Having a spiritual path

The topic of having a spiritual path is helpful to make a better idea about the characteristics of this course.
The strongest and clearest idea of a path is the one we get from the experience of school: at school we follow plans of studies prepared by institutions and teachers. A teacher has always a clear idea of the syllabus, he/she arranges the lessons to spread them properly over the year, so that there will be a good balance between time and progression on the syllabus. A smaller path is also the homework we might have assigned: the same way, just on a smaller scale, we plan our time so that we will be able to do our homework and also have space for other activities.
The problem with paths is that they seem to kill spontaneity. A path is exactly the opposite of spontaneity. Spontaneity means doing things randomly, just following passively our instinct, inspiration, whim, while instead path means control, table of actions to follow, procedures, method. It is not difficult to realize that even when we think we are free and spontaneous we are actually following either some implicit plans and ways of life established by society or industry; nonetheless, we humanly feel a strong need to protect our experience of freedom and spontaneity.
This topic is connected to the phisionomy of this spiritual course, particolarly about the situation of confusion about spirituality in the world, that I have already mentioned earlier. This means that this course is not specifically addressed to people who are just superficially interested in spirituality or, conversely, to people who want an academic rigour in order to become high graded professionals of spirituality. Today even academic people have a lot of confusion about spirituality, so that they have not elaborated any defined methodology of study, any syllabus aimed to specific results. If I want to address this course to academic people interested in obtaining or building something like a university degree in spirituality, we can notice that these people just don’t exist. We can find in the world some institutions that give some kind of degrees in spirituality, but none of their syllabuses actually deals properly with the philosophical contents of spirituality. They study how to deal with spirituality without having a clear definition of it and without engaging themselves with philosophy of spirituality. It is not their fault, it’s just the current situation in the world. That’s the reason why this course cannot be considered an academic course for specialists. This is also the reason why a lot of people today deal with spirituality pretending that they have clear ideas about it, but actually making a mess with concepts, ideas, methods.
This course is in a middle position between incompetent people and academic discipline. I don’t want to build a course of spirituality that would be easily criticized because of it superficiality and weak methodology. At the same time, in this moment I cannot build a strongly academic course based in a solid organization.
This has a consequence about how to mean the importance of a path in connection with this course. A path is a serious and necessary aspect of an academic course, but a sufficient degree of spontaneity is necessary for a course like this one, that is addressed even to common people who don’t have professional plans in mind.
As a conclusion, I would strongly recommend that anybody following this course follows a serious path, with strong engagement, especially considering that a true spontaneity can be realized, in my opinion, only in the context of a discipline, that tries to be critical against hidden conditiongs coming from society and industry. But, as I said, I mean it just as a strong recommendation, not as a mandatory requirement, like the one supposed to follow in order to obtain an official qualification in spirituality.