Spiritual Guidance – Pitfalls to Avoid on the Spiritual Journey
The spiritual journey is a challenging enough journey for most of us who consciously engage in taking it. There are pitfalls along the way that any seeker needs to be made aware off. This writer and storyteller has been involved with many spiritual groups both as an observer and sometimes as a member of such group. Many of these groups invite certain ideas that those who attend them are asked to make a part of their belief system. I want to share two of these commonly held beliefs that I think can become pitfalls along the way.
The first of these pitfalls is that the goal of the spiritual life is to get rid of the ego. The second pitfall is that the world is to be seen as a dream or an illusion. When you get rid of the ego you tend to have an experience of serious mental illness. You lose the ability to distinguish between what is real within this dimension of time and space and what is the contents of an unconscious mind that has no boundaries. The ego is a boundary and it needs to be strengthened in order that the boundless Self can, paradoxically speaking, be contained within a boundary called the self.
When you are invited to get rid of the ego who is doing the inviting? Is it not the ego attempting to get rid of itself in order to gain something the ego thinks it wants even if what it wants is transcendence of itself. The result is a kind of spiritual warfare. When you try to get rid of anything within the psyche you are simply creating a shadow dynamic. You create the opposite effect. Then what you resist persists. This is the invitation at the heart of the spiritual instruction
Resist not evil
The ego is an organising principle within the personality living within this time and space dimension. It is needed. For this writer and storyteller the problem of getting rid of the ego is attained through expanding the idea of self beyond the limitation of the body and the senses. There then comes a point when you may be graced the awareness of who you are beyond this separate sense of self that you refer to as “me, my and mine.” The ego tends to be that aspect of yourself that experiences fear, resistance and doubt. You do not get rid of fear or doubt by beating yourself up about these human experiences. All that you do then is to create your personal Pandora’s box. You might become a more functional persona but your unconscious remains fearful and this fear will become a block to the unfolding of your higher potential.
One way to expand your awareness is simply to witness the fear, witness the doubt and witness the resistance without having to do anything to get rid of them. This doesn’t mean that you ignore or suppress or indulge these energies. You are invited to simply allow them to be. In this way you are practicing the great spiritual directive
Judge not that ye be not judged.
In this way you are practicing a form of forgiveness. In witnessing these, so called negative aspects of your persona, you are absolving and reducing their power. However, let me issue some words of warning here. Do not practice this form of awareness watching awareness unless you are emotionally grounded. If you have issues around feeling your feelings then try a warmer practice such as the Buddhist meditation practice called the Metta Bhavana. This is a loving kindness meditation and it begins with kindness towards yourself and expands out into inviting and invoking kindness to others.
The reason why I warn you about the practice of witness consciousness (or awareness watching awareness) technique is because if you are detached from your feelings then this technique will allow you to further detach from your detached feelings. Then, in the words of a character in a novel by James Joyce, you will become someone who lives some distance from their body. Putting this another way there is the likelihood of you becoming depressed.
The Metta Bhavana practice uses the emotions to expand your sense of self and others with a focus on developing the feeling of loving kindness. It is a warmer practice and a more devotional kind of practice. It tends to avoid the pitfall of detachment from ones feelings which is often the reason why people start out on the spiritual journey. They hope that they can find a way of not having to feel the pain of their lives and simply transcend the need to experience the full range of human emotions. However, you cannot avoid this aspect of living because it is that aspect of living that expands into the finer feelings of empathy and compassion.
Another spiritual pitfall is the idea that this world is to be transcended and that other worlds are much better places than the one you now live in. This is another case of spiritual instruction that does not move beyond dualistic thinking. At its deepest core this writer believes this instruction contains a shadow of body hatred and a hatred of matter. We don’t say this of course because to admit to hating something would be unspiritual. Anything you try to get rid off without alchemising into higher consciousness will become a shadow issue for you.
This is why I love the invitation from the Lord’s Prayer
Thy will be don on earth as it is in Heaven.
There is no ego desire here. There is no demand that you transcend your earthy existence. There is the invitation, not to transcendence, but to the willingness to be in unity. There is no attempt to escape from this world of form but an invitation to bless all matter with the awareness of sacred unity. There is nothing in this line that is being got rid off in any way. There is no invitation here that would lead to the experience of a form of spiritual schism.
Here the ego has been developed enough through the integration of the opposites to be willing to allow the will of the divine to be made manifest within form. This invitation is not for those who have suspect ego boundaries. If you have weak ego boundaries and you go inviting the boundless to express through you through manipulating sacred technologies you might at best lose consciousness. You might, however, ruin your nervous system and you might even go insane.
In the line from the Lords Prayer there is no request for transcendence. Transcendence for this writer is a kind of invitation to another form of separateness. You cannot transcend Oneness which is the reality that pervades all. What transcendence means is the overcoming of the idea of separateness. Because this idea is not real (although it feels real to most everyone) spiritual teachers have called it an illusion. Transcendence isn’t about thinking that the earth is some second rate place that you are supposed not to enjoy. You are here to invite the direct awareness of love moving and expressing in matter.
The approach I personally take is to question any spiritual idea that invites me to get rid of some aspect of my personality. Please do not take my authority of this. Make your own choice. This doesn’t mean that if I have issues, say around anger, that I simply ignore these or indulge them. Spiritual direction that advises suppression or transcendence without the invitation of forgiveness, without the invitation to compassion and without the invitation to sacred unity is at best suspect. Suppression invites the creation of a personal shadow which then becomes a deeper problem for the ego.
You can witness the effect of shadow energy being made conscious in the catalogue of sexual abuse that was perpetrated against children by those in authority in the Roman Catholic church both in Ireland and abroad. This is not simply an issue for the Roman Catholic church. I have witnessed the same dynamic off abuse of hierarchical power in a Buddhist organisation that I was almost ordained in. If you read the book The Holy Longing – The Hidden Power of Spiritual Yearning written by Connie Zweig you will find that she writes
But sometimes our religious yearning goes awry. We may attribute it to an authoritarian personality who abuses us, leaving us feeling shocked and betrayed. Or we may direct our holy longing to another world, devaluing the pleasures of human life. Or worse, like cult members or fundamentalists, we may mistake death for transcendence and sacrifice our lives for paradise.
These are only two of what are common pitfalls along the spiritual path. Be careful who you invest your authority in and be especially careful of investing your authority in anyone who invites you to go against your conscience or asks you to get rid of some aspect of your personality that they think you should get rid off. Getting rid of anything in the psyche ties you to the world of opposites and creates internal opposition. Such instruction is filled with judgement rather than the invitation to forgiveness. Always remember that the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung said that there is gold in the shadow. These aspects of ourselves that we disown are often those aspect of ourselves that can teach us the greatest spiritual lessons which are the lessons of Love, forgiveness and compassion.
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