Modern Spirituality is Profoundly Wrong About the Self

A deep dive into the world of spiritual gurus, and what religious writings really say about the self and the way to deliverance

This essay is long, perhaps necessarily because of the topic, so I have divided into three parts, I- The state of modern spirituality, II- The questions of the human condition, and III- Real spirituality.

I — The State of Modern Spirituality

It’s trendy to imagine the self does not exist. Everyone in the world of spirituality from Eckhart Tolle to Rupert Spira, even to the torch bearer of the new atheists and meditation endorser Sam Harris, in fact anyone imbibing the Westernising of Eastern religious ideas has come to fancy that all they are is pure consciousness waiting to be realised.

Yet what can this possibly mean? Spira, to name one, says: “the illusion of separation arises when we believe that the one infinite consciousness is limited to the body-mind. When we identify solely with the body-mind, we create the illusory ego or separate self. Upon investigation, however, this separate self is never found. The reality lies in the one infinite, indivisible, and unnameable whole that underlies all appearances.”

The problem with this kind of language is that it actually doesn’t mean anything. Eckhart Tolle uses similar kinds of bungled spiritual language, he says in The Power of Now: “The pain-body consists of trapped life-energy that has split off from your total energy field and has temporarily become autonomous through the unnatural process of mind identification…”

The obvious problem here is that however you get there, be it reading these self-styled guru’s books, meditating, practicing mindfulness, the very act of ‘enlightenment’ remains an act of attention, and an act of attention is an act of cognition that requires a mental unity that can only be described as the self.

After all, whatever enlightenment Spira might possess is nothing that couldn’t be taken away by, say, a stroke that caused significant memory loss. To wake up each day and still be enlightened requires you to remember that you experienced enlightenment as a realisation with actual memorable contents. There is an ironic and inevitable duality to these gurus claims of nonduality, made inevitable by their self-promotion, books, youtube channels and endless waffling about how they have come to realise they are “infinite, indivisible” yet also want you to pay two grand for their seven day retreat.

It might be tempting to think I am criticising a proposition that is far more sophisticated, but these figures really have little of substance to offer when it comes to unravelling if they actually can present anything beyond category errors or spiritual language that veils a vacuous, pretentious and self important philosophy.

Spira, again, says the essence of his philosophy, which he takes from Vedanta is that: “Peace and happiness are the nature of our being, and we share our being with everyone and everything.”

It’s an interesting solution to the problem of evil and suffering to just say it doesn’t exist because everything is peace and happiness, but what seems to remain is the inescapable observation that such a philosophy is one of the comfortable and the entitled. What of suffering? What of evil? What of the path of life? Why is one person enlightened and another not? Why does Spira’s unique brand of enlightenment seem to be limited to well-off Western people who like bland minimalist decor and pot plants?

Yet Spira is so convinced by his philosophy he will take it to extremes, arguing we are conscious during deep sleep because we apparently have the experience of sleeping or not sleeping well the next morning. He suggests deep sleep, (and so presumably by extension all unconscious states), is “the awareness of absence”, a nice sounding little phrase that says, well, not a lot other than that you wake up the next morning.

Not only is this ridiculous, but it is not to be found in the Upanishads. While schools of interpretations vary on how the Atman-Brahman identification constitutes non-duality, Spira’s simplistic silliness is not to be found. In a passage in the Chandogya Upanishad, Indra is seeking an understanding of the Atman, our true self, from Prajapati. Each time Prajapati sends him away with a suggestion of what the self is, causing him to return each time after realising the futility, first of believing the self is your reflection dressed in finery, then yourself while happily dreaming. To each Prajapati points out that time and death and suffering can take these things away and they must be false. Prajapati then suggests it is the self in deep sleep that is the real self, and again Indra comes to a similar realisation: “If a man is in deep sleep without dreams he cannot even say “I am” and he cannot know anything. He in truth falls into nothingness. I cannot find any joy in this doctrine.”

I would imagine Spira’s version of Vedanta is one that doesn’t require you to actually, you know, read the Hindu scriptures. If he did what you find is something far more beautifully expressed and far more mysterious than what is bungled into the neatly packaged phrases of modern spirituality. Rather than the glib dismissal of the world of reality Spira suggests, what you find is the basis of all religious enquiry, a recognition of the fact that everything is ephemeral, that attachment or identification with what you cannot hold on to cannot be a source of deliverance from the human condition.

Yet nothingness is not itself deliverance either. To be in a state where you cannot even say “I am” and cannot know anything, is not to be desired. While Indra recognises that identification with the self of your reflection that will age and die cannot provide salvation, neither can anything that does not contain your very self knowing.

Interestingly Spira’s ideas are not completely modern. In his ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’, the publication of his 1901–2 Gifford Lectures, psychologist and philosopher William James describes a trend he calls “the religion of healthy mindedness”, or more simply “mind cure”. He describes ideas floating around making similarly vague propositions to Spira, about identifying with the “infinite spirit”, one teacher saying “the first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness or depression is the human sense of separateness from that divine energy we call God”.

William James makes a similar observation about “mind cure” as I have about Spira, which is that it is a philosophy of optimism that simply ignores the problem of suffering or evil. He says “Philosophers usually profess to give a quasi-logical explanation of the existence of evil, whereas the general fact of evil in the world, the existence of the selfish, suffering, timorous finite consciousness, the mind-curers, so far as I am acquainted with them, profess to give no speculative explanation. Evil is empirically there for them as it is for everybody…mind-cure has developed a living system of mental-hygiene…This system is wholly and exclusively compacted of optimism. Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.”

James goes on to note how the particular character of this philosophy plunders much from protestant Christianity, particularly its ideas of the moment of conversation and the doctrine of emancipation by a kind of realisation that ‘you are saved now, you have but to realise it’. As James puts it “the mind-cure with its gospel of healthy mindedness has come as a revelation to many whose hearts the church Christianity had left hardened.”

It’s peculiar to note that Spira claims to teach what he calls Vedanta, but is in fact teaching something far more akin to the feelings of Christian conversion and Calvinist election, mixed with a kind of obstinate optimism. What happens to consciousness when you’re asleep? It’s there, you’re always happy and at peace all the time, just realise it. No criticism can assail the walls of this philosophy because Spira has decided it shall be true and its terms are vague enough to be held on to.

And of course, as William James points out, this must be classed as a kind of religious experience. He included accounts of people genuinely brought to a better state of mind by “mind-cure” and no doubt people have been by Spira or Tolle, but ultimately beyond noting that certain elements of religious experience can be plundered for a kind of mental therapy, to those sincerely seeking truth, little else is to be found.

II- The Human Questions

Yet what these philosophies present is not nothing. As William James points out, they provide a path to an increase in wellbeing for some people, and they have common elements with religious ideas, however simply they may purloin from them. But the questions they leave unanswered and the errors they make might require many more serious minds to wish for more.

For one thing, if enlightenment is a realisation of some universal truth, how does an individual mind seek it if said individual mind has no meaningful existence of it’s own? Spira does not believe in free will, and how or why enlightenment comes to one and not another is unclear.

But as I pointed out, as much as suffering is ignored in such a philosophy what must be ignored most of all is the genuine reality of the experience of self. Spira does not know what it is to be non-embodied consciousness because his entire shtick is dependent on him styling himself as a self realised enlightened person.

For as Indra comes to realise in the Chandogya Upanishad, knowledge is a part of consciousness, knowledge of self, knowledge of reality, knowledge of continuity. If you were to wake up every day having forgotten who you are, you would arguably be less not more enlightened.

So we come to the essential question: what does it mean to simultaneously possess a self, moving through time, constructed, changing, and subject to all the necessities of being embodied, and possess a self-transcendence that is not a denial but an accordance with the substance of things?

III — Real Spirituality

It’s important to note the extent to which modern spirituality is a manifestation of individualism. Let’s take for an example ‘Yoga with Adriene’, one of the most accessible and popular Yoga teachers on youtube. No doubt her Yoga channel has helped probably millions of people, her community is a positive one and it is genuinely practically useful. She said in an interview with Russell Brand, “this practice is deeply rooted in spirituality”, yet video titles include yoga for gut health, yoga for vertigo, yoga for teachers, yoga for chefs, yoga for your butt and thighs, yoga for brain power, yoga for when you’re in a bad mood, yoga for hangovers and so on.

You might notice something here. These titles are all about you. What yoga is about is you. This kind of spirituality asks questions not of transcendence or morality but of optimisation, how do I feel better? How do I become happier? How do I get a better butt?

Yet these very things are that which Indra comes to observe are ephemeral. Not only this, it’s hard to see what yoga then becomes that is different from, say, taking a bubble bath or going for a run. It will make you feel better, so it cannot be called bad or wrong, but how is it really spirituality?

Put simply, it isn’t. It is individualism. Yoga in the west has become integrated into the world that William James again described as the “revelation to many whose hearts the church Christianity had left hardened”. So ‘religious’ kinds of sentiment are clung to as mere feeling or experience, but the content, and vitally the moral content, has come to be ignored, leaving us with a vital confusion about the self.

Let us consider for study a passage from the biblical book of Isaiah, one on the topic of an ancient religious practice: fasting.

Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter — when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I. If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday. The Lord will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail. Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations; you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.

The message of this passage, as in much of the prophetic writings, is simple. If you don’t care for the needy, the oppressed, the suffering, the “least of these” as Jesus would come to call them, then what you are doing is worthless. In the New Testament Paul describes the ‘fruits of the spirit’ as love, joy, peace, patience,kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness,self-control. These are moral characteristics, fruits manifest in who you are, they reflect not transformation primarily in wellbeing but in character, a character that reflects the indwelling of love. The Chandogya upanishad, again, says this:

“The Spirit who is in the body does not grow old and does not die, and no one can ever kill the Spirit who is everlasting. This is the real castle of Brahman wherein dwells all the love of the universe. It is Atman, pure Spirit, beyond sorrow, old age, and death; beyond evil and hunger and thirst. It is Atman whose love is Truth, whose thoughts are Truth. Even as here on earth the attendants of a king obey their king wherever he goes, so all love which is Truth and all thoughts of Truth obey the Atman, the Spirit. And even as here on earth all work done in time ends in time, so in the worlds to come even the good works of the past pass away. Therefore those who leave this world and have not found their soul, and that love which is not Truth, find not their freedom in other worlds. But those who leave this world and have found their soul and that love which is Truth, for them there is the liberty of the Spirit, in this world and in the worlds to come.”

Again, love, truth and freedom are identified with spiritual self knowledge. Is this what modern spirituality teaches? After all, onlyfans influencers and millionaire celebrities and silicon valley executives and CEOs and politicians all meditate and do yoga. Eckhart Tolle is a NYT bestseller with readers such as Paris Hilton and Katy Perry. Are we living then in an enlightened world? Maybe the answer is no not because people can’t come to a realisation of the fact that self is not limited to your temporal personhood, but because the realisation of what that means is too much. When a rich man comes to Jesus and asks ‘What must I do to inherit the kingdom of God?’ Jesus says ‘sell all you have, give it to the poor and come and follow me’. And the text says the rich man went away disappointed, for he had much.

To realise the self is constantly passing us by, that everything we try to cling to is ephemeral is to realise we have two choices. The first is to cling to things, money, success, feelings, optimisation, wellbeing, and the second is to give it up. To trade what you cannot keep for that which you can never lose. For Christians the path to love is through the enabling death and resurrection of Christ, an image of that same giving of self that promises a possessing of the self that identifies with a love that will never die, manifest in a transformation of character. The mysteries of the self are perhaps answered by the most enduring of truths: love your neighbour as yourself.

Thanks for reading.