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I’m sitting in a dark hat shop. The power went out after a good rain came through this morning. I left my love in bed as I headed out. I left him with a fresh cup of coffee and the sheets still warm. I love him so much.

Sinister spirituality

I saw a post the other day about someone believing they were a 1000-year-old soul. The entire post was self-aggrandizing. It was vain and arrogant, boastful, and simply seemed to exaggerate the author’s importance and reputation by using the claim that they’re somehow an old enough soul that that should mean something to the rest of us.

For the record, it’s literally taking a made-up fact (you have no idea if you’re actually a “1000 year old soul”—there is no way to HONESTLY know) and asking people to treat you or view you a certain way because of that. Even the best people in past life regressions and past life work talk about not trying to understand this. If we do have past lives, we don’t need to know them, and there’s a reason you forget them when you get here.

It focused excessively on personal achievements and status and used spirituality in one of the most sinister ways I’ve ever witnessed.

This is where I come back to spirituality has to get us results, GOOD results. Meaning that your beliefs and values create net-positive outcomes. Meaning your connection to the Divine, to mystery, to the greatest questions of the cosmos, has a material impact here on earth, on other people, and for the greater good.

Sure, you can be someone who doesn’t need their actions to be positive. I guess at that point you believe that whatever you do is part of a karmic unfolding and in some way you’re “doing God’s work”? Sounds to me like the most unconscious thing you can do. Because consciously, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t actively choose what creates good over bad, especially when you have, know, and hold your own power.

Because when empowerment, autonomy, and sovereignty are the aim, what emerges is a conscious, radiant life sourced in something beyond personal power or self-serving ideology.

And, this, is one of the core problems I have with karma and with reincarnation, functionally in the spiritual community. Although compassion is non-negotiable for samsara:

1. Liberation is reframed as insight or awakening, not moral conversion

2. Ethical urgency is softened by “next lifetime” logic

3. Compassion becomes secondary to “realizing truth”

4. Harm is reframed as “necessary lessons”

In practice, many contemporary interpretations (it’s just all narcissism) prioritize escape over repentance, detachment over love, and awakening over responsibility.

To me, that position isn’t enlightened. It’s unconscious. It’s a way of dissolving responsibility while keeping a spiritual identity intact, one that benefits you and no one else. And then, breaking samsara has become a project of transcendence rather than a demand for heart-level transformation.

Because once you are conscious (once you know you have agency, discernment, and power) I don’t understand why you wouldn’t actively choose what creates good over what creates harm. Not abstract good. Not theoretical balance, but real, lived good.

Real lived good that softens the heart, restrains cruelty, and moves toward love even when it costs you something.

Why the “1000-year-old soul” is a problem

Calling yourself a “1000-year-old soul” is not just cringe or vain, but spiritually dangerous.

The problem with believing (and then announcing) that you’re a “1000-year-old soul” isn’t just that it’s unverifiable. It’s that it quietly relocates moral authority away from your actions and into an imagined spiritual pedigree. It asks people to take you seriously, not because of how you love, how you repair harm, how you tell the truth, or how you restrain yourself, but because of something you claim to be.

It’s like saying, “I’m qualified for politics” with no lived experience in politics and then thinking that makes you justified enough to run the country. Because I say it, it is so.

That belief doesn’t make you accountable. It exempts you.

Once you identify as ancient, “evolved”, or “spiritually senior”, you no longer have to submit to the same ethical pressure as everyone else. Your failures can be reframed as lessons. Your harm can be reframed as necessary. 

Read that again: Your harm can be reframed as necessary. 

That’s a design for abuse if I’ve ever seen one.

And that kind of abuser will reframe their blind spots as wisdom others “aren’t ready to understand”.

That kind of abuser becomes difficult to challenge. Not because they’re right, but because questioning them becomes “low-consciousness.”

This is where spirituality turns sinister.

This is where we should be very cautious of a type of “leader” whose behavior is unaccountable, is a petri dish for abuse, and is using spirituality for their own gain.

Because the claim of being an old soul doesn’t make the heart softer, which I believe is the goal.

If we disagree on that, then we may as well stop here. But I believe the heart is the seat of true intelligence and wisdom. The kind of stuff that stays true for millennia, and holds the seat of truth and life, embodied and felt. That to transform and to be led by the heart is soul wisdom.

The Christians believe this. Some occultism does too. Theosophy, within the Heart Doctrine, gets something essentially similar: the heart is not sentiment or softness. It is the seat of spiritual responsibility. The head can accumulate endless knowledge (or information about what you think your soul’s age is) and still avoid change. But the heart is where truth becomes binding.

And this is where Theosophy connects back to Christianity in a really beautiful way: the path of the heart is a compelling and transformative path. To be a Christian is to choose the path of the heart.

Because, to be led by the heart is not to follow feeling or intuition unchecked. But it requires discipline, restraint, and purity of motive. Without that, what people call “intuition” is usually just desire dressed up as spirituality.

The soul-wisdom of the heart is: action without self-interest, and transformation that shows up in how you live. Not spiritual identity, not claims of advancement, not imagined seniority, but measurable good. A heart that chooses love over ego, repair over rationalization, and responsibility over escape. That is the work.

Not having or cultivating this heart doesn’t make you more repentant, more careful, more bound to the consequences of your actions. It does the opposite. It inflates the self while bypassing transformation. It creates a hierarchy where humility is optional, and responsibility is abstracted into cosmic bookkeeping.

Eroding urgency

And more than that, it erodes urgency.

If you are a thousand years old, what does this one life really matter? If you’ve been here before and will be here again, why rush to change now? Why feel the full weight of harm? Why let suffering break your heart instead of instruct it? Why treat your assistant with dignity and respect? She must be asking for whatever medicine it is that you’re dishing, right?

You’re not only creating the conditions for abuse but giving abuse an escalator to your soul.

This is how karma and reincarnation, when misused, become anesthetics. They dull the moral nerve. 

They allow people to narrate themselves as spiritually advanced while remaining emotionally and ethically stagnant, and again, I will go so far as to say abusive. Because it is so easily misused, and I deeply question the motives of someone doing this.

A transformed heart doesn’t need to be ancient to matter. It needs to be present. It needs to choose differently now. It needs to feel the cost of harm and let that cost reorient the will.

Claiming to be a “1000-year-old soul” skips that work. It replaces the demand to become good with a story about already having been important. And at the end of the day, it is just that: a story. A story that is seeming to orient your entire life, and I try to live my life free of stories.

And that difference matters because stories like that don’t reduce suffering. They create it.

Love,
Val

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