Buying your way into the spiritual world
I have known and lived with many types of spiritual seekers. Some have been religious like the family of Mormons I lived the simple life with in rural Victoria, others have claimed to exist on a higher plane and prefaced each sentence with “This may be out of your comprehension but…”. I have even known those who claimed to reach into the soul of the universe through illicit drugs like LSD, but recently I had the pleasure of experiencing another type of spiritual quest. An eye-opening exposure to upper class spiritualism.
This type of higher search has become more prevalent in Australian society as those holding sufficient funds leave the trappings of day to day survival behind begin to quest for a connection with ‘energy’, ‘love’ and ‘vibrations’. Although I have known about this particular group of people for a long time, this was my first experience in close contact. It seems to be a path driven through mystic ornaments, hip buzzwords, and boxed DVD sets of rock star style gurus.
This is the realm where organics reign, not the type you grow in your garden but the type you buy pre-packaged from health food stores. Products priced well above the reach of mere humble seekers living only to serve a world without destruction. It’s a place where insights of age-old spiritual teachers are not learnt and pondered but parroted as reusable quotes - a weapon for intellectual supremacy. The words are heard, memorised and repeated, but rarely taken in and truly absorbed.
It’s my last point which I would like to address first. I grew up in the early 80′s, the era of cartoon character Homer Simpson’s catchy one liners. Children’s calls of ‘Doh’ would echo down the long corridors of my home town school. Before long the words would fall to the fate of over use and become just another part of the school yard language, they would lose their profound connection.
This group of fairly well to do spiritualists managed to bestow the same fate on once powerful and carefully delivered insights of wise individuals. These words repeated without any real concern for their deeper message fail to hold meaning and become just another set of syllables uttered to bestow the speaker temporary spiritual grandeur.
DOH!
Being a journalist quotes are my second nature, I’m always listening for that great one liner. So regurgitating passages from Spiritualism for Dummies wasn’t a problem, in this game I was an expert. It was in the highly competitive sport of Guru Dropping in which I floundered hopelessly.
Guru Dropping is a truly addictive game and the rules are simple. To play you only need to drop the name of your latest guru fad into any given conversation. If your chosen guru is obscure enough to promote enquiry, this is the jackpot – the winning hand. You can then give a long and detailed run down of their teachings peppered with regurgitated quotes, all delivered with confident affirmation and starry-eyed wonder. The apparent elevated stature gained from this second-hand spiritual insight is indeed the main reason to be part of upper class spiritualism at all.
Unfortunately, I failed dismally at Guru Dropping. With the Dalai Lama being a little too obvious I could only recall the name one man who suitability influenced me, Peter Cundall. Yes that’s right, Peter Cundall – the older English guy from Gardening Australia. I would argue he is a guru in his own right, but alas, in the spiritual name dropping stakes he falls well short of better known enlightened identities.
To truly win at this game one must have at least an intellectual knowledge of guru teachings. This is where the expansive nature of modern technology saves us. There is no longer any need to endure the hardship of visiting these gurus in ‘the wild’, they can join us via DVD or even in high definition Bluray. A mass media spiritual messenger, complete with traditional higher purpose garments and complemented with mystical special effects and angelic super white lighting. Their messages bellow from surround sound speakers and images appear almost life size on a wall sized flat screen television. I am in awe, I have ascended.
Using this high-tech conduit of mass media they teach to thousands. Their quotes are tailored with the help of a ‘Dialogue Coach’ – a role I discovered through the credits of the latest spiritual buzz movie, Thrive. I believe on the set of a modern soap opera the Dialogue Coach would be called a Script Writer, their job is to tell the people on camera what to say. Maybe these off camera quote creators are the real gurus, the truly enlightened.
There will, hopefully in the not too distant future, come a day where I can get status updates from my favourite guru via their Facebook page. I will be able to follow their enlightened twitter feeds, age-old teachings conveniently condensed into 140 character snippets. Lets face it, it takes all the hassle, stress and discomfort out of spiritual learning.
Satire and sarcasm aside, two hours watching a DVD on building higher plane connections within the human race could be better spent building real life connections with your grandma, children, partner of even a stranger. Time spent regurgitating names and wise words of spiritual gurus could be better spent living the messages they aimed to teach. An open heart is no good to anyone, including yourself, if it’s not used unselfishly to help others.
But with one liners like that maybe I could get a place as a Dialogue Coach on the next big spiritual teachings DVD and contribute to this new form of spiritual enlightenment. I bet it pays a lot more than the Tibetan Monk version.
-John Corlett
This is really a great article john, melt and I have just read it together and feel it addresses a lot of the artifice of our instant society thanks very much, gill