People go to extreme lengths to recruit people into their religious system, ideology, or institution. And even when they get someone to join, it’s not actually helping them. Because instead of freeing them, they are leading people into spiritual bondage and captivity.

What I mean by that is that they pass down their own unprocessed generational dysfunction, unexamined corruption, subjective moral absolutism, lack of ethical coherence, stagnation of human consciousness, and selectively enforced standards of religious rules, values, or expectations. And so, in this way of attempting to convert others into the same frameworks of belief, belonging, and ethical inconsistency, all of which have never been genuinely critically examined, these same dysfunctions and patterns are passed on—often intensified—to the next generation of adherents.

And in practice, when it comes to these standards of rules, values, or expectations—standards that are being enforced not because they’re fair, principled, or coherent in ethical reasoning, but because enforcing them keeps existing hierarchical arrangements, power dynamics, and group norms intact—these enforced norms, religious beliefs, and institutional expectations are applied inconsistently, depending on who you are, how much power you have, and your position within the hierarchy, where selective enforcement of standards has become a normalized feature of the system itself, revealing a system that exploits moral language to justify coercion, to silence questioning, and to punish deviation from prescribed group norms.

That’s why I’m grateful to be spiritually awake now in my own relationship with the divine, outside of imposed rigid doctrinal frameworks, where in this spacious atmosphere of spiritual sovereignty and psychological autonomy, my path is free from being mediated by external religious authority figures or institutional religious control. Because very often, the people in these environments who wanted to convert me have only wanted me to make myself smaller, to give up my own higher faculties of thought, and to sacrifice my own integrity and authentic selfhood, all in order to join them in their own unquestioned conformity, ideological rigidity, ethical inconsistency, and arrested inner development.

And that by embracing a relationship with God outside of externally enforced religious control, I was finally free to meet God in the way that was most authentic and true to me in my own individuated relationship with that energy, where I could finally grow in alignment with my own conscience, inner knowing, and ethical discernment grounded in lived experience, all without interference from external religious authority figures, communities, or institutional agendas that very often required me to shove God into a box and suppress my own intelligence and discernment.

Because if I’m being honest, with where I’m at now in my own journey of breaking free from religious strongholds and rigid religious conditioning, looking back, it has only been intellectually stagnant people that have tried to shrink my mind, dull my discernment, and recruit me into their religious conformity and stagnation of human consciousness. And part of the reason the first half of my life was marked by confusion, self-suppression, and inner fragmentation is because religious people didn’t lead me toward any kind of sense of spiritual freedom, self-trust, or feeling of being worthy—they actually transmitted their own unexamined limitations onto me, their lack of self-worth, and their deeply ingrained institutionally reinforced shame, effectively making me carry the psychological and spiritual weight of what they themselves never had the courage to reckon with.

That’s why I’m glad I started doing the inner work years ago and began the long, necessary journey of breaking my soul free from a lifetime of inherited religious conditioning, imposed self-erasure, and belief systems in general that demanded unquestioning submission at the expense of conscience, independent thought, critical reasoning, and personal boundaries—systems that never truly honored my dignity as a human being, my spiritual autonomy, or my right to grow and think freely.

And while I understand that without going through those experiences of psychological containment and ideological restriction, without going through the abuse from religious authority figures in my family, in institutional environments, and within broader religious communities, and then without going through being disconnected from my own spiritual sovereignty, I wouldn’t have the knowledge, wisdom, and understanding that I’ve come into today. But at the same time, I really wish that life hadn’t required so much pain, confusion, and self-erasure just for me to arrive at my own internal sense of spiritual freedom.

But then again, I guess that’s life—where our suffering, when honestly faced, it can become the very catalyst that returns us back home to ourselves, often to a place we may have never even been allowed to know before, and that despite the damage done by these religious institutions and the people within them who operate from unexamined authority, unquestioned dogma, rigid certainty, ethical inconsistency, and overbearing control, something essential within us can survive, reorient itself, and come back online. And I think that’s very beautiful.