The Chosen Syndrome — Sweet Delusion

Imagine that you have never quite fit in. Your life has been unexciting, but deep inside, you’ve always felt different from others. You were the quiet one at school, and at work you nod along to conversations that mean little to you. Late one night, you open an article that promises to tell you who you are. The first trait on the list: “You have always identified yourself with superheroes and heroic characters.” The second: “You feel you were meant for something bigger, even if you can’t put your finger on what exactly that is.” You stop for a moment, because both are true. The headline already told you what they mean: any one of ten traits marks you as one of the 144,000 lightworkers prophesied to save the world. The last line confirms it: “If you possess any of them, you might as well be one of the 144,000 that will save the world”.

Any of them. One trait out of ten is enough to save the world. A quick wave of dopamine over a boring routine changes everything in a moment. Like a starving person who sees breadcrumbs, or a thirsty person in a desert who finds a flask of water, the human mind and Ego cling desperately to that idea.

The chosen syndrome is the belief that a person is special by birth, origin, or destiny rather than by work. It grows out of loneliness and the Ego’s wish to matter without effort, and once formed, it defends itself against every teacher and all critical information. In reality, it is a tremendous business in which publishers, streaming platforms, course sellers, and book writers make a fortune.

The chosen identity is usually offered with a list of signs that the reader checks against himself.

The page on the 144,000 lightworkers comes from a popular online magazine, and thousands of similar offerings appear under many names, shapes, and forms, targeted at different audiences. The proof is always a list of ordinary traits, so almost anyone can recognize himself in it. The trick has a name, the Forer effect: people readily accept a vague description as an accurate portrait of themselves. Astrology, horoscopes, tarot readings, fortune-telling, and palm reading all rely on the same psychological phenomenon.

The chosen ones give special meaning to the most ordinary and common things in human life: loneliness, sensitivity, vivid dreams, a love of the night sky, and the feeling of being different. These traits are close to universal. Nancy Ann Tappe, who invented the indigo label, said it described more than 95% of the children born in the previous ten years. At the same time, the chosen ones avoid the one kind of work that develops truly unordinary traits, skills, and qualities: cultivation, magic, and self-development training, which take years of daily practice. The label offers the feeling of being rare without any of the hard work rare abilities require.

Our article on the pitfalls of cultivation describes the syndrome in brief. The market sells it under many names, and the main ones follow.

The starseed leads the trend. Gaia, a streaming company traded on the stock market, tells its readers that starseeds “possess advanced spiritual and scientific knowledge and have chosen to come here to assist in the planetary transformation process.”

The signs include the feeling that you do not belong and that Earth is not your real home, and a strong sensitivity to the emotions of others. The page ends by telling the reader who recognizes several of these signs that he may be awakening to his starseed nature.

You can choose from a wide selection of seeds, each with a different set of attractive traits. Gaia names Sirian, Pleiadian, Andromedan, Arcturian, Orion, Lyran, Vegan, Maldekian, Lemurian, and Atlantean starseeds. Pleiadians, for example, are said to be loving and creative. If a reader does not fit one type, he will surely fit the next.

Dolores Cannon, a hypnotist, renamed them volunteers, and the academy that continues her business still teaches that souls on their first incarnation volunteered to come to Earth at this time to help humanity raise its vibration and ascend. Because of birth amnesia, they recall neither their task nor the place they came from.

Doreen Virtue, for years among Hay House’s best-selling authors, made the reader an angel. Her publisher’s description of Earth Angels (2002) promised five types of lightworkers, from incarnated angels and elementals to starpeople, walk-ins, and reincarnated sorcerers and wizards, and help for readers to feel happier about their lives, their peculiarities, and their missions.

The oddities readers found in themselves were turned into credentials and special qualities.

The 2014 edition announced “newly discovered realms — Cherubs, Atlanteans, Aladdin Genies, Galactic Angels, and more”. A reader who had not found himself among the first five types could now find himself among the genies. For those who wanted more than a book, Virtue’s company filed the name Angel Therapy Practitioner as a certification mark in 2008.

The empath is the gentlest version. Empath self-tests ask whether the reader feels he doesn’t fit in, tends to isolate, or has been called overly sensitive or shy, and enough yes answers make him an empath. From the test, the path leads to newsletters, books, online courses, and retreats. Shyness and isolation go in as questions and come back as a gift. The old soul, a close relative, draws a crowd of the same size: a YouTube video on ten signs that you are an old soul has 1.6 million views.

The twin flame is the chosen one in love. Twin Flames Universe, a company founded in 2017, speaks to the reader who is alone: he has never fit into the relationships on offer, he is not broken, and he is meant for “a different kind of love”, one that most people never find. The next line offers a free starter kit and a free clarity call. The pain of being single becomes the sign of a rare destiny and a marketing hook to sell products.

Another version promises a hidden inheritance. Talk of dormant DNA strands and so-called light codes runs through starseed material, and small sellers sell the key. One Starseed Activation costs 999 euros and promises to “Activate your intergalactic potential and genetic treasure chest at the DNA level”. It also promises a tribe, a sisterhood and brotherhood of starseeds, and a trade: the buyer learns to perform the activation on others and to become more successful.

Light language carries the same promise in sound. The speaker produces a stream of syllables, songs and hand movements that, sellers say, are received from extra-dimensional beings or come from the soul. One course page promises that it “activates dormant DNA and encoded wisdom within your being”. It is sold at many price levels. An online academy offers a light language healer certification for $250, with a certificate of completion and all sales final. Another seller lists a custom “Life Path Blueprint Activation” at $888.88, and recorded activations from $11.11. By 2023, videos under #lightlanguage had passed 237 million views on TikTok, and some single videos had a few million.

Another generation of chosen ones grew up on Goku, the hero of Dragon Ball, whose Super Saiyan transformations multiply his power, and on Chinese xianxia web novels, in which a hero cultivates until he becomes an immortal. For some readers, the story crosses into life, and they look for a real practice that will make them what the hero became.

Mo Pai is the practice most commonly named as an outlet for these people. The documentary Ring of Fire made John Chang, an Indonesian-Chinese qigong practitioner, an internet sensation, and Kosta Danaos then turned the story into a book, The Magus of Java. Young, impressionable viewers with little knowledge of esoteric matters decide that they want to become Goku: to emit fire and cut down trees with internal energy.

From there, the Ego drew a link between qigong abilities and immortality that has no basis in reality. The Ego wants to feel special, and in its view an ability such as telekinesis would prove that it is. Qi, whether called vital, ethereal, or bioelectric energy, exists, but harnessing it will not make anyone immortal. It is not much different from doing push-ups and believing you will become immortal after 100,000 repetitions.

Just because your lower energy body becomes stronger doesn’t mean your consciousness and soul will evolve. In fact, the opposite happens: countless hours of energy work without a spiritual component lead to a massive swelling of the Ego and create impassable bottlenecks on the path. Go to a gym and you may find someone who trains every day and takes steroids. Is he healthy? Is he anywhere close to spiritual immortality?

The seeker who sees himself as the main character doesn’t care about such minor details and doesn’t seek truth; he is simply obsessed with power. Quite often, what hides behind such obsession is fear, insecurity, and a fragile Ego. Joining a closed group that claims to teach the only working spiritual practice works like a starseed or DNA activation: it covers the Ego and the inner trauma with the belief that you are finally working on the solution to everything, including mortality.

When they point to historical figures of high attainment who are said to have practiced martial arts and lower energy body work, such as Bodhidharma, they miss the point: for those figures, the work with the body served to support the spirit on the path of cultivation. It was never the goal. The core practice was never taught publicly, because it requires a living tradition and spiritual transmission, which no book of simple exercises can provide.

Some of these readers formed a Western following that calls every other method fake and expects Chang’s method to make them immortal (see John Chang, FAQI Powers and Western Mopai Cult and Dissecting The Mo Pai Training Manual).

If you read the sign lists of the chosen one again, the same traits appear in all of them: loneliness, a sense of not belonging, shyness and sensitivity, relationships that never fit, and the feeling of being meant for something bigger.

The person who buys this identity is usually in pain and suffering, and both have root causes that go ignored. A life that has gone badly or nowhere is hard to look at. The chosen story explains it without asking for any change. You did not fit in because you came from another star. Your relationships failed because your twin flame was waiting. Your work bores you because you were meant for something bigger. The suffering and the mediocrity stay exactly where they were, covered by a label that turns them into signs of being chosen. The one who felt left out learns that he was set apart.

The wish underneath is to matter without the work of becoming someone who matters. The psychologist John Welwood, who coined the term spiritual bypassing, described the mechanism: many dangers of the path, among them spiritual materialism, narcissism, inflation, and groupthink, come from using spirituality to make up for gaps in a person’s development.

The motive shows up in measurement. On a Dutch scale of spiritual superiority, which asks, for example, whether a person is more aware than most people of what lies between heaven and earth, people in energy trainings such as aura reading and past-life regression scored higher than mindfulness trainees, and people with no training scored lowest.

A mother has a son with ADHD, and the school wants to send him to a psychologist. Then a book tells her that her son belongs to a new kind of human, here on a mission, and that he is not interested in studying mundane things because he comes from another star and has other talents.

The Indigo Children (Hay House, 1999) told parents to recognize such children and celebrate their exceptional qualities. The authors’ list of traits reads like a list of ordinary parenting problems rewritten as virtues. Indigo children “come into the world with a feeling of royalty (and often act like it)”; they also have trouble with authority and with waiting in line. Virtue explained the rest to a reporter in 2005: “These are sensitive, gifted artists who are nonconformists and don’t fit in, and that’s what gets them sent to the school psychologist.”

The label was built to fit nearly every child, and it originally rested on the color of a child’s aura. By 2008, the publisher’s description of the sequel said that indigo children “are not super-psychic kids with dark blue auras” and that the name “has nothing to do with auras or being psychic.” The authors dropped the basis and kept the label, because the label was what sold.

A gifted child is a far more attractive idea to a parent than a child with a disorder. In many homes the label took the place of ordinary upbringing. A child who cannot focus or wait his turn needs patient training in attention and discipline, and the indigo story tells the parent that he needs none.

Parents who read their child’s ADHD as a sign of an indigo child feel better; no source shows that the label helps the child. A study that followed 565 children aged 7 to 12 found that narcissism was predicted by parents’ overvaluation of the child, and not by a lack of parental warmth. Children inherit some of the inflated views their parents hold of them: that they are superior to others and entitled to privileges. Self-esteem was predicted by warmth.

The market has moved on to new names. Today’s titles ask parents whether their child is a starseed and how to raise rainbow starseed children. Beside them runs a title on starseeds and narcissistic parents. The grown child’s story now includes a parent to blame.

A cup filled with “I am chosen” cannot take in a teaching, and the identity keeps the cup full. It has five defenses, and each one makes the belief impossible to disprove. The pattern closely resembles the Full Glass Syndrome.

Suffering becomes proof. The Law of One: “Wanderers have as a general rule some form of handicap, difficulty, or feeling of alienation which is severe.” Among the most common, it lists alienation, personality disorders, and allergies. Cannon’s academy goes further: its site says the subconscious may decline to restore a blind person’s sight if blindness was a lesson the soul agreed to learn before birth. The symptom is the credential. A belief that counts all suffering as evidence in its favor cannot lose an argument with life.

Doubt becomes confirmation. When the mind begins to doubt an obvious absurdity, the belief system already has an answer ready: the doubt itself is a sign. Rebecca Campbell, author of Hay House’s The Starseed Oracle, writes that doubt is a sure sign that you are facing your soul’s greater plan. The doubt that could have freed the person becomes one more proof, and the loop closes: each new doubt is answered by the belief it questions, and the person stays inside it.

Failure becomes an attack. Every setback is read as the work of hostile forces: dark entities, negative extraterrestrials, or a world that resists the chosen one’s mission. The Law of One agrees that Wanderers are “high-priority targets” of the Orion group, the hostile extraterrestrials of its teaching, so each failure proves that the Wanderer is important enough to be hunted.

Critics become the unawakened. Anyone who questions the identity is placed below it: asleep, stuck in a low vibration, jealous, or an energy vampire who drains the chosen one. The objection itself is never examined, because its source has already been ruled out. Once the world is divided into the awakened and the asleep, every objection comes from the asleep.

Memory replaces the teacher. The chosen one says that he remembers who he is: a soul from another star, a priest of a past age, a being sent with a mission. A memory like this cannot be checked, so no teacher can correct it. In Cannon’s teaching, the volunteers forget their origin at birth, and a paid regression session gives the memory back: the seller supplies the memory, then confirms it. The student’s position is reversed. The one who came to learn says he already knows, and a teacher becomes an obstacle. Others say they need no teacher because they learn from their higher self. They do not ask where that higher self learned what it knows. If it can teach them only what it already knows, they learn nothing new in this lifetime. Those who say they can develop through reading alone make the same move, with books in place of memory (see Intellectualizing the Path).

Carl Jung described the closed state:

An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. This “consciousness” is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with.

Studies of narcissism agree: across eleven studies, people high in narcissism take less advice, however expert the person who gives it.

John of the Cross described the same behavior in the sixteenth century. He wrote of beginners on the spiritual path who leave their teacher for one who will praise them, and who “flee, as they would death, those who attempt to place them on the safe road”. The chosen one leaves a genuine teaching in the same way, and for the same reason.

The true self needs no confirmation. A person is what he is, and no one’s agreement or disagreement can change that. The same holds for a real practice: if it works, it works, and no argument about it can add to that or take it away. Only an identity that is not real needs to be confirmed from outside, again and again, and that is why the chosen identity needs five defenses.

The sellers publish lists of signs that a person is chosen, and these are the signs of the chosen syndrome:

• He claims a rank, a mission or a star origin without having worked for it.
• He avoids teachers who do not confirm that he is special, and he leaves a genuine teaching soon after he finds one.
• He takes every difficulty as proof that he is chosen: suffering shows his rank, doubt shows his path, and failure shows that he is under attack.
• He expects the teaching to make him feel exclusive and chosen, and grows angry when it asks for ordinary work instead of feeding his delusion.
• He chooses the company of less developed people, where he can feel advanced without working hard.
• He says that he remembers who he is, and that he needs no teacher.

Outside the New Age paradigm, the same psychological structure produces messiahs. A person with the chosen syndrome who is surrounded by loyal followers may come to believe that he is the second coming of Jesus Christ, or the avatar of some important historical figure. Once he finds support among his most convinced and loyal followers, the group quickly turns into a cult. In many cases, giving that much power to a deluded person has destructive consequences. The second coming of Jesus has been announced many times, in Russia, Japan, Australia and America, often in the same decades. Some of the people who made the claim:

• Grigori Grabovoi has called himself the second coming of Jesus Christ. In 2005 Izvestia reported that he promised about 400 followers, among them mothers of children killed in the Beslan school siege, that the children would be resurrected in October. Russian media reported fees of up to 40,000 rubles (about $1,350); he denies taking money. In 2008 a Moscow court convicted him of fraud on 11 counts and sentenced him to 11 years, later cut to 8. He did not plead guilty.
• José Luis de Jesús Miranda of Miami said the spirit of Jesus had entered him in 1973. In the mid-2000s he announced that he was Jesus Christ Man, and by early 2007 that he was the Antichrist.
• Hogen Fukunaga claimed to be the world’s final savior, following Jesus and the Buddha. His group diagnosed followers by reading the soles of their feet, and a Tokyo court found that he sold paid training as a cure for illness. In 2005 it sentenced him to 12 years for defrauding his followers of about 150 million yen (about $1.3 million at the time).
• Wayne Bent, who described himself as the Messiah, was convicted in New Mexico in 2008 of criminal sexual contact with a minor, which he had called spiritual healing. After the verdict he said: “Just as with Jesus, they’ve convicted an innocent man.” The conviction was reinstated on appeal.
• Shoko Asahara declared himself Christ. His group, Aum Shinrikyo, carried out the 1995 sarin attack on the Tokyo subway, which killed 13 people. He was sentenced to death and executed in 2018.
• Marshall Applewhite of Heaven’s Gate wrote that he now held the place in society that the being in Jesus had held in its time. The group’s website invited readers: “You may even find your ‘boarding pass’ to leave with us during this brief ‘window.’” In 1997, 39 members died by suicide.

The messiahs above claim to be Jesus in this life. The chosen ones who look into past lives to become important make a similar claim: a person with an ordinary life and an ordinary job learns under hypnosis that he was once a king, a queen, or a grand mage who ruled over the universe.

We have met people who believed they had been high-ranking Egyptian priests or members of a pharaoh’s family. Some spent years traveling the world to find a portrait of an important figure who looked somewhat like them, then photographed themselves with the same haircut and expression and proudly announced to everyone: “That’s me!” They confirmed each other’s past lives by agreeing on them, and concluded that if two or three people see the same picture, it must be objective reality rather than a collective delusion.

If every such memory were true, history would have had many Cleopatras, Napoleons and Jesuses.

The past lives found this way are remarkably well chosen. Regression rarely uncovers a peasant who died of fever at thirty; it uncovers a pharaoh, a queen, or a high priest whose portrait happens to hang in a museum. Fate seems to have kept the famous lives for exactly the people who went looking for them. Yet the strongest and most influential people of every age never became public. Bodhidharma is known across Asia, while Prajñātārā, his teacher according to Chan tradition, is known by little more than a name. In every generation there have been people of an even higher level whose names and identities no one will ever learn. They had no reason to be known.

A person’s consciousness always finds what it seeks, and a group that seeks the same thing finds it together.

Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.

Matthew 7:7–8

If you seek gratification and confirmation that you are chosen, that is what you find. In a series of experiments published in 1991, hypnotized volunteers were taken back to lives before their birth. In one of them, those told in advance the race and sex of their past identity reported that race and sex far more often. Across the series, the volunteers built their past lives from television, historical novels, their present lives and daydreams that fulfilled their wishes.

For the seekers, the search and what it finds satisfy a deep yearning for the recognition and importance that may be missing from their lives.

Sellers across this market follow the same six steps.

1. Signs. A list of common traits: not belonging, a tendency to isolate, seeming antisocial except among one’s own kind.
2. You are one of the few. A love that most people never find, or a channel title: “Child of Sirius, This Video Will Appear Only Once — You Were Chosen”.
3. A mission. Starseeds came to Earth to help transform the planet; the 144,000 will save the world.
4. A product ladder. Gaia’s episode page asks whether your life’s challenges come from a cosmic blueprint drawn up before you were born, perhaps as one of the angelic souls sent to help humanity, and then asks for your email to start a free trial. Twin Flames Universe climbs from a free kit to an $8,888 package.

5. A community that confirms the identity. Twin Flames Universe and Gaia both offer a community of like-minded souls, which Gaia calls crucial to a starseed’s development.
6. Critics dismissed. The five defenses described above close the circle.

Selling Ego and self-esteem has always been very good business. The product is a title, and a title costs the seller one sentence to produce. Pyrite is called “fool’s gold” because it shines like gold and has none of gold’s value. People who suffer want to be special badly enough to take the shine for gold, and they buy salvation for the price of a book, then for the price of a course, and then for the price of a certificate. Their money keeps the whole chain running. The seller solves none of their problems. He renames them: loneliness becomes a sign of a star origin, oversensitivity a gift, failure the cost of a mission. A Latin saying describes the demand: “Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur” (the world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived), found in Sebastian Franck’s Paradoxa in the sixteenth century. The wish to be deceived is the wish to matter without work. The industry that serves it is large, respectable in appearance, and includes a company listed on the stock exchange.

The Secret (Rhonda Byrne, 2006) sits at the top. Book and film had grossed $300 million by 2009, largely thanks to Oprah Winfrey, who gave it two shows in 2007. Its publisher tells the buyer that the secret was known to Plato, Galileo, Beethoven, Lincoln, Einstein and other great names, and that “when you realize The Secret you can have anything”. The buyer joins the few who know.

Hay House is the channel through which indigo children, earth angels and starseed cards reached the bookstores. In 2008 The New York Times Magazine reported that the company had sold more than 6 million books and other products the year before, for about $100 million in revenue.

Gaia sells the pure form of the claim through a streaming membership. It took $99.0 million in revenue in 2025 and reported 903,000 members in 185 countries.

Abraham-Hicks sells the power to create. Hay House describes Ask and It Is Given as the teachings of Abraham, a disembodied entity, that will help people manifest their desires, and tells the buyer that a good life is his birthright. The book sold 144,000 copies in February 2007 alone, after Winfrey’s shows on The Secret. Here the amplifier’s share of the business is visible in one month’s sales.

Much of this market is built like multi-level marketing, a pyramid of sellers in which the customers work for the company by spreading its product. The last product on each ladder is not a teaching but a license to sell the same product to others. Cannon’s academy certifies practitioners in three levels for $4,105, and they then sell sessions. Twin Flames Universe lists certified coaches. The 999-euro DNA activation includes instructions for performing it on others. Each buyer pays to become a seller and then has to find new buyers, so the market grows by recruitment, and money and greed drive it. The chosen customer becomes the next seller, and looks for vulnerable people to infect with the same belief.

Doreen Virtue, who stood at the top of this market, later left it, and described what the top looked like:

As recently as five years ago, I was the world’s top-selling New Age author. At the time, I enjoyed a phenomenally lucrative lifestyle.

… And all the while, we held up our wealth and fame as evidence that our principles were true and effective.

… Having sold-out workshops, standing ovations, adoring fans, and celebrity friends gave us swollen egos. I remember believing my every thought was a message or a sign from God or his angels.

Wealth was offered as proof of truth to people who wanted proof that they were special.

On YouTube, single videos reach millions of views (see the chart below). On TikTok, the #starseed hashtag had passed one billion views by 2023, and #maincharacter had over five billion views by mid-2021. One title states the message in its simplest form: “STARSEED: YOU ARE SPECIAL TO ME RIGHT NOW!”

The critics are barely heard. A video warning that the starseed trend is harmful drew 3,975 views.

Believing you’re special blocks real development, because it detaches your idea of self from reality. Development starts from an accurate picture of where a person stands: what he can do, what he cannot do yet, and which flaws hold him back. The chosen identity replaces and covers that picture with a portrait painted by a seller. “No, I do not have any flaws — I am perfect as I am.”

Every flaw in the portrait has been renamed. Isolation is the memory of another star. A child’s defiance is royalty. A failed healing is a contract signed before birth. A critic is asleep. A flaw renamed a gift cannot be worked on. It disappears from view, but not from existence. Over time, more and more lies and cover-ups are needed to mask the growing suffering inside. The believer gives rare meaning to sensitivity, loneliness, and the sense of not belonging, which nearly everyone shares, and avoids any real training.

Such training would expose these problems and give a real opportunity to solve them and heal those inner injuries, transforming the self in a meaningful, positive way. You cannot solve a problem without understanding it and admitting that it exists.

That is why the identity feels so good. It is a sweet lie, a quick fix that removes the pain of being ordinary at the price of the truth about oneself. Pride feeds the Ego, and the chosen identity is a form of pride that never has to be earned. Together with the five defenses described earlier, the renamed flaws and this unearned pride form a hard shell around the Ego and the problems inside it. Suffering, doubt, failure, criticism and the teacher himself are each turned into more proof, so no correction from outside reaches the problems that need work.

The money keeps the lie in circulation. The seller profits from the label, and the buyer pays for the next step on the ladder. At the top, he is certified to sell the same label to the next person. The ideas spread in proportion to the money behind them, and the money grows with the number of people the ideas appeal to.

The author who once led this market has left it, and the market has continued without her. Doreen Virtue wrote: “I still feel guilty knowing that people continue to use and sell my old products, even though I have begged them to stop.”

To learn the teaching, you have to be humble. You have to respect the Teacher you are learning from and the Tradition you are in. You have to know there is a lot to learn, and you still have a long way to go. It will likely always be this way, no matter how much progress you make. A proper student is like a sponge that absorbs knowledge, a hard-working disciple who doesn’t slack off or miss days, and who applies what he learns to himself. For any real esoteric knowledge to work, you have to absorb it, embrace it, and embody it; it has to become part of who you are, a lifestyle.

If your goal is cultivation and advancing on the path, you will always seek someone more advanced than you to learn from. People with an Ego issue do the opposite. They stay among less developed people, where they can feel advanced without working hard. This is the frog in the well of the Zhuangzi: the frog does not leave its well, because in that small space it is the most important and the most advanced creature. “You can’t discuss the ocean with a well frog — he’s limited by the space he lives in”. Most public forums work on this principle. Outside of schools with high standards and living traditions with high-level masters, the overall level of development drops sharply.

Ego is a natural mechanism that forms in the 1st caste and reaches its maximum potential in the third caste. Why would you do this or that? Why would you develop yourself? To make yourself better; that is Ego. Most people enter cultivation out of Ego, and at that stage, Ego is needed for the initial push. However, starting at level 4.1, AP on Anahata, Ego stops being the driving force. The soul begins to become aware of itself and realizes that it is something more than an Ego could ever be. As this happens, spiritual development becomes the primary motivation in life, and it does not require Ego. You are not doing it to become better than others, to impress someone, to feel better about yourself, or to chase superpowers. Then the purification process begins. Cultivation in all legitimate traditions leads to the path of purifying and letting go of the rigid structures of your Ego, because the human Ego and mind have only so much potential and limit growth past a certain level, creating impassable bottlenecks.

Ego is like a worker you hire to do a job for your benefit. Over time, the worker forgets that he was hired, develops his own will, and starts to serve only himself. That is the trap: instead of actually improving oneself, an Ego begins to improve an Ego. That is much easier and faster: you can just believe yourself to be a genius or a special kind of chosen entity, and that’s it: you are done.

We have interacted with the chosen ones far too many times, which should tell the reader just how common that kind of sickness is. It is a paradox, but people who believe they are chosen or special are among the most ordinary and common beings on the planet. Because almost everyone believes they are chosen, the truly chosen are those who overcome their Ego and walk the path. Because very few can do so, you can make yourself chosen through effort, dedication, hard work, and proper teaching. But you will never be able to enjoy it, like an Ego does, because that is just normal. You won’t be special among people with similar abilities.

A confirmation bias exists: people overwhelmed by a particular idea seek confirmation outside themselves. So they go to the teachers who affirm their beliefs or Ego. This means a person infected with an Ego disease will never seek a genuine teaching. If he finds one, he will try to escape as soon as possible to keep believing that he is someone special, walking an “unordinary” path. We have met people who claimed they could develop through books and intellectual research and didn’t require a Teacher. Others fumed with rage when told there is nothing mystical or supernatural about cultivation and magic studies.

For many are called, but few are chosen.

Matthew 22:14

These words close the parable of the wedding feast. A king invites guests to his son’s wedding. When the original invitees refuse, his servants go out and bring in everyone they find on the roads, both bad and good. Once the hall is full, the king notices a man without a wedding garment and asks how he entered without one. The man is speechless and is thrown out.

The Greek makes the same distinction: klētoi means invited or called, while eklektoi means selected or chosen. Being invited — and even being inside the feast — is not the same as being chosen. The decisive test comes after the guest has already entered.

That is the opposite of how the chosen-one market works. The market treats the invitation itself as proof: a feeling of being different, or an interest in the topic or in meditation itself, is sold as confirmation that you are already advanced and an ancient soul. On our path, everyone may be called, but people are chosen through their work and progress.

Progress comes from working on one’s Ego, not indulging it. What matters is dedication, a proper mindset, a training routine, good teaching materials, and connection with peers and teachers who also walk the path. Each person chooses their path by what they do, not by what they think about themselves.

Master Neirong puts it this way:

I see people running around with their Egos like treasures. They spend most of their lives caring for, protecting, and cultivating them.

What value is there in the Ego except for the thought? What is Ego in itself but a thought? Ask yourself that question.

The life of Aleister Crowley is a similar story (see Aleister Crowley: The False Prophet of Thelema).