Transcending Polarity: Healing from the False Guru and Rigid Religions (EP23)

What dogmatic BS from the church or elsewhere has kept you skeptical of spirituality and religion? What unclean spiritual teacher or unhealed parental wounding has now kept you skeptical of authority figures? How is all of this resulting mistrust blocking you from the receptivity to direct experience, spiritual depth, and support?

This episode is a continuation of Transcending Polarity, EP22, but it can be listened to independently. Note that EP22 describes a map through which we are analyzing these topics. The map is of a triangle where the two base corners are in polarity with each other. The bottom left corner of the triangle is a power-under position, and the bottom right corner is a reactivity to that, with some form of individuation attempt. The top of the triangle is the healed version of both put together, where there is integration, wholeness, clarity, and true power.

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This podcast show is for people dedicated to spiritual awakening, spiritual practice, psychology, healing work, collective healing and awakening, and global positive social change. 

This podcast show explores meditation, mindfulness, consciousness, spiritual awakening, and spiritual growth, with a strong focus on personal healing, trauma healing, emotional healing, and somatic healing. We dive into nonduality, embodied spirituality, the true self, life purpose, and spiritual practice, while also addressing shadow and integration themes like spiritual bypass, ego-death, root causes, and holistic healing. Episodes draw from psychology and attachment theory, as well as ancient wisdom traditions, esoteric wisdom, energy healing, and indigenous wisdom, offering grounded insights for seekers on a path of inner healing, wholeness, and deeper realization.

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1:30 - Dogma, Atheism, and Direct Spiritual Experience

10:19 - The “False Guru” Archetype: Being Duped, and the Problem with Mistrust

21:43 - Where are you and your culture stuck?

25:10 - Concluding reflections and takeaways

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Keywords for the show: meditation, mindfulness, consciousness, spiritual awakening, spiritual growth, personal healing, trauma healing, emotional healing, somatic healing, inner healing, nonduality, embodied spirituality, wholeness, grounded spirituality, life purpose, spiritual practice, enlightenment, realization, the true self, ego-death, spiritual bypass, attachment theory, psychology, root causes, holistic healing, energy healing, ancient wisdom traditions, esoteric wisdom, esotericism, indigenous wisdom, bhakti, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, sangha, Divine Will, spiritual ascension, collective awakening, collective healing, global ascension, connecting with angels, and connecting with spiritual guides.

Keywords for this episode: Spiritual teacher, spiritual guru, false guru

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Transcript

0:00

the intuition shows up, that can say, something feels off here.. But then there's a part of you that's like, oh no, but there are my authority figure, so I must be wrong. No, that could actually be a real intuitive thing, what happens when we overrode ourselves so much and we got into this whole mess. Now we finally freed ourselves from the mess. The problem is now we're in a place of mistrust. I'm not gonna bow down to any authority. I'm gonna be rebelling against anyone who might actually be able to. Truly guide me and protect me this time, so what's the receptivity that we've closed ourselves off to receptivity to maybe real teachers, maybe real enlightened masters. Those actually exist. few and far between, but they do Welcome to the Ground of Love. I'm your host, Olivia Frazao. This is a podcast for people who are deeply dedicated to the spiritual journey. You are here for self-growth care, for others, and being of service to the world. This podcast is in service to you to help you remember who you are and why you are here, you will receive inspiration, clarity, and no BS Love. We are walking each other home. Let's begin. This is part two of a two episode series on Freedom from Polarity. So let's continue where we left off Now let's look at spirituality. And we're gonna look at spirituality in two different ways. So let's go to spirituality in terms of your relationship to truth. Here we're talking about organized religion in the form of dogma when religion goes too far and basically becomes falsity in the name of God. So here they are saying, oh, this is the truth. This is the truth. God says so, or This is the truth of God, or This is what's true about God, or whatever. But actually it's the wound mind of the human being. Psychological self becoming rigid, having misunderstandings. Being righteous, and thinking they know what they're talking about, and actually believing that it's spiritual truth, but it's false. It's false in the name of God. That's gonna be the bottom left corner. Okay, that's gonna be ignorance, but not realizing that you're in ignorance. The bottom right corner is a reaction to that. The reaction to that historically in Europe was called the Enlightenment, ironically, because that's not what enlightenment is, that's when logic of the thinking mind and science of physical materialist. I wanna see proof in the physical world through the scientific method we're born. Now, I love philosophy and I love science. This is not anti those things, but this is becoming aware of what happens when we are being reactive to something versus additive. So we'll get there, but I'm purposely trying to create some, um, extremes here so that you get my point. I understand that different historical times are great and weird for different reasons. Okay, so let's just simplify this. We have the dogma on the bottom left, on the of the triangle, right step. Step two. I'm gonna call this the reactive atheist. Okay? This is people who have gone too far in the other direction. This is people who are physicalist or materialists. When I say materialists, I don't mean I wanna spend money and buy a lot of new clothes. I mean, materialists, meaning you think that 3D physical realities the only thing that exists. Because whatever you perceive with the five senses is the only thing that you're gonna trust. And this is where the thinking mind thinks that it is the one that's gonna find the solutions and the reasons and the answers for things. And so what has just happened is we have locked ourselves in to the human psyche as the source of information. This has locked us in inside of the egoic self, only trusting the egoic self. On a spiritual standpoint. That's like spiritual suicide. You have just removed your capacity for connection with the divine. You've removed your capacity for your intuitive capacity. You've removed your capacity for understanding that reality, true reality is actually found way beyond the perception of the five senses. But what have you protected yourself from? You've protected yourself from all the BS that all these other guys are spouting at you which to be honest, is also coming from being locked into the egoic self. But it's even worse on the dogmatic side of things because they're stuck in the egoic self too. But they're saying that it's God, you're stuck in the egoic self, and at least you're saying that it's your own mind or your own theories or your scientific method, right? Saying that God is the one that's telling you the truths that are total bs. I mean, that's a really tall, that's a big mistake. So at least you have freed yourself from that big mistake, right? You have run from that falsity, but the loss is massive because you've lost God. You've lost your open doorway. To God, at least on the dogmatic side of things, there is still the opportunity for a real connection with God as long as you don't get, as long as you have the grace of that happening despite all of the baggage that's also getting in the way. So both basically, they're both terrible for different reasons, and they both have some kind of an open doorway that if you put them together could be really great. So what does it look like to put them together? What's the best of both of these kind of messed up worlds. What would be the third part of the triangle? Remember, we're looking at dogma on the one side, a reactive atheism. On the other, the top, what would it be? It would be direct experience of the divine direct experience. So dogma is an attempt at being with or finding or talking about or experiencing the divine, but getting lost in that attempt and getting stuck in mental rigidity. The other one is an attempt to. Free oneself from mental rigidity in more of an exploratory, let's say philosophical or scientific method of exploration of experience where the goal is direct experience. So they both have an open doorway, but we need to actually get the best of both and drop the limits from both. So the best from, let's say the scientific side, right? The atheist side is, hey, let's find out. Let's actually do an experiment and live through it and see what happens. That is the call towards direct experience. Don't just tell me something that someone wrote in a book. Let me live it for myself. That is the beauty of taking that way of doing things and combining it with trust and faith in God. And now you're at number three. Now you're at the location of direct experience, which is my spirituality, my true experience of God. Nature is going to be through, let's say, the scientific method, but on a multidimensional level, what is that meditation I'm gonna find out for myself through my direct experience. I'm gonna try things out. I'm gonna run some experiments inside of myself in my own contemplation, in my own opening of my heart and my own surrender to that which is greater in my own deep listening to what's really in there beyond the noise of my thinking and the noise of everyone else's expectations and dogmatic teachings. And I'm gonna actually listen deep within to have a direct experience. And what happens in that direct experience, it's the direct experience of the divine. Yes. You guys see how this triangle, it's always the same. Both sides of the triangle have something good, but they're distorted. No matter what the triangle is about. And then the top is actually the combination of both of the good things and none of the distorted stuff. So just as a summary for this one, dogma is the not good part, but faith in God is the good part, right? Of organized religion, okay? That's the first location, bottom left, second location, bottom right. Wanting to find truth that's not just imposed upon you is the huge plus here. The loss, however, is a mistrust in that which you cannot perceive through the five senses or through the thinking mind or through the physical world. And because of that mistrust or even total lack of belief whatsoever, you've actually locked yourself out of the majority of being this. So finally, with the grace of God, with personal focus. We hopefully are then able to experience transcendence from both of those locations and land into a real direct experience. And also remember how part of the mechanism of this map is that you, sometimes you go back and forth, back and forth, just like victim perpetrator, go back and forth with each other. The dogmatic thing and the atheism thing can also go back and forth with each other, where maybe at a certain time of your life, you're in one and another time of your life you're in another. And then based on where you are at, maybe your kid does the opposite to you, right? Or maybe it's society can go certain ways, like maybe in for a certain time period. The society is more religious and the society is more atheist and the society gets more religious, right? Where is the direct experience? That's what we're really looking for. Where's the direct experience of the divine? So within yourself, where do you find yourself Location one, two, or three. In that triangle. Okay. One more. This is also about spirituality. This time it's how does this triangle show up in terms of your relationship to other beings, to other people or to other beings? Okay. Guides, angels, deities, God itself. Let's look at this. Here's the triangle. Ready? In the bottom left corner, you have given away your power. Are you seeing the parallel here to all the other ones? Remember in the one that we just did about dogma, you've given away your power. You've given away your power to the church, to the priest, to the bible, or whatever other religion's, versions of that is. Every religion has their own versions of those things. Who the leader is, what the text is and what the community says culturally, or what the rituals are and what the rules are, right? You're giving your power away to that structure. Okay. Now, in this. Triangle. It's similar, but now we're just honing in on giving her power away to a particular person. So this is like the false guru archetype, okay? This is people who've given away their authority to some kind of a teacher, spiritual leader, mentor that they trusted, um, some kind of authority figure where you put the power in that person, okay? And you're trusting whatever the other person says, more than you're trusting yourself. Now, remember this triangle, like that would be the child position as a child. That's what you're doing with your parent, obviously, right? You're three years old. You trust what your parent says, and that to you is ultimate truth. Where in life did you just impose your child self with a parental figure as an adult between you and another adult? Oops. So this is where we're honing it in to find out like, where am I doing this? Right? Or maybe you did it in the past and you already caught yourself. Because sometimes when you're in this location, when you're in the the first step, right, the bottom left location of the triangle, sometimes it's hard to see that you're there'cause you're so in it. But when you come out of it, you're like, oh my God, that was crazy. Right? So let's say we've come out of that, let's say we had this false guru kind of situation. And it could be on a spiritual level or it could be simply, like, in your friend group, when you're in high school, you think the cool kids are always right about everything and you believe everything they say and then later you realize it actually, they have no idea what they're talking about. Or maybe there's a famous person that they don't have to be a spiritual leader, but they could be some other type of leader that you really trusted. And then you realize that actually they don't really know what they're talking about, et cetera, right? So at some point there's some kind of a disillusionment where we put our trust in that person. What we really did was we externalized our authority. We gave our authority away, and we gave them the control, and we decided that they knew better than us. Sometimes that's actually the case, but unfortunately in the situation that we're talking about, we did it with the wrong person. Okay? That's the whole point. Now, once we realize that we're gonna go to the other extreme, we're gonna be on the other side of that binary. We're gonna say, well, now I only trust myself. What does that mean? Now I am mistrusting other people. Now we say I'm in control. What have we gained? We're gaining individuation. This is the teenage role or location of our healing process. We are individuating by pushing away from others. We are regaining our sense of control and our sense of empowerment. What's the issue though? The issue though, similar to the teenager who doesn't even want a hug from their parents, let's say, is where's connection here? Where's the capacity for receptivity? Receptivity is the top of the map. We have no receptivity when we're on phase two, when we're on the right side of the map, bottom right of the triangle, we have closed ourselves off because we don't trust. Before we were like way too permeable. We were letting the other person throw us around, not necessarily because they were right, We're not the victim here where we're being actually abused. I mean, maybe that's also overlapping with this example. But in this case. This person may have never even had a conversation with you. Maybe it's someone you're following online or something. Okay. It could be all the way to like a really creepy cult situation, or it could be a really light, superficial version. But where have you given your authority away as an adult? You've given your authority away to another adult thinking that they are somehow superior to you thinking that they're somehow more powerful than you, more right than you. But actually they're also wounded. They also have blind spots and maybe they actually have helped you a lot, but you kind of overdid it and you're believing absolutely everything rather than having discernment and being like, oh, I'll take this, but I'll leave that. Thank you. Right. Sometimes this is important because sometimes this situation is so extreme where you realize you've been completely duped and you're like, oh my God, this person's malevolent, creepy, da da, da sometimes, and this I think is the more important place because it's less obvious, so it's worth focusing on more. This can be people who are 90% really, really helpful, and 90% really on the mark, but 10%, everyone has their human wounding. Everyone has their blind spots and their mistakes, but unfortunately, you gave them a hundred percent of your trust and a hundred percent control and a hundred percent authority, that's on you. They didn't ask for that, let's say in this case, but somehow you're like, oh, great. Someone who I can just, you know, have. Me tell me what to do with my life, right? There's something there where we're actually potentially allowing ourselves to be in the child position because we don't wanna take responsibility. We don't wanna have to be in control. We don't wanna have to own our own power, because that takes work, that takes responsibility. With great power comes great responsibility. So sometimes it's actually more comfortable to want to be dependent or to want to say, oh, you're so great and I'm unworthy of all of the power that you have, right? There's something there that got stuck in a lack of power within ourselves. So I'm just looking at different examples and different ways of maybe why we may have gotten stuck or why we might somehow perpetuate that. So now let's look at that middle step. Right now we're in step two, the other side of the binary. This is a reaction to realizing that you had actually been in a disempowering position. It's a reaction. This has a loss of connection. Okay. And unfortunately, if we're not careful, we can become arrogant, we can become impermeable to feedback, we can become really self-focused, and we can think that we are the ones that have the control. What's the issue here and how is this a spiritual thing? The issue here is we have actually put ourselves in a position where because we are protecting ourselves from being receptive to that person who we probably should not have actually been so permeable to, or we actually should not have actually listened to them so much, or we actually should not have trusted them so much, and that's accurate and we know that now. The issue is we're throwing out the baby with a bath water. Now we're saying, I don't trust anyone. I don't trust healers because I had this one healer who did this weird thing. I don't trust spiritual teachers because I had this spiritual teacher who's weird and who did this thing, right? So instead it's like, whoa, how can we actually have discernment from the get go? So we don't end up in those situations. How can we understand that someone who is in a place of being a spiritual teacher or being a healing practitioner or anything like that, 99.9999999% of the time, you're dealing with someone who sure, professionally might be in a place of authority. But let's be very, very aware, and by the way, this can be your priest or your who, whatever religion you're in, whatever spiritual leader of, of your spiritual community, or your temple, or your synagogue, or your church or whatever. We need to really get that person is a human being with blind spots and flaws and mistakes. So we always have to have our discernment o online. We always have to have our own inner intuition. That's like a filter through which outside information comes through that can say, beep, beep, beep. Something feels off here. Right? Rather than the filter happens, right? The the intuition shows up, beep, beep, beep. But then there's a part of you that's like, oh no, but there are my authority figure so I must be wrong. No, that could actually be a real intuitive thing, right? That's important to listen to. What happens when we overrode ourselves so much and we got into this whole mess. Now we finally freed ourselves from the mess. Now the problem is we're in reaction to that mess. Now we're in a place of mistrust. Now we're in a place of, oh yeah, I'm not gonna bow down to any authority. Oh yeah, I don't trust you. I'm gonna fight you. I'm gonna be the teenage, the teenager who's rebelling against anyone who might actually have really good ideas, who might actually be able to. Truly lead and guide me and protect me this time, right? So then we become closed off. It's like you had a bad situation with a previous boyfriend and now you don't trust any future boyfriends, right? You've closed yourself off to connection. So what's the receptivity that we've closed ourselves off to receptivity to maybe real teachers, maybe real enlightened masters. Those actually exist. Extremely few and far between, but they do maybe a real lineage or a real spiritual path that's clean that could help you. And even if that stuff feels scary, that's okay. We don't even have to mess with the in between. How about real God itself? Divine absolute beingness beyond form, beyond any name, beyond any religion. Just go to the wholeness. Do we have receptivity to that? Or whoever it was who was our priest or spiritual teacher or healer or whatever, gave us such a bad taste in our mouth or our ex-partner who, you know, claimed to be so spiritually evolved, and that's who you learned about spiritual path from. But then you realize that they had no idea what they were talking about. And now you have trouble finding your own spiritual path or your own experience of whatever God is to you, because whoever this person is that now you had a bad experience with, they, they gave a bad taste in your mouth and now you don't, you, you're having trouble finding your own path or your own truth right? Now some people are listening to this and they're like, okay, okay, Olivia, you're talking about this for such a long time. This isn't my experience. So like, who really cares? Are you gonna the next example? Or like, this isn't relevant for me. Let's get very, very nuanced about this particular topic for a moment. Okay. Because I would say, for example, that certain countries or certain cultures are in different locations of this map. I am gonna name it in a slightly different way. Okay. Bottom left is you saying to someone else, like random human, not the one in one, in a billion enlightened master, but random human. What you're saying to them is you're in control. Number two is bottom right. you're saying, I'm in control, screw you. I'm reclaiming my control. I'm the one who I'm doing everything right. And then the top Number three is the divine is in control. So for example, looking at the American culture, where is American culture mostly stuck in the bottom two. So where is it in our culture that you see people giving themselves in ways that you wouldn't to some kind of spiritual path? And where is it that you're so afraid of that, that you end up locked in to your own ego itself, being in your personal will, and there might actually be a difficulty bowing to the divine. I'm spending so much time on this because when I say the word surrender to someone, surrendering to the divine, or surrendering to that which is greater or surrendering to the heavenly beings who hold us and guide us, or surrendering to God's, will a lot of people freak out? Or if I say bowing, bowing to God, bowing to the divine, bowing to that which is greater. I'm not defining God in any particular way. Like you take that word and translate it to whatever it means to you. I'm not here spouting, dogma, and yet even someone who knows that about me, they're still gonna freak out by the concept of bowing or the concept of surrender. So where are you in this map? Where are you? So anti the people who bow to the false God kind of vibe, where it's really hard to bow to whatever real God actually is. Where, for example, even the word God freaks you out, potentially, or the concept of putting your head on the ground freaks you out. Why does it freak you out? Or this word surrender freaks you out. Why? Because there's some kind of trauma, there's some kind of unhealed, some kind of wound, some kind of abuse, some kind of loss or pain or betrayal or falsity that happened where now we're stuck in defending ourselves and we can't be receptive and open. When we talked about feminine and masculine, what's the unhealed masculine within the patriarchy? Same thing. I'm in control. Egoic will, I'm in control. That's the hyper masculine in the patriarchy, right? And so everyone is now in the hyper-masculine within the patriarchy all genders. I'm in control now. I'm competing against you to find out which one of the two of us is in control. Now. We're all competing against each other to see who is the most rich and famous, who's in control. So what does it mean for our spiritual path to actually be one of, now I'm gonna go through the triangle again, okay? But only the top of every single triangle that I've given as examples. We're gonna do only the top. Now. Feel this, ready, only the top of all these examples. You are an autonomous adult who has the capacity for and the experience of both connection and independence. You experience power within yourself and you're able to share power with other people and have power shared with you, from other people. You are free. You feel power within. There's nothing to fight for or against. You have forgiven and been forgiven. You're free from the battle, and you're in a place of peace from the whole victim perpetrator thing. Your spirituality is one of direct experience of the divine because you are receptive and open to offering, giving yourself, giving what? Giving the part of you that thought it was in control, giving the part of you that was defending itself against previous pains, and just letting all of that go and being receptive. And rather than having a thought of what God is from some book or someone else's teaching, or rather than being afraid of spirituality or of the divine, because of all of the BS ways that it's been abused and misused, we're actually totally open and receptive to a direct experience of reality. So pick one. If you want to, as we're concluding this episode that you might wanna take a look at what most speaks to you here. Are you gonna look at maybe the concept of the psychological development child, adolescent, adult? Do you like that as the, the way that you're looking at the triangle, or how about the cultural level? Does that speak to you? When we look at the patriarchy, feminine, masculine, and union of power. Maybe that's where the language speaks to you most. Or how about victim perpetrator and a transcendence from that spiral or something in terms of the spiritual experience of some kind of a dogmatic way of seeing things or giving our power away where it shouldn't be, and then some kind of reactivity to that where we close ourselves down and kind of separate ourselves from it actually might be a path to God for us to, divinity for us, to union for us, and then something that actually reclaims that divine connection where we're able to be receptive and open to direct experience. So I hope that you can take this map forward and look at maybe one area in your life where you're working on healing from something. And you can take a look, where am I at? How can I look at whatever I'm going through through this lens of this triangle and see how can I find transcendence from the binary, from the polarity where I can actually have union of the best of both worlds in a place of peace and wholeness blessings. thank you for being with me in The Ground of Love. You can follow this podcast to receive the next episodes, and who is it that comes to mind to share this episode with? Who Could Benefit? Is it a family member? A friend, a client, who would be inspired, reminded of what matters to them by being in our energy that we've shared here today. So please go ahead and pass this along to them and go ahead and leave a review or a rating if you wish. I thank you for that. For other offerings that I provide, you can go to the ground of love.com I also provide one-on-one healing sessions and I will also be offering a group membership. All of that is on the website, the ground of love.com. Blessings to you. May you be protected, held, regenerated centered. And taken forward with all light, love, truth and highest and best health and wellbeing on all levels and taken forward to make the greatest, most beautiful impact doing exactly what you're here to do. God bless you. Protection, grace, protection, grace. So it is.