Manipulation and guilt ( spiritual narcissism)

[Adrian colby]

A member of my personal spiritual group totalling 12 people ( we bonded and supported each other after surviving a badly run ayahuasca retreat 5 years ago)…he put up a reel talking about “manipulation and guilt” where the main idea is not creating expectations by doing a favour and projecting blame when there is no reciprocity. He suggests keeping to one’s self and not spreading the blame, cutting off the feeling and keeping it within so as not to spread the mindset or negativity that goes with it.
 

I understand and agree with not placing responsibility for one’s happiness in another person because if they don’t or never respond, the feeling of disappointment and even rejection can be painful and a lot of people react to that pain with anger and push the person away by blaming them and projecting.( not understanding that they set up the expectation in the first place so creating a sort of self fulfilling prophecy)

The danger in overemphasizing non-duality is that it begins to devalue the emotional, social, and ethical texture of being human.

The way we relate to each other is essential for human coherence and reality navigation. In the same way, realising the non dual nature of reality should integrate not negate the duality. Like projecting right or wrong onto something when the thing is neutral till meaning is attached. Meaning can be attached and is necessary for purpose in rationalising. regarding the manipulation and guilt issue, while it’s important to take responsibility for one’s own actions, emotions and states of mind, the whole point of reality which can also be understood as real, reality, relate, relationship… it’s about form relating to other form or the ‘one’ as ‘many’ relating to itself from multiple different perspectives ( like mirrors reflecting itself to create feedback and information)

In order for one person to relate to another person there must be reciprocity so while we can take responsibility for our own actions and the way that we feel, nobody learns anything unless there are consequences.. shutting off any relationship with other people when their behaviour crosses physical, emotional, or conceptual boundaries does not teach the other person to learn. There is nothing against which the other person can relate to in order to correct themselves.. if we are in loving relationship with our community and we send out our own love as our true state of being and that love is not reciprocated then there is no community. There is no harmony or coherence creating a ‘whole’.

humanity holds itself together through loving coherence, love and relationship, meaningful relationship, openness, vulnerability and the capacity to lower entropy by reciprocating communally. if a person is not capable of feeling any guilt for an action that they have carried out then it means that they quite possibly don’t have any empathy and are so detached that they live in isolated circumstances. 

I understand that guilt is not a feeling that someone should be feeling or residing in but it may be just a tiny spark that pushes someone towards developing and understanding rather than wallowing in prolonged guilt. It’s energetically an informational push toward understanding something- understanding a mistake and rectifying one’s behaviour in order to get along with the rest of the community in harmony.
so being able to hold other people accountable and ourselves accountable at the same time (not in a guilty way, not in a punitive way) but in an understanding and loving way. this is where we live in harmony and if it’s based in love, compassion and understanding then the community is harmonious, coherent and stable. ( not all people are at that level of development and do need to be contained)

if I were to take responsibility and I mean ultimate responsibility for everything that I do everything that I feel and everything that I think, I’m just allowing people to walk all over me or to completely shut them out altogether without placing any responsibility in their court, there would be no relationship. If I love someone of course they need to reciprocate that love for us to have a relationship. It is not my responsibility to solely love someone and have them just walk off.( I can love someone unconditionally at the same time but there is a reality here that I am participating in as a mind, body, identity)  If I communicate with someone directly, there is a responsibility on that other person to respond because not responding is just me living in an isolated fantasy world and also rude of the other person especially when there were no ill intents in the communication. Cutting someone off for being rude is not a form of manipulation or guilt.  it’s trying to hold somebody else accountable for their behaviour and lack of relationship in harmonious community.. 

what I’m describing is the necessity of integrating non-dual insight into the relational, dual world we actually live in and experience. Not as escapism or bypass. 

Taking full responsibility for your own feelings, thoughts, and actions does not mean giving up the boundary-making, relational feedback, or moral structure that makes communal life viable. If that were the case, abuse would be perpetually tolerated, and meaningful dialogue or correction would be impossible.

There’s a critical difference between:

Blaming and projecting in reaction to pain versus Naming and communicating how someone’s behavior disrupted mutual harmony.

Guilt in compassion leads to self-reflection and change.

Guilt in shame becomes paralysis or deflection.

So when someone feels no guilt and cannot register the impact of their actions, it’s not “freedom from guilt”—it’s a lack of empathy and attunement. That’s not enlightenment, it’s a relational void.

Many people use the “you are responsible for your own state” trope to shut down relational repair. the One as Many implies relationship. The One knows itself through form—through us, through love, through mutual reflection. You can’t have mutuality without responsibility. Without that, you get spiritual narcissism.

many teachings of personal responsibility go to the extremes of isolation and fail to teach integrating insight into embodied life. And that means relationship, consequence, and communal resonance. Not living in a cave of detachment, nor burning bridges with projections but walking a fine line with nuance. 

When someone hurts us and we express that pain, we’re often told “That’s your trigger. That’s your work.” Sure! there is wisdom in tracing our emotional reactivity back to its source. But this doesn’t mean we should endure mistreatment or abandon our need for relational integrity. To be human is to relate. And to relate means to impact and be impacted, to feel and respond.

spiritual maturity includes: Owning our emotional reactions and Naming when someone’s behavior is harmful or incongruent. This is not guilt-tripping.It’s not blame or emotional manipulation. It’s feedback grounded in care.

this is where I start to notice Leo’s insistence on learning about politics and humanity. We can sit in higher mind states and understand how it all works but that’s useless if you come back to this level of distinction and try to push it on people in situations where it makes absolutely no sense to shite on about non duality. A lot of spiritual teachers have been becoming disillusioned by the whole ‘spiritual movement’ and dropped right back to helping people struggling with trauma and basic mind traps because it seems non dualists or the greater spiritual community have forgotten that our lived human experience is also a part of the whole thing so negating it is essentially bypassing an entire section of reality. 
 

im not innocent in this. The excitement of having awakenings about non dual nature was the biggest thing at the time and the topic of conversation but also a put down to those not yet in that stage of development. Recognising that was a big shift in realising I was actually bypassing the experience and learning of relationship, family, friendship, community, society.

in a sense when I recognise that I am also now starting to see the pattern in myself using that as a put down to the non duality people when it’s likely they are simply just at a particular stage of development as well that hasn’t recognised that it is at a stage of development.

its why I’ve started gravitating back towards people who simply still live in ‘this world’ to try and bridge the gap between the void and the experience and take the whole thing together in one big generalised understanding. 
 

this occured after one of my group was really struggling and the others rejected them and shut them out because they had cried wolf one too many times. It wasn’t that they kept doing it, it was that no one was meeting him where he was at. No one was showing any compassion or understanding that the crazy or horrific story he was telling had an undertone of crying out for help. It’s very easy to push someone away when they claim they are going to do something horrific but it’s another thing ( shadow love) to hear that there is a tormented soul crying out underneath it all. While I was lambasted for engaging with him, I continued to be there, to listen and gently guide him through his feelings. 4 days later after sticking with him, he  is not going to go through with his threat, he is stopping drinking and is not going to go to anymore psychedelic ceremonies as he has now realised that like the drinking, he’s using the ceremonies to bypass and sooth/ relieve himself of the emotional pain. We’re going to continue to sit with it and find the pattern or deep rooted self beleif that caused it. We’ve already identified some patterns that weren’t already known so he’s had some lightbulb insight moments already. It’s small but it’s more progress than in a year. 
 

now how could I do that if I had turned around and blamed him for emotional manipulation or guilting me. I have the capacity to help a friend and protect my boundaries at the same time. If I claim to be a friend then I would hope that I had the capacity to show up, support or even just listen without judging. For the rest of the group it looked like it was a nuisance disrupting their positivity and fun because as soon as he left, they completely redirected the conversation. I don’t blame them and they certainly wouldn’t be capable of holding space for someone but I’m also repeatedly dissapointed myself that none of them even bothering showing up for a coffee. You can be a friend and spend time with me or you can tell me to stop being emotional and go away and deal with it instead of ‘projecting’. At what point does the word friend loose its meaning here. At what point does the” do you want to go for a coffee” imply that I’m imposing when I’m expressing to spend time and actually nurture our relationship?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Rafael Thundercat]

Wow, great insigths. Tell me more about this Aya retreat and what happened. I also had some horrible experienceS

[Adrian colby]

On 11/06/2025 at 10:16 AM, Rafael Thundercat said:

Wow, great insigths. Tell me more about this Aya retreat and what happened. I also had some horrible experienceS

It was an ex estate agent turned ‘shaman’ who ran the retreats between Ireland and Majorca. It was similar to the likes of “inner mastery” ( I think they paid for a shaman course and got let loose with their first batch of ayahuasca straight after) no initiation or lineage from any specific culture. 
 

it was effectively a drug fest pushing every plant medicine they could think of for extra price outside of the ceremonies. And certainly things that shouldn’t have been mixed within 24 hours of each other. 
 

I had never heard of psychedelics or spirituality when I had my first awakening. I was contemplating and deconstructing conceptual frameworks and the self when it happened so I went looking online to see if anyone else had experienced this and then I came across people describing it after taking 5Meo ( enter Leo 🤭). 
 

I found this ayahuasca group advertising ‘Bufo’ so I booked myself in with the intention of furthering my exploration of consciousness and the nature of reality. The induction meeting was with this facilitator ( I won’t even give her the honor of the name shaman) and she was immediately dismissive and very judgmental saying that they only dealt with emotions there. After lecturing me for a solid 20 minutes I was nearly ready to get up and tell her “fine, I’ll leave then!” But decided I’d have to be a bit disingenuous to get through the weekend to get my Bufo experience because I wanted to contrast it against what I experienced during my meditation at home. 
 

The ayahuasca didn’t really speak to me on either of the nights but I was instantly surrounded by wide eyed seekers, trauma victims, addicts etc who were infactuated with my talks about non duality ( I later discovered the way I described things was fairly similar to Leo’s framework that was better understood by western people than it was to understand the mess in spiritual, religious or new age language, so I had them hooked on every word as they started going through mini realisations. 
 

the ceremonies were an experience in themselves while I sat meditating through it, I heard, screaming, moaning, shouting, crying… it was like sitting in hell which I’d never experienced the likes of before. I was very reserved and generally had a great dislike and distrust of people but when I woke up looking into the eyes of the guy beside me, listening to a beautiful piece of music, I was overcome with peace and a feeling of love. 
 

that weekend wasn’t about the medicine, it was about connecting back to humanity to find that the people were all the same and just struggling to get through their problems and I developed a deeper empathy and understanding for them.

during the integration and sharing circles, the others in the group reminded me that the facilitator kept dismissing what I was saying even though I was drawing analogies to different ‘direct experiences’ I had had. Like astral projection or reality jumping which I used to do a lot when in my teens.

 

the Bufo was certainly intense. Again everyone around me was puking, screaming, crying but I was still and quiet. I experienced what I now know to be source awareness, a step back from consciousness godhead. It was similar to my sober experience but energetically more intense because it was forced by a substance… so I decided because the experience was similar I could use psychedelics to explore further but I really wanted to develop my mind to do it sober ( I kept a regime to strengthen my mind so I could dissolve during my practices and explore those states sober as well. 
 

I returned to the retreat on a few subsequent weekends to do more Bufo for contrasting the experience to be sure but the aftercare and support chat group fell short. We had video calls with the facilitator to continue sharing and integrating but there was so much control over what was talked about that no one was actually able to express. The group eventually started dropping out and eventually there were only a few of us left. The facilitator started changing her attitude towards me and came to the conclusion I was actually quite spiritual ( being trans, this flew in the face of her beliefs and started dissolving her trumpism echo chamber)

I eventually received an invite to a different chat where all the participants I was with had jumped ship and set up a space to support one another as they were sick of the control and dismissal of the facilitator. 
 

I then started hearing the stories of what had happened with others, the way they were treated, shouted at, shamed, subsequent retreats some of them went to where someone nearly died and had to be resuscitated, someone who became a danger to everyone and punched the facilitator out cold then attacked everyone else, a police raid mid ceremony, bad energy and demons entering space etc etc! Some of that is just bad mindset but the health issues was a serious concern. 
 

plenty of complaints started surfacing across social media and the facilitator eventually said she was leaving and not coming back because the country had a history of begrudgery. 
 

my own group stayed together and still are till one of us dropped after having a stroke and heart complication and it catalysed something in me where I fell in love with them and the same happened with the rest of the group. We effectively fell in love with each other and I use that term to describe a deep sense of connection to other people we’d all never felt before. We quite literally love each other and the bond started at that retreat. While it was a shit show, it brought us together. 
 

im just watching some of the group go through a non duality trap , I think but then again, I went through it myself so I should be patient.