Below I compile evidence of modern spiritual teachers who've said our stories interfere with our spiritual development; that they are inherently delusional, meaningless, and distracting from our real work.

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Nondualist guru Nisargadatta Maharaj rejected personal identity narratives. Biography is fundamentally unreal, he said. Throughout his book I Am That, he characterizes personality as an accidental overlay on pure awareness.

Quotes:

“The self is a fiction created by thought.”

“All your problems exist because you believe yourself to be something.”

“The person is merely the result of imagination.”

"The story of your life exists only in your mind."

“When you believe yourself to be a person, you see persons everywhere. In reality there are no persons, only threads of memories and habits."

“Have your being outside this body of birth and death and all your problems will be solved.”
 
 
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Advaita teacher Papaji urged students to abandon every psychological and spiritual narrative. He treated personal history as entirely irrelevant to awakening.

His teaching style often involved interrupting students' autobiographical explanations before they could finish them.

Quotes:

“Drop the story.”

"Nothing that happened to you has any reality now."

"Forget the past. It is gone."

"There is no story. There is only the Self."

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Gangaji is Papaji's most prominent Western student. She has built an entire teaching around stopping "the story of you."

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Advaita teacher Mooji regularly encourages students to view their life stories as mental constructions. In many satsangs he explicitly discourages extended discussion of psychological history.

Quotes:

“The person is only a bundle of thoughts and memories.”

“Don’t identify with the story of yourself.”

"The person is a psychological construct."

"Without memory, where is your story?"

"The story of 'me' is only a passing cloud."

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Advaita teacher Ramana Maharshi is a foundational source for modern nondual anti-story spirituality.

His inquiry “Who am I?” aims to dissolve identification with all conceptual self-definitions.

He regarded the autobiographical self as a transient mental activity obscuring pure awareness.

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Nondualist teacher Adyashanti speaks of the separate self as a kind of dream or trance.

Quote:

"Life will conform neither to the story you tell yourself about it nor your interpretation of it."

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Nondualist teacher Rupert Spira treats the separate self not as an entity but as a passing thought-and-feeling, with no continuous biographical substance behind it.
 
Quotes:

"The separate self is made only of thoughts and feelings."

"The self is an activity of thinking."

"There is no independently existing entity at the center of experience."
 
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Jiddu Krishnamurti quotes:

“A mind which is not crippled by memory has real freedom."

"There is nothing much to learn about myself because I am just a bundle of memories, ideas, experiences and traditions."

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Eckhart Tolle quotes:

“‘I’ embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity.”

“What I perceive, experience, think, or feel is ultimately not who I am,”

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“You are not your body, not your feelings, not your thoughts.”
—Ajahn Chah, Theravada Buddhist teacher