7 Spiritual Ideas That are Total Bullshit

7 Spiritual Ideas That are Total Bullshit

Let’s be brutally honest for a second:
There’s a lot of bullshit floating around in the world of spirituality.
Pseudoscience, fake “gurus,” hand-waving, woo woo, conspiracy theories, unproven health “secrets,” posturing, cotton-soft faux-spirituality… the list goes on.
Having said that, it might be surprising to learn the following:
I consider myself a deeply spiritual person.
I’ve had mystical experiences in which the boundaries between myself and all the cosmos seemed to dissolve, revealing the inseparability of all things.
Experiences in which I felt universal empathy and compassion for all creatures wandering through this same labyrinth of creation.
Experiences of soaring, breathless awe and wonder in the face of our sublime and incomprehensibly vast universe.
Such experiences have left me with a deep reverence for the grand riddle of Nature—a reverence that is surely spiritual.
And yet…
I kind of grimace internally when I tell people that I’m a “spiritual” person.
The word comes with a lot of… baggage.
It triggers numerous assumptions about who I am and what I believe.

Meme via Contrived Platitudes
This is a disheartening and limiting state of affairs.
So one of my goals in this article is to set the record straight.
To show that I and many other spiritual people are more than stereotypes.
To show that spirituality and skepticism are not mutually exclusive.
To show that one can be spiritual while also being critical of certain misguided notions in the spiritual, hippie, New Age, and/or countercultural memespaces.
In addition, my main goal is to invite you to question various stagnant, sneaky, misleading, and/or insidious spiritual ideas that may have taken root in your minds.
The aim here is not to shit on spirituality.
Spirituality can be many things. Again, it can’t be pinned down to simplistic stereotypes or a few cherrypicked viewpoints.
The aim is to provide food for thought, questioning, realization.
I personally believed some version of most of these ideas at some point in the past, so I know how attractive they can be.
But I didn’t stop questioning, and my views kept changing.
I’ve learned that if you remain open and curious, there always seem to be deeper levels of understanding.
If there’s one thing you take from this article, I hope it’s the inspiration to Never. Stop. Questioning.
Now, without further ado, I’m going to deconstruct seven ideas held by some spiritual people—ideas that are at best shaky when scrutinized, and, at worst, total bullshit.
Let’s get into it.

1. Violence is never justified.

There’s a strong tendency toward pacifism in much of the spiritual community. This is definitely understandable. I hate violence and am nearly a pacifist myself. I deeply hope that peace, cooperation, love, and understanding will win out over the forces of division and violence that threaten to tear our world apart.
However, a lot of people take this position too far, in the tradition of Gandhi, asserting that violence is never justified.
This argument doesn’t hold water. Let’s say I’m a father, and I’m outside on a walk with my 5-year-old daughter. Suddenly, an obviously deranged person leaps out of a bush wielding a knife. He takes one look at my daughter, raises the knife, and starts charging toward her with a wild look in his eyes. In this situation, a Gandhian pacifist would hold that I should not defend my daughter. I should simply try to run away or reason with the violent individual. This seems self-evidently absurd.
We can make this even more clear-cut. Let’s say, by some twist of fate, I find myself tied up by a terrorist who is torturing my family and shows every sign of intending to murder them. In my hand, by some great fortune, I have a remote control. If I push the button on the remote, a device previously implanted in the terrorist will activate, and he will be poisoned to death. Gandhian pacifists would say that I am not justified in pushing the button. Me? I would push the fuck out of that button, and I’d go as far as to say that anyone who wouldn’t push the button is not an ethical person.
Gandhian pacifism makes even less sense when we consider violence on a mass scale. In World War II, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were hell-bent on world domination and unprecedented genocide. We can assert with near certainty that nothing short of violence could have deterred them from this mission. A Gandhian pacifist would be forced to conclude that the Allies should have simply surrendered, ran away, hid, or tried to reason with the Axis powers. In an interview after World War II, Gandhi himself once made this shocking statement:

“Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs… It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany… As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.”

Gandhi actually said this shit
Gandhi actually went as far as to suggest that millions of Jews should have simply “offered themselves to the butcher’s knife” in order to “arouse the world.” Anyone who hero-worships Gandhi should really take a step back and ponder this statement for a few minutes. Ironically, even if the Jews voluntarily surrendered their lives and “aroused the world,” what exactly could the world have done about it, if they too were practicing non-violence? Abso-fucking-lutely nothing. Thus Gandhi’s position is again shown to be absurd and unethical. In some cases, violence is necessary to neutralize an evil enemy attempting to take innocent lives.
As a final example, consider the most clear-cut case I can think of: A terrorist has gotten his hands on a molecular nanotechnology weapon. Unless he is stopped, he will unleash a swarm of self-replicating nanobots that will promptly convert the biosphere into a heap of trillions of nanobots, destroying all life on Earth. This is the classic “grey goo” doomsday scenario. You happen to be a sniper who is watching the terrorist from a mile away. You can see clearly that he’s about to use the weapon. There’s no time for any other course of action. You either shoot him dead, or you allow the complete destruction of life on Earth. Again, anyone who would not pull the trigger in this situation seems to me to be profoundly unethical.
Now, admittedly, this is a question of morality, and as far as I’m aware, there is no objective standard of morality, so there’s no way I can prove that Gandhian pacifism is an incorrect stance. I hope, however, that these examples have elucidated that Gandhian pacifism, when taken to its logical conclusion, allows for monumentally fucked up things to happen that could have been prevented. Again, I’m nearly a pacifist. I think violence should be an absolute last resort. But in some cases, it’s overwhelmingly clear to me that violence is not only justified, but an ethical imperative.

2. Culture, society, and “the Man” are nothing but oppressive forces.

This is something of a classic hippie idea. I love hippies, but they didn’t get everything right.
Like many countercultural platitudes, there is some truth in this, but it’s been taken too far, to the point of being an extreme and reactionary viewpoint.
Yes, cultures and societies are inevitably oppressive for everyone who exists within them. This is because they come with a whole bunch of norms—standards of acceptable and unacceptable behaviors—and they pressure the people existing within them to abide by these norms. And invariably none of us fit perfectly into these societal molds; we have plenty of whims, desires, ideas, fantasies, and dreams that are considered out of bounds. This conflict sucks. It creates a lot of suffering.
But this is only one side of the coin.
Jordan Peterson has noted that society is simultaneously a tyrant and a wise king. The tyrant is the oppressive side that forces you to conform in ways that conflict with your true desires. The wise king, however, is the side that many anti-establishment types overlook.
Humans are known to have a negativity bias: negative events impact us more deeply, and we tend to focus on the negative aspects of things, often blinding ourselves to the positive. Nowhere does this seem more true than in discussions of culture and society among countercultural types. “The Man” is nothing but a nasty dictator who just wants to “bring us down” and ruin all our fun, or else society is actually just a giant conspiracy to dumb down and enslave everyone.
But what about all of the miraculously good, life-improving aspects of our modern cultures and societies?
“Like what?,” the snarky counterculturalist asks.
Like, oh, I don’t know, how about the supercomputer you’re using to read this—the same one that gives you instantaneous access to humanity’s accumulated wisdom, most of history’s manmade beauty, and any other human with a computer, anywhere on the planet. That’s a pretty cool thing.
But let’s get more fundamental. Think about the elaborate supply chains and systems of agriculture we’ve devised that manage to feed nearly all of the 7.6 billion of us, while requiring only a tiny percentage of us to actually work on food production and distribution. In the absence of these systems, most all of us would need to be small-scale farmers and/or hunter-gatherers, and there’s no way in hell we’d be meeting and exceeding most of humanity’s basic needs as well as we are currently.
Think about plumbing systems, transportation networks, systems of cooling and heating, reliable structures to live/work in, running water, toilet paper, medical technology, comfortable clothes and furniture, refrigerators, ovens, fucking electricity. These things didn’t just fall from the sky. They were painstakingly invented over the course of centuries because we created this walled garden called civilization that shielded us from the vicious death-maze of the natural world and freed up a lot of our time to work on making cool shit to improve our lives.


Nowadays billions of us live in a veritable techno-wonderland in which life is more comfortable than ever before; in which each of us has incalculable technological power at our fingertips; and in which we’re largely free to live our lives however the hell we want. Not to mention that we’re all less likely now than ever before to live in extreme poverty or die at the hands of another human being.
And let’s not forget about the non-material inventions most of us reading this enjoy and benefit from: you know, freedom of speech, basic human rights, freedom of artistic expression, equality of opportunity, civil liberties, the right to a fair trial, etc.
And you want to throw all that away?
Sorry, but no. Open your eyes. Your ancestors figured out a whole fucking mountain of useful and amazing shit, and it’s all built so seamlessly into your life that you don’t even notice it. Do not underestimate how difficult life was in the state of nature, or how much blood, sweat, and tears have been shed in order to create the advances that have turned your life into a kind of Shangri-La your distant ancestors wouldn’t even recognize.
It’s a miracle that things function as well as they do, and this miracle was made possible by many millennia of individuals laboring to create more wonderful cultures and societies. Your culture and society represent an age-old legacy, a birthright passed down through countless generations. Don’t be so quick to decide they’re just trash. Don’t commit the Nirvana fallacy and judge our actual world by comparing it to your idealized fantasy of a non-existent utopia.
And yes, what we’ve got is still far from perfect. And yes, we should keep imagining ways to make it all much better. And yes, it sucks to feel the pressures of society. But if you have integrity, you won’t focus exclusively on these truths without also acknowledging everything fucking awesome and high-functioning about our present situation.

3. Meditation is a purely blissful pathway to love, light, peace, and goodness.

A lot of people in the spiritual community are meditators and meditation advocates, which is cool. Meditation is a tool for self-awareness and self-liberation that has been used for thousands of years. Numerous scientific studies have suggested a number of marvelous benefits that come with meditation practice. And meditation challenges form the core foundation of our course, 30 Challenges to Enlightenment. We love meditation.
With that being said, most people have a misconception of what meditation is or can be. Within the spiritual community, the most common image of a meditator is that of a person sitting cross-legged in silence with a slight smile on their face, perhaps in a natural setting. Meditation is associated with inner peace, realms of light, a transcendence of darkness and worldly concerns. It’s viewed as a purely positive experience, akin to floating away on a soft cloud of bliss.

But meditation is not all fun and games. Sure, when you first start meditating, you’re likely to have a pretty chill, peaceful experience. You’re just sitting quietly, focusing on your breathing, and returning your attention to your breath when you get distracted. All is well. This might be your experience for years.
But if you progress far enough with meditation, you’ll almost certainly encounter things that aren’t so rosy. In essence, advanced forms of meditation are means of directly observing your own mind, drilling down into your psyche to see yourself and your existence as clearly as possible and to accept reality non-judgmentally.
Eventually this process will lead you into “the places that scare you,” as Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron puts it. Meditate for long enough and you will be confronted with your deepest fears. You will come face to face with the fact of the inevitable deaths of you and everyone you love. You will uncover your own shadow—the parts of yourself that you reject, repress, and normally refuse to look at; the memories, impulses, urges, and desires that your society deems taboo. You will see yourself clearly, in all your beauty and hideousness, and you will need to find a way to accept who you are.
This is not to be taken lightly. Eventually, meditation will likely transport you into your own personal hell, and you’ll have no choice but to find your way through it. Granted, on the other side of this hell you may realize mythical levels of spacious awareness, acceptance, and freedom. But getting there is no joke.
If you take meditation seriously enough, you’ll likely eventually reach a point where you need a supportive meditation community, or an experienced teacher or guru, to guide you forward in the process. Vinay Gupta, a meditation expert, has even suggested that it’s a good idea to spend substantial time with a psychologist prior to diving too deeply into meditation, in order to start navigating your shadow and unresolved traumas with an expert, prior to encountering these things solo through meditation. This is an especially good idea if you’re depressed or otherwise mentally unwell.
This side of meditation is rarely discussed. If one looks only at the popular culture surrounding meditation, one would never guess that the practice can (and eventually probably should) take you to the darkest internal spaces you’ve ever visited. But this is the truth, and more people need to be aware of it.

4. The “ego” is an enemy that needs to be transcended.

Many spiritual people are, ironically, obsessed with the ego—the “I,” the personal, conscious self.
Depending who you ask in spiritual communities, you’re likely to hear that the ego is the evil root of most of our problems. Thus, the ego needs to be destroyed, transcended, and/or revealed as an illusion.
This attitude creates a paradoxical internal situation rife with cognitive dissonance: It places you in a position of being at war with yourself.
“There is something evil inside you that needs to be rooted out, done away with,” the ego-haters proclaim.[1]
This attitude is exceptionally toxic. It creates a sense of guilt and a feeling of being trapped in a hopeless predicament. One imagines that somehow one needs to “ascend” beyond one’s identity and self in order to become a genuinely “good” or “enlightened” person. This sounds suspiciously like a reformulation of Christianity’s “original sin” narrative.

But relinquishing the ego is monumentally difficult, perhaps impossible. Even if our selves do not have any essential nature, as Buddhism teaches, the vast majority of us are never going to transcend our personal identities and narratives, or let go of all of our attachments, desires, preferences, and expectations.
And would we actually want to? Aren’t such things important components of our individuality?
I’m all for gradually letting go of everything that does not feel authentic to oneself. Hell, I’m all for letting go of most things and giving very few fucks, but to me it’s also essential to reserve a few remaining fucks for the things I care deeply about: creating useful and/or beautiful things, improving the world, learning endlessly, doing fun shit, traveling the Earth, and having loving relationships.
Instead of trying to eradicate our personal identity, we’re better off working to accept ourselves just as we are, while also cultivating spaciousness within our minds, so that we may see ourselves more clearly, take ourselves less seriously, and refrain from over-identifying with our personal identity and narrative, instead learning to see it as one of many possible stories about who we are.
Meditation can help us with this. Non-judgmentally observing our minds, without assigning fixed meanings to anything, creates the space we need to see ourselves clearly. It creates the space to stop living reactively, which increases freedom.
This isn’t about eliminating the ego; it’s simply about creating the space to see it clearly. In doing so, one comes to see the ego as more of a wily friend, a tool, an amoral container of individuality, and a bundle of sometimes useful, sometimes counterproductive processes.
Joseph Campbell was referring to this process of reframing our relationship to the ego when he wrote, “How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick.”
A fundamental precept of Tantric Buddhism is that you are just fine, right now, just as you are. This is a much more empowering, productive, and calming starting-point for self- or spiritual development than, “There is an evil selfish part of you that needs to be destroyed.”
Knowing that you are fine just as you are does not preclude the possibility of continuing to learn, grow, and walk an ever healthier and more meaningful path. As David Chapman writes, “Tantra allows you to view your counter-productive habits with some affection and humor—even as you try to overcome them.”
Your ego is not evil. It is not your enemy. Befriend it. Observe its peculiar movements. Train it, through good habits of body and mind, to be a noble actor in the world.

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5. The differences between religions are trivial because, at root, they’re really all saying the same thing.

Maybe you’ve heard of the “perennial philosophy,” which refers to the idea that all religions, beneath their surface differences, actually point to the same fundamental Truth.
This idea is fundamental to the New Age movement and has been championed by luminaries such as Aldous Huxley and Joseph Campbell.
In his 1945 book, The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley defined the perennial philosophy as:

“… the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical to, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being; the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions.”

Joseph Campbell, in a similar vein, suggested that all religious mythologies contained metaphors pointing to the same great and awe-inspiring mystery of being confronted by all humans across time and space.
Now, let me say first of all that I have tremendous respect for both Campbell and Huxley, and I don’t think these brilliant thinkers were wrong, per se, about this universal element found in all religions.
I think there is a strong case to be made for the idea that mystics throughout history, in different traditions, had similar earth-shattering experiences of the Cosmos, the Mystery, divine Reality—whatever you wish to call it—and simply interpreted and expressed their experiences through whatever their particular cultural and mythological lens happened to be—and that some of these culturally specific stories about mystical experiences became foundational aspects of various religions.
At the same time, I do think it’s fairly presumptuous to assume that all mystics throughout history, in every religion, had fundamentally similar experiences and were pointing to precisely the same underlying thing, and that therefore all the religious mythologies that emerged from their teachings are also pointing to precisely the same thing. But let’s set that aside for now.
Even though I believe there is merit in what Huxley and Campbell were saying about the perennial philosophy, I think their espousal of this viewpoint had unintended and pernicious consequences.
The perennial philosophy has become quite popular in spiritual circles, resulting in many people believing some version of the following:
“The differences between religions are trivial and don’t really matter, because when you get down to it they’re really all about peace and love and the one Divine Reality.”
This is a an insulting, dangerous, and untenable point of view.
For one, this viewpoint is a readymade reason to dismiss and shrug off the mountains of specific practices, intricacies of belief, artifacts and objects, ideological nuances, geographical and historical contexts, esoteric rituals, distinct sects and denominations, and numerous other aspects that clearly distinguish religions from one another. Religions are among the richest and most complex human social phenomena, and to wipe away their countless differences in service of a hyper-reductive “all religions are the same” narrative is an insult to the diversity of humanity.
Beyond that, it’s simply not the case that these differences are trivial. Is it really trivial that Buddhists don’t believe in any god or deity, while Catholics believe in a wrathful male god who watches all of our actions and will send us to an eternal pit of torture and flame if we misbehave? Or that various modern incarnations of Islam(ism) limit women’s rights in significant ways, while most other modern religions do not do so (to the same extent)? Or that Pagans believe in worshiping and preserving the Earth, while Christian doctrine tells us we are meant to “rule over” the animals and all the Earth? Should we ignore the complex and extensive history of religiously motivated violence, or the fact that some modern religions seem to inspire more violence than others?

(Image Source)
Ignoring the differences between religions is not only insulting, it’s irresponsible. 

While it may be true that most religions have some significant and heartening general similarities, the devil, ironically, is in the details. Religions are massive ideological and cultural structures undergirding a colossal amount of human activity in the world today, and we need to be able to distinguish between them in order to criticize their unique flaws and applaud their unique boons.
I would argue that it’s more important to look at what modern adherents of various religions actually believe and do than to try to hunt for hidden metaphors and snippets of language indicating a universal message beneath all the external hubbub.
I’m all for comparative mythology and its profound unifying lessons, but at the end of the day religions are essentially ideological software programs being carried around and acted out by real-world, flawed human beings. In order to understand them and guide their development in a wise direction, we need to observe how they function in the real world, and we need to be honest about their nuanced similarities and differences.

6. All is One. “You” are an illusion.

Many spiritual people proclaim versions of the idea that “All is One,” that “you are the universe,” that boundaries do not actually exist.
Now, we should distinguish this view from the view that human beings are continuous with the universe—that we do have individual existences, but that we are also inseparable parts of the whole interdependent process of reality. This view was expounded especially eloquently by the late Alan Watts:

“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”

And on another occasion:

“You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.”

Such statements place Watts in a camp similar to that of Carl Sagan, who posited that we are “a way for the cosmos to know itself.” But others take a more extreme view, holding that you simply are the entire universe, and your individual existence is something to be regarded as a persistent delusion. In philosophical terms, this position is known as monism, which can be contrasted with dualism—the view that reality contains unambiguously separate objects.
Prior to the countercultural era of the 1960s, the Western world had for many centuries been fairly heavily entrenched in the dualist point of view. Alan Watts and others rebelled against this status quo, calling attention to the interconnectedness of all things and the ambiguous nature of the boundary between the self and reality.
The fatal flaw of some of these teachers was that in rebelling against dualism, they swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction, embracing pure monism. If you’ve ever had the intuition that there is more to the story than “All is One,” you’ve detected the problem with monism: It fails to recognize the specifics of the world, the uniqueness of individuals, and the most basic thing “common sense” tells us about ourselves: that we are, at least in some sense, distinct from everything else. In a poignant critique of monism, cognitive scientist David Chapman writes:

“If All is One, then there is no boundary, and you are really the entire universe. Typically, monists say that the universe is equivalent to God, so you are actually also God. As you realize everything is totally connected, you develop the ability to affect anything you want.
This is the ultimate fantasy of power and invulnerability. However, convincing yourself that you are All-powerful, when you aren’t, does not make your life go well.
When the fantasy collides with reality, monists retreat into a make-believe magical world. Monism produces dreamy spaciness, refusal to make any clear distinctions, refusal to judge. This leads to drifting through life, expecting other people to clean up your messes, contributing nothing except spiritual clichés mouthed at unwanted times.”

Not only is monism incorrect, but it tends to lead to bad outcomes. It’s pretty difficult to establish and maintain strong boundaries if you truly believe boundaries don’t exist and your individual self is an illusion. But in the trenches of day-to-day life, maintaining healthy boundaries, distinguishing between people, and taking responsibility for yourself are of course indispensable skills.

Chapman goes on to suggest that both monism and dualism are incorrect and proposes a “complete stance” called “participation” that combines the correct aspects of both monism and dualism. He defines “participation” as follows:

“Participation is the stance that revels in the extraordinary variability of the world, that loves and engages with specifics and individuals; and also appreciates the porous self/other boundary, works skillfully with diverse connections, and accepts responsibility for whatever you encounter.”

In other words: You are an inextricable portion of the reality-process that may or may not have begun with the Big Bang. You are comprised of the same atoms as everything else. In some sense, you are the universe. But in another sense, you’re definitely you, distinct from everything else. “Participation” is an approach to life that acknowledges and integrates both of these truths.
To the extent that some spiritual people insist that we are all simply the universe and nothing else, I would argue that they are wrong. In their excitement to embrace “All is One,” they overlook the valuable aspects of dualism: that (porous, ambiguous) boundaries do exist, and that this allows for individuality and for the game of human existence to occur.

7. You have to believe in something to be spiritual.

This myth is probably circulated more outside the spiritual community than within it, but it’s really worth mentioning here.
There’s a toxic stereotype of spiritual people as necessarily believing in a bunch of questionable pseudoscientific stuff, like the Law of Attraction, or the coming of the Age of Aquarius, or the third eye, or the healing power of crystals, or whatever this meme is making fun of:

Meme via Contrived Platitudes, probably the best Facebook page ever
Harmless LOLz aside, I’m not here to bash on people who believe in such things or to assert that such notions are definitely false. I’m ultimately agnostic about almost everything. Whereas most people think in terms of either believing in something or not believing in it, I think of my viewpoints in terms of how confident I am that something is true, and I’m never 100% sure. This approach is similar to Bayesian thinking.
The point is that I don’t believe in anything absolutely. 
You might wonder, “Wait, is it really possible to be deeply spiritual without any kind of absolute faith or belief?”
Yes, it really is.
Just take a look at people like Robert Anton Wilson, Carl Sagan, Sam Harris, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Terence McKenna—all deeply skeptical, scientifically minded, and deeply spiritual in some sense. I suspect there are millions of people like this.
I’ve quoted Carl Sagan on this point many times previously, but hell, once more can’t hurt:

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”

Or consider the words of Einstein:

“The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties — this knowledge, this feeling … that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men.”

Spirituality, in my view, is above all a capacity for what Einstein calls the “mystic emotion,” elsewhere translated as an experience of “the mysterious.” When we gaze upwards at the stars and sense the sheer magnitude of this cosmos in which we find ourselves—when we, through science and dedicated inquiry, begin to glimpse the glorious intricacies of the natural laws and subatomic building blocks that make up the visible world—we feel a sense of awe at the ineffability, inscrutability, and magnificence of this universe in which we find ourselves. We marvel at the sliver of this grand design which we are able to fathom with our feeble ape minds.
Absolute belief is utterly unnecessary for this form of spirituality. If anything, the assumption of final knowledge may detract from one’s ability to truly taste the oceanic mystery of this miraculous existence.

Conclusion: Beware of red pills.

Most of the ideas I refuted in this article have something in common: They’re red pills.
By “red pill” I mean an idea that makes you feel like you’re in on a giant earth-shattering secret—an idea that makes you feel you’ve “woken up” from the matrix that most people are trapped in because you now know The Real Truth.
Red pills are everywhere, not just in the spirituality memespace. Various movements and communities all over the world are peddling various forms of The Knowledge That Will Change Everything For You.
I’ve taken a lot of red pills in my life, so I know how seductive they can be. It feels great to think you’re in on some precious secret and more enlightened than all the “sheeple” who can’t see the truth.
The problem is that the vast majority of red pills turn out to be bullshit in some way. Usually they’re too all-encompassing, a new form of dogma: “Reality is the EXACT OPPOSITE of everything you’ve been taught!!”
No, usually it isn’t. It’s somewhere in-between. Reality can rarely, if ever, be characterized by sweeping, all-encompassing generalizations. Things are too complex. But because our minds crave security and certainty, it’s easy to swing from one form of Gospel to another.
Instead of doing this, learn to allow room for complexity and ambiguity. Be highly skeptical of any claims to Final Answers and instead assume that our current answers and models are incomplete, in need of further refinement.
If we’re able to do this, the world opens up to us. When we relinquish the need for certainty, curiosity is allowed to blossom, and the world becomes a never-ending series of interesting questions and investigations, with endless exciting new perspectives to gain.
When we embrace ambiguity, we stop living reactively based on our idea of fixed truth; we stop insisting on the correctness of our views and feeling insecure when others disagree. This is liberating—a weight off our shoulders, a new sense of spaciousness in which we can simply listen to what others are saying and see many perspectives on any given issue, situation, or conflict.
In sum:
I don’t have all the answers.
Spiritual people don’t have all the answers.
No group in human history has had all the answers.
If you ever feel like you’ve got everything figured out, it’s time to take a step back.
As Robert Anton Wilson put it, “Only the madman is absolutely sure.”
Now, go forth and be curious. Peace and love, human.

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Footnotes:
[1] I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this attitude seems a lot like a repackaging of Christianity’s “original sin” hypothesis. Many New Age and spiritual ideas are, in fact, rebrandings of much older religious ideas, Christian or otherwise (e.g. Note the sameness of, “Thank you, Universe. I know you will protect me.” and “Thank you, God. I know you will protect me.”).


Thanks to: http://highexistence.com

Excellent article. They even get the hubris of the "red-pill" fad.
I challenged Jill Babcock (who I refer to as "Namaste Barbie") on an Instagram post where she claimed "resistance is useless", followed by hashtags like #enlightened and #endlessduckfacedselfies. I brought up the WWII scenario of a charasmatic mad-man with a strong military openly attacking others and the nessesity at that time to stand up to him, which is an example of "noble violence/ resistance."
She blew it off with new-age justifications. Hey, she makes tons of money with her easy answers. Why would she stop now?

Just an FYI for you ave. Hitler was funded by the US corporations, Westinghouse, IBM etc and Hitlers body was never recovered. Think Bin Laden?. I am really quite surprised at your continuing attachment to the history books. Let me see if I can make things easier for you. My g/f has a 16yo son....He says to me the other day that in grade school they taught him Columbus discovered America, in Middle School the told him he didnt discover America and high school they taught him that Columbus committed genocide against the Native Americans....Imagine that...a history book with lies in it...And your reference to WW2.......Did you know that from 1941-1949 according the the World Almanac and the Jewish Ledger, along with the Red cross that the jewish population went up every year...How could that be with the holocaust? The lies are everywhere ave, you really need to start tapping those nails out of the box of life you live in...Next thing you know, they will tell you the civil war(mercenary action) had to do with trade and Lincolns status as an BAR attorney as the reason for the start of the conflict...Imagine that!

The Red Cross? You don't think they were part of the "unified conspiracy theory?"
Yep, "Hitler was right", meaning that the Jews are ALL evil and he was fighting a noble battle....
Nope.

Ave, broaden your thoughts as the picture is much larger...What happened as a direct result of WW2 that was of benefit to the jews? Bingo...get it? (Hint...Think May 14, 1948....)

Uh, the state of Israel???
The state Trump loves?
You are the definition of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.

There is rhythm is all of it ave, you just need to find it. The puzzle will all come together for you if you can.

Is this the same guy who claims to have been in the Dulce base but didn't bring a camera?
Sounds like a regular James Bond...
Tell him I think he is a parasite on our government and to stop cashing all those checks he gets from the (evil) federal government!

Ave, you hear people knocking but you just wont let them in...You will in time....

You sound like Cindy Kay Currier.

Avebury wrote:You sound like Cindy Kay Currier.

You sound like someone who refuses to believe TNT with a live fuse won't hurt you because societies conditioning told you so.

At my age and I have been around a while Ave, I find there are people who know much more than I, have experienced much more than I, and dismissing or ridiculing what they can pass on is stupid in the extreme. 

The truth of this planet is pretty much a simple one Ave, with few exceptions we are all debt slaves in one form or another, we watch sheepdogs and shepherds moving livestock and think no more of it without knowing they have more freedom in that system than we do in ours

Keep chewing the grass Ave, the bliss of ignorance is much more preferable to some than facing the truths that are there to be seen.

Or you could try to question what you see or question your guides as a physic, are they real or pretend?

Well I for one think we should be grateful to have Avebury on this site.........after all he is a psychic.........so theoretically he should have all the answers for us..........well if anything.........he is perhaps amusing to say the least..........my CIA friend enjoys many a good laughs from Avebury's posts.........like I said before........Avebury keeps my old friend young........laughter and long life go hand in hand................

Psychic? NOT until he tells ME what type, make, model and year of the car that I had in high school....... :er3:Oh yeah, and the color it was-

You do understand that psychic power is not some carnival game, right? It is not to entertain you with parlor tricks either. No lottery numbers either.
If you can't remember the make and model of your first car, you need real help, not a psychic...

P.S. Have your "CIA" buddy contact me, I'd LOVE to call him out on his bullshit to his face. I can't wait to hear him tell me ALL about the classified secrets he's not supposed to share.

Gotcha!!You JUST answered my question-You are no more psychic than I am German Shepard.......End of story-

Once again Avebury you crack me up......god what the fuck does it take to make you happy anyway ?

So now you want me to give you my CIA friends number........who just turned 86 by the way........so that you can yell and scream at him..........wow........not only are you a psychic........but you are also into elder abuse...........but then again being psychic.........you already knew that I was not going to give you his number..........

But I will say this my little keyboard warrior...........you do have a little way about you.......of brightening up my day..........with your off the wall humor...........please don't ever change.........you are Libtard humor at its finest............frankly you are a more naïve version of Al Franken.......without all the fringe benefits so to speak............please don't ever change..........

Did you fail English?
"......." Between every one of your spastic thoughts just comes off as autistic.

As for your invalid "CIA/FBI" friend, why bring him up if he can't "come out to play?"