The spiritualised inner critic

down with the the sic-ness

Most people know they’re capable of being their own worst critic. But what happens when your critic gets access to profound spiritual teachings?

The result is a spiritualised inner critic (SIC), a monster without compare.

Here are some things mine tells me:

• You should be seeing impermanence more.

• Your body feels tense; that must mean you’re still holding on. Why can’t you let go?

• Uh, it looks like you’re feeling bad again; why aren’t you practising equanimity?

• Why are you angry again? Why are you still buying into that?

• Why do other people annoy you so much? Can’t you be more mindful?

• Seriously, why are you shouting at those cars?

• Can you even do jhanas anymore?

• All things are empty; you shouldn’t need jhanas.

• Hm, this person’s experience sounds deeper than yours and you’ve been doing this for years.

• Lost in thought again? You can’t even focus on this blog let alone recognise the ultimate nature of things.

• You’re feeling really selfy today.

• Maybe your energy system is blocked? You should be doing more tai chi.

• You need a better set of pointers to keep the ultimate truths close to hand.

• You only need to surrender. Why aren’t you surrendering more?

• If your deepest nature is effortlessly and always the case, how are you still missing it?

• You have all these incredible teachings available, you have a better chance at this than anyone in history. And yet…

• Why are you still struggling with the basic stuff like loneliness?

• How can you feel lonely if there’s no self?

I visualise my critic as The Rani; the obnoxious, self-proclaimed Spiritual Authority in Aldous Huxley’s Island. The Rani swoons around in white muslin and gaudy jewellery, wafting a sandalwood stench. She is on a Crusade of the Spirit. She appears to be of a Different Order, and that is exactly the message she wishes to convey.

If left unchecked, the SIC can grow from an irritating companion to the biggest hindrance on your quest, reinforcing the very deficiency it promises to heal. From a rational, innocent desire to understand the deepest truths grows an unparalleled source of inner tyranny.

The key to breaking the hold of the SIC is a two-step movement. First, we have to see why spiritualised judgement is unique and secondly, we need to see why it’s not.

Why the spiritualised inner critic is unique

The SIC holds particular sway in our minds for a few reasons:

1. Its concerns are spiritual. It’s not just berating you for looking puffy in your holiday pics or failing to land that joke at the work party. It’s not your average conformity-inducing parental judge. It has in its sights your spiritual evolution and the nature of reality.

2. It’s focused on universal truth, beyond your relative opinions. So its helpful judgements are not only 1) way more important but 2) true in any possible moment. This allows the critic to pipe up in pretty much any situation whereby you are not feeling entirely free of suffering (see: life)

3. Sometimes we are blind to the above points because we think we’re already nailing this spiritual stuff; we’re already knee-deep in teachings of love, acceptance and compassion. There’s no way we could be secretly constructing an even more sophisticated form of self-flagellation, right…?

4. Living with a SIC inevitably leads to resentment and protest. The SIC has a trump card for this: there’s no self, asshole. How can I be hurting you? In playing the victim you’re just reinforcing a sense of self. This rod of punishment is all empty such-ness! Why are you hitting yourself?

Why the spiritualised inner critic is the same old

So the SIC carries a special weight through its lofty goals, universal remit and questionable understanding of shunyata.

But it’s important to see that, despite the ethereal aura of spiritual judgements, they are made of the same black sludge as any other. And like most judgements, they take the essential form of:

You are a shit, unless…

The topic of the judgement is largely irrelevant; if it fits this format, your essential value is (supposedly) under question. Spiritualised judgement is no different.

Ways forward

The SIC had me in its jaws for many years and I still have to chase it down the garden path now and then. But I have managed to transform an unconscious, exhausting struggle into something more manageable. Here’s how:

Make the message explicit. If it feels like your self-worth is dependent on seeing or being something, try to put that imperative into words. An effective judge works in the shadows. You catch sight of a quick flash followed by a gnawing sense of deficiency.

Try to write out the assumed judgement or trace its outline with someone else. In my experience, doubling down on meditation is not effective when judgement has a strong toe-hold. You need to pause and articulate. Make it explicit and the folly of the judgement is revealed.

You might also recognise that, like most dictators, the judge started out with a vaguely sensible wish: wanting to alleviate your suffering. Instead of going to war with it, thank it. Directly opposing a judge can often fuel it, so recognising and thanking the judge for having your back can be a powerful response.

But the most powerful answer I know to judgement is a particular flavour of forgiveness, inspired by A Course in Miracles.

My early associations with forgiveness are of having to pardon someone I didn’t like for something they did which was definitely not ok. But true forgiveness is not a compromise and neither is it a means to an end.

It starts by giving up the fight. Both the fight to be right and the fight against judgement. You do this by forgiving, unconditionally. Forgive all ignorance, all obstacles, all judgements and mis-steps. Be like butter in a pan and feel the lack of opposition as you happily slide around, bubbling away into a clear oil.

You can say “I forgive myself” to lean into it. Forgiving softens all the hard boundaries that “your journey” exists within, revealing that nothing has been done to you, nothing was lost and nothing was missed. It opts out of the entire game of “getting it right.” This recognition is without end and without ground. You are giving up the war to get it right even whilst judgements are still flying around.

Forgiveness is a recognition of innocence. Of course, you want happiness, and of course, you get it wrong, but it can never possibly stain you in the way you imagine. This forgiveness is radical; different at the root. It is not an antidote that must be administered in certain amounts to counteract the poison of judgement. It is to inhabit a mode of being where judgement is nonsensical, along with any idea of fighting it. Its flavour is release from imagined dilemmas. Release from the burden of my journey, my progress and my understanding.

Forgiveness knows you are whole by virtue of being at all. It’s part of the package; no terms and conditions. There is plenty of life that is conditional and amenable to optimisation. But your participation in the totality of undivided reality is not one of those things.

The validity of forgiveness depends on one fact alone: that you are a flawed, fallible and finite human, but that you participate in something that stretches inconceivably beyond that. If that’s you; forgive.