I used to practice with Peter Elbow calls methodological believing. For those of you who don’t know his work, methodological believing is “the equally systematic, disciplined, and conscious attempt to believe everything no matter how unlikely or repellent it might seem – to find virtues are strengths we might otherwise miss.”
In some ‘spiritual’ circles, Anti-Black, Anti-Semitic, Anti-Catholic–pick a label–has morphed into a more vocal Othering and exclusionary exceptionalism that divides people into ‘awake’ and ‘asleep’, higher dimensional beings and lower, real spiritual and just religious.
I watch these attempts to maintain power and control, prioritizing one understanding of the universe over others’ lived experiences and knowings, vested in the same manner of human supremacy, desire and experience over over nature, one that believes that we can and should control it. The latter is formed and executed without large extraction equipment but with the judgment that, say, weather phenomena cannot happen without us; attempts to “love fire away”, because that fire could not do what it needs to do on it’s own, as if by assigning it human attributes we can placate it or strike a human-like with it. I have watched this same thing as individuals and groups attempt to push hurricanes away from them so they harm someone or something else. I wonder about the lapse in understanding when another wonders why rain showed up when it did, “Who called that in? Someone must have because I didn’t” as if rain, connected to weather systems moving elsewhere couldn’t just show up because that what rain and such do. Did someone call in a drought? That’s never a consideration in these conversations, ignored entirely because it does not fit the individual world-view. In fact, there is a disconnect from the world in that view.
This odd use of ‘the spiritual ‘, whether connected to ‘Saving Gaia’ or dividing other people into another version of ‘less than’ or ‘too ignorant to see what’s really going on’, is like watching an attempt at reviving some lost moral code, a firmament that only a certain group of people who believe or behave a certain way have access to. It is no different from any of the other Anti-anythings. “We’re coming into a time where humans will know freedom!” Freedom from what, from whom? Your ideas about how they should be more like you? Think, feel and experience the way you do?
Those people? As if they don’t love, fear, thrive, give of themselves, worship outside their own ego while voting a different way, do good for their families and communities? The them held beneath anything ‘higher’ except scorn and contempt?
You won’t say n***** (at least in front of people) but will call someone asleep with the same derision my grandfather did of a Black new announcer, “What could they possibly know?”
Those claiming to be ‘spiritual beings’, whatever that means, while using the insincerity of awakening or Oneness to denigrate layers of meaning, expression, and experiences that create a wholeness of people is not love or an expression of grace. It is opportunistic, lazy, and another tired expression of ego-feeding righteousness. It mimics every other tactic that has ever been used.
The continued attempts at consuming the idea of and convincing ourselves that our stature in the eyes of God is above others, be they of the natural world or the human variety are sustainable as long as we allow them. That ‘Spiritual’ language has become yet another industrialization and way to capitalize on our perceived exceptionality and has created a strange and dangerous tribalism, not much different than others out there, should not surprise me. That the coronavirus, while devastating communities and families, has spawned a renewed ‘righteousness’ with a particular spiritual bent toward ‘it’s not real, only an illusion to’ forward a mystery agenda, truly does.
When you can see your judgment of others is an announcement of your own fears and perceived inadequacies, then we can chat. Until then, don’t come to me or at me with the idea that my, or anyone else’s, decision to wear a mask, in a pandemic; using one of the few tools we have to be safe and, say, live are less ‘spiritual’, less ‘in the know’ about ‘what’s really going on‘, too ignorant to understand, just falling for the satanic agenda that has controlled the world for so long.
What has controlled the world for so long is greed and this kind of thinking and behaving. It’s why victims do not come forward, why children are afraid to speak their truth and feel safe, why nothing will make humanity ‘free’ without the hard work of making that happen. And it won’t happen in these false judgments.
There is no virtue or strength to be missed in it.
Please stop it. Just stop it.