Six Signs of Spiritual Ego

How Do I know I’m in Spiritual Ego?

Spiritual ego can have us out here believing that we are fully aligned and preaching God’s honest truth when we’re really just running around getting high off our own sense of self-importance.

It’s so hard to see. It’s one of the most difficult tricks the ego can play.

As someone who feels led to share my own experience, and support and guide others on a spiritual journey by doing so, it’s crucial for me to stay vigilant around my spiritual ego. Whenever someone says something admiring, calls me wise or especially intuitively connected, I see the part of me that wants to preen.

I watch the part of me that wants to soak it up and use it to fuel my self-worth. I just watch it and remind myself that it’s ego. I remind myself that everyone has access to the same intelligence, the same intuition, and the same connectedness as I do. Sometimes, they don’t use it. Sometimes it’s blocked. But they do have access.

I am here to be a healer, to be a guide to some, perhaps, and serve my communities. But I never want to get to the point where I no longer see that ego flare. When I start thinking that it doesn’t exist at all is when I’m in serious danger of letting it rule me.

I want to share a few of the signs I’ve noticed that can point to the presence of spiritual ego in myself or in someone else.

6 Signs of Spiritual Ego

Superiority

This one comes up with religious groups a lot. People believe that what they practice is better or more true than what someone else practices. In other words, their faith or practice is superior. I find that to be a signal that their ego is invested in believing that they have access to truth that others do not. When our ego is tied to our beliefs, we feel threatened by other people’s (seemingly) contradictory beliefs and practices.

Without ego, there’s just acceptance of the many paths to the same place. Spirituality, and especially spiritual awakening, is phenomenological. It’s all about experience. It takes a special kind of arrogance to look at others’ experiences (things we haven’t experienced) and deny the truth of them to validate our own. If we feel the need to do that, something within us isn’t being seen.

Rigidity and Generalizations

Rigid thinking and generalizations can go hand in hand with that superiority, but they can also happen without it. Words like always and never start to creep into our language.

The fact is that we all exist in our own bodies and no one else’s. No one else is our particular assortment of molecules and memory, history, and personality. We are alone in our experience of this existence; nothing else is true for everyone.

Humans like to generalize because it brings us comfort. It helps us make sense of the world.

But when we start to get inflexible in our ideologies, we see things without nuance or perspective. This is usually so we can’t get threatened by ideas that don’t fit our worldview.

Without ego, there’s no need to do that. There’s no threat because we aren’t invested in everyone else validating our experience. What is true for us is true for us, and we don’t need rigid ideologies to support that knowing.

Identity

When we over-identify with our spirituality, we find our value in it. This is like what I first described seeing in myself. The ego will grab onto anything to feel good about itself, to fill that hole at the center of its structure. The concept of being “spiritual” easily fits into that hole.

When we’ve released every other ego identity, and we’re no longer valued for how much money we make, how we support our family, our job, our house, our intelligence, our productivity. When we’ve let all of that go and there’s nothing left, the spiritual practices themselves come in and become the thing we use to define who we are.

In my experience, this one requires coming back to a place of humility over and over again. We just keep seeing it. Every time our minds want to fill that hole and grasp onto something, we see it and acknowledge it as false. We leave the hole empty and remind ourselves we’re valued for our inherent beingness because consciousness is enough. When it’s nothing and when it’s everything; at all times, it’s enough. Even when we don’t feel it, it’s enough.

Shunning the Mystic, Praising the Rational

I’ve noticed a trend and I’m not sure if it’s new. Frankly, I haven’t been in spiritual circles for very long. But I’ve seen some people shun the more mystical and occult aspects of spirituality that are less accepted by society. Psychics, for example, or reiki, crystals, things like that.

It’s like certain spiritual teachers want to set themselves apart. They’re embarrassed by the “woo woo” stuff and want to show themselves to be somehow more rational. But why would we need to rationalize spirituality unless we’re catering to the rational parts of ourselves or others?

Our society has overvalued the scientific, the measurable, and the rational to the exclusion of the mystic, the unknowable, and the intuitive. Feeling the need to over-rationalize a spiritual experience can signal that we need this world to sanction it or value it. Or maybe we need people who more closely identify with rational thinking to validate it.

Yes, water bends when you play sounds. Yes, plants wilt when you’re mean to them. This is also phenomenological. None of it proves that energetic fields are real. Why? Because they can’t be observed.

All spirituality is objectively unobservable, objectively immeasurable, and objectively unfalsifiable. No spirituality is more rational than another. That’s creating a value system where one does not exist, which points us back up to…superiority.

Valuing Longevity

Ah, yes. This is a big one.

If we’re all that One thing beyond the body and ego-mind structure, there is no hierarchy, right? This means someone who has been practicing meditation for twenty years can be just as unconscious as someone who has practiced for two.

Or someone who has spontaneously awoken a year ago can have the wisdom of someone who has been doing yoga for ten years (people like Eckhart Tolle, for example).

Hierarchy is an illusion.

Let me say it again for the people who hate this (lol) — hierarchy of any kind is an illusion. It’s a mental construct that creates unnecessary separation.

Consciousness has no rules or limitations. No one way it shows up is higher than another or should be valued as such, especially based on arbitrary terms like time, which is a human construct anyway (Like ???).

It boggles my mind how easily we slip into venerating certain humans over others by the simple fact of how long they’ve been doing spiritual practice.

If someone’s been meditating for twenty years, great! If they know how to recite the Upanishads backward, amazing. That makes them a master of that (and truly, what a gift), but it means nothing about where they are in the process of awakening. That’s why plenty of spiritual “gurus” are jerks.

Sometimes, I get the wisdom I need from a child on the street. Sometimes the crossing guard shows more compassion than the most knowledgeable spiritual teacher. Nature is always teaching. Life is always teaching. Consciousness reveals itself when it wants to and longevity has very little to do with it.

Too Much Separation between Spirituality and Humanity

This one is about when the “spiritual” self is seen to have qualities that are better than the “human” self. (We should start to see a theme here; value judgments run rampant!)

A number of spiritual traditions over-value detachment from the body and our humanity. They position it as less than, even if only subtly. The human-animal with its ego and needs and desires and emotions — Ugh, so messy right? For sure. But do we have to treat the mess as less-than?

Now, I know that this is hard when it’s taken to its extreme. We think: how can a drunk be just as good as a monk? It can’t be. It must be better to be the monk. Monks are nicer, and cleaner, and probably do more good for society.

But let's, just for a second, take a kind of radical, absolute approach to this. Consciousness is everything. That means consciousness is a murderer. It’s also the guy who flipped you off when you almost ran into him at that intersection. Consciousness is your sister when she’s a brat and when she’s sweet to you. We live in a world of duality, but consciousness is not dual in its nature.

It’s all spiritual. It’s all spiritual.

We may say that there’s something to the nature of consciousness that evolves toward generosity, toward compassion, toward love and kindness and hell, maybe even cleanliness, but it is still what it is in any expression.

When we start valuing certain parts of ourselves over others (our ability to meditate over our ability to fit twenty marshmallows in our mouth at a time, for example), or worse, start rejecting certain parts of ourselves, it’s a pretty good sign that we’re in spiritual ego.

I hope this was helpful in some way. I know that several of these points might seem controversial (or maybe just too absolute in their perspective). As always, I am more than willing to further discuss or expand on my thoughts in the comments and I welcome friendly, open discourse down there.

❤

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