How to stay away from spiritual bullshit on the spiritual path.
Welcome to this article about spiritual bullshittery and divine narcissism. This is an article, ultimately, about a fake kind of spirituality proliferating across the Internet and seeping into the real world, causing people more problems than it solves. I want to talk about it because, first of all, it makes me feel superior. But also, I want to distance myself from that kind of stuff, because a lot of the things I talk about creep into the spiritual realm. What I like talking about is reality, and if you talk about reality, it leads you to wholeness. Wholeness is just about connection to yourself, the world, and everything else. You can experience this directly anytime you like because it’s always there.
There’s a lot of bullshit that is really just marketing stuff, I think, that causes people to go in the opposite direction and keep chasing things that cause them to be fragmented and split within themselves, even though it’s dressed up as the quest for the truth. Ultimately, I want to explore that.
There are two main things we can talk about in this article:
One is just general spiritual bullshittery, and the other is the divine masculine and divine feminine thing, and how that is often used to justify dysfunctional, fucked-up relationships (pardon my French) between disordered personalities and neurotic personalities. It’s very interesting when you see it, but because people like to cling to their own stuff and dress it up in all the spiritual gobbledygook, I thought it’d be interesting to explore it. So let’s see what happens.
It’s probably best if I start with some definitions of what I think spirituality is when it’s not bullshit. Spirituality, really, if you think about it, is very, very simple.
It’s two things:
1. Uncovering the truth: Living in such a way where you question your assumptions, question what you’ve been told about life, etc., and take steps towards an experience of life rather than just a conceptual understanding of it. The conceptual understanding is just an interpretation, and the experience itself is the real thing, which is the truth.
2. Living in alignment with that truth whatever it is: The problem with the truth for a lot of people is that it pisses them off because the truth is the opposite of all the comfortable bullshit we’ve learned to identify with in order to keep our shadow self at bay and avoid facing the fear of facing that stuff, but also the unresolved shame, guilt, and trauma that caused us to go into hiding in the first place.
If you haven’t heard me talk about this before or you haven’t read my book, “Shadow Freedom from Bullshit in an Unreal World” it’s basically a dance that most people are involved in. I call it the shadow dance between the ego, which is the little box they’ve created for themselves to live in, and the shadow, which is all the unresolved, unfaced, unowned parts of themselves that they have become detached from, for whatever reason.
When you are on this journey to uncover the truth and then live the truth, you have no choice but to eventually face all those parts of yourself. That is an uncomfortable thing, which is why I often like to say that the truth will set you free, as Jesus said. But first, it will piss you off and make you miserable. That’s because, in the short term, what goes up must come down. All the illusions you’ve been attached to and living in the clouds of, so to speak, are going to come crashing back down to reality so that you can get that foundation of acceptance and then rebuild.
The problem is that bullshit can actually be a fun thing. It can make us feel like we’re living according to the image we want to live according to in order to keep hiding. It can make us feel like life is just some beautiful fantasy. It can make us feel like all our dreams are going to come true. Basically, we like bullshit because it is an escape from the truth. If you understand that, then there’s an inherent contradiction between anything that takes you away from the truth that claims to be spirituality and the truth itself – the journey back towards wholeness.
If you become fragmented and split within yourself, and all healing ultimately, is about that. Returning to wholeness and truth and wholeness are the same thing. The journey back to wholeness, to healing, is always going to be a little bit painful in the short term because it means letting go of all the bullshit. What I am starting to see is that there is so much stuff out there dressed up as healing and getting back on track that is actually taking people further and further into the darkness of their own bullshit instead of the light of truth.
And that’s ultimately all you need to understand: the truth is about wholeness, and bullshit is about fragmentation. If you want to heal your life or feel alive, you always need to choose wholeness over fragmentation. But there’s a ton of stuff out there causing people to be more fragmented than they need to be because it’s just pure bullshit.
Spiritual bullshit often looks like it’s about moving towards the truth. But when you step back and really look at it, you’ll see that it’s actually about resisting the truth and distorting it. It puts some filter between the direct experience of the truth and the truth itself. In other words, it’s an indirect way of seeing what’s going on inside ourselves and detaching from it.
The truth itself involves letting go, surrendering, and accepting that the truth just is what it is. We can’t control it; we can’t force it. We need to understand what it is by uncovering it so we can accept it and then build on top of it. It involves awareness. Ultimately, awareness is what allows you to see clearly. But if you have all this bullshit, confusion, and clouded ideas about what you need to do to return to the truth, you end up paying someone to give you a bullshit spiritual reading or do some energy work or whatever. If you fall into that trap, you’re actually distancing your personal relationship with the truth by adding extra steps.
First of all, you’re turning to someone else to tell you what the truth is. Secondly, they’re doing their little funny techniques and all the things they do. Thirdly, they’re adding their own interpretations, which are usually just their unconscious stuff projected onto you. So you’re just paying them to give you a bunch of assumptions based on their own unresolved issues and the shadow dance they are involved in themselves.
Most spiritual bullshit is about avoiding the truth because it causes you to resist whatever is actually going on inside you. It gives you all these other things to do. Instead of facing your own stuff, you go out there and play with some tarot cards, dance under the moon, or finger your belly button, or whatever it is. All of those things are actually just a distraction from the truth.
Of course, the truth is everywhere, and we can access it at all times. So if you go into these things with the right attitude, then maybe they can be a doorway into the truth. But in general, they’re a way of avoiding the truth because it becomes more about your ego and self-image. You’re not performing these rituals or whatever they are to let go of that image, but to reinforce it. That causes you to become more fragmented and get more and more lost down the rabbit hole of bullshittery and confusion, causing you to seek your real self.
This is why people go on these wild goose chases in the first place. They’re disconnected from themselves, but they get involved in all this stuff that just reinforces that disconnection. The way forward is to stop resisting and distorting, which means letting go of all that stuff, finding stillness, being present with yourself, and seeing the truth directly for yourself.
Ultimately, most spiritual bullshit is just bullshit because it’s an attempt for people to reinforce the beliefs they already have. Most of those beliefs don’t even belong to them; they belong to the ego. The beliefs are just an extension of this little box they’ve created for themselves to live in so they can keep avoiding their own emotional stuff. As long as you keep avoiding that emotional stuff, there’s always going to be a block or a barrier between you and the truth because you’re not allowing what needs to move inside you to move inside you so you can start moving with life. The ego ultimately stops all that stuff from going where it needs to go. The beliefs we create are ultimately just a way for us to stay in that state.
This is why there’s so much stuff online where people interact with it purely because it’s telling them that what they want to believe is actually true. For example, maybe we want to believe that we don’t have to do anything to make money in life. We can just close our eyes, finger our belly buttons, yada yada, and then all our dreams are going to come true. People love liking that stuff. It’s not because they actually think it’s true, but because they want it to be true.
It’s the same with stuff about relationships. There’s all this content that people share online about relationships, which we’ll get into more in a few minutes. Ultimately, people aren’t sharing information about what relationships actually are, how they work, and how you can come together and grow intimacy. They’re describing their fantasy.
A lot of the time, women want a guy who will deal with all their emotional outbursts and allow them to be as emotional as they want. They call this the “divine feminine.” They feel justified in destroying things or having temper tantrums as part of their femininity. If a man doesn’t accept this behavior, he’s considered not a strong man. On the other hand, men want women to be traditional wives who are subservient. It’s a fantasy. People like this stuff because it means they don’t have to grow up or change. They don’t have to do the necessary work to reconfigure their ego, allow their shadow to come up, and own their actual masculinity or femininity in a real way to come together with someone in intimacy and wholeness.
The things I’m talking about—where people just like things to justify their beliefs—are a form of control and forcing life. That is why I call it spiritual bullshit. It’s not about growing into wholeness and embracing who we are and what life is. It’s about trying to control external factors and circumstances to avoid the journey back to wholeness. It ultimately comes down to resistance and distortion. The ego mainly messes up our lives in these two ways: by causing us to resist the truth and to distort it. Ninety-nine percent of all this spiritual bullshit is just that—helping people justify what they want to believe so they don’t have to find out what’s actually true and create a belief in themselves.
Another really common form of this spiritual bullshit is projection. I’ve talked about the shadow dance. Most of us live life filtered through the ego. You can’t avoid it; there’s always going to be some ego. But if you’re aware of it, you can at least put it in the backseat. We’re living life through the ego, filtered through the ego. The cost of that is that we have all these unconscious, hidden parts of ourselves in the shadow self that are constantly trying to resurface. If we block that resurfacing process because we’re overly attached to the ego, we end up projecting the unconscious stuff onto the world around us to detach from it. This way, we avoid the painful process of facing the truth and being pissed off, as I mentioned earlier.
A lot of spiritual bullshit is just people projecting their unconscious stuff onto you. For example, maybe you’re on Instagram, and there’s a psychic doing an astro report because the moon or planets are doing something. Even though, since astrology was first invented, the planets have shifted, making it not even that accurate. But anyway, you go on Instagram, and she’s written a whole thing or made an article about how there’s something wrong with Uranus, so you have to start doing star jumps or whatever. That interpretation she put on is just her stuff. It’s not accurate in any way, shape, or form. It’s just her projecting her unconscious stuff onto the stars and then writing about it. If you find any meaning in that, it’s because you’ve projected your unconscious stuff onto it and it resonates. She doesn’t know anything about what’s going on inside you because of the stars. She’s just projecting her stuff.
Other examples include people channelling things. Because of their self-image, the ego, and its desire for them to see themselves as gifted, they experience that channelling—which is just the unconscious speaking to them—as being from some divine source or archetype they’ve attached to. Again, because of their unconscious stuff and its magnetic pull towards certain archetypes, it’s just the unconscious trying to resurface. There’s nothing magical about it. There’s a Carl Jung quote: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” This is ultimately what he’s talking about.
I’m not saying fate doesn’t exist, or that God doesn’t exist, or that some people throughout history haven’t had a divine connection to the truth to such a high degree that they can share universal truths that apply to everyone. But what I am saying is that Linda on Instagram, who has just decided she wants to be a psychic, is just projecting her stuff. When she’s channeling and doing all this kind of thing, she’s actually communicating to herself about what she really thinks, feels, and needs to do in a way that allows her to keep her ego where it is. She’s not ready to grow through the ego resistance and distortion yet, so she brings these messages up as being from God, Angel Gabriel, or Mickey Mouse, in order to hear the messages but not actually receive them because there’s that detachment.
It’s the same with all the ‘personality’ stuff out there, like personality tests and human design. It’s generic. There’s a classic thing in astrology and similar fields where, when they’re writing horoscopes for newspapers, they’ll include a few generic statements. Anyone could read any astrological report in the newspaper and find something that resonates because it’s designed that way. When people are channelling, giving interpretations, and readings, they’re just projecting their own stuff onto you. The unconscious needs to become conscious, and that process is always unfolding, but they’re ultimately distancing themselves from it to keep their ego intact while still allowing that process to do what it’s doing. That’s why it’s bullshit.
I should point out that anything can take you closer to the truth because the truth is about wholeness, and the truth is everywhere. You don’t need to go into a monastery in the mountains. You can find the truth in a supermarket, at work, literally anywhere. If you do these rituals with the attitude that they’re about destroying or dissolving the beliefs you’ve already got and helping you break through them, then you can move closer to the truth. But you don’t need to do that because the truth is a direct experience. These things can help you move closer, maybe, but the more indirect it is and the more steps you put between you and the truth, the more you’re wasting your time.
Let’s get back to the divine masculine and feminine thing: It’s a good example of how spiritual bullshit shows up because masculine and feminine energies are real. They exist in the human experience and in nature itself. There’s yin and yang, Shiva and Shakti—these laws of polarity and how they interact have been observed for thousands of years. But with this modern divine masculine and feminine concept, it’s wrapped up in a lot of spiritual bullshit because it’s about selling people what they want to believe rather than the actual truth.
In other words, because it’s linked to marketing and such, it becomes about selling people their fantasies and what they’ll pay for rather than helping them connect to themselves as naturally masculine or feminine individuals and doing what they need to do to have a real relationship. The Internet version of divine masculine and feminine sells dysfunctional, toxic relationships as something godly and wholesome. A relationship dynamic that’s quite famous for being messed up involves one person with a disordered personality and another with a neurotic personality. This often shows up as one person with borderline personality disorder and another with narcissistic tendencies. Both are driven by unresolved shame, leading to strong egos that deal with that shame in different ways.
A disordered person externalizes everything. They don’t want to look at themselves and put everything outside of them, projecting and trying to control everything to avoid facing themselves. They blame others, try to control people, play the victim, and lack emotional intelligence and control in extreme cases. Ultimately, it’s about not taking responsibility. On the other side, a neurotic person tolerates all that because they take too much responsibility. They think they’re responsible for everything, falling into the ego’s trap of thinking they know everything and can control everything.
When you pair someone who takes too much responsibility with someone who takes none, you get a toxic dance where their egos serve each other, maintaining their egos and not allowing the unconscious to become conscious. They’re in a relationship ultimately about the unconscious becoming conscious.
And so, in these relationships, they constantly lock horns, argue, push and pull, separate, and come back together without truly developing any intimacy, which is the core of a relationship. The Internet’s version of the divine masculine and feminine sells this kind of relationship. It suggests that the divine feminine is about finding a man who tolerates an emotionally unintelligent relationship, and it tells men they must accept it to be considered men.
However, being a strong man or woman, divine or not, is about having a healthy relationship with yourself and the energy you embody. This doesn’t mean there isn’t a natural polarity; men and women generally have different energies. A man is more likely to stay grounded if he can be still and handle the external world, while a woman, or the feminine, feels more alive with movement and motion. But this doesn’t mean they must control each other and lock egos as the distorted version of divine masculine and feminine suggests. Without boundaries, mutual growth, and effective communication, which is all about maintaining egos rather than dismantling them, true intimacy will never be achieved.
This example highlights how people use toxic relationships as a way to indirectly experience the truth while maintaining their ego, filtering everything through it. A relationship should be a testing ground for intimacy, where the goal is mutual growth. If you use relationships to maintain your ego and allow your partner to do the same, you’re keeping the truth at a distance.
All spiritual bullshit operates the same way. It appears to lead you toward the truth, but it doesn’t. Of course, I’m just some guy on the Internet, and I might be projecting my own stuff into this article too. The point is, the truth is the truth. You can experience it directly wherever you are. You don’t need another person, rituals, or anything else. The truth is always real and always present. People know it’s uncomfortable to return to the truth, especially if you’ve over-attached to things and systems designed to avoid it. Consequently, people will sell you your fantasies, pain, and insecurities. All of that is spiritual bullshit.
All you really need to do, as I said, is uncover the truth and live the truth. If you can do that, you’ll keep flowing, keep growing, and avoid all the drama, tension, and stress that come from moving towards fragmentation instead of towards the whole. So, yeah, that was an article and a bit of a rusty article, if I do say so myself. I haven’t made one in a while. But anyway, that was an article about spiritual bullshit.
Even though it wasn’t the greatest article in the world, I hope that if you’ve made it this far, you can at least be open to this concept and keep your eyes open because that spiritual bullshit is everywhere. Also, pay attention to this kind of divine narcissism, where people ultimately dress up their personality defects as the solution or a panacea to all their problems. It’s ironic because it prevents them from reaching where they actually need to be, which is a place of wholeness.
Ultimately, it all comes down to what I said: the spiritual path, or if you want to call it that, the return to wholeness if you’ve been fragmented for a while, is always going to be unpleasant. If people are selling you the unpleasantness you’re already experiencing and getting you to identify with it, or if they’re selling you a fantasy and the illusion that things can always be pleasant, then it’s probably spiritual bullshit.
Remember that you need to uncover the truth and then live the truth. Part of that process is that the truth will set you free. That’s guaranteed because it leads to wholeness. Truth and wholeness are the same thing. The truth will set you free, but first, it will piss you off and make you miserable. The more you attach to all the fragments and all the bullshit you think you need, the more miserable you’ll be. But actually, you don’t need any of that stuff. All you need is your own realness, which is always with you because you are always real.
So, yeah, that was an article. I hope it helped you. If anyone wants to talk, shout at me, or call me names because of what I said in this article, you can book a call on my website, olianderson.co.uk/talk. Stay real out there. Peace be with you. Thanks a bunch.
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