Spiritual Consumerism
by Edward Morgan
When we become more aware of how poverty consciousness is being engineered into the materialistic minds that power up and feed into the machine of the global consumerism economy, we can see one of the main goals is to keep individuals feeling a constant pressure and concern over gaining material possessions and assessing their access to resources that equate into personal status, security or power.
This same social conditioning is aimed directly at the so-called spiritual ascension communities or those that are heavily marketing themselves on social media towards the consciousness industry, to manipulate the lower instinctual drives and get people to buy or endorse many forms of spiritual consumerism and label it as “being conscious”.
By specifically targeting and spreading poverty consciousness fears designed to generate insecurity, doubt and desperation in the masses, they fuel the deification of materialistic values throughout the world, and this runs an infection throughout many spiritually based modalities. Consumerism has become the main world religion, which capitalizes on the insecurity and survival fears in people in order to continually sell and market assembly lines of products, and it is wise to remember that spiritual products are also used in the same way.
On the spiritual path, if we are being honest with ourselves, it is important to observe and avoid the exact same marketing schemes used to make ascension, or reaching higher consciousness, a consumer item that can be easily purchased. Marketing campaigns are being used with all the consumer key notes to attract a massive spiritual following, and are being introduced and peddled to the public through social media, and YouTube.
People that generally are not equipped with strong discernment have the tendency to give away their personal power to an outside influence, such as a fake spiritual leader type, group consciousness or a spiritual consumerism movement marketing themselves as a spiritual authority. Too many people are believing that spirituality, expanding consciousness, and becoming enlightened can be achieved through the pathway of consumer spirituality and self-proclaimed experts that call themselves masters. They believe they can buy enlightenment, have a glamourous so-called spiritual life hanging out on the galactic planes, rather than commit to the deeper inner work of genuine yoga practice, together with observing the unruly ego in action, and correcting abusive patterns of behavior.
Materialistic values powering up consumer cultures glorify and breed narcissistic personalities that have little to no empathy for other people. People that are materialistic and externally motivated tend to equate their value, worth and esteem on their accumulated wealth, status and possessions. Yet, the same pitfall is common under the label of fake spirituality or falsely pursuing higher consciousness, a breed of spiritual consumerism that is marketed as enlightenment to gain a marketed level of faux spiritual status. A belief that enlightenment can be achieved through instant gratification and by skimming on the surface of life, while ignoring the deeper inner emotional work that leads to personal accountability and greater integrity.
People that are materialistic tend to have highly ambitious, competitive, arrogant, and aggressive behaviors and are deeply concerned with issues of personal adequacy and exerting their power in the world. These unethical qualities can show up quite aggressively in that which can be labeled as a so-called spiritual community, or in the industry that has sprouted up around topics promoting fake higher consciousness development. Thus, when such a so-called spiritual community or organization operates with this blaring blind spot, they also will compromise ethical and humane behavior in order to accumulate the resources and possessions they want, in order to gain more power for their cause.
Maybe they justify that power grab as required for serving the greater good, they feel they have a greater mission that is more important than others around them. Maybe they have deemed themselves as the leader of a mass movement for needed consciousness shifting, and like many others that have gone before them, are leaving the same trail of emotional damage and destruction in their wake.
However, a true spiritual leader is a servant of the people, and holding compassion and empathy for others is the primary milestone of being dedicated to the spiritual ascension path. Otherwise, it can quickly digress into a consciousness trap with astral delusions of grandeur that cause a root downfall from repeated power abuses. How many times have we seen the same storyline, different era, different people working in the so-called spiritual communities, yet the same abusive narrative is repeated over and over, and goes unnoticed and unrecognized?
Over many years, the group dynamics and world of forces present in many spiritual groups are not recognizing power abuses when they are occurring, which are caused from the same unchecked destructive egoic behaviors. These are the important lessons from the past that remain unlearned. What we do not learn, we keep repeating. If we study the fake gurus and the pretending spiritual communities in the recent years, we will begin to see a very disturbing pattern of gross abuses of power. Where an absolute power was given and fully corrupted, this set the group mission up to fail. The group field of the community begins to drown in the same massive archetypal dark forces that prefer to use betrayal and victim-victimizer manipulation tactics to continue the divide and conquer agenda within that group.
That is the big set up on the Earth, a person that highly desires external validation of self-worth and special-ness, will have to play the mind games to get what the ego and instinctual drive wants. This means they must make the deal or Faustian pact to give up personal sovereignty and many times prostitute themselves, because of who is really behind the power abuses and controlling the spiritual structure.
The first thing these dark forces do is find that spiritually ambitious person’s pressure point and work to compromise personal integrity and derail spiritual actualization, in order to exploit addictions and weaknesses through psychological and emotional blackmail. An emotionally unstable person is a weak-minded person that is easily possessed, therefore is easily manipulated by their uncontrollable impulses until they become so fully corrupt, their physical body is used to satisfy the whims of dark forces that are controlling their instinctual impulses.
Instinctual impulses are not enlightened behaviors, they are the marker of a spiritually undeveloped person. Thus, spiritual consumerism can be highly addictive to the instinctual body, as it is marketed as entertainment and an astral bliss pill. This is the main reason why so many people fall prey to their instinctual reactions and personal indulgences transferred over to spiritual consumerism, which leads to a rapid spiritual decline, which exacerbates even more unethical behaviors and power abuses.
For many, spirituality is viewed like a consumer option, like an extension or app with a free activation and trial period. Maybe this week we’ll try the mindfulness app, or the hot yoga app. Something that we can add to our operating system which offers to bring transformation, to help lift our base instincts, make us feel more fit, more kind or more peaceful. This usually comes with subconscious limitations, placing an internal stop on real transformation, that would make us uncomfortable or disrupt the way that we see ourselves or relate to the world around us.
This description of spiritual consumerism may seem callus, but there is a very surface feel-good quality associated with the marketing and monetizing of spirituality and self-help, that operates almost like a bait and switch. The bait and switch have dishonesty at its core, in the marketing used to fool our mind into thinking we are buying a product that will make us spiritually strong and more evolved than we actually are.
Attending week long retreats to look at our anger, our grief, or our thighs are treated as the false equivalent of an awakening or enduring a deep emotional healing process. Retreats that scratch the surface and allow us to feel something, allow us to check off a box that later gets turned into “I’m beyond all that inner misery because I’ve dealt with that already”. Thus, the setup is to ignore red flags and emotional weakness in everyday life, because the fear of actually facing deeper issues and having to make changes in one’s lifestyle is too overwhelming.
Spiritual development is about getting the ego out of the driver’s seat and being open and willing to feel the transformation that needs to actually take place while being honest with ourselves. If we are really being honest, we may know we need to transform, but we will be faced with a test of self-responsibility. In the consumer spiritual market, we can transfer that responsibility onto something else, and pretend that we are actually doing something spiritual because we paid for a product or listened to a fake guru type that promised awakening.
Yet there is an importance of value-based exchanges when we are in service in a spiritual community. It is necessary for us to spread that value and service to others, in order to keep circulating the money-energy to exchange with others that also contribute to the overall wellbeing of the community in their own ways. When we value human beings and what they contribute, the value is embedded in the work, service or product that is exchanged. The money received should represent the fair value exchange of that work. Money received represents the value of your work, time, energy, talents and contribution, when you spend that money you are letting go of the value created and honoring the value another person has created.
It is interesting to see people who would describe themselves as long term spiritual practitioners, get completely knocked off center by basic everyday challenges, or have a meltdown about political elections. These are some of the issues with consumer spirituality, where we invest time and money in a product, technique, tradition or artifice by making it a part of our routine and possibly our social fabric. Someone can have years of “practice” like this hanging out on the surface of spirituality, but then get knocked over like a house of cards by relatively small events of adversity. People can flip in-between these states of lower ego and momentarily higher frequency. How long they hold sustained higher frequency states is the hallmark of spiritual maturity and mastery over the personal energies.
When people lose their center, freak out or lash out, you are looking at an ego tantrum, and when they do it is the sign of inner violence, fragmentation and the need for integrative spiritual healing. Inner violence generated by the ego and mind control programming that remains unhealed will result in control-oriented tantrums. This is an important piece to remember as to why truly spiritual beings never deviate their focus to engage in combative strategies that are violent, and choose to stay peaceful and holding a pure loving heart within even the most difficult interactions.
Spiritual transformation takes authentic human character development and deciding what kind of person you really want to be. When we are honest and responsible about our personal commitment to improve ourselves, it is this commitment to do what is necessary, that takes us beyond our comfort zones and actually makes us stronger and more balanced people.
This is the time to take an active role in healing ourselves, healing our lives in so to become healthy and balanced people. When we can identify emotionally destructive behavior, and are willing to take steps to heal our thoughts and emotions, we empower ourselves in taking steps that lead us to spiritual freedom. May love, peace and spiritual strength bless us.
yogaesoteric
June 21, 2019