Spiritual But Not Conspiritual
Discerning the difference between healthy spirituality and toxic spirituality
Ram Dass, famed author of Be Here Now, fell for a con-artist.
In the early 1970s he longed for a new spiritual teacher after his last one passed away. He searched, but struggled to find anyone.
One day a friend took him to the basement of her Brooklyn home to meet a woman named Joya. When Dass entered the room, Joya sat in perfect stillness, eyes closed. Dass’s friend said that Joya was in a deep meditative state and encouraged him to disrupt her stillness, to no avail. She was in the zone.
After some time, Joya opened her eyes and began to say things to him that, according to Dass, only his former guru could have known. It was sign, he thought, that the Universe had chosen Joya to teach him.
He joined her community and trained under her.
It soon became clear, however, that something wasn’t quite right. Joya frequently lied to and verbally abused her students. She demanded that they buy her pricey gold bracelets to improve her spiritual health and lashed out whenever anyone didn’t comply with her wishes.
Her followers rationalized such patterns by claiming that Joya was channeling the Hindu god Kali — a god who, as they understood things, embodies the wrath of the Divine Mother. Dass bought into this same rationalization, going so far as to buy her a $1,200 bracelet.
Then one day he’d had enough.
“Joya and I were hanging out and the telephone rang,” he writes. “She picked up the receiver and in a pained whisper said, ‘I can’t talk now, I’m too stiff,’ and let the receiver drop. The phone was hung up and without hesitation she resumed our conversation as if nothing had happened. I realized how many times I had been at the other end of the phone.”
“No matter how I rationalized, my doubts grew,” Dass continues. “I tried to bow out gracefully. But Joya would have no part of it. … For almost four months, I had to live as if in a state of siege: refusing to answer the telephone, which rang day and night.”
“The drama got so heavy, that in one early morning episode she and her followers were sighted climbing over the roof of an eighteen story building in an attempt to break into the apartment where I lived. The police were summoned by the management to remove Joya, who by then was trying to pick the lock and kick my door in.”
“The reality had crumbled,” he concludes. “I began to see the similarities between these events and stories about other movements such as the so-called Jesus Freaks, Reverend Moon’s group, and the Krishna Consciousness scene. Once you are in them, they provide a total reality which has no escape clause.”
Dass eventually discovered that Joya had been able to say things his former guru had said only because she had previously read a diary of someone who knew him.
The whole thing was a ruse, top to bottom.
More Psychopaths Than Saints
If you’ve followed stories of charismatic leaders and cults, the warning signs that Dass highlights will be familiar. “There are more psychopaths pretending to be saints than there are real saints,” writes William Hamilton in his book Saints and Psychopaths.
In fact, you’ll know that Joya’s actions were tame compared to other narcissistic gurus.
John of God, a Brazilian healer featured on Oprah, faced more than 300 accusations of sexual abuse before finally being convicted of raping multiple women.
Cult leader Marshall Applewhite led a group of 39 people to commit suicide together under the belief that a UFO would take them to heaven’s gate.
Keith Rainier, founder of NXVIM, branded women with his own initials, leaving them scarred, before he was imprisoned for sexual abuse.
Buddhist teachers including Dennis Merzel, Joshu Sasaki, and Chögyam Trungpa all broke their vows and had sex with their students.
Rajneeshi leaders created a makeshift militia that tried to assassinate an attorney and poisoned people in Oregon.
Bentinho Massaro built a culture of verbal abuse and hypocrisy not unlike Joya’s that likely contributed to the suicide of one of his followers.
In short, examples of conspirituality — spiritual con artists — are plentiful.
Why Do So Many Get Duped?
People hunger for meaning and connection in a world where life can feel transactional, routine, and shorn of purpose. We want to belong to a community that matters — to feel like our lives matter.
For much of human history, religion has provided this source of meaning and community. But religion is in decline in many places around the world, and as a result many people feel unmoored. They feel like religion isn’t answering their truest questions or that it doesn’t measure up to their ethical standards. So they leave religion, only to find that secular consumerism is also unsatisfying — alienating, lonely, meaningless. There’s a deep need for some form of community-oriented spiritual practices such as singing hymns, expressing thanks as a collective, performing rites of passage (e.g., baptism, weddings, and funerals), celebrating as a community during festivals, etc.
It’s no surprise then when people reach for a charismatic spiritual leader as a lifeline. If you’ve ever seen a documentary about a cult, for instance, you know there’s always a moment where one of the followers says that belonging to the community was the best part of their life, even after the community collapsed in scandal. For that brief window, despite the abuse and terror, life was real.
We hunger for this reality — for connection, love, support, and purpose.
In a word, we hunger for spirituality. We want spirituality without conspirituality.
Spiritual But Not Conspiritual
So what does it look like to be “spiritual but not conspiritual?”
It starts by getting clear about the difference between conspirituality and healthy spirituality.
Here are a few differences I’ve noticed.
Conspirituality fixates on a charismatic leader who gets irritated or bored when they’re not the center of attention.
Healthy spirituality focuses on the collective, letting people take turns leading and following as it’s best for the community. A leader may still exist because they hold a certain skillset, but the leader isn’t seen as the source of all knowledge.
Conspirituality believes the in-group is superior to the out-group.
Healthy spirituality knows that even the most spiritually practiced people are still just people with blind spots.
Conspirituality fixates on fleeting trends and flashy deals.
Healthy spirituality is steady and unglamorous.
Conspirituality craves easy answers, downplaying the scientific process whenever it doesn’t work in its favor.
Healthy spirituality knows that truth is hard to find and requires as much objectivity and rigor as possible.
Conspirituality hides faults and doesn’t allow for criticism.
Healthy spirituality admits faults and welcomes constructive criticism.
Conspirituality doesn’t let people wonder if a strongly held belief is wrong.
Healthy spirituality, by contrast, wants to know if a belief is wrong, even if it’s strongly held.
Conspirituality just makes stuff up — with a posture of confidence — when it doesn’t know something.
Healthy spirituality says, “I don’t know” or “I don’t know, what do you think?”
Conspirituality targets those who are most vulnerable for the purpose of winning their money and loyalty.
Healthy spirituality works for the most vulnerable even when it’s not fashionable to do so.
The Questions That Remain
For me, all of this opens up questions that I find difficult to answer, such as:
Is it possible to have spirituality without conspirituality? If so, what are examples of healthy spiritual communities?
If all spiritual communities are flawed at some level, why not just stick with traditional religion?
What’s the difference between emerging science and pseudoscience? For instance, spiritual communities sometimes make claims about the objective world using systems from astrology to meditation. How do you know what is pseudoscience (and therefore should be dropped) versus emerging science (and therefore should be humbly pursued)?
These are questions I’ll be exploring in future posts.