Tuesday, August 7, 2012

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 universe. Even though he may acknowledge the existence of other consciousnesses, he nevertheless has a hard time escaping the feeling that his consciousness is higher and therefore in some way more powerful than most others.

3. The Eschatological Trap

The seeker convinces himself that humanity is on the verge of some great change, whether it is an apocalypse, an alien visitation, or simply a radical shift in consciousness. The seeker will inevitably believe himself to be a part of the movement towards this great change.

4. The Conspiracist Trap

The seeker becomes certain that his spiritual insight gives him a priviliged inside view on a global conspiracy that is designed to suppress humanity. He will explain most or even all of the evils in the world in terms of this conspiracy and the elusive cabals that are behind it, and devote much of his mental and emotional energy to exposing these cabals and obsessing over how evil they are.

5. The Paranoiac Trap

The seeker becomes convinced that he is in harm's way; that human or supernatural (or both) agencies seek his downfall because of his knowledge and status. He will devote energy towards defending himself, or even attacking back.


There's a wonderful story in Michael Harner's The Way of the Shaman that illustrates this kind of trapping and its resolution in action. In this case, it's the all too common conspiracy trap followed by a Messianic trap combo. Harner receives an Ayahuasca-induced vision of dragon-like entities who show him how they have always ruled humanity and guided our evolution; a tale quite reminiscent of the rantings of David Icke and his ilk - and much like David Icke, Harner feels compelled to share this revelation with the world. However, he wisely decides to consult an experienced shaman about this vision, and the shaman simply shrugs this off by saying "Oh, they’re always saying that. But they are only the Master of Outer Darkness." In Internet terms, one can easily imagine these dragon entities as playful trolls who entice the seeker with easy answers, and those who fall for them as newbies. Or in more conventional terms, the dragon entities can be seen as a manifestation of the Trickster archetype; they test the seeker and force him to face certain projections in order to learn from his foolishness.

Most of us need to go through many phases of foolishness in order to reach wisdom. As William Blake said: "The fool who persists in his folly will become wise." - so the traps are usually a natural part of the process of acquiring wisdom. However, it always helps to keep in mind that the best wisdom is the conventional wisdom of the ancients. If you believe you are somehow reinventing the wheel and exposing new truths, it's very likely that you've stumbled into the Messianic trap. You are indeed a special and unique snowflake, but your wisdom and knowledge is not; it belongs properly to humanity as a whole and should be treated as such. And one good piece of ancient wisdom goes: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

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