How Beliefs Impede Spiritual Progress

The Mind’s Version of God

Perhaps the biggest impediment to spiritual progress is your ideas about God. Only when you are able to still the mind, and are free of all ideas, can you truly know God.

The vast majority of people identify with the ego; the false sense of separateness created by past conditioning. The ego maintains control over your awareness through incessant thinking. You think about the past, comment internally on what happens throughout the day, and daydream about the future. Instead of living in the moment you live inside your own mind.

For those who interpret reality through the ego-controlled mind an idea that correctly represents reality is called a truth. You hold your spiritual beliefs to be true. Yet they are nothing more than ideas in the mind. And ideas are only mental representations of reality; they are not reality itself.

There is a deeper truth that cannot be accessed through the mind. It is experienced directly beyond the limitations of thought. Ideas can at best lead you to the experience. And at worst they keep you from the experience. Your awareness remains trapped within the confines of the ego-controlled mind, and you are unable to perceive the deeper reality.

Religious Beliefs

According to Meher Baba, every 700 to 1,400 years the world savior incarnates on earth to help all life forms draw closer to the divine. The world savior teaches us how to free ourselves from the thinking mind and experience the deeper truth.

After a world savior drops the body, a group of people get together to form a religion around his life and teachings. Often these people are not spiritually advanced. They are unable to experience the deeper reality. Instead they are under the ego’s influence and interact with reality through the mind. As a result the teachings of the world savior become obscured by religious doctrine. The methods of experiencing the deeper reality are supplanted by ideas about God and the spiritual path.

The followers of a religion are not taught how to move their awareness beyond the limitations of the mind and experience the divine directly. Instead the goal of a religious person becomes having the right set of spiritual beliefs. And his awareness remains trapped within the confines of his own mind.

The Idea of a Separate God

The infinite formless unity permeates and sustains everything in creation. There is not one thing that is not the divine.

A person who is under the ego’s control feels as though he exists within the confines of the body. And everything outside the body is a separate object. God become just one more object that exists out there apart from you.

Experiencing the Divine in this Moment

The mind creates the illusion of time—the concepts of past and a future that have no independent reality. When something occurred in what you call the past it occurred in the moment, in the now. When something occurs in what you call the future it will occur in the now. Everything always happens in the eternal now. But the mind breaks up this one moment into separate moments and calls it time.

For the person who interprets reality through the mind, God is something you encounter in some moment other than now. Yet the truth is that the divine can be experienced in the here and now. You need only learn how. And perhaps the easiest way of finding this moment is through the enlightened teachings of Eckhart Tolle.