On Becoming More Impactful With Spirituality
What most people think of when they think of spiritual people.
Inspired by people like Daniel Pinchbeck, who have been so critical of spirituality, I mount a full-throated defense of spirituality, first acknowledging the pitfalls and shortcomings. Spirituality for me is a holistic worldview and set of practices that make us more relevant and impactful in the world, instead of more escapist and checked-out. Authentic spirituality is becoming a spiritual scientist, making us more discerning, not more out-of-touch. Furthermore, true change cannot come about in the world without first expanding consciousness through spiritual practice. Finally, spirituality offers a nurturing cosmology that imbues our lives with deeper meaning.
Daniel Pinchbeck References
Note that I don’t endorse all of his ideas. Pinchbeck and I have gone in very different directions since How Soon Is Now?
Books: Breaking Open the Head, How Soon Is Now?, Conspiranoia
Articles: Bat Soup, Pursuit of Truth
Spiritual But Not Religious (SBNR)
American Veda, by Philip Goldberg
A recent New York Times article about the new Harvard chaplain being SBNR
Pitfalls Along the Spiritual Path
Yogi Bhajan’s depressing legacy
Documentary about the TM organization: David Wants to Fly
Making Spiritual Practices More Accessible
Business Sutra by Devdutt Pattanaik
Wild Spirituality
Iron John, by Robert Bly
Morphic Resonance
Finally, special thanks to Blaire Embrey and Meghan Kemp for providing valuable input as I developed these ideas!
Topics
Spiritual materialism
Spirituality as the most crucial human endeavor
What inspired this episode
Defining spirituality
Increasing our wildness
Acknowledging the pitfalls
Conspiracy Theories
Becoming more relevant and impactful in the world
The importance of expanding consciousness
Ripple effects
A meaningful universe
Making spirituality more accessible
Show Transcript
What do you think about when you think of spirituality or spiritual people?
Hippies, your friend who's a little too into crystals and astrology, that guy in your Facebook feed who's constantly posting spiritual cliches, or maybe cult members. Or maybe you identify a spiritual, I identify as spiritual. But I also feel like I have had to defend that. I straddle the spiritual world and what burners may call the default world. It's a strange and exhilarating place to live. It's like I'm gazing simultaneously into what feels increasingly like two extremes. So I want to offer this episode, as a way of sort of saying, like, hey, spirituality is great. Take it from your old level headed friend Jayadev. Because what I've noticed is that spiritual people have given spirituality, a bad rap. Perhaps like me, you've personally has disappointing experiences with a teacher or a community. And for many, I think spiritual, the word spiritual has come to mean, escapist, narcissistic, myopic and caught in spiritual bypass, that kind of thing. Many people I know who identify as spiritual have fallen into conspiracy theories and have seemed to lost touch with reality. So in this episode, I want to recognize the real challenge of spiritual bypassing, while emphasizing what's good and even crucial about spirituality. And when I say spiritual bypass, what I mean is the use of spiritual practices and spiritual cliches to avoid feeling painful feelings or facing distasteful truths. It's also known as spiritual ego or spiritual materialism, these are all connected basically, it's a kind of clinging tightly to like love and light, and this like Eastern mysticism without balancing it with Shadow Work or an instinctual wildness or even integrity. And it's sometimes asking your teacher to do your spiritual work for you. And I think spiritual bypass spiritual ego spiritual materialism is a built in stumbling block on the spiritual path. It's like a necessary step you have to go through, hopefully early and then quickly, but but sometimes not. So in these early episodes of the podcast, I want to continue to define spirituality and to talk about why it's so important, not just to me, but for all of humanity. So today, we're going to learn why authentic spirituality is the most important human endeavor, in my opinion, especially now. My goal here is to offer a positive and life affirming view of spirituality, one that reflects my personal experience with it, because it's been so hugely transformational for me and people I know in my life. So why is spirituality the most essential and urgent endeavor we can undertake? Why does it offer solutions to many of the challenges that face humanity? These are the questions I intend to answer on this episode, or at least try to.
In my opinion, spirituality, the spiritual path and dedicated spiritual evolution are as relevant to fomenting social change as any other means of activism, if not more, so. After all, it was deep spiritual work, faith and dedication to higher principles that informed the nonviolent civil disobedience movements of Gandhi, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr, among many others. And after spending decades of my own life, looking for the greatest point of leverage for true social change, I have landed on yoga and spirituality for myself as a vocation and a professional to some extent. So this question is not only deeply personal for me, but one I have spent considerable time pondering. And I make no claim to being more authentic than anyone. My only point here is that there is a vital and authentic vein of spirituality and that there's a way to find that, and that we need that more than ever. And I feel like I am uniquely positioned maybe to offer this kind of grounded perspective on spirituality. I grew up deeply sort of rooted in science, but also partially Catholic and partially Taoist. And so I think this combination of these three sort of traditions, really informed my early views on the world. And so then when I went into adulthood, I I started off in engineering and was very, very grounded with that, and the scientific worldview. And then as I went more into law, I became more interested in philosophy, Western philosophy, and how to make more of an impact in the world and those sorts of things. And that led me into yoga. And going deep with yoga especially has brought me into a much more deeper spirituality. And so I have always, for some reason, had this natural resistance to black and white thinking or blind faith. It's not grounded in experience. And so I hope that I can bring that that ongoing perspective to this conversation.
I wanted to start by talking about what inspired this episode. Over the past few years, especially I've had multiple family members and friends who seem to be so turned off by spirituality and spiritual people. In fact, I've had a few family members who have banned the topic of spirituality from conversation. It seems like they've had numerous negative experiences with spiritual people, which I totally understand. And we're going to talk about that in a minute. But all this kind of made me curious about where, where this underlying resentment and disappointment and resistance comes from. And then over the past year, I've been following the work of this thinker and writer, Daniel Pinchbeck, who has been a huge influence on my life. And he's been writing more about spirituality too. And he's a good example of somebody who I deeply respect but who also seems to have this very negative view of spirituality and spiritual people. And so I wanted to just explore that a little bit as we as we go into this topic, but everyone I wanted to credit Pinchbeck with basically inspiring this episode. Daniel Pinchbeck has been a major inspiration for me. His book Breaking Open the Head, which I read about five years ago, was very eye-opening for me I was I was starting to work with plant medicine myself, and reading about his experiences were just so illuminating for me and and so supportive in a way. And it was around that time, actually, that I started to bump into him in in New York at different places, at a friend's art gallery in other places. So when his book, How Soon Is Now?, which is a deep exploration of climate change, and the various solutions that we may have to this challenge. When that book came out, it was very inspiring for me, and I went and explored a lot of the things he proposed in that book. And so I've been following him for a while. And I just found it very interesting that he had such a different opinion about spirituality than I have. You know, I talked to him one time about the fact that I was teaching yoga. And he said to me, that's great. But you know, what else are you doing? How are you bringing that into the world? And I think that's a good question. And it's one that I've been thinking about ever since. So let me read a couple quotes from from Daniel and this will kind of tee up the discussion for this episode. So in an email from November of 2020, called is the pursuit of truth worth it? Daniel Pinchbeck says, “When it comes to postmodern spirituality, we prefer the half truths served up by useful idiots like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. If a charismatic guru comes along, Tony Robbins is a great example. Or Keith Raniere, who tells people with conviction that they can be super wealthy and have whatever they want in life. If they follow his program, that Guru is almost guaranteed massive success.”
He goes on to say, “How I would love at this point to transition to the other team, to transform myself into a lifestyle guru who was going to tell you how, by using the power of Wow, some secret mantra, the law of manifestation or a series of Voodoo incantations, that you will be able to gorge yourself with everything good and delectable from now into eternity.”
So there's a lot going on here. I just wanted to pause and take a moment to comment on this. You know, first of all, say what you want about Eckhart Tolle or Deepak Chopra. But I think they have performed a crucial service of exposing spiritual ideas to a wider audience. And for me, personally, Tolle’s A New Earth is one of the wisest and most impactful books I've ever read. So, you know, it's it's interesting, because I feel what I'm getting from this is that he's been hanging out with a lot of people who identify as spiritual who are in deep states of spiritual bypass, perhaps. That's that's my impression from these from these quotes for these passages. So let me just share a couple more that will complete the picture. Pinchbeck goes on to say in a short book that he wrote last year, called Conspiranoia: “Over the last decades, much of the spiritual community got lost in a narcissistic self centered haze, spiritual seekers meditators, Yogi's Neo shamans and festival goers seek to avoid the darker elements of our reality. They focus on the law of manifestation, the power of now and the never ending quest for personal healing and ecstatic states. One time belief is that our thoughts create our reality. People take this to mean that we shouldn't focus on negative outcomes or malevolent forces, because this will give them energy.” Pinchbeck goes on, “Instead of just developing a good yoga practice or chugging ayahuasca, I would like to see this privileged and influential group confront the social basis of oppression and exploitation.”
Yeah, so again, there's a lot going on here. And I agree with some of his points, you know, I do understand where he's coming from, in terms of a lot of spiritual people being kind of checked out, or a little self indulgent or escaping and privilege and all that these are all valid criticisms for sure. And I think, you know, I'm curious again, I'm curious about what spiritual communities he's been hanging out in, you know, he's, I know, he's been living in Tulum, maybe that's part of the problem. But I think, these criticisms, they deny the fact that first of all, the Shadow Work is part of the spiritual path. I think that's very important. I'll touch on that later. And he's sort of, I feel like he's describing this like Instagram version of spirituality, right? “Meditators, Yogi's Neo-shamans, and festival goers,” those are the people you see on Instagram, I think, giving spirituality kind of a bad name. So, you know, in Pinchbeck, writing over the past year, he goes on to suggest that we come up with a new ecocentric ethos, and then convince people of its validity through the mass media, which is, which sounds like a great idea. But I think it's a little naive and doesn't recognize that there's this dense state of collective consciousness today that is pretty intractable. And I don't think that just appealing to people's higher reason will, will change minds or motivate different behavior. But of course, I understand the desire to grasp for solutions when everything seems so dire, right? I mean, the world we live in right now is seems crazy. So I think we need to resist this pull toward revolution, when we haven't changed ourselves first. Because I think real lasting change can only come from the inside, from the bottom up. And forcing a solution from on high will only create more stress, more violence, and it won't last it won't stick. But again, I get it. You know, it's hard to take most spiritual people seriously. I think too many are trapped in spiritual bypassing and magical thinking. They come across as naive, and they're so easily falling prey to corrupt and dishonest gurus or conspiracy theories.
And yeah, I get it. I get it. I agree with him to some extent. But I think his thinking on this is a little black and white and a little reactionary. And I think to the Pinchbeck is still firmly rooted in this sort of 20th century like Age of Reason, intellectual tradition, where all you have to do is apply your mind your reason to any problem, and you can solve it. But this reminds me of what Einstein said, which is that you can't solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it, right. So I think there's other ways of being and knowing that the spiritual path can reveal I can offer that would augment Pinchbeck solutions here and to make and make them more tenable, I think, you know, and again, to his credit, he does recognize that the source of our disconnection and apathy is the grim materialist worldview from the 20th century. But I think it's a little ironic to that he seems to be still so kind of mired in that worldview at the same time, his arguments are so over-intellectualized in my opinion. And so black and white, you know, it's not either we do spiritual work, or we are activists, I think it's that we do spiritual work and be activists. I think we need people on the front lines, but we also need people doing this evolutionary Shadow Work of spirituality, in essence, like fighting a different battle on a different kind of battlefield. And hey, I admit that I don't have all the answers. I mean, for example, I'm still working out how to bring spirituality to the underprivileged in a productive and effective way. And that's something I want to explore in future episodes of this podcast, I have identified a few ways for myself, to bring these things to the underprivileged, you know, I'm getting involved in an organization, the Prison Yoga Project, which is very exciting. And I want to find more ways to bring yoga to and spiritual practices to, you know, troubled youth, and those are who are traditionally underserved. And also, I want to bring spirituality into the business world in a more meaningful and substantive way beyond just mindfulness practices, or helping people manage stress in the office. For example, I've been over the past couple of years, I've been teaching yoga and mindfulness to Silicon Valley companies. And I want to find ways to to kind of bring the spiritual ethos deeper into the approach to business, you know, deeper into leadership and that kind of thing. So that's, that's something else I want to explore in the future as well.
But back to Pinchbeck. You know, his stated motivation is a ruthless search for truth. And I think that's commendable. And I think that's actually a good description. Definition of spirituality to this ruthless search for truth. But again, he wants to arrive at the truth purely through the mind. And I don't think this is possible or the right approach. I mean, we can build a new alliance between the working class and the progressive elite, as Pinchbeck says, and we can create a shared vision for humanity's future. But I don't think we can do this by making the same perfectly reasonable arguments to both groups in the hopes that they will suddenly wake up to the urgency of the situation without doing the hard evolutionary work, the Shadow Work and all that too. I think it's got to be the complete package. And there's also this kind of thrust within Pinchbeck’s argument that there's not enough activism or not enough doing and spirituality, right. And I think there's, there's more to that, too. I mean, I think saying that there's not enough doing and spirituality is an oversimplification. And this attitude is sort of, it sounds very Protestant and Calvinist and sort of patriarchal, colonialist, industrialized to me, you know, it fundamentally misunderstands what spirituality is and how it works. I think this attitude of rushing around frantically fixing everything strictly from the mind is part of what I think has brought us to the brink of global collapse. Anyways. It reminds me of a Ram Dass quote, actually, who said, “I can do nothing for you, but work on myself. And you can do nothing for me, but work on yourself.” So maybe that's too extreme, too. But I that gets to the point that I'm making, which is the inner work is just as important as the outer work.
And it's certainly not my intent to call people out on this podcast. Pinchbeck has been as much an inspiration for me as a critical spirituality. And ultimately, I think he and I have the same goal, the same motivations. We both recognize how dire our predicament is. So I only include Pinchbeck here because I think we all know people with this attitude. And I think he offers some well articulated arguments that tee up much of the discussion for today. And finally, I hope in the grand dialectic tradition, that contrasting these ideas will lead us closer to the truth. Now, let me take a moment to attempt to define spirituality.
More people identify as spiritual but not religious today than at any time in modern history. In his book, American Veda, Philip Goldberg says that people identifying as SBNR, are somewhere between 16 and 39% of the US population. And, as you can probably guess, this spiritual but not religious phenomenon, is the inspiration for the title of my podcast. So more and more people are identifying as spiritual but not religious. This is exciting. It means we're moving away from what I think are the two great ills of the 20th century: organized religion, which fails to offer a direct transcendental experience and materialistic science, which offers nothing more than a cold, empty universe full of meaningless random events.
So what is spirituality? For me, spirituality is an acknowledgement that there is something more than what we see. And then a system of different practices for tapping into that something more, because I think we are spiritual beings. And there's a real power in acknowledging that fact. Spirituality to for me is an open and honest inquiry into what's true. It's sort of the truest science in that sense. And this inquiry goes beyond thought, it goes beyond concepts, it goes into direct experience, as well. So you could say spirituality is this commitment to seeing reality and ourselves as clearly as possible, and removing all impediments to that, and there's practices for doing that as well. So it's a deep inquiry into reality, in a sense, getting closer to reality through experimentation and observation. So again, like a science in that way. I mean, spirituality includes and requires actually rational thought, intellectual rigor, and even the scientific method, you know, trial and error. Try things over time to see what repeats that's, that's very much a part of spirituality. But it's also a means for approaching and relaxing into the mystery of life. It's a set of practices for making you feel more at home in the world, really. And for accessing, again, the direct experience of, of unity, this transcendent state of yoga, not to escape, or to avoid reality, but to bring this deeper expanded state of yoga back into the world in a very powerful way. So I think you can be spiritual and discriminating. Being spiritual doesn't mean opening yourself up to any and all traditions, beliefs and practices. Instead, it means being a spiritual scientist, encountering new systems and practices, and then testing them in the laboratory of your experience. I think there's an obligation actually, for spiritual people to, to have this kind of rigor to their spiritual practice this kind of skepticism even or this discrimination, this question, this constant questioning, not just of the outside world, but the question the questioning of yourself and the practices. I mean, there are of course, relevant times and ways to, to have faith and surrender, but there's definitely a dance that you do with that and your discernment. And I wanted to say to you is, is very important, because because I think a lot of people misunderstand spirituality to be, you know, all about just love and light and wisdom. But there are these other spiritual archetypes that are part of the larger package. You know, there's the kind of Fool energy the the Fool Tarot archetype, which is the trickster. There's the wild, indigenous hairy man or woman, you know, there's this the dark, mysterious shadow muse. And there's all these different kind of expressions of what a spiritual person is, I think it's very broad. It's a whole way of life. And again, like I said before, it's a lot more Shadow Work than people think. And in terms of increasing our wildness, this is I think this is a part that gets overlooked too often. We're not becoming angels, we're becoming more deeply human in a sense. And what does this look like? Well, it's being fully and passionately at home in the human body and in the natural world, a true human being somebody who is enraptured by the magic and utter mystery of manifest reality, in touch with your own mystery and the mystery of nature. We become comfortable being in a sensuous communion with the world. I mean, when was the last time you hugged a tree? Seriously. So I think spirituality is it's a comfort with your emotional body, with letting your feelings fully flow freely, and getting in touch with animal instincts, not denying those. In this sense, we're sort of rejecting Freud's oppressive view of the id. And actually, I wanted to read this quote from D.H. Lawrence, who's a great example of this kind of approach to the spiritual wildness.
“Oh, what a catastrophe. What a meaning of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox. This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots. Because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. And love is a grinning mockery, because poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized base on the table.”
So I just love that that imagery. I love what he's saying there, you know that there's this disconnect in the modern world. And he was writing, what 100 years ago or so. Right? So, you know, Iron John from Robert Bly is another great example, that the hairy beast at the bottom of the pond, you know, making friends with that kind of archetype, or the fierce form of Shiva in yoga, Bhairava, is a great archetype for this wildness. You've also got from the Greek tradition, Artemis, the Greek goddess of the lady of beasts, the goddess of the wild lands, the mysteries of animals. You've got Dionysus, wood nymphs. I mean, Robin Hood is one, you know, Henry Miller even or Anais Nin. Gabrielle Roth, you know, these are all great examples of wild spiritual people. In short, it's a full bodied feeling spirituality. It's a way of knowing, you know, it's intuition. It's emotion, its body, its nature, it's all of it. But ultimately, only you can define spirituality for yourself. And that process requires some sort of spiritual practice, you're not going to think your way into a spiritual state. More thought can only lead to more concepts. I mean, this is how we arrived at the current state of Western philosophy, right? So the kind of spirituality I'm talking about is a third way, in a sense, not blind faith and superstition or religious dogma. But a worldview with depth and soul and heart and grit, founded upon truth, and the direct experience of our infinite nature. And it doesn't have to be like this enlightened Yogi archetype or this or a Buddhist You know, I think it's better if it's not. Maybe it's like we were creating the new spiritual kind of archetype as we speak.
Now I want to acknowledge the pitfalls on the spiritual path or the ways that people become turned off by spirituality or skeptical of it. So first of all, there's no denying the fact that the traditional religions, the Abrahamic faiths of the world, have become increasingly problematic and irrelevant, right? Christianity in particular. But when you look at religion today, it's full of dogma and Puritanism and oppression. And these were clearly tools for controlling the masses. We see endless scandals, you know, Catholic Church scandals. And this is there's no question that organized religion as we know, it is flawed and generally more harmful than not, in my opinion, these these seem like patriarchal vestiges of a bygone era to me. But you know, if you look at the East as well, you can say similar things about certain manifestations of Hinduism or Buddhism. Look at the situation in Myanmar, with the Rohingya, or parts of India that are beset by Hindu nationalism and violence. It's very strange to me that yoga and Buddhism can lead to violence when they're both founded upon nonviolence. So I see how all of this casts religion and spirituality in such a negative light, and then you pile on top of that the fallen gurus and cult scandals that we've had in recent history, right? We've seen the infamous Osho discredited in Wild Wild Country, Birkam Choudhry was exposed as a lecherous megalomaniacal scammer. The Transcendental Meditation (TM) organization has been taking hundreds of millions of dollars from students to questionable ends. And more recently, Yogi Bhajan, the founder of Kundalini Yoga was exposed as a sexually abusive and egotistical tyrant, not to mention incarcerated cult leaders like Keith Raniere, right, so there's these all these abuses all these scandals. We see all these sexual abuse scandals in the various Buddhist organizations to entire organizations and spiritual communities have been rocked to the core by these scandals. And you can see why people are turned off by spirituality with all this, right? It makes abuse of power and egomania seem like an inevitability on the path of yoga or spirituality. And I think part of the challenge too, is that we in the West are bringing all sorts of strange and outmoded ideas to the spiritual path or to a spiritual teacher. For example, we project all our unresolved parental wounds onto teachers. It's like there's something about the spiritual path that makes people lose their discernment. people confuse spirituality with religion, and they bring all this baggage that religion brings like dogma or a lack of critical thinking. Another pitfall is that many you have developed a strange attraction to a specific archetype of a spiritual person, or especially a spiritual teacher.
For example, you have the classic stereotype of the old indian guru with a beard and flowing robes. But you also have the fit blond in Lululemon doing asana on Instagram, or the dark and hairy guy in a Burning Man top hat, a leather vest, beads and harem pants living in a camper van, you know, we it's like, we want our spiritual authority and spiritual authenticity, to arrive in a specific package. And I think we're too attracted to the presentation over the substance of the teachings and the practices. And this is why my opinion, spiritual materialism is so rampant, it's so easy to look spiritual, and to attract followers by by doing so. Also, too often, I think we seek to outsource the hard work of spiritual practice and Shadow Work by looking for a teacher who will do the work for us without asking too much of us. Or we subconsciously seek a parental figure because we seek love that we never received as a child, or we miss direct romantic love to a guru. See all the scandals that I just mentioned. Or we simply just want to belong somewhere. That's totally understandable as a motivation.
So again, I think this is where we needed to develop discernment, and to learn to listen with our heart, to follow our gut. And to trust ourselves Above all, we need to get out of our head and burn through our past conditioning. And so spirituality can actually offer practices that do all these things. You just have to be committed to a certain tradition or a certain set of practices. And also, having a teacher is important at certain points on the path anyways, but I think so is moving away from a teacher and becoming your own guru, listening to your higher self and following your own intuition, or doing what Terence McKenna advocated and following plants instead of gurus. So it's almost like there's a there's a spiritual approach for every season of your life, right? Sometimes you want to teacher, sometimes you just want to follow your own intuition. Sometimes you want to work with different traditions or try different approaches. It's again, it's like a science and you want to be a spiritual scientist. The other thing I wanted to just come back to first for a moment here is I've been really fascinated by the phenomenon of what seems like rampant conspiracy theories within the spiritual communities that I'm a part of. I know so many people who are anti COVID vaccine, for example. And so I want to explore this more deeply, I find this really fascinating, I'm gonna dedicate a whole episode of the podcast, to this topic in the coming months. But in the meantime, if you want to listen to more about this topic, you can find some great discussions on the Conspirituality podcast. So I'm here to tell you that there are authentic teachers and powerful transformational spiritual practices out there, I can personally attest to the deep and lasting transformation that can come from a dedicated commitment to authentic spiritual practices. But the spiritual path is hard. Any spiritual teacher will tell you, it's not a walk in the park. It's hard work. But the rewards are worth the effort, in my experience. So now we come to the thrust of my argument, the thrust of my defense of spirituality, and why I think it's so powerful as a lifestyle.
Spirituality for me, is a way of becoming more relevant in the world more dynamic. My understanding of yoga and other spiritual practices is that they are ultimately designed to make you more dynamic and effective in the world, to punch through to reality as one of my teachers would say, because spiritual practice strips you down to your essence, so that you can act in the world with greater purpose, Authenticity, and integrity. spiritual practice can make you fearless, but also compassionate. It should fundamentally change you in this way. There's a sort of stripping away and expansion, a maturation and, and an integration. That then makes you a natural leader. For example, in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna is not teaching a renunciate. You know, he's not teaching a monk who lives in a cave, he's teaching Arjuna, the most powerful warrior. So I think there's an important lesson here, an important reminder. Of course, the Indian spiritual tradition offers the ascetic model, but I think we've seen this development over recent history coming coming out of the yoga tradition of this householder model, going back a couple 100 years, at least, even the Buddha rejected asceticism.
So as a spiritual person, you refine your state of consciousness, and then you act on the world, in business, in family, and in friendship. A great, succinct way to define spirituality and the spiritual path actually is, it's a process of learning to transcend fear, and then to move towards fear as a practice. And then to help others do the same thing. Because when you become fearless, you make better decisions. And you operate from a place of love, and a place of service. Spirituality is so much about being of service. So instead of surveying the world through a rational lens, and deciding rationally, what problems need to be solved, the spiritual approach to being relevant in the world and making lasting change is to first liberate and center yourself, and then simply act spontaneously and intuitively in collaboration with intuition, in a total state of flow. Because I think a person with the best intentions, may decide they want to make a difference or change the world or help people. But the challenge is that they show up with all these unresolved personal and emotional issues, plus heavy layers of societal conditioning. And they're in this mode of material realism, bringing industrial solutions to problems and patriarchal thinking, and seeing nature separate and all these these things are preventing them from truly making change or impacting the world. They might enter a community that does not conform to their ideas of utopia. And then they take charge, and they impose their limited worldview onto an existing community who may have both problems and solutions that don't fit their paradigm. I mean, I think we've seen this time and again, in developing countries or with indigenous communities. This deeply flawed colonialist patriarchal industrial paradigm disconnects us from nature and Soul. And I think this is how the entirety of humanity has come face to face with his most intractable challenges, whether that's climate change or inequality. So again, acting from a deep place of inner stillness will, in contrast result naturally in a nonviolent, selfless transformational approach to to true change in the world. It's full of empathy and compassion, and love. So going back to Daniel Pinchbeck was saying, at the top, there is urgent, important work to do right now. But there is also a lot of inner spiritual work to do for all of us. So I don't think it's you have to choose one or the other. I think it's both I think we can do both at the same time. And I do think it's relevant for some people to play the role of teacher and to remain in that role. There is a deep need in this world for people who are focused on helping others to expand their consciousness, and we need that desperately to find.
Finally, it's important to cease habitually seeing problems everywhere, I think. The deepest change can only come from a person who has first totally accepted the world as it is completely, then change can come from a deep place of stillness instead of ego. Okay, we looked at how spirituality can make you more relevant and impactful in the world. Now let's explore the importance of expanding consciousness and developing discernment. And how spiritual practices can help with that.
As I've said before, nothing will change as long as a majority of humanity is living in a dense state of consciousness, living these lives of quiet desperation to quote Henry David Thoreau. Daniel Pinchbeck has suggested that we develop a new vision for humanity that is so compelling, inspiring and true that the multitudes can't help but be attracted to it, and change their behavior collectively. But I think this puts the cart before the horse, I think we need to change minds. First, we need to expand consciousness first. I mean, yes, there's work to do, we should do both. But this, this inner work is so crucial, in my opinion. And what do I mean by dense state of consciousness? Well, I think this is a relative sort of state of ignorance or fear, or it's a lack mentality. You know, it's an ignorance of our true nature. It's an ignorance of history of science to other cultures of other people, other communities. And so because of this dense state of consciousness, I don't think appeals to reason can work. And I think conspiracy theories will continue to proliferate, as long as we all have this dense state of consciousness. And I recognize again, that spirituality can too often be a process of adopting new misalignments with reality that are packaged as the truth. It seems like most people when they encounter the spiritual path, abandon all discernment, right. And so, and I think this is understandable, because spirituality, by its very nature often does require a deep questioning of beliefs, and especially mainstream beliefs. But then spiritual people, so easily fall victim to the sort of deepest trap of all, which is black and white thinking, you know, it's like, well, if I'm questioning mainstream beliefs, then I need to question everything. And I need to adopt these alternative views that are prepackaged for me by this community, or by this the spiritual tradition, right, instead of, instead of being a spiritual scientist, as I was saying before, but it's tricky, right? I mean, how do we know something is true? It's very subjective, in a sense.
But I think if you're taking this spiritual scientist approach, we observe over time and test against reality. But this, this process requires an ability to to see very clearly. And so all of this is coming from spiritual practices. But I think, yeah, we need to cultivate and maintain a healthy balance between our curiosity, and our openness, and skepticism. I think we need to maintain our skepticism within it all. And part of this process is refining the intellect, developing discernment. And again, there are practices for these things, and I'll be talking about that and an episode coming up that's focused on this process of discernment. But a lot of this is just becoming self reliant, to some extent. I mean, having community and being connected deeply with people in community but also being self reliant at the same time. We need to transcend our familial and societal conditioning, our samskaras and even our karma. This process is often called polishing the mirror in yoga and Buddhist traditions. And these are part of the practices that I share. Part of this practice too, is releasing past trauma from the body. So all these things are important. For example, solving climate change or inequality requires a large number of people to change their behavior and their mindset, right? We need to stop investing in certain industries, or we need to start making different buying decisions, or we need to change our lifestyle in pretty profound ways. And all these things require a new outlook, right?
And so I think, again, as Pinchbeck might say, you can you know, you can sort of make well reasoned arguments to this effect, but I think people aren't going to change their behavior until their minds are changed through spirituality. And I don't think we can have more conscious, more elevated leaders or politicians too, until citizens first change their minds and change their worldview. Another example is, you know, seeing, seeing the extent of systemic racism in our culture in our society, requires an ability to overcome our deep biases and, and to discern rhetoric from truth, right.
I mean, determining, in general, what's really going on requires discernment and self reflection. It's fascinating to me, this, this, this topic of conspiracy theories, in particular, I'm sympathetic to to this phenomenon, because I understand how, when you're facing the mounting challenges that we have, as a humanity, it can be stressful, right? And I can see how psychologically, adopting a conspiracy theory can give you some relief, right? If If you feel totally helpless, because there's a secret society who's who's running everything, then it sort of relieves you of responsibility, I think, and I can see the appeal of that. But, but again, this is a topic for another episode. So I want to just kind of tee that up for future discussion. But in short, I don't think we can drag people into a progressive future without a shift in consciousness. And we we expand our consciousness, not to selfish ends, but to reduce our suffering to some extent, but also the suffering of those around us. And to make us more relevant, and more capable of truly being of service in the world. Of course, we have to practice and expand, while also taking direct practical steps to help people and be of service you know, so it's, it's like we're practicing, we're spiritual, and we're activists, and we're taking direct action in the world at the same time.
Another important point I want to make about spirituality in this kind of defense of spirituality is that you can't measure your impact. And there are these ripple effects that come from transformation, we can become indirectly impactful as well, or even unintentionally impactful, just through spiritual growth and spiritual practices. Changing ourselves increases our impact by setting an example for those around us. This kind of impact can ripple outwards. Changing ourselves also changes the way we relate to people, and our relationships in general. And this can also cascade beyond our immediate network. When you're holding better space for yourself, you can hold better space for others. And this can come from the spiritual path. It makes you a better and more mature, more whole person who acts fearlessly and purposefully instead of reactively, or out of fear. And this kind of change in behavior can positively impact everyone you know, I mean, it has to right. And I think as you start to radiate love more consistently, and frequently, as you start to make decisions based on love instead of fear. Other people pick up on this both consciously and unconsciously. As we open and expand our nervous systems, this change can radiate outward in myriad ways. And as more people do this, this effect increases exponentially. And again, I'm not talking just about yoga here or meditation, but all this deep, dark shadow work that we all must do, and also expanding into our inherent wildness too, so it's all of it. And it all, I think, creates a positive energetic field that radiates outward, and it can uplift those around you. And I'm not just talking about the power of positive thinking because that's just bypassing. I'm talking about the power of an expanded fearless and love filled heart, soul, and mind.
So the more free we are of our past karma through spiritual practice, the less reactive we become. And the more we can consciously choose to make every interaction one of selfless service, whether that's in a business, a social setting, or in a personal context.
Carl Jung talked about this phenomenon with his collective unconscious. Like with everything he did, he was way ahead of the curve with this idea. This Jung scholar Marie Louise von Franz summarizes his view this way: “Whenever an individual works on his own unconscious, he invisibly affects first the group. And if he goes even deeper, he affects the larger national units, or sometimes even all of humanity. Not only does he change and transform himself, but he has an imperceptible impact on the unconscious psyche of many other people. Conversely, whenever an individual engages in practice, extensively intended to affect collective transformation, he himself is also inevitably transformed. By participating in the practice, he contacts a source of healing wisdom that cannot help but positively affect his own consciousness.”
So we see here how Jung was so far ahead of his time, and obviously a student of many practices, including Kundalini Yoga and spiritual practices from India that he studied when he was traveling in India. But yeah, so what he's saying here is, or what you know, what von Franz is saying here is that it's a two way street, you know, your is a positive feedback loop at work as well. So you're transforming yourself, you're engaging with people who are also doing the work. And then this kind of builds into a positive feedback loop. Part of what I'm getting at here is captured so well by this theory of morphic fields, which Rupert Sheldrake does a great job explaining, I won't get into that here, because it would take too long to explain. But if you're curious, I'll put something in the show notes. And you can check that out. So as we can see here, there are so many ways that simple improvements or simple transformations within you can ripple out and create positive effects throughout your community and throughout the world.
And I don't think you can measure this kind of impact, oftentimes, you're not even aware of it. But cumulatively, it can have an enormous potential for change. I've personally been pleasantly surprised over the years when people tell me how they were inspired by some small thing I did that I didn't even think twice about. So it's a great reminder that just living your life as authentically as you can, in itself can be very powerful, and very transformational for the world. Because you never know how far reaching and profound your impact is on the people you may know, or the people they may know.
So much positive change and influence can flow from just living your own life and authenticity, courage, integrity and love. Maybe this is enough to tip the scales of the world towards true positive collective change.
The final point I want to make here is that a spiritual life and the spiritual path imbues your life with greater meaning. And I think this can be very supportive and nurturing and transformational to. In contrast with the hopelessness and sort of moral vacuity of scientific materialism, spirituality offers a much more rich and life affirming kind of ethos, or cosmology. I talked a lot about this in my recent episode about astrology, where I took the listener through the history of European thought over the past 600 years and how materialism is empty and not capable of providing meaning. Because you know, when the universe is seen as a cold, empty space, then it's much harder to feel grounded and aligned in the world.
In contrast, when we experience the cosmos as alive and intelligent, and even nurturing this empowers us to have more trust, which I think can lead to more authenticity and to taking bigger positive risks, and living in alignment with our higher selves. When we see the world imbued with meaning, this emboldens us to live with more purpose, in alignment with the evolution of the cosmos. And you don't have to take my word for it. I mean, through specific yoga practices or plant medicine experiences or or certain spiritual rituals, you know, ecstatic dance, anything you can experience this deep intelligence of nature, firsthand. And when you have these experiences, you start to understand that life is meaningful and imbued with meaning and mystery, and that there's nothing to fear. Having a spiritual ethos allows us to live without fear, to surrender and embrace all of life. As a great mystery.
There is no need for intellectual argument here because it's it's a direct experience that you can have, relatively easily with these spiritual practices. I want to end this section with a quote from Rick tarnis, which I think encapsulates this beautifully.
“The primal world is ensouled. It communicates and has purposes, it is pregnant with signs and symbols, implications and intentions. The world is animated by the same psychologically resonant realities that human beings experience within themselves.”
So once you start to have this experience, that the primal world is ensouled, it's deeply empowering, and deeply nurturing, and deeply inspiring.
And before we wrap up, I just want to once again, acknowledge the fact that there's a lot of work to do for all of us in finding ways to make these spiritual practices and a spiritual path more accessible to more people. I want to dedicate at least one episode to exploring this question and this topic. But having said that, I do think it to some extent, you can only start where you are right. So there's no reason to wait. Until we're all able to reach every person on the planet, I think there's a huge benefit to practicing yourself, and sharing these things with other people and building community from where you are. And I think I think there's an argument that the most privileged people need transformation more than anybody, maybe. But again, this is a topic for another episode. And I invite any and all ideas that you may have around this question of making these practices and making spirituality more accessible to the traditionally underserved and underprivileged. And like I said before, I'm actively exploring, bringing yoga into prisons through the Prison Yoga Project, and finding other ways to bring spiritual practices to historically underserved communities. And I'm also actively exploring deeper ways to bring spirituality into the business world, in a more meaningful and substantive way. That's not just mindfulness, but transforming the way business is done. And I've been deeply inspired by the work of Devdutt Pattanaik, and especially his book Business Sutra. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well.
So just to wrap up here and conclude In this episode, we looked at spirituality from different perspectives, we explored the various ways that spirituality has kind of gotten a bad name and, and why that's happened and some, maybe some ways to rectify that. I took some time to define spirituality from from my standpoint, and my, my vision of kind of a holistic spirituality that's not just yoga, but also includes Shadow Work, and cultivating our animal wildness, and, you know, drawing from different spiritual traditions, without watering any one tradition down too much. And recently, I've been deeply inspired by the work of Bill Plotkin, I've been studying his, his approach to spirituality and to soulwork for about four or five years, and I love how he has this framework of the cardinal directions. So in the north direction, there is the sort of nurturing benevolent queen or king archetype. And that's one expression of spirituality really. And then in the south, we have this wild indigenous Green Man or green woman. And then in the West, we have the dark, beloved muse. And then in the east, we have the innocent sage, which is, I think, is this Eastern, you know, sage, Yogi, Buddhist archetype, I think, that most people think of when they think of spirituality. So I like the idea that we need to sort of be even more holistic than just holistic yoga, we need to be truly holistic in our approach to spirituality. And then we looked at ways that the spiritual path and spiritual practices can make you more relevant in the world and more impactful and more powerful, in contrast with the stereotype of The Escapist spiritual person, spirituality is not just escaping to a cave in the Himalayas, but it's, it's it's becoming an activist from this deep place of stillness.
And then we talked about the importance of expanding consciousness, raising awareness and developing discernment, and how you can't really measure your impact. And then finally, we looked at how having a meaningful cosmology or meaningful ethos, a meaningful kind of spiritual approach to life is so important to because it can help to sort of hold you or create a container in life that you can sort of nestle into as you as you go out into the world and act more relevantly. Because I think life again, is is deeply meaningful, and imbued with mystery.
Having a spiritual approach to life allows us to live without fear and to surrender and embrace all of life. Life and all of its mystery.
So thank you so much for joining me on this episode. I hope it's been as fun for you to listen to as it was for me to put together. Obviously, I love talking about this stuff. And this was a big one for me. I had been working on this for about six or nine months, and thinking about it deeply.
And it's sort of like this episode is like, it's like an expression of everything I believe. And so I hope I hope you got that. Hope you got that. That bhava from me.
As always, I invite questions and feedback, you can reach me at the links in my show notes. And so I leave you with this quote from Max Planck. “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And it is because in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve.”
Until next time, Hari Om Tat Sat
