The Ultimate Test of Your Spiritual Development

To be spiritual is to transcend.

“Transcend what?” I ask.

“Crude materialism. Isn’t that obvious?” I hear the answer.

No, it’s not obvious!

It’s highly suspicious, if not outright false.

When people present something as obvious, self-evident, undeniable, definite… I’ll definitely question it. Call it crude materialism, greed, sin, godlessness, attachment, illusion, arrogance, disobedience… none of these are obvious felonies to be transcended.

All such “obvious” truths need to be examined with utmost scrutiny! Particularly when such “truths” are prescribed, expected, enforced, especially in the ethereal domain of spirituality.

There’s hardly anything in the world as self-serving as spirituality. Charismatic speakers have often led their followers to literally moronic behaviors. Sometimes they convinced almost everyone.

Once everyone is doing something, it doesn’t seem moronic anymore. The behaviors closest to you are the most difficult to see and, yes, to transcend.

So, the test of genuine spirituality is: can you go beyond your most intimate field of reference?

Can you transcend your own self-referentiality?

I guess you’ve never encountered this phrase — transcend self-referentiality — so please repeat it a few times (if you can even pronounce it) and then let me explain it as plainly as possible…

Christians hold the Bible as their cherished evidence and reference. Proof of a (religious) truth is simple: it says so in the Bible. The Bible is true because the Bible says so.

That’s a literal example of self-referentiality. A less literal example is when you hold something as true because your trusted source says so. The factfulness of that source is a fundamental social convention, deeply rooted in tradition.

Tradition defines cultural identity. Therefore tradition is bound to be irrational. Tribes have concocted their own symbols and manners to distinguish themselves from other tribes. Today, large ethnicities and nations base their identity on the same irrational concoctions.

At the core of cultural identity is usually a religion. Well, in the recent century, you have the liberty to choose nonadherence to religion, or a political ideology, or a thought system of logical axioms… and I bet you can think of some other possibilities.

Religion is diametrally opposed to spirituality; it is cemented in self-referentiality. Its definition of “transcendence” is unmistakable. The religious are more prone to exhibit relentless self-referentiality than the agnostics, but even the avowed skeptics may themselves end up in their self-constructed referential prisons.

All religions have worked out some form of absolute good and evil, virtue and sin. All other goods and evils are subjected to those proclaimed as absolute. Strip a religion to the bone and you’ll find that, for all practical purposes, it’s an ethical code. That code is made up of a number of ingredients: some ageless common sense, some ridiculous folklore, some control-mongering, some fear, some tact, some empty promises, and loads of repetition.

Yes, you can find fantastic wisdom in religion, but that doesn’t give any credit to the dumb, superstitious context around it.

And being non-religious doesn’t automatically absolve you of self-referentiality!

Take the ethics, the code of good and bad, and transpose it to your own life. What tensions do you notice? Which referential fields are clashing against each other? What do you consider holy and what do you abhor?

Your individual experience is invariably nested in the global tension between neoliberal capitalism (including consumerism) and the rising environmental movement. Currently, these two ideologies stand in opposition to each other, they’re caught in self-referentiality.

What’s good for capitalism is bad for ecology, and vice versa. Climate negotiations are bound to fail with both camps categorically insisting on their own referential fields and a priori dismissive of the other side.

The best solution to this conundrum is spirituality

But it has to be spirituality as I’ve defined it here: transcending self-referentiality.

You can’t have a conversation in a vacuum, of course. You need a referential field to interact. When both opposing sides transcend their self-referentiality they may form a neutral referential field, free of biases and presumptions.

Then the capitalist can comprehend the ecologist’s “truth”, and the ecologist can understand the capitalist’s “truth”. Empathy serves as a super-conciliator.

Transcending self-referentiality is the precondition of every deep collaboration between different cultural backgrounds. It’s essential that both sides transcend it, and not that one side demands it from the other while not enacting it herself.

Evangelization is enforcement of a referential field. Yes, this does create the basis of social cohesion, but at a dire cost: institutionalized falsehood. The achieved uniformity can only be maintained with violence.

When a deeply spiritual message resounds in a religious society, it will be shunned or even declared a blasphemy. A wide agreement is a sign that the message doesn’t pierce through the institutionalized falsehoods. It’s tame and fearful.

Once you raise above your own self-referentiality sufficiently, you can see everything I elaborated on thus far. You can see your limitations along with the limitations of your society.

You know that grounding yourself firmly in your own “truth” doesn’t make much difference, It’s not really your truth. You’ve constructed this “truth” from stories and ideas and emotions and experiences you’ve picked from others throughout your life.

Maybe one day you reach a point where you define yourself, along with everything in your referential field, without any rigid “right and wrong.” Nothing shocks you. You see through everything because you’ve seen through yourself.

You see through the news on the TV. You’re immune to all the BS around you. You smile at atrocities and catastrophes. You laugh at inflated interpretation. And most of all: you laugh at yourself.

You notice your own idiocies and remain serene. Your self-change doesn’t happen as a fearful reaction, but instead as a patient and conscious act of love.

You don’t take yourself (too) seriously. You’ve transcended self-referentiality. Your identity is fluent, not cemented. You’re strong in your softness.

As such, you can interact with anyone and give them a fair deal regardless of what they appear to be on the outside: a president or a begar, a CEO or a teenager, a prostitute or a movie star.

You’ve transcended self-referentiality!

In my following article, I describe three key competencies for transcending self-referentiality.