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 because 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).

With love, Jordan

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