The Phenomenon of Weird Spirituality
Disclaimer: I am not religious, but I think about things.
So… if God and Goddess are the creators of reality, and their supposed antithesis is a sort of demon-devil who represents the opposite of reality creation, meaning void, destruction, end of nature and so forth; and people are against the idea of God and Goddess, but are nature loving, love-and-light apologists and also anarchist-agnostic who always say “well, I don’t know” when faced with “what is god?” and then have crystals protecting their homes, but at the same time follow Bakunin who said “god is to be destroyed”… I’m reminded of this, and bare with me before shutting this down:
I have nothing against both religious people or agnostics or atheists. As long as everyone respects each other we can all go a long way in believing what the freak we are told by our conditionings. Regardless, there are pretty epic realizations on that above, if we take the time to think about it.
Historical usurpation and decontextualization, or commonly mentioned as Colonialism.
There is this widespread notion of spirituality which deems humanity as the epythome of spiritual leadership (we don’t really know if animals revere any other God than nature), but let me think about this for a moment: besides the ways we think about spirituality being completely rooted in both the fear of death and the fear of life, we kind of understand that the feeling small is the problem. That is a major issue for humans, the feeling small thing. Humanity as a society has one major enemy and it seems every social aspect of this enemy is being faced right now: death. The end of life.
A lot about this issue is spoken in religious scriptures, there is always that sense of hope (to both spiritual and atheist people alike) that even if after death there is void, we kind of all hope it’s better than this. The issue here is how that very effectively creates a sort of apathetic posture in people in actually making changes in their world for the better. The fact that certain people are so against the idea of divinity that they can murder to make that the statement of their lives is pretty congruent to the reality of Weird Spirituality.
We tend to believe in some sort of spiritual reality in order to appease existential dread and questionings. Why is that? Because the unknown (the void) is absolutely terrifying. When we don’t believe in anything spiritual, we take that meaning out of scientific fact.
Hardcore atheists give no other meaning to blue than blue being there and existing (and kind of not existing at the same time), and religious people are okay with the notion that some God created the color blue, and are ok with blue just being there and existing. We are all comfortable with the notion that light reflects and color exists, it appeases our questioning about how blue came to be there. But if you add to the mix: Why does blue exist? You may start a food fight in your dining table and can even stop speaking to certain friends for life. “Why does it have to have a meaning?” it’s the usual thing. We tend to dismiss what we can’t solve. Ever tried solving those really difficult puzzles and then just throwing it somewhere and it becomes a decorative piece? It’s kind of the same. Meaning has become decorative, much like the puzzles we can’t fix.
But when we start layering out patriarchal notions of blue being a masculine color, all the conditionings we have regarding our feelings about color, the ideas we have about who can answer these questions, we firmly equip ourselves with time and mental space to think about the color blue, and go beyond colonialist academia views on color and their substance and meaning, including current scientific ideas, there is a whole range of deep, deep meaning we can find about life in the study of blue. But this doesn’t really have any academic merit in our society, what you think in your free time is your own, and if it’s not conductive to be reviewed by your peers, than it has no value.
It’s like swimming in the Ocean or in a swimming pool, the ocean water keeps changing, the pool water is basically the same since it was filled. The answers are either new, or are all there already.
We can also call this lazy spirituality. Meaning we already have all the answers given to us in Wikipedia, why try enlightenment anyway — bo-ri-iiiiing!
Lets dive deeper.
Christianity was also colonialized and usurped from it’s origins and cultural identity, like most religions. The fact that what we currently call West couldn’t really colonize most of Asia, gives us a clue and an idea what kind of Spiritual Respect there was in the Ancient times (which are not so ancient to begin with). Christians have been persecuted for all their existence, or the patriarchal colonial texts say so, but rather interesting is to note how the religion metamorphed itself in many ways throughout the ages.
There have been attempts to decolonize Jesus, which is an interesting aspect of our shared reality now. But that’s kind of taking in fully the story that the colonialists tell us about him. There is more proof of his existence than proof of the existence of Julius Cesar, and the thing is, it’s highly guarded and in dead languages current scholars with their own conditionings no longer understand — there is always room for inventing according to one’s perspectives. One interesting line of this is how there is evidence of his existence after his supposed death.
But if we agree collectively that a God was murdered and that gave rise to the society we live in today, we kind of believe the crap we are told anyway. Further inquiry on the realities back then, and reading current academia about Roman realities, we kind of understand that we know very little about what happened. It is being said now, that it was such a vast empire that it is highly likely it was more open and a lot more equal than it’s given credit for. Tiberius Claudius was a very interesting emperor, supposedly the grandfather of the Claudius that was in charge during Jesus’ death. But if you look at the timeline and dates of when they actually reigned, there is something wrong about what is being fed to us and our narrative of it all. Jesus was not only not alive anymore during his supposed murderer life, as he was living in the reign of one the most interesting Emperors that Rome had, a disabled and Republican emperor. Anyway… moving on…
So the bigger question arises, as usual: who does this narrative of a dead god actually serve? If we study how back then religious sects and spiritual beliefs were respected inside and outside the Roman Empire, this dead god theory actually starts to shake and tumble. As does a lot of other ideas that we have about Christianity. And sorry to be bursting bubbles like this is plastic bubble wrap, but it’s important we understand the level of insanity we live in reflects the number of lies we are being fed for about 2 millenia.
Another insteresting idea to ponder is that there never was Hinduism the way we know it before colonialist rule of what is now called India and the surrounding and neighbouring countries, what we call “India” is a term invented by colonial powers that gives an idea of “indigenous”, savage, inferior. Hinduism as a religion was a Colonialist made intersection of spiritual beliefs, and who knows the truth anymore, besides monks and those who hold the traditions? One of the terms for the area was Bharat but there have been many others. The region and it’s people, the what we now call Indus Valley, has more than 3000 years old now, the understanding of the contemporaneity of timelines gives us an idea of how different it all was just before the fall of the Roman Empire. Here’s a tiny speck of it:
So, the issue is, when we call ourselves spiritual nowadays — to which manipulated version of spirituality are we attesting to at the moment? We can follow the myriad of very confusing memes and Facebook groups that call themselves spiritual, but have a real void on content and substance about what is actually spiritual. But lets not fall into the blame trap: people want meaning, that’s all.
The Enlightenment thing.
Enlightenment has become the new buzz word for how to gain a million dollar fan base without saying absolutely nothing of substance. A lot of people repeat each other endlessly in order to sell books, gain followers and keep distance from the common mortal. Despite that, when you dive deep into cultures who value spirituality as a valid facet of life, you understand that the Western meaning of Enlightenment couldn’t be further from what it actually is. A simple example is how you don’t see Buddhist monks arguing with each other on Facebook saying “wake up sheeple!” to the ones who they deem less enlighetened, and if you do, rest assured they are joking.
Issue is, the backbone of a society rests a lot on the cultural narrative. One of the most difficult things for me, was being born in a place which valued multiple views on spirituality, including Goddess, Gods and other spiritual beings, and coming to a place in which people believe and reveer a murdered Messiah. It was so weird, I can’t stress this enough. “What do you mean, dead?!”, seriously fucked up, people. So if the cultural narrative is one of violence, aggression and murder, you bet it’s not healthy the slightest. Worse, it’s a lie on itself. If reality exists, it’s not possibly true (a “lol” here would make sense, but this is serious writing).
So, instead on focusing on what’s wrong, lets make an appreciative inquiry of all of this: first, what is the good that we can take from this narrative? Most of all, it has a connotation of abandonment, we did were not abandoned by our parents, we killed the father wound and made ourselves better. That’s the underlying narrative. Thing is, the state of the world will tell you that kind of backfired. Second, the disconnection from the common westerner from nature can bring a good thing with it: introspection on the level of importance. The feeling small thing is replaced with this anger-like thing of denying insignificance because, well, we are here and built a mighty presence for ourselves as a species, and that has to count for something. That shows in the scientific narrative of human superiority. So it seems to me that this narrative is played out by the simple idea that humanity felt it was inferior, passible to be erradicated and made a point of proving it’s creative worth. That can be a good thing, despite the West taking it slightly too far with Atom bombs and shit like that.
So, when we erradicated the need for enlightenment in our narrative and replaced it with the commonly held belief of a single God across the spiritual spectrum, and one who humanity actually murdered…, plus denied the influence of femininity and the long held narrative of both feminine and masculine presence, “we” created a society which is patriarchal, colonialist and over all, extremelly aggressive and less than compassionate about each other’s issues. Enlightenement is not more than the resting in love, in compassion, in understanding. The more you love, the more enlightened you are. The narrative of “knowledge is power” gives nothing to the actual meaning of what is power anyway. Enlightenment is not about power, and maybe that’s the issue, enlightenment is about happiness.
The fallacy of a supreme humanity, or It’s All Nietzsche’s Fault.
So the idea of a superhuman humanity has been present for who knows how long, as we started to erradicate disease, have control over nature in Agriculture, technology and entire populations which were not the same as “ours” — sorry, I have a really hard time putting myself in those shoes — and conquering land in this piece of floating rock in space that we call a home, there was this very simple pychological phenomenon: arrogance. “We’ve” become arrogant about our place in the world. Truth is, the more I study ecology the more I understand that it is not humanity who is trying to kill itself or the planet, is the planet who is trying to balance the harm done, and when that happens, certain things like tornadoes, tsunamis and climate change happens. I saw an interesting discussion online in which a Brazillian woman was fighting very nationalistic portuguese men in what was the colonialist narrative of portuguese people regarding indigenous populations and Brazil’s presence in the World. She was so angry that she started saying God was angry at Colonialist Europe and North America and that was noteceable to the rest of the world, they mocked her, but I put likes on her comments, mostly because I was like “PREACH SISTER!”. The idea that God is behind the colonialist massacres, is the oppressors narrative, which in turn turns us against the idea of God, which not more than reality itself, playing the game of the oppressor. It’s as simple as that. How can we hate something that supposedly created something as beautiful as life? Do we truly believe Trump when he comes up with a Bible in his hands while he is pepper spraying protesters? Do we truly believe something as good as nature would really side with Trump, who wants to murder her? That’s the oppressor’s narrative again.
So, the idea of a supreme humanity and why it’s all Nietszche’s fault is due to the simple idea that humanity can and will somehow transcend reality. That’s what Freud called the Death Drive. Transcending reality is dying, people (another lol would be fine here, but this is serious writing).
The cult of the Goddess is not a cult of white blonde female humans who call themselve goddesses for instagram followers.
The cult of the Goddess has been throughout humanity, the cult of femininity in nature, not the cult of humanity’s femininity alone. All feminine aspects, from lionesses to butterflies to the idea of a mother of all beings. It’s not about twerking, or yoga, or crystals up your vagina (I recently discovered this trend and will mention it more often, because lol). The cult of the Goddess is not about sacredness, or about how women have a special spiritual place in the world. The Goddess probably dislikes you using her names to sell yourself on social media, it’s not really what’s it about. The colonialist view of usurping the reverence of the Goddess has come in the form of a deep misunderstanding about what the goddess implies: love for nature, love for creation, understanding humans owned insignificance in the grand cosmos of things, reverence for mother. You can hike and buy cacki pants and take walks in nature, or put crystals up your vagina, but if at the end of the day you don’t respect ALL aspects of natural reality and you use energies for your own benefit, then there is no point in having a statue of Kwan Yin or Mother Mary in your living room, you do not understand Spiritual Respect. You follow colonialist ideas of a feminine form of reality which is to be used, abused and discarded when it’s no longer useful. And there is really no point in calling yourself a Goddess, you’re simply… not. It’s a common patriarchal myth of denial of importance in the grand cosmos of things. When (what’s his name? The reptillians guy?… David Icke!) David Icke said on national TV he was Jesus, what happened? Why on Earth (be mindful of this sentence), why on Earth would any human being call itself the Goddess, the mother of all things? The creator of the Universe? That’s disrespectful not only to the actual mother of all things, but to women themselves. The flipside is to realize that one is so insignificant that that can even cause mass suicides. That my conspiracy theory of the day: feminine collective insanity. There are more women suffering from mental health issues then men, as a statistical analysis point.
Anyway, I can mock the crystals up the vaginas thing, but in the end of the day I’m playing the oppressors game if I do that. I ask the question again: Who gains from this narrative? It’s not men, they need mothers too, it’s not women, not the Gods… who? Not even the elites in power, they are men and women too, very very human (sorry to disappoint).
There’s also the whole Empowerment Myth. It rests on the notion that women have no power to begin with, and then sells women a product on how to gain power through very weird practices (crystals and vaginas).
So, what is the issue in this whole thing anyway? Isn’t it a matter of perspective? Why should we understand all this?
It doesn’t really matter what you believe, in the end of the day, reality does not change according to your specific beliefs. The imposed narrative in your culture, however, shapes your reality, because you will act a certain way, reacting and responding to specific cues. The thing is, if it serves a higher agenda, who do you think that agenda benefits? The ignorant.
Go right to the source: is it trying to sell you something? To make you propagate information, which could be true or not, you don’t know? Is it creating followers on Instagram and feeding someone’s cult of personality? Is it about power or compassion? Does it make you behave like a better person, who respects others and is genuinely caring? Do you believe that’s a way to endoctrination, helping you be a better person? Do you have a thirst to have power over others? Male and female alike? Do you respond to orders of someone who tells you to act a certain way? Is it inculcated in you since your childhood? It’s just a way in which to prove your own worth?
There can be many reasons why there is an adherence en mass to Weird Spirituality, but at the end of the day, is not more than conditioning of a very oppressive and aggressive culture.
Like I said, I was born in a place where this does not make sense. And that place is deemed by Western society not only as an oppressor, as an enemy: China. Well, chinese people and culture have no fault to the fact that they’ve had a very turbulent political situation on their hands, and that they live in a totalitarian regime at the moment. The 5 thousand year old culture is much more than a simple government. The ignorance of passer-by tourist that absorbes 0.000001% of the culture and thinks of themselves as experts, it’s another one of this colonialist mindset western societies love so much. The issue is: they have their own spiritual problems, but do we have to have an opinion on it? We really don’t…
Attempts to colonize the Earth have been sort of successful, in a way, but Agostinho da Silva, a portuguese philosopher and philanthrope, said about 40 years ago that this society is in it’s death bed, simply because it does not respect reality, nature or life itself. Everything is a comodity, everyone is passible to be used and abused. Original populations, or what are now called indigenous, have been saying for a long time that western society is sick. You think this sickness will create a good outcome if it’s not healed?
It has to start with every single one of us. The decolonization of the mind has to go through growth pains to reach a level of understanding that the best place to be is in line with compassion for nature, life, people, animals and everything alive. Otherwise it’s simply suicidal. Trump wanted to nuke a hurricane, that speaks volumes about our current state of mind regarding nature. Trump is not, however, representative of humanity. But he does represent the ignorance and insanity that plagues western society, like a very real cartoon.
Conclusion.
This is not a game to be won. There are no real players here. The thirst for power is merely an illusion to have you believe there is a sort of transcendence which in the end is to simply transcend either life (meaning, dying…), or your own patterns of self-destruction, in order to live in communion with natural values and respect for life, love and good things in life. Those in the elites? They haven’t figured this out yet, they’re playing their own game of self destruction.
The point of living? To be happy, to live. That does not mean being a millionaire, though it can actually mean that depending on where you’re at in life, or the highest spiritually manipulated person, but being a good person and working for the common good.
Note:
I don’t really subscribe to any religion, despite a genuine affection for Buddhism due to my original culture. So this is not an apology for you to become religious at all. To get out of the dualistic notion of religion or no religion, one can simply accept to be respectful.
