If directory structure is regular, lets say something like this:
folder
├── a
│ ├── a
│ │ └── aa.txt
│ └── b
│ └── ab.txt
└── b
├── a
│ └── ba.txt
└── b
└── bb.txt
you can use * wildcard for each level of nesting as shown below:
>>> sc.wholeTextFiles("/folder/*/*/*.txt").map(lambda x: x[0]).collect()
[u'file:/folder/a/a/aa.txt',
u'file:/folder/a/b/ab.txt',
u'file:/folder/b/a/ba.txt',
u'file:/folder/b/b/bb.txt']