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Spiritual Perfection

New Age doctrine is an oxymoron. According to the dictionary in my computer doctrine is “a body of ideas, particularly in religion, taught to people as truthful or correct.” Spiritual experience is as individual as a fingerprint because the meaning and purpose we place on things is personal. I find this the most endearing part of the Spiritual Movement, as the lack of dogma is where spirituality differs from organized religion. Unfortunately this is turning out to be less and less true.

The doctrine of spiritual perfection seems to be popping up more and more. I hear it when I talk to people. I feel it when I read books, not by what is being said in the book, by what is not being said. And like all dogma it can instill shame, guilt and fear into people since it tells us how we should be or what we ought to believe.

I began recognizing this as I was reading new age books. Not all books, however many of them. A feeling of inadequacy would creep up on me as I was reading. There in front of me was a full book of how to master abundance, happiness, open my chakras and many other topics. It appeared that all the authors had hit mastery and never looked back. How was it that I had been working so long on many of these issues and hadn’t hit that place of being past them? Sure I had come a long way, however, I still had my moments of struggles. What differed between the author and me? Was I a failure in the spirituality department? Or am I at a low level of spirituality?

The same belief of needing to be spiritually perfect would come up when I was talking to those around me. Sometimes friends would be berating themselves for attracting certain people or situations into their lives. By listening to them it became clear that they believed there was something wrong with them, and I could feel their shame. They too yearned to understand what they were doing or believing that made their divinity flawed.

More and more I would hear stories of people sharing challenges with their supposedly like-minded friends only to have their friends point a finger of blame at them for their apparent lack of spiritual discipline. A great example of this is when I mentioned to a friend that I wouldn’t be taking a course because I didn’t have the money to spare. He came back at me telling me that he didn’t want to hear it and I should work on my poverty consciousness! The funny thing is that I consider myself a very abundant person.

The point is that the Spiritual Community is hitting a dangerous place. We are so intent on mastering the laws of the Universe that our humanity is being forgotten about. Is the imperfection of our humanness so distasteful to us that we need to transcend it with the hope of perfecting our divinity? Unfortunately it seems like it. As authors omit their own continuous struggles with whatever topic they write about, and we blame and shame each other when we ourselves haven’t perfected our spirituality the doctrine grows more powerful.

I’ve said it before and I WILL say it as many times as it needs to be said – we are here to have a human experience. Our true essence is that of pure beings of light, and that wholeness never leaves us even when we take on these earthly bodies. We chose to be here to experience this humanity we try so hard to escape. Each of us is beautiful and it is our flaws, not our perfection, which enhances our beauty. It is the flaws that make us vulnerable, keep us humble and give us a reason to strive for excellence, not perfection.

I promise you that as a pure being of light that you are not and cannot be spiritually flawed. There is nothing in the Universe that is either more or less divine than you, as we are all one. Most importantly, you are on your perfect spiritual path at all times. Our job here is not to strive for divine perfection, it’s to learn to accept our so-called flaws which are nothing more than our human differences; the different ways we look, think, believe and behave from each other. Who’s to say that one way is better than another anyway? As Neale Donald Walsch wrote in Conversations With God (in more than one of the series), “Ours is not a better way, ours is just another way.”

Embrace your humanity.

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