Deconstructing spiritual gentrification

One of my heroes, Elizabeth Gilbert, did a phenomenal talk about how spirituality is geared towards men. And when they preach about being selfless, this is actually advice that’s towards men, and that women need to become more selfish. I was reading an esoteric book about souls and spirituality, and I noticed that the language always used the pronoun he, and I was a little bit annoyed by this. The content that it was talking about was the seven states of consciousness, and this is a rough aggregate of many spiritual cosmologies throughout history. And he talked about how in the seventh state of consciousness, this is like unity and God, and we’re all one, and there’s no differentiation between souls. And then in the sixth, there’s a slight differentiation between souls, and in the fifth, there’s like an abstract consciousness, and then in the fourth… to the first, it’s more individual, it’s about emotions, desires, instincts, and then finally, living in the actual body and the needs of the body for safety and things like that. And he talked about how when spiritual pressure is applied or some kind of trauma is applied, the fastest routes of that pressure, of the direction of the individual, is the path of least resistance, and it would push down the person’s consciousness from the seventh down to the first, and they would become more animalistic, and in order for them to regain unity and consciousness, they need to work their way back up to being socially more aware and conscious. As a woman, I’m actively learning to do the opposite. I’m actively healing from various types of trauma to the point where I feel comfortable in my physical body, I know how to stand up for my selfish needs, and I thought about Elizabeth Gilbert’s comment about how current spiritual culture is run by men, and this author, like so many authors of spiritual textbooks, are predominantly white men and very privileged ones. Even if they’re talking about spirituality and they’re saying, like, oh, money is not important, this is this, the fact that they have the superiority and the time and the leisure to ponder these things is such a high level of privilege. 

When you look at Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, it’s talking about how the master and the slave learn opposite things. The master dominates the slave, and the slave, while doing the physical labor that the master does not do, the slave starts to gain consciousness, gain more practical skills, more life skills, and are eventually able to overtake the master. Now, Hegel was warning against enslaving each other because he’s saying this is going to put us into a cycle where we don’t actually gain true independence. When I explore the oppressed/oppressor dynamic of western new-age spirituality, it is through the Hegelian lens.

The spiritual framework is correct, but the oppressor and oppressed would have opposing directions. So with the seven planes of existence example, a privileged white man might be motivated to exalt the selfless 7th state of being, but a woman, more likely should be exalting the 1st state of selfish, creature comfort and self defense. For example, a woman who has experienced sexual violence, the path of least resistance when it comes to that trauma on her spirituality is not going from the seventh plane of consciousness into the first state of her body. It’s actually the opposite way around. She’s being kicked out of her physical body, pushed into the seventh plane in which she identifies herself with the attacker. And instead of defending her body when she goes to the police, she’ll be afraid of, oh, I don’t want my attacker to go to jail. Oh, I don’t want to get anyone in trouble. And her path to healing will be to let go of being overly conscientious and the guilt of that. So that’s an example of how the oppressed class uses spirituality, the exact same framework that’s named, but always in the reverse.

However I think this goes beyond simply gender dynamics. I’m noticing that it’s not necessarily that women have a different spirituality than men. I think the oppressed have necessarily a different and inverse spirituality to the oppressor class. So the oppressor class wants unity, and when they already have power, what they need to bring themselves into balance is selflessness and humility and awareness of others, more empathy. That would be the so-called seventh state of consciousness from the example of this book. What the oppressed class needs is to move away from empathy, move away from too much consciousness, too much conscientiousness, too much guilt about how they are showing up in service of other people and moving back into their body, into their selfishness, into asserting their rights to have land and basic needs and safety. So spirituality for the oppressed class moves in the opposite direction as spirituality for the oppressor class. 

Now you can see precisely why there are so many problems with the current state of spiritual literature today. It’s because the oppressed class probably has the deepest spiritual hunger, and they’re reading these books that they’re looking up to from the oppressed class, reading the books from the oppressed class, trying to apply spiritual lessons that are meant for oppressors and not for the oppressed. And thus… being told to negate their needs when they’re actually needing to affirm them. And you can also now see the futility of the oppressor class, the white privileged male writers of these books, who possibly are practicing humility in their own lives, but the more they become preoccupied with the message of propagating the message of humility without any disclaimer that this should only be applied to the oppressor class, they’re actually maintaining a status quo of more and more deeper aggravated oppression and thus becoming further from unity and balance from their own morality. And this very likely leads to why a lot of very famous spiritual people become so corrupted and a lot of the disillusionment we have with some spiritual leaders.

An important disclaimer I wanna make that I never see in any political writing is that a lot of political writing really oversimplifies who is oppressed and who is oppressor, when the majority of people are never one or the either. And this is simply by definition, because anyone that is pure absolute oppressor class is 1% or less of the population. And anyone who is pure oppressed class, I’m not sure what is the magnitude of that demographic but I think by definition, anyone that is so absolutely oppressed, by definition, doesn’t have any agency. So they’re not the target demographic for any of our political dialogue because unfortunately they don’t have the agency to even free themselves. I’m talking about people who are illiterate or trying to survive the day. The target audience for political change are the people in the middle who have some kind of hybrid identity between oppressor and oppressed. So for example, I am a BIPOC woman living in Costa Rica who has autism and who is an engineer. So as a westerner, who is an engineer, I have economic power. As a woman, I have less in relation to men. And as a person with autism, there’s benefits and disadvantages there as well. So every person has a mix of power and lack of power depending on which relationship they’re interacting with. And even within one relationship, there’s a different mix of power dynamics. And it’s really important for many political texts to at least mention this, because for people to actually apply ideas and theories into their lives, they need to make sense of where it actually applies to them. And to be an intellectual teaching these ideas and yet not teaching people where it actually applies would be a great lack of responsibility.

When it comes to analyzing spirituality within the new context of seeing them as an oppressor spirituality, we can now analyze where this habit was formed, which I think always traces back to the Roman Catholic Church and the legacy of Rome, because that’s where this habit of colonialism and dominance really traces back to. And Rome itself kind of traces its roots back to Sparta. You can sort of imagine how these emperors of Rome, who arguably, for the first time in history, had so much absolute power that they felt very alienated from their own morality and so needed to reach for the most humbling form of spirituality, the most self-negating form of spirituality you can imagine, which in my opinion, is Christianity. I think it requires a humiliating level of self-negation. And obviously, we see how the emperors failed to apply this within themselves and instead demanded this religion of the entire empire and the people that they colonized, much in the same way that a spiritual teacher who is extremely privileged and unable to grapple with the responsibilities of their own privilege, they end up publishing and propagating very dogmatic spiritual ideals that are not really meant for anyone other than themselves. So I believe this is the origin of the current state of civilization, the origin of this habit of propagating spirituality for the wrong audience. The last of the ‘good emperors’ was Marcus Aurelius who wrote the popular notes on stoicism that we love today, but you can see how much he was struggling with how much power was corrupting his own morality. And from this point on I think the Roman emperors simply lost all touch with morality.

As I’m writing this essay, a reggaeton song comes up in my playlist, and I can viscerally feel how freeing this is in my body while I’m thinking of these spiritual themes. Every form of Latin American music, cumbia, bachata, merengue, salsa, has always been a form of resistance. And as Stuart Hall says, pop culture is a place of transformation, it is a place of resistance, but it’s also a place where both oppressor and oppressed play together. And reggaeton is exactly one of those things. I truly feel that reggaeton is the epitome of all the previous genres of resistance music before it. And I can really feel that in how much it celebrates crude sexuality and the way it plays with these roles of power dynamics between men and women. And yet, in a defiant, fun, buoyant, rambunctious way. And it’s almost like being in a demonstration line and getting right up close and personal with the police guard that you’re standing against when it comes to that spiritual clash between moral correctness and moral defiance. It is the loudest and proudest defiance of catholic values. The album that I’m listening to is literally titled ‘La Resistancia.’’

When it comes to Costa Rica, Costa Rica is unique because a lot of the gentrification doesn’t come from major companies extracting minerals or slave labor or… produce, as they do in the rest of Latin America, a lot of the gentrification is coming from spiritual colonization. It’s coming from spiritual entrepreneurship. It’s coming from retreats. So this is now what I call spiritual gentrification. And they have a specific language of spiritual dominance. And they’re using the language of spiritual oppressors that make it hard for the resistance class to confront them. So a spiritual phrase that they might use is ego death. And the silent effect is that it teaches locals to suppress their righteous anger or defense of their land. They can say things like money is just energy, which justifies economic domination without accountability. They can say everything is your mirror, and it blames locals for the violence and inequality they face. Or they can say you just need to align with abundance, which turns systemic poverty into personal spiritual failure. Some of their language sounds benign, or even beautiful, but it actually functions as gaslighting. And what’s very insidious about the type of gaslighting that really happens in Costa Rica is that it happens on a mystical level. It happens in a place of spirituality. Now, Costa Rica isn’t extremely known for being religious or Catholic, and so that makes this even more diffuse and harder to pinpoint, because spirituality is not really talked about in land restoration or any type of political movement. But spirituality is still an extremely important part of an individual’s mental health and well-being, just as much as physical health or relational health. And what I see in Costa Rica is that a lot of the wounding and the colonialism is happening around the spiritual aspect, and a lot of the powerlessness is being interfaced in that spiritual context. And what happens is that resistance gets pathologized into spiritual immaturity, and so the oppression becomes untouchable. It’s really hard to push back because spiritual supremacy weaponizes softness, and it makes any pushback looks aggressive, unhealed, closed-minded, triggered, or in your ego. It creates this double bind where if you resist, you’re told to let go. If you defend your land, then you’re too attached. And if you name injustice, then you’re not in alignment with love. And yet they bought the land, and yet they charge thousands of dollars for retreats. And yet they block off areas of recreation, of community importance, for retreats and hotels and use soft pressure, such as higher pricing, to systematically drive out locals. Language is the hardest thing to fight, because it creates the illusion that there’s nothing to fight. So this is where I think understanding exactly how spirituality itself has been colonized, and the context from who writes these spiritual ideas and what it is used for, is extremely critical for people to regain agency over the spiritual plane of resistance, because that is very much a real area of conflict.