Jordan Bates & Jon Brooks — Spiritual Narcissism and the Shadow (#22)

The HighExistence Podcast

In May 2019, Jordan Bates and I (Jon Brooks) met up in London to attend the Rebel Wisdom summit.

Having not seen each other in the flesh for 6 months, we thought we'd celebrate our reunion by recording our first ever podcast together.

Jordan and I have always had incredible, dizzying, profound conversations about topics that frequently come up on HighExistence, and we've been intending to start recording them and releasing them as podcasts for quite a while.

There is this segment of the spiritual or psychedelic or new age community that seems to be participating in these things more from a place of ego and kind of trying to really wear the costume and have this kind of spiritual chic clothing and have all the markers of spirituality. It's kind of like spirituality and psychedelia are a fashion trend for some people, and it's kind of all about what's on your spiritual resumé, how many ayahuasca ceremonies have you had, etc. There's this kind of misguidedness around what spirituality actually means. And some people don't even realize the extent to which they're using spirituality as a persona and another game of appearances and status and virtue signaling rather than being deeply invested in the inner journey which is largely a thing that no-one sees.

— Jordan Bates, HEx Podcast #22

Personally, some of my favorite podcasts are not strict interviews but more of the "hanging out" genre, were I get to see individuals I'm interested in riff on topics I'm curious about.

If you're a regular HighExistence reader, or anyone interested in spirituality for that matter, I encourage you to hang out with Jordan and me in this episode and leave a comment with your thoughts and questions. Let's keep the conversation going!

Here are some of the themes we delve into on this episode:

• The toxic elements of modern spirituality
• The psychological need to create personas and identities
• The benefits and traps of "not caring what people think"
• Spiritual narcissism and the shadow
• The hidden danger of rebellion and non-conformity
• The beauty and magnificence of ordinary folk
• The limits of mass psychedelic healing in society
• Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as a spiritual practice
• The art of letting go
• And tons more...

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