Dogma and Ritual Do Not Equal Spirituality by Tina Erwin

There are endless books about the spiritual path. There are wonderful guidelines about what it means to be spiritual. There are great teachers who demonstrate spirituality by their life mission.

And then there is religion, which is supposed to epitomize the building concepts of control and power. It would appear that the trappings of religion equate to a very profound structure. The pillars of that structure are dogma and ritual.

When the Great Ones walked the Earth, none of them built a church. When the Great Ones sought to show us the way, none of them specifically wrote anything down and demanded that it be followed other than the Koran and the Ten Commandments, which were literally written in stone so they could not ever be edited. None of them demanded dogma or ritual to show their power.

It was the followers of the Great Ones who built the structures, created the dogma and invented the rituals that would define a particular religion based on what the current, second or third generation leader at that time felt was appropriate. Some of the rituals were appropriate for that time and place in history but no one was ever allowed to question them, so they could not ever be revised to accommodate ever-changing times.

Ritual is a specific way of doing something at a specific time with unique tools following unyielding guidelines. Ritual is rigid, uncompromising and unforgiving. Ritual carries with it the energy of power and associated fear. If you don’t perform the ritual in the exact manner, then somehow you have done a terrible thing and ‘God’ will not forgive you. No one is ever allowed to question whether or not the ritual actually ever does anything particularly spiritual for anyone.

There are very profound rituals that create a certain frequency and that have often been corrupted from their original intention. The original ‘Mystery Schools’ back in the mists of time, taught the physics of how these rituals worked and why they worked. They had a very specific purpose and a very deliberate outcome if performed properly. This is where the concept of the hand gestures called mudras came from, the use of essential oils, incense and prayers. However, along the way, many rituals became completely corrupted.

The original Mystery schools also taught the basic tenants of spirituality. These were eventually corrupted into guilt producing, stomach wrenching dogma. Being spiritual was originally believed to be able to take place anywhere, whether it was in a field of flowers, by the bedside of the sick or at your dinner table. Prayer was always appropriate and never limited to a specific grandiose building of wood and stone.

The concept of forgiveness was corrupted into the power to forgive and that power was invested in certain people who lorded it over, literally, the followers of that religion. Believe what we believe or you are not ‘one of us.’ We will require you to confess your sins, and only we can absolve you. Power was and still is the key here. The ritual of confessing sins to another person was a corrupted form of an individual speaking directly to God. The priesthood of all believers was the original tenet, not give your spiritual power to another to judge.

The other problem with this concept, of often dogmatic ritual, especially when it comes to confessing one’s sins to another is the concept that one mortal can transmute the karma of another. Six Our Fathers and Five Hail Mary’s will not transmute anyone’s karma. Lovely prayers each one, but they do not have the power to absolve someone of a terrible karmic act. No mere mortal, no matter how elegantly they are dressed, can absolve the karma of another.

Each individual uniquely defines being spiritual; no one has a monopoly on that definition. Perhaps each of us might wish to look long and hard at the ritual and dogma that often confines us in our belief system. Doing something routinely because you are supposed to without remembering why you are doing it is not being spiritual.

Just for a month, let go of ritual and dogma. Experiment with spiritual freedom. Perhaps then each of us can feel what it must have been like to walk with the Great Ones and know the freedom in the delight in the divine because we could feel that the connection to the Divine genuinely lived within us!

KS&L 375 Not so Sweet Surrender

by Tina Erwin

         Recently a friend of mine was talking about her fears and how hard it is to face these fears. She told me that she read somewhere that truly spiritual people simply surrender to spirit.

         I asked her what that meant. When you surrender to spirit what are you really doing, what does this mean for you in your heart of hearts?

         “Surrender,” she said, “means that you release, you let go and you let God come into your heart. What does the word mean to you?”

         “When I think of surrender, it has a whole different meaning. I suggest that we look it up. To surrender means that you give in, you give up or admit defeat. It can mean that you submit or stop fighting. It can also mean that you capitulate, as a defeated person. To me, surrender means just that: you lost, you were defeated, all of your power is gone.”

         She told me that she didn’t look at it that way, that she was now really confused. So I asked her if she had been fighting God. What had she been resisting that involved God?

         At this point, she was totally bewildered. I wasn’t trying to be argumentative, only working to have her see that the point of her statement was in and of itself a contradiction. If you love God, then you are filled with the love, the power and the protection of God. You are power ‘full’, not power ‘less’. In metaphysics, words carry tremendous meaning. If you love God, there is nothing to surrender because you do not give up, you embrace, you stand up to the challenge of the spiritual path. You find your courage. What courage is there in surrender, in admitting defeat?

         All of us at some time or other are filled with some combination fear, doubt, confusion and hopelessness. Surrendering to these feelings is not beneficial and means that you just let them wash over you because you ‘lay down your arms’, you submitted to the darkness. Standing up to fear, clearing doubt and confusion and finding hope in the future directly relates to finding your source of spiritual power.

         Spiritual power is the direct connection we have the potential to find. Our spiritual path is defined by our search for this connection. Everyone is on a spiritual path to the light whether or not they think they are. Every single day we live is a step either closer or farther from achieving that sense of the divine connection that defines that path.

         Every interaction we have with another person is an opportunity to have it be beneficial or detrimental. Never surrender to anything. Always, find a way to embrace your own light and the light of others. This will save you. This will help you to heal. This is light work in action. Those who choose to do this work do not wave the white flag of surrender but rather rally those around them with the bright hope of a better day.

         Strike the concept of surrender out of your spiritual dictionary. Replace it with the concept of courage, hope and dedication to the spiritual path that takes us all home to God. The divine loves us all. We are all part of the whole and no one can take that from us.

         Perhaps one of the most precious lessons to take from this concept of erasing the word surrender from your spiritual vocabulary is that words matter. What you say to yourself, about yourself makes a tremendous difference. Let those personal words be terms of greatness not capitulation or submission. The brightness of your own light depends on it.

KS&L 293 The Economics of Being Spiritual Part 2: Spiritual Practitioners

The truly dedicated soul seeks out a spiritual practitioner to help guide them in the understanding of not just their childhood, but also the other things that are happening in their lives and to awaken in them the understanding that they are here to evolve as souls. Perhaps that human spiritual guide helps them to understand themselves on a whole new level.

What is interesting about those who seek out a spiritual practitioner, if they are even fortunate enough to find a competent one, is the unusual fact that they are not sure how they feel about paying them. Many, many people feel that a spiritual practitioner should want to work for free, and should only work for free. Somehow, they should not need the money and that the money somehow negatively taints the process. Not everyone feels this way, but enough people do, that this part needs to be addressed.

People are funny. They willingly pay thousands of dollars for a five-day seminar but resent paying for the practitioner’s time. People pay for the knowledge they receive in a book, but resent paying for the tailored knowledge that is given to them focusing on their particular situation.

Finding a spiritual practitioner is a unique challenge. They are not listed in the phone book. They do not have any mortal credentials for who can certify them? You will not find any certificates on their walls proving they can do what they do, but when you find one who helps you, it can change your life. Karmically, if you are meant to find one, you will, otherwise, you may never even know that these people exist.

Consider that it may take lifetimes for that spiritual practitioner to get to the level of spiritual insight to even be able to take on a client. They will have studied all of their lives and seldom have a day when they are not studying, working on continually improving themselves, and they are always on call. All of them will have spent the time, effort and money on their own human teachers to get to the point that they can even think of taking on a client. Many of them never set out to do this work. Consider how tremendously daunting it is to take on a client who has been raped, is being possessed or haunted, is being controlled by a black magician or who is suicidal. Often, people just start calling them and so it begins. No one consciously wakes up one morning and decides to do this level of spiritual work for others. It just happens.

The energy it takes to handle even one client on a spiritual level is tremendous. When they give this energy out, they do it with a willing and generous heart. Many of them do offer the service for free, earning positive karma in the process. However, if they give all of this energy out without monetary gain, then because they are in mortal bodies, they end up with a serious physical energy drain. The karma of their service to their client is going to be returned to them one way or another. However, when the client does not offer something in return for the energy the practitioner pours into them then a spiritual imbalance begins to take place.

Reciprocity means that you give something for that which has been given to you. When you give it in gratitude to that person, there is a more balanced feeling between the two parties. Spiritual people still have to eat, still have to pay bills in mortal life. Many of them give and give because most of the time, their clients only call them when they are in dire straights and are penniless. It is as if karma forces the client to finally come to the conclusion that they need help beyond what a good psychotherapist can do. How do you put a price on the work someone does that helps you reconnect to God? How do you value what that person does to help you heal your broken heart or your fractured soul?

Many people are bitterly disappointed when spiritual practitioners charge for their work, and tell them so. Many do not realize that sometimes, you have to pay for what you receive and that to have even found one of these people is it’s own miracle. Payment also honors the lineage of spiritual teachers through all the mists of time. Spiritual law states that when a student is ready, a teacher appears. That teacher/practitioner may have no choice but to do this work: that is absolutely their karmic path and they have to take people whether they pay them or not. However, if and when situations become out of balance, they have the difficult task of trying to right the situation.

So there are economics to be considered along the way of spiritual growth. Sometimes you need to keep your purchases in balance and yet at the same time realize that you do have to pay for the knowledge that you receive. It is critically important to understand that sometimes, the money will be quite well spent. Other times you may not know how something benefited you for quite a long while. However, the spiritual knowledge you acquire, the growth you experience and the soul evolution you achieve are the only things that live within you, which you take with you at death. Sometimes, you just have to understand that the knowledge you may have paid money to acquire will eventually become priceless to you over time.


*This KS&L is dedicated to my treasured teacher Tashi Leo Lightening.

KS&L 292 The Economics of Being Spiritual Part 1

An interesting question was recently posed: do we have to buy ‘things’ to be spiritual, or can we just be spiritual without all of the accompanying paraphernalia and cost? Can’t we just be a good person inside without having to prove by what we own or wear or what books we read, or classes we take that we are spiritual? Can’t we just be spiritual all by ourselves?

The answer is, yes, of course we can. Millions of people are spiritual. We come into the world as very naked spiritual beings. Then we begin to work on our spiritual contract by learning about our parents, our family, our home and how much we are loved or in some cases not loved enough. Our spiritual education pretty much begins from the moment of birth. But we are not aware of it. Our norm is our norm and we usually would not think of that norm of home, school, relatives, toys and TV as having anything to do with being spiritual at all. But all of it is part of our spiritual education whether we realize it or not.

Eventually, we do become aware that we are having a spiritual education because we learn about morals, ethics, religion, God, and good and evil. Finally we do eventually become aware that we are in fact, learning about all the millions of tiny facets of love.

As time progresses, there becomes in some people, a growing desire to learn more about the more esoteric aspects of life. It usually starts out by wanting to understand why some people are just so cruel, why there is war and why bad things happen to seemingly good people. We begin to develop that kernel of desire to understand how everything works. That desire becomes the basis of everyone’s spiritual path. Some people will travel a very long way down that path, while others will be satisfied with about nine months of the journey and then decide that they now understand it all.

Eventually, the economics of the spiritual path appear. To understand more than just the basics, we decide to attend a class about something. Perhaps we suffer a death and decide to get a grief book to understand death and dying. Perhaps a natural disaster hits our family and we wonder if God is angry with us. All of these things are going to prompt us to want to explore the spiritual side of things more. Inevitably, that is going to cost us money. We have to replace the energy of the person who offered us the information and that costs money.

If we are part of an organized religion, we are going to financially support our church and the clergy who offer us their services. Are they bad people because they need to take money to support buildings, classrooms, property and salaries? Of course not, tithing has been around a long time and that means that people have to financially support that aspect of their spiritual path.

For the person who decides to really pursue the path beyond organized religion, it can become really pricy indeed! Classes with people of every discipline are thousands of dollars. Then there is Feng Shui. The cost of having a home or office Feng Shuied can be several hundred dollars. That is just the beginning. Then there is the cost of actually buying the ‘cures.’ Once we learn about the concept of creating balance in our lives, we will then want to continue to pursue this, by not just de-cluttering, but also by working on bringing in more spiritual objects into our homes, everything from angel statues, to crystals.

If we do nothing else, we will surely expand our library of books that help guide us in our health and emotional wellbeing. Books alone can become quite pricy. Yet, each book takes us that much farther down that spiritual highway. Perhaps there is just one concept in this book or that, that opens us up to a whole new level of understanding. What is that worth in the long trek toward soul evolution?

Let us not forget all the amazing metaphysical gadgets such as radionic devices that we can wear that protect us from electromagnetic energy or devices that balance the energy in our home. Some include precious stones such as diamonds and jewels. Some are more mundane but just as esoteric, such as pendants or pendulums. Are these necessary? They are necessary because as we raises our frequency, we become far more sensitive to the frequencies around us. The higher the frequency, the better we feel and often it takes a variety of devices to get us to those higher levels.

Then there are those forays into the darker aspects of metaphysics where many of us purchase Tarot cards or Ouija boards. We may pay to have our futures told by fortune tellers. Some call psychic hot lines - and that is pricy indeed! Are any of these experiences really necessary either? Perhaps in these cases, it is not a question of necessary but rather a question of learning. Sometimes we have to learn about the darkness before we can truly appreciate the light and we pay for those experiences.

All experiences teach us something. However, for the diligent student, the next step up the spiritual ladder is finding a spiritual practitioner, which is Part 2.