“Discover why sacred talk can wound” ~Crystal Wind

When a healing path starts sounding like a courtroom, something has already gone off course. This piece looks at the moment spirituality stops widening a life and starts policing it. What follows keeps the author's argument intact; the note here is only a doorway into a difficult, necessary conversation about freedom, fear, and borrowed authority.

Read Time: 8 min | Exclusive Publication | Crystal Wind News Service | 

Spirituality is meant to heal a person, strengthen them, and lead them toward truthfulness. But sometimes it turns into a tool of control, moralizing, and manipulation. This article explains why some people use spirituality as a weapon, what it reveals about their psyche, and how to recognize unhealthy spiritual patterns that have nothing in common with genuine growth.

Spirituality is meant to be a path to oneself. It is a space in which a person grows, heals past wounds, learns to work with their current difficulties, gathers strength for change, and also learns to be more truthful and kinder to themselves. But spirituality is a very free direction that can be understood in different ways, and its concrete form is a little different for every person.

And if someone understands spirituality as a way to escape their problems, themselves, reality, or responsibility, they can turn it into a tool of control, moralizing, and manipulation. They may call it spirituality, but in reality it is not spirituality at all. Instead of support, pressure arises. Instead of freedom, rules arise. Instead of growth, only fear grows. Instead of healing, new wounds arise.

Why does this happen? Why do some people use spirituality as a weapon against other people?

For Some People, Spirituality Replaces Their Identity

Most people come to spirituality at a moment when they feel lost, insecure, or empty. That is all right. The spiritual path often begins as a search for a solution to pain that other paths do not answer. The problem arises when a person confuses spirituality with their identity.

“I am the conscious one.” (unlike you; you are unconscious)

“I am the one who knows.” (unlike you, because you know nothing)

“I am the one who lives correctly.” (so I have the right to dictate how you should live, because of course I know better than you)

In that situation spirituality becomes a shield against one's own insecurity. Instead of helping to heal and resolve that insecurity, it is made into a mask. When a person's identity is fragile, it has to defend itself somehow against disruption and devaluation... often by attack. And spirituality, which is malleable, offers a wide field of action and room even for one's own creativity.

This is how the need arises to prove one's own worth by correcting, lecturing, or putting someone else down. When someone uses spirituality as a measure of their own value, they logically begin to use it as a measure of other people's value as well.

Spirituality Masks Fear of One's Own Issues

The spiritual ego is born from fear. Fear of looking inside oneself, admitting a mistake, or feeling pain that a person has long suppressed. It is simply much easier to say:

“You are not conscious enough yet,” than “I have an issue I have not processed.”

It is easier to judge someone else's life and look for faults in it than to look at one's own. Attention is diverted that way. Spiritual moralizing is only a defense mechanism and a projection. A person sees in others what they do not want to see in themselves, and instead of working with their own shadow they begin to repair the world around them, or criticize and denounce it.

Spirituality Compensates for the Need for Control

Some people use spirituality as a way to have control over the environment, relationships, or people around them. Spiritual terminology then becomes an instrument of power and sounds roughly like this:

“This is a low vibration; we will not deal with that.” (when you have some problem and are trying to solve it or talk about it)

“You should not do that as a conscious person.” (for example you must not eat meat, or send anyone to the doghouse, because that is supposedly “unspiritual”)

“This is not the right path.” (I do not like what you are doing, so I will manipulate you into doing what I like and what is advantageous for me)

I would bet you have already heard one of these sentences, or one very similar. In reality this is not about spirituality at all, because spirituality is about freedom and self-knowledge. Here it is only about controlling your behavior and thinking. About keeping the position of “the one who knows.”

This is about cultivating a feeling of superiority. Because if you are smaller than the manipulator, you will not be a threat to them and you cannot confront them with their own smallness and weakness. That is why similar people keep around themselves a circle of followers who obediently bow their backs and have the impression that this is “spiritual development,” because they believe they are warming themselves in the light and glory of an enlightened spiritual leader.

"When someone needs to manage other people's lives, they usually cannot manage their own."

The Need for Simple Answers

The spiritual path is complex, lifelong, and difficult. It has many layers and requires the capacity for introspection and self-reflection. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes this path is quite chaotic. Sometimes a person does not even know what is right. And all of that is all right, because that is what the process of learning and maturing looks like. Without a mistake there is no progress.

But some people cannot bear uncertainty, because inwardly they feel that danger is there and they are unwilling or unable to face the consequences and solve problems. That is why they need clear rules, lists, and boundaries. They need to know exactly that “if I do A, B will happen.” Because that gives them a sense of safety and a clear overview. (But it is only an illusion; in reality there is nothing advantageous about it, nor does it protect a person in any way from reality and the consequences of their actions.)

And so they create a spiritual manual:

• “A spiritual person must not eat additives and meat.”
• “A spiritual person must not wear black.”
• “A spiritual person must not feel anger, or fight, because that would attract impure vibrations.”
• “A spiritual person must not have plastic surgery, tattoos, listen to metal, use Wi-Fi...”

The greater a person's fear of chaos, the more rigid the rules they apply to themselves and to those around them. And the more rigid these rules are, the greater the pressure placed on others to observe them too. Because if someone else breaks them, it threatens their own certainty.

This can also be seen in sects, when the moment a member rebels and disagrees, they are labeled bad and excluded from the group. Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, for this reason cut off contact with members of their family if they do not profess the same faith.

Spirituality Can Serve as an Escape from Reality

Sometimes spirituality is used as a way to avoid real problems. Instead of solving relationships, work, health, or the psyche, a person hides behind:

• “The Universe is giving me a lesson with this.”
• “This is my karma, which I simply have to live through.”
• “A spiritual person is supposed to be poor, so it is all right that I do not work; at least I am not a materialist.”
• “This is a low vibration; I will not talk about that.”
• “Those people do not talk to me because they simply have not grasped my high spiritual level; I do not have a problem, they do. They are low-vibrational.”
• “I am an eternal spiritual being, so I answer to no one, not even the state. What, an ID card? I returned that; I am not a birth number.”

And when someone else reminds them of reality, they become “unspiritual.” In this way an illusory “safe” space is created where nothing needs to be solved. It is enough only to point a finger at other people and notice: “how badly they live, how they play along with the system, how they accumulate property and how they keep chasing after something without understanding the true essence of this world.”

Spirituality Helps Cultivate a Sense of Superiority

The spiritual ego is recognized by this typical view: “I am further along than you.” It is a very strong form of putting oneself above other people because they disagree with something or do something differently. Putting oneself above others is always a defense of the self. When someone feels small, they need to make themselves bigger. And that applies everywhere, not only in spirituality... When someone feels insecure, they need to appear more certain. When someone is afraid, they need to look stronger. Spirituality then becomes a tool for maintaining that illusion.

“As long as I am spiritual, I am better and I am ahead. That means I no longer have to deal with the fact that someone is better than me in something, because my ritual is more than their university degree and my opinions are more than their thriving company and my asceticism is after all more than their three children. I do not need any of that; I am better even without it, because I am conscious and awakened and I vibrate on a different frequency than these ordinary people.”

The Ugly Truth Straight Out: It Is Dangerous

Spirituality is not one concrete path. It is a personal, individual path. So it is necessary to know how to look correctly and ask the right questions if we want to distinguish what is healthy and what is not healthy.

When spirituality is used unhealthily, or as a weapon, so that one's own ego and unresolved problems can be masked, we recognize it mainly by these patterns:

• Pressure arises instead of freedom. You have a list of everything possible that is forbidden, instead of exploring and experimenting.
• Fear instead of growth. Rather than trying something, we would rather be afraid of it, because we are not prepared to deal with anything if needed, or to be confronted with our own error.
• Control instead of respect. Spirituality is about self-acceptance. About accepting life, the flow of time, and empathy toward other people. If someone finds themselves in a self-centered spasm from which they try to control other people, that is completely wrong.
• Manipulation instead of support. Because “other people after all have no right to live their lives in their own way. It is better to manipulate them so they stagnate and stay at my disposal,” because that is what the spiritual ego and inferiority preach.
• Anxiety instead of calm. A wrong path is recognized by the fact that instead of a person healing and becoming calmer, they become more and more afraid of everything.

And that is the exact opposite of what spirituality is for. Genuine spirituality humiliates no one. It does not judge. It does not determine what anyone may or may not do. It does not impose rules. It does not interfere with other people's boundaries. Genuine spirituality expands a person; it does not narrow them.

When you encounter spiritual moralizing, it is good to remember an important truth: This is not about you. It is not even your issue, or your responsibility. That is only someone else's fear, insecurity, or need for control.

Your path is yours. Your body is yours. Your decisions are yours. And your spirituality is also only yours. No one else has the right to determine what it should look like. You always decide that only yourselves.

Image and Translation by CrystalWind.ca

Disclaimer: The information in this article is presented for educational and informational purposes only. Views expressed are those of the contributing author and do not necessarily reflect the views of CrystalWind.ca, which makes no claims regarding the accuracy of any content herein.

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