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Showing posts with label Spiritual Materialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spiritual Materialism. Show all posts

Wednesday, 23 February 2022

The New Age Movement is the ‘McSpirit’ of Spirituality

 [Wake Up World]:The new age movement is an eclectic combination of many different psychological, philosophical, and religious ideas from around the world. It emerged after the countercultural hippy movement of the 1960s and began to truly blossom by the 1980s.

Ethnobotanist and psychonaut, Terence McKenna, once defined the new age in this way:

The New Age is essentially humanistic psychology eighties style, with the addition of neo-shamanism, channeling, crystal and herbal healing, and this sort of thing.

The original driving force behind the new age movement was to liberate humanity from the dry, rigid, life-denying, and in many cases, dangerous ideas propagated by orthodox religion.

Such a noble and worthy ideal to leave corrupt religious ideology resulted in the impulse to combine, cross-reference, and merge multiple wisdom paths and teachings to achieve a kind of universal unity.

Unfortunately, however, this syncretism, this fusion of different ideas and practices from around the world led to a dilution of their power. As such, we now have terms like “new age fluff” which is self-explanatory, and also references to “new agers” which is a term that’s increasingly used in disparaging ways.

Note: not every “non-religious” form of spirituality is necessarily new age. In other words, those who identify as “spiritual but not religious” are not always new age (although sometimes they can be).

Without getting wordy and long-winded here, let’s just get right into the cons and greatest disadvantages of the new age movement.

Hopefully, this exposé will save you years of struggle, confusion, and pain...<<<Read More>>>...

Friday, 7 February 2020

Warning Signs You’re Practicing Spiritual Materialism

[Wake Up World]: Originally coined by Buddhist meditation master Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche in his book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, spiritual materialism is what happens when we use spiritual concepts, practices, and tools to reinforce the false sense of self, the ego. As the ego is the source of all our suffering, bolstering the ego through spiritual practice is totally at odds with the whole point of the spiritual path.

As Trungpa writes,

"No matter what the practice or teaching, ego loves to wait in ambush to appropriate spirituality for its own survival and gain".

We need to be honest with ourselves and realize that we aren’t immune to spiritual materialism. As we all have an ego, its mission is to survive, no matter what it takes, because it is terrified of the prospect of non-existence. Yet being free of the ego is the very definition of enlightenment according to all major non-dualistic spiritual traditions...<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>...