Strong beliefs about spirituality can even get in the way of experiencing spiritual states.
For thousands of years spiritual teachers and traditions have said, "God is everywhere," yet our human way of looking at things can make that reality difficult to embrace. How can God be within the evil in the world? Some things seem too awful to have God anywhere near them. It is easy to think that the way to find God is to create distance between ourselves and anything that smacks of "evil." Because of this, religious and spiritual people sometimes take the approach of separating from what they regard as evil, sinful or, in New Age terminology, "negativity." If we separate from parts within ourselves that we call evil, we have inner splits and conflicts. We try to act and feel in a balanced, whole, and loving way, even when some parts of ourselves don't want to. This approach results in feeling conflicted and feeling the need to control our negative thoughts, angers and desires, or shove them aside. Yet most of us have noticed that just shoving them aside doesn't work. We don't feel fully congruent in our "niceness."
When we go on a spiritual path we often seek "God" in the obvious places. We look to the parts of ourselves and others that already feel loving, compassionate and deeply peaceful. We try to feel these "good" feelings, and shove aside any parts of ourselves that don't fit. This creates a polarity between spiritual states and daily life--a split between our "nice" and "not-nice" parts. The spiritual states are wonderful in and of themselves, but are ungrounded and disconnected from the "unspiritual" parts of day-to-day living--the impatience, anger, irritation, jealousy, judgment and other negative behaviours, feelings and responses that are inevitable parts of being human and living. Parts we judge to be unacceptable and unspiritual are suppressed. The result of suppressing these parts is that they never come to resolution and never get access to the spiritual states, and the "spiritual" part remains disconnected to maintain its separateness from the "unspiritual" parts. This kind of search for our spiritual essence can actually diminish us. Every time we "disown" an emotion, desire, or other unwanted response as "not me--I'm beyond that!" we become a little bit smaller. We lose some or our vitality and our essence. We distance ourselves from universal truths. Attempting to suppress our own "dark side" actually leads to diminishing our spirtual growth. Core Transformation - Andreas, Connirae & Tamara