There are so many ways to answer that question. Our character flaws and tender vulnerabilities is the first thing that comes to mind. Without these we are certainly not human and this is the reason we can have such empathy for others. The second thing that comes to mind is our self-consciousness, the fact that we are embodied beings who can sense our original nature as spirit and who therefore have this upward, expansive sense of self, which is another reason, recognizing this in all others, we can care for each other so deeply. The great fifteenth-century humanist and teacher Guarino of Verona was thinking precisely of this nature when he said in his speech welcoming Giovanni Tavelli as the new bishop of Ferrara:

In one sense, the spiritual path began the moment as a little kid, sitting on the giant rocks behind our house and looking up into the sky, I began wondering where the universe ended. I realized that if it indeed ended that someting would have to be beyond that and if that ended something beyond that and so on. This first moment of cosmic mystery made me question the limitations of viewpoints and was an imaginative exercise in expansiveness.

In another sense, it began with my Humanities class in High School, reading poetry, and trying to write a paper on the crisis of the soul in the Renaissance. I was reading things like The Duino Elegies ("Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?"), Yeats ("An aged man is but a paltry thing/A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing/For every tatter in its mortal dress"), Whitman ("I have said that the soul is not more than the body/And I have said that the body is not more than the soul/And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is/And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy, walks to his own funeral, drest in his shroud), and D.H. Lawrence (The only salvation is to realize that we know nothing about it/and there is nothing to save/and nothing to do/and effort is the ruin of all things"). My questions then were about the relationship between the sensual and the spiritual, body and soul. So I guess this period could be thought of as the beginning of formulating the spiritual questions that were important to me. I studied spirituality in college, taking Intro to Zen Buddhism, Early Christianity, mysticism, medieval and Renaissance intellectual history, medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art. I was especially interested in monastic subjects and also took a very important private reading in medieval monasticism. I spent a semseter abroad in Italy. Intellectual life and spiritual life were something that I saw as inextricably bound up together at that time. And that ccontinued in graduate school and in my job at the Getty Museum, where I worked on topics of art and spirituality. But one might say that this was second-hand spirituality, historically imagined with sympathy but not exactly about one's own world or experience.

The next step came as experience of my own, psychotic, hallucinatory experience that I am sure was more than just that because of the strong sense of guiding presences that were helping me. They directed me to a nearby apartment building and told me to go to the door of a specific apartment. There I would receive help, but only after kneeling down in front of the door and answering certain initiatory questions that came from voices behind the door about what I felt was going wrong with my life. When I reached a point of satifactorily honest self-examination I was told that I was now granted access to the apartment and could open the door. To my utter astonishment the door opened into an empty apartment. When I went inside the space was filled with an energy that can only be described as unconditional love and complete acceptance and compassion. Then, after some rest, there was a kind of tribunal at which I was asked various questions about my life, some of which seemed designed to suggest what my deepest values and real passions were by pointing out what was most arid. This experience really expanded my notion of what it was to be a human being and my sense of the reality of other entities in different planes of reality. Shortly after this I picked up a book at The Bodhi Tree called Street Zen, about a drag queen and speed freak named Tommy Dorsey who later became Issan Dorsey, the abbot of ZeN Center San Francisco. I also had coffee with Bill Coffey, the founder of Crystal Meth Anonymous, to whom I reported this visionary incident. He said he wasn't sure exactly what all that was but that it must have something to do with soul. This is the first time it ever occured to me that a "normal guy" like me might be able to experience soul as an almost tangible part of the self, as a living entity. (The voices themselves had joked to me as I looked in a literal fashion for them in the trees or behind windows: "we're closer than you think." Such a lovely joke, in retrospect, if they are to be taken as aspects of one's Higher Self.)

I spent the next year and a half or so going to AA and CMA meetings, which I suppose was really my introduction to spiritual principles that could be put to very practical use. As well, it was an introduction to having a spiritual community that one participated in on a daily basis.

(to be cont'd)