Spiritual Vanity and the Trap of "Holy" Compulsions

I'll be honest: I kind of despise the word "spiritual".

It’s been so overtly misused, packaged, and romanticized that it has almost lost its meaning. We’ve turned it into just another aesthetic. Someone grows their hair long, someone loops a specific count of rudraksha around their neck, someone wears a certain ring, someone applies kumkum in a very precise geometric shape, someone switches entirely to linen or unbleached cotton, someone shaves off their head, someone meticulously matches the gemstone on their finger to the planetary hour, or drops heavy Sanskrit words into completely casual conversations.. We build these hyper-specific, unique identities, slap the label "spiritual" on them, and call it a day.

And let me be absolutely clear...this is not an external, judgmental observation of other people. I do it too. I am right there in the mud with everyone else.

Wiping the Slate Clean

If you’ve read my last post, you know I literally just chopped off the long hair I had been fiercely identifying with. But was it more than a haircut?

Over the last few years, I watched myself become heavily enmeshed with my identity as an artist with "Layasthana." It became a construct I was carrying around. So, right after the intensity of a specific sadhana, I decided to do something drastic. I didn't just log out of Instagram...I completely wiped it clean. The plan is to stay off it entirely for at least a month.

I needed a forced reality check to see who I was when I wasn't feeding, maintaining, or looking through the lens of that specific, curated avatar.

But here is the catch, and the ultimate paradox of the path...while I was deleting everything to kill my own attachment, a part of me realized that the art and the journey do genuinely inspire people. Shutting it down forever out of an aggressive need to remain pure is just another ego trap. It’s spiritual vanity disguised as detachment.

The real challenge isn't running away from the platform or the identity; it’s learning how to hold a completely dispassionate approach to it. It’s a muscle I’ve been trying so hard to build...to engage with the world, to create the art, to share the journey, but to care so little about the reflection of it that if it all vanishes tomorrow, my internal temperature doesn't shift by a single degree.

Dropping the "Pure" and "Impure"

This shedding process also bled into my lifestyle choices. Over the last few months, I started eating non-vegetarian food again whenever it gets served on my plate.

I completely stopped looking at what is "clean" and "unclean."

The real spiritual discernment isn't about maintaining a pristine, rigid checklist of moral purity (as I recently had to remind an old friend who called to give me unsolicited spiritual gyaan); it’s about making sure you aren't compulsive about either side. If you stand on one side and rigidly declare, "I am holy, I will never touch non-veg," and you stand on the opposite side saying, "I am a slave to my tongue, I cannot survive a single meal without meat," you are trapped in the exact same cage of compulsion, no?

It’s the exact same difference between a hardcore religious believer and a hardcore atheist. Both are utterly obsessed with the exact same concept...one is just desperately asserting its presence, and the other is desperately asserting its absence. Neither is free. They are just two sides of the same coin of certainty.

The Trap of "Us vs. Them"

The moment we adopt a fixed "spiritual identity," we accidentally build a whole new wall of duality.

If you aren't on a path of active sadhana, you look at sadhakas and think they’re supposed to behave like flawless, serene saints who never get messy. On the flip side, the people who are on the path often fall into the trap of looking at "normal" people and thinking, “They really need to live a better way.”

It’s exhausting. And it completely beats the entire point of doing sadhana in the first place.

Sadhana isn't a badge of honor or a certificate of moral superiority. It’s just a tool. It is a chisel meant to slowly chip away at our limitations and dissolve these exact dualities. But instead of letting it dissolve us, we often use it to build a shiny new spiritual ego that’s even harder to break than our old worldly one.

It reminds me of an audio clip from Osho that perfectly cuts through this delusion. He says:

"In the world you desire money, power, prestige, then you get fed up with it. Then you see the whole thing is just rubbish. Even if you get, you are defeated; if you don't get, you are defeated. When you come to feel that this whole thing is nonsense, now suddenly you start playing new games: enlightenment, meditation, yoga, god, the other world, the other source. Again the mind is at ease. A new world of desires has opened, now you will be after these goals. And money is not so elusive as meditation. This world at least is solid. That soul, that world, the other world is absolutely fantasy. Now you are in a deeper ditch than before."

When you map your old worldly greed onto spiritual goals, you don't actually change; you just find a more elusive, untouchable ego to hide behind.

Of course, it takes years, probably lifetimes of brutal, consistent practice to actually shift this. Our previous samskaras (past impressions and tendencies) play a massive, stubborn role in how we react to the world. We can’t just bypass them because we sat for a few malas.

Yoga or Bhoga: We Are All Chasing the Same Thing

When you strip away the outfits, the diets, the accounts, and the vocabulary, the truth is incredibly simple: on the path or off the path, everyone is exactly the same.

Every single human being on this planet is just looking for a way to expand themselves. We are all trying to experience something more than the tiny, limited version of ourselves we wake up with every morning.

One person tries to do it through breathwork, kriya, or thousands of japa counts. Another person tries to do it through a drink, a heavy meal, or sensory pleasures.

Sadhguru sums this up perfectly with a phrase from Bhaja Govindam: "Yogaratova, Bhogaratova - either in yoga or in bhoga, either in discipline or in pleasure, somehow make it. It doesn’t matter how; the important thing is you get there."

At the root of it, the drunkard at the bar and the sadhaka at the homa kund are looking for the exact same thing: a moment of freedom from their own boundaries. One is just using a method with a terrible hangover, and the other is using a method that clears the system. But the human longing driving both is identical.

Tumbling Toward the Sweetness

We like to pretend we have it all figured out once we get initiated or start doing intense practices. We don't.

We are all just doing our own little bits. We are all stumbling blindly in the dark, sometimes falling flat on our faces, sometimes finding the strength to rise back up, and occasionally catching a glimpse of something vaster.

There is no "us" and "them." There is no holy and unholy. There is just the process of becoming a little less rigid today than we were yesterday.

Whether you’re holding a mala, creating art, sharing a drink, or just trying to survive the day, may everyone, in their own way, finally taste the sweetness of that expansion.

Shambho!