New Age Spirituality and Capitalism | Do We Have a True Self Deep in Our Mind?| Fantasy Novel?
Re-entering the rabbit hole...temporarily
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So…let’s enter the labyrinth.
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New Podcast Episode: Decoding New Age Spirituality | Hyper-Individuality, Colonialization, Commodification, Inflated Selves, and...Starseeds?
New Age Spirituality and Capitalism
Let’s examine the rise of New Age Spirituality and its integration with the wellness community. And put focus on our obsession with self-actualization, our truth, and hyper-individuality.
So, to get some initial thoughts out here are a couple of quotes from Zizek…
“The reason for this shift of accent from religious institution to the intimacy of spiritual experience is that such a meditation is the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism.”
“Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of technological progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as an expression of the modern logical of domination — one should, instead, “let oneself go,” drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards the mad dance of this accelerated process.” — Slavoj Zizek
Zizek expresses this beautifully: Modern New Age Spirituality has placed themselves above organized religion, as though they have reached some pinnacle realization—or self-realization.
Many in these spiritual spaces, which have also bled into the wellness community, see organized religion as an organization or myth that utilizes exploitation and manipulation. And then their assumption becomes that this exploitation and manipulation is something they’ve moved beyond.
Thus, they’ve positioned these New Age practices as something that has moved beyond religious dogma — often hijacking quotes from Zen Buddhism to help exemplify this superiority.
So, how does the spiritual and wellness community become consumed by global capitalism?
For one, we often bring up our spiritual experiences in relation to the historically and commonly accepted form of spiritual experience: religion. Thus, when people begin having this perception of a higher connection, higher calling, or deeper truths away from a perceived organized religion — they individualize the experience.
So then their truth becomes the ultimate truth.
They free themselves of the symbolic order that is organized religion.
Yet, is this the only destructive and oppressive illusion?
In history, the source of our truth and meaning came from religion. Today, most see religion as their source of meaning, even if they may say otherwise. But many in the spiritual spaces take on those individualistic spiritual experiences and proclaim them to be their new source of truth and meaning.
They maintain their obsessions with the individual and their individual suffering, which then prevents them from looking towards a symbolic order that becomes the creation of collective suffering and oppression.
“The simplest definition of God and of religion lies in the idea that truth and meaning are one and the same thing. The death of God is the end of the idea that posits truth and meaning as the same thing.” — Jacques Lacan
As soon as we understand this definition, we can see how capitalism exploits these truths and meanings.
Capitalism is our global system that consumes our new ideas of truth.
But you see? Capitalism consumed the Western Christian's conception of truth, as it remains their unconscious drive while they continually reposition those drives back into their moving narrative for the religious doctrine they uphold.
Capitalism remains the symbolic order that runs the lives of Christians.
The same is true for New Age Spirituality, convincing themselves they’ve escaped the ‘Matrix’ while demanding high prices for their lackluster teachings. And those teachings? They often are stolen from Eastern traditions and then packaged into a commodified product so that others can find their true self and achieve self-actualization.
Thus, the colonization continues.
And the symbolic order that formulates our truth looks for us to maintain our identity with the individual self, our individual suffering, and self-actualization. Why? So we avoid our gaze from collective suffering. We then place blame on the individual for not overcoming their own suffering, for not finding some higher calling, and for not escaping ‘the Matrix.’
We victim blame.
So, then the oppressive symbolic order can continue.
I’ll leave you with this thought…
We assume that we can break through our illusions…
From this, we assume a more true reality exists beyond them.
But could this be a distraction? A destructive assumption?
We assume that we can break through our illusions, yet we fail to wonder, why do illusions arise within our reality? And then what do those illusions do to our perception of truth and meaning?
Do We Have a True Self Deep in Our Mind?
Examining the psyche and psychoanalysis with Freud, Deleuze, and Henry Miller…
“The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.” — Sigmund Freud
“Sh*t on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater!” — Gilles Deleuze
The Myth of the Rabbit Hole (An expansion to last weeks Red Book Chapter)
Should I stop seeking some foundation?
Is the foundation of the psyche always crumbling and building a new?
When exploring the depths of your psyche, as you dig deeper and deeper, a realization occurred: your psyche will continually create a perception of depth within the mind, it’s as though the psyche creates an illusionary treadmill, yet we often remain unaware of the existence of that treadmill. Instead, we perceive the existence of the depth of the rabbit hole, as though we will find some endpoint with an ultimate realization to end all realizations.
This desire for an ultimate realization is our mind being pulled into that desire for an absolute foundation.
This makes me wonder, is our desire for an ultimate truth simply a distraction from our own death drive?
And there is a meandering of this strand, an oblique connection to the living organism of the labyrinth. It goes from being a symbol of death and rebirth to being a symbol for psychoanalysis itself.
This becomes an endless exploration of our own grand illusion, our own sense of a symbolic order, so our ego becomes lost in this maze, where our desire for some ultimate truth becomes something that is ever elusive, thus we become lost within the labyrinth in our search for that truth.
This labyrinth is not only simply the mind, our own psyche, but it is something that has manifested itself in our culture. We are confronted with this image of the maze every day.
We are told to buy objects for some higher self-actualization; we are told to optimize our body and mind otherwise we will remain flawed beings; we are told to fall in line with social norms around marriage, wealth, and family…as though the mundane many find themselves in is an inevitable reality.
We are told, that if we do all of this, we will find the end of our own labyrinth. Meaning? Life will fall into place…and make sense. Yet, we wish to avoid the harsh reality that one labyrinth maze falls into another.
Our pursuit of individuation becomes a personal singularity for the self. What comes out? A new self with a new drive for individuation.
The maze becomes an allegory for psychoanalysis because psychoanalysis is simply an exploration of one’s own mind.
The labyrinth becomes an allegory for the psyche itself because the mind creates its own labyrinth, it is an endless exploration that has no end in sight (other than death), and thus there is always more to explore, but where does this all lead?
Is psychoanalysis leading to some ultimate realization about the mind itself? Or is it simply a way to gain some sense of control over one’s own interpretation of our own reality, as though we are all lost within the maze of our own minds and yet we cannot seem to find a way out.
“Lie down, then, on the soft couch which the analyst provides, and try to think of something different. The analyst has endless time and patience; every minute you detain him means money in his pocket… Whether you whine, howl, beg, weep, cajole, pray or curse — he listens. He is just a big ear minus a sympathetic nervous system. He is impervious to everything but truth. If you think he can help you, and not yourself, then stick to him until you rot.” Henry Miller, Sexus
Although this post has a skeptical tent towards psychoanalysis, I truly see the benefit in the practice. I’m just examining my own hesitations with the psychology behind the practice, so I hope this leaves you with something to contemplate.
I’m working on a fantasy novel…
I’m actually using the story I’m making for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign I’m DMing as my core inspiration.
So, I thought I’d provide my Substack paid subscribers with some beginning ideas and dialogue I’m throwing around! Let me know what you think:)
Here’s the World Setting I’m playing with at the moment…