Monday, August 12, 2013

The Art of New Age Myths

After the secularization of modern societies, Westerners increasingly lost confidence in their traditional religious institutions, but they still wanted answers to their existential questions. They became seekers and sought answers in both ancient and Eastern traditions, deemed heretical or blasphemous by the Church, and in modern science. So began the New Age movement over the last couple of centuries, in which modernists combined mystical or esoteric teachings with contemporary scientific formulations so that they could be unashamed of their spirituality.

You can find numerous New Age gurus on YouTube. For example, with their mellifluous delivery, the young and beautiful MaNithya Sudevi (20,000 subscribers) and Teal Scott, called the Spiritual Catalyst (45,000 subscribers), teach all manner of radical contentions. Sudevi says she’s a starseed, an alien being in a human body sent to Earth to enlighten us about the nature of reality. She speaks of the power of crop circles, of the harm that fluoride does to the third eye, and so forth. Scott applies the New Age cosmology to practical questions of whether we should worry, whether happiness is selfish, or how to manifest money.

The New Thought Fiction

Here’s the basic New Age cosmology, as far as I can tell. God or Source energy is the fundamental reality. God created a world in she could lose herself in projections, in beings who are misled into believing that they’re merely material, alienated individuals. Matter isn’t a domain of impersonal spatial and temporal dimensions but is a machine that serves God’s purpose of teaching her projections about their true, divine identity. That is, God wants to know herself, but to do this, she has to fragment and delude herself to test whether she can regain her self-awareness. One such delusion amounts to philosophical naturalism, the worldview in which mindless matter is fundamental, we’re merely individual animals that evolved accidentally, and there is no God or perfect self that unites all things and guarantees a happy outcome for us.

The truth, according to New Thought proponents, is that material things are projections of our thoughts, so that we create our reality by means of the law of vibrations or attraction. Depending on our vibratory frequency, we attract certain experiences that match us and repel those that don’t. We can co-create experiences if we have similar vibrations, but each person as a projection of Source energy literally lives in his or her own world. As Teal Scott says, physical reality is a mirror hologram that reflects our thoughts. Instead of a multiverse based on quantum fluctuations, we have an ideational multiverse based on the frequencies that distinguish us as unenlightened individuals, or individuals who don’t yet fully identify with God. For example, as Scott says in the last cited video, when a murder happens, both the murderer and the murdered person create the act in that they’re vibratory matches to it. Or to take another example, when we worry, we ironically bring about the dreaded event, because we focus our mind on it and thus attract that which matches our vibration.

This worldview is an eclectic mix of mystical ideas from Hinduism and of scientific concepts, like the concepts of a natural law and of a quantum mechanical vibration. Curiously, gurus like these two women display absolute confidence that their worldview is correct and they seem to pity naturalists and traditional theists for not waking up to the truth. A new atheist would respond by going line by line through their metaphysical doctrines and showing that they’re illogical and contradicted by science. But this would be a mug’s game. New Age is a religious movement and New Thought is a collection of myths, not arguments or scientific theories. To the extent that speakers like Teal Scott maintain that their worldview is factual, empirical, and logical, they too are mistaken and are bound to be disappointed. As a challenger to naturalism on philosophical or scientific grounds, New Thought is glaringly inadequate. For starters, New Thought is unfalsifiable; New Age gurus have an answer for everything because they’re free to reinterpret their teachings at will or to add or subtract from them, and their terminology is metaphorical rather than quantified. For example, Sudevi was influenced by a Hindu sect which critics called a cult, but then she came under the influence of a Catholic priest and so she added some Christian theology about Christ consciousness to her New Age synthesis. Is Christianity consistent with Hinduism? Of course--when you’re free to ignore parts of the religions. And were Teal Scott to take her talk of vibrations to an actual quantum physicist, the physicist would toast her over an open fire, as it were; the pwnage would be epic. But were the physicist to think that refuting New Thought on those grounds is scientifically useful, she would have badly missed the point.

New Thought is clearly a work of art, a collage of ideas. That’s why the teachings of these gurus are untestable; the seekers are in the business of imagining self-contained, fictional worlds, like the world of Harry Potter. Proving scientifically that Harry Potter doesn’t exist is as asinine as searching for Noah’s Ark. The story of Harry Potter isn’t meant to tell us the facts; the story operates as a metaphor about growing up with your friends in school. Other sorts of art, like paintings, movies, sculptures, and performance pieces are meant to challenge your perspective, to engage with your emotions, and to guide you as you make your life choices. The question, then, isn’t whether the Law of Attraction is true as a matter of fact, but whether the law works as a metaphor or as a test of our character. New Thought proponents likely don’t regard their spiritual beliefs as mere metaphors and fictions, but those beliefs nevertheless don't rest on rational arguments or on scientific theories, and they function as guides for some creative liberals. The point of the Law of Attraction is that you should be optimistic, not pessimistic. When the so-called law is interpreted instead as a statement of fact, New Thought becomes pseudoscientific and a fair target for rational obliteration.

The Arbitrariness of New Age Optimism

So how does New Thought fare on aesthetic grounds? I think New Thought is superior to postmodern Christianity in terms of the former’s greater originality (its synthesis of ancient and modern ideas), but while the hideousness of exoteric Christianity is unrivalled, due to the historic depths of Christian hypocrisy, New Thought practitioners too are liable to use their worldview as a front for capitalistic concerns. Take, for example, Teal Scott’s talk on why we shouldn’t worry. She rightly points out that worry has a clear naturalistic role, which is that worry is a painful warning that’s supposed to prevent greater harm. We worry about an possible unpleasant turn of events and the worry motivates us to take steps to avoid it. But if we’re really all God rather than separate beings, and nature is an illusion that exists only as a field of holographic manifestations of our thoughts, worry becomes a counterproductive absurdity. By worrying, we bring about the very harm we wish to avoid; we live in fear and attract the associated experiences.

Again, taking for granted that the world doesn’t literally correspond to this fiction, that there’s no rational basis for believing that mind has such power over matter, I’d go ahead and question the ethical implications of this fiction. Just as we understand our favourite novels by considering the background events that establish the characters’ motivations, to understand the function of the Law of Attraction we need to interpret this “law” in the context of the larger New Age mythos. So why should we think positively? Because we’re meant to be happy and not to suffer, and thinking positively attracts pleasurable experiences. Why ought we to be happy?  Perhaps the inner logic of the myth at this point rests on the Golden Rule: we should treat others as we treat ourselves, and the New Thought reason for such consistency is that we’re all one in Source energy. We’re all projections of God’s mind, just as the worlds of our experience are projections of our thoughts, given the self-contained New Age fiction. The more we identify ourselves with God, the more we’ll identify with other projections of God, and so the more we’ll empathize with their plight just as we feel strongly about our personal problems.

But optimism and the prescription of happiness don’t follow from the Golden Rule or from New Age mysticism, not even if we’re talking only about the narrative’s inner logic. Just because we shouldn’t make an exception of ourselves, given that we’re all one, doesn’t mean we should be kind to others. What if we happen to loathe ourselves? In that case, consistency demands that we treat others just as poorly. And why would we loathe ourselves, given that we’re mental projections of God’s mind? Well, why should God love herself? That’s the fundamental ethical question for the New Age seeker. The guru who’s lost in bliss is supposed to be expressing God’s self-love, because the guru identifies herself with God, and so the guru’s contentment is God’s. But why would Source energy be content rather than anxious, or benevolent rather than malevolent?

Buddhism to the Rescue?

Maybe the reasoning here is of the Buddhist variety: malevolence is a kind of suffering, suffering is caused by ignorance, and the guru who identifies with God is enlightened rather than ignorant; thus, the more we know of spiritual reality, which is to say the more we engage with the New Age fantasy and let it shape our character, the less we suffer. But this still leaves the question of why knowledge of everything’s unity should make us euphoric rather than, say, appalled or aghast. Suppose that just as you might entertain the fictional world of Game of Thrones or Adventure Time, you come to ponder the fantasy that God wanted to know herself indirectly by playfully fragmenting herself and testing the fragments’ ability to see past the natural illusion of their finitude. Why is such playfulness automatically worthy of respect or love? What sort of character is this Source energy? Is Creation just a game to pass her time? If she can grow bored, perhaps she can also be corrupted by her power. The problem is that the idea of God is of an absolute, transcendent singularity, whereas our emotions are responses to particular situations. There’s just as much reason for a guru to preach that spiritual knowledge should make us miserable and pessimistic, precisely because we would then have to identify with the mercurial and lonely deity who imagines herself surrounded by invisible friends, namely the mental projections that think of themselves as mortal individuals. We might as well pity this deity rather than bask in her majesty. And so worry isn’t ruled out by this mythos. The more we identify with God, the more we might dread that identity and thus the more we might come to express God’s self-loathing.

Buddhists are more logical when they prescribe mere detachment to those who see through the illusion of the independence of material things, because the oneness of everything couldn’t amount to an ordinary person who experiences emotions that make sense only as limited natural phenomena. But Buddhists too speak of the need for compassion and love. Should an enlightened Buddhist remove herself from society and seek nirvana, because all else is folly, or should she help others reach the same insights? Should she abandon the world or help improve its condition? Mysticism implies that we should free ourselves from ignorance and from maya, from the world of illusions, not that we should be selfless rather than selfish. Ignorant people might naturally be selfish since they’ll be led by their primitive impulses, and enlightened ones might naturally sacrifice themselves, since they’ll identify with a transcendent wholeness rather than with a particular physical body. But if only the interconnected whole can matter, because the parts of that whole are nothing in themselves, why should a Buddha figure sacrifice herself, say, to save a child? A Buddha would perceive the child not as a limited being, but as a part of the interconnected whole, but then we’re back to the question of why the knowledge of everything’s unity should inspire altruism and peacefulness rather than subversion and horror. The enlightened Buddhist won’t care about the results of her actions, but why would she act in one way rather than another, without any emotions to motivate her? This enlightened person might just as well let a boy drown to teach people the worthlessness and emptiness of natural life, since the boy would likely be thoroughly deluded about his identity.

The upshot is that the mystical aspect of the New Age mythos makes New Thought not nearly as salutary as gurus like Sudevi and Teal Scott would have you believe. Like shining, happy salesmen peddling a mass-produced bauble, these gurus pretend that the fictions they uphold can only improve your life, that the “knowledge” they offer will bring you peace and happiness, but as is the case with all salesmanship, their propaganda oversimplifies, because the happy-talk is a step in an underlying inhumane process—and that’s so regardless of whether you’re a naturalistic atheist or a New Age mystic. The naturalist understands capitalism and religious movements in terms of power games we instinctively play. Although New Thought doesn’t entail optimism or altruism, gurus spin their stories for mass consumption because they’re not withdrawn from the play of nature, after all, but have items to sell and they know there’s a much greater demand for happiness than for misery. After all, there’s a New Age industry out there, including markets for New Age books, lectures, massage therapy, health food, yoga classes, crystals and hippie garments, and so on. The New Age guru herself should be just as realistic about the underlying processes, regardless of how she’s forced to publicly interpret her mysticism, to preserve her dignity.

The Egoism of New Age Spirituality

Let’s turn, then, to Teal Scott’s talk on why happiness isn’t selfish. Those she calls bleeding-heart liberals sometimes criticize her New Age philosophy by saying she’s actually teaching people to be selfish, by counseling them to seek their inner spiritual fulfillment rather than sacrifice that project for the sake of actually helping other people. Scott replies that the naturalistic liberals who think the world is independent of us are the real egotists, because they’re caught up in the illusion of their separateness from other people. So the liberal who works for an NGO in Africa, building schools for starving children, is actually behaving selfishly, because she labours under the misapprehension that those children are independently real, whereas they’re really just that liberal’s mental projections. All the liberal can do is work on improving her inner space, rather than being misled by the illusion that there’s an outer one. So if she wants to end poverty, she should stop co-creating poverty by worrying so much; instead, she should change her thought vibrations so that poverty no longer shows up in the world of her mental projections—or something like that.

Unfortunately, this response is sophistical. Scott equivocates when she speaks of egoism. The liberal’s objection is that Scott’s teachings imply that we should act to benefit mainly ourselves, so that our benefit becomes the object of our actions. But Scott’s reply moves the goalposts, so that egoism becomes the belief that our actions are caused by separate selves. The bleeding-heart liberal is supposed to be selfish even though she intends the beneficiaries of her actions to be starving children, because the liberal also assumes her actions are caused by her ego. So egoism becomes the belief that egos exist rather than the belief that each ego should act to benefit herself rather than some other ego. This is an equivocation. Moreover, if egoism has to do just with the assumed isolation of each self, the New Age guru is surely the biggest egotist of them all, because she’s a solipsist! She thinks there’s only one true self, God, who is perfectly alone. So how could God fail to be selfish in both senses? She must be the cause of her actions or her mental projections, since there is nothing else, and for the same reason she must ultimately think of herself as the sole beneficiary.

Scott’s myth implies that the idea of altruistic action is incoherent. Imagine you were the proverbial brain in a vat, like in the Matrix movies. Should you then help other people? Well, you couldn’t because they too would be brains in vats and you’d be dealing just with your mental projections of them. All you should do is to learn to treat the people in your world as mere mental projections, until you wake up to reality and leave behind the illusory world inhabited by them. So would there be any harm in slaughtering people that you think of as mere mental projections? The Matrix movies deal with this ethical question by positing a naturalistic reality underlying the matrix, and by assuming that if you kill someone’s mental projection you kill the brain in the vat.

But New Thought has no such restriction. Instead, the guru says that murder is wrong because it’s bad for the co-creators of that event in their respective holographic worlds. By killing a person who is only one of your mental projections (you being a projection, in turn, of the higher self who is God), you’re only hindering your spiritual evolution by attracting negative experiences that prevent you from reaching deeper spiritual insights. And the same is true if you create your own murder in your world. That’s a necessarily egoistic condemnation of murder, since in the New Age mythos, there’s no material connection between people and everyone is locked in his or her private fantasy world. So just as you can’t physically help anyone, neither can you physically harm anyone. All you can do is elevate or degrade yourself, spiritually speaking. The idea of murder, then, assumes naturalism or at least some nonsolipsistic metaphysics, but mysticism is ultimately solipsistic. Therefore, mystical morality is egoistic. If there are no separate selves, there’s just God playing with her virtual realities.

The Aesthetic Inferiority of New Thought

This is why New Thought aligns with consumerism: both encourage selfish behaviour, albeit for very different reasons. Capitalism assumes social Darwinism and thus philosophical naturalism. Animals struggle for power because they’re machines programmed by genes that mindlessly seek their perpetuation by using those machines as vehicles. The power struggle ends in dominance hierarchies which distribute the power of those vehicles according to their social standing. So more powerful people exploit weaker folks, resorting to all manner of mischief, including the lies that fill the public spaces dominated by advertisements. We should be hedonistic to support the economy, seeking our personal pleasures, because there’s no afterlife and we’re caught in a competition in which we can either win or lose in evolutionary terms, all else being frivolous delusion. From the naturalistic perspective, New Thought is a bizarre ideology propped up for economic, materialistic reasons. In any case, New Age spiritualism is consistent with consumerism on the point of egoism. Either way, we should concentrate on our welfare and should even look down on others as animalistic competitors or as second-degree mental projections. Also in either case, the egotist must wear a mask in public, pretending that she’s motivated by some high-minded ideal. Thus, the libertarian will act as though she worships individual freedom (even though she presupposes that we’re slaves to our evolutionary programming or else she appeals to math as a substitute theology, as in neoliberalism), while the spiritual seeker will seem to be preoccupied with esoteric, transcendent matters. The noble lies are needed to protect the underlying process: for the naturalist, this is evolution or some other cosmic regularity, while for the spiritualist this is the play of Source energy.

Aesthetically and ethically speaking, then, New Thought doesn’t inspire me. As works of science fiction, the myths have some merit because of their coolness factor. The core ideas are just the ancient Eastern ones, but New Age seekers give them quasi-scientific formulations to make them palatable to a postmodern Western audience. But just because the appeal is to those cynical, nihilistic postmodernists, the old ideas must be distorted and the result is a lower class of art. Is there an alternative? Remember that the New Age movement began as an attempt to naturalize ancient spiritual teachings. Whereas fundamentalists react to the rise of science by preferring the most irrational and literalistic readings of their scriptures, New Age spiritualists wanted to work with science to reconstruct the old teachings using the new vocabulary. These spiritualists should be applauded for their creativity and for the disdain they have for exoteric theism, but they lack existential authenticity; they take on board only some scientific vocabulary rather than the substance of philosophical naturalism. Thus, they deceive themselves with their pseudoscience and lose themselves in their fictions.

We do indeed have spiritual questions and we express our answers in some religion or other, including the atheistic religions of consumerism, scientism, and transhumanism. But I think modern science obligates us to establish our existential authenticity as the starting point of our spiritual journey. Science is only the messenger, however; personal authenticity means that we’re condemned to suffer, to some extent, rather than lose ourselves in blissful ignorance of natural reality. The harsh facts of life force on us a mournful sort of spirituality. We should begin with atheistic existentialism, which assumes philosophical naturalism both as a rational obligation and as a worst-case scenario to test our mettle, and then we should create art that makes natural life more bearable, telling stories that inspire us to act heroically in the real world.

19 comments:

  1. I enjoyed this, Benjamin. There has always been something creepy and indeed, narcissistic, about the New Age. Which I think you nail here.

    ReplyDelete
  2. How do you feel about groups such as the OTO, or the various Setian movements? Imo, they are just variants on the New Age religions, though they protest otherwise.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I take it you're speaking of Ordo Templi Orientis and the Temple of Set, which are Aleister Crowley-influenced organizations. I don't have special knowledge of them, but I have written something on Satanism. These are left-hand path esoteric religions, which means they prescribe the breaking of taboos, the subversion of social conventions. The similarities between these groups and the New Age movement would be the doctrines of perennial philosophy which go back to Hinduism and to the mystical, psychedelic traditions in all the major religions.

      Here's my article on Satanism:

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/02/is-devil-hero.html

      Delete
  3. I have been reading some pulp hard-boiled fiction with Lucifer as one of the main secondary characters. Richard Kadrey and his Sandman Slim novels. Don't know if you ever read pulp fiction, Benjamin, but amusing stuff!

    Anyway, I was actually at the author's reading yesterday, and we all lined up to get our books signed, and the woman in front of me asked him if he "believed in demons". He demurred, but she responded by offering, if he ever needs it, to do an exorcism.

    (I promise...no more frivolous asides on your blog!)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't mind frivolous asides on this blog. In fact, I'd like to try some more comedic writings here to keep it up-beat. As early as my first stab at laying out the whole of this philosophical/religious perspective I'm working on, "Inkling of an Unembarrassing Postmodern Religion," I spoke of the need for comedy.

      Anyway, no I haven't read that author's work. I've been working on putting my first novel up on Amazon by the end of September. I don't want to spoil anything, but something like the devil may make an appearance in that book...

      Delete
  4. An interesting question: Regardless of what you think is true, what would you ultimately LIKE the world to be like? What would be your "best-case-scenario" for reality, even if you don't think it seriously plausible?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's certainly a helluva question. What's my personal heaven? One of the problems is that the worth of things might be tied to their finitude, so that there's goodness only if there's the tragedy of death and suffering. This would have the makings for a theodicy except that it implies that heaven--in which we're immortal--is equivalent to hell, as I say in "The Meaning of Death."

      I suppose there are three main options for ontology. What's fundamental is either (1) mind, (2) matter (undead objects/mechanisms/processes that somehow physically come into being out of the "nothingness" of chaotic quantum fluctuations), or (3) something else that transcends those categories. I think (1) and (2) both leave lots of room for suffering and tragedy, while (3) requires a sort of humility and faith that the world's stranger than we can conceive. I tend to think (3) is most likely, although (2) amounts to (3) for the masses that have only exoteric understanding, at any rate.

      But which scenario is preferable? (2) is probably best, because it makes for the most absurdity, for the most conflict between minds and an uncaring universe, and that suffering can be sublimated to produce the greatest art. If we value creativity above all, we need a world that maximizes melancholy and other kinds of art-friendly suffering. We might, then, be living in the best of all possible worlds, after all!

      Delete
  5. An interesting perspective. Makes me think of Poussin's Et In Arcadia Ego. And so then, the kindest God is the dead one, no?

    I don't "disagree," but I think the existence of objective value complicates any vision of the world as being purely "chaotic." In all chaos, order lurks, longing to assert itself. I think the world is the best possible story, infinite order emerging freely from the least possible amount of order, though never total chaos as there is no entropy without it's opposite. No zero without a one.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I argue for objective aesthetic values in some places on this blog, but in (2) I was thinking of straightforward nihilistic natualism, or of nature as it's disenchanted by accursed reason. Creativity and art come about, then, by way of existential rebellion and re-enchantment (after our ancient, more infantile theistic enchantments).

      I'm not sure the physics theory of how information relates to noise, and so on, counts as a narrative in the aesthetic sense, if only because the theory would be true whereas all stories that evaluate things are fictions (works of art made of ideas). Are you taking the postmodern line that science is just another form of myth-making?

      Delete
    2. Kinda. Though I wouldn't want to be saddled with post-modernity's various anti-realist philosophic language games.

      I guess what I want to say is that all models of the world are correct to some degree and are always, necessarily incomplete. Some are just less entropic than others. A conscious state is a discrete articulation decoding some (THE) infinite signal. But, just as we shall never know all the digits to pi, one can nevertheless get better and better at approximating it.

      In one approximation the metaphors of myth and archetype explain the signal, at another the quantification language of science...the nature of the understanding is ordered temporally. What comes next, no one knows. (Though it's fun to speculate.)

      Science as we know it has reached a kind of mythic terminus because the myth was based on a separation between the world and the self. This was why Descartes was the founder of modernity. No one ever "really" believed in the Cartesian form of dualism but all of scientific understanding and modern existence nonetheless relies on it. Now science is looking at the thing itself, the mind, and a new paradigm is going to emerge. Consciousness science will be the grand convergence of the 21st century, where theoretical physics, computer science/information theory, and biology/neuroscience become one subject. And of course, with the mind follows all of culture and experience. Science had been a myth in the past because it denied the mind (and the will). Incorporating it into the model is gonna blow the whole thing wide open. It already is if you read the really edgy neuroscience stuff.

      Delete
    3. Fascinating stuff! I think I see where BBT fits into your view.

      I read some of the overview of that Multisenserealism blog. I like its contention that aesthetics is objective, since I've been thinking of how to make that work. It looks like MSR is panpsychist, which is similar to my interpretation of natural ontology as including, in effect, the undeadness of matter.

      But MSR is anti-cosmicist or life-centered, with its view that to be is to be understandable/interpretable by some life form. That's not quite dark enough for me. I like the idea of godlike entities that maybe understand much more than we do, just as we know much more than ants. But the idea that what exists is limited by mental capacities leaves no room for absolute horror or strangeness. It makes living things too comfortable and at home in the universe, and so it means there's no absolute existential predicament (dread of alienation, of being estranged from the world). According to more optimism MSR, there's at least the potential for omniscience, for an entity that lacks the capacity for surprise. Mind you, I think such a god would go mad, which is what actually happened according to Mainlander's creation myth, which I've written about on this blog.

      Anyway, very interesting stuff! I'll keep reading.

      Delete
    4. Perhaps spatio-temporal reality is a way of preventing the madness/burden of total omniscience, in which the sheer act of understanding would negate itself in an apotheosis of sensation? The will is reality's way of controlling what NOT to understand, ultimately for aesthetic reasons. Something like that.

      I'll keep reading you now too. Great blog.

      Delete
  6. BTW, here's one for your blog-roll. This is the best contemporary metaphysics I know: Multisenserealism.com

    ReplyDelete
  7. My problem with Teal Scott is this. She is only 29 and s on her third husband, two months after dating a supposed psychopath. She moving to another country with him! She said she was going to try to be alone, the decided it was too uncomfortable or "out of source alignment" for people to be by themselves. Aka, her. I can understand if she's running for her life (and she claims she's been getting a host of death threats) but less on the philosophical side, more on the realistic one, all of her teachings on. You Tube seem to be great, except they preach a lot about not living in fear. So when someone is dying, just think happy thoughts and they'll be okay, right? One video she says you know what's best for you, not the universe, the other says the opposite. So she comes up with a video to counteract her contradictions. That's great and all....but what about the people who'd been applying the previous techniques for so many months? For some people with little common sense her teachings can be dangerous, even those who DO have common sense. I found many of her techniques to be excellent...but people are saying she borrowed most of the from Abraham Hicks and Byron Katie. Lately, though, since the divorce of her ex-husband, Mark, you can see she has started to come unhinged. (when people told her to take some time to work on herself (and mind you, a lot of her followers have had abusive pasts, she said she felt like punching THEM in the lower lip) wow, what a way to thank the people who care about you. She didn't even have the guts to tell everyone she was getting married. Just a....SURPRISE on her blog. I guess she couldn't take the criticism, as she said how badly it hurt that people didn't trust her choices after dating a psychopath. Well, I can have sympathy for her hurt and all of that, but to take it out on your "fans." Wow. Thats pretty messed up, because a lot of them have trauma. My point is this. She has openly admitted to having DID. That's multiple personalities, and after her trauma one could fully understand.
    But having interacted with those with DID before, I think she's acting textbook suspicious. She mentions in an interview the first thing out of her mouth, "Well I'm getting out of here because I'm worried about the value of the American dollar not being worth anything, the state of our country!" Wow, nice starting point to anger people who live in America still and can't exactly relocate! Great job Teal! Very contradictory to her statements about keeping enough people high vibe and the "collective unconscious" can change. (A group of people sharing the same reality, like when experiencing a war)
    Also her blog shows not that she's "being transparent," but that she's protecting those with this sort of information who could possibly ruin her career by saying stuff beforehand. Not that that's a problem, but what is a problem is that her blog is usually so chaotic, so depressing--and then one day it's the best day in the world--I think it is very counterintuitive to her teachings, because how can you keep your vibration up when thinking about that stuff? It tends to linger, for more than a few days. She doesn't seem to be like 'The Spiritual Catalyst.' at all. Teal would tell one thing, the spiritual CATALYST will tell you another. It hurts my brain. It's confusion in its worst form.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Teal thinks its funny (after thirteen years of being in a Satanic cult, dragged into it when she was five) to announce on one of her question/answer workshops (Dec. 21st) that she used to be a High Wiccan Priestess after getting out of the cult. In her own words, "That's what I was doing when I was on the Snow Team!) wow. I can once again understand, maybe, wanting to intimidate your haters, or people sending death threats, but can't she see she's putting her audience off as well?
    I looked past that, as well as countless other things. But really...reading her blog on her wedding day she is mentioning because there's thirteen of something (bridesmaids maybe), she feels her and her bridesmaids are all a part of a witches coven..... I am sorry but this is NOT what I'd want MY wife to be thinking about on our wedding day. She has a very young audience and I think it's dangerous to promote young girls getting married without knowing said/person. (Teal married to first or second husband, three weeks after meeting him) this third one, like....two or three months at most? Yes, kids, get married and go run off with complete strangers! I'm sorry this is just too much. I have had psychic insights & awakenings, and something sits very wrong with me about Teal and the way she is presenting her teachings. Lose the blog. No more interviews until she can act like a luminary, not a giddy school girl.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for your comments, Anon. It sounds like you used to be a fan of Teal Scott's. You certainly seem to know her work well. A couple of things strike me about her. First, I think a spiritual person who happens to be physically attractive should be appalled by that bad luck, because he or she will have all sorts of opportunities to act in a most unspiritual way. Such a person will have so many more temptations and then they'll have to rationalize their behaviour and ruin their philosophy/religion with contradictions. Add to this a traumatic past and whatever the person has to do to come out of that with some dignity, and again you're going to have more rationalizations and contradictions.

      Second, it takes some serious audacity to give people personal advice on the internet when you don't know anything about them. I mean, on my blog I talk about general philosophical and religious matters, but I never tell anyone in particular that they should do X rather than Y, because that would be personal therapy, and it would be absurd to give someone such advice without sufficient training and without knowing the person's background or circumstances.

      So again, I'd say Teal Scott's physical attractiveness may haunt her in this regard too, because it can make someone arrogant. She thinks she knows enough not just about life in general but about God and the nature of existence to start up a cult and to hand out all this personal advice. That takes a lot of nerve and a lack of conscience. (On my blog I also talk about God and the cosmos, but I claim only to be engaging in metaphysical speculation, which I construe as literally the creating of art made of ideas.)

      I suspect that spiritually enlightened people are much more likely to be physically unattractive than beautiful or handsome. Meanwhile, YouTube gurus tend to be attractive, because that medium is utterly superficial and most of the viewers are shallow and have short attention spans, so they just ignore the uglier teachers.

      Delete
    2. Good point about the You Tube gurus tending to be more attractive. What kind of gain do they suspect their looks to bring them? Especially when they advertise they are using their sexuality to do so! Again, I was not appalled. Yes, you are right. A spiritual person should be appalled by that amount of bad luck. I give everyone the benefit of the doubt but, as I said I too have had awakenings and spiritual happenings quite often. Her teachings seemed to cloud my own personal connection with God. The DID (or multiple personality) discovery did it for me along with other things. She says they are all integrated into one by years of therapy but somehow I suspect this not to be the case. I applaud anyone coming this far from abuse, but my bad feeling is speaking to me for a reason. After many years on the spiritual path I tend to be right a hell of a lot more often than I am wrong. Just thought I'd include this in case anyone else may get sucked into all of that. Just a warning.
      But well said. I have been enjoying your blog.

      Delete
    3. Thanks! Of course, physically attractive people gain a lot. In the first place, they gain people's attention, which is especially helpful in a big competition like the one playing out on YouTube. That attention allows them to make an easier living. We all prefer to look at beautiful people as opposed to homelier ones. It's just that in the particular field of spirituality, physical beauty seems to be more of a detriment, which is why in this case it's a sort of curse. I'm being a little facetious here, but someone who claims to be spiritually elevated should try to de-emphasize his or her physical attractiveness, at least, which is what the other guru I talk about, Sudevi, does.

      Delete