You don't want to be getting too attached to the mainstream secular spiritual stuff that exists, or anything for that matter. Unless it's counter cultural and basically makes the masses shudder and call you crazy (because it really opens their eyes and scares the sh*t out of them) then it's not going to hit the core issues and for that you need more than an audiobook you can download from Amazon. Mindfulness is great but it's utilization in real world problems are useless. It only highlights a very small percentage of the flaws people tend to have in modern society without actually having the balls to point out the problems causing them or even the flaws in those who preach the goodness, and that's because mindfulness as a secular teaching is now a product that generates billions in revenue every year and is protected within the shield of the same toxic system that creates all the problems in the first place. The purpose of mindfulness in the West is largely to make money and then sell people ideas from the East that have been butchered to suit the superficial and empty self-destructive lives of the masses. It's also a pretty toxic self absorbed demographic that aligns their identity with this area of interest, particularly the middle class and beyond whose worldview is based solely on privelege and of having rather than on having very little to anything at all to begin with. You'll get plenty of privleged rich kids teaching you how to meditate and what it all means but none of them are real. They've not been the depths of their own problems and understood their own privilege and how it clouds their ability to actually see the world beyond their own priveleged lens. Most of them wouldn't last a few months in a Thai monestary, or even on their own in the wilderness if they couldn't have their smartphones and whiny self absorbed preppy kid friends with them talking about fancy exotic teas and sitting in the window at Starbucks looking like a world getter.TheHandbag wrote: ↑Sat Apr 03, 2021 8:07 pm I have found great consolation in listening to Eckhart Tolle. It keeps me in the now a bit more securely than any of the psychological abusers running the govt would like me to be.
There’s a great podcast with him and Russell Brand out there. (I know he’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but this has been a year for re-examining everything). Just Google it. I think it’s on YouTube too.
The nature of Western society and culture is to steal ideas others have, rebrand it and then sell it for yourself for a huge profit. We also take these ideas and philosophies and then throw all our own projections into it while pretending it's still the same thing. All these projections are the projections of our own pathology and of our cultures sickness yet we stamp 'Mindfulness' on the cover and all of a sudden we are saving the world (for our own gain, of course!)
Eckhart Tolle is pretty good and manages to keep lots of personal tendencies and predispositions to identify with the same traps that many other so-called spiritual teachers fall into essentially selling themselves as new and realized beings while not understanding that by doing that they are masking over their narcissistic pathology and all their problems and playing the guru role. You should never trust any one self professed guru or teacher. They all their own agendas. Take the messages they teach and then challenge them and pick them apart and see how they apply to their life. Don't just assume they become part of your identity without doing the work to understand the complexity of what exists beyond the words.
To really get the message being taught in mindfulness and other states of awareness similiar to meditation and spiritual awakening you have to take action in your own life which is contradictory to what the Western model proposes. Just sit still and breath, it says. Just use these trendy apps and listen to these attractive looking audiobooks with unusually well presented people who tend to always be smiling and giving off the typical life coach/wellbeing salesman pitch. While the lifestyle choices you have continue to cause you the problems you'll then later try to meditate away. All the while attempting to amass brownie points and tell you're friends how enlightened you are because you've listened to an audiobook and you've got a meditation app.
Unless it cuts to the core of the problems and unless it creates a monumental shift in consciousness that sets you about understanding why you're in this predicament that makes you want to try and find peace and how you are to blame, it will be superficial. Especially in today's climate people need a serious wake up call in order for them to see how they contribute to their own suffering and consequently how they allow society and culture to make them suffer as well. If anything, detachment from both society and culture is needed in some massive shift in consciousness so to realize most of what you're actually looking for is behind all the bullsh*t and the complexity of who you are as a person. Hours of therapy cannot guarantee you that let alone hours of an audiobook. People go through a lifetime of therapy and not resolve issues. People meditate their entire life and just amass the role of meditator but nothing else. People read books on spirituality but do not connect with the ideas they simply regurgitate them in order to look good and get approval from others.
Western secular spirituality is a business at the end of the day. And it's not a business that will give you the answers to lifes problems. For that you have to do your own work and it involves more than audiobooks. You really need to be launched out of your body and to go out of your mind in order to see what the ego often deliberately through it's own mechanism as a form of survival prevents you from seeing. That's where the treasure is. Not many are doing that or even have the courage to do it because it involves radical changes in your life, perception, lifestyle choices, relationships, goals etc.
