Grimoire

There comes a point in almost every sustained spiritual practice when it stops working.

Not because you have done anything wrong. Not because the path has turned out to be false. Not because you were never really on it in the first place. It stops working in the specific sense that the practices which once reliably produced something – a feeling of contact, a quality of presence, a sense of meaning or connection or the subtle rightness that let you know you were doing something real – now produce nothing in particular.

There is a quality of experience that practitioners describe and non-practitioners are sceptical of, and for which the ordinary vocabulary of the secular world does not have entirely adequate words.

It is the moment of real contact.

Most people do not come to a spiritual path through a gentle, gradual unfolding.

They come through a crack.

Something breaks open. A loss so significant that the framework you had been living inside, the one that told you what was real and what mattered and how the world workedturns out not to be sufficient for what you are now carrying. A period of illness, or grief, or the specific kind of darkness that arrives when everything externally is fine and the interior is nevertheless in pieces. A moment of contact with something you cannot explain and cannot unfeel, that refuses to stay within the categories you previously trusted to contain it.