Spirituality that ignores or covers up our inevitable dark or undesirable sides is doomed to be bitten and burned by them. Models of realization that involve high ideals of human perfection have caused so much dejection, despair and misguided effort throughout the ages that I have no qualms about doing my very best to try to smash them to pieces on the sharp rocks of reality. They are not completely useless, and there is some value in keeping the standards to which we aspire high, as we will see in the next chapter, but most of the time they are taken way too seriously to be helpful at all.

It is clear that those who adhere the most rigidly to the self-perfection models of enlightenment are also very often those who believe enlightenment is the least attainable and feel the most disempowered in their practice and spiritual life. Not surprisingly, those with the highest standards for what realization will entail often have the lowest standards for their own practice and what they hope to actually attain in this lifetime. They are the armchair quarterbacks of the spiritual path. Becoming grandiose about aspiring to a high ideal seems to be a common coping mechanism for dealing with a lack of confidence and insight. As Christopher Titmuss, one of my best and most honest teachers, often says, “We do not come from a self-perfection lineage.” There are those who do explicitly come from self-perfection lineages. I wish them good luck. They’ll need it.

MCTB So What's Full Enlightenment