The Fanaticism Test

There were seven of us in the ashram that summer, and we were all trying to be the best volunteer in the room.

Nobody said it out loud. That would have ruined the whole thing. We were spiritual people, after all. We didn't compete. We served. But service had a way of looking a lot like audition - who fixed the problem fastest, who had the sharpest idea, who earned the longest nod from the teacher.

I was somewhere in the middle of the pack until the afternoon I suggested a solution to a logistical problem that, by some combination of luck and common sense, actually worked. The teacher noticed. And then he did something I didn't expect: he started creating informal hierarchies among us. Spiritual rankings, essentially - based on who brought the best ideas, who demonstrated the most insight, who got it.

Overnight, I was promoted. Not officially. There were no titles, no certificates, no ceremony. Just a shift in how the teacher spoke to me - and how everyone else stopped.

Congratulations, Soren. You won the unspoken competition that nobody was having.

The friends I'd been eating dinner with last week now looked at me like I was a different species. Not with hostility, exactly. More like the way you look at someone who's been seated at a different table at a wedding. Still in the same room, technically. But not really with you anymore.

The whole hierarchy experiment lasted maybe a few weeks before it quietly evaporated. No announcement, no explanation. One day the rankings were everything; the next, they'd never existed. And we all went back to pretending we were equals who'd never been anything else.

But I remember the feeling. That brief taste of being chosen - and the loneliness that came with it. How quickly devotion to a practice had turned into devotion to a position. How naturally "I want to serve" had become "I want to be seen serving."

I didn't know it then, but that summer was the first time I should have run the test.

The distance you don't notice crossing

Nobody wakes up one morning and thinks, Today seems like a good day to stop thinking critically. It happens the way most dangerous things happen - gradually, comfortably, and with excellent justification at every step.

You start with genuine curiosity. A practice that makes your life measurably better. A teacher whose words land somewhere deep. A community that feels like home after years of not quite fitting in anywhere. All of that is real. All of that is valuable. I'm not here to tell you that devotion is just another word for delusion.

The problem isn't devotion. Devotion is beautiful when it's chosen freely, examined regularly, and held loosely enough to survive disagreement. The problem is what devotion becomes when you stop noticing it's changed.

There's a term in psychology for this: need for cognitive closure - our craving for definite answers in an uncertain world.¹ When life feels chaotic, we don't just want guidance. We want certainty. And the more uncertain we feel, the more aggressively we cling to whatever framework promises to end the ambiguity.

A spiritual practice can be that framework. So can a political ideology, a diet philosophy, or a CrossFit gym. The mechanism is identical.

"The distance between devotion and fanaticism is exactly one unanswered question."

The shift from open-minded devotion to closed-fist fanaticism isn't a personality flaw. It's a cognitive pattern. And it has a trigger: the moment questioning starts to feel like betrayal.

The test

I run what I call the fanaticism test on myself about once a month. Not formally - I don't sit down with a checklist and a cup of tea. It's more like a diagnostic scan that runs in the background. Antivirus software for the soul.

The test is five questions. They sound simple. They're not.

Can I disagree with my teacher and still respect them?

Not hypothetically. Actually. When was the last time I thought, I don't think he's right about this - and the thought didn't come with a chaser of guilt? If disagreement feels like disloyalty, that's data. Important data.

If someone criticized my practice, would I feel personally attacked?

There's a difference between "I disagree with your critique" and "How dare you." The first is a conversation. The second is an immune response. Healthy devotion can absorb criticism and keep walking. Fanaticism treats every question as an act of war.

When was the last time I actually changed my mind about something in my tradition - not "deepened my understanding," but genuinely thought I was wrong?

If you can't name a specific instance, that's worth sitting with.

Could I leave tomorrow and still know who I am?

This one stings. Because if the honest answer is "I don't know who I'd be without this," then you might have fused your identity with the system so thoroughly that the practice has become a load-bearing wall. Remove it and the whole structure collapses. That's not commitment. That's dependence.

Do I explain away things that bother me?

Festinger called this cognitive dissonance - the mental gymnastics we perform when reality conflicts with our beliefs.² The more you've invested in something, the harder your brain works to justify it. Seven years of my life? That can't have been naive. That had to mean something. The investment itself becomes the evidence.

How many times do I need to learn this?

What the test actually measures

The test isn't measuring whether your practice is good or bad. Plenty of practices are genuinely helpful, and devoted practitioners are not, by default, fanatics. I want to be clear about that because the internet has enough takes equating all spiritual commitment with brainwashing.

What the test measures is elasticity.

A rubber band that can stretch and return to shape is functional. A rubber band frozen stiff will snap the moment you pull it. The questions above aren't checking what you believe - they're checking whether your beliefs still have give in them.

When I stopped stretching

In my ashram hierarchy days, my beliefs had zero give. I couldn't have disagreed with the teacher if I'd wanted to, because disagreement wasn't a category that existed in my operating system. There was "understanding" and there was "not understanding yet." If you disagreed, it meant you simply hadn't reached the level where the thing would make sense.

What a brilliantly airtight system. No exit door built in. Very healthy.

I'm not sure at what point curiosity became compliance. It wasn't a single moment. It was a thousand tiny ones - each "yes" making the next "yes" a little more automatic, until being chosen felt like validation rather than what it actually was: evidence that the system was working on me exactly as designed.

"Fanaticism doesn't feel like losing your mind. It feels like everyone else finally losing theirs."

That's the cruelest part. You don't experience it as losing your judgment. You experience it as gaining clarity. Everyone else is confused, and you've been given the answer. The certainty feels like a gift, not a cage.

The part nobody wants to hear

There's an uncomfortable corollary to all this, and it's the reason I still run the test twenty years later.

I'm not immune.

I practice within a tradition I respect. I have a teacher I trust. And every single one of those five questions could, on any given month, catch something I'd rather not look at. Some months I notice I've been defending a position I haven't actually examined. Some months I realize I've been explaining away a discomfort rather than exploring it. Thirty years of practice, still catching myself mid-rationalization.

This isn't weakness - it's neurology. The need for closure is a dial, not a switch, and stress, loneliness, and life transitions can crank it up without you noticing.¹

The test isn't pass-fail. It's a weather report. How am I doing right now? Where's the pressure building? What am I avoiding looking at?

If this sounds like I had this figured out for years - I didn't. For a long time, the idea that I should test my devotion would have felt offensive. Devotion, by definition, wasn't something you questioned. You deepened it. You surrendered to it. You absorbed it so completely that it became indistinguishable from your own thinking, and you called that progress.

I'm making this sound like an epiphany. It was more like ten years of slowly noticing I'd stopped asking questions.

What I'm not saying

I'm not saying leave your teacher. I'm not saying devotion is a trap.

I'm saying: check. Regularly. The way you'd check the oil in a car you love driving. Not because you expect something to be wrong, but because the cost of not checking is too damn high.

And one more thing: running the test isn't the same as using the results to avoid commitment. There's a difference between "I could leave if I needed to" and "I should leave because staying feels too vulnerable." The first is freedom. The second is fear wearing its costume.

The fanaticism test isn't designed to make you doubt everything. It's designed to keep the door to doubt available. To make sure the room you're in has windows.

Because here's what I know after thirty years of practice, two different traditions, and one informal hierarchy that lasted three weeks before vanishing like it never happened:

The best teachers want you to question them. The best systems make room for disagreement. And the best version of devotion is the one that survives being tested.

If it can't survive five questions, it wasn't devotion.

It was something else.

For You

Pick one of those five questions. The one that made you uncomfortable. Sit with it for a week. Don't resolve it. Just notice what happens when you let the discomfort exist.

If nothing comes up - great. If something does - even better. That's the test working.

Continue Exploring

What Your Guru Forgot to Tell You - The one instruction most spiritual teachers give that almost nobody follows. Including me, for years.

Your Beliefs Probably Aren't Yours - How borrowed beliefs feel exactly like genuine understanding - and why that's the whole problem.

Notes & References

¹ Kruglanski, A. W. & Webster, D. M. (1996). "Motivated closing of the mind: 'Seizing' and 'freezing.'" Psychological Review, 103(2), 263-283. The need for cognitive closure - our craving for definite answers - increases proportionally with uncertainty, stress, and fatigue. See also: Kruglanski, A. W. (2004). The Psychology of Closed Mindedness. Psychology Press.

² Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press. The concept of effort justification - where people value outcomes more when they've invested significant effort - is particularly relevant to long-term commitment in spiritual organizations.