The West’s Spiritual Pillaging

[zazen]

Still formulating my thoughts on it but found this interesting.

Here’s what I think so far:

A sort of spiritual and spiral dynamics supremacism exists that subtly degrades in their own grading - other civilisations and “religion”. This has been used by empire to justify empire and still is today via interventionist neoliberal democracy spreading.

Just like the idea of coming from below vs from above - I think one can approach “organised religion” from above also. After studying plenty of non-duality, Osho (in my anti-religion phase lol) etc I actually came to understand religion (its depth) a lot more and find an appreciation for it.

I get that religious literalism and superstition can be irrational because it takes what should be a metaphor for reality as reality itself - but can’t crystal alignment new ageism be just as irrational? 

Muslim prayer according to the suns timing is seen as lesser than Sadhguru prompting seekers to pray at the “auspicious” time of 6:20pm local time..because Western new age has validated one but not the other. Marcus Aubrey needs to sign off on fajr (Islamic sunrise prayer).

At the same time - I don’t see any of these as total nonsense either. They can be ritual or psychics guard rails, as long as they aren’t mistaken for reality but ways of engaging with reality ie the menu is not the food.

Organised religion basically socialised spirituality into a social operating system for society. The issue comes when the two get conflated (spirituality with society/survival) which unfortunately happens for many. But awakening to that doesn’t negate the value in that organisation or that one can engage in society from a place of spirituality - which is what aspects of organised religion try to inculcate.

It’s like spiritual libertarianism, similar to political libertarianism - attractive from the get go (because freedom always is), but then you realise the short comings in a lack of organisation scaled up to and extended towards a social order itself.

Humans can’t unneed what they need - one of those needs is structure. We literally are the “formless” existing in the structure of “form” to begin with.

So when societies develop structure it’s shallow to view them as mere constructs or un-realities that need transcending - as if you can escape form altogether. Even an enlightened master is in-forming you of his awakening, in the form of words, through the form of his body, before he leaves that very form we think needs transcending. Where are we transcending to? Can you go anywhere but here?

It may be semantics but perhaps the word transform is more accurate. As in transforming how to live and engage with form, not seeking to escape form all together. What we have is a formless reality (Oneness, God) that transcends the duality of form - but we don’t transcend that form, only transform in it by awakening to that which transcends it.

In the same way, we can be awakened in “organised religion” - while realising it as a spiritual form-ality. Just as the world of form (material) is itself a formality (means) for the formless (spirit) to live through and enjoy. 

The form of religion can then be approached from above as having a strong belief (in an operating system) held loosely, whilst its essential kernel of spiritual truth being grasped tightly and in total.

There is a meaning people and societies find in all this that shouldn’t simply be discarded or taken for granted. People find meaning in having a means to an end (purpose), but how is meaning sustained after reaching that end? By having that end be endless - which is God itself. That makes life not just a means but meaningful for many.

[zazen]

Related:

On 02/11/2025 at 11:43 AM, zazen said:

These stage green philosophies aren’t errors due to compassion or their original intent that is sincere and valid - it’s that they’re taking what are situational individual choices and universalizing them into a cosmic ethic. Why can’t lifestyle choices remain as such? Why do they need to become moral crusades and isms? (veganism, anti-natalism)

The wider point about this phenemona emerging in the West is that these moral overextensions keep emerging in the context of a culture trying to re-soul itself through moral absolutism - because for a long time it submerged itself in rational scientific materialism that metaphysically unmoored it.

They are symptoms of what happens when you have a correct moral intuition (suffering is bad) but no metaphysical container for it (no understanding of suffering’s role in growth, or a transcendent meaning that contextualizes earthly pain, or spiritual framework that grounds existence as fundamentally good despite its difficulties).

So that moral impulse - which in a traditional framework would be tempered by wisdom, cosmology or initiation into life - instead becomes absolute. It eats itself. “Suffering is bad” becomes “therefore existence is bad” becomes “therefore reproduction is unethical.”

This is the West’s particular pathology: we rejected a transcendent metaphysics, kept the moral sensitivity, and now that sensitivity has nowhere to go but into increasingly totalizing, life negating philosophies that we call progress.

Spiral Dynamics assumes a linear, universal trajectory of development that’s actually Western centric in both its aesthetic and milestones. It interprets progress through the lens of the Western psyche: material mastery (Orange), then moral overreach and empathy (Green), then synthesis of the tensions and contradictions in the below stages (Yellow).

Other cultures with a spiritual or metaphysical anchor already resolved these tensions without collapsing into nihilism. Spiral Dynamics can’t see that because it reads history through a Western teleology and developmental arc, where everyone else looks like a “lower stage” for not following. It universalizes the Western developmental arc - as if that trajectory is the natural path for all humans. Every other culture is measured against this Western timeline and implicitly cast as “behind in development” rather than “differently developed”.

The West lost its metaphysical grounding and then tried to reconstruct it through psychology - then mistake its own rediscovery of balance as “the next stage of evolution.” It’s civilizational amnesia posturing as progress. As if these colour coded values never existed before and only “came online” in Ken Wilber’s terms - in recent history. How does stage green or yellow values only come online recently - as if they never existed before lol. It’s called spiral dynamics yet approached as if it’s ladder dynamics in some linear manner.

Concern for the environment and marginalized is a recent evolution? Tell that to Jains who’ve been practicing radical non-harm for 2,500 years, or indigenous cultures with sophisticated ecological wisdom embedded in their cosmologies, or mystics who experienced universal divine love. Tell that to every traditional culture that understood humans as embedded in - not separate from - the web of life.

Apparently none of that counts because it was wrapped in “mythic” or “magic” worldviews. It only becomes a real developmental stage when white Western baby boomers discovered empathy after dropping acid lol. The model literally takes Western culture’s temporary pathological detour through mechanistic rationalism and calls it a necessary path of evolution for the entire globe. It treats these values as novelties that “emerged” rather than a recovery from lost and found.

I’m not saying spiral dynamics is junk - just that “the map is not the territory” - and this map doesn’t map onto the territory of reality so cleanly and neatly in the way we think it does.

 

[Breakingthewall]

On 18/10/2025 at 5:44 AM, zazen said:

 

Seriously you don't realize what nonsense does that guy spout? A smart guy like you? Everything in the West is bad; it's a deliberate plan to do evil, appropriating other people's religions to humiliate them and strip them of their identity, all while impoverishing them. Well, I suppose the 12th-century world that Muslims long for was richer, and they respected a lot others religions. The Islam is expansionist, it's written in Quran, and that guy complains that Christianity expanded. Poor man, he's very sad and bitter, and his vision is extremely limited, because he's just jealous.   don't you see it? He's full of anger because he feels inferior, then he needs to put west down. Too obvious. 

This man probably would have approved of the fate that the Islamic authorities reserved for al-Hallaj, perhaps the purest known mystic in history. Ana al haqq, I am the truth. Alter ego of Christ.

Edited Monday at 05:44 PM by Breakingthewall

[Breakingthewall]

On 18/10/2025 at 5:44 AM, zazen said:

while realising it as a spiritual form-ality. Just as the world of form (material) is itself a formality (means) for the formless (spirit) to live through and enjoy. 

That would imply intentionality, which would imply a conscious god who does things for a reason, which would imply that this god is limited.

True spirituality is openness to the unlimited, and it cannot be formulated. Religion is a formulation of spirituality so that it can be integrated into the human conceptual system. Spirituality is non-conceptual.

No religion is true; they are all systems of social cohesion necessary for coexistence. The great religions have a core of true mysticism, but true mysticism is formless. It's an action, not an structure.

[Nivsch]

I think Green and Yellow exist in underdeveloped countries too, even if surely not as common as in Western countries.

I agree with you that it doesn't make sense that Green and Yellow didn't exist in the past.

After all those are neorological structures that can be developed independently regardless of the structure of society, just that it will be less common when the society is pre modern and the brain is more worried about basic physical needs.

Edited Monday at 07:18 PM by Nivsch