u/white_lotusWL

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

I know this saying has probably been interpreted in many different ways over the centuries, spiritually, symbolically, psychologically.

But lately I’ve been seeing it through a slightly different lens... What if “bringing forth what is within you” isn’t only about discovering some hidden divine truth? What if it also includes the parts of ourselves we suppress, reject, or push out of awareness? Because those parts don’t necessarily disappear, Sometimes they come back as anxiety, sometimes as repeating patterns, sometimes as reactions we don’t fully understand, And sometimes as experiences that feel bigger or stranger than we know how to explain.

The more I sit with the saying, the more it feels like it might be pointing to something simple but powerful. What is brought into awareness can be integrated.  What stays buried often continues shaping us from underneath.

So.... I’ve been wondering if Saying 70 might also be pointing to the process of bringing those hidden parts of ourselves back into awareness.

I'd love for you to comment your perspective as well, I am curious how others read this saying today.

I came across a line in the Gospel of Thomas today that I keep thinking about...

“Why do you wash the outside of the cup? Don’t you know that the one who made the inside is also the one who made the outside?”

When I first read it, I thought it was just talking about hypocrisy. But the more I sat with it, the more it started to feel like it was pointing to something a little deeper.

It made me think about how easy it is to work on the outside version of ourselves, the role we play, what we say we believe, how we present to other people. Meanwhile the inner world, the things that still trigger us, old experiences we haven’t really processed, the emotions we tend to push aside, can stay mostly untouched.

You can see this all the time in real life....Someone can look calm, wise, spiritual, successful… but the moment something hits a sensitive spot, the reaction is immediate. Anger. Defensiveness. Shutting down. Anxiety. Almost like the outside of the cup has been polished, but the inside is still carrying things that haven’t really been looked at yet.

It makes me wonder how much of our effort in life goes into the outside of the cup… and how rarely we stop to look at what’s happening inside it.

I’ve been thinking about something lately and I’m curious how others see it. Earlier in my work I used to do spiritual clearing and SRT (Spirit releasement therapy ) type work. Sometimes people would come in feeling like something was attached to them, influencing their thoughts, or creating disturbances in their space. In many cases the clearing process seemed to help them temporarily. But the longer I worked with people, the more I started asking deeper questions about what was actually happening.

What I began noticing over time was that even when something seemed to be “cleared,” the same patterns or experiences would sometimes come back later. That made me start wondering whether what we were interpreting as an external entity might sometimes be something internal within the person instead.

In psychology there’s the idea of fragmentation, where parts of the self split off during overwhelming experiences and later resurface in ways that feel foreign or separate. Those parts can hold memories, emotions, or identity states from a difficult period of life. If something like that surfaced strongly enough, I could see how it might be perceived as something external, especially if the person has been taught a spiritual framework that interprets those experiences that way.

So it made me wonder... What if at least some of what we call spiritual attack is actually the psyche trying to process something unresolved? Not saying that’s always the case, but it might explain why some clearings seem to help temporarily while the deeper pattern eventually shows up again.

Curious how others think about this. Has anyone come across similar ideas in psychology, spirituality, or personal experience?

I’ve been rethinking the way a lot of spiritual spaces talk about protection. So much of it is framed as shielding, blocking, guarding, scanning for threats, or constantly trying to keep something out. I understand why. If someone has felt overwhelmed, destabilized, or spiritually impacted, that language can feel reassuring at first.

But over time I started noticing that too much focus on protection can also keep a person’s attention locked into fear, hypervigilance, and the assumption that they are always under threat. Lately I’ve been seeing it differently.... It seems like when someone becomes more coherent internally, more grounded, more aligned, more present in themselves, a lot of what felt overwhelming either loses its grip or stops affecting them in the same way. Not because they built a better wall, but because there is less fragmentation to hook into.

So I’m curious how others here see this. Do you think coherence, inner alignment, and embodiment may actually be a deeper form of protection than shielding and defense?