Spiritual Milestones
This came up in the podcast and was worth discussing.
One of the reasons I’m so adamantly anti-consistency in this blog is because I spend a lot of time talking to people who have confused their control issues with universal standards—particularly when it comes to spiritual issues. They want to know exactly how they’re getting helped, what it means, when everything is going to happen, what to look for, etc. They want to know how they’re going to feel about it and what they’re going to do about it. They want to prove everything will happen they way they want it to, and sometimes to find that one detail that lets them know for sure that it’s all fake.
Either way, it’s a pain in the ass.
The other reason is that I’m paying attention when the lwa speak. One of the most consistent topics I hear the lwa speaking about in possession is people’s control issues, particularly where it comes to expectations and the demand that reality do what we want.
Some of those control issues are to be expected, because control is very much a human reaction to change, and specifically a fearful reaction to change, which is how most people greet it. It takes a fairly hefty amount of personal development to greet change with anything but fear.
I was asked on the podcast how you know you’re getting spiritual milestones. I talked a bit about control issues there, but I’ll expand further—in a practical way, you know you’ve achieved spiritual milestones by the changes in your life, your character, and how you act. Those changes are fundamentally surprising. They’re not what you wanted, not what you expected, not what you thought. Even when you’re hitting a milestone for a specific character trait, it will still express itself in a way that you could not have anticipated.
If it’s entirely what you thought without any surprises, you probably didn’t hit a milestone. A true epiphany is weird by definition.
That fear response from control issues is never going to let you fully predict, anticipate, and understand a spiritual milestone. It’s typically a distraction from doing the work that will get you to that milestone and an exercise in futility and self-indulgence. Attempting to enforce conformity and consistency on a world which has very little of both is always futile and as self-indulgent as masturbation.
Nothing wrong with masturbation, as long as you know it’s not leading you to spiritual elevation (by itself.)
