The Grandiose and The Powerless
From Anthony Rella
You can also read this article at A Beautiful Resistance.
I was at a friend’s party, having just had a personally beautiful and moving psychedelic experience, in which the god who experiences life through me showered my parts with praise and gratitude even as it encouraged them to lighten up and stop spending so much energy on stress and anxiety. I’d mentioned the trip in passing, not intending to dump it on people, but two of my friends seemed interested and affirming, so I spent longer sharing the story. Afterwards, a part of me that always comes in to find something to cringe about imagined these two friends walking away with a bit of an eye-roll. I was a cliché. White Man, Tripping, Discovers He is God – News at 11.
There is this cynical, dismissive part of me that gets concerned about spiritual narcissism and worried that I will succumb to it. The tone is quite judgy, but it’s not always been so harsh. It’s watched my sincere, enthusiastic parts run toward the spiritual world with a desperate longing to be told my purpose and meaning in life, and that running toward has gotten me into great hurt and confusion. Every wise teacher I’ve had, human or otherwise, has responded to my seeking by holding up the mirror. Even in this psychedelic connection to the divine, the message remained the same: look how hard you are searching outside of yourself for what’s been here always and forever.
My good friend and spiritual compatriot once sent me an episode of Teen Creeps in which the podcasters, themselves seemingly not occultists, do a hilarious survey of theosophical occult ideas and the tendency for spiritual teachers to eventually “reveal” that they’re incarnations of important deities. “Oh my god, you guys. Me and my wife Alice are actually descendants of Osiris and Isis. Isn’t this crazy?”
If you practice long enough, it seems, eventually a spirit will tell you you’re a manifestation of a god, or something like that. There’s a way to take such experiences and use them to stop growing. One could take such an experience and turn it into an identity. This is akin to finding a balloon and forcing your whole being inside of it. Feelings of specialness and importance inflate us, lifting us high off the ground. It feels amazing! The perspective is profound. And it feels safe! Because we are held aloft by this warm air and we are separated out from the poor ignorant ones who still live on the ground.
What we’re missing is that we’re still living inside a latex vessel. We can’t keep growing inside of it. Eventually the material starts to chafe against our efforts to grow. We feel vaguely suffocated and panicky and don’t understand why. If we want to stay afloat, we have to keep the feelings of specialness warming and filling our balloons—no wonder people like this position themselves as gurus and human gods for their devotees to inflate. Fear the day when that special identity punctures, and we fall hard back to reality.
Instagram’s algorithm offers up a lot of inflated balloons to my feed. And my cynical part wants to protect me from the foolishness and the fall of such inflation, so much that it mistrusts the beauty and nourishment of these moments of connection. What feels most true to me is that, being a facet of god—whatever that is—is both profoundly special and extremely mundane. You, too, have god within you. The fiddle leaf fig that lives in my office is a facet of god. We all emerge from the same material, if only the soil of the earth, and so we are all composed of the body and of that god. Even the people I would judge and dismiss.
This truth need not be inflating. Such a realization frees us of the relentless urge to fix ourselves, constantly scrutinizing for deficiencies and flaws to correct and excise. My first true message from the divine came in response from repeated entreaties to be changed and freed of something about myself that I thought was awful, and it turned out it was nothing to worry about. It was fine. I could go and live. When you feel how profoundly loved you are, it’s easier to stop being a surgeon constantly operating upon one’s self and instead become the soul from which our lives grow. This is spiritual experience that ripens us.
Lately I feel my cynical parts themselves becoming inflated, bitter in attitude toward those they perceive to be prioritizing prayer over action, intention over getting one’s hands dirty in the business of living on this earth. Yet this is a projection of how I feel, my own feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy. Parts of me miss the idealistic belief in sincerity and spiritual purpose. They do not miss the impossible state of moral purity I felt pressured to perform.
I would reconcile these again, the parts that believe life is worth living, that it’s worth trying to be more than we are, and the parts that say I am just enough and do not need to carry the world’s sufferings on my shoulders all the time. Neither idealism nor cynicism need to be at war, for both can drive us off the cliff, while together they can keep us on a human, healthy path. We are not gods responsible for redeeming the world, nor piles of shit whose every effort is meaningless. This moment matters, and how we act in it is important, and that is enough.
Anthony Rella
is a therapist, a writer, and a spiritual teacher in Seattle, bringing light to dark places and honoring the shadows in bright spaces. He is the author of Circling The Star (and instructor of the course of the same name), and In The Midnight Hour, both from Gods&Radicals Press. He is also the author of the upcoming Slow Magic (Llewellyn).
His website, where this essay first appeared, is here.
Spirits can lie, just like humans.