There is an image from my years in Sedona that still makes me smile.
Some of us would sleep outside the lecture hall the night before a spiritual teaching so we could get seats close to the front.
We were camping overnight for a teaching on surrender.
At the time, I called it devotion. Some of it was devotion. Some of it was also competition.
That is exactly why spiritual ego can be so difficult to see. It rarely arrives wearing the clothes we associate with ego. It can look humble. It can sound surrendered. It can speak beautifully about nonattachment, service, consciousness, or love.
And sometimes it forms around spiritual experiences that were entirely real.
That is the part I want to explore here.
A spiritual realization can be genuine while the ego simultaneously begins building an identity around it.
The experience itself may be real.
So may the ego’s response to it.
What Is Spiritual Ego?
Spiritual ego begins when spiritual experiences, knowledge, roles, attainments, practices, teachers, or meanings begin becoming part of the identity the ego builds around itself.
A mystical experience becomes my awakening.
Spiritual insight becomes evidence that I understand.
Proximity to a teacher becomes part of who I am.
A practice becomes not simply something I do, but something that tells me what kind of person I am.
Over time, a spiritualized identity can begin to form.
Sometimes this is obvious. A person believes they are more evolved than everyone else.
But the obvious version is not the one that interests me most.
The more subtle spiritual ego may say:
I am surrendered.
I no longer judge.
I have seen through the ego.
I am only serving.
I understand what other people have not yet understood.
Some of those statements may even contain truth.
The problem is not necessarily the spiritual insight itself.
The problem begins when what we have seen, practiced, understood, or received becomes increasingly entangled with who we believe ourselves to be.
Research has found a similar paradox. Studies on spiritual superiority and mind-body practices suggest that practices intended to quiet self-enhancement can, in some circumstances, become new vehicles for it. Spirituality does not automatically remove the human tendency to build identity around whatever has become important to us.
My own life taught me this long before I knew there was research on it.
The First Taste of Being Special
At seventeen, after years of feeling that something essential was missing from the world I had inherited, I had a powerful psychedelic experience alone in an Austrian forest.
My ordinary sense of self came apart. For several hours, the boundary between myself and the world seemed to dissolve into something vastly larger. I walked home afterward changed. Whatever interpretation one places on such experiences, I had encountered something I could not reduce to the worldview I had held before.
But in the weeks that followed, two things happened at once.
I felt lonely.
And I felt special.
I looked around the classroom at people joking beneath fluorescent lights and thought, in effect: They don't know.
That thought had begun before the psychedelic experience. At seventeen, I had already looked at teachers, priests, adults, and institutions and felt that the people who were supposed to know did not really know.
There was genuine discernment in that rebellion.
There was also distance.
I felt compassion for people and a gulf between us at the same time.
The forest did not create that gulf. It gave an existing distance experiential force. I no longer merely suspected that the inherited picture of reality was incomplete; I felt I had encountered something beyond it.
But it was still a seventeen-year-old ego that had to make sense of what had happened.
The experience itself had humbled me before something enormous. My young personality then began to assimilate that experience into a story about who I was.
I had seen something.
They had not.
The opening was real.
So was the identity that began forming around it.
That distinction has stayed with me.
A mystical state may tell us something about impersonal consciousness. It does not automatically tell us how mature we are. The insights gleaned from a deep, life-changing experience still have to be integrated into the time-and-space-bound person who must live them.
Experience, Assimilation, Accommodation, Integration
I find it useful to distinguish four movements that spiritual culture often collapses into one.
- Experience — something happens that opens us beyond our ordinary frame.
- Assimilation — the ego absorbs the experience into the identity structure already in place.
- Accommodation — the ego itself has to reorganize because the experience can no longer be adequately contained by its old structure.
- Integration — the broader lived process by which that reorganization becomes embodied in life.
The distinction between assimilation and accommodation is especially important.
Assimilation asks:
How does this experience fit into who I already am?
Accommodation asks:
What in me now has to change because of what I have seen?
Integration is different again.
It is not simply a third Piagetian mechanism sitting beside assimilation and accommodation. Here I am using integration in a broader sense: the lived process by which an accommodated insight becomes embodied across the person’s actual life.
Put more simply:
Experience opens something.
Assimilation fits the experience into the existing ego.
Accommodation changes the ego in response to the experience.
Integration is the broader lived process by which that change becomes embodied in life.
A profound spiritual experience can therefore be assimilated very quickly while accommodation remains incomplete and integration takes years.
A person may begin thinking:
I am awakened.
I am spiritually advanced.
I understand reality differently from other people.
I have touched something most people have not.
A spiritual identity can begin forming around the experience long before the experience has changed how the person handles conflict, intimacy, shame, sexuality, grief, power, attachment, anger, responsibility, work, or ordinary life.
This is why I do not think the right response to spiritual ego is to dismiss mystical experience.
The experience may have been real.
The spiritual identity forming around it may also be real.
And the work of living what was revealed may still have barely begun.
The Ego Does Not Disappear. It Relocates.
Most of us recognize ordinary forms of ego easily enough.
Money.
Beauty.
Achievement.
Status.
Recognition.
Being right.
Belonging to the right group.
Spirituality does not necessarily eliminate that organizing tendency. It can give it new material.
The old ego wanted status.
The spiritual ego may want attainment.
The old ego wanted proximity to powerful people.
The spiritual ego may want proximity to a teacher.
The old ego wanted to be admired.
The spiritual ego may want to be recognized as humble, conscious, devoted, intuitive, pure, detached, or unusually awake.
The ego does not disappear. It relocates. It dresses itself in different clothing.
That is why spiritual ego is not simply hypocrisy. A hypocrite pretends to believe something he does not believe. Spiritual ego can be completely sincere.
The devotion can be real.
The love can be real.
The mystical experience can be real.
And the personality can still build an identity around all of it.
The Scoreboard Problem
At twenty-two, I encountered the work of David Hawkins while living in Salzburg.
Reading his books produced one of the most important spiritual openings of my early adulthood. I remember sitting in my apartment while rain tapped the window, reading about surrender and love, when a powerful state moved through my body: warmth in the chest, a profound stillness, a sense that the ordinary room around me was participating in something alive.
That experience helped change the direction of my life. I eventually moved from Austria to Sedona, where Hawkins lived and taught.
His work also gave me something my young mind desperately wanted: a map.
Hawkins described levels of consciousness numerically. Shame was low. Courage marked a threshold. Love was higher. Enlightenment occupied the summit.
At twenty-two, I took those numbers very seriously.
A mystery had become measurable.
And once something becomes measurable, comparison is never far behind.
Among some students, calibration became a form of currency. People discussed where they or others supposedly tested. Spiritual states could become accomplishments. Proximity to the teacher could acquire meaning. Sitting near the front mattered. Understanding the teaching mattered. Being further along mattered.
Again, I was not standing outside the community diagnosing everyone else.
I participated.
I wanted to be further along too.
This is one reason I am wary of critiques of spiritual ego that make the critic feel spiritually superior to the people being criticized. That would simply recreate the same structure in a new costume.
The more useful question is not:
Which spiritual people have ego?
The useful question is:
What happens in me when the sacred becomes something I can possess?
Spiritual Ego Is Not the Same as Spiritual Bypassing
Spiritual bypassing and spiritual ego overlap, but they are not the same phenomenon.
Spiritual bypassing is primarily defensive.
We use spiritual ideas, practices, interpretations, or states to move away from psychological material we do not yet know how to hold: grief, anger, shame, trauma, conflict, dependency, vulnerability, responsibility.
The question behind bypassing is:
What does spirituality allow me not to feel or face?
Spiritual ego concerns identity formation.
Spiritual experience, knowledge, attainment, belonging, purity, insight, or status begins organizing the person’s sense of who they are.
The question behind spiritual ego is:
What does my spirituality now tell me about who I am?
The two often reinforce one another, but they do not have to.
A person can spiritually bypass without feeling spiritually superior. Meditation may simply become a way not to feel grief.
And a person can develop a strong spiritual ego without obviously bypassing much at all. They may face painful emotions honestly while still being deeply invested in being the most conscious person in the room.
Sometimes both happen at once.
A person might say:
I do not get angry anymore because I understand that anger is just ego.
There may be spiritual ego in the identity:
I am someone who has moved beyond anger.
And there may be spiritual bypassing in the avoidance:
I do not have to feel what is actually happening in me.
The distinction matters.
Spiritual bypassing concerns the defensive use of spirituality.
Spiritual ego concerns the construction of identity around spirituality.
Recent research on spiritual bypassing has similarly emphasized movement toward a more integrative spirituality in which spiritual life can coexist with emotional honesty, psychological self-knowledge, and relational accountability.
That resonates strongly with my own trajectory.
The answer was never to become less spiritual.
It was to become less divided.
Healthy Ego Is Not Egotism
There is another confusion worth clearing up.
A healthy ego is not the same thing as egotism.
Psychologically, we need a sufficiently developed sense of self.
We need to know where we end and another person begins.
We need to make choices.
Set boundaries.
Take responsibility.
Act.
Tolerate frustration.
Remain present when someone disagrees with us.
Develop competence.
Say no without collapsing.
Repair when we have caused harm.
A person can become very sophisticated spiritually while remaining underdeveloped in some of these capacities.
In fact, teachings about ego dissolution can become especially attractive when ordinary self-development has been painful or incomplete.
If I learned early that anger threatened attachment, a teaching that treats anger as spiritually inferior may feel immediately true.
If I am frightened of intimacy, nonattachment may become not only wisdom but protection.
If I never learned to stand firmly inside my own experience, “there is no self” may arrive before there is much of a self available to surrender.
This does not invalidate nonattachment or nondual insight.
It asks a psychologically important question:
Which part of me is using the teaching?
What Twelve-Step Rooms Taught Me About Spirituality
Years later, during heartbreak and depression, I began attending twelve-step meetings.
The atmosphere was radically different from much of the spiritual culture I had known.
Construction workers, recovering addicts, divorced fathers, nurses, men carrying shame and consequences sat in folding chairs and spoke plainly about their lives.
Someone had lied.
Someone had relapsed.
Someone was terrified.
Someone was learning to call another person instead of isolating.
Someone was trying to stop abandoning himself when shame arrived.
God was spoken about often. But God had to become practical there.
Otherwise someone might drink.
What mattered to me was not that twelve-step culture was somehow free of ego.
It wasn't.
Long-term members can build identities around the program just as people can build identities around spiritual traditions. Years of sobriety can become status. Familiarity with the principles can become certainty. The language itself can become another way of sorting the world into those who understand and those who do not.
The principles can also be used as a bypass.
Acceptance can become a way not to feel anger.
Powerlessness can be confused with passivity.
“Keeping my side of the street clean” can become a way of avoiding confrontation that may actually be necessary.
No path is immune.
The ego can build a home almost anywhere.
But at their best, twelve-step meetings lived closer to shadow work than much of the spiritual culture I had known.
They kept returning attention to character defects, resentments, fear, dishonesty, dependency, shame, harm done, and the emotional wounds beneath our behavior.
The language was not always psychological, but the movement often was.
Less toward transcendence.
More toward deconstruction.
What had I actually done?
Where had I been dishonest?
What was I defending?
Where was I blaming?
What pattern kept repeating?
What was I unwilling to feel?
In that sense, the rooms kept me closer to the wound.
They did not merely ask me to rise above my reactions.
They asked me to examine them.
Name them.
Take responsibility for them.
And, where possible, repair what they had cost.
In spiritual communities I had heard beautiful language about love beyond duality.
In those rooms, I watched people attempt love within duality.
Imperfectly.
Sometimes badly.
But concretely.
That was the corrective.
Not because twelve-step culture was beyond spiritual ego or bypassing.
But because, at its best, it kept returning me to a very earthly question:
What is actually happening in me, and what am I going to do about it?
Perhaps spiritual maturity could not be measured only by the heights a person had touched.
Perhaps it also had to be measured by what happened when life became humiliatingly ordinary again.
The Teacher Who Pointed Down
My work with the Jungian analyst Nathan Schwartz-Salant intensified that correction.
Most of my spiritual teachers had pointed upward in one way or another: toward surrender, awakening, higher consciousness, transformation.
Nathan pointed into the body, the wound, the unconscious, the material I would rather have considered already transcended.
When I projected enormous qualities onto a later mentor, Nathan did not tell me the mentor was fraudulent.
Nor did he encourage the projection.
He helped me see that the man was carrying an image of something I had not yet fully lived myself—what he called the “potential you.”
That distinction changed the meaning of spiritual projection for me.
The task was not to destroy the teacher.
It was not to keep worshipping him either.
It was to retrieve the projection without denying the gift.
Something similar applies to awakening.
We do not need to deny the experience in order to reclaim what the ego has assimilated into identity.
That is a much more difficult movement than either idealization or disillusionment.
Awakening and Integration Are Not the Same Achievement
I now think of awakening and psychological integration as related but distinct dimensions.
Awakening may reveal something profound about consciousness, identity, God, or reality.
A powerful spiritual experience does not integrate itself.
The experience may happen in an instant.
Learning how to live from what it revealed can take years.
This is one of the places where psychospiritual mentorship can become especially valuable.
A skilled guide is not there to explain the mystical experience away or impose an interpretation on it.
The work is to help distinguish the experience itself from the identity that may gather around it, to notice where the experience has simply been absorbed into the existing self, and to support the deeper changes the experience may actually require.
What in the existing personality has to reorganize?
What old understanding of self can no longer remain intact?
What defenses, loyalties, wounds, habits, and assumptions are now being challenged by what the person has seen?
Then comes the broader work of integration: allowing those changes to become embodied in the concrete conditions of a human life.
In relationship.
In choices.
In the body.
In work.
In sexuality.
In grief.
In boundaries.
In responsibility.
In the unresolved psychological material the experience itself may not have touched.
The guide's role is not to tell us what the experience meant.
It is to help us discover what living it now requires.
Without that kind of reflection—whether it comes through mentorship, psychotherapy, spiritual direction, community, or another serious form of accompaniment—it is remarkably easy for a transformative experience to become part of identity long before it has substantially changed the person or the life.
The experience may take us beyond the person.
But the person still has to learn how to live what was seen.
That may take years.
Perhaps a lifetime.
For now, the essential point is simple:
Having seen beyond the ordinary self does not exempt us from developing the ordinary self.
How Do You Recognize Spiritual Ego in Yourself?
I do not trust rigid checklists here. The wish to become completely free of spiritual ego can itself become another spiritual achievement project.
But a few questions have become useful to me:
What happens when someone questions my spiritual understanding?
Can I receive important feedback from a person I consider less spiritually knowledgeable than I am?
Can I admit, without immediately turning it into a teaching, that I am jealous, afraid, hurt, angry, confused, or wrong?
Can I apologize without explaining the other person's projection back to them?
Does my spirituality make me more available to relationship or more insulated from it?
Can I allow another person to remain mysterious rather than interpreting them through my preferred spiritual map?
Do my practices help me inhabit my body, or mainly help me leave it?
Can I let a mystical experience remain sacred without using it as a credential?
And perhaps the most revealing question:
Does my spiritual life make me more capable of being an ordinary, unfinished, still-becoming human being—or more certain that I am no longer one?
What Comes After Spiritual Ego?
Not ego destruction.
Not humiliation.
Not abandoning spirituality.
And certainly not replacing spiritual superiority with psychological superiority.
What comes after spiritual ego, if we are fortunate, is greater intimacy with reality.
That means allowing transcendence and psychology to correct each other.
It means letting our relationships reveal what meditation did not.
Letting grief reveal what philosophy could not.
Letting the body tell the truth when the mind has already declared the issue resolved.
Letting another person say, “You hurt me,” without escaping into metaphysics.
Letting ourselves discover that a teaching we love may have become entangled with an old survival strategy.
Letting a teacher be gifted without making him superhuman.
Letting a mystical experience remain enormous without making ourselves enormous because we had it.
For a long time, I imagined the spiritual path primarily as ascent.
Higher consciousness.
Higher Self.
Transcendence.
Much of the second half of my life has been an education in the opposite direction: into the body, grief, anger, relationship, family history, and ordinary human limitation.
Not because the heights were false.
Because the heights had to become inhabitable here.
The question that matters to me now is no longer simply whether an experience was real.
It is this:
Can what I have seen become the way I live?