The Corruption is Collective: Why "Spiritual" Teachers Who Lack Integrity Get Popular.

Spoiler alert: soundbites aren't substance.

We want it quick, cheap, and sexy.

I think that sums our culture up in a sentence.

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Where is the tenderness, the humility? Where is the ownership of desire that does not become suppression, but instead becomes passion, protection, stewardship, and courage?

We want fast food, fast “fixes” for our health, injections for weight loss, fast fashion, fast ways to make money, fast ways to find sex, and fast “fixes” for our soul.

Super Soul Sunday sounds like a good idea for a spiritually starved culture, but is it? My answer is emphatically, no, largely because I have not trusted Oprah’s yo-yo dieting ass for as far as I could throw her for at least a decade, but probably longer. She never sat right with me. She’s “buddy buddy” with too much scum including John of God: predator, Deepak Chopra: creep, and her famously photographed relationship with Harvey Weinstein: rapist extraordinaire. There are others I am sure, but I do not follow her, so the household names are not familiar to me. And frankly, I do not care what they have to say.

I am likely to find more spiritual wisdom in my breakfast, my dog, or the babbling of my toddler granddaughter than what mainstream spirituality has to say.

How do we trust bought and paid for soundbites, and more importantly—why should we?

At this point a lot of the public has lost faith in the mainstream media. Many people are seeing the narratives handed down as the divisive drivel that it is. People are “waking up”. That same uncomfortable process is seeping into the spiritual community as well. Deepak Chopra being on the Epstein list was a moment of uncomfortable reckoning for many. Not me, I never could stand him. Something about the tone of his voice, something dissociative as in—out of integrity about his words—but also because I have a friend who witnessed him on a yacht in the middle of nowhere cavorting with prostitutes. His now infamous quote, “God is a construct, cute girls are real,” from the E-files seems to substantiate what my friend witnessed.

Spiritual corruption isn’ t new. It is as old as organized religion itself.

I’m not a Jesus fan, but I do like the story about him flipping the money changer’s tables. So, when people ask, “What would Jesus do?” I like to think he might whip a fool or break something. That being said, we can go back before to the Egyptian priest class and we can most certainly note how since at least then, but probably before, organized religion has been used as a tool to control the masses. The Latin “regulus” literally means “to bind”.

Monetary exchange for spiritual favor isn’t new. The concept of tithing doesn’t actually buy a person credit in the afterlife, just credit with the church, but that is how it is packaged. It is “moral” to give money to your “spiritual” organization. It is convenient for the church to collect dues to keep itself in business.

All of these processes could be called “spiritual materialism”, but even more so, spiritual transactionalism.

Money grubbing, usury, and wealth hoarding under the guise of self-righteous spiritual entitlement is as old as human history itself. Why do we expect different scruples and morals because it’s been rebranded as “New Age”? There is nothing new about swindling people and there is nothing new about many of the dissociative, gaslighting philosophies which favor pie in the sky promises over grounded, humble, embodied practice.

True spirituality takes us through pain—the pain of being cut off from the Gawd force, the pain of separation, the pain and fear of abandonment, and all the hurt that gets visited upon the human soul, psyche, and soma throughout our lives.

True spirituality also brings relief—the relief of facing ourselves.

Adepts have called the process of facing ourselves prayer, meditation, and communion among many other things. Buddha dharma calls it “mindfulness”, but these mind practices are not enough. The body needs to be brought along as well.

The body needs to be honored.

We in this world cannot “do spirituality” that is disembodied. To be in a body means hurting, yearning, feeling, not wanting to feel, feeling anyway, eating, shitting, and fucking. Life seasoned with vulgarity—that is what it is to be human..

The holy/vulgar or madonna/whore split is where too many of us get lost.

We see this split as a “black and white” either or. No nuance. No, yes—and. So, instead of living prayer, people pray in their closet and act like bigoted jerks all week except when they go to church; then they congratulate each other on being pious, which they are not. To say the split is lived isn’t accurate, either. The split is suppressed. From that suppression comes rape, molestation, and child pedophilia in nearly if not every organized religion in existence.

The entitlement is there, clearly, in these religious fellowships, but where is “the humanity”? Where is the tenderness, the humility? Where is the ownership of desire that does not become suppression, but instead becomes passion, protection, stewardship, and courage?

These qualities have been systematically destroyed and replaced in humanity and in men specifically. Men who ascend to positions of “spiritual” authority believe in their own specialness and so believe they are entitled to special treatment, special privileges, special rights over women and children’s bodies. They do not see themselves as stewards—they see themselves as dominators, as owners, and very often as “chosen”.

We, the collective, with our fragile egos and immature desire bodies evoke from the ethos the gurus we deserve.

These unethical chodes who we swear our allegiance to, buy their books, attend their seminars, and travel for their retreats are the collective consciousness’ own creation to continue to reflect its immaturity, abandonment of self-hood, and disowned sexual “shadow” in particular.

Why do the spiritually corrupt get so popular while people who offer material of substance work sit on dusty shelves and unwatched YouTube videos? Because program speaks to program.

These so-called “spiritual” figureheads are deeply programmed. What I mean by programmed is that they have the ability to speak the soundbite. They have the psychological makeup to amass followers, and they are “brandable”. But a brand is just a symbol, something that speaks directly to your subconscious, it doesn’t mean because it’s popular that it contains substance.

The rise of celebrity culture plays right into the culturizing of “spirituality”.

It used to be that to find a spiritual master you had to climb a mountain and sit in the ice, snow, and rain until they deigned to let you in, but now all you have to do is turn on Oprah. Yes, I will throw her under the bus until she is a predator-promoting pancake. But if not Oprah then a bookstore, podcast, YouTube, or whatever social media platform you prefer to peruse. And the majority of it is junk food for your soul.

The same tenet with “spiritual” material could be applied as food: If it comes quick, cheap, easy, and leaves you hungry, but maybe slightly ill after consuming it—it’s probably crap.

Which brings us back to fast food, fast sex, fast “fixes” and fast or mass produced “spirituality” which are all facsimiles of the real thing.

Real food takes time to grow, harvest, prepare, and cook and you can tell the nutritive difference in the process it has undergone when you eat it. Good sex, really good sex, is with someone you know, someone where there is shared care, trust, and safety. Fast health “fixes” always come with “side effects” so, enjoy your side of anal leakage with that injection.

And fast “spirituality” is a marketing scheme by a well-groomed charlatan. They know the words to whet your appetite, but carry no substance to fulfill your hunger because without integrity, care, courage, and patience there is nothing there.

So, what is the answer to the collective’s guru crisis?

Grow the fuck up–and cut them off. Seriously. They can’t save you. They can’t even save themselves.

What we need is accountability, maturity, mutuality, and care.

~Justice