Traps for the seeker
The spiritual path is fraught with traps and enticements and challenges to be overcome. Most of them boil down to different ways of bloating the ego through a misguided perception of the importance of one's knowledge, and the traps often overlap. However, there are of course many ways to skin a cat, and here follow some of the more common ones. While there may be some grain of truth to some of them some of the time, all too often there is no or very little truth to them when they are examined closely enough. I will use masculine pronouns throughout for convenience, and apologise if this offends anyone. 1. The Messianic Trap The seeker, believing that he has been gifted with some uncommon insight into the true nature of reality, sees it as his holy mission to spread out the good word and liberate others from their blindness and ignorance. 2. The Solipsistic Trap The seeker will have his own consciousness so inflated that he believes it to be somehow central to the univers...