Symbolic Satori

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...

All discussions have to start somewhere, and Wikipedia is usually a pretty good starting point for any discussion. This is a good starting point. In short then, the Guardian of the Threshold is an entity that must be confronted at one point or another along the path of spiritual growth, and it represents one's darker sides as well as the darker sides of humanity as a whole. Let us then explore some clues as to how this can be done. In the most esoteric of the schools of psychology, the Jungian one, the Guardian is represented by the archetype of the Shadow . The parallels are rather plain to see; the Shadow is one's repressed evil, in both its personal and its collective aspects, and by confronting the Shadow and integrating it into one's being one gains a deeper understanding of oneself and a better integrated personality, even going so far as to tap positive Shadow potential that had been buried and disowned along with everything else pertaining to the Shadow. In the...