working together as one.

The effect is a form of movement in which momentum along the horizontal propels, rather than negates, movement along the vertical. And similarly, movement along the vertical acts as impetus for movement along the horizontal.

The mortgage becomes the medium for deeper inquiry. The meditative insight becomes a means for generating more focused vocational direction.

The relationship becomes the vehicle through which the false self becomes dismantled. The awakening becomes the lens through which a more compassionate form of social connection with others is formed.

Marriage, parenthood, friendship - these become our meditation, our prayer, our rituals for connecting with the sacredness of life. Silence, stillness, spaciousness, surrender - these we shape into the values that begin to form the institutions, the businesses, and the enterprises we build.

The modern mystic may be an anomaly, but they are also the antidote to the malaise of modernity. Because they embody an adaptive intelligence that finds a way to preserve the spiritual impulse in a world growing increasingly mechanical.

The diagonal path is rife with difficulty. On one hand lies the temptation to succumb to the devil’s bargain - the commodification of the soul in return for social safety. On the other lies the temptation to surrender to God’s promise - to relinquish oneself entirely to the gravity of the inner pull.

Traversing the diagonal path entertains both impulses yet acquiesces to neither.

It neither bargains nor holds to promises. It neither fears the devil nor clings to god.

It unites them. It bridges their eternal rupture.