It's easy to assume,
that other people have the same motive for doing things that you have.
Psychologists call this: False Consensus Bias
Essentially, we have the tendency to expect and project
that other people have the same motives,
the same preferences, aversions, desires,
beliefs, thoughts... Everything.
Right?
You get the point.
So, the thing is,
is that sometimes people don't.
And when people don't,
this opens the door wide for conflict.
Especially, as today will show you,
in the spiritual field.
As some of you know,
the spiritual and the self-help field have become commingled.
So let's call this field,
right?
the spiritual / self-help field, one field.
You can actually divide it
into two different camps.
This camp, is the people who practice spirituality and a self-help
in order to find and feel comfort, relief and feel good.
This other camp,
are people who have found spirituality and self-help
specifically because they want awareness
and they want to awaken.
These people are true the seekers.
Now it's very important that you recognize
that these are two distinct camps
and there are often times when
life itself or whatever you run into on the path of awareness
will definitely sort you into one of these camps or the other.
The thing is you have to look really really really really deeply
to be able to see
which teachers and which concepts
fit into which camp.
This is why:
There's a lot of gaslighting in the spiritual field.
I think that's an understatement of the century.
There are so many teachers and so many concepts
that claim to be about awareness,
that actually or not.
They're entirely about pain relief.
This mode of split
that exists within spirituality and self-help,
is not even something that people in the business
of spirituality and self help have accurately recognized
and they really need to.
We tend to project onto other people
they are interested in spirituality and self-help
for the same reasons as us.
They have the same motives for doing it.
And this blows the door wide open for conflict
in self help and spiritual circles.
To understand this concept deeper,
people who fit into the first camp want to feel good.
They see the knowledge and practices available in this field
as a way to feel good.
People who fit into the second camp want to know it's true.
They imagine that knowing the truth will enable them
to make changes that will lead to feeling better,
but they want to know the truth even if what they come to find out
makes them feel really really bad.
It's the classic matrix blue pill or red pill scenario.
Now some people who are interested in self help and spirituality
recognize both motives within themselves
and it's these people within the field,
who tend to suffer the most.
Why?
Because often these two motives
find themselves in contradiction.
Not all truth is painful.
But some truth is very painful
and it's at this point
that you see this divide or rift happen
within a person who has both motives.
A person who is interested in spiritual practice
in order to find comfort, is pretty much unconcerned
with whether those methods that create comfort reflect the truth
or whether they're serving as a coping mechanism.
A person who's caught in the middle wants to feel good,
but is always worried about whether they are simply going into denial or avoidance
or whether it's something that feels good that they are told is true or not.
While there are some teachers
that straddle the fence, so to speak,
most teachers
and most of the thoughts, concepts, tools
and everything that they teach
can be fit into either camp.
Before I continue with the rest of this episode,
I have to make you aware
that I deeply understand people who want to be using
spirituality and self-help for the sake of pain relief
and in order to feel good.
I mean, we all want to feel good. Let's just be honest.
We all want relief when we're suffering.
The thing is, is that I need to make you aware
of the fact that there is this different motive
that is inherent within the spiritual field and the self-help field
and this different motive that may exist within yourself,
so that you can actually be in a space of choice.
Both the field of spirituality and self-help
in order to feel good
and spirituality and self-help in order to awaken,
have very powerful tools and beneficial tools,
if they're used in the right situations and in the right ways.
That's kind of where the risk is,
for people who commit to spiritual practice
and commit to self-help
for the sake of feeling good.
Because oftentimes they do not actually
use tools in the right ways
and the right circumstances and the right situations.
and can dig themselves into a very deep hole because of it.
There are scenarios in which pain relief is beneficial.
The path of awareness recognizes this.
there are also scenarios where pain relief is detrimental.
Comfort and feel good based spiritual practice
blows the door wide open for these detrimental aspects of pain relief.
For example,
if the barometer of whether something is true is whether it feels good,
we will end up in the land of ignorance.
For example, it is true that sex trafficking of children is happening.
That does not feel good.
If we follow our emotions like a compass,
we must see that our emotions are dictated by thoughts,
most of which are programmed into you at a young age,
and have no real bearing on reality.
So are we following our authentic compass,
or a compass that has been programmed by our family and culture?
We may be in a situation
where we really can do something to change it,
but instead we use the techniques that are offered
in the field of spirituality and self-help,
that are comforting, that enable us to cope better,
so that we spend years
putting up with a situation we have the power to get out of.
We may use comforting feeling concepts
to completely whitewash over the reality of something that is happening
and therefore completely misinterpret the meaning of it.
For example, I know people who are intimacy phobs,
I mean the reason that they go from
relationship, to relationship, to relationship,
is because they can never get too invested.
And yet, they go to seminars and come back
and they look at me in the face and they say things like:
"You know, what I'm really realizing about myself
is that I'm a star seed
and that the reason I haven't been able to make relationships work
is because no one can relate
to my personal frequency,
because it's not from here.
We may use "feel-good truths"
that belong to certain dimensions,
to negate "feel bad truths" that belong to other dimensions.
We may defend truths that feel good to us
if we have wounding around our truth being excluded
from someone else's reality.
When our truth has not been acknowledged,
especially in childhood,
we tend to fight for our own reality against other people's.
By fending for our own truth,
we cope with the pain by becoming exactly like what hurt us.
A person trapped in a perceptual bubble.
I could make a list five miles long about the risks involved
with belonging to the comfort and feel-good camp of spirituality.
To go deeper into this you can watch my video titled:
Novocain Spirituality
What I want you to become acutely aware of
is that the desire for pain relief and the desire for healing
often take you in drastically opposite directions,
at least in the beginning.
Many of the tools and practices and teachings
that are taught by the "feel-good" camp of spirituality
can be super beneficial,
if used in certain situations.
They can also be super detrimental.
They can lead you straight into ignorance,
straight into the lack of awareness,
straight into destruction, even,
if it's used in the wrong ways.
Your only access of power and of true choice
is in reality and in a space of truth.
It's an awareness.
It's in consciousness.
Most people don't want to see the truth,
when they feel like they're powerless
to do anything about whatever truth they see or find.
Also,
not just people who feel like they can't,
people who feel like they don't want to.
Another reason people don't want to see the truth,
is because they don't want to change something
they feel like they would have to change
if they saw the truth.
They feel like changing that thing would be so painful,
that it's better just to avoid looking at the truth.
All this being said,
a person has to want to see the truth.
And unfortunately, you can't make them want to.
and so one of the most important things you can do
is to really decide what your motive is
for practicing spirituality and self-help.
If you honestly want comfort and to feel good and relief,
you've got to really own it.
And be aware that what you're going for is to feel good,
not to know the truth.
You are engaging in these practices
so as to get out of the dirt
If you want awareness, be aware that there may be things that feel amazing,
and there may be things that feel so bad,
you doubt your ability to swallow them.
Part of awareness is to go directly into the dirt.
If you are one of these people
who understands that you're part of the camp of people
who use self-help and spirituality
in order to feel good,
in order to experience a relief,
in order to find comfort,
you should run away from me as fast as your legs can carry you
and come back only when you're ready.
All this being said,
if you look at the field of self-help and spirituality
in terms of these two camps,
a lot more is going to make sense to you.
All that's left to do is to ask yourself:
"Which camp do I belong to?"
"Which pill do I choose?"
"The blue pill or the redl?"
Have a good week.
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte www.tanyaduarte.com