Cutting Through Spiritual Colonialism

• Under capitalism, poor people can be beaten for doing the things necessary for their biological existence to continue. The homeless can be moved on, regardless of their condition. The hungry are not automatically fed. Once you have no money you have essentially no rights. Money is therefore the right to act without violence: it is exchanged for consent of various kinds. “You make take one of my cakes for eleven dollars” or “you may stay in my hotel room for $161.” No money means no consent means criminalization, and the State legitimizes violence of various kinds against criminals. This is the internal violence of capitalism.
• Capitalism has no goal, any more than fire has a goal. Fire is burning in much the same way that capitalism is violence. Capitalism is simply mass predation, encompassed within systems of government that reduce the damage enough that people experience the people feeding on them as shepherds rather than wolves.
• The notion that capitalism is fundamentally purposeless fundamentally matters, because humans are not fundamentally purposeless.
• The aristocrats know how to keep it together, generation after generation, and all have sophisticated fictions to wish away these existential doubts: the most refined levels of hypocrisy known to man.
• The ability to get those lies right is what separates the nouveau riche from the real aristocratic deal. The true blue have so internalized the lies that maintain their position that they cannot allow reality to penetrate without complete meltdown, enter the vast psychotherapy industry, to care for the psychological flesh wounds of the rich, without ever addressing the systemic infection.
• this stuff is all wrong, but I still have to do it to feed my kids, and it was not ordained by God that things be this way.
• We built the entire system on a credit card that we thought was being paid for by the Blood of Christ, as outrageous indignities were committed by all parties to build this civilisation, and now we discover that those credit card bills are actually being delivered to our house, and we ourselves are responsible for our actions, not the absent God.
• Western civilisation has few or none of the necessary mechanisms required to handle the moral weight of people being responsible for their own actions, and the resulting split between reason and our history is the major driving force behind syndromes like global warming denial and praising HIV as “the wrath of God.”
• It’s not that people have simply lost their mind: Faith built this hell, and the loss of Faith leaves us responsible for fixing it. We have a civilisation-level moral hangover.
• Spiritual Colonialism is the futile attempt to steal methodologies from, for example, the Dharmic civilisations of Asia and apply those methods for individual spiritual absolution for members of Western society who are unwilling to give up their lavish lifestyles just because they require bloodshed on an epic scale to maintain.
• The desire is to find a framework which allows colonialism to run wild by convincing people that they are not personally responsible for their own personal participation in and gain from the evils of society as a whole.
• If one can say “I was just playing out my role in the great wholeness of life” as one slaughters in the mall with a credit card, unconcerned by the child labour making the clothes, and the piled bodies of generations of union activists who were shot in the back of the head by guys trained by guys trained by guys who were trained by the CIA back in the ‘70s, then there is no fundamental responsibility: once again, all is as God wills it.
• the Hindus really did believe that they were talking on the karma of the people they were harming by their habits in the marketplace. As a result it was possible to motivate them to act en masse to push back against the incursion of a system which required them to act in unethical ways to survive economically.
• There is no escape from personal responsibility for your participation in capitalism in the religions of Asia. In all of those traditions, you are massively more responsible for the consequences of your actions than in any Western conception of reality.
• [Without the story of Jesus] we would never, ever have built this hellhole because there was simply no way to externalise the spiritual costs of constructing it.
• What I have seen is an endless parade of people who’ve been brainwashed by the same spiritual vision: a world of spiritual oneness in which some kind of advanced techno-tribal civilisation runs without ecological offence, in a paradise of peace and plenty. And, while I have no doubt that such a world is possible, it is my severe duty to tell you drugs will not get you there.
• coincidentally most of the people who are most profoundly sold on the Californian ayahuasca vision of the future are sitting on top of trust funds.
• What they’re looking for is a vision of the future in which they can live a life of luxury and pleasure, flying round the world taking drugs with their friends, and feel this is directly contributing to saving the world by ushering in The Great Awakening.
• California has been steeped in hippie values and every drug, drug cult, and drug culture known to man for 60 years, two full generations, and there is absolutely no sign of mass awakening as you can see from the treatment of San Francisco’s homeless population.
• If there is no human solidarity, then no awakening has occurred.
• We are morally responsible for what we buy, and for the living conditions of the people who made it, transported it, sold it to us, and will dispose of it when we are done. There is simply no escape from this conclusion, and any spirituality which does not acknowledge that we are responsible for what we do is simply a false path which will lead us deeper into hell as the environmental and resource crises deepen. No more Spiritual Colonialism. It’s time for that show to end, permanently.
• If there is to be real spirituality, it must come in the form of what we do, not simply the stories we tell ourselves about our lives.
• How, then, are spiritual beings to live in this world?
• Let’s go back to basics. Here is Gandhi’s list of the fundamental problems.
  • Wealth without work.
  • Pleasure without conscience.
  • Knowledge without character.
  • Commerce without morality.
  • Science without humanity.
  • Religion without sacrifice.
  • Politics without principle.
• Are we willing to be poorer to be better people? Do our spiritual values have any reality at all?
• The specialized knowledge of the Asian world in consciousness is being horrifically abused, perverted and distorted by Americans and Europeans to provide moral absolution where none is warranted or deserved. It’s providing a moral escape hatch for just exactly the culturally progressive people that should be buckling down to implement Gandhi’s vision of voluntary simplicity and service to the poor, and today, to the earth itself. We need a grounded, worthy, dense, durable, and above all responsible spirituality for the global conditions which now pertain.
• Freedom comes from having multiple paths forwards, each of which represents spiritually, morally, ethically and creatively correct behavior. If the choice is between one evil and another evil, you have no freedom: you are enslaved.