Most authentic spiritual teachings are wasted on most people. Most people are TRULY preoccupied, I think and feel, with truly petty worries.
Without speaking to the rest of the world, I think what most Americans need is just to grow up. To mature. And what is maturity? For me it is calm consistency. Achieving this is harder than you think. I’m not there yet.
And to be clear, I’m not advocating for the treadmill. The Buddha was calmly consistent, in all the right things. Jack Kerouac spoke of Buddhism but died of alcoholism. To be calmly consistent, far from being stuck, is being able to CHOOSE your life, rather than have it dictated to you. If you really get down to it, Kerouac had his life directed by emotions he never processed and dealt with. They killed him, and of course his friend Neil. HE was on a treadmill, wasn’t he? Of getting up every day, feeling the same things come up, then running from them as far as he could, and never succeeding?
And, again, to most likely say something I don’t need to say, I am very, very familiar with Corporate America. I am outside of it, but connected to it. I observe it every day. There is a lot there I would not want to be stuck in.
For the clever, though, there is always a way out, and perhaps your first move is to try and be more clever. Actually, prior to that decide there is CERTAINLY some way you can improve your situation. You are not helpless, not even now, not even with two kids, a mortgage, and a lawn that needs to be mowed. There is no doubt there is something you have not thought of, some feeling you have not yet felt, some insight which has been knocking on the door you have been telling to go away. Some scary thing that may just be the gate to the next path of your journey through this life.
But it is interesting to note that you can buy within ten seconds books whose content was a closely guarded secret, in many cases, as recently as perhaps a century ago. There are teachings out there which, if an initiate would have unwisely divulged them, could have gotten him or her killed. There are books people would have given their right hand and ten years of relentless effort to possess, that you can have delivered in a day with Amazon, or find today at your local bookstore.
We have this ocean (make that a large fresh water lake for the following metaphor) of wisdom, of spiritual water, and the inability of Tantalus to drink from it [actually, is there a salt water ocean of stupidity out there, that makes all who drink from it more thirsty? I think so.]
Obviously pearls are wasted on swine. The task most of us face is not looking for an advanced teaching, but developing the ability to benefit from it. If you want pearls, don’t be swine.
And there is of course this notion of a “spiritual bypass”, a term which made immediate sense to me when I saw it. I tried to do that in my late teens and early twenties. You read Rumi and Advaita, and the Tao Te Ching, and Meister Eckhart, and try to get spiritual.
This is a recipe for emotional illness. Trust me on this one. At some point, some part of me said “fuck this: it isn’t working, and it’s not going to work.”. That’s when I started reading psychology, which is vastly more useful for most, and certainly was for me.
Still, it is interesting to note–and I am not sure I have here–that I have had my Kum Nye books since the late 80’s. The actual physical books. They are one of my oldest possessions, along with a cow’s horn that was made into a trumpet of sorts, that I blow every time I move into a new place. I’ve had that since my teens. It made me feel like Boromir, if I am honest.