Spiritual Identity and the Ego's Sneakiest Disguise

A hug, as Kute Blackson tells it, has become a choreography. You no longer simply embrace someone; you position yourself, hugging on the left side, then the right, because that is where everything supposedly aligns. In a conversation with host Ben Stewart, Blackson argues that this is the moment spirituality quietly goes wrong: not when it is ignored, but when it is polished into an identity. Practice that began as a way of meeting life can harden into a costume, a set of rules, a social signal, and a way for the ego to feel special, safe, or superior. The remedy he points toward is unglamorous. Stop performing spirituality, and start living it in the ordinary, unphotogenic texture of a day, including the parts of ourselves we would rather not show anyone.

Why Does a Hug Become a Ritual?

The image is funny because it is familiar. Almost everyone has encountered the person who has learned the vocabulary of awareness and now uses it as a badge: the right clothing, the right phrases, the right way of standing in a room. Blackson's point is that this is not a new problem. He describes his own upbringing as steeped in it. His father is a minister with 300 churches in Ghana, West Africa, and his mother, who is Japanese, grew up meditating in the Buddhist tradition. He recalls being a boy of six or seven and watching a crippled woman crawl across the floor, pick up the gravel his father had walked on, wipe it across her face, and stand up. It is a memory that does not fit neatly into a category, which may be why it has stayed with him.

His father's own story is the hinge of the family's spiritual history. Blackson says his father traveled to India in the 1960s, had an awakening experience, and came back without abandoning his churches. But the theology shifted: from what Blackson calls an old-school, hellfire-and-brimstone orthodoxy toward a view of Christ as a consciousness rather than only a person. Blackson grew up between two rhythms, church on Sunday and meditation at home, and he says the same lesson he absorbed from that mixture is the one he now wants to warn others about. Spirituality, he says, can become another dogma, "another attachment, another restriction," in which people get so attached to rules that they forget the living experience the rules were meant to point toward.

"You can't just give someone a hug anymore. You got to like hug on the left side, hug on the right side, because that's where everything aligns. And before you know it, now you're not living the true feeling and essence of what's authentic."

Kute Blackson, in conversation with Ben Stewart (Gaia, approx. 0:09 and 4:13 in the episode)

What Is the Purpose of Spiritual Practice, If Not Being Spiritual?

This is the sharpest line in the conversation, and Blackson sets it up with an analogy most people will recognize from the gym. The purpose of going to the gym, he says, is not to live inside the gym for twenty-four hours. The purpose of training is to develop strength, density, and stamina so that you can move through daily life more freely, more flexibly, and with more endurance. Nobody confuses the workout with the goal of having well-developed muscles to display at a party.

Apply that logic to spiritual practice and the confusion becomes visible. "The purpose of spirituality is not to be spiritual," Blackson says. He lists the things people accumulate in the name of the path, the chanting, the mantras, the Himalayan yoga, the meditation retreats, and then asks the question that gives the argument its edge: "I can open my pineal gland. But what's the point of that? What does that really serve?" For him, the test of any practice is not the experience it produces on the cushion but the quality of attention it brings to the next hour. "How am I living my life each moment, moment to moment?" he asks, and he answers that real spirituality is the capacity to see the divine in exactly that ordinary flow.

The analogy also explains why the talk keeps returning to the body. A practice that cannot be felt in the body, in the way you speak to a child or respond to a stranger's bad mood, is not yet doing the work it promised.

How Does the Ego Hide Inside Spirituality?

Blackson's most pointed observation is about where the ego goes when it is trying not to be seen. "The sneakiest place that the ego hides is in spirituality," he says. Ambition that once chased money or status can now chase the appearance of depth: the photo from the retreat, the pose on the mat, the detail that the phone was just happening to be in the room during meditation. Blackson laughs at the absurdity of it, but the point is serious. Identity is identity, whatever it is built on.

He describes performative spirituality as relying on comparison: what is everyone else wearing, doing, saying? The problem is not that the performer is necessarily a fraud. Blackson's observation is that such people often "are performing it but they're not aware that there's a shadow side inside them that is asking for a different kind of attention." In other words, the performance is a symptom. Underneath it is a need for validation, for disciples, for a sense of being seen as more evolved than others, and that need is precisely what the practice was supposed to illuminate rather than feed.

This is why he frames the work as self-examination rather than self-improvement. He speaks about looking honestly at his own identity, his fears, and his needs, and about unraveling the sense of specialness that can quietly attach itself to being on a path. The question he poses is not "Am I spiritual enough?" but "What is this spirituality protecting me from?"

What Is the Difference Between Awakening Up and Awakening Down?

The description of the episode introduces a distinction that Blackson develops more fully later in the conversation: awakening up into higher states, and awakening down into the messy reality of being human. Much of spiritual culture is organized around the first. It promises transcendence, expanded perception, and the sense of leaving the density of ordinary life behind. Blackson is not dismissing those experiences. He is arguing that a spirituality which only ascends can become a way of avoiding the body, the family, the unresolved hurt, and the daily friction that tests whether any insight has actually landed.

"Waking down. Not just waking up."

Kute Blackson, Gaia conversation with Ben Stewart (approx. 33:16 in the episode)

Awakening down means letting spirit inhabit the ordinary. He talks about parenthood and marriage as places where that happens, where he has been confronted by his own reactions and had to stop pretending to be above them. In this frame, the sacred is not something to be reached through a higher state; it is present in the shadow material we have been trained to bypass. The wellness industry, he suggests, often teaches people to skip that work, and the skipping is one of the things that makes spirituality look like a performance.

Can Acceptance Bring Real Peace?

The conversation's closing promise, as the episode description frames it, is "the profound peace that comes with total acceptance." That phrase needs careful reading, because acceptance is easy to misunderstand as passivity or as a new kind of spiritual pose. What Blackson describes is closer to honesty. Stop curating the self you present, and allow the full human to be seen: the anger, the envy, the ambition, the tenderness. He says that embracing "the full human" is where authentic spirituality begins, because it is the only place where a person can actually meet life as it is rather than as a story about how evolved they have become.

"Maybe the deepest spirituality" is a question worth sitting with on your own, and the conversation leaves room for that.

Kute Blackson, Gaia conversation with Ben Stewart (approx. 52:00 in the episode, partial quote from the published transcript)

Acceptance, in this sense, does not erase effort. It changes the reason for the effort. A practice done from identity asks, "How do I look?" A practice done from life asks, "What is actually happening, and how can I meet it?" The second question is slower and less rewarding on social media, which is precisely why it tends to be more honest.

What Does This Mean for Someone Starting Out or Deep in the Path?

The useful takeaway from this conversation is a set of checks rather than a doctrine. Notice when your practice has acquired rules you did not discover for yourself. Notice when you want others to witness your depth. Notice whether your meditation makes you more available to the people in your life, or more separate from them. Notice what you avoid when you are "spiritual," and whether that avoidance has a name.

Blackson's own framing suggests that the answers will often be uncomfortable, and that discomfort is information. The shadow is not an obstacle to spirituality; in his telling, it is one of the places where spirituality is most alive.

Where to go from here

If this conversation resonated, the most useful next step is the full episode, where Blackson and Stewart go deeper into the awakening-up and awakening-down distinction, the role of parenting and marriage in confronting the ego, and the practical question of how to stay neutral through life's ups and downs. The episode description also points to Blackson's upcoming transformational experience in Bali and to a free resource called 8 Levels of Gratitude, both linked by the speaker's team for readers who want to continue the work. Read them as invitations rather than prescriptions. Blackson's central challenge is simple to state and difficult to practice: the purpose of spirituality is not to be spiritual, but to live, moment to moment, in a way that the practice makes possible.