What's in it for me?

A classic spiritual text helps me loosen the knots of my narcissism

April 13; Berkeley, California.

I lie exhausted on the hardwood floor of the Dharma House. As the sun sets over the lush and blooming hills, I play a song for Sam on the guitar. When I am finished, he reaches out for the guitar and plays his own. The last guest has just walked out the door, which means that we are finished leading our first two-day workshop together.

We called it The Agile Collective — an experiment in bringing relational and imaginal intersubjective practices into dialogue. The event has been a portal of sorts: an initiation into collaboration with Sam, whom I hadn’t met in person before this weekend; a celebration of my relationship with Tyler, who beautifully co-held the event with us; and a deep dive into the questions about intersubjective practice — and our souls’ vows — that we cannot put down.

After ten months getting to know Sam on Zoom and Whatsapp, I traveled here to hold this space with him. We have spent two days pouring ourselves into the novel task of tinkering with the protocols of our inherited practice lineages to see what affordances would emerge. We have wept, wrestled, struggled, and celebrated.

By all accounts, The Agile Collective has been a success. But lying on the floor now, a familiar pain begins to permeate my being. I could call it grief, but it feels crueler than that. There is deflation, absence, and the bitter taste of disappointment. Now that the event has ended, I feel bereft and empty.

An inner voice begins to wail, asking me the familiar, self-centered questions that I will never be able to answer. What’s all this for, anyway? she demands. And worse: What’s in it for me?

I hold my pain in silence, sitting on the floor with Sam, Jeffrey, and the guitar. We contemplate the evening. Briefly, we consider driving to a lake; we consider taking acid; we consider (incredibly) drinking. But none of it materializes; the comedown needs to come down. We drift off to our separate places to sleep.

That night, lying in bed, I remember a quote from Anaïs Nin:

"Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. Woman may be busy too, but she feels empty … When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child rearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to be. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment man rests inside of her."

There was no sex at this event, but it dawns on me that what I am feeling can be seen as a postcoital loneliness. In bringing forth a creative impulse, I become a kind of womb. I allow myself to merge, to be penetrated, to receive what happens within me. And when the ecstasy of creating new life has passed, I lie again in solitude. I have been nourishing an active presence — a someone, a something — and that presence is gone now. I am left with my own emptiness.

It is this exquisite, excruciating emptiness that I must face now. It is this childish cry — What’s in it for me? — that I must answer. With a wince, I remember something my teacher Soryu once said in a Dharma talk: “Until awakening, everything you do is about you.”

Over the past year, I have occasionally slipped into the role of spiritual teacher. On meditation retreats and Circling immersions, I have found myself working with human souls: their deepest aspirations, and all that holds them in bondage. If I am to continue doing this work, I know I must face the ways that it is still about me. I need to look at where I might be doing my work to feel seen, or appreciated, or important. I need to confront the delusion that lies behind my disappointment. Ruthlessly, tenderly, I must investigate my true motivations for doing the work I do.

What’s in it for me?

At every energy center in my body, I must become both chalice and blade. At every energy center, a star wants to explode; a black hole wants to collapse; a climax wants to saturate and suffuse.

There is nothing in it for me, the child weeps in desolation.
There is nothing in it for me, the sage declares in freedom.

April 14; Berkeley, California.

On the bookshelf of Dharma House is a fat blue book which, I later learn, belongs to Mrinank. He ordered it used on Amazon, only to discover that it was signed by the author. It is The Point of Existence: Transformations of Narcissism in Self-Realization by A.H. Almaas.

For me to encounter this book now is a perfect synchronicity. The Point of Existence has been precious to two different friends of mine during periods of psychological unraveling. It is this same unraveling that I sense needs to happen within me. The book contains what I, in this very moment, need to know.

In the days after our workshop, I devour the book. It sits in my backpack as I ride the bus through Berkeley, weeping for reasons that aren’t clear. I take a bath, and then a shower, and lie in bed reading the book. I take Sam and Tyler to the sauna. I read the book.

Mrinank, having found the book inscrutable, offers it to me on long-term loan. “I would feel good if it came back to me in five years,” he says. I offer to report back on what I learn. We joke about how he and I — image types on the Enneagram, types 4 and 2 respectively — need all the help we can get healing our narcissism.

So, dear Mrinank, this one’s for you.

A brief introduction to The Point of Existence

The Point of Existence was written in 1996: decades before Trump, TikTok and BetterHelp; and well before the term ‘narcissism’ became so culturally laden. The book feels simultaneously timeless and timely. Almaas is one of our great living spiritual elders, responding to “a need for a spiritually informed psychology, or conversely, for a psychologically grounded spirituality” (p. i). The insights in The Point of Existence make today’s pop-psychological takes on narcissism look crude at best.

The Point of Existence is long, dense, and technical. It also, like Anaïs Nin’s mournful take on sex, has a Freudian bent. (Chapter 37, “Oedipal Narcissism,” is followed immediately by Chapter 38, “Oral Narcissism.”) Throughout the book, Almaas places himself in dialogue with two psychoanalytic giants, Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg, while masterfully mapping the spiritual places that psychology has not dared to tread.

As a therapist with some psychodynamic training, I can (usually) manage to keep up with the book’s specialized language. But for those without the appetite to wade through nearly 600 pages, here is how I would crudely summarize some of the understandings I’ve taken from the book:

1. Narcissism, as Almaas defines it, is so common as to be nearly universal. What is meant here is not a crippling personality disorder, but something more mundane and pervasive. Basically: to the extent that we are identified with our conventional selves — instead of what Almaas calls the Essential Identity — we are suffering from a delusion, and will therefore experience narcissistic disturbance. This is what Almaas refers to as “the narcissism of everyday life.” He writes: “Narcissism involves being identified with relatively superficial aspects of the self, as opposed to being aware of one’s identity as Being” (p. 10).

2. Under this general condition of mistaken identity, we have a constant need for mirroring. Our sense of existence urgently demands that we are seen and reflected — positively. We are fixated on how we appear to others, and feel an urgent need for their “admiration, approval, and recognition” (p. 4). When this positive mirroring falters, we can become painfully self-conscious and self-centered.

3. To shore up the fragility of our constructed identity, we may become identified with a grandiose self. This self-experience is of being powerful, invulnerable, special, and superior to others. When we are identified with the grandiose self, we are protected from feeling our underlying pain.

4. We may also shore up a sense of strength by idealizing a powerful ‘other.’ As children, we have a natural developmental need to idealize our parents. As adults, our ‘idealized objects’ may be our partners and spiritual teachers. The inevitable disillusionment we experience with these idealized figures is part of our waking-up process.

5. When we run out of “narcissistic supplies” (i.e. all the stuff that affirms our existence and our value), we feel a sense of emptiness, darkness, and worthlessness. This emptiness, however terrible it feels, is our contemplative portal into freedom. We must enter this emptiness and darkness directly in order to discover what we actually are. (This process is described wonderfully in Chapter 33, “The Great Chasm and Black Space.”)

6. When we experience “feelings of pointlessness, meaninglessness, [and] purposelessness” (p. 333), we are in some sense correct. Our feelings of meaninglessness “arise directly from the absence of [contact] with the Essential Identity.” When we are unquestioningly identified with our superficial selves, we are living a kind of meaningless lie.

7. This experience of meaninglessness is not the end of the story. By making the transition to increasingly identifying with Being, we begin to experience ourselves not as fragile, but as indestructible — made up of fundamental aspects of Essence such as Compassion, Clarity, Will, Peace, Strength, and so on.

8. Almaas places particular emphasis on the experience of Support. As we come to identify more with Being, we shift from constantly “needing support” to, as one student in the book describes it, “being Support.”

Circling back: the empty womb, the abandoned child

With the help of this book, I can look with more clarity at my experience of the end of The Agile Collective.

I can see that both the “empty womb” feeling, and the “abandoned child” feeling, are experiences of feeling fundamentally unsupported. They are experiences of absence, of lack, of something missing. These feelings arise repeatedly in the life of the ‘superficial self,’ and they are (in some sense) true.

I can see that the end of a big event — however wholesome and beneficial it was — represents a cutting-off of a kind of ‘narcissistic supply.’ I see that I still use events, identities, roles, possessions, and successes to stave off feelings of emptiness.

I can see that, at the event’s end, I had the feeling that I hadn’t been “seen” as I wanted to be. To some extent, I was using the event to meet my own need for mirroring — a need that, when yoked to the superficial self, can never be fulfilled.

It’s not easy to reveal these unflattering aspects of my inner process — especially because I can’t present some happy and complete ending where I will never experience these issues again. I am not yet fully self-realized, not yet fully identified with Being, and therefore vulnerable to making things “about me.”

But I am sharing these humble insights because I hope that a deeper understanding of fundamental narcissism — within myself, my spiritual community, and our society more broadly — will lead to greater wisdom and compassion. This self-revelation is part of a commitment I have, alongside my friends and co-teachers, to engage in collective shadow work. We dare to reveal our soul-making pathologies so that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past and, instead, make new ones.

There’s a reason Almaas wrote a 600-page book about narcissism and realization. Narcissism, spiritually understood, is a foundational territory that lies at the trembling heart of human experience. This territory includes our pain, our vulnerability, our failures of love, and the ways we harm ourselves and each other. Narcissism marks the wound from which much relational and religious trauma emerges. Narcissism is the fundamental confusion that we work to heal as we walk an integrated path of awakening.

All images are from the Public Domain Archive.