teaching

Hi! A little about me. I'm a Wisconsinite. I am in my first year of retirement from teaching. I feel I have had lots of different experiences both in school and out of school. I am a cardiac arrest survivor from ventricular fibrillation  and had an 80% blockage angioplastied. Last year I had my first battery replacement. I am married and my husband has 1 year of retirement  in. We have 2 adult sons. The oldest is married and is a step dad. The youngest is not married yet. My parents are deceased and I have no siblings. My life has been a rollercoaster of ups and downs, right from my birth. I enjoy camping, gardening (though I am not a green thumb), family and my Chihuahua/ beagle, Snoopy. I am a person full of life experience contrast, one beingcontrasts such as being spiritual yet not church going. I hope  my experiences can help others. 😀

Are spiritual teachers more narcissistic on average? Our best guess at infant phenomenology is that we come out of the womb experiencing a pre-differentiated oneness. As babies, we assume the world revolves around us because for all we can tell, the world is us. We have no way to empathize bc we can’t take another perspective. This theory underpins a lot of psychological claims, like “we internalized our parents’ fighting, assuming it was about us when it really wasn’t.” 

I claim this isn’t an elevated spiritual state, because we haven’t developed individuality yet. We need to have something before we can transcend it. Ego collapse and ego-transcendence both involve a different sense of self from the adult norm, so they’re easy to confuse without a developmental distinction. Both provide a sense of certainty, and rely on non-linguistic knowing, making it harder to recognize the distinctions.

To the extent this is true, it makes me wonder: Are spiritual teachers more narcissistic on average?? (some evidence points that way, but no rigorous studies exist). Can they differentiate between the state of pre-differentiated and post-differentiated union? And if they can’t, how often are experiences labeled “union,” or “nonduality” actually literal infantile regressions? If so, wouldn’t these teachers exhibit the same self-centered orientation of an infant?

Plus, selection effects: narcissistic individuals are drawn to roles with authority, attention, and reduced accountability structures. Communities where charisma is more relevant than independent reviews of competence (versus accounting or Nascar), and states of attainment are categorically unverifiable by the students (versus massage or writing fiction).

Distinguishing infant oneness from transcendence

This doesn’t mean all spiritual teachers or leaders are “narcissistic” even in a colloquial sense, just higher risk. And it’s an inherent epistemological risk in finding someone who’s better than you at something you haven't accessed, using frameworks you haven't developed, verified by experiences you can't reproduce (yet).

So best to encourage critical thinking, and introspect on some of the checks I have for myself (and others) about myself and anyone I look to for guidance: Is my spiritual practice increasing my need for special treatment, entitlement, surrounding me with people that never challenge my views? Am I always turning criticism around—saying it's “your karma,” “your projection,” “your lesson”, “your drama triangle stuff”?” Am I telling others what’s true about them without acknowledging my projection (ironically), justifying boundary violations since it’s all illusory, calling my emotional reactivity "authenticity," calling others’ reactivity attachment?

Or do I laugh at myself, and the inevitable foibles I engage to maintain the sense of self I’m laughing at? Can I laugh at any so-called “spiritual attainment”? Do I truly not need special treatment—do I wipe the toilets and empty the trash like everyone else? Am I able to hold many different perspectives at once, including “unity” and my uniqueness? Do I maintain appropriate boundaries while experiencing interconnection? Is my ethical behavior consistent across contexts?

On Things I Loved That I Dropped. In a workshop I attended several days ago, everyone ended up sharing, one-by-one, about their experience or relationship with the subject of God (with a capital G). When it was my turn, I described being very young, with no training around religion or God, experiencing a very personal relationship with a God that cared about me and that was the still point at which all the chaos in my young life (and in the whole world) made sense. From this, I rested on a belief that somewhere beyond my understanding, life made sense. In many ways, this relationship not only comforted me but actually saved me.

Later, in college, I was exposed to traditional Christianity and took all the traditional teachings and trappings of it on as my own. I was a devout believer and I ended up leading the bible studies, not because of my expertise, but because of my earnest belief. And then, I began to find things about this Christianity I had learned, that I could not make sense of. As the questioning grew into serious doubt, I found I could no longer believe what I couldn’t believe. Through tears, I formally broke up with the very personal God of my youth, still vibrant in my experience, because I falsely believed that I could not have my real experiential God if I could not believe in the teachings that were associated with him. It has taken my years to begin to reclaim my God (different now, much more expansive, but still experientially real), leaving behind what no longer feels integral.

There are other things that I have loved and left behind based on trappings associated with it rather than on the essence of the thing (reading fiction, singing and playing the guitar, for example). As I move toward more integration in my life, I find myself rediscovering some of those things I loved from my past. They are not the same, having been laid aside for decades, yet rediscovering them is bringing my joy.

Do you have things that you loved that you dropped because of the trappings?