We need your spiritual gifts

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I have taste in contemplative instruction. Which means that I’m highly opinionated about which practice instructions are good, and which are bad. There are many prominent spiritual/therapeutic influencers about whom I have gripes. I might air some of those gripes, from time to time, in this newsletter.

Ultimately, though, when I’m assessing someone’s work, I try to ask the following question. Is this teacher, pastor, therapist, facilitator, coach, whatever, on average, according to my best guess, moving people closer to liberation, or further away?

And there aren’t actually many spiritual teachers who are so bad that their effect on the world is definitely net negative. Even some of the looniest loose cannons on the scene, the most corrupt and megalomaniacal (Jeffery Martin) often have positive effects on balance. The wisdom of Chögyam Trungpa lives on, even though he was massively unethical at times. Spiritual teachers aren’t competing versus a wise mass culture. They are competing versus TikTok and Fox News, popular astrology and fad diets. It takes work to be worse than that.

This doesn’t mean we should automatically forgive horrible conduct. As individuals, we ought to strive for exemplary behavior, and expect the same of others who do spiritual work.

However, there is the following question. Who do we need out there, if we want to awaken all beings? My answer is:

We need everyone.

Frequently, I hear backchannel spiritual community gossip along the lines of: “I tried studying with teacher A, but they had such obvious blind spots. Then teacher B straightened me out.” Later, I then hear the same story, but reversed, where teacher B is the obviously blinkered one, whose faults were illuminated by the teachings of teacher A.

We need teacher A and teacher B.

We need the spiritually gifted Mormon sex therapists. We need the heterodox bodyworkers and the near-psychic embodiment wizards. We need contemplative accounts from Christian mystics and stridently atheist polyamorists. We need pricy spiritually-flavored executive coaching programs. We need old-school Theravada teachers who are not for sale at any price.

We need psychedelic dropouts, and people who correctly point out that drugs can’t be the ultimate answer. We need spiritually-informed psychotherapists who urge the meditators to look at content, and meditators who encourage the therapycels to ignore their stories sometimes, or look at the emotions underneath.

We need Neo-Tantra weirdos to teach people emotional release and butt exercises, and we need DBT therapists to teach emotional regulation and theory of mind.

We need IFS artistes to provide space for others to encounter their parts and achieve greater inner coherence. We need Zen teachers who can remind people to just be open and quit it with the fragmentation.

We need scientists working avidly, providing the neural correlates of awakening. We need irascible naysayers who point out that awakening is probably not something that can be fully mapped by scientific understanding.

We need non-dual YouTube influencers with cringe taste in video effects. We really need Frank Yang to make many more videos. We need Cheetah House to help with meditation side effects caused when unbalanced people get too high on spirituality content.

We need the massively scaled meditation hucksters who claim that their techniques work for everyone. We need the angry blog posts by people who point out that these techniques do not, in fact, work for everyone, and that real spiritual work doesn’t survive scale.

We need autistic teachers who carve up the contemplative landscape into a million sub-techniques, like Shinzen Young, and poetic teachers who tell you to just relax and wake up, like Adyashanti.

Sometimes, I hear complaints about the overabundance of professional spiritual types. Well, I’m in Berkeley, the white hot center of it, and I can tell you that we are nowhere near saturation on effective meditation teachers, or spiritual workers generally. I don’t have enough good people in my referral network.

Meanwhile, lots of smart, informed people still don’t believe in jhana. That’s like not believing that ibuprofen is real.

I think I’ll believe we are saturated when awakening is viewed, in popular culture, like noob gains in lifting. It is commonly understood that a novice lifter can double their strength within months of training, that’s in the water. There’s plentiful information about all the different programs you can do, and how to rehab injuries you might get along the way. Sure, there are arguments about the best method. But a general picture has cohered, and is common knowledge. Awakening isn’t there yet. Not nearly. I’d like to ask people on the street what they think of spiritual awakening, and hear the response, “Yeah, I know I could open my heart and relieve something like 90% of my suffering and be much happier and more prosocial if I did some years of serious spiritual practice. I understand that I can have a deep relationship with the transcendent that can transform me and my relationships and all of my perceptions, I know that’s out there for me.”

I believe enough in the intelligence of the world that, through the existence of more and more spiritual voices, rough points of consensus will emerge that could massively benefit humankind.

We’re not there yet. We need you to help us get there, even if I find you personally annoying.