Spiritual Engineers
The Four Paths of Creation Spirituality as Spiritual Technology
I love telling stories. My childhood was full of them. My great grandparents told me stories about their lives, the community, changes in the land, and the world. They had stories about God, life, and mystery. There was wonder in their words and in their hearts. They taught me that story was how we understand the world.
When I got older, I started telling my own stories, each one seeking meaning in this life. At first, these stories flowed from an overflow of questions and imagination. Over time, though, the stories grew thin, as did my imagination. I poured out my heart into the tales I told, but I didn’t refill the source of that creativity and wonder.
When Matthew Fox wrote Creativity, I devoured that book. I wanted it to fix me. I carried so many expectations into those pages that I couldn’t receive what was actually in them. I was looking for a formula, a secret that would unlock my creativity so I could keep writing without end. I did not find what I was looking for, because I did not greet the book for what it was, but for what I wanted it to be. With a great sigh in my heart, I muddled on. I wouldn’t understand that book or what it had changed in me for years.
So I sought out an idea that fascinated me, not just one I was interested in, but one that held real wonder for me. I didn’t realize I was walking the Via Positiva until much later.
The problem with these ideas was that there were too many ways to tell them and too many ways for them to go, so I had to apply constraints. I had to tell myself what could not happen and what I had to let go (Via Negativa). Then I had to write, trusting that if I showed up, the story would flow (Via Creativa). Once it was written, the story had to justify its words and elements. It needed to be edited until it would bring joy to my readers (Via Transformativa).
That is when I realized the Four Paths were so much more than just a path to walk. They could be utilized for so much more. They were a spiritual technology.
Machines of the Soul
I first heard the term “spiritual technology” from Dr. Justin Sledge on Esoterica. Spiritual, mystical, and esoteric traditions are often practical systems aimed at transformation, divine encounter, or the mediation of spiritual realities through ritualized techniques and practices. When we start to see them as technologies, it becomes easier to identify their component parts and understand how the machine of practice works.
What is a spiritual technology? It is a system of practices, symbols, rituals, disciplines, texts, or techniques intended to transform consciousness, produce spiritual effects, mediate divine contact, or reshape the practitioner. When we can see the parts, we can understand, fix, upgrade, and exchange them to make them work more smoothly.
A spiritual technology is not a way to guarantee results. It is a metaphor that helps us ask the right questions:
What is this practice, belief, or symbol trying to do?
How is it trying to do this?
How is it different from or similar to what other traditions do?
What parts are essential?
What parts are keeping the machine from working well today?
The Four Paths of Creation Spirituality are themselves a retooling of an older spiritual technology that goes back to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. That older system moved through three stages:
Purgation, the cleansing and detachment from destructive habits, ego, and disordered desires;
Illumination, the growing insight, wisdom, and awareness of the Divine; and
Union, the deep communion with God or ultimate reality in which the person becomes aligned with divine love and will.
Matthew Fox took this mystical system that had been in Christianity for centuries and reassembled it as the Four Paths, adding what was missing, repairing what was already there.
The concept of spiritual technology isn’t a replacement for religion, spirituality, or mysticism. It is a metaphor that helps us understand what our practices are and how they work so we can build something better. It is also a way to keep ourselves honest.
Most traditions use some kind of music in their services and rituals. That music works on us emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. Many people feel betrayed when they realize that what they believed was an encounter with God was just a precise chord progression that creates a sense of awe in us. It is a philosophical and theological debate whether that is a distinction without a difference or with one, but we have to be honest that there are chord progressions that can create these sensations in us, regardless of their setting. Approaching such practices from the perspective of spiritual technology allows us to be more honest and open about the method, and whether it is right to use it. Some might feel it is a manipulation of their emotions, but if we are honest about what we are doing and offer it as an aid to set the right mood and intention, perhaps we are justified in using it with full disclosure.
When we view our practices, symbols, and beliefs as technologies, we are able to be honest about what they are doing so we can stay aligned with our goals, hopes, and intentions on a spiritual path.
As a person who left Evangelicalism a long time ago because of spiritual abuse, understanding my beliefs and practices as spiritual technologies has allowed me to see the moving parts. I don’t want to be manipulated into the self-hatred and self-destructive tendencies I grew up with. When I encounter a new idea or practice, I can approach it differently. I can break it down into its parts, see what it is doing, and assess whether it has the possibility to do what it claims. It gives me the tools to engage better with my spirituality, and I hope it will give that to you too.
The Four Paths as Mechanisms
So, let’s apply this framework to the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality.
Path 1, the Via Positiva (the Positive Way) is trying to help us find awe and wonder. It does this through teaching us the power of the Living Word, our Royal Personhood, recovering our ability to savor life, and understanding that the Kin-dom is here and we don’t have to wait for it. This is a unique starting point not just because it rejects original sin and proclaims original blessing, but because it starts with awe. It doesn’t start with devotion, sacrifice, or obligation. It starts with awe. It forms us to begin with wonder and curiosity, not fear or doubt. It honors our experience without diminishing us or building us up as something other than we are. There is a naked honesty to this path. It works because awe is all around us, as long as we take the time to see it and don’t ignore it.
Path 2, the Via Negativa (the Negative Way) is trying to help us let go and make space so we don’t become rigid about how we encounter life. A rigid tree breaks in the wind; a supple one bends. It reminds us that we don’t have to find all the answers, but we do need to live in the present moment. The present is real, and if we don’t sit with it and make space for it, we cannot heal or rejuvenate. This path is different from others because it does not moralize our pain, nor does it sentimentalize it. It teaches us to be attentive without grasping, and to surrender to the moment so we can experience it. It invites silence and makes space for us to live now, not in our hopes or our regrets. In our overly rational age, it reminds us that sometimes we need to be quiet and be with what is rather than talk over it. It opens us up so we can let go of what we do not need to carry anymore.
Path 3, the Via Creativa (the Creative Way) shows us that we are not powerless in the world. We are a part of it, co-creating life with everyone else every moment of every day. This path is different because it honors what is in us wanting to be born. That is the core of it. No one’s life is worthless, pointless, or meaningless. We all have something to offer if the space is open for us to do so. Everything is participatory. We participate, and in participating we mutually create the world. We all feel that desire to be part of something greater, and we want the freedom to do so. The Via Creativa shows us how in a way that is open and equitable to all.
Path 4, the Via Transformativa (the Transformational Way) brings us completely outside of ourselves. It takes the awe, openness, and creativity we have learned and applies them to society. In each of the other three paths we encounter injustices, and here we are empowered to interfere with those systems of injustice with joy and celebration. Unlike other traditions, we are not guided by duty or obligation, but from our own center, because we have encountered those edges that need to be repaired. Joy and celebration are core to path 4, as is learning to see the anawim, those cast out to the margins by systems seeking to increase their own power, wealth, and authority. Once we learn to see these groups, we learn what the system actually cares about and what needs to be fixed in it.
More Than the Spiral
The way most of us encounter the Four Paths is as the spiral we dance on our spiritual journey, and they are that. But as I discovered with my writing, they can be applied to other things entirely. Once we see the Four Paths as a set of interlinked spiritual technologies, we can use them to build more than just the spiral path.
I have always had problems with self-esteem. There were many contributing factors, but I personally didn’t find a way forward until I applied the Four Paths to this specific problem. This is not medical or psychological advice. It is simply the method I used to work on one of my own struggles.
If the problem is low self-esteem, and the first path tells us to look for awe and wonder, where can we find awe and wonder in self-esteem? The honest answer, for me, was that I couldn’t. Self-esteem is a word that did not resonate with me, so what could help with low self-esteem instead? I found my answer in humility, anavah in Hebrew.
In Alan Morinis’ wonderful book Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar, it says this about humility: “Occupy a rightful space, neither too much nor too little. Focus neither on your own virtues nor the faults of others.” That rang in me like a bell and was the first taste of awe I savored. Yes, I needed humility.
I sat with this definition in path 2, and asked what I had to let go, what I needed to sit with, and where I needed to make space. This was hard and took years. I had collected so much baggage that weighed me down, and worse than that, I had accepted the lie that it was a part of me. In that prolonged Via Negativa, I sat with these beliefs about myself so I could learn to see which of them were really me and which were beliefs I had merely accepted as me. This process was liberating, but it left me hollow. So much of my life had been built on other people’s ideas of who I was that I forgot who I actually was.
When I took this into path 3, I had to relearn what was really in me and what wanted to be born in my life. I realized I had to go back to path 1 and find something within me that birthed awe and wonder. As I found these things, one at a time, I sat with them in path 2, to see what parts I needed to sit with and what parts I had to let go, and then back to path 3 to birth them in my life.
This cycle repeated until these new (to me) parts of myself met resistance or pushback from the outside world. That led me onto path 4.
Now I had a spiritual technology to rebuild myself and find the humility I really needed. Simply practicing the Four Paths out of the box had not worked this alchemy in me. Utilizing them to work on this specific problem did. That is the power of a spiritual technology.
Becoming Spiritual Engineers
One of the great gifts of Creation Spirituality is that it transforms us from passive practitioners of a spiritual path into spiritual engineers, co-creating a renewed world that interferes with injustice with joy and celebration.
As spiritual engineers, we have to try and test things, then tinker with them to make them better. In its bringing together of science and faith, we have even firmer foundations for the stories we tell, the symbols we use, and the practices we do. The more we learn about nature and psychology, the more we can adapt our spiritual practice to accomplish its goals.
This doesn’t free us from having spiritual directors and friends on the path. It does not kill the traditions; it revives them with a new and more honest life. We can share our constructions with others and together make them better. All four paths teach us not just how to live with ourselves, but with others.
We no longer have to wait for an enlightened master to show us a better method or technique. We have the tools to build them ourselves.
The work of a spiritual engineer starts with study and practice. We have to understand the spiritual technologies we are using before we can apply them to other things or rework them to function better. Once we understand the technology, we can tinker with it, test it out, and continue to improve over time.
An Invitation
Most of us started our journeys in top-down institutions. The preacher, the prophet, the tradition handed down the capital-T Truth that we simply had to follow.
It isn’t a platitude when Creation Spirituality says we are all mystics, artists, and prophets. We are. Each and every one of us. But it also teaches us that these are not the rarified and privileged vocations we were told they were. A mystic encounters the Divine in a way we all can. Everything we do is an art form, and we all have our own, which makes us all artists. A prophet does not receive THE WORD OF GOD; they speak the Living Word that gives life as filtered through their understanding of the world, in the same way we all do.
Once we have humbled these vocations and ourselves, we see how we can do this work together. Through practice and study we can become spiritual engineers if we want, but at the very least, we learn how to become spiritual mechanics, able to fix what is broken in our practice and tune up the engine when it needs it. We can even do that for one another.
Spirituality gets our hands dirty tending the gardens of our souls. Reading about a garden doesn’t make us gardeners, planting and tending do. That is what this offers us: a practical way to fix what is broken and do the work we long to do.
For many of us who grew up in faiths that hurt us, we can, if we want and choose to, recover what still has meaning for us and discard the rest.
Twenty years of Buddhist silence, Pagan earth-wisdom, Christian mysticism, and the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality distilled into a primer for the living journey. Creation’s Paths: A Creation Spirituality Primer, foreword by Matthew Fox.
