Once there was a human with a sincere interest in the highest spiritual goal.
It had many lives as both man and woman, as father, mother, daughter, son, lover, husband, and wife.
It tried many different spiritual practices - some lifelong - and slowly built up, from life to life, its understanding of effective techniques.
It had deep, broad, and intense relationships with other humans - positive, negative, and neutral. In these relationships, it hurt others - knowingly and unknowingly. Yet, it also helped others, again knowingly and unknowingly. Other humans hurt and helped it similarly, physically and emotionally and intellectually, in the course of their own strivings, conscious and unconscious, towards the highest.
It built up many layers of behaviours and biases from these relationships and thought they were solely its own.
Now, at the outset of this life, this human decided that, no matter what, it would reach the highest in this very life. No more getting sidetracked by non-eternal goals. For many years, all went well. It lived and worked on its own, isolated mentally, even if not physically. Then it started an effective spiritual practice that rapidly removed the layers from its individual activities across many lives.
Relationships got made and unmade easily, with seemingly few residues. It reached a particular point in spirituality.
Then the residues of relationships also started getting removed and other humans from those relationships, themselves spiritual seekers, rejoined its life, physically and mentally. The variety of those relationships and the effects of unravelling their residues were some or all of these - blissful, painful, uncomfortable, deeply comforting, joyous and depressing.
All this came as a shock to this human who had thought the spiritual journey to be a solo adventure. Which it is, in that its own effort and understanding is a must. Each human hews its own path. Yet it is not completely solo, either, in that the residues from the relationships of many lives require an engagement at the spiritual level, which gets translated into social, emotional, and physical engagements.
A rising tide lifts all boats, true, but how about a group of swimmers? Can't they stay afloat with reduced individual effort if they link with each other?
A spiritual journey is akin to swimming in an unknown ocean of consciousness, where one learns various swimming strokes, how to drown and come back to life, techniques for saving others, other group behaviour, and so on, all the while being in the water.
Frustratingly or happily, depending on your view of spirituality, there is no ultimate static spiritual goal as a human. The higher spiritual goals come into a human's conscious awareness when it has gone beyond normal human states of consciousness. Is it then still a human?
Thus a fable without a neat ending, but some elucidation, reassurance, and promise.
