Meaning & path
United Wisdom: The Right to Change Your Path
An authorial essay on changing convictions, readiness for different paths, and respecting another person’s freedom.
Changing your philosophy or religion is not betrayal, but a sign of the soul at work.
Andrey Zarinsh & Maria Evilkut
Inner Transformation · Author Series
Why changing philosophy or religion is not betrayal, but an indication that this is what suits this particular person at this moment. Radical changes of conviction have already been described and legitimized in very different, sometimes hostile traditions—from Indian adhikāra and Buddhist upāya to Christian metanoia, Jewish teshuvah, and Sufi maqāmāt. This article brings these lines together.
Archival translator’s note. This complete revision restores passages omitted from the earlier accepted English adaptation, which is retained separately. Claims of agreement across traditions, stages of maturity, and group dynamics are the essay’s interpretations, not newly verified findings. Section V locates the raft comparison in MN 22. Section XI discusses James’s 1902 book without assigning that discussion to the nineteenth century. These models should not diagnose people who stay in or leave a faith.
I. A Question Rarely Asked Honestly
There is a silent assumption that is convenient for social groups and inconvenient for a living human being: if you once chose a philosophy, religion, or worldview, you are obliged to remain in it forever. Any movement to the side is treason. Any change is weakness, pride, superficiality, delusion; in the worst case, betrayal. This assumption is almost never voiced openly. It shows through in other peopleʼs words, in the tone of elders, in the reaction of the community, in whispers behind your back: “he left,” “she now believes in something else,” “he abandoned what is ours.” The word “abandoned” is crucial here — it replaces an inner movement with a moral offense. This article is about something else. About the fact that over the course of a lifetime a person has every right to change their convictions. Several times. Radically. That one philosophy can be replaced by another, one religion by a third one, spiritual seeking by a scientific worldview, and vice versa. And that such change, in the vast majority of cases, is not apostasy but a precise indication that at this particular moment this particular person needs exactly this. We are not calling for chaotic changes of views or turning the spiritual path into a consumer choice. We are speaking of something else — of the right to be honest with oneself, which is older than any institution, and of the fact that this honesty has already been acknowledged in very different, sometimes mutually hostile traditions.
II. Where Fear of Change Comes From
Fear of changing convictions does not arise from texts or philosophy. It arises from social structure. When a person joins a group — religious, philosophical, political, esoteric — they do not merely adopt ideas. They enter a system of relationships, a system of loyalty, a system for recognizing “us–them.” Leaving the group is experienced by the group as a loss, and the reaction to loss is often blame: the one who left has not just changed — they have done something bad. This mechanism operates at the level of the family, a sect, a philosophical circle, a spiritual school, a political party, and even a fitness community. It has nothing to do with the actual content of the convictions. Any sufficiently cohesive group tends to evaluate leaving it as moral decline. That is how group dynamics work. Therefore, when someone is told “you betrayed us,” it is important to distinguish between two levels. At the level of the group this may be a sincere experience of pain. At the level of that
personʼs own soul it is often the opposite event — the moment when the soul stops betraying itself.
III. The Word “Heresy” and Its Present Meaning
The word “heresy” (from Greek hairesis) originally simply meant “choice,” “chosen way.” In the early ancient and Jewish milieu, philosophical schools were neutrally called that — Stoics, Epicureans, Pharisees, Sadducees were referred to as haireseis. The word carried no negative connotation. The negative meaning appeared later, when emerging institutions — first the Christian church, then many others — began to fix a single correct interpretation and declare the rest “deviations.” This was a historically understandable process: early communities fought for survival, for identity, for consolidation. But it is important to understand that turning “choice” into “crime” was not a theological revelation but a sociohistorical operation. Today, when someone is called “heretic,” what stands behind this is not an eternal law but a specific institutional habit. The tradition itself does not require such language. Most mystics and serious theologians within the same traditions understood this better than their public gatekeepers.
IV. The Principle of Adhikāra: Different People, Different Paths
In Hindu thought there is the notion of adhikāra — literally “competence,” “fitness,” “level of readiness.” It means that the same text, the same practice, the same truth is not equally suitable for every person. Different people are in different inner states and need different approaches. One is ready for pure jñāna — the path of knowledge. Another is better served by bhakti — the path of devotion. A third moves through karma — the path of action. A fourth needs yoga — the path of discipline of body and mind. The principle of adhikari-bheda — “difference in fitness” — lies at the very foundation of how the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras, and the Bhagavad Gītā present their outwardly contradictory teachings. These contradictions are not a mistake. They are addressed to people at different stages of inner development. From this follows a direct conclusion that is rarely spoken aloud: changing oneʼs path over the course of life is not only permissible — it is expected. A person who at 25 was ready for one form of spiritual work may at 45 be ready for a completely different one. This does not mean that the earlier work was a mistake. It means that they have completed it and now need the next stage.
V. Upāya: Teachings as Ladders That Are Left Behind
The Buddhist tradition formulates the same idea from another angle. The concept of upāya — “skillful means,” “appropriate method” — describes how the Buddha and bodhisattvas use different teachings for different listeners depending on their capacity to receive them. In A Short History of Buddhism, Edward Conze writes: “Skill in means is the ability to bring out the spiritual potentialities of different people by statements or actions which are adjusted to their needs and adapted to their capacity for comprehension.” Another Buddhist simile appears in the Alagaddūpama Sutta (MN 22): the teaching is compared to a raft for crossing over. Once safely across, a person leaves the raft behind rather than carrying it onward as proof of loyalty. The logic here is radical: even a true teaching is not the final goal. It is an instrument appropriate for a particular stage. When that stage has been completed, the instrument changes. This is not betrayal of the teaching. It is acknowledgement that the teaching has done its work. If such an idea is acceptable within Buddhism with regard to the teachings of the Buddha himself, it is all the more acceptable with regard to temporary worldview forms in which a person lives during a single lifetime.
VI. Metanoia: Change of Mind as a Religious Act
In the Christian tradition there is a word that in mass translation has turned into its own opposite. The Greek metanoia is usually translated as “repentance,” but literally it means “change of mind” — meta (after, change) and noein (to think, to understand). It is not self-torture and not regret about sins. It is a fundamental reorientation of thinking, a change in oneʼs view of the world and of oneself. One researcher calls the usual translation an “extraordinary mistranslation” (Metanoia, Wikipedia). Already in early Christianity, Tertullian objected to the Latin translation paenitentiam ago: “In Greek, metanoia is not a confession of sins, but a change of mind.” When the call “repent” in the Gospel is translated correctly — as metanoia — it means not “punish yourself,” but “change your thinking, reorient yourself, see differently.” It is a deeply respectful, liberating word. It demands from a person precisely what they fear: to change themselves. If within the Christian tradition itself such change is the central spiritual act, then denying a person the right to such change contradicts the essence of the teaching.
VII. Teshuvah: Return, Not Punishment
In the Jewish tradition there is a parallel concept — teshuvah, from the root shuv — “to return,” “to turn back.” This is not “repentance” in the Western sense of punishment and self- flagellation. It is a return to oneʼs own true essence. Hasidic thought goes even further. The Zohar teaches that teshuvah performed out of love transforms even intentional transgressions into merits. The Talmud says: “In the place where baalei teshuvah—the returned—stand, even the perfectly righteous cannot stand” (Berakhot 34b). This is paradoxical: the one who has gone through change may reach a spiritual depth inaccessible to those who have never left the path. The logic is the same as in Christian metanoia: inner change is not a fall but movement. Changing the path does not cancel a personʼs connection to the source. It renews that connection at a new level.
VIII. Maqāmāt: Waystations That Change
In the Sufi tradition the path is presented as a sequence of waystations (maqāmāt) and states (ahwāl). A waystation is a stable inner condition through which the Sufi passes in the course of the journey. In Qushayri’s Treatise on Sufism, the waystations follow one another: repentance, spiritual struggle, solitude, patience, trust in God, gnosis. Each subsequent stage is impossible without the previous one, and each previous one remains as a completed phase. A person who gets stuck at one waystation and is afraid to move on violates not freedom but the structure of the path itself.
Here an important detail appears: the Islamic tradition in the Qurʼan explicitly establishes a fundamental principle — “there is no compulsion in religion,” lā ikrāha fī d-dīn, Quran 2:256. This verse is among the most frequently cited in Islamic thought about freedom of conscience. Classical theologians—Ibn Qudama and Ibn Kathir—state that faith accepted under compulsion does not count as faith at all. If compulsion is unacceptable at the entrance into religion, it is all the more unacceptable as a way to hold a person in it.
IX. Fowlerʼs Stages of Faith: Change as Development
In the twentieth century, James Fowler built a psychological map of how a personʼs religious and philosophical thinking changes over the course of a lifetime. His six stages of faith remain one of the most detailed models in the psychology of religion. Fowler’s key idea is that change of convictions is not a breakdown but the norm of development. At the third stage, adolescence and early adulthood, a person usually absorbs the faith of their surroundings as part of their identity. At the fourth, they enter critical reflection, begin asking questions, and may leave the inherited system or radically reconsider it. At the fifth, they become able to hold paradox, see several perspectives at once, and recognize the value of other traditions without losing their own. In this model, a person who changes religious or philosophical belonging over the course of life demonstrates not moral failure but development. By contrast, someone who remains at the third stage and has never seriously reconsidered their faith has most likely not reached maturity: they have simply not moved beyond an adolescent relationship with truth.
X. Jung: Midlife as a Point of Reorientation
Carl Jung singled out a moment he called midlife — roughly from 35 to 45 years. In his observations, it is precisely during this period that many people undergo deep reorientation: what worked in the first half of life — career, identity, social role, inherited convictions — ceases to satisfy. For Jung, the key task of this period is individuation: the process in which the ego ceases to be the center of psychic life and yields to a broader structure he called the Self. For some people, this change is accompanied by a return to the religion of childhood at a new level. For others, by leaving it. For others, by discovering a completely new philosophy or abandoning any system in favor of something quieter and more personal. Jung did not judge these trajectories as “right” and “wrong.” He considered them different forms of the same process: moving beyond the first half of life. To forbid this movement is, in effect, to forbid adulthood.
XI. William James: The Multiplicity of Genuine Experience
In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James offered an important philosophical observation: religious experience takes different forms in different people, and those forms can be equally genuine. He distinguished the “healthy-minded,” whose religion rests on trust in the world, from the “sick soul,” which sees evil and struggles with it; gradual conversion from sudden conversion, the path of will from the path of surrender. He did not try to choose the “best” type. He showed that different psychic constitutions have different forms of genuine contact with what they experience as sacred. From this follows a clear conclusion: a person who has changed one form of spirituality for another is not necessarily superficial. Their inner structure may simply require another language for the same experience. Perhaps they have moved from the “sick soul” to the “healthy-minded,” or the reverse. Perhaps their inner center has shifted, and the old form can no longer hold that center. This is not a game of circumstances. It is respect for human complexity: a person’s spiritual life changes not on a whim, but according to an inner logic they cannot always grasp at the moment of change.
XII. What the Inner Logic of Change Says
If we look closely at how real changes of conviction happen in living people, a repeated structure appears. It almost never looks like “I got bored, so I chose something else.” First, a mismatch emerges. The old system no longer describes something important in the person’s inner experience. Dissonance appears and is initially ignored. The person continues living within the former system, but some of its statements now ring hollow.
Then comes a crisis. The old system demands belief in what the person can no longer believe with the same strength. Not because they have become worse, but because they have grown or changed. This is painful: they feel simultaneously a liar toward their community and a traitor toward themselves.
Next comes searching. The person begins reading, listening, observing. Often they do not know what they seek. Sometimes they encounter another tradition that suddenly describes their experience exactly. Sometimes, conversely, they gradually assemble their own synthesis from several sources.
Finally comes re-forming. The person accepts a new form—religious, philosophical, or a worldview. Perhaps it will last decades. Perhaps in five years it too will prove insufficient, and the cycle will repeat. Each such change is not a rejection of truth but a clarification of the form in which truth can, at that moment, be held by this particular person. It is movement in depth, not sideways.
XIII. When Change Really Is Superficial
It would be dishonest not to say this: change of convictions can indeed be superficial. There is a form of spiritual consumerism in which a person sorts through traditions like clothes — yoga, tarot, Buddhism, quantum physics, indigenous esotericism — never staying anywhere long enough to truly understand anything. This pattern is recognizable. The changes happen quickly and without crisis. The person does not suffer during the change; on the contrary, the transition brings light excitement and novelty. They do not deepen into practice; they collect impressions. Each new enthusiasm is presented as the final answer. This dynamic is real, but its existence does not cancel the right to serious, hard-won, conscious change of path. Superficial consumption and deep inner change may look similar from the outside, but after genuine change meaningful years remain behind; after consumption, nothing remains but memories of fashion.
XIV. A Principle That Dissolves the Accusation
If we gather together adhikāra, upāya, metanoia, teshuvah, maqāmāt, Fowlerʼs stages, Jungʼs individuation, and Jamesʼs multiplicity, a principle emerges that mystics of many traditions have long known but communities rarely speak aloud. A path is not a one-time choice of a form for life. A path is a sequence of forms through which a particular soul passes in its particular movement. Form is always temporary because the soul changes. Holding on to an obsolete form out of loyalty to the group is not faithfulness but stagnation. From this it follows that accusations of betrayal usually miss the target. The person is not betraying the community; they have perhaps simply ceased to fit it. If they could betray anything, it would only be themselves — and that is precisely what they did not do when they chose to change. This does not give anyone permission to be cruel to those who remain. The person leaving is not obliged to ridicule those staying, just as those staying are not obliged to condemn the person leaving. They simply face different tasks, and those tasks have a right not to coincide.
XV. Respect as Practice
Respect for another person’s path is not abstract politeness. It is a practice requiring effort, and it includes several concrete things.
Do not diagnose. Do not try to explain why the person left, especially before they have put it into words themselves. Any “I understand what happened to you” at the moment of change is experienced as a violation.
Do not recruit them back. Do not slip them literature, drop “casual” arguments, or pretend nothing happened in the hope that it will resolve itself. This humiliates both people.
Do not declare their path a temporary delusion, even if that is how it seems inwardly. Perhaps it is not a delusion, but precisely their present stage. Perhaps in ten years they will return of their own accord—and then it will be a genuine return, not obedient acquiescence. Perhaps they will never return, and that is their right.
Do not use mutual acquaintances as instruments of pressure. Do not turn family, friends, or spiritual leadership into a mechanism for bringing them back.
Finally, keep an open door without conditions. Not “we are waiting for you to come to your senses,” but simply “we remain those who are close, however you live.” This is rare. Yet precisely this unconditional open door often becomes what one day allows a person to return—if they truly wish—without shame or capitulation.
XVI. Final Orientation
A human life is long, and the soul passes through many phases. Each phase requires its own form — its own philosophy, its own religion, its own way of understanding the world. When the form ceases to hold the content, the form must change. The one who dares to do so is not a heretic and not a traitor. They have simply remained faithful to what is greater than any form. Indian sages knew this when they spoke of adhikāra. Buddhists knew it when they taught upāya. Jesus knew it when he spoke of metanoia. Jewish teachers knew it when they taught teshuvah. Sufis knew it when they described their maqāmāt. Jung knew it when he wrote about midlife. William James knew it when he showed the multiplicity of genuine experience. All of them spoke of the same thing — each in their own language, each from their own point of view: movement is the norm. Change of form is a sign, not a catastrophe. The inner path has its own rhythm, and no external institution has the right to silence that rhythm. To respect anotherʼs path is to trust that inner rhythm. To respect oneʼs own path is to allow it to sound, even when it is frightening. United Wisdom is a series of deep authorial essays on inner transformation. One source — many languages.
References Inherited from the Archive
These links were inherited and have not been newly verified.
Keep what resonates with you.