New Age Spiritual & Religious Rituals Are Often Traps

Spiritual & Religious Rituals, Ceremonies, Chanting, and Drumming Traps Rituals and ceremonies abound in many New Age paths and often include the use of a variety of "sacred" objects, both natural and man-made. Generally, their purpose is to bring the participant into a more spiritual space. And if that were all they did, they would not be traps. However, spiritual/religious rituals and ceremonies often become the ends instead of the means. The ends become the feelings that one gets in the process of doing them, perhaps powerful energies or feeling good/high, or feeling God's love.

Stalking Wolf, a Lipan Apache whom I consider to have been a highly advanced spiritual teacher, taught that rituals, ceremonies and sacred objects were only beneficial in the beginning when we are learning how to tune in (Brown, 1994). Beyond that time, he considered them crutches. These crutches are rampant throughout almost all religious and New Age paths, and people almost never question their favorites. Condescending thinking often goes, "Your rituals are not very relevant when compared with my superior spiritual path and its vital rituals and ceremonies."

You are attached if you feel any more attachment to spiritual tools (such as rituals, ceremonies, drumming, chanting, sacred objects, and so forth) than you do to a little-used wastebasket in your house. If these "spiritual" items are important to you or you think they are wonderful, you have attached yourself to them. If you use such tools often or you feel any excitement about them, you are attached. You are focusing on the tool instead of the spirituality to which the tool is supposed to lead you. Often these attachments can and do fill psychological emptiness, as well as sharply limit spiritual development to the lowest spiritual plane, the lower astral plane.

"Ritual is the husk of true faith,the beginning of chaos." Change Your Thoughts, (Dyer, 2007, p. 186)