As a straight-up spiritual person, I regularly tend to judge my thoughts and behaviors and hold them against an invisible standard.

There is good behavior and bad behavior.

Nice thoughts and not-so-nice thoughts.

And the general idea is that I should be as good and as nice as possible.

It’s not just that this will make me an even BETTER spiritual person in the long run: life will also reward me for those attempts at sympathetic perfection.

It’s a secret system.

That doesn’t exist.

Because in reality, it’s just a naïve unconscious concept, created by the mind, that meaning-making mental machine.

Be a good person and life will give you good things.

Live a worthy life and it will open up extra levels of amazingness.

You need to deserve it first.

Yeah.

Nah.

Not really.

‘Karma’ has a million different definitions and explanations, which, according to me, means that it is not a real thing.

Just like there is no such thing as True Spiritual Behavior.

It’s not objectively better to be nice than to be a shithead.

And life is not a divine race towards perfect kindness.

Unless you want it to be, and you simply like the idea.

Because you most certainly can have your personal preferences.

You can totally appreciate it more to be gentle and loving and empathetic, but that is not a requirement for anything.

We can make even the subtlest things into new not so subtle things, and the whole idea that living a spiritual life comes with very specific demands and requirements is obviously completely fabricated.

You do you, and that’s it.

You can live whatever life you want to live, and the only reason for me to disagree with that would be coming from my worldview, that dense collection of second-hand opinions.

Not believing in a specific ‘spiritual’ system is very liberating.

It means everything is up for grabs.

Personally, for instance, I love being in a more loving place.

I like cultivating the patience to be kinder, more forgiving, and more joyful than I used to be.

I deeply appreciate that my addiction to booze and anger and victimhood and cigarettes became more or less obsolete and unimportant.

All of those things just appeal to me very much, and that’s why I keep exploring ways to have and do and live them more.

But none of that will make me a more spiritual person, and life doesn’t register or record my behavior so it can hand out presents to me for being such a good boy.

I am in this for myself.

Doing stuff for other people is what I learned to enjoy.

But it’s still for me.

This clumsy, faulty, messy spiritual phenomenon.

You know what I think?

Life itself is the reward.

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(Photo by @kaylamaurais, for Unsplash)