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But Caitlin, me just wanna feel good.

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Reminds me of Carl Jung : “One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.”

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"mindfulness has become a banal form of capitalist spirituality that mindlessly avoids social and political transformation, reinforcing the neoliberal status quo."

It would be more accurate to say that mindfulness, like anything else, can be used for escapism and avoidance. But I've been practicing it for 35 years and it's been the single most empowering tool I've found for taking back one's power, getting in touch with the truth, promoting awareness both within and without, tapping into our pain, its sources, and our deep desire to effect radical change. As you wrote in a brilliant piece recently, awareness of truth is the most powerful avenue for change. And that's exactly what mindfulness promotes -- awareness of truth that then forms the foundation for passionate personal and social action.

Mindfulness is also radical in that it enables one to take back individual power. I'm a psychotherapist who encourages her clients to look critically at the outer world and its disempowering false beliefs and ways of keeping us away from the truth. Mindfulness restores the self to its rightful place as the only trustworthy authority. One looks within for answers, discovers, nurtures and relies upon ones own values, beliefs and truth-based reality. For me personally, mindfulness put me in touch with my deep connection to all of life and my profound need to become my own authority, trust my own perceptions and become an agent of change.

From that place the most powerful social action then naturally arises.

Finally, the mindfulness emphasis on awareness without judgment puts an end to the endless self-criticism that keep us small, self-critical and dependent on external validations.

There's simply no basis for attacking mindfulness itself and risk turning people off to the practice itself. Better to address the element of human nature that looks for a quick fix. Better to describe how powerfully mindfulness can be used to support one's deepest truth and values, to take back one's authority and capacity for activism and to nurture oneself through the inevitable challenges and burnout problem we all face.

Mindfulness can be used to empower and nurture activists -- that would make an excellent essay that would give people something positive to work with. I've never met an activist or anyone concerned about social justice that doesn't need better self-care skills. Why cast the most powerful self-care tool around as something negative?

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Thanks for these essays. Today's critique of "mindfulness" and its vulnerability to pseudo-spiritual, easy, feel-good uses that enable moral escapism and avoidance is very timely. I differ with the perception of the Christian virtues invoked by the writer, especially of "meekness." A strict adherence to meekness, or practicing a patient and humble acceptance of blows, was shown to be remarkably powerful in the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s. Suddenly meekness revealed its own toughness, integrity, and humanitarian greatness in 1961: the world watched the Freedom Riders meekly accept abuse and violence in their nonviolent protest to desegregate the nation's buses. The practice of meekness proved over and over again in the Civil Rights Movement to be the only effective way too disarm injustice that is prosecuted with violence.

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The most important thing in life is to follow our paths, and if we all do this then Nature will sort everything out. Truth and Law.

Is the purpose of the false spirituality appropriated by business following the path? Definitely not, but maybe some people will start following.

Are 99% of the people in the wider spiritual community following the path? I don’t know, it is not for me to judge but it is for them to be true to themselves. Observably in parts of our society it is encouraged for people to delude themselves that they are following the path when this is not the case.

But do we measure the path by how much our actions impact on social wellness and political struggle? The implication of this article is that our impact on how defiled the world is is the benchmark of path even though this is not explicitly stated, but we have to work on our own defilement as well.

Other than my own path, the mechanisms of path are not open to me to understand. If a person is in their room experiencing bliss and down the road a person is being robbed; this is not for me to assess. If politically the defiled world is a 1%-satrapy and I am encouraging meditation, is that the path or not? Being true is of course integral to the path. It is easy to let anger rise when our compassion sees the pain and suffering in the world. It is easy to become angry through our compassion when observing individuals claiming they are following the path but apparently not contributing to social well-being. But at what point on their paths are they?

People need to follow their paths at their own pace. Requirements of the path are 100% dedication and 100% engagement, but how many of us can reach that? Do we give up because we don’t reach this? Do we give up because currently our path is not carrying a placard or denouncing Bezos?

If you feel you are on your path but you don’t match up to criteria such as 100% dedication, 100% engagement and some compassionate activism, please don’t give up. In this last sentence it is not the criteria but your feeling that matters, if you are genuinely trying to follow your path that is what counts. If we follow our paths then activism will arise at some point – when we choose, ultimately an objective of path is ending defilement personally and societally.

Yes false spirituality contributes to the 1%-satrapy, but where we are on the path varies. “Humanity will not survive if we don't all start getting very, very real with ourselves very, very soon, both inwardly and outwardly” is observably true but we respond by following our paths and not by being pressured into emotional actions. Be true to yourself, authenticity is what counts – not activist nectar points (too harsh?).

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Caitlin! I talked about this in one of my "insight posts" in my class. I am an undergraduate students and we were talking about liberalism and Immanuel Kant's ideology. Here is what I wrote -- would love to hear your feedback!

I found Kant’s argument about universal laws bringing more peace to be paradoxical. I believe that we are not our thoughts, but rather the space of awareness that comes before our thoughts, emotions, senses, etc. When we recognize that, we realize that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are very subjective. When consciousness arises, the ego is at low, and thus humanity rises. On the contrary, however, low consciousness equates to a higher ego, and therefore, a decrease in humanity. That being said, though Kant advocates for peace through a republic government, the fact that he is looking at the world through black and white inherently yields a “zero-sum” and “us vs. them” mentality, inevitably producing conflicts and justifying murder. So, although liberalism is different than realism in that it builds on the idea of progress rather than accepts the idea of human nature being flawed, it is still narrow-visioned and limited in its perception.

From here, one could argue that more cooperation between states, especially asymmetrical in power, through different institutions (largely international and regional) is flawed because it is based on what right and wrong means for the powerful state. Therefore, because powerful states have the say in most manners, globalization, rather than bringing societies together, deteriorates non-western nations' cultures, annihilates indigenous communities, and erases the middle class abroad and at home since it is intertwined with capitalism. 

I think one of the problems at hand with both liberalism and neoliberalism (especially regarding institutions and the idea of functionalism) is that it becomes difficult to stop states/institutions at the forefront of manufacturing and selling weapons (because they ‘excel at it’) from waging (new) wars for profit. So really, it seems as though institutions were built to carry the same prejudices realism was ok with, but in a ‘nicer and more progressive’ manner. Liberalism did not shift from militarism and materialism. Rather, it created sophisticated 'economic' channels to carry them out. 

In the end, bad seeds don’t bear fruit no matter how much you water them. And the Kantianism ideology is in itself flawed, so building on it is just as ridiculous. Circling back to the begging of my insight, because institutions carry violence in a “moderate and right” way (low consciousness, high ego), inhumane practices are justified and thus slowly accepted by societies at large (low humanity levels).

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Thank you so much for this, I really love it!

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While the absurdly brainwashing requirements of Catholicism polluted my mind the most, simply because they were inculcated to a very young and hence very impressionable brain, my most enduring recollection from my adult forays into new-agey stuff comes from A Course in Miracles, where the real miracle is self-examination without sugar-coating. It is simply this: "Hell is what the ego has made of the present." It seems pertinent to inquire what delusions arise as a result of either our neurological structures, our societal structures — or probably both, in concert — that leads us to construct hell on earth, rather than loving, nurturing communities that may have been present in pre-agricultural societies (probably echoes of Jiddhu Krishnamurti somewhere in that statement). That's the only type of spirituality in which I'm interested. Any type that refers to our inherently destructive, non-regenerative economic system is pure rubbish because it fails to look in the mirror.

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True evolution is the infusing of spirit and science, of doing REAL scientific work that scientists are doing. Dr. Masaru Emoto left behind ground-breaking work on the proven effect of consciousness on water molecules! Mainstream medicine is pseudo-science that ignores the obvious healing properties of nutrition and ozone therapy.

Tesla, who patented the first ozone generator, said “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

It could be that THIS is the real reason why they want to gene-edit the soul-belief out of us with their FunVax - they don't want it interfering with their vaccine passport agenda to inject the world multiple times a year with whatever they choose just so we can live our digitally manipulated lives. There are current court cases against the vaccine program based on religious beliefs.

Below is a video of Dr. Stanley Plotkin, considered a leading authority on vaccinology, who only received ONE vaccine in his life, explaining matter-of-factly that it's okay to inject the average US child with over 70 vaccines during his/her life, filled with aborted fetal tissue, among many other harmful adjuvants.

https://www.facebook.com/watty.watts.754/videos/2938473443079619

I was taught that Jonas Salk was a hero, but his book "Survival of the Wisest" is very disturbing. I encourage everyone to watch this full analysis of Jonas Salk's book from 1972:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C8haClASQI

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