Because spiritual experiences, in themselves, are not rare and fairly easily accessible. A long meditation session, a course of Vipassana, a sensory deprivation chamber or psychedelics can quite reliably invoke spiritual experiences in a lot of people.

Spiritual experiences do not constitute awakening. But ego has a tendency to co-opt every experience for itself, so it says “wow, I am awake now”. And so communities of “awakened” people form, discussion boards, all of that.

The truth is, there is no such thing as an awakened person. There are only people with awakening egos. In true awakening, there is no difference between awakened and non-awakened people, but egos are attracted to similar egos, so “awakened” or spiritual people are similarly attracted to other “awakened” or spiritual people.

There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, it’s not any worse than Democrats preferring to hang around other Democrats - it’s the same phenomenon. The danger is only that in doing so they limit their further growth, and also that they usually export some version of “truth” which tends to revolve around being nice, loving, graceful and harmonious with others. And unfortunately, it tends to include how other people who do or say stuff that is none of these things, are “ignorant” and need to work on themselves.

Paradoxically, this results in harsh judgment of people who are not “awake” which they are unable to see. In my experience, “awake” people are often times more cruel and intolerant of “ignorant” behavior (displaying anger, jelousy, ill-will or hurt feelings) than people who are not “awake” and never claimed to be. I didn’t see any correlation, the only difference is vocabulary.

Some “awake” people teach. Even though those who do usually are more accepting of others, they can’t teach from the place of unconditional love. Some lessons are basically cruelty in disguise.

It’s not hard to see all that from the place of authentic realization, but it’s really hard to see it for most people. The best advice I can give is that if something feels “off”, it probably is. And do not for a second think they are different from you, more “advanced” than you, or see things “deeper” than you - they aren’t and they don’t. They just use a different vocabulary. How close a person is to self-realization has no correlation whatsoever to the amount of spiritual words they use. Ego co-opts spirituality just like everything else.