Hindus and Don’ts
I come from a Hindu background.
“Hindu” is a practically meaningless label except as a general reference to belief systems and traditions of the network of cultures originating across South Asia. There are some groups that will argue for a nationalist identity behind “Hindu” but this will necessarily be a modern reclamation of the world. Practically speaking, all I know if someone says they’re Hindu is that they look at the world through a metaphysics interpreted out of the Vedic texts and the lineages of literature and traditions that evolved in the thousands of years after.
I do not think a lifetime of study would be sufficient to appreciate the diversity and depth of ideas developed in these traditions. Much of it cannot be understood without direct experience between oneself and the world around them, which is where the impetus behind yoga and meditation come from; sure, they have physical benefits as somatic exercises, but they’re embedded in broader frameworks about understanding one’s psychology.
Personally, I draw a lot of my beliefs out of Kashmir Shaivism, which posits that a single universal consciousness defines all of existence, and material reality is a finite contraction of an infinite reality with creative experience as an end into itself. An infinite being can never experience beind told a story, so it requires a finite version of its existence to experience hope and suspense, comedy and tragedy. Ultimately we are all drops in an ocean, and our ego is both a necessity to see the gift of being a finite drop and a barrier to recognizing our true nature as the ocean itself. Within the microcosm is the macrocosm, as the saying goes.
Note that in the above description, I never once used the words “religion”, “philosophy”, or “spirituality.” If you asked me what religion I identify with, what cultural traditions I inherit, what kind of philosophies I apply to life, and where I derive my spiritual practices from, I would say “Hinduism” to all.
So the question is, what do you mean when you’re asking me to distinguish between a “religious” practice and a “spiritual” practice?
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Are you asking if I believe in God? I would ask you if my description of a universal consciousness that forms the substrate from which all finite things emerge satisfies your definition of God.
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Are you asking if I believe in souls? I would ask you if the formulation of an impermanent ego that has never left the permanent consciousness from which it emerges satisfies your definition of “soul.”
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Are you asking if I believe there’s a rational order to the universe according to some core higher maxims? I would ask if you consider the pattern of things creating other things to be rationally motivated or just a property of a reality in motion.
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Are you asking me if there’s some force that evens the scales according to justice, love, or balance? I would say the universe has justice, love, and balance just as it has injustice, hate, and imbalance; if there is a force that evens the scales, it’s the same force that renders them uneven too.
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Are you asking me what I do to practice letting go of my attachments and chase a transcendental experience? Pratyabhijna, or the term used in Kashmir Shaivist circles to refer to internalizing the recognition of the individual self as the Universal Self. I approach it similarly to the way Buddhists use koans to break analytical reasoning and force a mode of thinking that deals with the concepts, or non-conceptual processes if you prefer, beyond the descriptive limits of language and material reality. I can go to a Recovery Dharma meeting and get much of the same core practices and teachings that my understanding of Kashmir Shaivism shares.
So, where do these labels like “religion”, “philosophy”, and “spirituality” come in?
Welcome to the New Age
I have a burning passion for the legacy of the New Age movement.
I can acknowledge some very valid tendencies behind wanting to understand new approaches to life, especially to overcome the feeling of something missing in yours in our global society’s hyperindividualistic ratrace to fill a black hole of meaning through one material bucket of dissociation at a time. We as humans seek novelty and experimentation, and I love diversity and trade as the creative engines of human society.
I can sympathize a lot with having limited access to information about another culture, thus forming inaccurate but well-meaning interpretations of their ideas and traditions. Rest assured that if you are someone who actively seeks knowledge to help yourself grow and share it with others in your community, I am not aiming this at you. You’re almost certainly doing the best with what you have to work with, which reflects on the systems around you rather than you as an individual.
What I despise is the attempt by institutions to treat these categories as rigid enough to generalize, manualize, and operationalize.
My first experience with these came through AA literature and The Four Agreements, both of which are treated as “spiritual” rather than “religious” despite drawing on explicitly religious traditions in their history and substance. It’s perfectly fine if these are options presented to people as ways to explore themselves, but it is the norm rather than the exception that literature like this becomes part of a syllabus or curriculum as a starting point for recovery approaches in institutions like treatment centers. I was very vexed about the decision to label these as “spiritual” when it seemed to be pushing a particular hyperindividualistic perennialism that is fundamentally incompatible with the belief systems practiced by billions around the world.
The answer is disappointingly simple: marketing.
That’s it.
Just like “Artificial Intelligence” is used to imply that statistical models are sentient reasoning agents capable of replacing humans instead of requiring even more humans to operate the new machinery.
Just like “evidence-based” is used to imply that a treatment is driven by the latest evidence to be as effective as possible, when it really tends to mean manualized treatment that is easy to produce evidence for in controlled trials.
Just like “Toltec” is used to imply lineage to an ancient mystical Mesoamerican civilization and culture, when actual Mesoamerican scholars point out that celebrity authors of the New Age movement created a version of the Toltecs that does not match the archaeological evidence we now have.
Just like “Eastern” is used to imply something mystical, ancient, and collectivist in contrast to “Western” rationality, industrialism, and individualism even in the works of transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (see Edward Said’s Orientalism for a very thorough breakdown of this).
Similarly, “spirituality” has been a rhetorical tool. Sometimes it’s used to market something derived from religion but without the institutional organization. Sometimes it’s used to add exoticism to a philosophy that wouldn’t actually be coherent or digestible without the, pardon the technical term, “woo-woo.”
The New Age gurus, pundits, magicians, diviners, prophets, old wise men, liberated witches, esoteric archivists, alternative healing practitioners, supplement factories, life coaches, wellness lifestyles, publishing houses, influencers, celebrities, online merchandisers, and countless others have formed an industry that never rises to the metaphysics of religion nor the empiricism of science. They’re simply spiritual, no less individualistic and hedonistic than the materialism it claims to address but with a garnish of foreign words to appear transcendental. In short, the New Age spiritual movements encourage dissociating from the world and into your own mental reality even harder in response to materialism.
And again, that might actually work for people. I don’t have to like it in order to acknowledge its efficacy. I have no doubt lots of people have developed coping skills or improved their health through exposure to the industry. When it enters the recovery space through institutional acknowledgement, we have a problem, because we’re leaving the space of consumer choice and entering the space of wellness and health. Something like The Four Agreements goes from a book on a shelf at Barnes & Nobles that you might flick through to standard reading in treatment paid for by insurance companies and administered by healthcare professionals or paraprofessionals. This can lead to really disastrous moments like telling someone living with domestic violence that “no one can abuse you more than you abuse yourself” or claiming the government isn’t taking away your freedom as much as you are for having a part of you that insists on playing The Victim. Real things from real books that reached real people while being marketed as a liberating framework.
But it’s a “spiritual” reading, so it doesn’t have to be evaluated by religious authorities or researchers with expertise. The prescriptions it gives don’t have to be tested through randomized controlled trials or undergo peer-review before it gets published and distributed into treatment. It gets by on the standard of inducing good vibes and a “take what works, leave what doesn’t” approach to coherence. You’ll notice I use that phrase specifically as a disclaimer that I’m not prescribing solutions, only presenting my own analysis. That’s the opposite of what the New Age literature does by creating vast generalizations out of a syncretic piecemeal approach to very intensive philosophical traditions that are then haphazardly synthesized through personal anecedotes.
That’s where we have to start making institutional critiques.
Publish or Perish
The Four Agreements is a thread that I never tire of pulling on.
The publishing company behind The Four Agremeents is Allen & Allen, based out of San Rafael in Southern California. The project that put them on the map of New Age publishing was The Chronicles of Seth by a woman claiming to be possessed by a spirit named Seth who would share the secret to changing reality with your mind.
For those who may not know, Southern California is home to a lot of mental health programs and industries. There’s a strong network of universities like the UCs (Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego) and private colleges like USC and the Claremont-McKenna group. The entertainment industry has both some of the wealthiest clients and wealthiest proponents of mental health and wellness services. Municipalities like Ojai, Topanga, and Sedona are home to lots of businesses and organizations that spawned out of historical attempts to address tuberculosis with nature retreats. Southern California is very well-structured to amplify countercultural trends, though much of it is born out of a focus on individual self-actualization.
The way The Four Agreements became popular connects these dots. After Ellen DeGeneres came out as gay, she was blacklisted from the entertainment industry and spent time in the spiritual communities in SoCal. [WIP]
To the West
In practice, much of this ends up reinforcing individualism. Yoga and breathwork become personal wellness exercises to relieve stress rather than a set of principles to liberate oneself from an ego that undergoes worldly suffering. Karma is seen as an external force that ensures “what goes around comes around” instead of a principle by which any action done with bad intentions has ongoing consequences. Mindfulness is seen as a self-awareness tool that can help one achieve their goals better when right mindfulness is just one of the parts of the Eightfold Path which are intended to be taken together. A serial killer can be very mindful of their inner self while they cause harm to others after all. Meditation and mindfulness are intended to question the notion of a permanent self and the ego seeking attachments, but they end up becoming coping or self-actualization mechanisms that focus on increasing the self’s wellbeing and strength.