Does Spirituality Always Lead to Suppression of Emotions and the Violation of Ethical Standards?

I just came across a wonderfully written post on the dangers of “spiritual escapism,” which leads to suppression of emotions and violation of ethical standards: https://substack.com/@hiromitsumorita/p-186689527

Hiromitsu and I had a wonderful exchange about this. I agree fully with him about te potential dangers of spiritual escapism. I also pointed out that these dangers are very different on the paths of knowledge (nowadays known in the spiritual supermarket as “non dualism”) vs the paths of devotion (often mistaken for being limited to popular religion, but often going deeper than many who pride themselves on being non dualists)

Here is one of my comments:

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Whatever purely Knowledge-based non dual teachers say in theory, in practice, we are making use of a portion of our mind in the process of Self inquiry (withdrawing our attention from all objects of experience and redirecting it toward That in which all experience takes place).

And that mind is associated with egotism.

Something that Ramana Maharshi emphasized over and over again, which most of his followers ignore: As long as we “feel” that we are separate, the assumption of God, to whom we surrender, is necessary.

Otherwise Self Inquiry can just build up our subtle, spiritual ego, we ignore ethical standards and we end up trying to suppress thoughts and emotions.

However, in the process of surrender from the heart, the more we give of ourselves, the more we can have a deep spiritual intuition that there is some Power infinitely greater than “me.” (Of course, there are different kinds of dangers on the devotional path, involving excessive indulgence of emotionalism, rather than suppression, but that’s another point!)

This path of self giving and surrender is the path of the Christian, Sufi, Hindu, Buddhist (Pure Land, in particular) Sikh and Jewish mystics ). At some point, this spontaneously transitions into Self inquiry. So ultimately, the seemingly dualistic path of devotion and the apparently non dualistic path of knowledge blend into One (or more accurately, beyond all that we conceive of as “One”!)