The spiritual path is the most sophisticated trap your brain has ever built.

That’s not cynicism, and it’s not a hot take. That’s what I’ve watched happen to almost everyone who takes inner work seriously, including myself. You escape the achievement trap, the money trap, the "I’ll be happy when" trap, and you go looking for something real. And then the thing you find starts running the same code as the thing you escaped.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, because it keeps showing up in conversations, in forums, with people who’ve done real work on themselves. Not beginners. Not people who read one book about mindfulness and bought a meditation cushion. People who are years into a genuine practice. And they’re stuck in a way that feels worse than before, because they’re supposed to be past this.

They’ve sat with the discomfort. Read more about consciousness than most people read in a lifetime. And yet.

There’s a second matrix. And this one is dangerous specifically because it feels like freedom.

Your brain was never designed to let you keep what you found

Your mind automatically adjusts back to a normal level of happiness over time.

You’ve probably heard this applied to money. You get the raise, you adapt, the raise becomes the new floor. Same with the house, the car and the relationship. Your nervous system recalibrates after every win and returns to baseline. That’s well-documented, you can find a hundred studies on it.

What nobody talks about is that the exact same mechanism applies to spiritual experiences.

You had a moment. Maybe during meditation, maybe on a walk, maybe it just happened one afternoon for no reason at all. Everything went quiet. The constant narration stopped. No “I should be doing something.” No planning, no worrying, no story about yourself. Just experience. And it was probably the most alive you’d felt in years.

That was real. I want to be clear about that. Something actually went quiet in your brain, and the peace wasn’t imagined. That part is true.

But then your brain did what it always does. It adapted. It turned the experience into a story. “I had an awakening. I’m on a path now. That was the beginning of something.”

Now there’s a part of your brain that narrates your life whenever you’re not focused on a specific task. Neuroscientists call it the default mode network. It runs in the background and fills every silence with stories about who you are, what you’re doing wrong, what you should be doing instead, what’s missing. During that glimpse of stillness, the DMN went quiet. That’s why the experience felt so radically different from your normal state. No narrator. No story about you. Just raw experience with nobody watching.

The DMN always comes back. And when it comes back, it grabs the glimpse. Labels it. Files it on a timeline. “I had an awakening on that retreat last March.” The experience of freedom becomes another entry in the autobiography your brain is constantly writing about you.

And autobiographies need new chapters.

So you go to the next retreat. Read the next book. Follow the next teacher. Not because the last one failed, but because the narrating machine needs new material. Your brain evolved to seek - the seeking behavior itself releases dopamine, not the finding. That’s why the search feels meaningful even when it produces nothing. Your brain is literally rewarding the searching, not the arriving.

Seeking becomes the story. And the story needs to stay alive.

(I genuinely think most people would stop seeking overnight if they understood this one mechanism. The drive to keep searching has almost nothing to do with what’s actually missing. It has everything to do with a narrator that needs something to narrate.)

The spiritual identity runs the same code as the achiever identity

You’re in a meeting. Someone pushes back on your strategy. The old you would have gotten defensive. Argued. Made it personal.

But you’ve done the work. So you stay calm. Measured. You respond thoughtfully.

And underneath the composure there’s a quiet thought running: “They don’t get it. I’ve done the inner work. I see things they can’t see.”

I wish I could say I caught this one early. I didn’t. It took years before I noticed I’d swapped one superiority for another, and it was especially hard to see because the new one sounded so much more evolved than the old one.

That’s the trap. A genuine experience gets converted into an identity, and identities need maintenance. So it keeps seeking to justify its own existence. You’re someone who meditates now. Someone who reads Eckhart Tolle and gets it. Someone who talks about consciousness at dinner and feels a quiet sense of superiority about it, even though you’d never admit that out loud.

Your brain does not care whether the identity is “successful founder” or “conscious being.” It treats them exactly the same way - builds a self-concept, then defends it. The defending feels like growth because you’re defending something that sounds noble. But defending is defending. The content changed. The mechanism didn’t.

If you’re building a business on top of all this, you now have two feedback loops running simultaneously. One says you’re not successful enough. The other says you’re not awake enough. Both promise the same thing - peace, once you arrive. Neither delivers. They can’t. Because the promise IS the loop.

The entrepreneur’s version of this is especially brutal. You’re used to solving problems by learning faster and executing harder. That instinct is what got you here. And now that same instinct - “I’ll figure this out if I just go deeper” - is the exact thing keeping the loop spinning.

I’ve talked to guys running solid businesses who can articulate both loops with perfect clarity. They know the money loop is empty. They know the spiritual loop is a trap. They can explain the whole thing to you over dinner with real insight. And they’re still stuck. Because knowing the trap exists doesn’t break the trap. The knowing just becomes another item in the identity’s collection. “I’m someone who understands the trap.” Great. Still in it.

It all feels like progress. That’s what makes it so hard to see. Every retreat, every conversation where you “get it” and feel that surge of recognition. You’re moving forward. You can feel it. Real forward motion, inside a cage.

And the spiritual marketplace is built on this exact mechanism. The Instagram guy posting sunrise photos with captions about surrender is selling you the next level. The ten-thousand-dollar ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica. The “advanced” breathwork certification that costs more than your first car. The teacher who always implies there’s a subtler layer of ego to work through.

The hierarchy never ends. It just gets more expensive. And the seeker is the perfect customer, because they never stop buying.

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Every tradition says stop, and the marketplace says buy

Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.

– Patanjali

He didn’t build a ladder. He said stop stirring.

That was roughly two thousand years ago. Not “add this practice.” Not “climb to these stages.” Stop. What’s underneath was never damaged.

Advaita Vedanta says the same thing in different language. The false self was never real. Stop feeding it. What remains is what was always there.

Buddhism doesn’t promise a special state at the end of practice. Your original nature was never broken. You don’t construct something on top of it. You stop constructing.

Three traditions spanning different centuries, different cultures, different languages. They converge on almost nothing else. They converge on this: subtraction.

The Yoga Sutras are free online. The Heart Sutra fits on a napkin. Ramana Maharshi’s complete works cost less than a single therapy session. The source material all points in the same direction, and you can access it for nothing.

And the industry that grew on top of it charges ten thousand dollars a weekend to tell you you’re not there yet.

(If you were designing a business model specifically optimized for extracting maximum lifetime revenue from a single customer, you’d be hard-pressed to beat what the modern spiritual industry has built. The customer’s core belief - “I’m not there yet” - is the exact belief that keeps them buying. The product doesn’t solve the problem. The product IS the problem. And the customer calls it growth.)

I realize I’m making this sound simple. It’s not. If it were simple, two thousand years of philosophy and hundreds of traditions wouldn’t exist. But the direction is clear even when the doing is hard. The answer is not more. The answer is less.

And you can’t sell subtraction.

The seeker is the interference

Gallwey put it as a formula in the 1970s. He was writing about tennis, but the formula keeps explaining things far beyond tennis.

Performance equals Potential minus Interference.

I’ve been sitting with that equation for a while now and it keeps making things I thought were complicated feel obvious.

Most people try to solve the equation by increasing potential. More practices, more retreats, more books, another teacher, another framework. Gallwey’s entire point was that the leverage is on the other side of the equation. Reduce the interference and the potential that was always there comes through.

The interference isn’t a lack of practice or a lack of depth. It’s the identity that says you need to keep looking. The seeker IS the interference. Not the curiosity - curiosity is how you grow. The identity. The “I” who woke up and now needs to keep proving it to themselves and everyone else around them. That’s the noise sitting between you and the clarity you already tasted.

Think about that for a second. The moment you stop defending the position “I am someone who is awake,” what’s left?

Not nothing. The same awareness that was there during the glimpse. It didn’t go anywhere. You just piled an identity on top of it and spent years maintaining the pile.

I caught it during an ayahuasca retreat. I was there filming a documentary about awareness, which tells you everything about where my head was at. During the ceremony something actually went quiet. The narrator disappeared. For a while there was nothing to capture because there was nobody trying to capture it. Then I spent the rest of the night trying to bring back what I’d seen, hold onto it, turn it into something I could explain on camera. Like running in a dream. The harder I reached, the faster it dissolved. The next morning the pattern was obvious. The mind can’t break down what’s beyond the mind. My whole project of seeking truth and pinning it down was the interference. The seeker trying to own the experience was the exact thing blocking the experience.

I spent years in this loop. Over two thousand hours of sitting, reading, working through whatever surfaced. All of it filed under “the journey.” It took a while before I started catching what was actually happening in real time - I’d have a genuine opening, a clear moment, and then I’d watch the mind reach for it, label it, and file it as progress on a path that only existed because I kept telling myself I was on one.

Two thousand hours. And the biggest shift didn’t come from a deeper sit or a better teacher. It came from catching the pattern that was running the entire search.

The ego doesn’t care what costume it wears. Achiever, seeker, “conscious entrepreneur” - it just needs a position to defend.

But once you see the mechanism, you can’t unsee it. Every time the mind reaches for “I’m someone who…” you catch it a little faster. Not because you’re trying harder. Because it’s just obvious now. Like watching a magic trick after you’ve seen the method. The trick still plays out. You just see the hand move.

The exit nobody’s selling

The freedom you tasted in that first glimpse wasn’t something you found. It’s what was already there when you stopped being someone who was looking for it.

When you drop that identity, your work changes too. Your business is no longer a stage for the “conscious founder” to perform on. You stop asking “what would the awakened version of me do?” and start asking something much simpler - what actually makes sense here? What’s needed?

That’s when things get clearer. Not because you reached some state. Because you stopped performing one.

The exit was never through another door.

If you want to see where the loop is running hardest, take the Inner Game Score.​

All love,

-Tomas