Spiritual Ego Explained: Signs You're Stuck in a False Identity (Ego vs True Self) (EP42, 1/2)

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What is the spiritual ego—and how do you know if it’s shaping your spiritual path?

This episode, part 1 of a 2 part series, explores the spiritual ego, how it forms, and how it can quietly influence your spiritual awakening, identity, and healing without you realizing it.

The spiritual ego often feels like growth—more peace, more awareness, more “spiritual” identity. But underneath, there can be repression, perfectionism, performance, and control.

We break down the difference between ego vs true self (true nature), and how the mind creates a spiritual ego identity by defining itself as “a spiritual person.” From there, we look at how the ego co-opts spiritual experiences, reinforces identity, and suppresses shadow aspects like anger and emotional truth.

In this episode:

• What the spiritual ego is and how it develops
• Ego vs true self and the illusion of identity
• How repression, denial, and perfectionism show up in spirituality
• The link between spiritual ego, superiority, judgment, and comparison
• Why the ego is rooted in fear, control, and validation
• The difference between constructing identity vs ego dissolution

At its core, the spiritual ego is about construction—building a more “spiritual” self.

The deeper spiritual path is ego dissolution—a softening of identity into authenticity, humility, embodiment, and true self.

If you’re exploring mindfulness, nonduality, shadow work, or spiritual awakening, this episode offers a grounded way to recognize the spiritual ego and begin letting it unwind.

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Timestamps:

16:14 - Repression and Performance

21:18 - Perfectionism (Solidification rather than Dissolution)

23:18 - Healing: Humility and Surrender

26:11 - Superiority Complex

28:08 - Why Do We Have a Spiritual Ego?

Stay tuned for Part 2

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This podcast show is for people dedicated to spiritual awakening, spiritual practice, psychology, healing work, collective healing and awakening, and global positive social change. 

For free meditations, private sessions, and the Ground of Love Healing School, see www.thegroundoflove.com

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This podcast show explores meditation, mindfulness, consciousness, spiritual awakening, and spiritual growth, with a strong focus on personal healing, trauma healing, emotional healing, and somatic healing. We dive into nonduality, embodied spirituality, the true self, life purpose, and spiritual practice, while also addressing shadow and integration themes like spiritual bypass, ego-death, root causes, and holistic healing. Episodes draw from psychology and attac

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Transcript

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The spiritual ego focuses on construction, construction, construction, not dissolution, dissolution, dissolution. The more we construct, the more we are basically faking things to ourselves and to everybody else. The more that we deconstruct, the more that we are in humility, authenticity, and allowing ourselves to jump off of all of that attachment and all of that control that attachment brought. So how do we free ourselves from the spiritual ego? Welcome to the Ground of Love. I'm your host, Olivia Frazao. This is a podcast for people who are deeply dedicated to the spiritual journey. You are here for self-growth care, for others, and being of service to the world. This podcast is in service to you to help you remember who you are and why you are here, you will receive inspiration, clarity, and no BS Love. We are walking each other home. Let's begin. In this episode, we're looking at the spiritual ego. So first we're gonna define what is the spiritual ego, and then we're gonna be looking at ways that it is basically running our life, our spiritual path, our view of ourselves, how we might be showing up in our work, if we do any work related to healing work or spiritual teaching. And what's actually on the other side of that? What does freedom look like from being bound in? Something that we actually don't even realize we're trapped within. The main problem of the spiritual ego is when we're in it, we can't see that we're in it. It's similar to bypassing, avoiding denial. It's, it's not in that family, but it has a similar effect, which is being totally clueless about the fact that we're suffering from it. There are a lot of things that we're very aware that we're suffering from. We're aware when we're in fear, when we're in depression, when we're in anxiety, when we're in all kinds of emotional discomfort. But, there are certain things that are most insidious when we actually can't feel them. So spiritual ego is, quite the trap because it's hard to perceive. This might be a little bit of a spicy episode. I'm going to be quite informal here. I'm going to poke at people a little bit. Probably you might be a little irritated or triggered by this episode. If so, I hope it's actually very helpful and you can look at this concept simply to understand it in general, if you wanna identify it in other people. And if you're brave enough, you can look inside and find out. Where might I be running some version of this program, of this psychological program inside myself? And just take a look. I'm not saying you are. I'm not saying you're not. I'm just here to offer a way for us to look at things that might be a little uncomfortable actually, which ultimately is what healing and awakening often requires. So let's define it and then we'll go from there. In order to define the spiritual ego, we need to define the ego. So, I'm not talking from a Freudian perspective, okay? So if you know anything regarding the ego from his perspective, you can throw that out and we're just gonna start over. The ego or the egoic self, or the personality self, or the small self are all different ways of naming the same thing, which is basically naming the construct of what a human being thinks that they are when they are within the mental mind understanding of themselves. So to understand the egoic self, we can simply compare it to that, which would be beyond it, which would be what we would call the true self, true nature, God, nature, whatever is. This is kind of ironic, but whatever is self outside of the confines of what we think self is. And it gets a little mentally jumbled at that point in terms of how to even define this. Because ultimately when we are fully out of the egoic self, we're not actually in any other individual self. We are outside of the concept of separate self. We don't need to worry about that. We don't need to go all the way down to the end of the line and be like, I am no self. I am everyone. Everyone is me. We are all the great I am. A lot of us have heard that some of us have had glimpses of that. Very few people are actually living. A sustained emanation of that, I would consider that to be enlightenment. And so we're just, we're not even assuming that that's our short-term goal. We're gonna have a little bit more tangible of a short-term goal. Eventually, our long-term goal will be to sustain the understanding of the great I am and actually embodying that and having nothing else besides that. That's fantastic. Let's get a little more tangible than that though. Let's get something a little more relevant to the here now, the here now is that we are still stuck in the egoic self, and when we are on a spiritual journey, what happens is we start to titrate between identifying as the ego, egoic self, and identifying as what I will call true self. That which is beyond constriction of the mental mind, projecting an image of itself, and solidifying that and believing that. That which is free. So the ego, egoic self in comparison to that, which is free and unconstricted is an identity constructed by, a mental construct of who we think we are, based on what we think reality is based on. Most importantly, the belief that what we think is actually true, which in and of itself needs to be the first to go. In order for us to really excavate anything else, we need to stop believing that what we think is actually true. But basically it's the identity formed by projection. It's the identity that is the amalgamation of all of our conditionings, all of our karmic traces, all of our traumas that have not yet been resolved. So the ego is a conglomeration of all of those things. What is the spiritual ego? We will get there, I promise. But we need to do a little bit of a, a narrative first. So once upon a time, you're completely stuck in your ego and your suffering, and then you find some type of spiritual path and you embark upon it. And whether through random grace or through actual spiritual practice of some kind, let's say meditation or whatever else, you end up having glimpses of reality beyond what your mental projections told you it was, which is the unconstrained reality of freedom that I had just defined. Ultimately, the great I am without defined identity, or perhaps somewhere in the middle, which would be some aspect of a greater emanation of self, of some kind. Let's say the soul level of self, right? Unconstrained by mental projection. So in this step of our story, there is some kind of an experience of unconstrained self, of self beyond egoic self. As I said, we're gonna call that true self. Yay. So you're not in step one anymore, which is, I only think I'm the ego. You're now in step two, which is sometimes I think I'm the ego, and sometimes I realize that I am way beyond a definable, localized, solid, confined identity. Great. What is that? That is what I could call true self, true nature, et cetera. Now, ultimately, ideally, the step three would be how often you are believing yourself to be the limited constrained identity. The result of all your mental projections of who you think you are. Hopefully all of that is gonna happen less and less. As those projections become less solid in your understanding, as you start being able to see through them as you realize that you should not be believing your thoughts as solid realities, you start becoming more permeable to basically a dissolution you are letting go of your righteous grip on. Believing your thoughts. The more you do that, the more this healthy version of step three, we'll go to the unhealthy in a moment. The more the healthy version of step three becomes the capacity to experience more and more percent of the time, you in your true nature and less and less percentage of the time in your ego self and over time you end up having a baseline that is more and more free. And from that freedom you start gaining even more capacity to liberate the rest of yourself. Because from that freedom, you start truly seeing how transparent everything is, how temporary everything is, how not yours, everything is how much part of a greater undefinable plan everything is that your mind is not able to define or wrap itself around because it's totally beyond the mind. It's beyond the thinking mind and that understanding of the paradigm of reality that's different from what the ego, egoic self understands reality to be starts actually freeing whatever's left of you in your ego, egoic self, to be held by a new paradigm, a, a new understanding of what reality actually is. That is much more fluid, much more open, much more dissolved, and because your baseline of reality now has this more realistic ground, the capacity to release the remaining parts of the ego can become easier. Now, I'm not gonna go into step four because I personally have not experienced step four, and there's no point talking about something that I have not experienced. I don't think that's a responsible thing to do. Obviously step four would be some version of enlightenment or somewhere closer to there than step three. Okay? That's not necessary for this podcast episode, nor as I said, would I be the one to be able to explain that. In order for us to understand the spiritual ego, now we need to look at what basically the unhealthy step three looks like. Okay? Let's say we're in the unhealthy step three, and to be honest, I would say, I don't know if all of us pass through this phase, but I think so. I could be wrong. I feel like the spiritual ego, the identification with the spiritual ego is actually its own step. So I'm sorry to be changing around numbers in the middle of this episode, but ultimately I'm now gonna put the unhealthy step somewhere between two and three. Okay. What is it? This is the spiritual ego. Listen closely. In step two, you basically have. Two understandings of yourself. One which is you being identified with your egoic self, which is basically a construct of who you think you are and the other being you having a realization of the fact that that's not you. You are actually what I'm calling your spiritual self, which ultimately is no self at all, but that whatever all ev, everythingness, nothingness, it all ends up being the same ultimately, your love, your God, nature, all that, all the good stuff, okay? That's totally beyond our mental understanding of what good even means. You understand that there are, let's say two in this sense, this is much more complicated than that because the ego itself is actually made of a myriad of different parts. But let's just say two, the unhealthy step three that I'm now calling somewhere between two and three. The spiritual ego is when check this out, one of the aspects inside of the ego itself thinks that it is the spiritual self. It's not the spiritual self, it's the spiritual ego. So the ego, like I just said, it's made of a myriad of different parts within itself, right? The egoic identity is made of all these different traumas and karmas, all these different projections, all these different unresolved and unintegrated, basically frozen consciousnesses from throughout time, this lifetime, multiple lifetimes, stuff you're carrying from your lineage. All kinds of unresolved beliefs and understandings, emotions. All kinds of stuff in there. It's glommed together into what we call I, my name is blank. That's your ego self. Whatever you actually believe about it. That's what I'm talking about here is the amalgamation of all these thoughts and feelings, all these historical whatevers that have come together to amalgamate themselves into what you think you are. Now, you start thinking that you are a spiritual person. You're not a spiritual person. You are spirit itself. You are the undefinable. So one of the ways to start noticing the spiritual ego is that it's definable. So rather than being free of a construct of self, which is what our spiritual self actually is, our true nature actually is. Instead, we have now created a definition of ourselves, just like the ego always does, right? I am a. I am a female. I'm a mother. I am a lawyer. I am a really smart person. I'm someone with a bad temper. I'm a liberal. I am a vegetarian, I'm an American. All these things are these definitions, definitions, definitions, right? Well, guess what? One more definition is I'm a spiritual person, right? I'm a spiritual person. Now, this spiritual person, just like any other one of these identities, it has qualities, it has characteristics. What are the characteristics of a quote unquote spiritual person? Well, there's real characteristics of what the actual spiritual self emanates the true spiritual nature, which is loving, kindness, compassion, wisdom, more patience, taking things less personally or not personally at all, actually. Being capable of selfless, generosity, selfless, unconditional love. Those are actual qualities of our true nature. Those are actual qualities of what I was calling our spiritual self. The spiritual ego. Not true self capital s self, but the spiritual ego, meaning the part of us that is now posing as the spiritual self that has these weird, culturally constructed qualities. They have certain qualities that you think make someone a valuable spiritual person. So you start having this list of qualities of whatever you think you're supposed to be, and you start acting that way and you start repressing the other parts of yourself that are still there under the rug. So now what's happening is one part of you is taking precedence, thinking it's superior, defining itself in a way that's culturally validated, trying to act that way, and then getting frustrated about other parts of you that are trying to ruin the show when you're trying to act all peaceful and love and light and talk with this soft voice, because that's what everybody else does in the spiritual scene. Or you use some kind of lingo, or you have to act like you like certain things or like you believe certain things, but then there's the real rest of your egoic self that's like. No, I'm messy. I have doubts. I get annoyed sometimes. I'm selfish. And then there's this war between the part of you that's trying to be perfect'cause oh, I'm so spiritual, and the rest of you that's like, uh, we're still here. Right? That's just parts fighting with parts. There's no true spiritual nature happening there. There's a performative spirituality happening there trying to believe itself as like a pathological liar while repressing the rest of you. That is spiritual ego. Spiritual ego has a lot of performance in it, a lot of faking, a lot of hiding and a lot of denial. The spiritual ego is basically wanting to be further along on the path than you actually are, trying to be seen as that by other people. You're not realizing you're doing this, but you're doing this. Because it gives you some sense of validation, worthiness, importance, specialness, or whatever other kick you get out of it. Why? Because being in the spiritual ego feels better than being in the regular ego. Only it feels better because it has more positive qualities. But that's why there's also repression. But because you're in all of these positive qualities, oh, I'm so peaceful. I'm such a helpful person. I'm someone who's, well, this is kind of a different thing that I would need to talk about, but I'm so superior to other people that's sometimes part of the spiritual ego. It's part of how, you know you're in the spiritual ego.'cause true spiritual people actually have complete humility. But whatever it is that you're feeling as. Who you want to be. You start acting like that person and believing that you are that. And then anything that can't match with that, like the fact that sometimes you're selfish or impatient or you have shame or whatever, that all has to be repressed. You're not allowed to show that to other people or else they're not gonna value you as much. They're not gonna respect you as a spiritual person as much. And obviously you can't show yourself that, or else you're gonna realize that you're a fraud and that doesn't feel good. So unfortunately, so many people who say that they're, let's say quote unquote spiritual people, I'm such a good spiritual person, would be the inner belief system that part of the ego is trying to hold up. These people have repressed their anger. It's still in there. Oh, I'm so peaceful. It's still in there. There is nothing helpful about repression. It's actually worse because it comes out sideways. It comes out passive aggressively. There is denial, so there's no capacity for ownership, accountability, healing, amends, learning, and doing better next time. The capacity to show up fully with our fully integrated self. I have seen this so often. This is why I need to talk about it. There is a fake niceness with an edge underneath that's hidden, but at some point, if you poke the person enough, it will come out and it will come out potentially viciously. Why? Because anger and whatever we call negative emotion or painful emotion, or maybe some emotions that people might have shame around. Shadow emotions. When that stuff is not integrated, it gets worse. It gets more extreme. It has no babysitter, there's no compassion towards it. There's no contact to it. And so it's just living on its own isolated in a pressure cooker. And then at some point it pops out. All of a sudden it, it's now center stage when the person goes past their own edge. Past their capacity to keep their cool. So repression and kind of this inner polarizing where you have to be good and any shadow of you is like not okay. That can be a part of the experience of the spiritual ego. Another part of the spiritual ego that we need to recognize is perfectionism. The denial of our shadow comes from the need to be perfect as good. Perfectionism is going to make you judge yourself. Be hard on yourself, be rigid towards yourself. And actually this is ironic, but your thoughts are getting stronger. They're getting more solid, and you're believing in them more. So the whole thing about the spiritual path is about softening our thoughts, softening our sense of understanding about reality, and getting humble about the fact that actually we don't understand anything that's going on and we're going into the don't know mind. Unfortunately, perfectionism that part of our egoic self, it can start guiding the rest of our ego itself towards. A sense of safety around let's construct my identity and my beliefs more solidly so that I feel a sense of control. Unfortunately, we are actually going further away from spirituality. So the irony of this spiritual ego is you think that you're getting further along in your spiritual path, but you're actually solidifying your identity and your beliefs more and more, and that's actually the opposite of where the spiritual path would actually be taking you. Going into true self and having a direct experience of true self, rather than simply going more and more into an intensification of certain aspects of the egoic self thinking that they're spiritual, which is the spiritual ego. What we want is the actual spiritual self. Now let's say someone who's trapped in this whole situation, it doesn't mean that they don't have direct experiences of divinity. It doesn't mean that they don't have direct glimpses of true self. But the ratio is not improving because the egoic self keeps co-opting those experiences to act as proof of its own self definition. To act as proof of its own construct of the spiritual ego, it becomes very meta, it becomes very insidious. So what is the other side then. When we heal perfectionism, it is actually realizing that we are not the ones running the show. That we are not the ones who need to control everything or even who can control everything. And that there is no such thing as getting it right, because that itself is a construct. Everything that I just named relates to humility and surrender, which is what actually gets us to true self and keeps us in true self. And what true self actually teaches the egoic self in order for more of the egoic self to to chip away and become true self. It's kind of like right now I'm imagining the ego self as like an iceberg. Not that this is a good thing with regards to climate change, but just stay with me in the metaphor and forget about what it would actually mean for Mother Earth. It's the iceberg, like little pieces of of the great glacier falling off into the ocean and then melting into the water, right? The water being the great ocean of being this true self, what I'm calling spiritual self and the iceberg, chipping off would be the ego softly kind of coming undone over time. So the spiritual egoic self does not have humility and trust in the divine, in God, in the higher order, in source, whatever you wanna call that. They say that they do, and they probably do, but only to a certain extent. The rest of it is. Me, me, me in the sense of it's on me. It's on me to make sure the world goes round. It's on me to make sure that I'm okay. It's on me to make sure that I'm successful. It's on me to make sure that I'm loved. It's on me, me, me, me, me to make sure that the other parts of me, me, me, the other parts of our egoic self have all their needs met. Oh, I wanna feel special. Oh, I wanna feel important. Oh, I wanna feel whatever. Why? Because the other parts of the ego itself are feeling unworthy, feeling afraid of being rejected. And so the spiritual ego is like, don't worry everybody. Look how perfect we are. Look how spiritual we are. Look how admired we are for being spiritual. Now we're worthy, right? So the spiritual ego can be this strange bandaid for all these other egoic parts to be like, oh, now I'm okay. Now I'm okay because I'm special. Now I'm okay because I'm admired. Now I'm okay because I understand things that other people don't, and that makes me cool. Unfortunately, these are all false support. At some point, all this is gonna break down, but let's keep going. Let's pretend it hasn't broken down yet, and you're still in the spiritual ego. What other qualities does spiritual ego have? Superiority. This is related to spiritual bypass, avoidance, denial. When we're in those kinds of things, what happens is we are not able to face certain pains within ourselves, certain aspects of ourselves that we have shame around. Like I was saying before, for example, perhaps our anger or other things that we're ashamed of. Why are we feeling superior to other people? What we're feeling superior to is the fact that other people look messy. Other people are expressing their anger. They're expressing whatever we find embarrassing about ourselves, that we're hiding from ourselves and pretending is not there. And so, look at me. I'm so perfect, right? You, on the other hand, are a big mess. But I'm so spiritual and peaceful and centered. You are a big mess, right? That's the superiority. Meanwhile, we're all a big mess. We're all a big mess. We are all a big mess. Now, the true nature, the true spiritual self is what? Only compassionate. Only accepting. Totally unafraid. So if we were in our true nature and we saw somebody that was a big mess, we would be like, Aw, baby. Wow. Big mess, huh? That's okay. I love you. You're loved. God loves you. You're God, you're love. All is well. It's okay, whatever. How can I help you? Right? The spiritual ego looks at that person and is like, oh, you're such a mess. I'm so perfect, right? Now. Obviously, that belief system is hiding something underneath that's really, really afraid of admitting this, that it's true, which is like, oh my God, I'm so messed up too. Right? So the reason the spiritual ego looks down on other people is it's actually looking down on other aspects of its own egoic itself while trying to deny them. Ultimately, why is the spiritual ego there? When we know why it's there, we can know how it could be not there. The spiritual ego is there because there is fear, obviously every single pain and suffering that we experience. Is because there is some version of fear We actually need to own the fact that we're stuck in our spiritual ego, we all have it in some way, shape, or form. We all think that we're a spiritual person because we still think we're a person. And if we're a person that's interested in spirituality, it's very easy to see ourselves as a spiritual person. But spiritual person is different from the true nature aspect of, of self. It's the ego with the clothing of spirituality. The spiritual ego is there, as I said, because of fear, why is it in fear? Because it doesn't believe that God is there in those places. And if God isn't there, then nothing will be there unless I construct it. And what's God ultimately? My own true self, my own true nature, and my own spiritual self. So if from the vantage point of my ego, I cannot see divinity, which by the way, the ego can't see divinity. That's why it exists. Otherwise, it would be like, oh, cool, nevermind. Now I can dissolve. When the ego self doesn't see divinity, what it sees instead is aloneness. It thinks it's the only game in town. It thinks it's just me and that's it. And so if it's just me, then I have to do everything. I have to take care of myself. There's nobody here taking care of me. I have to do everything. I have to do it really well because if I don't, I may not succeed. And if I fail and I fall off the cliff, there's nothing there. It's just a void, forever and ever. Not a good version of the void. So now I have to work really hard. Now I have to control, and I have to grip, and I have to grab, and I have to have a lot of attachments to how things go. And thus, because I have to be successful, I have to be perfect. You see how this is all a big loop? And because I have to be successful and hopefully I'm perfect, in order to be successful, I have to be liked. That's one of the aspects of success. How can I be liked? I need to be seen as someone who's more perfect than I actually am. In order to perform as that, I need to actually believe it, and thus I need to actually make myself be better than I actually am. How exhausting is this? Where is spirituality in anything that I've been talking about in this whole episode? Where is it? I don't see it.'cause let's actually define spirituality, which I did briefly in the beginning. Our actual spiritual self, meaning our true nature, meaning our God nature meaning infinite, God beingness, the great I am, the no self, the we are all one. Whatever you wanna call all of that. What is it? Ultimately, emanations of Peace. Love. The power of love, generosity, wisdom, compassion. Right? Have you noticed that I haven't been actually talking about any of those. Because that's not what the spiritual ego does. The spiritual ego focuses on themselves, focuses on construction, construction, construction, not dissolution, dissolution, dissolution. The more we construct, the more we are basically faking things to ourselves and to everybody else. The more that we deconstruct, the more that we are in humility, authenticity, and ultimately no self. The more that we construct, the more we are actually revealing how much we're gripping and holding onto and attached to. The more we deconstruct, the more we are with faith and trust, allowing ourselves to jump off of all of that attachment and all of that control, that attachment brought. thank you for being with me in The Ground of Love. You can follow this podcast to receive the next episodes, and who is it that comes to mind to share this episode with? Please go ahead and pass this along to them and go ahead and leave a review or a rating if you wish. I thank you for that. For one-on-one healing sessions and a group membership. you can go to www.thegroundoflove.com Blessings to you. May you be protected, held, regenerated centered. And taken forward with all light, love, truth and highest and best health and wellbeing on all levels and taken forward to make the greatest, most beautiful impact doing exactly what you're here to do. God bless you. Protection, grace, protection, grace. So it is.