Superficial Spirituality – A culture built on taking power rather than giving it

I want to talk about some really big things brewing inside of me. I feel a bit like I’m talking to myself but these are things I need to say out loud – to hear and have documented, so I can reflect on them afterwards and come back to them.

The Intuitive Intelligence Symposium is coming up in September both online and in Tuscany.  As part of that, I’m doing interviews with some of our keynote speakers such as Howard Martin of Heart Math, Renee Baribeau, a Hay House author, and a shaman I spoke to today.

As a result of these conversations and planning for the future of the Intuition Symposium, I’m thinking about what is the future of intuition?

What does it mean to me and for my Institute training women as intuition masters and spiritual leaders?

What is the future of intuition and how are we going to get there?

These conversations normally happen inside the Third Level, but I want to share it more broadly so that people can understand the difference between going and doing a full week learning how to read oracle cards compared to spending a year training as a contemporary mystic and a spiritual leader.

I’m not sharing it as a pitch for the Third Level. Rather, I want to speak about what I’m doing to contribute to the future of intuition and how I feel it is the responsibility of spiritual leaders and teachers to be investigating their own lineage, what they’ve learned, the quality of what they’ve learnt, and to see what is actually empowering others vs what is taking power. 

Unfortunately, a lot of what happens in the name of intuition and spirituality has been built on a foundation of rareness, specialness, or gifts.  Even if we talk in the language that everybody has the capacity to open to their intuition, we still are privileged in this idea that some people have it more naturally and innately than others. So we’re still creating the idea that there are some people who are more entitled to have access to our intuitive intelligence and applied intuition than others.

The reason we’ve got that kind of culture in spirituality is that there is a power differential. If someone who you think has more power than you, you are more likely to go and invest in them.  That’s what the “guru” culture is built on, this idea that we have to go and sit at the foot of someone who holds more of the God-consciousness, more of that infinite special magic inside of them than we do.  That somehow, we will be infected or impregnated with that energy. The guru culture is coming to an end globally because it is a problem. It’s an abuse of power and those systems of power are coming down.

We don’t have to look very far to see that the systems of power everywhere are coming down.  I’m not talking just about Indian Yogis.  I’m talking about the self-styled gurus that Sharon Holmes talks about.

There are a number of high-profile white spiritual leaders who are being brought in to question their integrity and authenticity. The whole system is being questioned and we’re talking about political systems and economic systems. Anywhere there has been the subjugation of power, where someone’s power has been based on taking power from somewhere else.

Unfortunately, so much of what happens in spirituality when you’re training has been built on the idea that someone has power, and to get that power you have to go and sit at their feet and subjugate to their power. That is a really good business model if you think there’s someone who can do something for you that you cannot do for yourself.

I want to stop that. I don’t want to be party to that anymore and I don’t want anything that I do to look like that.

I guess that’s why I’m kind of speaking to myself right now because I really want to make sure that the way I speak and what I offer is full of integrity. And if it isn’t, to take it further. To go deeper.

So, what is the future of intuition?

How is it different from the model of paying someone to read you, to look at your energy field, to read your future, to give you insight into big questions of your life, to heal you or to aspects of your emotional psychological, physical, or spiritual pain?

What is an alternative to that model?

An alternative to that is in exactly what intuitive intelligence is.  The future of intuition is intuitive intelligence. This is self-initiated so it is possible for us to be masterful in and standing our own life situation with intuition.

Intuitive intelligence is about recognising that you really are changing your perception of yourself and coming home to the truth that you are God or the infinite. The self-initiated, self-reliant intuitive is the future of intuition, not this culture that we currently have that goes under the guise of spirituality. I think that actually has nothing to do with spirituality.

The only ways in which I believe it is ever appropriate to put yourself into someone else’s care is so that they may gift you the capacity to know your own intuition better so that you may be more empowered in your own intuitive knowing.

What is intuition?

Intuition is the language of your soul. Therefore it is the language of God. If the services that you seek move you from fear to love, which, by the way, is the formula to increase your intuition,  then that person is in integrity. They are authentic. They are showing up to their spirituality in accordance with the laws. As a result, the work they do for you will empower you to not need them anymore.

I speak to my Third Level priestesses about this. If you’re doing your job well you, make yourself obsolete. If you’re doing your job well, your client will no longer need to see you. Depending on the individual consciousness of the client, they may need to see you a few times. But ultimately if you set up a paradigm where that client has to see you more than four or five times, then you’re actually setting up a paradigm that is the old model of intuition. It’s not even intuition. It’s this co-opting of intuition into a kind of conversation that has nothing to do with what intuition truly is.

Intuition is a private commune between you and God. It is not up to someone else to have that communion for you. 

There are going to be things that prevent you from being able to hear that communion. Those things are all one thing and that is fear. That fear might be in you for many different reasons but ultimately it doesn’t matter. Anything that is fear is preventing you from knowing your true nature.

So to seek out someone who can help you know yourself better, to teach you how to do this for yourself better, to scaffold you to do this for yourself, is acting in integrity. To go to someone who behaves as though they have a key to unlock your soul and that only they can do it and you can’t do it is to act out of integrity.

I hope that difference is painfully obvious. I don’t want to continue to bang on about it if it’s obvious, but I think for a lot of people it seems like they’re going to someone to seek support and become empowered, but they’re actually going to someone to give away their power.

When I speak about an energetic scaffold, I would say the women I train are energetic scaffolds. An energetic scaffold is someone who can hold you temporarily so that you may meet yourself as God, or infinite unlimited consciousness, and have that clear channel of your God-consciousness without mediation. Temporarily it is sometimes required because of the level of fear that we might carry. When someone else does that for us, they hold us to show us and remind us of our true nature and to guide us back to those places that have become foggy and clouded to our reasoning conscious mind.

There’s a deep science to this which I’m not going to go into right now, but that is the paradigm of what I would see as the future of intuition. The energetic scaffold, the spiritual director, the person who guides you or directs you back to yourself. Not someone who guides or directs you back to their services so that you need to spend 12 months with them and do their things because they know the answers and you don’t.

An energetic scaffold holds you whilst you may self-initiate into your own deep intuition. It’s vital that we self-initiate because we know if someone does the work for us, it’s going to be temporary. Even if you go to someone and they seem to answer all your questions and seem to heal your body, there’s a very good chance that those states of being are temporary. Because until that becomes your state of being in a permanent way through self-realisation, nothing can stick. You haven’t altered your subconscious program.  You’ve got a temporary band-aid. It’s a temporary conscious program where it feels good not to have to take responsibility. Self-initiation is the difference between the temporary healing and the permanent healing.

It’s vital that we are trained to self-initiate. Everything that I teach – from my initiate programs right up to the Third Level to the now postgraduate program – is about “how do I become self-reliant”.

If you are with someone who is doing the work for you then that should be your first red flag that there is something very wrong.

They are part of a system coming out of that guru model and it’s causing so much harm. It has caused so much harm and that’s where get into the danger of claiming special magic powers for yourself.

I get very nervous when I see this and I get very uncomfortable when someone says they’ll add you to their list and send you healing or do a reading or  pay them the money and they’ll bless you with their magic or they’re an intergalactic portal to the 29th dimension or they’re the only one who can access that information because they have special access to the dead people that have come before you. Claiming special magic powers for yourself is an act of spiritual supremacy. I’m quite consciously using that word that I am borrowing from unpacking my own white privilege, my own white supremacy.

This is part of a challenge that Leila Saad is running and I’m recognising that so much of the problem is in racism and. What Leila is highlighting when she’s pointing the finger at a particular brand of spirituality is their superficial spirituality where we use spirituality as a way to gain power over someone else. That kind of acquisition of power is what our culture is built on. Success is this idea of having power over someone else and that if we are higher ranking, if we have more money, if we have more prosperity, or if we have more followers, then we’ve somehow succeeded in ways that other people haven’t.  That model is the opposite of everything that we’ve been told is true.

We’ve been told by multiple studies that our true nature is not competition. 

The Darwinian notion of competition has been debunked multiple times in every place that you look. These are scientific peer-reviewed studies. The optimal amount of competition for a species to survive is zero. We’re not meant to be in a culture where we are attempting to gain supremacy or control over others in order to feel power. Power that is attained through the acquisition or the reduction of another person is not power, it’s abuse.

I’m speaking to myself right now  – remember I started this saying I’m talking to myself right now. I need to say these things out loud because I look around me and see the perpetuation of suffering because we are continuing to build false temples and false idols.  This idea that we can put our power into someone else’s hands or into the trinkets and superstitions of the New Age and somehow get what we need is wrong.

This idea is being perpetuated by people who I honestly believe think they’re doing something good. They’ve never stopped to investigate it.

I want you to investigate your spiritual practices. Always investigate your spiritual practices. Question everything.

Are you teaching people to place power into external objects or external people, or are you teaching people that the power that they’re seeking can only be attained through themselves?

Are you teaching people that they are the power?

It’s going to be uncomfortable as hell for people to hear, and it might lose you some followers, and it might make you less popular because you’re no longer offering free readings. But make sure you are doing something that has the integrity of what you showed up to your spirituality in the first place for.

We can imitate the bullshit rules we’ve inherited of a contemporary superficial spiritual culture. Or we can have the courage to question why we have built a culture of spirituality that is an attainment of a lifestyle, or behaviours that appear to be spiritual but do not actually behave that way.

I hope it’s apparent what I stand for but if there are any places where it’s not apparent, then I will do my darndest to change those things.  It is vital to me that you know the Institute has always claimed to be revolutionary, to lead a new conversation, and to take us beyond the trinkets and superstitions of the new-age.

I request of all of my sisters in the year-long Third Level training that you put down your trinkets and superstitions. Don’t play with your crystals with the intention of trying to get wisdom out of them. Don’t play with your oracle cards. Don’t engage in the habits and behaviours that you are desiring to break free from.

In that year, you learn how to become one with what you are which is God. At the end of the year, if you want to pick up those things, you can. You see me wear my crystals and my mullahs. I love these things but it’s safe for me to have them because I do not have any sense that my power or authority lies in those things. Just as I do not imagine for one second that my power or authority lies outside of myself.

Questioning our spiritual bullshit rules is uncomfortable work and that’s what it should be. We need to identify where we are engaging in things that are simply trinkets, that are superficial engagement with our spirituality, and where are we actually taking ourselves and others to meet themselves as God. If we’re unwilling to do that work then there’s a very good chance that we have a very superficial spirituality.

I would love to see some engagement around this. If you feel moved by this, if you’re angry with me because of this, if you want to ask questions, if you want to push me or interrogate me, please do that. I don’t want you to necessarily feel safe and comfortable with what I’m saying.

I’m asking for a revolution!

I’m asking for us to stop engaging with the superficial spirituality. I’m asking for us to take our power and to recognise that we are God and that takes a lot of self-responsibility and a lot of unpacking of the places where we’ve behaved in ways that have perpetuated suffering. I just don’t want to do that anymore.

Thank you so much for being here and please don’t hold back. Let me know how this makes you feel. Let me know if you think that that there are things you need support around with this.

RJ xo