They try to mastermind their way to a spiritual path.
Many spiritual teachers will try to convince you that it’s okay to be broken. They’ll preach to you about the reasons it’s fine to treat others unkindly and to attach yourself to your pain. Or, they often find ways to justify being selfish. This is the ego talking — and it’s strong in all of us. It takes a lot of inner strength to resist it.
The ego loves to hear a validating, authoritative voice telling it that it’s okay to stay attached to fear. It loves to hear that it can disguise fear, anger, and self-preservation as something loving. That’s why this type of spiritual teacher can be so popular.
Forgiveness
I was just scrolling through my feed and saw yet another spiritual leader telling her followers that she has an “unpopular opinion” about forgiveness. She said this would probably get her canceled from the spiritual community (as it should) because she said we should not forgive people — it’s part of our soul journey to keep grudges against other souls. It’s part of working through karma. She encouraged everyone to stay in a place of hurt.
She was reasoning her way into attaching to grief, grudges, and anger. But there’s no magic trick that can make non-forgiveness okay. It’s just a mind trick — something that allows her to make no inner changes.
Don’t We Want to Grow?
Forgiveness is a basic tenet of all spiritual practices. So is finding peace, resisting anger and jealousy, and acts of service. But we’re in an age when spiritually-minded people think they can use logic to twist the spiritual path into justifying all of these, therefore making it acceptable not to even try to change.
What these people really want is to have a spiritual practice that requires no change. (The ego loves to hang onto its emotional outbursts and its selfish choices.) They want to put in minimal effort. They are hoping to be able to go on their Ayahuasca retreats and dance around a fire playing drums in the forest, claiming they met their souls, and then go back to their regular, mundane lives without making any changes whatsoever. That’s the dream. They get to say they’re spiritual with almost no substance behind that claim.
They want to take mushrooms and talk to shamans all day and then go back to doing what they’ve always done. Maybe they’ll do a little inner child healing along the way, but the ego allows this so that it can continue to choose the self over others and attach to negative emotions.
Fear Creates Separation
I’ve seen content on social media from people arguing about many things besides the justification of grudges. It’s also common to see videos about embracing harmful masculinity, about ghosting friends who you don’t like anymore, and “self-care” — a concept that can be easily skewed to be totally self-serving. We hear all the time how “boundaries” are so important. But these are all ideas that come from the ego — a source of fear and separation from others.
All of these things seem innocent on the surface, but can be used by a deceptive mind to manipulate others. Imagine the amount of pain it must take to cause someone to create content encouraging others to stay angry and to withhold forgiveness.
On a grand scale, we see in society that politicians — self-proclaimed spiritual Christians — have no problem justifying selfishness and harm against others. They turn a blind eye to fellow humans in need. The poor and persecuted mean nothing to a strong ego that has justified its selfish ways. When we start to separate ourselves from other humans, we go down a slippery slope to a place where pseudo-spirituality is being used for cruelty.
Don’t Settle for Mediocrity
So, my friends, we must be wary of people who don’t choose the great path to enlightenment and goodness. If people are settling for mediocrity, the ego mind rejoices because it is being allowed to continue harmful, self-indulgent, and fearful habits. Don’t be like them. Go all the way. Choose to be pure.
Forgiveness is liberating. Releasing anger and suffering creates inner bliss. Treating others with compassion is healing.
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