Some of my thoughts on the Buddhist / New Age / EA / "spiritual" movement.

(I have a lot to say about this topic, so I apologize that some terms go undefined and some claims unsubstantiated. )

Religious awakenings occur in response to crises. This is true in individual lives, and world history.

We Westerners have recently had some kind of religious awakening.

There are many possible candidates for what crisis spurred it, and the timeline of these crises. I see them as loosely beginning in 2007, accelerating in 2016 and again 2020, but somebody else may have an entirely different story. Are they social in origin? Technological, cultural, political, chemical? Who knows. All that matters is a widely-perceived sense of society cracking open like an egg. You can argue this feeling corresponds to no objective reality, is a self-perpetuating cultural delusion, but if you’ve ever been online, you know that everybody in America believes the crisis is real.

There are also many religions being awoken, or invented, in response. The one I am interested in is a sort of new age, Buddhist, “spiritual”, scientific doctrine which I’ve chosen to call Detachmentism. We see devotees to this faith in crystal shops, retreat centers, and yoga studios, and mock their naivety, but I would argue that the fundamental premises of this belief are widespread in popular culture, “rationalist”, tech, and therapy circles. It’s sort of the default belief for non-Christians, and its conception of the human psyche and its metaphysical assumptions are considered fact.

Yet it doesn’t seem to be a topic of hard inquiry, skepticism, and debate. It treats itself as above argument; its halls are quiet places of antisocial inwardness. Yet debate, conversation, and wordiness are essential human functions. A faith that does not deal in these functions cannot cure them, and if you cannot cure language, you cannot cure humans, only animals or children. Why is Detachmentism not debated and taken seriously as a psychological, cultural, epistemological force, the way Christianity is? The first question when talking about it must be: why isn’t it talked about? This will reveal its defense mechanisms; attempting to discuss it before defusing these will only yield frustration. So, how the hell has an Iron Age religion managed to avoid serious criticism?

1. The obvious good it does gives it a free pass. Yoga and meditation are incredible. Nobody wants to be seen as criticizing something valuable.
2. It presents itself as “not a religion” and “nondogmatic”, thus any criticism would be punching at empty air. In reality it presents a clear philosophy, and there is huge agreement among hundreds of millions of people on them. Avoiding aggressive conversion of outsiders does not make you immune to dogma. Isolation of this kind may actually make it worse.
3. Exociticsm. It presents itself as strange, other, incomprehensible to Western minds. It’s something you need to study, and keep learning, and always admit your ignorance of. Few Westerners feel they understand it enough to critique it, and critiquing a foreign culture is (often rightfully) seen as an arrogant stance.
4. Coolness. This stuff is popular right now. Everyone wants to be with it, nobody wants to say they don’t get it, or don’t agree. In fact, the Western image of “cool”, as uninterested, detached, smarter than the room, self-possessed, containing a whole inner world with no need to share it, the movie bad boy, is nonverbal and quiet, and remarkably similar to how Detachmentism and traditional Buddhism presents itself.
5. Similar to 4. A casual, low-stress attitude is central to it. Stress = ego = bad = enemy = devil. In its houses of worship, the tone and structuredness of serious argument would not fit. This is not a movement of heavy reading or long discussions. The books are bestsellers, or ancient collections of aphorisms, meant to be read in five-minute bursts as a stress-relief and energy pill, like coffee, self-help books, hypeup music, or scripture. Its verbal advocates (gurus), speak in the prophet’s style of koans, parables, anecdotes, and abstractions. Their minds and rhetoric are unable to accommodate discussion, only agreement or master-student condescension.
6. They seem happy, and you don’t want to kill their joy. Yet, when has euphoria ever been considered a sign of truth? We have an attitude of live and let live, “if it makes them happy, who cares?” But why does argumentation need to be seen as threatening? Why can’t it be fun and friendly? Argument is seen as sadness/ pain, quiet as joy, only when one is a Detachmentist. In their image system (aesthetic), which dominates our culture, argument, objection, disagreement, are stormy, poo-poohing, killjoy, hateful, in bad faith, unproductive. This is how ego depicts ideas that threaten it.

7. Most significantly: in Detachmentism and classical Buddhism, hard thinking, seriousness, inquisitiveness, indeed words themselves, are equated with unenlightenment.

   Here is an archetypal myth told by Detachmentists. A Westerner and Easterner are walking. The Westerner is asking a million questions about the Easterner’s faith, about life and the world. Finally, the Easterner simply gives him a smile, or points to a flower, or a parable pointing to the limits of rationality.

   This story has a good lesson: some things must be intuited, words have limits, arguments often become endless and circular. I concede that some questions may be beyond verbalization, or human understanding at all. I do not concede that these questions are the only important ones, or the most important ones, or even particularly important at all. Maybe some gurus make this distinction: words for some questions, no words for others. It seems rather that most gurus make few distinctions at all, about anything; this is their entire belief, and their rhetorical style. Distinction is sickness, and “clinging”. Rhetorical techniques such as paradox, and the use of parables that make every sentence only a symbol for something greater make serious discussion seem superfluous and stupid. Another technique is praising body above mind, as if one needs to make a choice. Another is to present the Western tradition as hopelessly addicted to reason.

   The Easterner of our cultural imagination understands that absolute questions cannot be put into words. That’s fine, but Detachmentism makes plenty of claims about things besides “the Absolute”. It uses plenty of words, and value judgements, and likes some things on Earth, some parts of the psyche, some people, more than others. Arguments against any judgement it makes can be, by depicting the questioner as the Westerner in the above myth, defused.

8. Serious discussion about this has been avoided simply because our culture no longer has serious discussion. It’s often said that online, everything is either infinitely good or infinitely bad; there’s no nuance. The same is true of Buddhism, despite any claims that it is not moralistic like Christianity. Maybe it’s not a coincidence that a faith utterly dismissive of discussion, argument, wordiness, learnedness, practical knowledge and booksmarts, history and science emerged at the same time as our current post-literate digital society which has no patience for any of that.

I propose, along with many other psychologists and interpreters of culture, that we can see how the ego element of the psyche prefers to see itself by looking at images of heroes in our culture, from Classical myth to modern cinema. What images are our protagonists, conquerors, young men of action movies and creation stories and epic poetry associated with? Likewise, in your head, what does your ego and pride feel like?

A sole light in infinite darkness. The center (or beginning, or end) of both consciousness and universe. Small, or average-sized, and mobile, but of infinite strength. Orderly. Angelic. “Good”. A sword slaying demons, monsters, or animals. High energy. Fearless. Above worry, doubt, limit. Physically high places; mountaintop, sky, heaven, castle. Youth. Physical health. Glowing. Purity (of body, mind, and deed). In tune with an intuition that lets him always make the right choice despite not having a huge body of knowledge. Able to hear and see things that others can’t. Simplicity of dress. Unbound, free from a cage or restriction.

Now, are these not the exact same images with which our gurus adorn themselves, and act out in their lives? (Do these images not also describe how a person in a manic state sees himself?)

One image I’d like to focus on is that of having little need for food and water, the social world, stimulation, sex, wealth, property, warmth, comfort, clothes, style (see the shaved heads of monks, hair being fundamental to fashion and a symbol of weight). Are all of these things not just poetic stand-ins for the concept of “limit”, whether biological or social? There is no better poetic metaphor for being unbound by limits than the ability to defy the laws of physics, as in when gurus claim to perform telekinesis, levitation, extreme acts of endurance or pain resistance. Defying the laws of physics or possessing psychic powers is also a classic manic fantasy, and mania is usually agreed to be pathological inflation of ego.

How the hell has a movement that depicts itself like this been able to claim egolessness? This is possible through a naive conception of what ego wants. This naive, childish conception of ego is absolutely central to Detachmentism. This conception claims ego wants to accumulate as much stuff as possible: food, sex, money, land. This does not describe the ego. This describes the old, decadent king, the slow, fat, stupid giant, the greedy dragon on a horde of gold, the very characters which the hero (ego) slays or usurps. The ego wants to be godly; not some fat, rich human. Power, not accumulation. To be able to do without as much as possible, to transcend, to be without limit. Ego is said to be of infinite appetite, but the hero is not a figure of appetite and gluttony. He doesn’t enjoy eating much, does not have a sensory relationship with anything really. (Detachmentist culture has no good food, music, painting, dance, literature, poetry. Everything serves an infinite function, and therefore the form itself is awful. Food is for health, music a background to yoga or meditation, literature parable or instruction; life is often said to be a “dance” yet “ecstatic dance” is an uncoordinated, unharmonious jerky orgasmic spasm, narcissistically lacking sufficient structure to be performed along with a group or partner)

This gets into something else that’s extremely important: ego’s relationship to time. Detachmentists claim that ego endlessly tries to extend its reach into past and future. The exact opposite is true. Ego wishes to be ahistorical and to have no consequences for its actions - to be “present”. It sees itself as entirely its own invention, without any past predecessors. No ancestors, no father or mother - Oedipus before the tragic turn. The hero is always the bastard son, the orphan, rootless. Our present society’s war on culture, turning away from literacy, historical ignorance, is this ego vision that can only see the past as weighing down its endless energy.

What if Detachmentism, and classical Buddhism, is the story that the ego tells itself as it devours and silences all other parts of the psyche, of life? There are certain thoughts that cannibalize all other thoughts; religion and mental illness hinge on these. The Greek story of Saturn devouring all of the Gods (to the Greeks synonymous with devouring all of the elements of the world and of the psyche) seems to be a warning against these types of thoughts, or a parable of what this part of the psyche wishes to do, and it’s no accident that Saturn then vomiting up the children, and those children slaying Saturn’s entire race, is considered the founding act of our stable world where life is possible.

Pictured: Ego devouring one of his fellow psychic entities. What is he eating? Is it Love, Hate, Passion, Creativity, Judgement, Paternalism, Maternalism, Fraternity, Hunger, Thirst, Humor, Deceit, Irony, Competitiveness? See the fear in his eyes? He knows he is ugly, hence he hides behind the silence and blinding light of Detachmentism.

What if our monks and gurus and Buddhists and Buddha are the living embodiment of these gluttonous thoughts in our world? What if desiring purity of mind, holiness, enlightenment, absolute answers, and being willing to abandon and forsake the world to get them, is the most pure form of ego domination invented? How little love for anything but their own minds they must have. Their relentless words of hate against the material world are all disguised as “love”. “Love” is a word that means something to every living, feeling human, something central, and teary, and powerful, and is therefore a word the ego is attracted to, and the ideal word for it to disguise its operations with.

Detachment is one of the fundamental skills for navigating the human psyche. You need to be able to gain distance from attachments and to see emotions not as literal truth. Detachment is one of the directions you learn to swim, if you want to get anywhere. Like all religion, detachmentism takes the observation that moving in a certain direction is often deeply satisfying, and projects along that direction infinitely far, assuming the satisfaction will become infinite.

All that I want out of life is to be attached. When this attachment comes, it is uncontrollable. The fantasy of control is egoism (not that egoism is evil). One cannot have attachment without obsession (the name ego gives to attachments to insult them when frustrated that it cannot control them); then give me obsession, and all its suffering, pride, and insecurity. If we are all connected to everything around us, what form would this connection take if not attachment? Detachmentism visualizes this not as a web of connections stronger in some places, weaker in others, of many characters, qualities, and colors, but as one homogenous glowing white light, and any sort of distance between objects is demonized. Or, it’s sickness, or “work” to be done.

Detachmentism characterizes love as infinitely good, attachment as infinitely bad. Tragedy teaches us rather that love is impossible without attachment, that the two only appear to us to be separate concepts. I believe all religion is fantasy created to avoid tragedy. Detachmentism is therefore the fantasy generated by inability to cope with love’s entanglement with attachment, and, eventually, violence.

I believe, with James Hillman, that “Human beings were put on this Earth to fall in love with it.” Love occurs as a response to beauty, to texture, to a thing’s uniqueness, the fact that it is not something else. There are some things I love less than other things. I could probably perform mental exercises until I force myself to love something, or until I experience a trace of love without any attachment at all, but I’d rather be out there, in love, spending time with her.

If you see the Buddha in the forest, don’t kill him. Nothing would make him happier than death. Ignoring him, too, would only delight him. What you must do is engage him in conversation. This will make him uncomfortable, and he will try to turn your words into parables all pointing in the same direction. Bread is never actually bread with him, it’s always God. Bluebirds are god too, cactuses and monkeys are Ego. Do not let him do this. Keep bringing him back to concrete topics: “what did you do today?”, gossip, likes and dislikes, favorite recipes, history. He may begin to insult you, will dismiss everything you bring up, but keep bringing him down to Earth, it might seem to be hurting him, but it’s out of love. Then go off and do something for any reason at all besides an infinite abstract theological one.