The path of spiritual awakening is peppered with pitfalls, especially pitfalls where the reality of things is the exact opposite of what it appears and present itself to be. For example, in the attempt to set oneself free from the ego self, people can become entrapped in the ego about being egoless. One such pitfall, is the pitfall of the spiritual persona. Let’s look at what it is, so that this will be one pitfall you can recognize and avoid falling into. 

There is a big difference between genuine awakening and the creation of (and over-identification with) a spiritual persona. So, let’s define the difference between the two. With genuine awakening, a person dis-identifies from their temporal sense of self (what people call the ego). Doing this, causes you to become aware of your non-physical aspect and therefore the fact that you are simultaneously two points of perspective. There are many names for this nonphysical aspect such as the soul, the seat of consciousness, the eternal self, witness consciousness etc. This is the aspect of you that is creating the temporal, physical form that you call by your name. You are a consciously spiritual being because of your sudden awareness of the you that is beyond the physical. You are living life from your two points of perspective. From here, you take positive ownership of the temporal self (your own ego). Recognizing that you are the you that you call by your name and at the same time, you are also not. When you are living life from this place, it causes your perspective to be drastically different. This causes things about you to change. You recognize all potentials inherent within yourself and you begin to consciously work with those potentials, choosing what to bring forth when and for what purpose. At the very heart of awakening is drastically expanded awareness of all that is.   

The problem is, over the course of history, people have watched individuals who have experienced genuine awakening. And whether the people were actually right or not that certain behaviors owe themselves to that person’s awakening; they attributed certain character traits and behaviors to these awakened people. They saw these people as good and right and as having what they want to have. And so, they began to emulate them. This emulation was in fact part of the process of the creation of a new identity. The creation of a new part to the structure of their ego. They then identify only with that part and convince themselves and everyone around them that this is their new self, who they “really are”. They will say it is due to them having an awakening, which in fact they only thought they had. They don’t know what a genuine awakening is, as opposed to a situation that increased their awareness in some way or a spiritual experience. 

The human ego is not cohesive. It is fragmented. Even though we have one body, within that body, we end up with multiple selves. The best way to picture this is to imagine that inside your body, you have a collection of conjoined twins.  They are technically all conjoined because they all share one body.  But each one has its own identity, its own desires, needs, perspective, strengths, weaknesses and appearance. The vast majority of these fragmented selves that belong to the ego, are formed as splits in consciousness when we experience distress. The split being between a vulnerable self and a self that coped with that vulnerability so as to self-preserve. You could call this part, a protector part. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Fragmentation, The Worldwide Disease. All of these parts make up the you that you call by your name, but at the same time, because your consciousness exists separate from your ego, it is also true that none of them are you. The thing is, the creation of a spiritual persona, is the creation of a split within the ego. It is the creation of a protector part. It is a coping mechanism that masquerades as a spiritually awakened person. And the people who have these “spiritual protectors”, are completely convinced that what is in fact just a spiritual protector part of them, is who they are, the “real” them. And as a result, these individuals are a walking, breathing gaslight. A gaslight to themselves and a gaslight to others. It is over-identification masquerading as disidentification. It is a disconnectedness masquerading as a deep connectedness. It is personal truth bypassing masquerading as spiritual transcendence. It is emotional suppression, denial and dis-ownership masquerading as non-reactivity. Above all, it is a 24-7 game of pretend that the pretender does not even recognize as a game of pretend. It is self-delusion and it is deception.  

So that you can understand this better, meet Therese. Therese grew up in England in an upper middle-class family. She felt a lot of pressure growing up to do whatever it took to be held in high esteem and achieve status. Her brother had down syndrome, something the family was looked down on for, so she had to work twice as hard to overcompensate for it. She wanted this social esteem so badly that she convinced herself she was whatever gave her that and that she wanted whatever gave her that. This was very painful at a deeper level because she had to deny and suppress so much of what was actually true about herself. 

Growing up, Therese attended all the most prestigious schools and played on a net ball team and went on to become a model and refused to date anyone until she met a young man from an aristocratic family. But her picture perfect, esteemed life covered up poor self-esteem and came with a lot of pressure. The pressure of pretense. The young man she was in a romantic relationship with was emotionally unavailable. This caused consistent misunderstandings and a loss of trust in the relationship. Therese was lonely and felt completely unsupported, which was a big deal when she found out she had become pregnant. This of course was totally out of line with her picture-perfect life façade. And her boyfriend started pressuring her to get a secret abortion, so his picture-perfect life façade was not ruined too. When she did go through with the abortion, Therese’s life fell apart. She left her boyfriend because he was so profoundly not there for her during any difficulty she faced, including this life changing one. She could no longer suppress the flood of negative emotions she felt towards so many things, including having had an abortion, something she was wracked with guilt about. And it became painful to pretend to be fine. She had a nervous breakdown and started looking for help on the internet. That was when she came across the spiritual world. She started reading and watching everything she could find. These spiritual teachers were everything she was not. They were virtuous and stable and calm and unemotional and peaceful and stoic and powerful and they knew the way out of suffering. Therese took a job in a crystal bowl shop which was run by an older woman with 30 years of yoga practice and spiritual experiences under her belt. Therese did a mushroom journey in which she felt her body and identity fall away until all that was left, was this deep connectedness with all that is. Absolute peace. This, she thought, is what an awakening is. She would never be the same again. 

Subconsciously, Therese saw this way of being as her new way out of suffering. As her way of truly feeling good in life and keeping away from pain. She began to create a new persona for herself. One that reflected this new self (she would tell you, her true self). The person who she wanted to be and felt down deep that she was. Because of this, she felt her name didn’t fit her anymore. So, she decided to pick a new name, Shaanti because it means peace. Therese identified solely with this new part of her ego. Of course, she was quite convinced that it was not her ego, it was her true, eternal self she had found and was allowing to come out through her. She began to craft herself in the image of what she imagined and had been told a spiritually awakened person would be like. She began to mimic other spiritual teachers and people like her new boss at the crystal shop. As if in character 24-7, she would ACT in a way that her thoughts, words and actions matched how she believed a spiritually awakened being should be. She bought all new clothes, ones that made her look more spiritual, more like the yogis. She repeated the truths she had heard other spiritually awakened people teach. In fact, she decided that she needed to help other people to awaken and to be recognized as a teacher and healer.  So she set out to become a spiritual influencer on Instagram. She changed the tone of her voice to reflect more divine femininity. She attended every spiritual event she could in order to get every certification she could that would enhance her status in the spiritual communities. She lived like a zealot according to any spiritual ideology that resonated with her.    

Therese felt safe in her new disguised and covert power trip. The superiority she felt around “normies” and other, less awakened people, protected her from that pain and vulnerability she felt before. Of course, she would tell you the exact opposite. She would tell you “we are all perfect as we are, each and every one of us.” Therese is now further away from a genuine awakening than she was in the midst of her mental breakdown. The problem is she, as well as many people around her, are convinced of the exact opposite. She is completely lost in a spiritual ego. She is more identified than ever. And now, anyone who does not act in perfect alignment with how she has decided an awakened being should act, she sees as not awakened. Therese is lost in illusion. She is playing a new game of pretense and is again, lying to herself that it is real. 

Here are some tips for how to tell whether someone is identified with a spiritual persona.

1. If you are sensitive, you will feel that they are pretending. You will feel the façade because you are perceiving what they are presenting vs. what is underneath what they are presenting, and the two will not match. 

2. You will get the feeling of belittlement by virtue of the virtue power trip they are on. Advice they give and things they do are meant to make you feel subordinate and make them feel better than you. These power trips are often disguised as a kind gesture, such as healing they think you need or prayers or channelings from your guides or contacts to other people who you can learn from or sympathizing with you based on how they used to be or positive energy sent your way. 

3. Their personality will be very one-dimensional. This is because they are stuck in a single part of themselves, rather than truly owning the multifaceted nature of the totality of their ego. 

4. They will have huge issues with emotions and emotional reactivity. They are using this coping mechanism (this protector part) to escape from negative emotions. So, their persona is designed to not have them and to resist others having them. Non reactivity will be a commandment. They will negate, invalidate, deny, bypass, and reframe their negative emotions and the negative emotions of others. 

5. They will be in a degree of disengagement from other people, especially anything unsavorily human about them. They only want to be in relationship to the “true” aspect of others, which they see as being the “higher self”. Or have a relationship with others where they are the one on top socially, usually as the healer that is healing or teaching them. This protection mechanism comes about most often in people who have suffered relational trauma and so, their relationship will be with people’s potentials and the universe or God instead. They will be trying to get all their needs met from ‘within themselves’. They don’t want to be in the nitty gritty mess of human-ness and human relationships.  

6. Due to their own powerlessness to pain, especially in relationships, they crafted this persona to have power over pain. The idea of a victim is too threatening. So, they don’t believe in the existence of victims and will not acknowledge anything other than a person’s power or the blessing in any given situation. 

7. They hold a strict dogma. So, you will start to feel around them, like you would in a religious setting. You will feel like there are only certain things that are good, right and acceptable and you must hide anything that doesn’t fit into those categories, so as to not be negatively judged. You’ll start to feel insecure about yourself, especially your own virtue.  

8. They struggle with any questioning that leads them towards vulnerabilities or truths about themselves (or about the world) that make them feel unenlightened or feel uncomfortable negative emotion, disempowered, too human, destabilized, weak, like they don’t know the answer, stuck or inferior. They are using a spiritual personal to AVOID going into and towards any of these things. They don’t question themselves in any way that leads them in this direction either. If you do question them in this way, they will behave like you are trying to go against a commandment.  They are not interested in canvassing what is real. Nor are they committed to the continual finding of what is true and real in any situation. They look to negate certain aspects of reality with other aspects of reality, such as negating suffering by pointing out that people choose their life experience because they know it served them in some way.   

9. An awakened person does not want you to reject, deny or disown any aspect of yourself, no matter how “unsavory”. A person with a spiritual persona will influence you to do exactly this with their words and/or behavior. Because it is what they are doing.

10. Their spirituality will be performative. You can think of a person with a spiritual persona as a method actor. This is after all an act that someone has confused as their real selves. They must become that person. So, they walk the walk and talk the talk and dress the dress and put it right out in front and up in your face to assert that this is who and what they are. Nothing about them will be original, because their persona is copied from other spiritual people who came before them and the current spiritual trends.

The spiritual persona is quite possibly one of the most obnoxious, mind twister things you will encounter in the spiritual communities and you will encounter it if you haven’t done so already. And it acts as a prevention to genuine awareness and genuine awakening and even genuine spiritual connectedness. This being said, the more people that are aware of the existence of the spiritual persona as a pitfall on the spiritual path, the less likely the spiritual persona can continue to serve as a gaslight or a false image of awakening in the spiritual world.