From the Ringer Podcast Network, this is Dissect, long-form musical analysis broken into short digestible episodes.

This is episode eight of our season-long analysis of Kendrick Lamar's Mr. Morrell and The Big Stepers.

I'm your host, we examined Mr. Morale's seventh track, Rich Spirit, a song that

exposed Kendrick's dichotomous relationship with a spiritual journey of healing.

On one hand, the song shows signs of Kendrick's progress.

He's fasting from sex,

isolating himself from the toxicity of the internet, and even reading Eckhart Tolle.

At the same time, Kendrick is still very much in the grip of his ego, which appropriates

his spiritual gains to validate himself and judge others who are not as awakened as he is.

In the words of Eckhart Tolley, Kendrick's ego

has snuck in through the back door, giving Kendrick the false belief that he's more spiritually

developed than he truly is. According to Tolley, this is a common stage in the awakening process,

where one alternates between polarities of consciousness.

And then most people do not drastically go from one to the other.

They go to a prolonged transitional period where they are partly still the suffering

entity and partly the liberated consciousness.

So that can go on for quite a while. And many of you are probably

at that stage where you move between being liberated and being back in the narrow personal

sense of self with its reactivity, it's complaining, its unconscious thinking, and so on.

Kendrick at this point in Mr. Morales' narrative is clearly in this transitional stage of his spiritual development,

and Rich Spirit made clear that he's fallen for the ego's classic trick of priding himself in his new spirituality.

However, as the album continues into its next track, Kendrick gets a reality

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