The Seeker’s Quest Project is my journey toward a deeper understanding of the great spiritual traditions of the world. This is the story of how the journey began:

If a date needed to be assigned to mark the inception of The Seeker’s Quest Project, it would be Sunday, April 24th, 2011 — Easter Sunday in most Christian traditions. My grandmother asked me to accompany her to the small Baptist church she attends for Easter service. Organized religion had long left a bitter taste in my mouth, the result of having grown up in a toxic environment where Christianity had been frequently used to justify intolerance, injustice, and abuse. I can still vividly remember the terror I felt as a child as my grandmother would grab me by my shoulders and violently shake me as she commanded, “in the name of Jesus, make the demons leave this child!” This was either followed by or following several strikes to my body with a metal coat hanger. This event and many other bad memories and religious wounds all came to my mind on that fateful Sunday morning two decades later, but I reluctantly agreed to go anyway, because I knew it would mean a lot to my aging grandmother.

While sitting in the pews listening to the church band perform songs which I had absolutely no emotional or spiritual connection to, something dawned on me. I realized that there are billions of people on this planet who identify themselves as Christian, and a large number of those people were sitting in their churches celebrating this day so sacred to their faith in their own unique ways. I began to wonder what differences I might find if I found myself instead sitting in the Easter service at a Catholic church, or a Lutheran church, or a Pentecostal church, or any of the other roughly 38,000 denominations found under the banner of Christianity. This was followed by an immediate sense of awe at the infinite ways that people come to seek communion with Deity.

The thoughts of Easter began to drift from my mind. As I sat there, my body remained in the church, but my mind had left to ponder the depths of spirituality present throughout the world. I began to wonder not only what the other Christians were doing on Easter, but what variety could be found within the services from week to week and tradition to tradition. And what about the ways that others connected to Divinity? The world is full of spiritual people seeking ways to come closer to the powerful presence I had come to call “God,” be they Christian, Jew, Muslim, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Seikh, or followers of some other faith.  It was this sense of wonder mixed with my own desire to understand mystical experiences I had undergone in the past outside of the confines of a religious tradition, which gave birth to the first phases of The Seeker’s Quest Project.

I came home from that Easter service filled with a sense of purpose and a goal. My original intent was to make a list of every church, temple, synagogue, and mosque in the area and begin to visit at least one different service every week and to keep notes about what I experienced in a private journal. I had mentioned the idea on my Facebook page and received some very supportive feedback and it was suggested that instead of keeping a personal journal, I should blog about it. I considered the blogging option seriously, but decided it was better kept to myself instead of being shared with the world. And so I set out putting together my extensive list of places of worship I was to check out in the coming months.

It wasn’t long after my first visitation when I realized that my plans were deeply flawed. I had sent emails to a handful of random houses of worship explaining what I was doing, and the first to respond was the imam of Bilal Masjid in Beaverton, OR. He graciously invited me to visit on the coming Sunday (an experience I ended up blogging about), an experience I will never forget, even though I never actually set foot inside the prayer hall. The second response I received to my inquiries came from the Sufi Circle of Portland inviting me to come visit the day following my visit to Bilal Masjid. I again attended (and blogged about it, although I was still so unfamiliar with what was happening around me that the blog post was rather short and non-informative) and was struck with the realization on my way home that my project — after only 8 days since inception and only 2 days in practice — needed to change or die.

After a couple other visitations to local mosques that week (The Islamic Center of Portland and Masjid As-Saber respectively), I began to understand that visiting a religious service is interesting, but without understanding the history, the traditions, the teachings, the sacred texts, the rituals, and the practices, the services become stripped of both their context and their deeper spiritual essence. Since my journey had began with Islam, it was only fitting that I take the leap off the cliff of comfort and embrace this faith which I knew nearly nothing about (I had spent a very short amount of time learning about some of the basics in a World Religions course I had taken a year earlier, but that hardly qualified me as knowledgeable on the topic). As I said back then:

In my quest for understanding spiritual traditions, I have quickly come to realize that visiting a few places of worship is far from enough to get any sort of even basic understanding of a tradition itself. Since my ‘Seeker’s Quest’ has started with Islam (not for any particular reason, but only because it was the imam of a local Mosque who responded to me the fastest when I was sending out emails requesting visitation information at various places of worship), this first phase of the project will remain focused on Islam.

In my quest for understanding spiritual traditions, I have quickly come to realize that visiting a few places of worship is far from enough to get any sort of even basic understanding of a tradition itself. Since my ‘Seeker’s Quest’ has started with Islam (not for any particular reason, but only because it was the imam of a local Mosque who responded to me the fastest when I was sending out emails requesting visitation information at various places of worship), this first phase of the project will remain focused on Islam (View 114 Days of Islam: Day 0 for more).

Some may have noticed that it has been quite some time since I have updated this blog. The reason for this has to do with a number of factors including school, family, financial, and motivational issues. Goethe once wrote that ”life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.” I have learned that while the need for change can at times become overwhelming, to ignore that need can be devastating.

I have come to a point in my life that I can only describe as a major crossroad. I have spent far too long immersing myself into the great spiritual traditions of the world without allowing myself to undergo the great transformation at the heart of so many traditions. Because transformation is my ultimate goal at this point in my life, and because there is no tradition which I can think of which speaks more clearly about transformation than the alchemical tradition, I have decided to use it as my basic framework for the process. The alchemical process is broken down into 7 stages:

1. Calcination – The Calcination process is the first step of the alchemical process and involves burning your initial substance into ash. On the personal level, this is often understood as detaching ourselves from our desires and attachments, overcoming and destroying our ego, and looking deeply within and evaluating our own strengths and weaknesses to see what parts ourselves we would be better off letting go of.
2. Dissolution - In lab alchemy, Dissolution involves dissolving the ash from the Calcination stage into a pure water. On the personal level, this can be understood as forcing our conscious mind to let go of the control which we so often feel is necessary to hold onto, and instead let the subconsciousness and less rational parts of our mind to come to the surface. It is here that we should let go of our preconceived ideas of how things are and instead remain open to all new possibilities that we had never considered possible before.
3. Separation – The third alchemical stage is Separation. In this stage the alchemist will filter out the undesirable parts of the mixture created from the previous two stages. On a personal level this means  we must take those parts of us we have discovered in the previous stages and get rid of that which has been causing us trouble or which are not part of our true selves while holding onto those parts of us that are good and which allows our true selves to come alive.
4. Conjunction – In the fourth alchemical stage, known as Conjunction, the alchemist creates a new substance from the saved parts of the Separation stage.  We can understand this on a personal level as coming to understand our true selves and beginning to live a life which brings us into harmony with our true nature.
5. Fermentation – The fifth alchemical stage is known as Fermentation. In the Fermentation stage the alchemist takes the substance created in the Conjunction stage and allows it to ferment. This process creates a putrid smelling black substance which over time lightens in color and changes into a sweet smell. We can understand this in our personal lives as connecting our imperfect lives on the material plane with the perfection of the spiritual plane through prayer, meditation, entheogens, or some other form of mystical union with the Divine.
6. Distillation – The alchemist would take the product of the fermentation process and Distil it to extract the purest elements of the substance. On a personal level this involves clearing ourselves of any impurities or inflated ego that may be left over. This involves a lot of introspection and one who has reached this level should be able to flush out the things which may not have been as obvious during the first three stages.
7. Coagulation – The seventh stage of the alchemist is Coagulation. Here the alchemist perfects the substance that the Distillation process created. This is the state of perfection which we must always strive for. Though perfection may be out of reach in this lifetime, it is always the ultimate goal of the personal alchemist to come as closely to achieving this state as possible. And perhaps the true adept who has truly mastered this Great Work may finally reach this perfection in a world to come.

So as I set out on this alchemical quest for a more perfect me, I must first enter the stages of Calcination. The pain of burning away those parts of me which do not serve me will not be easy, but it is essential just as the fire must consume the old for the Phoenix to rise again new from the ashes.