When Spirituality Becomes Anti-Human

Spirituality promises so much and sometimes way too much.

I used to expect meditation to cure my depression and anxiety, to take away my emotional pain, and to remedy any kind of relational challenge I was going through. “It is enough,” I thought to myself “to be aware of pain.” 

The truth is that the more I meditated, the stronger my pain got and the more lost in it I began to feel. The more I expected from spiritual practice, the more it backfired. 

Luckily, when I talked about what I was going through I quickly realized that I was not alone in this. I’m going to attempt to give you a summary of what I’ve found through nearly 20 years of spiritual practice. 

“Meditate harder” is often the only advice a spiritual teacher can give you because that’s the only tool they’ve got. 

There are also those who will dismiss, deny, and gaslight any emotional or relational difficulty you bring to them and they do this in the name of spirituality. Some seem to have lost their souls as well as their precious humanity in a soup of homogenized spiritual euphoria. 

Spirituality is such a mixed bag: From those manifesters who bank a little too much on the power of their imagination, to those humanity denying non-dual nobodies, from the everyday crooks out to make a buck by fooling people to truly genuine realizers, everything is here. 

There are paths that advocate so strongly for “the end of the cycle of rebirth” (framing that as Enlightenment), that you cannot help but hate being alive. You are left wondering what is so terrible about Life itself that these so-called “paths to ultimate freedom” feel the need to advocate for its ending. 

I have heard stories of meditation teachers shaming their students by saying, “You just finished a silent retreat, you shouldn’t be crying!” It seems like their vision of freedom doesn’t include human emotions. 

I know those who believe they are not good enough as spiritual practitioners because they “still” experience fear every now and then. Feeling like a giant failure seems to be the default paradigm of a lot of spirituality. Because, “Well, I’m not even enlightened!”

“If I was enlightened enough,” they think “I wouldn’t have all these human struggles.” 

What an existential nightmare in the name of spirituality! What a desperate, hateful fight against human nature in the name of freedom! 

There are also those who are very eager to destroy any argument you have with social systems or groups of people and to show you, instead, the ultimate truth of your nobodiness. How much they must struggle with being somebody that they resort to such violent redirection! 

Humanity-hating spirituality is so common that it goes unnoticed. Those who seem so eager to transcend their humanity congregate like cults in facebook groups and elsewhere, making sure to validate each other’s delusions. 

None of this should come as a surprise, however, if we truly understand what’s at stake now in our world. In George Carlin’s words, “The planet isn’t going anywhere, we are! We’re going away. Pack your shit folks, we’re going away!”

We are, as a species, at the brink of self-destruction. And of course the pain and the shock, the agony and the trauma of this truth can be so massive and overwhelming that we turn to spirituality (again) to hide from it. 

A very common way that we hide from our personal, relational, and social problems is through sucking on the highs (or hopes!) provided by spirituality as we turn the Ultimate Freedom into the Ultimate Addiction. 

Isn’t it interesting that what the religious hopes to get by being pious is also what the greedy hopes to get by getting rich? We cling to God, to money in the same way that some of us can cling to a romantic partner or to the pleasure of sex, and to the euphoric freedom of spiritual realization. 

Same clinging, same desperation, same trap, different context. 

Let us talk about a Life honoring, a Life celebrating, a humanity enhancing spirituality. Let us include what we are so eager to exclude and leave behind in the name of Enlightenment. 

Let us also look at our emotional and relational suffering. Let us face death even as we continue to seek the Deathless. Let us embody and express and feel humbled by our limitations even as we recognize our very nature as the Limitless. 

Let us not leave any part of our precious human experience outside of the infinitely compassionate embrace of our magnificent spirituality. Let us live so fully that we don’t cling to even the greatest experiences of spiritual freedom. 

Let us transcend our problematic relationship with pain. Let us live.