What is a spiritual journey?

A spiritual journey can be understood by using an airplane as an example. Imagine a passenger on an airplane who doesn't know that flight exists. As the plane takes off he panics, thinking such thoughts as "What's holding us up? What if this plane is too heavy? Air weighs nothing, and this whole plane is made of steel!" Thrown back on his own perceptions, the panicked passenger loses all sense of being in control; he is trapped in an experience that could be leading to disaster. In the cockpit the pilot feels more in control because he's been trained to fly. He knows the aircraft; he understands the plane's controls that he works. Therefore he has no reason to panic, even though in the back of his mind the danger of mechanical failure is always present. Disaster could occur, but that is out of his control. Now move on to the designer of jet planes, who can build any craft he wants based on the principle oflight. He occupies a position of greater control than the pilot because if he kept on experimenting with various designs, he could come up with a plane that is incapable of crashing (perhaps some kind of glider with an airfoil that never stalls, no matter what angle of dive the plane goes into). This progression from passenger to pilot to designer is symbolic of a spiritual journey. The passenger is trapped in the world of the five senses. He can perceive flight only as impossible because when steel is compared to air, it only seems capable of falling through it. The pilot knows the principles of flight, which transcend the five senses by going to a deeper law of nature (the Bernoulli principle), which dictates that air flowing over a curved surface creates lift. The designer transcends even further by coaxing the laws of nature to arrive at an intended effect. In other words, he is closest to the source of reality, acting not as a victim of the five senses or a passive participant in natural law but as a co-creator with nature.A spiritual journey is more than symbolic because the brain, which is already manufacturing every sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell that you experience, is a quantum machine. It is more than symbolic because the brain is a quantum machine.