I’ll never forget the message. After months of deep connection with someone I thought I knew, she wrote: “Martin, there’s something I need to tell you. I’ve made it all up. None of my experiences have been real.”
It was the kind of honesty that stops you mid-breath.
And it changed how I see spiritual communities forever.
The Setup: A Spiritual Community, A Spiritual Buddy, and the Red Flags I Missed
About a year into my own spiritual practice, I joined a closed online spiritual community-roughly 20 people, mostly American women, meeting weekly on Zoom for intensive study and personal work. We were encouraged to pair up with a “buddy” in the group, someone to process the material with, to share our spiritual experiences, to keep each other accountable.
I connected immediately with one woman-let’s call her Sarah. She stood out. She was closer to my age than almost anyone else in the group. She’d done the retreats, the intensive trainings, the multi-week immersions at the big spiritual headquarters. When she spoke, it was with the quiet authority of someone who’d been somewhere. And when she was a little confrontational with our group leader, it didn’t feel disrespectful-it felt like she knew something the rest of us didn’t.
In other words, she had credibility. She had the markers we all unconsciously look for: experience, intensity, a hint of being “further along” spiritually than the rest of us.
So when she became my buddy, I was genuinely delighted.
The Beautiful Friendship (And the Cracks)
For the first few months, it was a beautiful connection. We talked about the material, we shared insights, we supported each other. But then something shifted. Sarah became increasingly confrontational-not with the group, but with me. She’d rant for hours about people in her life, her relationships, her frustrations. Which is fine; we all need to process. But it started to feel less like spiritual study and more like I was her unpaid therapist.
Looking back, I was naive. I genuinely wanted to help. And I had just completed training in a particular form of deep therapeutic work-spiritual hypnotherapy, which includes something called channelling. For those unfamiliar with it: you guide someone into a light trance state, and what emerges can be deeply meaningful-memories, insights, spiritual presences, guides, ancestors, angels, or other entities that offer wisdom and healing.
I offered Sarah sessions. Free, because I wanted the experience and because I believed she needed help.
What happened in those sessions seemed profound. In one, she channelled an ancient spiritual entity with a profound message. In another, a figure that seemed Christ-like, offering wisdom about love and peace and oneness. Each time, she emerged visibly moved, grateful, transformed. I left those sessions genuinely believing I was making a real difference to her life.
I was wrong.
The Confession That Changed Everything
Weeks later, Sarah came back from a break. She sat with me (virtually, across the distance) and said the thing that cracked open everything I thought I understood about spiritual communities:
“I made it all up. Every experience. The entities, the profundity, all of it. I fabricated it because I realised something: the more profound my spiritual experiences were, the more people loved me. The more people welcomed me. The more people tolerated my difficult behaviour.“
It landed like a punch.
But she kept going, and this is where it gets important:
“I only figured this out because I started noticing it everywhere in the community. The people who claimed the most transcendent experiences got the most attention, the most sympathy, the most validation. And no one was checking. No one was asking, ‘Actually, how do you know this is real? How can I verify this?’ People just… accepted it. And rewarded it.”
Why This Matters: Spiritual Bypassing Meets Zero Accountability
Here’s what I realised Sarah had inadvertently revealed: she wasn’t just lying. She was exploiting a system that was built to enable exactly what she was doing.
Spiritual communities are, by their nature, predicated on belief in the unseen. That’s not inherently a problem-faith is part of the human experience. But it creates a vacuum. When the most “advanced” proof of spiritual development is an internal experience that no one else can verify, the door is wide open for fabrication.
And-this is crucial-what Sarah was doing is a form of spiritual bypassing.
Spiritual bypassing is using spiritual beliefs or experiences to avoid dealing with real psychological pain, difficult emotions, or hard truths about ourselves. Sarah wasn’t just lying for attention; she was constructing an identity that allowed her to:
- Avoid her own difficult emotions and relational patterns
- Skip the hard internal work of genuine healing
- Get the emotional reward (love, acceptance, belonging) without doing the uncomfortable psychological labour
And the community wasn’t just enabling it-it was rewarding it. Every “profound” experience Sarah claimed became a conversation, a moment of connection, a validation. It was positive reinforcement, reinforcing the exact behaviour that was keeping her stuck.
She wasn’t healing. She was performing. And the community was her audience, applauding and asking for an encore.
The Uncomfortable Truth: This Is Everywhere
Here’s what keeps me up at night: Sarah isn’t an exception. She’s probably the rule.
Think about it. In spiritual communities:
- There’s no mechanism for accountability. You can’t fact-check a transcendent experience.
- The most socially rewarded behaviour is claiming the deepest spiritual insight or experience.
- People who are emotionally vulnerable (which is most people seeking spiritual communities) are often desperate to feel seen and accepted.
- The culture actively discourages scepticism. Questioning someone’s experience is treated as a lack of faith or spiritual maturity.
It’s a perfect storm for fabrication. And it’s not limited to channelling, or past-life memories, or divine messages. It happens across all spiritual modalities: shamanic journeying, tarot readings, energy work, manifestation claims, guru worship, all of it.
I’m not saying everyone is lying. But I am saying there’s no way to know who is and who isn’t-and the structure of most spiritual communities actively prevents you from finding out.
What I Did (And Why)
A few weeks after Sarah’s confession, I left the spiritual community.
Not because everyone in it was fake. Not because the teachings weren’t valuable. But because I couldn’t unsee what she’d shown me: a system designed to reward spiritual experiences, with zero mechanism for distinguishing real transformation from clever performance.
And if you can’t tell the difference, how can you trust anything?
Sarah only told me the truth. She didn’t confess to the group. I kept her confidence. But I also quietly withdrew. And I imagine her fabrication likely continued, rewarded by a community that had no reason to suspect it wasn’t real.
The Questions You Should Be Asking
So here’s where I’m going to be a bit confrontational, because I think you need to hear this:
Have you experienced something similar in a spiritual community you’re part of? Have you noticed people claiming increasingly profound experiences? Gaining status or acceptance based on how “advanced” their spiritual journey seems?
Can you spot the signs? What would it look like if someone in your group was doing what Sarah did? What markers would give them away? (Spoiler: there probably aren’t any obvious ones.)
What’s actually being rewarded in your spiritual community? Genuine transformation and hard internal work? Or compelling stories, profound claims, and the ability to perform spirituality convincingly?
And perhaps most importantly: if someone admitted they’d made it all up, would they feel safe doing so? Or would the social cost be too high?
If the answer to that last question is “they’d never feel safe admitting it,” then you’ve already got your answer about what your community is actually reinforcing.
The Path Forward
I’m not anti-spiritual. I’m not suggesting all spiritual practice is fraudulent. What I am saying is this: be suspicious of any community that can’t tolerate questioning. Be wary of any spiritual framework that rewards profound claims without requiring evidence of change in people’s actual lives.
And if you’re in a spiritual community right now, ask yourself: Am I here because I’m genuinely transforming, or am I here because it feels good to be part of something that tells me I’m spiritually advanced?
There’s a massive difference. And Sarah, in her honesty, gave us all permission to ask it.
