Disrupt Yourself

Indeed, these days, as being human feels ever more painful and precarious, we are witnessing a spirituality boom led by yoga and mindfulness and new-age-ness and generally being spiritual but not religious. It’s interesting and inspiring, and it’s potentially making things worse. Because unless we’re conscious about how and why we employ spiritual practices, we’ll bring to them the same self-interested, self-pitying mind that pervades the rest of our lives. Just as everything looks like a nail to a hammer, the self-interested, self-pitying mind sees everything, even spirituality, as being all about me. This issue is known as spiritual materialism—when we use spiritual practice to strengthen the ego’s stories and demands instead of releasing them. If we look, we can see this happening within and around us.

As a yoga teacher, I have seen our culture turn this practice into a performance piece of vanity and consumerism. As an MBA, I have watched corporate types warp meditation into a way to mostly support material success and then wonder why they still suffer. As a college professor and hospital chaplain, I witness how being new age and spiritual but not religious often lacks clear practices and instead leads people into a pit of self-fascination. As a Buddhist convert, I watch myself and friends get caught up in exotic offerings and practice goals while forgetting that the whole point is to benefit beings. Moreover, as a human being, I see us all trying to be more aware, spiritual or even religious while still sounding off and posting opinions about all that is wrong with those people over there without owning our own ripple effects in the world we co-create. We take up spiritual practice to expand our minds and hearts and instead end up smug and self-righteous. We can see how spiritual materialism is a trap of self-interest that ends up causing further pain for self and other…because our self-pitying self-interest, dressed up in spirituality or not, is always what’s causing pain for self and other.

In this time and place, we’re especially ripe for spiritual materialism. With our spirituality boom, we’ve unlocked practices from the structure or process of religious systems and spiritual paths. Initially being spiritual but not religious feels freeing. I can create my own spiritual path?! Something personalized that feels right for just me?! It even feels rebellious, like we’re sticking it to The Man—The Religious Man. However, by creating a personalized, feels-right-for-just-me spirituality, we might be falling in line with The Man—The Capitalist Man.

Throughout history, wisdom traditions—religions and spiritual paths—have been co-opted by dominant cultural systems because systems seek homeostasis. Through spiritual practice, people awaken to a sense of subversive connection beyond the instinctive self, and the system squashes that spiritual practice into rules or behaviors that maintain the status quo. This process is both conscious and unconscious, done by ruling parties and people like you and me. Because on a systemic and personal level, the spiritual insight into self-expansion threatens our habitual, self-centered patterns, and that is scary. Even though we suffer in self-interest and self-pity, moment by moment, there is that tremendous, habitual momentum to stick with the devil we know—which sounds like “what about me.”

These days, our dominant system seems to be consumer capitalism with its hallmarks of self-interest, individualism and consumption. This is the water we swim in, the birthplace of our thought and behavior patterns. So, as we feel a pull toward spiritual practice and insight, it is natural that we take an individualist, consumer approach. In a time rife with access to more and diverse spiritual teachings, our self-interested approach often looks a little something like this…

Enough with you, Big Daddy Sky God!

Then, with all of our American entitlement and newfound ethereality, we make our way to the Spiritual Buffet. And we load up—we’re Americans!

Mmmmm. I’ll have some yoga. Oh, just the physical practice, thanks. Who knew spirituality was going to be so good for my butt?!

I’ll take some meditation. No hocus-pocus, just neuroscience and focus. Who knew spirituality was going to be so good for my bottom line?!

I’ll take some Law of Attraction, so I can manifest all the stuff I want.

I’ll take some mysticism—not sure what that is, but pretty sure I want some.

I’ll take some tarot and astrology and incense and candles and prayer beads and Burning Man and shamanism and shrooms and…

Tantric sex?!—I’m really not sure what that is, but I’m probably gonna need more incense and candles!!

Here’s what we don’t do at the Spiritual Buffet…

Ooh, ethical precepts! Did you all see these ethical precepts?! These look so good! I haven’t had commandments since I was a kid!!

We don’t do that. Because ethics practice seems tired or obvious or not as hip as handstands, brainwaves and sun signs. I mean, who wants to hear “thou shalt not” when there’s tantric sex on the table?

But, when we approach spirituality with our instinctive, self-interested, consumer mindset, we shop for practices that seem comfortable or interesting or trendy, that might help us become more successful or attractive or cool. We might be keeping calm, but we’re carrying on with our habitually human and consumer capitalist agenda of “what about me.” Now strategically hidden in spiritual materialism—“what about spiritual me.” We end up using spiritual practice to practice self-interest. And, as we’ll discuss, all of our micro- and macro-level problems from anxiety and addiction to human rights violations and overconsumption of the planet stem from getting stuck in ourselves.

So let’s consider this view: The point of spiritual practice is not to further your self-interest. The point of spiritual practice is to disrupt yourself—to disrupt the momentum of habitual thought and behavior patterns that are all essentially “what about me.” To that end, wisdom traditions generally start us off with self-disrupting ethics practice so we break the trance of “what about me” and say, “How you doing?”

Many of those “thou shalt not’s” are simply thou shalt not forget that other people exist and their lives and feelings are just as important as yours. It’s an essential but easily ignored step. When we make up our own spiritual plate instead of following a proven path, we often miss the most potent offerings because they appear uncomfortable or boring. Yet, these are often the practices that free us from painful self-interest. In fact, if we don’t do these self-disrupting practices first, we use other practices to create spiritual prisons of self-absorption. Ethics practice is the practice of self-disruption in that it expands our sense of self beyond ourselves. We need not get back in bed with old time religion or abandon our yoga, meditation, shamanic journeying, tantric sex or anything. But, unless we take on ethics as an introductory or parallel practice, we’re missing the point.