I wrote the following blog post 11 years ago—in February 2012. It was written shortly after I gave up on the spiritual pursuit of “enlightenment” realizing not only that it was impossible to attain, but also that it’s not a worthwhile goal otherwise.
Spirituality is a word with as many meanings as there are people using it. In this post, I am referring to spirituality as the hard-core practice where the goal is to attain enlightenment—which means the end of suffering—through understanding the human psyche, the world, and existence.
Focus on the Inner
The biggest flaw in spirituality is its exclusive focus on the inner. In spirituality, everything that needs to be fixed is inside the person’s mind. For as long as the spiritual person suffers, his focus would be fixated on the inner, that is, himself.
When there is always something to fix on the inside, naturally, he won't be interested in the problems external to himself. And he would justify that by saying, “Unless and until you fix yourself, you can’t fix anything else in the world.”
The spiritualist looks at the problems of the world and internalizes them. He views everything that causes him to suffer as his own weakness. If he is suffering in love, he would say he needs to develop from the inside. Feeling anger and jealousy? Develop from the inside. The more he suffers, the stronger his obsession with the self gets.
Since the ego is the root of suffering, the spiritualist wants to eliminate the ego. He believes that his true nature is not his ego/self which is just an illusion created in consciousness. His true nature is the nature of the universe, the whole. Any man having an ego (which by the way includes every normal, functional human being) is imperfect and needs to develop himself. The state of perfectness is when one loses one's ego and experiences oneness or unity with the universe, or the whole, whatever that means.
The spiritualist fails to see the irony. The obsession with eliminating the ego is nonetheless an obsession with the ego!
The “Enlightened”
The spiritualist refuses to accept that suffering is intrinsic to our existence and that there is no escape from the human condition.
The so-called enlightened people are not free of suffering. If anything, they have built thick walls around themselves cutting them off from every element of the human world. Through reclusive practices, they have mastered the art of deluding themselves. At best, they have achieved unwavering focus on the self, and their obsession with the self has overridden every other drive they might have. They appear to have a concern with the problems of the world, but not really. For every suffering they encounter, they view it as a sign of their imperfectness and obsess more with the self, through isolation and meditation and whatnot.
And they offer the same to others, which is not really a concern for the world but their self-affirmation.
It is impossible to care and not suffer. To not want to suffer is to not want to care about anything. That is narcissism.
If there is truly an enlightened person who is free of suffering—which I don't think is possible—then he must be a narcissist of the highest rank. He cares squat about life, the world, and other people's suffering. He is happy in his delusions. The king in the empty kingdom. He is no more alive than a piece of vegetable. Pinch him and he will crawl ever deeper into himself.
A Few More Thoughts
There is value in understanding the nature of reality and developing your mind. It is called self-improvement or getting wise.
A wise man can manage the suffering instead of being consumed by it. The spiritualist, on the other hand, wants to get rid of the suffering completely. That is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
As I wrote in this post:
Happiness is what you feel when you overcome suffering. Desires, difficulties, and inconveniences are types of suffering, and when you solve them, you feel positive, you feel successful, and happy.
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I don’t want to be vegetation—which is what I would become if I don’t feel anything. My goal is not to attain a state where there is no suffering but to reframe suffering as positive.
Here is suffering? Wow, that means here’s an opportunity to take action, solve the problem, and feel happy! See how the reframe works?
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How boring life would be if there was no problem to solve! Because happiness, as you may have noticed, wanes after a few days or even hours. You need new achievements to maintain interest in life, and for life to seem meaningful.
Suffering—be it in the form of desires, anger, envy, sadness, or whatever—is what gives life meaning. Just like a game without challenges would be the most boring game no one would want to play, a life without problems and suffering would be the most boring life.