Stop looking up to your favorite guru. Right now. Whether he’s a successful rockstar, a CEO, your spiritual teacher. Stop looking up to personal development gurus too. Stop looking up to Tony Robbins. It’s time for you to throw away all mainstream commercial self-help and take a step forward.
It’s keeping you stuck, really. In this article, I’m going to share something difficult to stomach for most, but the sooner you understand it, the faster you’ll grow. And the more you grow, the clearer you’ll be able to see it.
Here’s what you need to realize: most of the celebrities that you admire – including big names in the self-help industry and spirituality – are not well-developed human beings.
I’ll say it again: most people at the top of society’s pyramid are not well-developed, psychologically mature and actualized human beings. This may likely include your favorite guru and your yoga teacher too.
You’re confusing success in any field with authentic growth. Most of those you look up to, simply have an aura of authority conferred to them by their followership. But when you look deeper and grow yourself enough, you’ll come to the shocking realization that 90% haven’t unwired their own neurosis, more than the average Joe. Most of them are simply the winners of this game that society at large neurotically plays and they’ve done very little of the deep psychological work that’s required to evolve into a balanced, sane and peaceful human being, despite all their external achievements.
Most of the celebrities you admire are not well-developed, psychologically grown and actualized human beings
Actually, success is often a façade, it’s all smoke and mirrors. Even worse: it may become a self-delusion mechanism and a distraction from doing the real inner work!
Outgrowing the master
Chimps have hierarchical structures just like our societies, and you’re being a chimp looking up to an alpha chimp, thinking he has evolved into a higher level of consciousness. That’s what you’re doing when you’re looking up to anyone. For the sake of your personal growth, stop it right now.
Should you also reject the teachings around personal development? Not the teachings. You see, the beauty of personal development, what makes it so counterintuitively delicious is that you can learn a lot and get massive growth even from the most self-deluded individual. Unlike most other fields where achieving mastery is required before passing it on, any fool can walk up a stage and babble about leadership, love, motivation, hard work, or even meditation and enlightenment. Without having seriously embodied any of it.
And yet, if you take that advice and apply it to your life with discipline and seriousness, it will really work for you and take you extremely far. The irony is that, in no time, you’ve outgrown the teacher.
You’re being a chimp looking up to an alpha chimp, thinking he has evolved into a higher level of consciousness. That’s what you’re doing when you’re looking up to anyone
And that’s precisely your purpose in life! It’s to outgrow your guru! That’s what he is there for. Even if he is not a fake, even if he’s done a great deal of inner work, his service is to pass you the message so you can outgrow him, not stay stuck. Realize this and you’ll realize the full depth of your hero’s journey.
You’re being a sheep
Most of the big names you see on stage, talking about leadership, will tell you that leaders create leaders and not followers. And yet, their business model is predicated precisely on having followers! Look at the whole social media game these days and how business is done online: it’s all about followers and numbers.
But if all the followers actually applied a third of what they’re taught and moved on, then in a short time there would be no more audiences. No upsells, no next courses.
But out of a room of 1000 people getting educated on the finest principles of life, probably 20 will go ahead and do the real work that’s required to get to the next level. The rest will remain a herd of sheep, migrating to follow the next alpha animal.
But that’s precisely what’s required for a guru to be a guru in our society! It’s you, remaining a sheep! Understand this mutual relationship and you’ll be clear on how outgrowing your guru means to stop being a sheep. You can’t have both.
What’s behind the curtain?
When it comes to the personal development industry in particular, you also need to realize that the most visible teachers and gurus are usually those who’ve been best at marketing themselves. Understand that they’ve basically won a marketing contest, not a sanity or enlightenment contest.
Also, humans are very complex creatures. When you look at successful people, you see only a tiny fraction of their entire life and personality. Usually you see a selected and highly-curated portion that they choose to display through media.
You never get to see the whole picture, their neurosis, their screw ups, the sleeping pills they need to take, or how their ‘success mindset’ and silly go-getter attitude they preach from stage actually backfires on them physically and mentally. Nor you get to see their unresolved issues with self-esteem behind the mask, the sense of emptiness they may face after their greatest achievements, their narcissism in disguise when they’re trying to ‘impact the world, or ‘save the planet’, and the list goes on. You simply don’t get to see any of that.
To have a real take on the wisdom of a human being – even the most enlightened sage – you should be around him for a very long time, day and night. Then you’d see the whole picture. How he or she reacts to all circumstances, what he does behind closed doors. Hence, it’s no surprise that even some of the most admired spiritual gurus in history, in the end turned out to be total screw-ups, sexual offenders, financial fraudsters and worse.
The truly advanced stages of self-development
The most visible human beings in our social matrix have usually accomplished flashy stuff: sending rockets to the moon, having a TV-show, filling up events with 3000 people, having a garage full of fancy cars. As an undeveloped human – a consumeristic trained chimp – you’re addicted to flashy stuff, to more contents, more insights, more stuff to watch, a new chapter, a new episode. But the more you grow the more you get to see it’s all paper thin.
To have a real take on the wisdom of a human being – even the most enlightened sage – you should be around him for a very long time, day and night
Counterintuitively, the path to the wisest, juiciest, deepest life is often built on simplicity, subtraction, silence, contemplation, subtlety, nuance.
Real depth is an acquired taste. It appears tasteless to a naïve mind. Some of the most well-developed humans are those you’ll never get to see at the head of a corporation or on a TV-show, striving to increase the number of ‘lives impacted’ or preaching about their earth-changing mission, while in truth they’re still playing society’s game like hamsters on a wheel.
This doesn’t mean that all of them are like that. There are genuinely well-developed and sane leaders that take action from the right place. What this means is simply that status or position are loosely correlated with real personal growth and most of us will never fully appreciate that in an entire lifetime. Even in so-called personal development circles and spiritual circles, the delusion is massive.
Some of the most actualized humans go unrecognized unless you have a sufficient level of wisdom in yourself to be able to o appreciate their level of mastery.
I remember my first Vipassana meditation teacher and how I felt about his advice during my first retreat.
“Go eat a piece of chocolate in the kitchen. Then you’re happy. The mind calms down a bit and then you come back to the meditation hall and try again”, he said.
“If the sensations are strong, you have the breathing that saves you. Focus on the breathing”.
That was about it. Chocolate and breathing is all he had to share anytime I’d speak to him. Not enough wisdom to make for a successful Youtube channel, or an Amazon best seller, for sure.
“Fuck you, the chocolate and the breathing”, I thought within myself. “I come to you dude, you’ve lived and meditated in a secluded place for more than 20 years and the best advice you have to share is always that goddamn piece of chocolate. Day after day, no matter what I ask or experience”. It felt like I was speaking to a broken record. Chocolate and breath.
Many years later, I have the most profound sense of admiration and gratitude for this man. I can’t express in words what his wisdom was about. I just know it, now. Because the deepest levels of human experience are not flashy at all, and sometimes altogether incommunicable.
When I was a fool, he also looked like a fool to me. Once I grew into a wiser man, then I saw the wisest man and felt a deep sense of gratitude in my heart.
Personal development is… personal!
I am not saying you shouldn’t give credit to anyone. Some people truly have outstanding accomplishments, they’ve been through pain and hard work. Congratulations. I admire their strength, but that’s one slice of life. You’ve got a bigger work to do. It’s your own journey and nobody is going to give you the recipe, so stop looking up to anyone.
Stop looking up to your boss, the head of your corporation and his mission, your guru, Oprah, Michelle Obama, your feminist icon, your favourite figure who fights for rights of this or that minority, your favorite author, sportsman or TV host.
You don’t know them, at all.
They may sell you the recipe for their success, their mission, but never the recipe for how to live your life. In the best scenario, they’re giving you a hint, a nudge to move forward, but if you stick around too long, they’re keeping you stuck. How they lived their life may as well be complete disaster for you.
The deepest levels of human experience are not flashy at all, and sometimes altogether incommunicable
Notice how personal development is called personal and yet virtually everyone’s trying to give you a step-by-step process, an ideology, a framework, a hack, a method, an inspiration based on their story. Learn from all, respect all and idolatrize none. Figure out your way, because you’ll soon see that most of them don’t know any better.
As Socrates, (the wise character in Dan Millman’s classic book “Way of the peaceful warrior”) said: everything you’ll ever need to know is within you; the secrets of the universe are imprinted on the cells of your body.
It’s personal development because your path is personal and all the rest is just pointers – at best – or distractions, at worst. It’s time for you to outgrow your Guru.
Stop looking up and just look inside. This is your ultimate hero’s journey.
Also published on Medium.
