The Way of the Spiritual Warrior is essentially the way of the Spiritual Path, but very few teachings are clear about how the Spiritual Path works. Many teachers may tell you about the Spiritual Path, that you have to meditate, chant or pray, but they do not really understand the mechanism of the Spiritual Path. As with anything, the Spiritual Path has a mechanism by which it works. For example, if you are an auto mechanic you have to know how cars work; otherwise you won’t be good at repairing cars and nobody will come back to your garage. So with everything you need to know how it works.
Knowing how something works requires a deeper layer of understanding, and this is especially true of the Spiritual Path. A teacher can give you a meditation technique but it does not mean that he or she understands how meditation works. Th e religious traditions are like that, whether they are Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or Chinese: they give you the tradition but they do not understand how it works. It takes an Esoteric Teacher to know why and how a spiritual technique works, and to explain it scientifically. To simply meditate without understanding why you are doing it, or whether you are doing it correctly, is not sufficient.
So let’s start with the fundamentals, for we need to build up an understanding of how the Spiritual Path works. First of all, you have to understand that you are multidimensional and the Universe is multidimensional. It is at this point that the regular teachers and orthodox teachings fail. They tell you that God exists, that you are a Soul, that you have to meditate or pray, and they give you some techniques and that’s it. But they do not know the basis of the Spiritual Science—the multidimensional nature of the human being and the multidimensional nature of the Cosmos. Without this basic understanding, all they can offer are hit-and-miss teachings or techniques based on trial and error.
Many teachers of spiritual life also do not know of the multidimensional nature of Reality. They have an experience and they describe it to their students, who get a certain point of view of what spiritual life is or what Realization is. But then the students go to another teacher who has had a different experience from a different part of Reality, and then they get confused because one teacher says one thing and another says something else. The fact is that there are as many explanations as there are teachers, and the differences in their explanations are simply due to the fact that the teachers are experiencing Reality through different aspects of themselves, that is, they are experiencing different parts of Reality, so their descriptions are different.
The Buddhists, for example, have this idea that they have to look for Śūnyatā, the Emptiness, whereas the ancient Greek Mystery Schools looked for Plerōma, the total Fullness. And so it is with all the religions: through each realization they look at a point of Reality and emphasize that. They say that is it and you have to strive for that, not realizing that they have tuned into only a point of Reality.
So let’s come back to the fundamentals once again: You are a multidimensional being, which means you have a physical body, a vital (etheric) body, an emotional (astral) body, a mental (mind) body, a causal (Soul) body, and beyond your Soul nature you are divine (the Spirit within you). And the World around you is also multidimensional: it contains the physical dimension, the etheric-physical dimension, the astral dimension, the mental dimension, the causal dimension, the Buddhic dimension, the Nirvāṇic dimension and the worlds beyond Nirvāṇa. This is something basic that you need to know because whatever you experience comes from one or other of these worlds, and then you know what layer of your Self, and what layer of the Universe, you are experiencing.
The key to this understanding is what I call Building a Bridge between Worlds. And according to the bridge you build will be the world that you are going to experience. I will give you an example of a bridge between worlds. Since 1875 it has been fashionable for mediums to open their astral bodies and ask that some entity come to them. Nowadays they have refined the technique a little but they still go inside themselves, seeking and desiring for contact with some master or other entity, sometimes using an affirmation so that some spirit will enter and speak through them. In such a case, the bridge that has been built is a bridge to the Astral World.
Naturally, to build such a bridge you work through your astral body to get in touch with the Astral World, and you receive the experiences that are possible in the Astral World. The key thing is where the bridge you build is going to lead you, that is, which part of the Inner Universe. It is not the same for everybody. In this day and age we are told that we are all equal and we will all get the same results, that we are all already enlightened, we are all Buddhas. This idea is another New Age delusion. We are not all the same, the paths are not all the same, the end results are not all the same. How you build your bridge and where it takes you are what determine the results you get. It is very simple.
Excerpt from The Way of the Spiritual Warrior (Pages 185-187)