I was watching a YouTube© video from Vanessa Ooms
(March 16, 2018 “Feeling Worried/Lost”),
who is a young woman who had a spectacular Kundalini Awakening several years
ago, and she has been giving the World a record of her evolving, or devolving, experiences
with her videos. I don’t know from what condition
she started from, but my perception is that she is going downhill. We can notice that the title of her most
recent video isn’t “Smiling So Much It Creeps People Out”. Her big issue now is feeling Worried and
Lost. One of the points she made is
that we should use our Spiritual Perspective to support us and that we should
resist worrying because the torments of worrying are constrictive and
deadening.
Well, my first thought is that often people in the
most desperate situations have good reason to worry. ‘Worrying’ is simply what we call the process
of thinking of all the negative possibilities inherent in a situation which gives
us the opportunity to then think of our contingency plans if any of those
horrible possibilities should ever actually occur. I heard a joke from some Stand-Up Comedian –
“they say that 90% of the things we worry about don’t happen. You see, It Works!”
Another word for ‘Worry’ is ‘Stress’. Some people have High Stress Lives. Generally, this means that they are caught at
the bottom of Maslow’s Pyramid of Ascendency of Needs – their Physiological needs
are not being met, or they fear for their Safety, or that they may become
Social outcasts and never know Love. You
know, even people with great careers can feel a threat to their physiological
needs, if they work so much they can’t eat or sleep adequately; and they may
have concerns for their ‘safety’ if their employment is precarious. There is also the Need for Social Belonging,
but often the demands of Career or a confining monogamous relationship will
screw up one’s social life and love life.
These kinds of conditions would create stress and worry. Yes, worry can be a good thing, when we can
do something about our condition, but often we worry from the perspective of
facing a dead end with no way out. But
the Self, as a Body Organism, is instinctively driven to seek Survival and will
nonetheless continue to worry – to continuously scan for some pathway for
escape or some strategy for deliverance. What happens if we suppress worry? You know, there have been studies that show
that Worrying eventually ceases when the Body gives up Hope. The Personality can only take so much before
it shuts down into a state of demoralized dejection. Worry is replaced by a blank stupor. Well, being in a dejected stupor is Really
Dangerous for the body, in so many ways, and so the body may react with a kind
of a desperate survival mechanism – a Nervous Breakdown with a Personality reconfiguration
designed to Simplify Life and allay all Anxiety. Yes, the Body’s actual precarious situation
and danger may still be present after such an Emergency Personality
Restructuring, but at least the Body is able to overcome the danger of wasting away
to death in a state of paralyzing dejection.
William James in his classic “Varieties of Religious Experience” sets
this particular schematic up as the pattern for Religious Conversion or Enlightenment
experiences. James wrote before they
knew much about dopamine – the feel good neural secretion, but I would suppose
that when the Body is faced with such an existential emergency, it will crank
up the Dopamine which would provide for an intensely blissful spiritual experience,
and probably also come up with some really cool hallucinations. But wouldn’t the end result still be a
practical Dejection, only it is a Feel Good Dejection. The Rotten Life Conditions which set off the
causative chain of events would still be present. Or perhaps the Neural Mechanisms that shut
down the crippling Anxiety also may take the sting out of Worry. The Personality may have freedom to think of
All the Possibilities, but without the Anxiety
that is wiped out by the flood of Dopamine, how could there be any Fear of
Consequences? This is perhaps why so
many Religious Enlightenees have not flinched in regards to martyrdom. Well, in the Religious Context, being
fearless may seem like a good thing. But
in the day to day world the word we use for ‘Fearless’ is ‘Reckless’. Families and Social Groups are endangered by
members, and especially by Leaders, who too heedlessly court disaster, sometimes
simply as a means of trumpeting some vague Principle or Point of Honor (for
instance, the Survival Cultist Leader who declares “I can’t let those police take our guns”, and
so turns what might have been a few relatively minor weapons charges and some
time in jail into a massacre of all the men, women and children that he or she was
responsible for.)
In regards to achieving ‘Enlightenment’, has anybody
besides myself noticed that people who are able to cope well with Life very
seldomly experience these kind of Crisis Enlightenments, which are actually
just dressed-up Nervous Breakdowns. I’ve
heard legendary stories about Saints who have reached a state of paralyzed dejection
simply from a sense of Spiritual Desolation, and that THAT would trigger a high
order Enlightenment Experience. But this
would require a kind of pathological Obsession.
You see, I can understand being paralyzed in hopeless dejection because
of unrelieved poverty or having somehow made one’s self a Social Pariah and
somebody that nobody could love, but just being Spiritually Dejected!? If one already has everything the World has
to offer, would one really agonize over trying to possess Heaven too, or would
the pleasures of the World be enough. Even if one did attempt a Spiritual Quest it
would be so easy to just say to yourself “this is something I really don’t need
to worry so much about. I am sure that
God can do fine without my help.”
So often any effective and successful Pursuit of
Enlightenment is facilitated by belonging to a very strict Cult. The Demands of the Cult would have to
simulate the same kind of Hopeless Dead-end Dejection that we find in the Real
World of unrelieved poverty and social disintegration. Basically, the Cult just needs to keep piling
on the Stressors until the Cultist breaks.
Restricted Diet and Fasting, sleep deprivation by forced prayer times and
meditation hours, forbidding any kind of sexual outlets, constant shaming in
the guise of moralistic sermons, imposing impossible expectations, taking away
all social status and engraining a sense of worthlessness, and imposing social
isolation through enforced silence…. Pretty soon the Nut will crack. This was the Modus Operandi by most Traditional
Religious Orders – Catholics, Hindus, Buddhists, Zen – they all used to roll
out the same kind of torture chambers. And
they were successful.
But now we have the New Age which attempts to
Enlighten People with weekend Seminars in 4 Star Resort Hotels over 3-day
weekends. Yes, the Vegan Buffet may
drive people into a state of hopeless dejection, but nothing else would. Such Seminars are more like Entertainment and
Amusement. The Body Organism would not
be fooled by a few Inspirational Speeches, and the guided Mediations would more
than likely put us to sleep. We need to
remember the Primary Rule here, and that is that as long as the Body Organism
is coping and adapting to its environment and providing for its essential
Needs, then there is no reason for the Personality to go through any kind of
Crisis Reconditioning, which is what ‘Enlightenment’ actually is.
Well, that was not the Conclusion I was looking for
when I first started this essay. I had
started with the idea of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in mind, which is often
set forth as a diagram of a Pyramid which has layers of ascending ‘needs’ going
from the bottom to the top in the order of Physical Biological Needs, Needs for
Safety and Security, Needs for Social Connections, Love and Companionship,
Needs for Self Esteem, and finally the Levels of Self Actualization and Self Transcendence
at the tippy top. It all sounds great
at first, but after taking a close look at it, well, whatever Maslow means by
Self Actualization and Self Transcendence couldn’t be too much of a big
deal. History has many instances of
Privileged Classes that enjoyed every satisfaction – their bodies were pampered,
armies would be mustered to assure their safety, their homes were the centers
for High Society and they were free to relate to anybody howsoever they liked,
and endless flattery assured momentous levels of Self Esteem. But where in History do we find any ‘Self
Actualization and Self -Transcendence in this Class? We might as well look for such things in…
certain current World Leaders who are famous for their relative Prosperity and
their inordinate levels of Self Esteem.
Well, it was good that I put pen to paper so I could find out that I
really didn’t believe what I had been thinking.
You know, one of the biggest problems I have with the
Spiritual Community is with their do-nothing lethargy in regards to Social and
Political Issues. The World is
systematically kept Poor and Miserable and the Spiritual Community meekly
accepts it, especially those who are still ‘comfortable’, that is, the scourge
of under-employment and low wages has not reached them…yet. But even the Poor and Miserable, like Vanessa
Ooms, whom we were just speaking of, would rather stifle her ‘worries’ and seek
Spiritual Dejection before organizing and uniting for some political and social
means for implementing a New Systematic Means for Producing and Distributing
the World’s Resources and the Fruits of the People’s Labor, where everybody
could be provided for fairly, equitably and most of all, sufficiently. But what if the Spiritual Community did
jump in and effectively reverse the trends towards Systematically Imposed Poverty
and Social Disintegration. Well, then we
would have a World where everybody could Cope and Thrive and where nobody would
feel any desperate need to do anything.
It would be the end of Spiritual Enlightenment as we know it.
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