Years ago I saw someone describe a particular narcissist as someone who is unable to understand that someone can fully comprehend his opinion, and still disagree with it.

I thought about this, looking at people who simply assume that their untrained, intrusive and often aggressive dogs will be universally accepted as “cute” by every “good person”, implying that you must be a bad person if you mind their bothersome animal intruding on your personal space. The same applies to their loud and obnoxious children, or themselves – loud, often drunk, and with poor manners.

Every single one of those people thinks that you must be a bad person if you don’t love them, which brings me to my observation: narcissism is a fundamental trait of human species. Humans implicitly assume that they are good, and everything that opposes them or hates them is evil. It seems to be an evolutionary imperative of some sort. Humans, essentially, believe that God can’t be a proper God if He doesn’t love them. You can see this in the comics – the difference between super-heroes and super-villains is that the super-heroes fight on the side of mankind against all kinds of threats; it’s siding with humans that makes a super-powerful being good, because you can’t be good and not side with them, good and loveable as they are. It’s stunning, when you observe it from a distance, removing yourself from the picture to gain perspective.

In spirituality, this creates a very stubborn but wrong belief that human core, their soul, is in its essence some kind of a “diamond in the rough”, that only needs to be properly expressed and polished in order to shine. I would be very surprised if people holding such beliefs ever made any kind of progress, among other things because their inherent narcissism makes them not “hear” anything that contradicts this firmly held implicit belief. I had such an experience with one former student – I would tell him that enlightenment works by surrendering yourself to God fully, in darshan, to the point where God burns away everything in you that is not of God, and then you learn how to manifest yourself as such a new person. That’s what I said. What he heard was that he had to learn how to express and manifest himself in the world. Never, at any point, did it occur to him that I told him that he has to die in God’s light, because his entire “self” is illusory and, basically, made of garbage that needs to burn. That part was simply not heard, but the idea of manifesting himself in the world, he’d go around repeating that at every possible instance.

Let me tell you what I think about this. Yes, there is a phase when you are a “diamond in the rough” that needs to learn how to “hone” the physical in order to be able to express high spiritual realities in terms of the body and the world. The phase I’m talking about is after initiation into vajra, when you are essentially Buddha in the world, the jewel in the lotus. You need to learn how to speak while bearing that power and reality in the words; you need to learn how to act. Truly, you need to learn how to manifest That, but in reality we are approaching the reason why the saints describe the angels as beings who “praise the glory of the Lord”. That’s what it feels like, but you’re not really literally praising the Lord, you are manifesting God’s light, bringing it into dark places where it wasn’t present before, and making it open up like an unfolding flower. You are praising the Lord by making everything you touch more satcitanandamaya, more of reality-consciousness-bliss which is a description of God’s nature. Angels, essentially, make God obvious by their very presence – they look at you and God’s presence awakens in you and all illusions are cast away as reality unfolds in your soul. That is so because an angel is essentially a being who abandoned any definition of self other than God. He walked into God and everything that wasn’t God burned away, and what returned was God’s light and reality in a particular shape, and humans tend to call this an angel.

The reason why humans have such a hard time with spirituality is because they expect it to magnify and enhance them, while in reality they are garbage that needs to be burned away, and God is the incinerator. There’s another narcissistic concept, that God made humans in His image. No. There is a process of being remade in God’s image and by God’s design, and it’s called yoga. This process implies that you surrender everything to God, one piece at a time, and allow God to remake you in His image – essentially, make you as He would make you, in the process un-making everything that you are, and as this process unfolds you get to learn true humility, by understanding that you were really neither great, nor loveable, nor agreeable to God. The only thing that can truly stand in the presence of God is God, and as you get closer, and in order to be able to get closer, you need to stop being a sack of shit that you are, and allow God to remake you in His image. In the process of being remade, everything that you are needs to die. If you oppose the process and attempt to keep yourself, you are destroyed because filth has no right to exist. If you surrender to the process and to God, you are remade and God acquires another name and form to be called by.