Signs of a Spiritual Ego (An Audit by the Department of Non-Existence)

Spiritual ego is the ego taking credit for spiritual progress. Instead of loosening its grip when you start meditating, doing yoga or reading about awakening, the self quietly gets a promotion: now it's the self who meditates, the self who's more present than other people, the self who has done the work. Practice that was meant to make the ego lighter becomes one more achievement for it to carry around and show off.

Nobody is immune to this, including (especially) the people who make shirts about not existing. So the Department of Non-Existence has conducted an audit. Findings below.

Where the idea of spiritual ego comes from

The sharpest early description is from the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, in his 1973 book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. Trungpa's term, spiritual materialism, describes the ego using spirituality the way it uses everything else: to build itself up. Wisdom, calm and insight become possessions. The path gets turned into a collection.

A related idea came a decade later. The psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher John Welwood coined the term spiritual bypassing in the 1980s for using spiritual ideas to sidestep unresolved feelings or problems. Bypassing is about avoidance; spiritual ego is about inflation. They often travel together.

Neither idea is a criticism of practice. Trungpa was a meditation teacher. The point is that the ego is extremely good at its job, and its job is to make everything about itself.

Eight signs of a spiritual ego

Each finding below is a behavior, not a person. If you recognize one, congratulations: the noticing is the useful part. Please do not frame the certificate.

Finding 1: The streak screenshot. Practice is reported publicly, with numbers. Day 412. The calm is real; so is the need for witnesses.

Finding 2: The retreat anecdote that arrives within four minutes. Any conversation about weather, traffic or soup reliably arrives at "when I was in silence for ten days." The silence, it turns out, was quite talkative afterward.

Finding 3: Being more present than you. A person who is fully in the moment does not usually announce it, and almost never compares their moment favorably with yours.

Finding 4: Vocabulary as rank. "Holding space," "doing the work," "high vibration," deployed less to describe an experience than to establish who's further along.

Finding 5: The serene exit. "I'm just not attached to the outcome" used to leave a conversation you'd rather not have. Sometimes that's wisdom. Sometimes it's ghosting with better branding.

Finding 6: Collecting teachers like trading cards. Each new retreat, book or teacher becomes a badge rather than a practice.

Finding 7: Enlightenment as a project with a deadline. Awakening is pursued like a promotion, with milestones, quarterly reviews and a quiet resentment of colleagues who seem to be ahead.

Finding 8: Pride in having no ego. The classic. The ego has achieved egolessness and would like to talk about it.

AUDIT SUMMARY: The ego was found to be operating under a new job title ("Awakened Self") with the same duties as before. No disciplinary action is recommended. The ego will be offered a seat and a glass of water.

Spiritual ego or real progress? A rough test

It's not always easy to tell spiritual ego from genuine change, partly because the ego is involved in both. A few rough signals, offered with appropriate humility:

• Does it need witnesses? Real changes in how you relate to life tend to show up quietly, in how you treat people. Spiritual ego tends to show up in how you describe yourself to people.
• Is there a ranking? If the insight comes with a sense of being further along than others, that's usually the ego adding a scoreboard.
• Can it laugh at itself? In our admittedly unscientific experience, a sense of humor about your own practice is one of the better signs that the self isn't running the show. The ego is deeply committed to being taken seriously.
• Does it make things simpler or more elaborate? Most contemplative traditions describe progress as things getting plainer and more ordinary. If the practice keeps getting more complicated, more expensive and more photogenic, the ego may be in charge of procurement.

Why it's funny, and why it's fine

The joke in all of this isn't at the expense of people who practice. Meditation, yoga and contemplative study help a lot of people, and making fun of them would be cheap. The joke is at the expense of the ego, which turns out to be the most adaptable employee in the building. Give it a spiritual practice and it will find a way to put it on a résumé.

The useful move, according to most of the traditions that discuss this, isn't to defeat the spiritual ego. That just creates a new identity: the person who defeated their spiritual ego. It's to notice it with a bit of humor and keep going. The ego only needs the spotlight; it doesn't do well with being gently laughed at.

The antidote, on cotton

The most direct cure we know for spiritual ego is the observation from the Buddhist teaching of anatta: there's nobody here to be good at this. No one is winning at awakening, because there's no separate one to win. That's what There Is Nobody Here says, in four words, on a shirt that pairs well with not mentioning your retreat.

And if the voice in your head is narrating this post as evidence of how humble it is, that voice gets its own write-up soon. It has earned one.

Sources

• Cover art: Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap (c. 1480), Art Institute of Chicago, CC0
• Spiritual materialism (Wikipedia)
• Spiritual bypass (Wikipedia)