The Lightworker may feel like a distinctly modern spiritual identity, but you might be surprised to learn that the ideas behind it go back much further.
In the 19th century, Western esoteric traditions were developing elaborate spiritual hierarchies of advanced beings, initiates and Masters. Alongside this developed the idea that certain more spiritually oriented people were leading humanity’s spiritual evolution. Alice Bailey’s “New Group of World Servers” was the later form of that idea. These “World Servers”, scattered around the globe, were participating in the larger Divine plan.
In the 1930s, the I AM teachings of Guy and Edna Ballard built on these earlier ideas, through the I AM Presence, Saint Germain, the Ascended Masters and a spiritual hierarchy. Their teachings proposed that human beings could act as instruments for a greater Divine purpose, working with their Divine presence within.
But by the time the Lightworker idea shows up, towards the end of the twentieth century, there’s already a lot of structure surrounding it. And clearly, it’s the case that the same old spiritual intermediaries just simply keep changing their clothes. Angels, saints, and prophets have long acted as mediators of divine knowledge; now Ascended Masters and channeled beings occupy much of the same territory. Different language, but still someone—or something—with access to truths the ordinary person supposedly cannot reach alone.
I recall how in 2019, Michelle Manders, who ran an international ascension group (that I had briefly been a part of, until my gut always told me otherwise), realised that the Spiritual Masters she had been channelling for decades were deceptive, and the group disbanded. It was a very shocking experience for some in the Lightworker community, but I have to admit, it wasn’t for me, since I remember the feeling in my body during her recordings: a strange metallic current running through me.
We have all met people who talk about the Ascended Masters the way the rest of us talk about work colleagues. They are the ones on first-name terms with the beings of light and check in with them before making a decision. Fortunately, I think many of us are moving a bit beyond this now.
And so, while those kinds of intermediaries may be a bit of a dying breed, the deeper structure underneath them hasn’t really gone anywhere. The Lightworker identity still carries many of the same ideas found in older spiritual systems: that humanity is evolving, that some souls are further along than others, and that certain people have a particular role in helping that process, while others do not.

And in fact I agree with most of these ideas about spiritual evolution. That’s not my debate here. For me the issue isn’t the idea of spiritual development itself but how we understand it, how it is misrepresented, hijacked and simplified. I understand spiritual development as more of a spiralling journey, where people and cultures develop, regress and lose capacities and then later rediscover them in a deeper way. And so regression is an integral part of development itself.
Through experiences of descent, which may bring deep loss, betrayal or limitation, a soul can deepen. But descent is not the only path to development, and we must not get caught up in it. Of equal importance is our capacity to find our way back from being lost in the depths to our connection with Spirit. And with that embodiment of our Spirit, within each descent there comes more space and freedom to live our lives with joy. The inter-relationship between descent and Spirit is fundamental to sovereignty, but that’s for another time.
There are some serious gaping holes with this whole idea of evolution and growth. Spiritual development is not necessarily always about evolution at all. Not everyone changes. We all know some people who actually change very little. We call these people “rocks” or more derisive terms. But what is rarely considered is that some people’s purpose is to be stable, like a rock or an anchor, during collective changes. They hold particular frequencies or qualities of consciousness which are resistant to change when everything around them is in flux. There is a difference between being stagnant and being stable, and we shouldn’t mistake one for the other.
Others still may act as strong catalysts for change. In this game called life, people can have very unique purposes that we can’t even remotely fathom, but we render it all down to the 3D.
Even being energetically porous, chronically overwhelmed, or having a life-threatening illness can have a unique role in a person’s life, even across the entirety of their existence. We tend to assume all difficulties need to be healed, but what happens when, despite our best efforts, that doesn’t happen? How do we understand our relationship with Divinity when healing remains elusive, despite everything we have done to bring it about? And what if some difficulties are not here to be overcome, but are integral to something much larger, perhaps even preparing us, or someone connected to us, for a role in the spiritual evolution of the collective?
This possibility sits outside our conventional understanding of life, which rarely considers the individual within life’s vast cosmic process. Yet it offers a far more inclusive understanding of spiritual purpose than the familiar Lightworker narrative, with its emphasis on healing, awakening and ascending to higher states of consciousness. It leaves room for those who rarely feature in the narratives: the homeless, the chronically ill, the dying, those living with severe mental illness, even those on death row. People whose lives may appear to have little place in our ideas of spiritual advancement, yet whose part in the larger unfoldment of life may be no less significant.
Then there is another complication with this idea of evolution. Development is not necessarily a movement away from difficulty, pain or what we might eventually call darkness; and neither does entering those places make us more developed. Suffering, descent and confrontation with what is difficult can deepen us, but it can also overwhelm us or take us away from ourselves (often for long periods of time). Descent can also bring illusory processes with it, even when they feel very real, and these can distort truth or keep recycling in our consciousness.
What is more important is that we become better at deciding how to respond to what life brings: recognising more clearly what’s actually in front of us, distinguishing what belongs to us from what does not, and knowing whether something needs to be entered more deeply, or transformed through Spirit. Development, then, is not only about being able to tolerate more uncomfortable situations; it can equally be about loving ourselves so much that we refuse to stay in certain situations.

So seeing evolving consciousness as only “lighter”, higher or more evolved misrepresents spiritual growth as only a vertical scale, a continual upward trajectory into supposedly higher states of consciousness. In many ways, the old language of salvation has simply been given a more modern spiritual wardrobe. Before we were being saved, and now we are evolving, ascending, raising our vibration or endlessly processing ourselves. And a vertical scale will inevitably imply that there’s a higher and lower, ahead and behind, awakened and asleep.
To be accurate, not all Lightworker teachings claim superiority outright—plenty define it as anyone answering a call to serve, regardless of spiritual attainment. But the hierarchy doesn’t need to be stated to be there; it lives inside this idea of “answering a higher call”, the moment the call becomes proof that you are further along than others.
Within the Lightworker world, there are plenty of subtler ways of finding your place on that ladder. The status attached to healing or psychic gifts, for example. Even if nobody calls these skills “advanced”, they can easily feel that way from inside the Lightworker identity, reconfirming that you are more spiritually developed than Joe Bloggs. The hierarchy disappears into all the seemingly benign language about gifts, awakening, purpose and service.