Narcismissm disguised as 'Spirituality'

I’ve been reading Paul Theroux’s book ‘The Great Railway Bazaar’, which I find to be both fascinating and funny in parts. I like particularly the way Theroux subtly derides people with an over developed sense of self importance. For instance when he meets a Mr Ercumena Behzat Lav, then president of the Turkish Literary Union. Theroux, making conversation, asks what Mr Ercumena does, to which he replies ‘this is a completely meaningless question. One cannot say in a few words what one does or is. That takes months, sometimes years’. Theroux, sensing the sheer deluge of comic pomposity that would follow up this taster, cuts him off by telling him ‘you’re too much work’ and walks away. Mr Ercumena clearly believed his statement to be supremely profound, yet without modesty, or indeed substance, he is forgotten (this account was written in 1975) by history, aside from this one brief reference mocking him, and is bloated to the absurdist level of parody. Theroux also met a man in his mid thirties who said he had ‘the tone of a man who tells you, with a mixture of piety and arrogance, that he has a vocation’. The man was on his way to spend the rest of his life at an ashram in southern India, despite having ‘a wife and children in California’. This man, confusing his own narcissism and selfish desire to abandon responsibility with ‘spirituality’ and latching on to an obscure superstition to justify it, has left behind him what truly matters: love, both romantic and paternal. People like him just cannot grasp the deceptive simplicity of that which is truly spiritual, for no matter what your situation, you’ve reached a good place if the only thing you care about is another person.