Hugh Johnson
Member
The problem with spiritual practices, magic and yoga, is that people are not willing to deal with their ***t. There is a reason why Buddha was strict moralist, because if you have not dealt with your ***t and become a decent person, you have no business getting into any of the deeper stuff. There are ex-Satan worshippers who claim that their church pushes all this New Age stuff and whatnot because while they themselves consider stupidity and solipsism "sins" they want others to engage in them. It makes people weak and easily manipulated.I think the thing about most spiritual practices, is that they're very contextual, and you can't just import them into a new culture and have it have any meaning. It seems a lot of ancient spiritual practices arise out of an intimate relationship with the people and the land, water, and sky. These are practices to ensure healthy lives, good weather, high crop yields, good hunting, and other very practical things, they're not just meaningless esoteric procedures. In general, people are quite practical, it's just often we only see part of the picture, so we don't realize how things came to be by a long serious of rational decisions.
If you put wings on ***t, all you get is flying ***t.
Mysticists like to test their students. Some will just waste your time, but in the past they might tell you to smoke hemlock just to see if you are wise enough to do your own thinking.
I liked this Osho video when I saw it because the idea of countries and imaginary borders is something that I thought of years before I saw him talk about it:
Humanity will one day have to live in a world without borders simply because of limited natural resources and because of what the nature of the planet will be a long time from now, that is of course if humans survive long enough for that to happen.
With that said, the modern "spiritual" culture is nothing more than passive-aggressive, dirty, smelly salesmen who masquerade as hippies for attention and social status.
Borders exist because of limited resources. As long as the human population was small enough that conflict could be solved by groups moving there were no borders or wars. Borders and wars between peoples exist for the same reason personal boundaries and the aggression to defend them, via police or otherwise, exists. If you let people trample all over your boundaries, physically or otherwise, you will eventually be used up and destroyed.
What Osho is doing here is attracting the sort of uncritical people with porous boundaries that are easily manipulated and used. This doesn't mean you are necessarily such a person, and you probably would have been selected out of his groups.