First of all, you're quite right. A lot of people who think they're in touch with profound spiritual wisdom are mindlessly parroting the messages of the corporate media. The last decade has been an acid test for the ability of spiritual traditions to help people rise above the mass mind, and a great many of the traditions active in the Western world have failed that test utterly, often in the most humiliating ways.
I do have a theory about why this is, though it'll doubtless offend some people. The forms of meditation practiced in most spiritual traditions in the modern West teach people to shut down the thinking mind. Whether they're chanting mantras, practicing mindfulness meditation, or what have you, they're all teaching themselves not to think, and it's not surprising that in fact, they've learned not to think.
Classic Western occultism, by contrast, teaches discursive meditation, which engages the thinking mind. In discursive meditation you don't silence your thoughts, nor do you observe them floating past while making no attempt to assess them -- you examine them, study them, take them apart to see how they work, and put them back together in various ways. That develops skills that enable the practitioner to see through the kind of cheap thoughtstoppers marketed by the corporate media. There may be other tools that make this happen, but discursive meditation is the one I know.
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branchandroot
Re: The failure of spirituality
Date: 2025-01-06 07:25 pm (UTC)I do have a theory about why this is, though it'll doubtless offend some people. The forms of meditation practiced in most spiritual traditions in the modern West teach people to shut down the thinking mind. Whether they're chanting mantras, practicing mindfulness meditation, or what have you, they're all teaching themselves not to think, and it's not surprising that in fact, they've learned not to think.
Classic Western occultism, by contrast, teaches discursive meditation, which engages the thinking mind. In discursive meditation you don't silence your thoughts, nor do you observe them floating past while making no attempt to assess them -- you examine them, study them, take them apart to see how they work, and put them back together in various ways. That develops skills that enable the practitioner to see through the kind of cheap thoughtstoppers marketed by the corporate media. There may be other tools that make this happen, but discursive meditation is the one I know.