However, it also has some serious flaws , like externalizing massive costs upon the environment and driving the rapid imprudent development of nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and other technologies that could be weaponized catastrophically and decimate the biosphere. I think that in order for the various interconnected global spiritual movements to be maximally impactful and useful, they need to address their shadow aspects. In this essay, I have attempted to illuminate some of the blind spots that seem to be prevalent in the spiritual community.
The lesson here is that growth and learning are unending processes. It can be profoundly difficult to admit that for a long time one has been incorrect or misguided, but the alternative is much worse. In a rapidly changing world, continual learning is of paramount importance. At its best, spirituality is a force which propels us toward a more harmonious, cooperative, sustainable future. Follow Jordan Bates on Facebook and Twitter. Have a comment? Sign In or Create an Account.
People will try to use the girl in the meme to divert self reflection but it just validates the realizations based your list on. Kudos to you Sir, great article. I am writing a book and have posted on indiegogo about my philosophy to avoid all these pitfalls…Incremental Yoga. He and I were there together with Maharaji.
And then in Ram Dass completed the circle by taking me to Maharaji. Ravi Dass starts his quest right after college in at the urging of Allen Ginsberg, my poetry mentor from , to go to India for spiritual awakening. After meeting Ram Dass he asked to be taken to his guru Maharaji in the Himalayas. From that moment on, his last book, The Sacred Wanderer, interweaves the odyssey of a long time seeker with the mysterious hand of Maharaji that guided him for the next forty years from householder to Maui and then to Thailand.
We must change from a materialist fear-driven culture to a global village rebuilt on the principles of mindfulness, compassion and integrity. Hopefully this next book will inspire the search in others for their true divine nature and to see the sacred in everything.
Your shortcomings, your lack of self-esteem, physical perfection, or social and economic success — none of that matters. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. Why, because you believe in bs, in tranquilizing your mind with spiritual lightweights of all colors and shapes.
No one really understands these lectures. They have used that phrase so much like Trumps Mexican Wall that you start repeating it yourself. Get a life. Get going with Incremental Yoga. But radical and fierce. This is also the daily garbage put out by satsangs that they sell in many electronic forms for years.
And what did we get, the destruction of America by the new president. Ravana himself reincarnated. A lot of this bs teaching emanated from sources in India mostly. But it started earlier in the century with a speech by Vivekananda and the Yogananda move to the USA. Allen went all over the country incorporating Indian chanting into his poetry readings. I went with him doing this on a tour of the upper midwest in Montana.
Even my cousin did it. Now the spiritual and yoga movement took off. Everyone went to India. They were escaping the Vietnam War and a bourgeois US society.
Then I got fed up and lonely on the spiritual path so I went back to society and worked in advertising. I got fed up with that and went back to India in The problem was twofold. We learned a great deal about Asian culture and philosophy, Hinduism and Buddhism and poverty.
Sex and celibacy was especially fraught with problems. It seems American women were too beautiful for Hindu gurus. And America was an ATM machine for the female gurus.
The other problems were power and money. Basically those are the chakras we are all stuck in, as they were. He meant sex and money talking to the guys. He liked to marry off the Americans at the temple. What is still lingering now from those days is the ridiculous adoration of Hindu statues, many spiritual cults centered around Hindu deities and books.
But the Tibetan brand is as screwed up as the Hindu cults. The one problem is that those who profess the Buddhist teachings pretend to also be Buddhists.
They have no childhood contact with Buddhist upbringing. They do not practice Buddhist religion but want to be called Buddhists. Basically, we all need to rise above religion to a universal principle of compassion and sacredness. The worst religions are of course, Christianity and Islam Two archaic, repressive and denigrating practices.
In Thailand, a very liberal country when it comes to judging people, they put up with rude and crude Chinese and Russian tourists, but the ones they dislike the most are Indians. Indians are so repressed, which is why they have such a terrible rape problem in India that they come to Thailand in big groups to take part in the common sex scene.
I used to adore India and stayed there for 6 years on and off. I had so many friends. I have totally changed my opinion of India. The infrastructure is falling apart. The place is totally sexually repressed. The only good things are the music, dancing and the high Himalayas. The country is so prejudiced against lower castes, which still exist. The government is totally corrupt and ridiculous. They have polluted the great Ganges and other rivers, they have no sanitation system that works and the smog is really bad in Delhi.
Little old you is not walking around anything, believe me. You may not come out unscathed, but you will go on to the next step. As such, they are one of the easiest ways for students of all traditions to imagine, visualize, sense, and think of a number of energies and subtle forces and processes that are extremely complicated for the average practitioner to consciously manipulate, and for which the Western world clearly does not as yet have a literal way to speak about.
Still, theirs are forces that we can nevertheless tap into and impact by means of the variety of technique and practices Yoga recommends and describes; because, as the common phrase goes, where our mind goes, energy flows and vice versa! And it is often by developing greater control over our awareness and greater concentration that we unleash the hidden power of our chakras.
Chakras and Other Blooming Flowers. But bear in mind that this doesn't necessarily mean that one is spared the trouble of having to deal with previously blocked emotions, repressed memories, and whatnot.
Still, releasing their potential enables us not only to improve the flow of energy in our subtle bodies so that our chakras can vibrate at the right rate, but it also allows us to move on to the next possible roadblock, and thus to the next higher frequency of vibration and to a more refined plane of existence.
This is where your common description of the chakras as flowers with varying numbers of petals enters the picture. And so, the petals characteristic of a chakra's classical representation basically speak of how a chakra's dormant potentials can also flourish or open up and bloom, much like a beautifully fragrant flower does when properly watered and exposed to the right amount of sunlight. So, we hope to have done our job correctly, and given you enough background information for you to go ahead now and read all those other chakra posts and their often contradictory tips on how to activate them What I sort of struggle with in the book is that it's decidedly not New-Age-y, but still kind of inevitably borrows from ancient-turned-New-Age traditions.
Like you wrote, "the default mental condition for human beings is dissatisfaction," which sounds a lot like the Buddhist principle of "dukkha," or suffering.
So there is this kind of tension between hating New-Age-y spiritual terms and aspects but also having to draw on them just because of the nature of the practice. I'm fascinated by Buddhism.
I think the Buddha was a genius who understood the nature of the mind. My problem is that the way people talk about Buddhism now is often incredibly annoying. I'm trying to take Buddhism and make it accessible to modern, hard-charging, skeptical people. And I know as somebody who is skeptical and ambitious that Buddhism, when distilled to its essence and communicated clearly without all of the didgeridoo music, is super compelling.
So to me there's no tension because this ancient tradition of Buddhism is a gold mine of super practical wisdom, like a treasury of incredible advice, and I've only begun to mine it. The only thing I don't like about it is the way some modern people talk about it.
Do you think meditation is a fad, or is it with us to stay? I hope it's not a fad. It'll probably slow a little bit as these things do, but I think the perfect comparison is physical exercise. People used to be super skeptical. In the s, if you told somebody you were going running, they would have said, "Who's chasing you? What changed everybody's minds was the science. And that's where we are with meditation, I think. It's mental exercise. And I think the robust embrace we're seeing now in corporations and in athletes and celebrities and scientists—we even have a meditation room at ABC News—is the beginning of a major trend.
Right here in the comfort of my living room. Where no one can see how scratched up my yoga mat is from my cat, or how hard it is for me to focus. My practice is perfect. So take that social media gurus and the yoga community elite. My chakras are misaligned as all hell but here I am.
Namaste to you too.
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