For a couple weeks, I tried posting my writings on Medium.com - I realized it’s just another bullshit popularity contest for wannabe writers. C’est la vie.
A conscious seeker is a master of destiny. An unconscious seeker is at the whim of gravity. A seeker may hit rock bottom with a splat, or a seeker may bounce back up, but only when a seeker becomes a believer does she or he stop moving. A believer is inert, unmoving, with every experience, up or down, affirming his or her belief.
Can a believer become a seeker? Yes. The belief must first be shattered, usually through trauma, tragedy and unforetold suffering. Can a seeker become a believer? Yes. If a seeker becomes comfortable, “stable,” “steady,” “secure,” and thus, stagnant. The belief system may be as simple as believing tomorrow will be the same as yesterday or as complex as an ethical, religious, or ideological belief. Beliefs are beliefs, and believing is by its very nature, inertia.
A seeker simply doesn’t believe anything. A seeker refuses to believe anything. A seeker cannot believe in anything. A seeker only knows experience. A seeker may be seeking in all the “wrong” experiences, but seeks nonetheless, in relationships, power, money, sex, drugs, fame, thrill-seeking, extreme sports, etc. A seeker simply cannot accept or become ascribed to any belief.
A seeker knows that believers believe “drugs are bad,” but a seeker must find out whether or not this belief is experientially true. A seeker knows believers believe fame and money are unfulfilling, but a seeker must find out if this is experientially true. And onward, a seeker moves down the list of experiences until the revelation comes, of what the seeker has really been seeking all along, which, believe it or not, is the ultimate, the One, the universal, the whole.
Every so-called “spiritual” article I’ve read the last couple years (particularly on Medium) was clearly written by a believer. Perhaps seekers don’t write much. Or perhaps writing helps believers fortify their beliefs. Perhaps “clapping” helps believers solidify their beliefs through reading and writing, affirming each other’s beliefs, but it doesn’t seem to be inspiring seekers to seek the ultimate or believers to become seekers.
One surefire means by which to confirm whether or not an article is written by a believer is looking to see if it has a number in its title: “10 ways to spot a mystic,” “5 ways to deepen your spiritual practice,” “7 ways to know you’re having a spiritual awakening.” “3 articles of which I can confirm were written in cow feces.” “1 way of detecting bullshit.”
You want to know how you’re really having an awakening? It will be entirely new territory, so nothing will make sense. All your beliefs lay completely shattered at the bottom of the deepest, darkest ocean. All the words you’ve read, all the words you’ve written, all the ideas, concepts and methodologies will have disintegrated into thin air. All the rules by which you’ve lived up until this moment will become meaningless. The very laws of physics will no longer remain lawful. An anagnorisis of the human spirit will leave the protagonist, the character, to act out the third act of the play, but you, the actor and director, will no longer be here. “By the awful grace of God,” your comfort, your security, your stability, and life as you’ve always known it… will be gone. The revelation that life itself is one momentary delusion to the next will leave you with no ground to stand upon, no faith to rely upon, and no meaning for any of it. (“10 ways to know your spirituality has led you to hell: #1. no rainbows…”)
“We are all one energy” may become an experientially true statement for some, but keep in mind, the experiential awareness that “I Am a tree, I Am a fungi, I Am the tick and the lime disease, I Am all diseases,” is a shocking and terrifying revelation. Oneness is conceptually and artistically awe-inspiring and awesome, but can be experientially awful. All of life’s ambitions become null and void. Oneness puts an end to personal triumphs, successes and motivations, with the all-encompassing revelation that she or he has chosen to undertake this meaningless experience of life as separate from Oneness, and now must begin making his or her way back to that Oneness. The yearning is unbearable. Intellectual and artistic endeavors no longer have any purpose. The insanity of separateness becomes an obsession, and no one and nothing else matters. Friends? Family? Career? Home? No one else understands Oneness. For them, life goes on as usual. Everything that once mattered is usurped by the expansive, experiential awareness of Oneness. In a moment, it’s all gone. Years later, it’s still gone.
Empathy, too, is a beautiful concept, but do you really understand what it’s like to feel the whole world’s pain? Every day is your most heart-wrenching breakup relived in real time. Every day is Groundhog Day. The sadness, the anger, the fear can no longer be avoided.
“We’re all the same energy” may be a scientific fact, but as a lived experience, feeling one’s own energy for the first time is experientially akin to being taken over by a foreign entity (years later, it still feels foreign.) Its onset feels like a demonic possession. It may, indeed, be “all the same energy,” but it certainly isn’t experientially the same as anything else in the lived human experience. It’s utter insanity.
Writing about this energy innocuously, colloquially, nonchalantly, arbitrarily serves to further alienate and isolate anyone undergoing this experience. As well, concepts, philosophies and trivializations of energy serve to further repel atheists and agnostics.
I wouldn’t have dared believe in energy until it became violently, turbulently real to me. It’s still perpetually real to me in this very moment. I had repeated pilonidal cysts at the base of my spine, which is where the energy seems to originate. Years later, I can report that I only experience the turbulence, and the cysts only appear when I try to ignore the energy. I have to sit for hours each day, to let the energy do what it does. I call it “spiritual surgery.” It’s impossible to explain, but over the years it’s worked its way through the body into the head. Years after the onset, I still have no description, no explanation, no knowledge, no understanding of this experience. In fact, I’m more bewildered now than I was when it started. A fleeting, poetic glimpse of an infinite experience in words is futile. There are no words for this but the feeling. Perhaps one can grasp at this emotion, but nothing more of it will be real to you until it’s experientially real to you.
And yet every so-called “spiritual author” has a complete understanding of oras, chakras, nadis, ida, pingala and shushumna. Apparently the energy centers are rainbow-colored? Who knew? Learn a new belief every day, right? I had no idea God was so “cutesy.” He made everything else in the universe really complex, but he made the human energy system really “cute” and simple. It’s no wonder why so many seekers on Earth refuse to take part in the cheesy, idiotic drama ascribed to “spirituality.” It’s just more beliefs for more believers.
If my sardonicism on the topic isn’t a breath of fresh air to you, you probably aren’t a seeker. If I didn’t have a sense of humor, I wouldn’t have survived this long. I recognize that it’s unbecoming to write this way, but I actually feel a responsibility. And this is the truth. The shock, the suffering, the revelations and the sardonic humor are all part of the same experience. I’m somewhere outside of this experience always laughing, but it doesn’t make the difficulty less real.
Articles about enlightenment make great fire starter, too. “I’m enlightened” is not something a seeker would ever dare to speak or write. A seeker identifies with nothing, as nothing. And there’s no other experience by which to compare it, and it isn’t an it, and God, why am I trying to explain it? I don’t know anything, except thy Self.
Remember that time Jesus spoke about his enlightenment? No? What about that time Buddha talked about it? Oh, right, never mind, enlightenment is impossible to describe, and Buddha repeatedly spoke of “what God is not” and “what enlightenment is not,” knowing that this experiential state of being is beyond thought, beyond the limitations of logic, and thus beyond the limitations of language.
I must call bullshit when I see it, and the so-called “spiritual” community is full of foolishness. Calling oneself "a spiritual person" is just another dumb identity, another lackluster belief system. God isn’t cute. Spirituality isn’t fun. The mystic experience is magnificent. It is awe-inspiring. But a more appropriate description would be that it’s terrifying and horrifically painful. It’s life-shattering.
At the onset of my existential crisis, my energetic highjacking by means of some serpent-like thing, I researched as much as I could, though I could barely see straight enough to read. I couldn’t sleep or eat for the first 3 weeks. I found that people across the globe were calling this experience a “spontaneous kundalini awakening.” I laughed when I saw how many people were intentionally trying to invoke this energy, to turn it on, to wake it up - “On purpose?! They must be insane,” I thought, “playing toss with an atom bomb.”
The more I read other people’s experiences, the more alone I felt. The more articles I read, the more fearful, isolated, angry and alienated I became. Because all that existed across the internet were cutesy articles with numbers in the titles and desperate pleas from people experiencing similar crises, neither of which are experientially helpful to anyone. Unanswered pleas for spiritual help and cutesy “spiritual” articles aren’t helping anyone, anywhere!
I hope you “spiritual authors” take note of this. Your words have a real-life impact on people. If you’re not experiencing something, you shouldn’t be writing about it. The Disinformation Age hits home everywhere. 99% of music is trash. 99% of media is lies. 99% of words are idiotic beliefs. Just be aware of the fact that, in the 21st Century, when people across the world experience these life-altering experiences, existential crises, energetic or otherwise, they will run to the computer to try to find some way of making sense of their experience. And your faux spiritual wisdom gets mixed up with the words written by enlightened ones, the inclusive truths written to truly guide us. Your bewildered pseudo-spiritual articles, with the same keywords as the masters’, make real guidance much more difficult to find.
Since recording and releasing music has become accessible to everyone, with built-in recording software on every computer and distributers willing to distribute any four-chord gibberish for a few bucks, everyone has become “an artist.” In the 21st Century, there are huge swaths of the worldwide population who actually believe “there’s no good music anymore.” Obviously that’s not true. It’s just becoming more and more impossible to find the needles in the haystack, in an era which stores all the world’s trash and all the world’s art in the same place, on the world wide web. Fans and artists alike are at a great loss. Companies like Spotify and Apple Music are eating it up, because they’re the only ones getting paid.
This is what’s happening with faux spirituality. Just like trashcan music is being produced in far greater numbers than art, so too believers are creating much more “content” than seekers, and deciphering the difference between “spirituality” and Spirituality requires a great discernment for which is only garnered by seekers after experiencing these life-altering experiences.
Henry David Thoreau wrote, “We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.” But what happens when “what we already half know” is actually just another belief system? What happens when the map’s all wrong? You keep going full steam ahead, believing you’re on the “right” path, when really, you ought to throw away the map and go get lost in the wilderness. This has been a popular approach for mystics all throughout time and space, from Buddha, Jesus and Rumi to modern-day yogis and mystics. Get lost. Throw away the fucking map. It’s garbage. Or, give it here. I need to start a fire tonight. The wilderness is getting chilly.
The faux spiritual community originally distinguished themselves by separating religion and organized religion, as though the "organization" makes a difference in the dumb belief structures. Nowadays, they separate themselves entirely from religion and call themselves “spiritual, not religious.” But what’s the difference? The so-called “spiritual” people just built another dumb religion. It’s just one more group of believers believing in beliefs.
There’s an equally valid critique to be made of the overtly rationalistic dogma of “scientific,” academic atheism. The so-called “scientific” community blasphemes Science in every leap of faith into the empirical, sensually perceptible, objective world with every existential assumption leading to the same nihilistic conclusions, blacklisting scientists who dare mention the metaphysical, much less testing hypothesis of the illogical or the irrational aspects of life. All experiments are paid for with grants from the same elitist, pedantic, academic “cool kids” circle which refuses to acknowledge all of the aspects of life which make life worth living, the aspects of life which actually acknowledge the existential conundrum of Being a human Being. They’re the ones who give us all the “facts” which simply don’t add up with this experience of life.
But when the “spiritual” response is utter nonsense, woo-woo gibberish and uninspired conspiratorial rantings of the star children with their pixie dust and gemstone wands, what the fuck do we expect? The point is, “spiritual” people are deepening the divide. "Spiritual" articles to atheists are like Leonardo DiCaprio preaching about global warming to climate deniers. Hollywood royalty flying in on a private jet to teach a group of working class people a science class isn’t helping the cause of climate change. It’s deepening the divide. “Spiritual” authors hyperbolizing infinity, stuffing existence into a rainbow-colored tin can aren’t helping to unite seekers or to “turn” scientific-minded people towards spirituality. This gibberish is turning more people off the spiritual path than turning on.
I still feel closer to the thinking people, the atheists, the rationalists, than I do the “spiritual” community, and I have a fucking metaphysical, Vedic serpent slithering through my body 24 hours a day. Does this description provide any “spiritual” people with some much-needed context?
Sometimes your loving mother gives you a good, stern admonishing, but you never doubt her actions come from a place of love, right? My actual intention with all my work is to unite people, not to tear people apart. I’m attempting to provide context to those whom desperately need it, to the two poles of the bipolar world: the thoughtful and the intuitive; the two extremes: the objective and the subjective; the two forces of nature: the masculine and the feminine; the two brain hemispheres: the left brain and the right brain; the two dominant systems of human experience: the empirical or corporeal and the metaphysical or spiritual; because they’re both entirely necessary for life to exist! Latching onto one extreme without the other is an imbalance-ing act.
I want to appeal to the scientific, dogmatic rationalists to say, “I have many hypotheses about this elusive energy which I’d love to test. Experimentation upon these energetic phenomena could help us to better understand the human experience, the brain, the central nervous system, and the evolution of life itself. I have no doubt this energy I experience is the same energy which evolves a child into an adult, a seed into a tree, an ape into a man; the same energy which digests food, beats the heart and pumps the lungs. I have no doubt that every human holds a huge concentration of this energy within them, and awakening this energy, becoming conscious of this energy instigates and propagates a ‘second puberty’ of sorts, a stage of human development not yet known to western science. Most importantly, I want to show that it is possible to live with this energetic phenomena without losing one’s scientific method of discernment, skepticism and logical deduction - without becoming another believer!”
God bless all of you “spiritual” people, truly and sincerely, but you don’t even “half know” what you’re writing about. “Spiritual” is just another identity to which you cling. As long as you’re comfortable, secure and stable, you’re not “spiritual.” You’re stuck. You’re stagnant. You’ll know you’re “spiritual” when you’re in completely uncharted waters, brand new territory which doesn’t exist on the map. When none of your beliefs make any sense anymore, you’re probably on the “right” path.
And, someone help me understand, what is the essence of spirituality if not truth-seeking? Moreover, what is the point of existence if it’s lived entirely from its illusory senses, vailed in belief systems, artificiality and disinformation? The only definition for spirituality which seems legitimate is, “seeking the true nature of existence, seeking the true nature of Self.” It appears the essence of spirituality is lost on the spiritual ones.
If in broad daylight, Jesus walked across the water, poured a believer a glass of it and then turned it into wine right in front of her eyes, how would she know Jesus was real? She’d believe or disbelieve, and that’s all a believer could do. A believer has no discernment, no means of discerning truth. This “vision” of Christ would either affirm her belief, or she’d create a new belief. Now, she’d believe in sorcery. Or now, she’d believe in shape-shifting demons. Or, maybe she’d believe it was all a mirage or a dream. After all, can one really believe one’s own eyes? Apparently St. Thomas couldn’t. Descartes couldn’t either. I certainly don't. Try to imagine this scenario with Jesus standing in front of you. What would really change for you, experientially? You’d be no closer to truth, no closer to reality. You’d just have a new belief.
Believing things, whether scientific or spiritual, doesn’t lead anyone closer to truth. Science, as a process, as a tool, may lead us to truth. Spirituality, as a process, as a tool, may lead us to truth. But we can only know through experience, and we can only experience through seeking.
Energy is confusing to the other senses. Anything I’ve seen, I’d classify as illusory. Although I feel the energy strongly from the base of the spine upward, in the solar plexus area, heart, throat and forehead, I have no visual relationship with the energy. It’s like an electric current somewhere between physiological and psycho-emotional. However, it seems to be almost universally accepted by Buddhist, Hindu and yogic mystics that the lowest energy center is an earthy yellow color. Martial artists throughout timespace have referred to the third energy center as being a fiery red color. The throat is often associated with blue, hence all the hindu gods appearing blue. I’m not suggesting anyone believe this or take it at face value. I’m only pointing out the disinformation surrounding energy. 99% of information on the internet portrays chakras as 7 rainbow-colored, glowing orbs, and this is by all mystic accounts, entirely wrong. The classical accounts of enlightened beings appearing to us with white halos on top of their heads may actually be closer to reality. But don’t take my word for it. I don’t know shit, except I do know what I don’t know. That’s the point.
To the “spiritual authors,” next time you sit down to write a “spiritual” piece, please imagine someone, somewhere across the globe, frantically scouring the internet, scared shitless, experiencing the onset of what feels like complete insanity, what psychologists refer to as “dissociative disorder,” in her and his first experience with an unknowable, primordial force of nature. Will your article truly help this person? What is the actual intention of your article? To get lots of “claps”? Are your words meant to bring people together or to bring about more separation on the planet? Are you writing bunk spirituality to reaffirm your faux spiritual community’s pseudo-spiritual beliefs? Are you writing “spiritual” click-bate?
Or ask yourself only one question: “Is my intention inclusive or exclusive?” Spirituality is simply inclusive. Are you at least attempting to inspire people to seek the ultimate? Inspiration is personal! If, in actuality, you had one spiritual experience years ago, write about that experience. Don’t write about all the dumb shit you’ve read since that experience. If you have an experiential awareness of your own energy system, write about that. Don’t write about rainbow-colored chakras after you saw a graphic online. If spirituality is as elusive and mysterious to you as it is to me, write about how elusive and mysterious it is. Perhaps it’ll even make you a better writer! Writing on the topic of mysticism requires poeticism, hence the beauty of Rumi and other Sufi poets. It requires artistry, allegory, allusion and a mastery over language. And it requires honesty. The world is filled up with imitation, repetitiveness and redundancy, but this type of “how-to” journalism actually affects people’s lives. Art matters. Words matter. Don’t fuck with the human spirit.
For whom are you really writing? To whom are you really speaking? The world needs inspiration, not maps, not more beliefs, not more repetitive garbage or energetic flow-charts. Serve as inspiration to the skeptics by sharing your personal experiences. Truly, a well-written personalized article on anything is more inspiring than “5 steps to enlightenment.” Salinger could write an article about a man sitting alone in an empty room, and it’d be more inspiring than any “spiritual” article I’ve ever read. Serve to inspire us! Serve the sufferers. Serve the “mentally ill.” Serve the intellectuals stuck in their rigid atheism. Serve the religious, stuck in their rigid certainties. Serve to inspire others to REBEL against their own dumb belief structures! Stop building walls, and start tearing them down. Stop serving separateness with your uninspired articles on Oneness. Stop enforcing dumb beliefs, and start inspiring us. Inspire me. I need your inspiration. I do not need your facts, your methods, your ideologies or your numbered steps to ascension.
Perhaps most importantly, mystic art, in words, images and sound, is where creation and creator merge. “Spiritual art” is doing a great injustice to creation, dulling it all down, boxing it all up. Whoever or whatever created this existence was and is an unfathomably glorious artist, and to write about Him, Her or It, or to write about how Him, Her or It manifests within one’s personal experience of life is an indubitably colossal task for which shouldn’t be taken lightly. Effectively, if you’re going to write about the majesty of the spirit, the life in which it contains, the energy which propagates it, your writing better be goddam majestic, beautiful, honest and personal.
I wrote music from the wilderness, professionally for 17 years. I channelled emotions for the emotional, and I now write words from the wilderness, for the intellectuals, because the so-called “spiritual” community is already stuck in their beliefs. My work is mostly for the skeptics, the cynics and stoics. I write for the so-called “mentally ill” too, because they’re the ones who acknowledge their own suffering. They’ve acknowledged the suffering within them, and they seek to end suffering through medical council and medication. This is, by all means, the entirely “wrong” way to seek an end to suffering, but these sufferers have already taken the biggest step. They’ve acknowledged their suffering, and they’ve become seekers.
Disbelievers across the planet are seeking the ultimate in drugs, power, money, sex and fame, but at least they’re seeking! Jesus and Buddha seemed to have sought out these people too. Why? Because seekers seek and believers believe. There’s no point wasting one’s time with a believer, because every believer believes in his and her own beliefs more than his or her own experience, and every experience a believer experiences serves only to affirm or deny his or her beliefs.
We’ll seek until we reach the ultimate, or else we'll seek until we die, but we refuse to get snagged on beliefs. Believe it or not, disbelievers are the true seekers.
(Video & podcast every Wednesday, starting 2023)
A note from the author,
The artist formerly known as Robert LaSalle:
Despite my rather pointed critiques of the “spiritual community,” I Am inspired from a place of loving awareness, of unity rather than separateness, and I joined Medium to try to find my Satsang, to try to build bridges across my lifelong loves of music, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology and history and my current experiences in the metaphysical; to share my revelations of Aldous Huxley’s “perennial philosophy,” that all the world’s religions and all the world’s philosophies do actually crossover at one central point; that life is apparently illogical and logical, irrational and rational; that Socrates and Darwin and Nietzsche and Jesus might’ve had much more in common than they didn’t; that the scientific and the spiritual and the physical and the metaphysical may merge as perfectly as yin and yang, and beliefs may be the only thing separating us. I hope to inspire rather than denigrate, to unite rather than separate. Thank you for reading.