The Dark Side Of Spirituality

07.11.24

Spirituality has a dark side that is seldom discussed and striving to kill your ego can be one the greatest mistakes of your life.

Today, I’d like to explore the hidden dangers of spiritual pursuits and update one of my best articles. It’s based on my personal and professional experience.

Don’t Kill Your Ego

I’d like to open by quoting Jung:

“Just as there is a passion that strives for blind unrestricted life, so there is a passion that would like to sacrifice all life to the spirit because of its superior creative power. This passion turns the spirit into a malignant growth that senselessly destroys human life. Life is a touchstone for the truth of the spirit. Spirit that drags a man away from life, seeking fulfillment only in itself, is a false spirit— though the man too is to blame, since he can choose whether he will give himself up to this spirit or not. Life and spirit are two powers or necessities between which man is placed. Spirit gives meaning to his life, and the possibility of its greatest development. But life is essential to spirit, since its truth is nothing if it cannot live” (C.G. Jung – V8 – §648).

Many young people are fascinated by spiritual teachings and make their mission to pursue their ego-death. They devote all their spare time to reading and listening to people like Alan Watts and Eckhart Tolle.

They can’t get enough of it!

Eventually, many of them achieve the spiritual experiences they were after, but the results are nothing like the eternal bliss. It’s the exact opposite.

After you experience a brief moment of relief and “enlightenment”, you’re left with no motivation whatsoever to continue living your life.

Many are taken by a state of apathy, depression, anxiety, and extreme loneliness. In worst cases, there’s a psychotic outbreak. Now, they are plagued by weird visions and persecutory fantasies.

But why does this happen? Shouldn’t a spiritual pursuit elevate you to a state of happiness?

Well, the main problem is that when the ego-complex isn’t strong and developed enough, getting in touch with the unconscious has a disintegrating effect on the personality. In other words, you’re completely engulfed by the unconscious and become identified with it.

As I investigated this pattern and being a victim of it myself, I was led to the problem of the Puer Aeternus once again.

I realized this obsessive spiritual pursuit conceals a deep desire to escape from the responsibilities of real life and truly grow up. This can be amplified when it also becomes a coping mechanism to flee from a traumatic childhood, but this last part is a subject for another day.

Robert Bly jokingly refers to this condition as the flying boy or flying girl. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with spiritual pursuits, nor with the guys I mentioned, the problem is a childish attitude toward the unconscious.

When you refuse life and its practical aspects, the unconscious turns dark and devouring. People acquire a false knowledge that lacks real experience, it’s only an intellectual exercise, pure mental masturbation.

Interestingly, this enmeshment with the unconscious evokes a feeling that you know something special that others don’t, but this also creates loneliness as this is based on infantile arrogance.

This also opens the door for psychic inflation and we we see all sorts of crazy stuff, like people thinking they are the next incarnation of Jesus.

Or a more common one, the people who believe they are like real shamans because they read one book while smoking joints and playing video games all day long. Let’s not forget their breaks to post nonsense on Reddit, lol.

Jokes aside, spirituality has a dark side that can completely ruin someone’s life.

The Ego Is Not The Enemy

So why should you care to strengthen your ego-complex?

First of all, a strong ego-complex is a requirement to overcome the mother and father complex and truly become an adult. This is an archetypal challenge and people who resist this process never develop their own identities and are doomed to live under the parental shadow.

• I explore this process in-depth here – Conquer The Puer and Puella Aeternus.

Moreover, a strong ego-complex gives you solid roots in reality and acts as a counterpoint to the unconscious. The ego is what allows you to safely engage with the unconscious and maintain an objective perspective without being identified with it.

It gives you the ability to confront the unconscious material, elaborate it, and integrate it into your life. Without the ego, you’re bound to face the ruthless disintegrating facet of the unconscious.

Besides, having a strong ego-complex is what allows you to have self-confidence, motivation, and a sense of direction. The individuation process only occurs when the conscious mind directs the process.

The Self inspires but the ego has the mission to concretize it in real life, being at its service. That’s how life and spirit are balanced.

The Two Stages of Life

When discussing the notion of building a healthy ego, it’s important to make a distinction between the two stages of life. This idea is so central to Jung that he recommends entirely different treatments according to someone’s age.

“As a rule, the life of a young person is characterized by a general expansion and a striving towards concrete ends; and his neurosis seems mainly to rest on his hesitation or shrinking back from this necessity. But the life of an older person is characterized by a contraction of forces, by the affirmation of what has been achieved, and by the curtailment of further growth. His neurosis comes mainly from his clinging to a youthful attitude which is now out of season. Just as the young neurotic is afraid of life, so the older one shrinks back from death. What was a normal goal for the young man becomes a neurotic hindrance to the old—just as, through his hesitation to face the world, the young neurotic’s originally normal dependence on his parents grows into an incest-relationship that is inimical to life. It is natural that neurosis, resistance, repression, transference, “guiding fictions,” and so forth should have one meaning in the young person and quite another in the old, despite apparent similarities. The aims of therapy should undoubtedly be modified to meet this fact. Hence the age of the patient seems to me a most important indicium” (C.G. Jung – V16 – §75).

Again, this obviously doesn’t mean that younger people shouldn’t have their spiritual pursuits, it simply means that it’s often linked with escaping from adult life. As long as you’re seeking to become independent, by all means, follow your interests and what inspires you.

I know that some of you might be thinking: Can’t I skip the first half of life and let go of my Ego now?

Well, that’s exactly the kind of question someone identified with the Puer or Puella Aeternus would ask. The short answer is no, you’ll be neurotic and dominated by the unconscious for the rest of your life, but I’ll elaborate on it further.

First of all, you can’t let go of something you never had but the process isn’t a “let go”, it’s a process of emergence. When you pair these opposing forces, a new and higher structure arises that is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

This is an idea that stems from systemic psychology that perfectly fits this process. It’s the alchemical notion of the 4 becoming 1. For this process to take place, you must have developed your ego-complex and psychological functions to their maximum.

The Transcendent Function:

“Fantasizing this inner ground is what Jung calls the transcendent function; it creates the uniting symbols. This coincides strangely with the alchemical symbolism, which always speaks of the problem of the four elements— water, fire, air, and earth […] There you have the same idea: onto the four comes a fifth thing which is not the four but is something beyond them and consists of all of them. That is what the alchemists called the fifth essence, the quinta essentia or philosopher’s stone. It means a consolidated nucleus of the personality which is no longer identical or identified with any of the functions” (Von Franz – Psychotherapy – P. 118).

The individuation process is based on the 4 psychological functions (Thinking, Feeling, Sensation, and Intuition), but exploring it would exceed the scope of this article. Luckily, you can learn about the psychological types in my book PISTIS (claim your copy by joining my newsletter).

The second reason why you should care to build a strong ego-complex early on is to avoid having the worst mid-life crisis of all time.

In the past 3 years, I had incredible opportunities to analyze a few older men and women and I took one important lesson from it:

The feeling of regret is the heaviest one can bear.

You don’t want to live your life aimlessly and have your wake-up call when you’re in your 50s dealing with money and health problems, and partners and kids are involved.

Any fear you might be feeling now is nothing compared to the raw reality of having wasted your life and taking your talents for granted.

As I approach 32, this is a reminder to keep pushing and moving in the direction of my fears, as they often conceal our true mission.

The Vessel

Ok, so how can one strengthen their ego-complex?

I learned a metaphor during Active Imagination: We have to become like a vessel to contain the unconscious and allow the process of emergence to happen.

This “vessel” consists of two parts. First and foremost, we must strengthen the ego-complex by honoring our commitments to real life. Every time you hesitate, you allow the unconscious to devour you, that’s why it’s strongly linked with the mother complex.

During his famous confrontation with the unconscious, Carl Jung saw several patients per week, was raising a family, and even worked for the Swiss army. He never neglected his commitments, that’s why Jung never went psychotic and was able to integrate his experiences.

Second, it’s important to learn how to decode the symbolic language of the unconscious. That’s where Jungian Psychology (especially the notion of psychic reality), philosophy, and mythology are extremely helpful.

This will prevent you from interpreting the experiences with the unconscious literally and raise it to the symbolic level. That way, the conscious mind can safely and actively participate in the process.

Carl Jung explains this is one of the main functions of religion, to provide the conscious mind with a framework that protects it from the unconscious.

Lastly, the most important key to forming a healthy ego is something Jung calls moral confrontation. Without it, learning psychology and philosophy is just mental masturbation and a way of avoiding dealing with reality.

In other words, the only thing that truly matters is if you take the necessary actions to apply your knowledge. By developing these skills and committing to fully living life, you become a vessel in which the Self can manifest itself.

True spiritual and psychological development requires that you hold the paradox between life and spirit. A strong and healthy ego is what allows you to do so. The individuation process is about co-creating your unique sense of meaning in conjunction with your inner center – The Self.

It’s about allowing the Soul (personification of the unconscious) to guide you but at the same time consciously directing the process. It’s an art of balancing our inner and outer life.

Meaning is not static, it resides in being engaged in this process. Meaning is not found, but created.

Rafael Krüger – Live an Audacious Life

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