True Spirituality Confronts The Abuses Of The Empire

Reading by Tim Foley:

A spirituality that is uninterested in ending war, genocide, poverty and injustice is a dead spirituality. If you hold your time on the meditation cushion as something separate from the weeping mother clutching a small body in Lebanon, you’re wasting your time.

Sometimes I get asked why I only occasionally write about “spiritual” matters like awakening, egoic delusion, inner work etc, but from my point of view everything I write is about that stuff. To oppose the injustices and abuses of our world is to directly interface with the mechanisms of humanity’s struggle to become a conscious species.

The overwhelming majority of what people call “spirituality” in our society is really just glorified escapism. It’s about avoiding reality by focusing on good vibes, nice feelings, and comforting stories about the nature of the cosmos. Some of the most unpleasant individuals I’ve ever encountered considered themselves deeply spiritual people, because for them spirituality is about creating a Spiritual Person identity to feel good about yourself rather than engaging in uncomfortable confrontations with the repressed materials within you that are the source of your personal dysfunction.

And this happens to align nicely with the whole of mainstream culture under the western empire; our entire civilization is built upon psychological compartmentalization and avoidance of uncomfortable truths. If we paid too much attention to all the war, imperialist extraction, exploitation, injustice and abuse that western society is built upon, we’d never consent to the political status quo which holds those abominations in place.

Authentic spirituality moves in the exact opposite direction to all this. While false spirituality is about turning away and avoiding, true spirituality is about turning towards and facing. Turning and facing all the uncomfortable realities about yourself, your internal dynamics, your trauma, your maladaptive coping mechanisms, your belief systems, your interpersonal relationships, your community, your society, your nation, and your world.

Authentic spirituality doesn’t separate inner work from outer work, because with enough investigation you discover that “inner” and “outer” are imaginary distinctions created in the mind. For every abuse or dysfunction I have seen “out there” in the macro world I have found a micro version playing out in my own subconscious. For every delusion-based mechanism I have found within myself, I have seen a reflection of that same mechanism in the large-scale strife of the human species.

So if you keep doing the work, at some point you lose the ability to see spiritual liberation as separate from writing an essay about Gaza. Your ability to hold subtle self-enquiry apart from anti-war activism evaporates into the ether. You just move to bring what’s endarkened into the light, however that happens to play out in a given moment.

You won’t often see this modeled for you in spiritual teachers — even the very skillful and enlightened ones. Their focus is on keeping their teachings open to everybody, so they’ll avoid saying things that might turn away someone with awful politics in the hope that that person can start doing the work and wake up eventually.

And hey, fair enough. Westerners with shitty power-serving worldviews are the people whose delusions the world most urgently needs rescuing from. Whatever gets them removing the scales from their eyes is probably a helpful thing.

But the rest of us shouldn’t look to those teachers as role models in this regard. Don’t mistake an enlightened teacher’s avoidance of politics as a signal that enlightenment looks like avoiding politics. Internal clarity is by its nature a radically political development, because it naturally leads to a deep compassion for all the anguish in our world, and we live in a world whose anguish is largely caused by politics.

True spirituality is the never-ending process of getting real about what’s real. Letting the light of truth pervade every aspect of the human adventure, from our unexamined habits of perception and cognition, to our understanding of global power dynamics. And letting our actions flow from there.

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Feature image by Alison Newman — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=186196663