After a decade of deep spiritual work, I’ve decided to tap out on constantly ascending and becoming. I’m done with seeking to be my higher self. I’m good as I Am; I’m choosing to live life as a divine being in a human body. Some days are great, other days less, there is peace present, and growth is inevitable. The more I reflected on my incessant need to improve and the constant impatience to become, I realized that my obsession with self-optimization was another ego trap disguised as pursuit of growth. This layered essay discusses self-optimization, becoming, our higher selves, and the shame that may fuel our burning need to constantly improve.

I have sat with the feeling of “never quite good enough” for quite some time. After setting up myself for disappointment way too many times when I fail to be who I said I was going to be, I realized that it’s very hard to even see my growth when I’m constantly seeking to be my next best idea. In those instances when I get pulled into “who I’m supposed to be”, my mental identity tends to weight more than my actual reality. My ego, something that I made, is running the show and thus constantly urging me to meet its expectations.

Ego 101: understanding the self-created self

I will not be making the ego bigger than it is or going too deeply into all the different understandings there are about it, but I need to have a central definition so we are all on the same line. So, what do I mean with “ego”?

Our egos are the identities we make ours.

We all have a made-up identities. They are mental attachments to things that we like, things that happened to us, things that we want, things that we despise… You name it. As long as we seek to find and define ourselves in them, we will find our egos there. Much like we have an identity for the outside world, we also adopt an identity of who we claim to be and who we want to be. We have ideas, expectations, thoughts and beliefs that we want to align in one identity.

It’s important to note that everything is relational. So when we create these idealized version of ourselves and all the things that make up our identities and our worlds, we don’t often pay attention that they are not created in a vacuum. We have cultural references, social references, mythical references, and so the list goes.

With this information, let’s go to the psychology of the so-called “higher self”. As we go deeper into this piece, I argue how the “higher self” is just be another creation—something of our own making.

What makes our higher self
our higher self?

We all have a different understanding, a specific idea, of our “higher selves.” While no higher self is the same, we can all agree that this self is an elevated version of our current self. Our “higher selves” don’t come out of nowhere; we create them. If you think about your idea of your higher self, what is the frame of reference? Where does the mental image come from? Who or what inspires our notions of our higher selves?

I’ve come to realize that it’s informed by the world; our ideas of right and wrong, of virtues and vices, our notions of wisdom and maturity, and our perceptions of God and Love. To name a few.

The “higher self” is but a mental idea of an identity that we believe we must become based on different impressions that we have received that have informed us what it means to operate as this version of self.

There’s nothing wrong with creating an aspirational identity based on social conditioning and rooted in the cultures you know, but it becomes problematic once we are at the mercy of our creations—when who we decided to become ends up mattering more than who we are right now.

As an example, you want to run marathons but you have yet to start routinely jogging to get in condition. That space between where you are and where you want to be, is an ambition. That ambition did not come out of nowhere; you saw someone running a marathon and you found value in the activity. At the very least it piqued your curiosity to try it out. You did and you liked it. All good.

It becomes an issue the moment you start fighting yourself because you are not living up to your expectations of what you said you wanted to do, how you wanted to show up, and who you said you wanted to be. Because now, an activity that may have inspired you to move more and challenge the limits of your body, has been reduced to an identity that you need to live up to: a runner.

Identities always weight heavier than activities. Because with identities, we create all these ideas of who a runner should be, what a runner should wear, and eat, and do, and even how a runner should rest. These ideas are adopted from larger agreements that are already in place, and resources available, informing us about the things that make one “a runner”, for example.

Before anything else, we are being someone right here, right now. But feeling stuck in becoming, I’ve had moments where I’d forget that I am not who I want to be; I am who I am being. I’ve had enough moments where the idea of my becoming weighted more than who I was being.

Stuck in be-coming

We can trade the word “runner” for any nouns with a strong adjective. It does not matter what identity I aim to adopt, as soon as I attach myself to it and seek to define myself through it, there is always something to improve, something to strive towards, something to be-come. You see how BEING in those moments is not yet enough? It’s yet to “come”? Yeah, that’s the trap of be-coming; it’s never quite there.

With the ego, that’s what happens at some point: the moment is reduced to a means to an end. Because “the ego wants to want more than it wants to have” as wisely noted by Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth, so it will never be fully content with what is.

Confusing what we identify with for our Essence, is what creates a world ruled by egos. Attaching ourselves too strongly to our created future, ideal selves, chokes our authentic ones—who we are being right now.

Respectfully, fuck my “higher self”

After feeling like not good enough despite my best efforts and intentions after many years of “doing the work”, I have decided to fuck it. Fuck trying to become my “higher self”.

Somehow, I have managed to gather all these mental labels of what I must do so I can be-come my “higher self”, even though nobody has ever met him. He only lives in my imagination, in my mental labels of “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts.” This persona that I have created lives in the future. I find his image in my constant need to improve, in an idealized strict mental program, in the thought always seeking the next milestone, always anticipating something else, something better—never fully content with what is. I experience my longing for a version that is always on the way but not quite fully there yet where I want him to be. That’s an ego trap disguised as a spiritual path.

My regular self turned out to be a shadow I was running from, and my “higher self” an ideal imagined persona created by my own ego. Imagine how crazy it is to let our minds, a tool to serve us, run our lives. This is what happens when we seek to constantly find ourselves in mental labels. This happens, unfortunately, very often. We’d rather live in the future than being where we are, as we are.

Moving Beyond, I’ll share more intimately about my journey making peace with who I am as I make space for who I will be. These reflections are rooted in my lived experiences battling with myself in the name of becoming and ascending spiritually.

Weed, porn, and sex:
my personal teachers

I wrote a Note to Self back in 2019 titled “Always Spiritual”, and in that post, I shared how one cannot not be spiritual. Quite an explicit post, it was inspired by what I already knew back then about spirituality and the essence of things: no performance required to belong. There is nothing to do to be a spiritual being.

Seven years later, if someone would ask me about the things that I’m ashamed of admitting that I enjoy, my answer would be watching porn and smoking weed. I had peace with these activities, as openly discussed in that blog post in 2019, until the idea of who I thought I was supposed to be as a (spiritual) teacher and writer got in the way. Again. Shame found its way back to me. To the point where I would hate to admit that I liked those things. But I do. I like to smoke a good joint, and every now and then arouse myself with audiovisual material created by other people meant to sexually arouse people.

Does any of that make me any less of a person? No, I don’t think so. Does any of that change the fact that I’m a wise, knowledgeable man? Not at all. Do I understand nuance and am I informed about the effects of excess and addiction on the body and psyche? Yes, and I am still teaching myself moderation and balance as I learn about my motives and what I like. I am still learning new ways of being and doing.

Now, have smoking weed and watching porn made me feel like I needed, am supposed to, be someone else because there is something “wrong” with me for enjoying/doing these activities? Yes. This has happened often. If anything, that has been the reoccurring theme with shame in my life, creating much tension and frustration between who I am and who I think I need to be. Somehow, these activities were not seen as virtuous, and therefore, more often than not, have made me feel ashamed. They have taught me where shame lives, and what creates it or awakens it in my life.

Deconstructing shame

It’s quite telling, actually, when self-optimization, when the pursuit of our higher selves, still does not give peace or lovingly encourages growth. In Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of The Emotions, Neel Burton notes that “shame arises from measuring our actions against moral standards and discovering that they fall short”, and he shares a fundamental difference between guilt and shame. While they often go hand in hand, according to Burton, “shame involves falling short of cultural or societal moral standards, whereas guilt involves falling short of one’s own moral standards.”

That’s to say: we feel shame about certain things because the world told us what we should feel shame about and we have agreed at some point to this. Our individual moral standards are not independent of our societal or cultural ones; one informs the other. Much like the ideas that inform us about what makes a marathon runner a marathon runner, we have notions of who we think we should be, based on borrowed agreements.

“How can I claim to be spiritual and watch porn? Porn is bad, as it reduces the human to only the physical and makes us objectify people.” “How can I claim to be my higher self and smoke weed? Weed is used to suppress emotions and block spirit.” These were some of the discourses informing me that shame is the right response whenever I felt frustrated and ashamed of myself, telling me that I have failed to meet a moral standard, and that who I am is wrong.

Which is funny if you ask me, because what morality??! This world’s? Where babies are beheaded and nothing is done about it on the highest levels? What moral authority do societies have when profit is prioritized over people? I’d rather be sovereign in my decisions than letting society dictate how I must move.

So, shame can creep into the most enjoyable activities simply because we have collectively decided to create a separation between the hollow and the holy, and have made (unconscious collective) agreements on how to feel about each category.

I had to learn the hard way that we tend to set ourselves up for bullshit by our own thinking, and it’s only we who can “emancipate ourselves from mental slavery”, as “none but ourselves can free our minds”, like Bob said.

There is more nuance to life than the hard “rights” and “wrongs” that we rely on to make sense of the world. Smoking a herb and beating one to porn doesn’t make me a bad person. Fuck that. I no longer subscribe to that belief.

And consensual sex… You think we aren’t gonna talk about it? That is God in action. Let’s go Beyond…

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Go Beyond…

Thank you for reading all the way here. If you are not yet a Paid Member, I invite you to join us in the Paid Sanctuary section, Beyond, where we will continue the conversation on this topic more intimately. All offerings that go Beyond have a level of personal investment that goes beyond the already established intentions and efforts put into regular offerings. If you think what we covered was interesting, insightful, informative and relatable, Beyond will take you elsewhere.

Beyond this offering, you will find:

• Raw reflections on shame, sexuality, and spirituality;
  • sexual experiences, sexual abstinence, spiritual purity;
  • confronting thoughts on purity culture and how it perpetuates shame, even outside of organized religion;
• Deeply personal and insightful conversations with self on this topic;
• Practical tips to deal with shame and be kinder to one’s self while growing and moving towards ambitions and goals;
• Concluding thoughts on the coherent totality of this offering;
• Exclusive downloadable audio files of reflections shared in Beyond Episodes;
• Continued access to the downloadable Beyond Files for deeper personal reflections on this website and all posts that go Beyond for the duration of your investment.

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