We like our Spirituality clean. That is to say we like our spiritual journey to be clean, neat, filled with lots of wonderful happy experiences, and love. If that’s all you want you can at best go,,, half way.
That kind of spiritual journey ignores or denies dealing with the ego, self importance, fears, and various other illusions in the mind. Coming face to face with your inner demons like the Judge, or Victim aspects of your personality are a dirty affair. Being honest with our lack of impeccability, how we judge our self, or other people, is humbling. Miss those opportunities, and you miss out on dissolving the ego.
This business of cleaning up and dissolving your fears is dirty as well. You can’t move through your fear of death, loneliness, or what others think of you, by looking at it from afar. Nope. You have to get dirty. Be present with with those fears,,, and stay aware and awake at the same time. That’s how your emotional body gets cleaned of fears and emotional wounds. If you try and stay “clean” in this work you will miss those wounds. You’ll end up having a nicely spiritual coat over your emotional wounds.
Challenge your inner demons and you will lose your attention to their tricks more often in the beginning than you will win. You will take your licks as you learn to play their game better than they do. You will have some falls into muddy emotions of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and perhaps even touch hopelessness now and again. With some good training, and practice you can keep your self clean. But you will get dirty along the way.
Yes this spiritual journey is dirty business. At least it can be that way in the beginning. Later, if you’ve cleaned up your emotional wounds, and dissolved your self importance, it takes on that bright sparkling look, and may even have a lemon fresh scent to it.
But for now, it’s okay that this spiritual work is dirty business.