While the division between mind and body is not wholly true, it can be a useful conceptual tool too. There are after all certain factors that seem to set more in the mental realm, such as attitudes, views of the world and certain habits. In this section we will look at several of such mental factors that might have an impact on spiritual practice, and on which spiritual practice will have an impact upon.
Accept the reality of the supernatural
One of the types of people who seem to very consistently have an extremely bad time with spiritual practices are the kind of people who get involved in it while sitting on the fence about the reality of the supernatural aspects of reality. I was one of those people, and the stress of the paradigm shift was intense. If you can accept that it's not ”all in your head” before you even begin, you will have a much smoother time.
At the same time, the mundane aspects of reality are still there and they are just as impactful and meaningful as they have always been. Not everything is supernatural, and not all that is supernatural is of relevance. Beyond some point the novelty wears off and things that would have at some point been one of the most consequential experiences of your whole life become ”huh, that was curious” instead. What you would have once updated into a demonic incursion or signs of psychosis are now the spiritual equivalent of a roach infestation. The world may be souled, but you still have bills to pay and food to cook.
At the same time the actually meaningful elements of it the supernatural will still be meaningful. Your potential spirit guides will be much happier when they don't have to spend time and energy trying to convince you that they are real and that they have something useful to say. You too will find the path that will emerge much easier to walk on when you no longer wrestle with ontological questions.
Growth mindset
There are a great deal of spiritual practices that essentially hinge on the idea of growth mindset, even if the concept did not exist when these practices were born. In short, the growth mindset sees that it's possible for humans to change and improve their various attributes. This is contrasted with the fixed mindset, which sees that our attributes are simply given to us. While we all have our own limitations, as far as I can tell, a growth mindset is both psychologically healthier and empirically true.
Why do these things matter? Well, if you wish to embark on a more spiritual path, you will inevitably need to develop skills that either don't come very intuitively to humans or then we unlearn by adulthood. If you don't believe you can become better at meditation or visualization or that you will ever remember some complicated prayer or ritual, you will of course give up.
Spiritual ideas related to self-development are found in all of the traditions deal with here, as well as those outside of the scope of this document. The Taoists have elaborate ideas about cultivation practices, the Buddhist quest for enlightenment takes serious effort and even in Shinto there are elements related to self-development.
Beyond the spiritual side, a growth mindset makes you more capable of adapting to life's challenges. The only constant in life really is change, and you fundamentally never know what is going to happen. We build all sorts of mental scaffolds to cover this fact, and that is fine. We can not live in a permanent state of chaos and insecurity either. However, the real difference emerges when a crisis or even a major positive change happens. People with fixed mindsets have much greater difficulty adapting.
Last but not least, the most obvious benefit of cultivating a growth mindset – yes, this too is something that you can develop – is that it simply allows you to become better at whatever it is you want to be better at. We of course have limited time and resources, and the various spiritual traditions can do much to teach us about how precious our time is and how to make best use of it. Nevertheless, this precious time and resources should be put into use, not spent living a life filled with negative self-beliefs. I am not writing this as someone to whom this sort of mindset came naturally, quite the opposite. So believe me when I say that change is possible.
The value of being sober
Many spiritual traditions argue for sobriety. I believe that there are good reasons for this, but the reasons are a bit counter-intuitive. The arguments for sobriety are usually framed either as moral or relating to some kind of clarity of mind or impulse control. I don't see the use of alcohol or even drugs necessarily as a moral problem in itself, so long as their use does not lead to compromised actions or addiction, which they of course can.
The arguments for clarity of mind are in my opinion valid and very much related to the aims of a more spiritually attuned life. If the process is not making you into someone who is content and stable at the present moment while sober, something is going wrong.
There are two aspects here that I would however would really like to highlight, because they don't get talked about enough. The first aspect is that adopting a more spiritual way of life will eventually make you more sensitive to all kinds of things, and this includes intoxicating substances. You might simply find that such things become unpleasant, their toxic attributes becoming highlighted, and their enjoyable aspects feeling fake, hollow and confusing.
The second aspect is related to spirits. Various substances, even the seemingly mundane alcohol and tobacco, have been used to facilitate spirit contact for ages. These techniques are legitimate in the sense that they work. I don't think they are delusional in that all the experiences would be just some kind of internal phantasmagorias. I think a lot of people's entity contact encounters while under the influence of some substance are legitimate.
While few people are likely to attract spirits because of some light drinking (the shadow entities people see in cases of delirium are an entirely different case), there are increasingly popular other substances that are much more potent and therefore potentially much more troublesome. There's this meme going around that goes something like ”ayahuasca is so crazy because it's enjoyed by the most normie people possible who then get oneshotted by it and some mesoamerican 6D demon turns them into circus strippers or something”.
Potent psychoactive substances essentially detonate open the interfaces for spirits to reach out to you, and this can get extremely troublesome. There are cases of people becoming possessed by spirits after using psychedelics or developing medical conditions that can not be treated with Western medical science.I think the riskiness associated with the use of psychoactive substances is the reason why these practices mostly vanished from the various Eastern traditions. As the traditions have been broken, the possible support structures that they had for problem cases have vanished too.
This all said, I am not 100% sober either. I consume small amounts of sake in ritual contexts and have drank alcohol about a dozen other times the past year. I was not always this sober, and this should be contrasted to how half a dozen beers on Fridays was the low norm for many years. My main argument isn't necessarily being completely sober, but that less is more.
It should of course be noted that excessive use of intoxicating substances have negative health effects, which of course have an impact on your overall well being. These substances can, as we all know, also be addictive. Various addictions and compulsions can of course become a stumbling block, and thus we will take look at them next.
Addictions and compulsions
Even beyond the various intoxicating substances, we live in an extremely addictive age. The cultivation of various kinds of addictions and compulsions has in fact become one of the most prominent forms of social control. There are mechanisms in place to cultivate addiction to food, intoxicants (caffeine included), information entertainment and pornography. Beyond these obvious ones, there are mechanisms in place to cultivate addictions to hate, envy and even fear.
There is a very high chance that you are on some level addicted to something in your life. As hyperbolic this is, and as much as people like to deny this, you will have to face this as you advance in your practice. Our lives are filled with all kinds of things that give short-term pleasure and enjoyment that grows numb rapidly as we mindlessly browse ”content”. The addictions to negative emotions are the most insidious ones. Engaging in such conduct on some weird level feels good, yet it's exhausting and digs you deeper and deeper into a spiral of negative emotions until the whirlwind tears you limb from limb.
These addictions and compulsions are of course a waste of time, diminish your agency and steal away attention from better pursuits. Spirituality can give you tools for dealing with these, but it's not easy. You will eventually be forced to take a good honest look at your life. Giving up negative influences is however always ultimately satisfying, even if it may take a long time to do so. When you are called to do so, you however really need to do so.
There is also a often not very much talked about risk that if you have become a very ”addictive” person. That risk is that you will find spirituality becoming another addiction. This can be very hard to recognize and can lead into...
Going too deep too fast
The absolutely worst outcomes from any form of spiritual practice come to those who go into it too deep and too fast. There are people who go into multi-day meditation retreats with very little beforehand knowledge, people who end up in monasteries or cults without understanding what they are really committing into, people who do too advanced yoga, qigong or magical practice too soon and have at best harmful, at worst lethal outcomes.
Yes, people have died because they went too deep too fast or were in bad condition to begin with.
I get it. There is this inherent human drive to go far and fast, and it has pushed us along. Spirituality is however more of a marathon than a sprint. Beyond the obvious factors of people looking at the ”head on collision with reality” and saying ”nah, I'd win”, there are also factors of people selling or peddling knowledge that is not contextualized properly. For example, it's astonishing how much Vajrayana Buddhist materials and practices are just floating around the internet. Traditionally, these were reserved only for monastics with proper preliminary work and active guidance. The situation is even worse with Western magical techniques because of how broken and mutilated the lineage has become.
There are also some people who went through the pear wiggler too early and too fast and came out on the other end mostly fine who then think that everyone can manage it. You can see some astonishingly irresponsible things shared around, particularly on the worser corners of the spiritual internet.
Taking things slowly and really building up the fundamentals puts you in a much, much better place to deal with whatever challenges that may emerge in the future. Moving at a slower pace and spending time studying (but not dabbling with!) materials, views and techniques from multiple sources also allows you to develop a much better picture of just what this is all about. If you see certain elements or precautions emerge over and over again, you should take note.
Mental hygiene and negative influences
Besides going at things at a reasonable pace, another important thing is to practice a certain kind of mental hygiene. To put it bluntly, you need to learn to avoid mentally harmful influences. Often in today's world these come in the form of various media and entertainment that is designed to be emotionally distressing. These can include things like social media, traditional media (news is more about fear than information) but also things like horror and violent and sexual entertainment.
Out of these, horror is a big one. The spiritual by its nature involves energies and entities that are normally invisible to us. This can rouse intense paranoia. You really need to manage your expectations (both good and bad) and develop a habit of not getting too spooked, and avoiding negativistic, horror-flavored depictions of spirituality really helps. This goes both for fiction and people operating within a religious framework peddling their own narratives. Do not upgrade the spiritual equivalent of a rat in the walls into a demonic incursion.
Not all negative influences come from the media either. There is also a social component at play here. While you shouldn't not become a hermit or burn down all your relationships, you need to become aware of and assess the quality of the relationships you have with people. Sometimes we slip into extremely exhausting, one-sided relationships that just take from us without giving back. You really need to let go of these types of unfixable, parasitic relationships for your sake.
There are also all sorts of negative social influences in the spiritual world. These include cultish, abusive and swindler types. Familiarizing yourself with the type of language that cults and advertisers use is a good way to learn to recognize these types. There are also people who are not actively malicious, but rather have a negative presence due to personal issues. The danger here is that their involvement with spirituality can make these issues metastasize into something paranormal, be they entities trailing them or some talent at projecting negativity upon others in a very effective manner.
One has to of course be reasonable about this all. Rather than cutting yourself off from all influences, it's about learning to recognize and manage these influences. In the end we all have to deal with all sorts of negative emotions, events, energies and even entities in our lives, and spirituality can give us tools for that. It should be also noted that not all that is ”dark” is ”evil” or ”bad” or ”negative”. Studying the various Buddhist wrathful deities is a good exercise here.
Staying grounded
”Grounding” is a word with annoyingly multiple meanings in the spiritual world. For some it simply means staying focused at the mundane world, for some it means exit strategies from a kind of spiritual state of consciousness, for others it means very particular energetic practices, and for some it means some combination of these. So we will look at all of it briefly, because all of these interpretations are relevant.
Grounding as in staying focused on the mundane world has, paradoxically as it may seem, very high value for those who will get involved with spirituality. It can be very easy to get swept up into the ”spiritual pinball machine” as some have called it (I am to an extent guilty of this), and you can become completely enraptured by anomalous experiences or become permanently stuck in a state where your channels to the spirit world are open. The latter two can have particularly destructive impact, especially for unseasoned practitioners, as our society largely lacks suitable niches for such people. Being too open to the spiritual for too long in the wrong place can result in very severe effects, such as possession.
When one starts studying and practicing spirituality, one usually starts to knock down routines and established views of the world. This in itself puts you into a more liminal state that is conducive to spiritual experiences. However, if you are constantly stuck in a liminal state, you risk a kind of rupture, the walls of consciousness getting permanently knocked down. That's why it's very important to maintain a mundane life too, and to designate set places and times for spiritual activities. If you were to dedicate all of your life to spirituality, you would essentially need to live in monastery-like conditions.
So finish your studies and do your work. Clean your living space. Cook for yourself. Stay in contact with friends and family. Do your everyday activities with focus and intent. Set aside a place of its own for meditation which you use for nothing else. If you engage in more religious or magical activities, set aside some place separate for them too.
Meditation, intense prayer, rituals, magical working and similar activities can all put you into a certain state of being that you might find difficult to exit. This can manifest in various forms such as dizziness, exhaustion, feelings of lightness and a kind of altered state of consciousness, a sensation of being untethered from the surrounding reality. Some might find themselves feeling overly energetic instead. I'm not quite sure what exactly it is that causes this, but the ideas I have seen range from a side-effect of ”spirit channels” being open to depletion or overload of some spiritual resource or a kind of ”muscle fatigue” of the energy body.
If you are tired you should of course rest. If you are feeling overly energetic, do something mundane that eats up the energy. Beyond these, there are certain quite well-established things that can be used to re-enter a mundane state of being. Eating is a very common one. Conversely many find spiritual activities much more difficult to conduct if they have eaten beforehand. Sex and masturbation have been reported as effective by some. On the flip side, the spiritual implications of sexual abstinence are well known. Some people have resorted to slapping themselves in particularly stubborn cases of magician's brain. I've used focusing extremely intently on the soles of my feet and really feeling the pull of Earth.
Grounding as an energetic practice is something we will look at later on. It's an extremely valuable skill to have should you wish to pursue such a path. Energy work without doing such can be tremendously exhausting, ineffective and will drain you quickly. Beyond the energetic side, such practices also have an aspect of ”keeping your feet on the ground” in a more tethering, mundane way too. Some paradoxically report that routinely doing such practices helps to keep them ”real”.
Don't get discouraged!
And last but not least, don't get discouraged, not even by this text. Less than to scare people away, this has been presented as a collection of potential stumbling blocks and things you need to be mindful about. You can not fix everything at once, and you need to prioritize what to work on. You also don't need to fix everything mundane in your life before you can sit down to meditate or start dream journaling. But if and when you stumble upon these things, you can come back to this document to reflect what has been written.
Next, for all those who still remain, we will take a look at meditation, arguably the core practice in nearly all, if not all, spiritual traditions.
