What is the wall preventing your spiritual growth? When we encounter a spiritual wall, it’s time to examine ourselves. Our beliefs and values are where we build the barriers that hinder our development.
What Are Spiritual Walls?
A wall is a barrier, a vertical structure that encloses or divides one area from another. A belief system is a structure like a wall. A spiritual wall is a mental construct that contains harmful ideological elements such as bias and prejudice.
“Every belief system has parameters, boundaries, limitations… these are walls. Some belief systems have more boundaries than others. If we are not progressing in our spiritual walk, it’s time to inspect our beliefs and values. Religious or spiritual beliefs are often the boundaries holding us back.” — Guru Tua
What are the Types of Spiritual Walls?
There are two basic types of walls, one to keep people in and the other to keep people out. The walls used to keep people out are religious exclusivity based on race, socioeconomic status, and specific religious beliefs.
Faith, belief, fear, and greed are the walls that keep people imprisoned. The comfort zone is yet another barrier used to keep people paying customers.
On the surface, belief and faith seem innocent, even positive, since they mean confidence. But, below the surface, you find they are attached to religious values based on the existence of an imaginary friend—God. God is the concept used by ancient civilizations to explain things they didn’t understand. It is a concept that asserts there is a magical being who made the universe and everything in it and is controlling everything.
Fears about the afterlife are a huge wall. It keeps people paying customers. People pay indulgences so they can go to a nice place in heaven and keep from going to hell. Greed also plays a large role; the property gospel tricks people into paying so they can get rich.
“The wall preventing your spiritual growth is belief in superstition. A wall is created when our beliefs and values grounded in myths.” — Guru Tua
The concept of God is one of the most formidable spiritual walls in our lives. It prevents many from finding their own path. Sadly, this wall is a common obstacle. Even people who do not follow an organized religion believe God exists.
About half of the population has an imaginary friend under the banner of the Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism (1). If you ascribe to one of the three religions, you won’t see faith and belief as types of spiritual walls. After all, these religions have all the answers.
““Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them”all the way through!” — Richard Rohr
There is nothing new in the Abrahamic religions. They are a rebranding of earlier ancient mystery religions from the Mediterranean. The Semitic faiths come from Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, and Persia mythologies. The Abrahamic religions adopted their recruiting and retention tools, self-hypnosis and group hypnosis.
They conveniently confuse the concepts of faith and confidence. We have confidence that the sun will rise tomorrow. This confidence is based on the evidence of all the previous sunrise events. You don’t need to have faith that the sun will rise, and it has a high probability of doing so.
But, religion uses faith as an assertion against the pertinent facts and evidence. The very assertion of faith is the denial of facts. And many are proud to proclaim they live by faith. It is why breaking down the spiritual walls in our lives can be so difficult. I correct them. I say, no, sorry, to be more accurate, you live by the denial of facts.
You pretend that something without proof has occurred, such as talking snakes, donkeys, and zombies rising from the grave. You pretend with all your might because your identity is tied to the mythology and superstition you hold dear.
“Religion as a source of consolation is an obstacle to true faith.” — Simone Weil
Our Beliefs and Values As Types of Spiritual Walls
The misuse of faith and belief are the mechanisms religion uses to overcome rational thinking. The mythologies and superstitions create these barriers. These contradictory and illogical doctrines justify irrational and harmful actions.
People come to love the obstacle that imprisons them. Believers see the answers given by religion as simple answers to the more difficult questions. Unfortunately, these answers are counterfeits and limitations to the truth.
Organized Religions capitalize on our most basic fears. For instance, our existential fear of death could propel us on our spiritual journey. Instead, organized religion uses it to sell belief in the afterlife. They use our most basic fears as a way of selling an ideology. Hence, building spiritual walls in our lives.
Many people compare religion to fast-food spirituality. Like fast food, religion is readily available; it tastes good but lacks spiritual nutrition. Like fast food, religion is habit-forming. Religion promises to fulfill a need it can never meet and requires frequent visits to maintain control. The primary reason for control is your financial support. The dogma of religion can not quench your spiritual needs, but you can become addicted to cultural programming.
Breaking Down The Spiritual Walls in Our Lives
All the great teachers, sages, and avatars of the ages have repeated this message repeatedly. They rejected organized religion. But instead of creating spiritual explorers, their teachings are used to keep paying customers.
If used correctly, mythology can be helpful. The important thing is to recognize mythology as fictional stories, typologies, and analogies, not the depiction of actual persons or events. You can glean useful points if you understand it as a collection of metaphors. But, if you treat mythology as fact instead of fiction, it can be detrimental. This confusion of facts with fiction is what happens with the creation of organized religion. Some religions intentionally substitute myths for facts. It is part of the effort to make belief and faith perform as legitimate facts about reality. This tactic skews our beliefs and values and distorts our moral compass.
It’s important to distinguish between harmful systems and those that are not. Religion becomes destructive when it promotes and programs bias and prejudice. The more racism and bigotry, the more damaging it becomes to its members and the world. Hate is a wall that separates people from their hearts and conscience. These types of spiritual walls in our lives become the justification for hate.
The major religions are still influential social institutions. They fight to maintain control of the cultural narrative. Their programming contains a significant amount of bias and prejudice, from sectarianism to genital mutilation. You can draw direct lines from most of the world’s wars and genocides to the religious sectarianism of these systems. When a religion hijacks our beliefs and values, it can program us to do anything, which is scary.
In contrast, some traditions are not harmful. For example, Taoism and many forms of Paganism have the fewest boundaries on thinking and encourage you to develop your path.
The Problem with the Easy Way Out
Joining a religion seems like an easy way to fulfill our spiritual needs, but it’s a trap. The mind tends to believe because it’s the easy way out. But there’s no question about it, and our reality is ever-changing. Breaking down the spiritual walls that religion builds to gain and retain its customers is not something they let go unnoticed. Religions protect their customer base with violence.
Every day we awake to new knowledge. So, the easy way out is to stay behind the wall. It creates a blind spot of perception. And the physical reality is but a shadow representation of the spiritual.
If your beliefs about spiritual reality cannot grow and change, you face a wall that prevents your spiritual and individual growth. Once you’ve reached the boundaries of your spiritual wall, you cease to grow.
Your spirit and consciousness cannot grow unless you climb the wall, go around the wall, or bring the wall down. There are two time-trusted ways to break the addiction to cultural programming.
How to Break Free
There are three primary steps to becoming a freethinker. Acknowledge that the wall preventing your spiritual growth is yourself. Since you are creating these boundaries that imprison your mind, you can break them down. Our beliefs and values need to be free of sectarian myths and superstitions. Breaking down the spiritual walls imprisoning your mind is good for you and everyone in your life.
Western religion prohibits your freethinking. After all, these religions want to keep you a paying customer. You must follow their superstitions and mythologies.
1) Step one admit this cultural filter exists and is harmful.
You must recognize and identify the thought scripts that hold your mind hostage. Realize the wall preventing your spiritual growth is the belief in harmful programming. To do this takes both honesty and courage. Sit down and write your core beliefs. We recommend the process known as comparative analysis.
Comparative analysis is a structured form of comparative religious study that helps you confront harmful and inconsistent beliefs by comparing yours with similar beliefs. It’s always easier to see what’s broken if it belongs to someone else.
Once you have a worksheet of your core values, you need to inspect them for anything harmful to yourself OR others. Just because a belief or value benefits you doesn’t mean it isn’t harmful to someone else. Here are some examples:
- You believe you have a disease, illness, or disability because of sin. In other words, God punishes you because you have done something your religious beliefs condone. (2)
- You believe you can kill because your religious beliefs tell you it’s okay to eliminate those who believe differently or have a different ethnic background or lifestyle.
2) Step two is to identify and break the programming.
If you acknowledge that the programming exists but think it’s okay, you are still under their brainwashing. Organized religions accomplish this brainwashing using self-hypnosis and group hypnosis techniques.
Brainwashing is a method of systematic indoctrination. Brainwashing creates a wall designed to prevent your spiritual growth. It takes a lot of effort and unbelief in facts to maintain belief in mythology.
So, you must use inner work tools to identify the harmful stuff. We recommend tools like the Enneagram to find the common thought scripts which link to trigger fear and anger.
Last but not least is the study of logic. Enhancing your critical thinking capabilities will help you break the habit of religion. The essential thinking toolkit will help you discern fact from fiction. These tools include Logic and Rational Thinking Skills Training, the Truth-Seekers Spiritual Axioms, and 10 Common Logical Fallacies. We’ve found these are the best tools to determine the facts from fiction. Using these will help return control over our beliefs and values.
3) Step three is reprogramming with positive thought scripts.
Don’t skip steps 1 and 2. If you try to reprogram without removing the defective programming, the old stuff will override anything new you try to change. Use mantras and affirmations to reprogram after you’ve decluttered your mind.
In Conclusion
“Anybody who gives you a belief system is your enemy because the belief system becomes the barrier for your eyes, you cannot see the truth.” — Osho
At the dawn of the 19th Century, many scientists and archeologists believed the truth would end the Abrahamic mythologies. They were wrong. The “need to believe” can overcome intelligence and science. The battle between science and religion continues with more casualties because they believe their political and religious pundits over scientists.
Overcoming the obstacles of faith and belief isn’t easy. Faith and belief are the primary weapons of religion. The wall preventing your spiritual growth is belief in mythology and superstition masquerading as facts and evidence.
What are the types of spiritual walls that are in your psyche?
However, we are not without hope. We’ve mentioned some tools which can help us triumph over the brainwashing techniques of self-hypnosis and group hypnosis.
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References
(1) Abrahamic Religions, Wikipedia
(2) Positive and Negative Religious Beliefs Explaining the Religion–Health Connection Among African Americans.