Don’t Deepen Your Practice

(Some rough, opinionated notes.)

 

I’m realizing that reading the dynamics of high-demand yoga and meditation groups through a cult psychology lens is necessary work and personal to me. I get hate mail for it, but the grateful notes outnumber the missiles by about three to one.

However, using this language doesn’t answer a crucial set of questions:

Why do groups like Michael Roach’s Diamond Mountain, Rajneeshpuram, Rigpa, Shambhala, and Agama exist? Not: where do the ideas and personalities come from? Not: what unmet needs do they pretend to fill?

But: what are the basic political and economic conditions that allowed so many of these groups to mushroom in the post-war era, and so easily construct a pretence of value? What did the culture at large have to first commodify for these groups to then come along and upsell?

Political cults run on the premise of political action. Warlord cults run on the premise of revolutionary struggle. Psychotherapy cults like the Newman Tendency ran on the premise of transforming a therapeutic mode into a social justice tool. In each of these contexts, I sense a product.

But yoga and Dharma cults? What broadly-accepted social discourse and value allows them to be a thing, to project a plausible relationship to positive, pro-social human labour? What do they promise to make?

The tagline for Shambhala International is: “Making Enlightened Society Possible.” The vagueness seems a direct reflection of Chogyam Trungpa’s alcoholic dreams.

I am the son of lower-middle class union activist high school teachers. They were about two years too old to have run into weed or acid in college. I rebelled against their perceived squareness — also a respect for things — in part by thinking it was good idea to drop out and pursue the weed and acid of spiritual self-development full time. And later, to consider it a job.

But did I really feel it was a good idea? Or was the spiritual marketplace simply open to my privilege, and proximal to other closing doors? I can use psychological frames to look at this till the cows come home, and they’re informative, but the larger political economy that pushed my buttons and pulled my strings will remain illusive if I stay there.

The yoga and meditation cults I’ve been in and have studied emerged in tandem with how neoliberalism mobilized post-war wealth towards an internal turn. This internal turn spiritualized consumerism and conflated globalization with universal consciousness.

Michael Roach used to wax poetic about all of the money he made in the New York diamond business. (I never heard a word about blood diamonds.) He was convinced that his understanding of the diamond as symbolic of Middle Way emptiness theory was at the root of his financial success. He talked about how the money seemed to come out of nowhere. Wealth was an external projection of an internal state.

Unsurprisingly, Roach was also an early dotcom fan boy. He would say that it was through the mystical power of people’s ripening karma that the internet suddenly created a trillion-dollar economy out of nothing. Out of emptiness. Get it?

His barely-hidden subtext was that the Buddhism industry could emerge out of nothing as well. The evangelism would sweep painlessly around the world. But this is as untrue as claiming that smartphone factories don’t kill people.

Dharma courses, workshops, trainings, retreat centres all emerged as reinvestments of 1970s-onwards surplus value, the cream at the top of the globalization milk. They grew, like gentrification developments, as other supportive work was outsourced. Many of the first yoga urban studios in North America opened in spaces left vacant by urban manufacturing companies that outsourced their labour. So now we had folks wearing yoga pants imported from Bangladesh to stretch in rooms where the sewing machines, now in Bangladesh, used to hum.

Dharma leaders of the Nineties emerged parallel to the dotcom boom. Accelerating deindustrialization and technologization parented the gig economy, and us humanities folks began to find or create work in “wellness” by professionalizing their own internal journeys.

Those journeys gained social and capital value to the extent they appeared to “deepen”. Doing the next training seemed to give more license to make intrusive eye contact. But often ignored is the fact that the journey usually began from a basic state of privilege and okayness, which means it might have been running on a manufactured rather than existential anxiety.

Analyzing the cultic exhausts me. But its basic lessons in systemic thinking have given me the liberty to really consider the opiate manufactured by the yoga/meditation industries en masse.

When key aspects of the Shambhala project become indistinguishable from an intergenerational trauma pyramid, I’m no longer thinking in terms of:

If only those people had had access to ‘authentic’ teachings and ‘pure teachers’, their lives would have been better,

but:

What if neoliberalism hadn’t ordained yoga and Buddhism as its religious instruments, and made pseudo-professions out of teaching them? What if neoliberalism hadn’t conflated seeking with consuming, while ignoring the trauma in its wake? Why did seeking become a not only a thing, but a big thing, instead of staying put and repairing shit? How much deepening do we need when the surface of things is so broken?

I’m wondering now, at the starting line of what’s sure to be a long study: what would that slice of the Boomers who went to Pune or Mysore or Naropa or Oregon or Dharamsala have otherwise done?

How many of them relaxed their attachments and activism through meditation and self-work to eventually help degrade today’s resistance to fascism? I know a lot of people 10-30 years older than me who seem trapped in the radiant neuroticism of self-improvement. They continue with it to the extent they can monetize it. What else can they do? What other options do they have?

Make fun of hipsters and maker culture all you want, but if someone is out there learning to grow corn and knit sweaters, thank them.

I think of all those meditators and yoga people who went beyond the self-care of “This is something nice I do for 30 minutes every morning to help me self-regulate” to “I’m seeking enlightenment through 6 hours of practice a day”. What became of all that labour? I’ve spent over ten thousand hours in meditation, trance, and yoga. What if only 5% of that was materially useful — life-skills useful — and the rest was indoctrination?

When the dharma industry presents itself as more than offering help in self-regulation, how is it not parasitic? Shambhala International is quite obviously NOT “Making Enlightened Society Possible.” It is, however, Making a Pile of Money to Service Overextended Properties.

Nobody is born with the ideology that they must personally become enlightened, or that they should join a utopian movement, or that they should approach the problems of the world through obsessive self-work, while mostly ignoring the sleeping conditions of the migrant workers who harvest their vegan lunch. People have to be taught, implicitly, that their self work will raise the vibrations of migrant workers. It’s not their fault.

I was in two cults, but the cults existed within and because of neoliberal transnational flows. They lived and breathed on the cheapness of international air travel and easy credit cards. I believe this is the functional truth of Every. Single. Post-Sixties. Dharma. Cult.

It’s like the economy did this thing that freed only those people who benefited from not having to think about or account for how economies actually work.

Years ago I had an Iranian friend who expressed puzzlement at the ennui of her Canadian mates. Her family had escaped the revolution. Before the Shah was overthrown, she was out in the streets as a child handing out leaflets to help organize workers. In Toronto she hung out with artists and writers.

“You all blame yourselves,” she said, “for being marginally employed, poor and depressed. Why haven’t you read Marx?”

Stealth neoliberal ideology playing out in my own life has fostered a primary focus on psychological issues. I’ve spent an awful lot of time considering the trees of my childhood and my family constellation, to the neglect of the forest of my political reality and privilege. It’s not just Catholicism that gave me a guilt reflex driving me towards self-work, but an entire culture that told me I was solely responsible for my relationships and feelings. The whole culture taught me to centre myself, and while also investing me with the powers of gendered whiteness to make that centring almost impenetrable to other forms of analysis. I was stunted by that.

It’s so difficult for young people in this world to find meaning and structure. I didn’t just drop out of material reality because I met a partner and was recruited by a cult. I dropped out because I couldn’t see what value my labour would have in a world that was dematerializing before my eyes.

Increased digitization, AI, and automation will make all of this worse. This is why Jordan Peterson is both so attractive and so disastrously wrong. He thinks more self-focus is the answer. He thinks the social-material view is both irrelevant and poisonous. Of course all his followers will jump at the opportunity to have the narcissism their political culture has immersed them in from birth sanctified by a preacher who intones Jung. For someone so apparently square, he seems to have nothing to say about real things.

Do your practice, and a little bit is coming, maybe. Learn the basics, share them around. Ask for a reasonable amount of money when you do.

What’s really worth deepening in any substantial way isn’t your breath, flexibility, understanding of Sanskrit, or hours on the meditation cushion. What can deepen is a general awareness of modern global yoga’s unconscious spiritualization of neoliberalism. Then, we can desecrate that spiritual with all the things it wanted to tell us it could replace: accessibility training, trauma awareness, consent eduction, and anti-oppression work. How much deeper could you get?

 

 

18 Comments

  • Could you please define what you mean by neoliberalism early in the article? I keep running into this term in your articles and it’s as if you assume the reader will already have a mutual understanding of this term that is consistent with your own. It’s hard to know what you mean without your definition.

    • Mike,
      and Matthew yes that word neoliberalism is not used correctly here, Neoliberalism refers to free trade deregulation, it’s an economic term. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism I think you are referring to our consensual narcissism, moral relativism, or maybe you can coin “modern liberalism” but not neoliberalism.
      However we understand your many excellent points, thank you for your wisdom and eloquence during this hard time.

      • Thanks. Yes, it’s an economic term, but sociologist are increasingly using to describe psycho-social impacts. This is one of my favourite essays on its relation to yogaland.

  • In a previous comment, I asked if you ever turn your high-powered perception on yourself. You don’t stay with the personal for long here, but I’m willing to consider this great post as a good enough example of that. Close enough. Of course, you see things in a broader context as well, so I think it makes sense to restate your ideas in relation to a Judeo-Christian myth. All of us engaged in the “spiritual marketplace” have unknowingly signed a Faustian contract and our best move now is to consciously contest the Devil’s work for the time we have left (before he takes our soul).

    • If that is how you feel, why don’t you do something different? There are options out there. Many people have second and third careers. Why not do something that is life-giving? If Judeo-Christian myths speak to you, consider joining a church or talking to a priest.

      • Hi Bea–the answer to your question can be found in Matthew’s last paragraph. Having already supported his ideas with the facts, he tells us what isn’t worth deepening anymore, and then suggests how we can appropriately “desecrate that spiritual(ity) with all the things it wanted to tell us it could replace.” He lists those things. What I’ve been doing is “anti-oppression work.” To do otherwise–to do as you suggest–would be to go back and repeat what got us into the Faustian deal in the first place. And as Matthew explains, there’s no way to undo what we have allowed to be constructed, but we can adjust. While we have the chance, and with no thought that it will undo the pact that we signed we can do good work. It will be all the more powerful as it is expressed from within a Dark-Night-of-the-Soul-type hopelessly heartfelt awareness.

        • There are some interesting arguments in this article however some assumptions as to the outcomes of ‘spiritual discipline’ as something essentially for one’s own good alone as somehow disconnected from that of others. A rather particular stance seems prevelant that there should be a utilitarian outcome that serves society. I beg to differ. First of all if anyone is practicing in a context that supports transformation, that can only be a positive thing for society at large as people are affected by one another. Whilst I agree there is much psuedo spiritual idealism that goes no where nowdays, that is a product of the comodifying mind rather than the practices and strategies for growth as such.

  • A further analysis might also show a “double-bind” for some organizations. On one hand, modern (maybe neoliberal yes) disruption has uprooted westerners’ (the “students”) ties to community, tradition, economy, shared ethics, ect. On the other hand, highly specialized meditation teachers from other cultures (the teachers) have been unmoored in their own right by the end of the structure and discipline of the monasteries. Could be?

  • I always appreciate your insights, Matthew. Keep it up.

    The promise of enlightenment in one lifetime is RIgpa’s product. At least that’s what came over to me in their recruitment manual, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. That’s why I followed Sogyal for 2 decades. But after 40 years, did we see any Rigpa student reach enlightenment? No. We saw the longest-serving students involved in a highly damaging cover up of serious abuses by their revered teacher. The product is a farce and so is the cult that sells it.

    There’s nothing like an unachievable, perhaps imaginary, product to keep people paying their money in the hope that the next retreat, or the next one, or the next one, will be the one that will catapult them to some vague idea of eternal bliss. It’s spiritual materialism through and through. Chogyan Trungpa knew how to exploit that (all the while preaching against it), and unfortunately he provided a model for other Tibetan lamas to follow – the business of selling the promise of enlightenment for self and society, one with a philosophical justification for a boss’s unethical and abusive behaviour. Not enlightenment itself, just the promise of it, something nice and vague. And we fell for it. While being told to look into ourselves for the truth, we were manipulated to look out to the lama as the key to our spiritual progress. We became slaves in a business selling an illusion.

  • Thank you again. Your words are insightful during a time when a lot of people are reeling from the revelation that the paths they devoted years or even decades to are actually a sham designed to keep them trapped in a cycle of physical, economic, psychological and/or sexual exploitation. Waking up is harsh, but I think we can all help each other get through the other side. As a former Buddhist monk of 18 years, I’ve seen a lot of crap.

  • i feel from you Matthew a latent rage, and to be sure it’s warranted. I’m not sure your exemplary skills would not be better served with promoting positive message, rather than highlighting the negative aspects of spiritual life, such as denouncing false prophets and such. Mate, I’m Australian, and we have nothing on your American scandal of BS, often wholesale from afar. I truly, TRULY, wish, you would use your gifts to not ignore, but debase these issues by not giving them credence. Not because they of non-import, but because you, and your voice, are bigger than THIS. I’ve been following you for some time, and I’ve experienced much of what you’ve spoken of, but please, PLEASE, let. it. go. The more attention we give, the more it grows. Let’s grow not in hyper-criticality (as much as I appreciate your lucid criticisms), but in opportunity. Use your gifts for good in this space, PLEASE. peace.

    • Thanks. I do a lot of different things with my writing. Like this. “This space,” is my own. I wonder if you’d be better served elsewhere? Maybe a place where people appreciate those who ignore content to offer unsolicited therapy?

  • Deepening . . . its a word of selling profundity where there may be none. We can see the profound in anything but we are possibly just in a high, altered mental state … do we have long lasting different views based on realization. Deepening is saying – this practice, that isn’t getting you anywhere – it is your fault. Do it for weeks, months, years and even if it doesn’t work be like the Hindus or Muslims Sogyal would say … who never blame their god even if they get damaged by their practice and die with no prayers answered. That is completely one sided faith based. Deepening implies there is something more and you are enriched by going down a philosophical study rabbit hole.

    Really, in a cult situation, where you exchange your value for their secret knowledge it is a way of marketing that you buy the same products that have no more, nothing new, no special perspectives again and again. Listen to the same mind numbing tapes, CDs, Mp3s – watch the videos again and again to be “inspired” until one day you are just desperate for real meaning, real meditation and real retreat.

    Post cult I want the benefits of meditation but I had to stop a long time to get this embedded cult figure out of the flashbacks that were a part of most meditation sessions. So the only deepening i’ve had to do is deepening my comprehension of narcissists, cult mind control techniques and others strategies. The psychology of abuse and using it to bond people into service. Some of M. Remski work is deepening contemplation … variations, value. Thanks

  • Excellent and timely analysis of the various yoga and dharma cults, and their leaders’ pathologies, within the context of neoliberalism. I refer to these Asian and western therapeutic cults as forms of “emotional capitalism.” You are correct in locating their physical locations within the abandoned spaces of de-industrialized areas. Their adherents felt abandoned themselves, by their class, their churches, and in many cases, their families. They found a place for themselves in these new yoga and dharma worlds, and abided by their leaders’ directives, albeit ones based upon authoritarian principles. In effect, they traded their modern western class-based norms for these exotic neo-feudal ones. It is not surprising that they ended up with servitude, serfdom, and eventual despair. together with the various physical and emotional abuses, and their traumatic impacts that came with these hierarchical arrangements, and their diminished status within them.

  • An Austrian born monk and Sanskrit scholar named Aghananeda Bharati wrote a book about meditation and non dual realization entitled Light at the Center, Context and Pretext of Modern Mysticism (1976 – Jossey Bass)

    Bharati lived in India for decades, lived as a sadhu in one of the old monastic orders. He observed
    how guru careers were made, how gurus behaved and were expected to behave. Bharati also experienced non dual realization and met others who had done so.

    What he discovered and stated was this: non dual realization does not make us better persons. He summed it up as saying that if a bloke is a stinker before he attains non dual realization, he will remain a stinker afterwards. Bharati wrote that he met a myriad of persons who had experienced this state and who retained the most retrograde social and political views.

    Bharati stated that from his standpoint, nondual realization was best understood as an aesthetic pleasure, and one practices to attain it much as a musician practices to become proficient. But he stated, “You to do learn to better love your neighbor by learning to play the cello. If you want to become a kinder person, you need to engage in moral and character training of quite a different sort.”

    Bharati also wrote that most of the literature on mysticism has confused the issue by equating nondual realization with moral virtue. It does not happen that way at all.

    Light at the Center is a difficult read – Bharati was crabby, and a snob. English was not his first language. But he was an enemy of charlatanry, sought to demystify a difficult subject, and he ,was genuinely concerned about people’s welfare.

    Again, Bharatis most important statement was that meditation, yoga and non dual realization do not improve a person;s character or make that person better aware of social justice issues. Bharati also warned that when original sources are consulted, Hindu and Buddhist practice are not about making the world a better place and are not about improving living conditions. He stated that the goal was to escape the cycle of birth and death, period.

    Concern for justice in this life comes from the Abrahamic religions, not from the Asian religions.

    We would not have had the American Revolution had it not been for persons who were discontented and did not second guess themselves. If the Founders had had meditation and yoga practices, we might be a British commonwealth country.

  • Commonly people quote the Dalai Lama’s advice to scrutinize a teacher for ten years before deciding to study the teacher.

    What is ignored is that one must, during those ten years, spend all that time in social settings created by that same teacher. Through social influence, you will lose your capacity for critical thinking. If you are intelligent, you will even persuade yourself you’re lucid and unaffected by the devotionalism, while your emotions have become co-opted and your mind subtly biased. Its like being drunk and willing oneself to believe one is sober.

    No, that advice to scrutinize a guru or teacher for ten years before deciding to get involved is at best naive advice, and worse, it is disingenuous. No one can stay ten years in a sangha focused on a teacher and remain unbiased. You’ll make friends during that time, spend money.

    And — what if this is a teacher who is clever at hiding misdeeds and has a team of enablers just as resourceful in hiding miseeds?

    I’ve looked at the Vajrayana industry and see it as creating serfs who can operate laptops.

    You’re indoctrinated to be the lama’s pet dog — a dog on an extensible leash. A dog that thinks itself a citizen, can earn income, recruit others into the lama’s sect.

    ” In effect, they traded their modern western class-based norms for these exotic neo-feudal ones. It is not surprising that they ended up with servitude, serfdom, and eventual despair.” Carol Maida

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