The First Rule of Spirituality: Do Not Get Attached to Your Path

Excerpt: The moment your spiritual understanding becomes something you defend, you have already stopped growing. The path is not the destination.

I came across an article recently that stopped me mid-scroll.

Not because it was provocative or controversial. Because it was honest — in the way that only writing from genuine experience tends to be.

Thomas Oppong spent three years in a seminary, one decision away from becoming a priest for life. He chose a different path. And what he learned from years of reading, reflection, and watching his own mind produced something worth sitting with:

The first rule of any spiritual journey is not to get attached to it.

The Trap Nobody Warns You About

Most people who begin a spiritual practice — meditation, philosophy, religion, mindfulness, stoicism, Buddhism, whatever form it takes — go through a recognisable pattern.

They discover something that works. Something that brings clarity, peace, or a sense of meaning that was missing before. They go deeper. They read more. They practise consistently. And gradually, the thing that was a tool becomes an identity.

They recommend it to everyone. They defend it in conversation. They measure other people's growth against the framework they have adopted.

And somewhere in that process, without noticing, they stopped growing.

Because the minute your understanding becomes something you protect — an authority, a certainty, a precious possession — it has already become an obstacle.

Oppong quotes the ninth-century Chinese Buddhist monk Linji Yixuan:

"If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."

Not a literal instruction. A metaphor for one of the hardest things on any path of growth: the willingness to release even the teacher, even the framework, even the belief that has served you most — when holding on to it starts to limit what you can see.

The Finger Is Not the Moon

There is a teaching from Thich Nhat Hanh that Oppong includes, and it is worth reading slowly:

A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The finger is useful — it tells you where to look. But if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never see the real moon.

Every teaching, every framework, every spiritual practice is a finger. It points at something real. It helps you orient. It carries genuine wisdom worth absorbing.

But it is not the thing itself.

The moment you begin worshipping the finger — defending the teaching, building your identity around the practice, insisting that your path is the only path — you have stopped looking at the moon and started staring at your own hand.

This applies to everything: religion, philosophy, self-development, therapy, coaching, productivity systems, life philosophies. Any framework that helps you grow can also become the thing that stops you growing, if you hold it too tightly.

Makyo: The Rest Stop That Feels Like Arrival

The Zen tradition has a name for a particular kind of plateau: makyo.

It describes the attainment that feels like arrival — the stage on the path where you have done real work, achieved real clarity, and genuinely grown — and where that very achievement becomes the most convincing reason to stop moving.

You can see where you have come from. You can see what you have shed. You can even see, with some accuracy, where other people are in their own development.

And that seeing — that clarity — is exactly where the trap is.

Because the feeling of being advanced is, as Oppong writes, "one of the most reliable signs to watch out for."

Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen monk and teacher, said:

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind there are few."

The beginner is still curious. Still open. Still willing to be wrong. The expert has narrowed the field — and sometimes that narrowing is wisdom, and sometimes it is just the calcification of a mind that stopped asking questions.

The hardest thing to maintain, the longer you have been on any path, is the beginner's mind.

You Are Not Your Understanding

The second rule Oppong offers follows naturally from the first:

You are not your understanding.

Most people who have done serious work — years of reading, practice, therapy, reflection, study — identify deeply with the conclusions they have arrived at. Those conclusions were earned. They came from real effort and real change.

But identifying completely with every belief, every conclusion, every framework you have ever adopted is its own kind of prison.

What you are, Oppong suggests, is not the thoughts or the beliefs or the story of who you have become. You are the awareness behind all of that — the one who notices, who observes, who remains even when the beliefs shift.

A river, not a stone.

When you are no longer completely identified with your beliefs, something unusual becomes possible: you can hold two contradictory ideas at once without losing your footing. You can sit with someone whose worldview is entirely different from yours and be genuinely curious rather than defensive.

This is not weakness. It is a more advanced form of strength — the capacity to remain open in uncertainty rather than reaching frantically for the comfort of a fixed answer.

What Non-Attachment Actually Means

It is worth being clear about what this philosophy is not saying.

It is not saying: detach from life. Detach from people. Stop caring about anything.

Oppong is explicit: connect with people, with work, with routines that make you come alive. Feel grief when grief arrives. Love the teachings that have served you.

What you release is not engagement with life. It is the demand that things stay as they are. The insistence that your present understanding is final. The anxiety of needing your spiritual identity confirmed by everyone around you.

You can love a teaching without needing it to be the only one. You can live by a set of values without needing everyone else to share them. You can pursue truth without pretending you have already arrived at it.

As Jiddu Krishnamurti said:

"Truth is a pathless land."

No single teaching fully contains it. Every path is partial. Every map is an approximation of the territory it describes.

The menu is not the meal — as Alan Watts put it so simply.

What This Means for How I Read and Think

Reading this article made me sit with something uncomfortable.

I have frameworks I love. Books I return to. Ideas that have genuinely changed how I see the world and how I operate in it.

And I notice, when I am honest, how easy it is to start defending those frameworks rather than questioning them. How easy it is to read new ideas through the filter of what I already believe, rather than letting them challenge it.

The beginner's mind is harder to maintain the more you have read. The longer you have been on any path of growth — personal development, philosophy, spirituality, business — the more your accumulated knowledge becomes both an asset and a potential ceiling.

What Oppong is pointing at is not the rejection of knowledge. It is the practice of holding knowledge lightly — using it as a tool without becoming a servant to it.

Keep searching. Read widely. Test ideas in your own life. But do not build a home inside any single conclusion.

Let it be a place you pass through, not where you settle.

Three Things Worth Carrying From This Article

1. Every tool for freedom can become a new cage. The moment any teaching — spiritual, philosophical, practical — becomes an identity you defend, it has stopped serving its original purpose. Hold it as a direction, not a destination.

2. The feeling of arrival is a warning sign. Clarity and growth are real. But the certainty that you have figured it out is almost always a signal to look more carefully, not to stop looking.

3. You are not your understanding. What you believe today is your best current approximation of truth. Tomorrow, with new information and new experience, it may be different. That is not failure. That is what growth actually looks like — not the accumulation of permanent answers, but the willingness to keep revising them.

Keep walking. Not toward a final answer. But with the quiet confidence of someone who has learned to walk without needing one.

Reference

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