Let’s talk about spiritual practice. Think of it that way, the whole purpose is to strip our ego of its clothes and see it as it truly is. What can happen though in our process, is to actually put more clothes on our ego and not even realize it. We are upgrading the wardrobe, making it look even fancier than before. Our ego is now “a conscious being, an awakened one”. When in reality, all it does is to use the same mechanism, self-construction, comparison, superiority. It’s the ego’s masterstroke: it co-opts the very tools meant to dissolve it and uses them to build a better self. It’s exactly what Chögyam Trungpa said : “ the path itself becomes the ego’s newest acquisition “.
The ordinary ego is catchable because humility can see pride. But the spiritual ego hides inside humility itself. "I'm so much more surrendered than I used to be." "I've really let go of my ego." The moment you notice you've transcended your ego, the noticer is the ego, congratulating itself. It weaponizes self-awareness. It can even weaponize this reading: you could walk away thinking "good thing I understand the spiritual ego, unlike all those people who don't," and it's already back, feeding on the insight. There's no move you can make against it that it can't absorb, because any "I have defeated my spiritual ego" is itself the spiritual ego's finest costume.
Keep an eye on the subtle comparisons. Measuring everybody and keeping track of their patterns, quietly rating who’s “awake”, who’s still asleep, who’s bypassing.
The performance. You might feel the need to be seen as you practice, to be acknowledged about your achievements. Real depth though doesn’t need a witness.
The spiritual credential. After my awakening…" "Since I did the work…”. This one is experience deployed as authority, the resume of enlightenment.
The subtle contempt. And this is one that a lot of people find themselves in, including myself, without even realizing. You feel impatience with people “who are still in their ego”, “low vibration” or “not conscious”. It’s basically just judgment, with prettier clothes. This dismissal of others is dressed as discernment. It’s crucial to understand that everybody is where they are supposed to be, so they can learn and eventually understand their lessons.
The immunity move. Using spiritual language to dodge accountability: “that’s your projection”, “I’ve released that”. The teachings are slowly becoming armor against feedback, rather than a mirror.
As we discussed in our previous article about how the spirituality was commodified, the commodified seeking works because the spiritual ego is hungry for a flattering identity and will pay for it. That's why the market can sell awakening: there's a buyer inside who desperately wants to be awakened, as a status, and that buyer is the very thing awakening is meant to end.
In 1984 a psychotherapist named John Welwood, himself a student of Trungpa's, gave the phenomenon a second and equally durable name: spiritual bypassing. He had watched it in his own Buddhist community and even in himself. Spiritual bypassing is the use of spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep the unfinished emotional and psychological work a person still genuinely needs to do.
It is the grief skipped over with "everything happens for a reason." It is the anger relabelled as low vibration and swallowed rather than felt. It is detachment performed where there should be involvement, and indifference mistaken for equanimity. It is, in Welwood's framing, a premature transcendence, an attempt to rise above the messy human material before you have actually dealt with it. The spiritual frame becomes a place to hide from the very things that most need attention, and because the hiding looks like wisdom from the outside, almost no one calls it out.
This is why real inner work goes inside before it goes outside. You cannot bypass the shadow and awaken past it at the same time. This is shadow work territory, and the two subjects are inseparable, because bypassing is, at bottom, a refusal to meet what has been disowned. It is also why the tradition's word for genuine growth matters here. Real change is evolving rather than performing evolution. Performing can feel comfy and you can easily remain stuck there.
The bypass has a dangerous mirror. In one direction, real psychological distress gets relabelled as spiritual. Genuine anxiety, depression, dissociation, or something more serious gets reframed as an awakening, a purge, a dark night, and therefore never receives the ordinary, unglamorous, sometimes clinical help it actually needs. This is spiritual bypassing at its most harmful, and it can cost people years unfortunately.
In the other direction, the error reverses. A genuine existential or spiritual opening gets flattened into pure pathology by a medical frame that has no category for it, and something meaningful gets medicated into silence. Both errors are real and they can be helped by a third idea. In their 1989 book, the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and the psychotherapist Christina Grof introduced the term spiritual emergency for exactly this overlap: a genuine transformative process that arrives as a destabilising crisis. The word is a deliberate double meaning, holding emergency and emergence in the same time, crisis and opening at once. The dark night, understood this way, is seen as a stage rather than a malfunction, and also a stage that sometimes needs support to move through safely.
So the practical takeaway? Discernment between these three, ordinary illness, spiritual bypass, and genuine spiritual emergency, is genuinely difficult, and it is not something to do alone when you are struggling. If you are not functioning, or the darkness is heavy and persistent, please treat that as real and reach for help. There is no version of this path where suffering alone is the more advanced choice.
You cannot think your way out of the spiritual ego, because thinking is the medium it thrives in. But you can learn to feel for a few honest markers, held lightly and without turning them into another test to pass.
The clearest one is direction. Does this experience quiet the self or inflate it? Genuine opening tends toward ordinariness, humility, and a softening toward other people. The spiritual ego tends toward specialness, subtle superiority, and a growing distance from the people who have not done the work. Watch which way you are moving.
The second is compassion, as we discussed earlier. Real awakening is almost always accompanied by more warmth toward ordinary struggling humans, including the earlier version of yourself. If your spirituality is making you colder, more judgemental, or more impatient with people who are simply where you used to be, that is worth examining honestly.
The third is avoidance. Ask, gently, whether your practice is helping you meet your life or helping you escape it. Whether the serenity is earned or performed. Whether there is a feeling you have been spiritually rising above rather than actually feeling. The answers are usually available if you are willing to be a little embarrassed by them.
And here is the trap inside the trap, the one this whole article risks becoming. Knowing about the spiritual ego can itself become a spiritual ego. "At least I am aware of my own bypassing" is one of the most refined costumes of all. There is no concept that gets you out of this, because the wanting-to-be-out is the same self in a new outfit. What actually loosens it is the return to ordinary, unglamorous, unwitnessed practice, and to the honesty of admitting you are as caught as anyone. That is the whole of it. This is the same movement underneath real change of any kind, where the pattern only loosens once you stop performing the solution and actually do the plain work.
If you want a container for that plainer practice, the Highest Self workbook is guiding you and giving you some steps on how to achieve a higher state, while keeping everything we discussed here in mind.
One thing I would emphasize on is this: the moment you are certain you have escaped the ego is the moment it is most in charge. Humility is the practice itself, returned to daily.
The most useful posture is a kind of cheerful suspicion of yourself. Don’t think of it as self-flagellation, that's just the spiritual ego wearing sackcloth, still making it about you. More like a light, humored watchfulness: of course the ego is in here somewhere, dressed up, and of course I can't fully see it, so I'll hold my own sense of "how far I've come" loosely and let reality keep correcting me. The people who seem most free of it are the ones who'd be the first to laugh and say they aren't.
The spiritual ego is the sense of self that forms around your spiritual progress, quietly turning practice, insight, and awakening into a superior identity. It feels like the opposite of ego while functioning as one of its most refined forms. The telltale sign is a growing sense of being further along than other people.
Spiritual materialism is a term coined by the teacher Chögyam Trungpa in 1973 for the way the ego co-opts the spiritual path into an ego-building pursuit. Instead of dissolving the self, seeking becomes another way to accumulate and to feel special, collecting practices, teachers, and realisations as possessions.
Spiritual bypassing, named by psychotherapist John Welwood in 1984, is the use of spiritual ideas and practices to avoid unresolved emotional wounds and psychological work. Common forms include skipping past grief with tidy platitudes, suppressing anger as low vibration, and mistaking detachment for genuine equanimity.
This is genuinely difficult to discern, and the two can overlap in what the Grofs called a spiritual emergency, a real transformative process that arrives as a crisis. Because the distinction is so hard and the stakes are high, it is not something to sort out alone when you are struggling. If you cannot function or the distress is persistent, please seek professional support and treat your wellbeing as real, whatever its ultimate meaning.
Yes, and this is one of the most common and refined versions of the trap. "At least I am aware of my bypassing" is simply the ego wearing a more sophisticated costume. No concept gets you out of it, because the desire to be out is the same self in new clothes. What loosens it is ordinary, humble, ongoing practice rather than more insight.
There is no shortcut through this, and anyone selling one is selling the costume. If you want the plainer path, this article is a gentle starting point, and the daily practice underneath all of it stays ordinary on purpose.
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