Don't be a spiritual nerd

Oh God, I have to stop being a nerd

I’ve noticed something in my approach to spirituality. Which is that basically, I approach it like a nerd. Like I’m a fan of certain things, such as Dzogchen, the Sufis, Krishnamurti, Advaita Vedanta.¹ Certain people, like René Guénon, Idries Shah, and Krishnamurti.

It’s almost like I engage in spiritual stamp collecting.

This is wrong because it means spirituality is a kind of obsession for me. All nerds are obsessives about something, and I, who have always been a nerd, have been obsessed with spirituality for a while now.

Sufis, well, Idries Shah, says we all have attention needs. They include the need to receive attention, and also the need to give attention, this second need being one I haven’t really seen anyone else discuss. We all now of the need to receive attention, perhaps have even met those with narcissistic personalities in our lives. A narcissistic personality signals a hypertrophy of the need to receive attention, which is a need we all have, but which needs to be kept within healthy boundaries.

And being a nerd signals a hypertrophy of the need to give attention. I don’t control what draws my attention, but when something does, it tends to suck me in hard. I have never been sucked into anything as hard as I was into spirituality. ² I am a spiritual nerd.

Spirituality is about, well, it’s about everything. But I think, pretty centrally, it’s about balance. And the nerd is an imbalanced personality type.

And I have encountered in my studies that imbalanced personalities are ill suited for the spiritual path. The first priority for imbalanced personalities is to rectify the imbalance. Studying Vajrayana, I came across a claim that in actuality, the people least likely to step on the path make the best adepts if they do step on it. The passage was in reference to bandits specifically: some very famous practicioners in that tradition were bandits before a chance encounter with a lama set them on the path. And that makes total sense to me. A bandit, after all, has to be wise in the ways of the world, a pragmatic man. If he’s not, he will soon end up killed or in jail. A nerd could never be a bandit.

It was also interesting seeing Idries Shah commenting on the spiritual obsessive, the spiritual nerd:

This is an extremely common type of letter; dozens of them, every week, contain one or more of the phrases which distinguish this one:

I want to integrate myself with the real world; to develop my potential, to find that which is missing in my life. To see and feel things more objectively, I will have to detach myself from the background which has been imposed upon me by my country, my parents, my culture. I feel that we have all left the Natural Order, and we must re-enter it ... I seek a spiritualising of the material, and an improving of the restrictive life in which I find myself…

This incoherence, when you come to meet the people who write like this, always masks an over-development of the virtues which Sufi activity seeks to reduce, and a near-absence of those things which Sufi action seeks to develop… ³

This is great stuff. Shah has the driest approach to spirituality I have ever seen, so seeing him encounter a vapid New Ager rushing to disgorge their nonsense on the latest Mystical Man of the Orient is delicious.

That is perhaps more of an example of a spiritual obsessive than a spiritual nerd proper, but the nerd is a type of obsessive.

I had a pretty interesting encounter with a fellow spiritual nerd the other day. I started a club to go meditate on the beach and I invited her. She had previously told me they were studying a lot of material on spirituality, particularly Judaism and the Gnostics. She was even hoping to one day put together all of spirituality ‘like a jigsaw puzzle’. I had some words of caution regarding that (‘the proper view is that they [the traditions] already all fit together’), but I smiled inwardly, because this is literally the project of a Mr. Casaubon, a guy who could fairly be called the villain of the amazing novel Middlemarch. He is attempting to figure out the Key to All Mythologies, and he is treating that project as a scholastic endeavor consisting of a lot of reading. Both the author and his wife can see this is hopeless.⁴

And my friend is not a Casaubon, who in the novel is a dry and passionless creature⁵, yet, in a sense, she is.

I had such a nice chat with her. She has a shrine to Hecate in her house and feels a connection to the Moon. We would already be dating if not for the unfortunate fact that she is trans. I was grieving that actually: if only I could’ve had this conversation with a girl I could have children with.

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That was last Saturday. Later in the week, on Hinge, I came across another spiritual nerd. Or so I thought. She had some pretty far out prompts. Including “My most irrational fear: ...Scylla and Caribdis [sic]”. I remember hoping very badly to match with her. I sent her a like asking her about this Scylla and Charybdis thing, saying she had the most interesting profile I had seen so far, and that I thought the Scylla and Charybdis myth was about dangers on the spiritual path. Later, we matched! But she said nothing in reply. I wrote her a mini essay explaining what I think the Scylla and Charybdis myth is about.⁶ And after I sent it, I realized I don’t care if she does or does not reply. I’ve been reading Krishnamurti and I came across that passage from Shah this week, and I realized that, contra last Saturday, I don’t think a spiritual obsessive is my kind of person. Sure, I’m still willing to befriend them and even date them, but I no longer think they are especially right for me.

Since the spiritual journey leads to above the world, it makes sense that an important preliminary to that is to be firmly in the world.⁷

And yes, the nerd is beneath the world, as most people are not obsessives, at least not to anywhere near the same extent as a nerd. That can be difficult for me to accept, given my background of being bullied for being different, but accept it I did.

The past has to die at some point.

1. Advaita is pronounced Advait. I only learned that because I met someone named Advaita, for ambiguous reasons (the naming, not the meeting. The meeting was due to me chasing a really hot German girl).

2. This does come along with full-blown attention deficit disorder when I am forced to engage with something that doesn't draw my attention.

3. Knowing How to Know, ch. What Cannot be Answered, Idries Shah

4. There's a beautiful passage about this hopelessness:

it was a method of interpretation which was not tested by the necessity of forming anything which had sharper collisions than an elaborate notion of Gog and Magog: it was as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars together.

5. Shah is dry and passionate, in case you're wondering about the difference.

6. Damn, I'm something of a Casaubon myself.

7. Sufis says Sufis are in the world, but not of the world.