I am kinder, wiser and holier than you

Are you getting tripped-up by the unholy trinity of excessive emotional laboring, intellectual arrogance, and spiritual materialism?

Image by setthayos sansuwansri from Pixabay

You’re probably familiar with the seven deadly sins. Well, here are three more – excessive emotional laboring, intellectual arrogance, and spiritual materialism – which, when thrown together, can result in the ultimate ego trip.

Emotional laboring: Managing, regulating or masking your desires and emotions – in particular the negative ones – in order to better anticipate and support the needs and feelings of others. An example of an emotional laborer is a person who always does their best to encourage, stay calm, or be nice so as to carry the “burden” of their friend, family member or co-worker’s worries, anger or sadness. This is all very sweet, but excessive emotional laboring is when you labor so extensively and intensively that you feel like a martyr, you secretly resent those who you are being stalwart and dependable for, and you think you are more “together” than them.

Intellectual arrogance: Relishing feelings of self-satisfaction as it pertains to your own intellectual abilities. Believing you have superior knowledge, reasoning skills, critical thinking capabilities and powers of imagination than most other people. Believing that most of the time, you are right and others are wrong.

Spiritual materialism: Seeking spiritual experiences, achievements and personal growth to boost your self-worth or raise your spiritual or moral status with the secret hope that you’ll become (or be seen as) enlightened, important, or virtuous. For example, doing charity work wishing to accumulating good karma or making it to heaven after you die, ceaselessly seeking out lessons from famous spiritual teachers so you can tell your friends that so-and-so is your guru, or attending one too many psychedelic ceremonies or meditation retreats with the intention of making your third eye so big it pops right out of your head.

I’m guilty of being seduced by this unholy trinity more often than I’d like. Why? Because it feels so damn good to imagine that:

1. I can make your shit shrink or disappear simply by holding in all of mine, sans turtlehead.

2. I know it all. And if I don’t, I will eventually figure it out all by my brilliant self anyway. Talk to the hand. No need for instructions professor, thank you very much!

3. I will soon be purified from my humanness. That I sit by the feet of the godhead and will soon be blessed with phenomenal psychic powers, so y’all third eye blind folks better pay attention now!

The original seven deadlies are kids play compared to excessive emotional laboring, intellectual arrogance and spiritual materialism because when these three big boys get together, the result is a human being who sees themselves and “presents” as saintly and sage-like but who’s really just their getting self-aggrandizement kicks.

So how can we guard against these three nasties sneaking up on us?

Put a brake on excessive emotional laboring

To put the brakes on excessive emotional laboring, stop acting. Disagree if you feel like it. Talk about yourself more, share your feelings and opinions, whinge, complain, get mad. Stop saying “Don’t worry about me”, “I’m fine”, “I’m good”, “I’m OK”, “I got this”. There’s a time and place for reassuring talk (like when you’re parenting, a paramedic or guiding someone on their first skydive or psychedelic journey), but it’s a drag when that’s the only way you know how to communicate. Do full disclosure and stop trying to look like you’re doing such a great job managing your life, relationships and emotions. Let others know what’s really going on and what really sucks about being you. And you can even tell the other person that you’re tired of having to be their shoulder to cry on all the time and would appreciate a role reversal. Understand that it’s not only acceptable, but necessary, to be in need of help. Being able to support others feels good so give others the chance to feel good by letting them support you too goddammit! Sometimes, we engage in excessive emotional laboring, in “always keeping it together” because it makes us believe that we’re better-than ‘cos unlike all the other people whose lives are a mess, we know how to run a tight ship. Baby, that may feel like the case for now, but your ship is sinking just like everyone else’s!

Arrest your intellectual arrogance

Every single person has a magnificent mind with its own unique architecture. Just because someone isn’t able to articulate their thoughts with linguistic eloquence or through achievements in art, science or industry doesn’t mean their interior worlds are any less complex, wonderful and creative than yours. If you start getting too enamored by the contents of your own little noggin, remember – you may have traveled the world, had many amazing experiences, read thousands of books, and spent a lot of time analyzing yourself, but you will never, ever really know what the guy across the room from you knows, or the entirety of the lived experience of the woman living one floor above or below you. Therefore, your knowledge will always be limited. Because you are just one little noggin in a world of more than 8.2 billion noggins, all your cleverness doesn’t really amount to much, so who cares how intelligent you are or how much information your little computer can hold and regurgitate. There’s nothing all that special about your brain after all, so hop on down from your smarty-pants throne.

The race to be "spiritual" is a bogus challenge

Spiritual materialism – what to do about this one? What does that word “spiritual” even mean anyway? If you see yourself as spiritual, it just means you believe that you have a non-material self – a soul, a spirit, or some kind of wave-like bundle of energy that can move around and stuff. If you pray, meditate or fast more often than your friend, does that mean that your non-material self will become bigger, cleaner, more beautiful, more animated, or more powerful than theirs? Is there some kind of hierarchy of souls – where top tier souls (perhaps the soul of the Dalai Lama or the pope), are deemed the most successful and bottom tier souls (maybe an unrepentant serial child killer) are utter failures? Much of spiritual literature would have us believe this. But something tells me that things don’t work the same way in the world of the unseeable. Those who chase spiritual merit are like hikers who walk a mountain path because they want to get to the summit. But the path is not a vertical one, it’s horizontal and circular, it goes up and down around the sides of the mountain but never to the top. When he gets to the crowded sections of the path, the hiker races and overtakes the slow pokes in front of him. But then three miles on, he sees that those same folks who were eating his dust are now once again ahead of him on the path. This frustrates him and he doesn’t understand the logic of it, so he picks up his pace again – Om nama Shivaya, Om mani padme hum, hail Mary full of grace, our Father who art in heaven, la ilaha illa Allah, smudge more sage and palo santo, go on vision quest, firewalk, confess sins, consume more peyote, ayahuasca, and Iboga, sweat in lodge, go to temple, go to church, walk the El Camino, do a Hajj, do good deeds, fast, do more kriya yoga, breathwork, sound baths, give up meat, give up alcohol, give up TV, give up iPhone, feed the homeless, give bigger tips, and of course, up the prayer and meditation, go out and save more souls – phew……He stops to catch his breath and sees once again that another group of hikers whom he recently overtook, are ahead of him. How exhausting. Every time I get it in my head that I might be more spiritual than the next fella, I tell myself this story and laugh.