Patterns of Spirituality

Becoming Aware of the bad side in Oneself

Travelling a spiritual path has one particular side-effect : it makes us more sensitive to what is happening to us and how we are feeling. This is not always beneficial. We become aware not only of our "good " personal characteristics, but also our "bad " ones. Our sensitivity means that we can no longer hide from our psychological limitations.

The sensitivity is magnified when we try to live our life within society : social demands and expectations bring out our internal contradictions and confusion. We become more aware of the background hostility within normal social relationships. As we begin to fear such hostility, we gradually learn to fear becoming involved in emotional relationships. And so our social roles often lead us to experience failures in life. We blame the bad side of us for those failures. We start to carry a heavy burden of guilt.

Ideas of good and bad reflect our current personal judgements, and not any absolute standards.  Keep in mind that what we now consider to be "bad ", once upon a time we considered to be "good ".  As we evolve spiritually, our values change. What is "bad " is simply aspects of ourselves that we have outgrown.

More generally, any spiritual /creative practice energises the effects of the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is usually our main source of creativity but it is also the source of confusion and mental conflict.  When we energise the subconscious mind, we energise all of it.  Hence not only our creative side is magnified but also our destructive side.

In the past, the standard way for a spiritual seeker to handle this problem was either to escape from society by retreating into solitude (so the intensities of social problems could die down) or to practise duty (when we did what we believed was right, irrespective of the consequences).  These approaches made moral decisions easy to make.  It was clear what was right and what was wrong.

Nowadays, I believe that spirituality has changed. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that each era has its own best form of spirituality.  What seems to be required in our modern era is to practise spirituality within society in a more flexible manner. The only effective way to do this is to learn psychology and explore ourself.

We need to learn that issues are neither completely good nor completely bad. The inflexible attitude of doing duty, no matter what consequences it leads to, has to evolve into the ability to negotiate issues of right and wrong.  We can learn to accept what we judge to be the right way, even though it is not completely good. The attitude of  "I am spiritual, irrespective of what other people do ", is replaced by "I want to help others, even though this means that I am likely to make ethical mistakes". We learn most effectively about ourselves when we are willing to face our mistakes ; our mistakes show us our limitations.

The ordinary person tries to hide his contradictory characteristics from himself.  The spiritual seeker cannot do this.  What we do is to use the unpleasant characteristics within us to help us understand the reasons why ordinary people do "bad " things.  In other words, our unpleasant characteristics can lead us into developing empathy and compassion towards other people.

For example : in order for a person to understand poverty, he has to live through poverty (at least for a time) ; in order to understand the problems of people with mental disorders, he has to live through mental disorder himself.

Copyright © 2002 Ian Heath
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