There’s a lot of bad spirituality out there. Discerning between what is good vs what is bad can be tough at first. People make tall claims. As they’re are many trixsters and charlatans afoot. Before we move forward and give a simple barometer that lets you know what is fake vs what is real let’s define what spirituality really is.
Ask 9 out of 10 people on the street, in the west, and they might associate it with religion. Giving claims of religious affiliation. Saying traditionally, spirituality refers to a religious process of re-formation which "aims to recover the original shape of man", oriented at "the image of God" as exemplified by the founders and sacred texts of the religions of the world. The term was used within early Christianity to refer to a life oriented toward the Holy Spirit and broadened during late medieval times to include additional aspects of life.
A more modern initial description could be broadened to refer to a wider range of experience, including a range of esoteric traditions and religious traditions. Modern usages tend to refer to a subjective experience of a sacred dimension and the "deepest values and meanings by which people live", often in a context separate from organized religious institutions, such as a belief in a supernatural (beyond the known and observable) realm, personal growth, a quest for an ultimate or sacred meaning, religious experience, or an encounter with one's own "inner dimension". So you could include the formal structures and teachings of the world's religions as having a tie to one of those definitions but certainly not all of them.
Most modern day religions are so neutered and watered down, co-opted by empire with blood spillings, judgments, guilts, dogmas (and catmas) and or deplorable behavior by their followers they are actually today almost void of spirituality. All religion stems from astrotheology (a tie to man's relation to the cosmos and the As Above So Below relationship to that) and shamanism which is about tripping balls using a sacrament to union with the divine. An experience of initiation and expansion that can gives you direct connection to the gaian mother, or smears you across all space and time or gives you downloads from fungal intelligence or back door mesh network gnosis from the underside of the circuit board of reality and thus allows one to more realize their spiritual heritage and capabilities. That has been reduced into eat this wafer that was from the body of this corporal man in a large and cold building. The inside esoteric has been replaced with the external exoteric. Religions esoteric core truths have been dimmed and a hollow shell remains. But at their inner core, that light does still dimly shine. Not as bright as it once did, but there is still some good stuff there. So religion is both not to be blanketly disrespected while at the same time, if it’s real it can take the pressure. Same with any claims of spirituality as secular from religion.
The Webster's 1828 definition of spiritual is consisting of spirit; not material; incorporeal; as a spiritual substance or being. The soul of man is spiritual. It’s what you are capable of in your most expansive state. Spirituality is not chasing rainbows. As the amazing Mexicacn Calro Alvete who I spoke to on the podcast in 2019 said, it’s your life. And I would extend into that to say it’s your real life. And how you conduct yourself through your mind, your heart and your will. The further you go in that process. The more balance and work you put in the more you will have experience and realization that spirit and soul are aspects of you or what you might call your higher self. To connect more with higher self you must reduce ego because ego blocks wisdom. When ego is balanced, your energetic centers are balanced, and your deeds and conduct are honorable, your spirit is a beneficial connection to larger spiritual realms. And that everyone and everything is embodied with it. A spiritual developed human will become a big individual which does not so much need big corporations or big governments. Thus, the larger you become, the more powerful you become. For we are spiritual beings having a human experience, not the other way around. So Spirituality is the real. Switch out those words. They are synonymous.
Now, let’s look at an opposite definition to spiritual. Which is material. The Webster’s 1828 definition is “Consisting of matter; not spiritual; as material substance; material bodies.” Nature is both spiritual and material so we of course exist in both places. Material has aspects of excellence but solely seeing things from only a material standpoint is materialism. Commercialism is the promotion of material things not made by the divine, but by man. What conscious man makes is excellent, let’s say a woman making her own beautiful jewelry from her artistic talents. Yet, what less conscious man makes is horrible, such as a mountaintop removal coal mining company in West Virginia which blows the entire top off mountains leaving a desolate sludge of chemical mudslide disgust. There’s a Grand Canyon of difference between those two types of materialism. One is balanced, and the other is massively imbalanced. AS the most commercial things will have the most overloaded material things.
The Webster’s 1828 definition of commercial is the principles, practices, and spirit of commerce. The spirit of commerce. Compared to the spirit of the individual. Most exemplified by extreme commercialism which emphasizes on the maximization of profit within materiality. Materiality is a contraction of what you’re capable of through ego misalignment. Because of opposite to spirituality, the commercial world wants to feed your ego. By having you climbing up a work ladder and thinking you are defined by your role in commerciality or catering to what they want you to think your ego needs. Egomaniacs and even sociopaths can do very well in capitalism and the corporate world. Information is the pinnacle of importance in marketing but in spiritual practice it’s just an early step. For reduced humans make great dull minds and dim hearts to be marketed to and commercials don’t work on or likely are not even seen in the first place by sophisticated intellectual developed humans. What is made by define forces is spiritual, like nature, what is typically but not always made by man (due to our low, but somewhat rising cell phone bar signal of consciousness) is commercial. Everything in the commercial society thinks of you as a barcode. They want you to be a materialist meat suit eater solely here to be advertised too in order to buy and sell things through your wage slavery. Cell phones and web traffic access a world wide web fraught with algorithms designed to get you to access commercial sources to click on things and spend time in their places because clicks and follows and traffic equals money for advertising dollars. Our entire consumerist world is filled by the oily glurge of this concept. Barcoding humans in their matrix pods. Turning them into batteries to be siphoned off of until death. A rare few who play ball with this system and show their willingness to work very hard within it sign away their soles with secret sacrifices who are then sanctioned to be propped up rising to join with or even become part of the shadowy cabal’s highest echelons of what they claim is success and the best achievablity by having their names becoming brands. Like Rotschilds, DuPonts, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Astors, Forbeses, Livingstons, Roosevelts, Lowells, Griswolds, Winthrops, Vanderbilt, Ford, Cargill, Walton, or even Oprah Choprah and Robbins. All of which have had marketing empires to sell their products throughout the world.
Unless you want to go live in a remote cabin or connect with a remote indigenous tribe, dealing with the brutality of sustaining food and shelter on your own, everyone in the modern world somewhat has to live in the spider web of commerce. Meaning the buying and selling of commodities. Which is all promoted commercially. In Matrix land, everyone is trying to make money all the time. 90+ percent of our jobs inside this modern world are solely for commercialism. Newspapers and magazines are paper which just existed to sell ad space first and spread propaganda second, with real journalism third, and their denigration is obvious because if this. Same think with television and radio. Which was only invented to air advertising. It also has things in between the advertisements called programs (named that for a reason) which make sure you dont think and making any possibility for long-form uninterrupted conversation or interactions, how humans really talk, broken. Again, followed by their inevitable decline. Politics has become a political ad circus where the party who spends the most, wins. Many major corporations are just ultimately marketing companies, who also make a product or products as a secondary. Big tech allows you to freely sign up to their platforms and upload your content onto them so they can collect your data and sell it off to the highest bidder. Film festivals don’t care about your film. They care about their festival and the submission money they will make off of it. Music industry contracts are 9 out of 10 times written in blood and will take the souls of the small authentic band who’s trying to create real art so they can water down that art into a commercial success. The most commercial music is what you’ll most often hear being broadcast to the masses on the loud speakers of movie theaters or shopping malls. It’s plastic catchy poppy music at best or K-Pop or Boy bands at worst which are balless, soulless, spiritless, heartless, corporate little bitches, suckers of Satan's cock as the wonderful comedian Bill Hicks very kindly and accurately used to say. Everything about them is fake and fabricated solely for commercial ends. They are a product. A Brand. An ultimately a bar-code. While social media is just self-marketing. The system is Inauthentic, greedy, and deceptive and its the world we’ve created today and that inherit inauthenticity is why it will continue its slow decline.
Yet most people don’t seem to fully realize this do they? They spend their entire lives just trying to succeed in a commercial world and have nice material possessions and stop there. But you, dear listener, realize there’s more don’t you? Good for you. You are probably more interested in states of mind, conduct of character, creating great art, living in as much harmony with your environment as possible, the expansion of consciousness, connecting with fellow tribe on your similar vibratory level, and the mystery of reality. All of which can be done living much more in symbiosis with nature. A system which is void of meaning can only force conscious beings to want to take less part in it in order to bring back meaning to life. However much you choose to take part in it is your choice, but the problem with this cultural operating system which is in desperate need of software upgrade installation is that human beings are not solely commercial traders.
When one starts to evolve in state of mind, and becomes concerned with wanting more out of life, then pursuing it, they are moving away from the commercial and toward the spiritual. Everything truly spiritual will be antithetical to our jobs within material commercial commerce. The empire loves commerce because its a distraction from your spiritual progress. As you progress spiritually, through spiritual growth you will come to peel old ways of doing things away and see old systems, you once may have taken part in, for what they really are, and you may no longer want to be as much a part of. You will discover that what is really going on is the opposite most of the time what you have been previously told or we could say previously indoctrinated into. So based upon what we’ve already said here, what would you say is the simple quick cliff notes answer to a sign of real spirituality? Here’s a simple cipher code to pier behind the veil. A basic sign of knowing if something is real spiritual philosophy (spiritual meaning real, and philosophy meaning wisdom) real wisdom is it will NOT BE COMMERCIAL (meaning fake). It will have no or extremely little commercialism surrounding it. Nature is the ultimate spiritual teacher. It is not commercial. There has been a few hundred years of attempting to commodified the elements, but it won’t ultimately last. Commercialism is fake, spirituality is real. The majority of the modern technologically advanced world (not organically technologically advanced like a mycelium network in the undergrowth of a forest) is commercial, thus it is ultimately more fake than it is real. So Time Square is a fake place while a redwood grove is a real place. This is why nature never gets tiring.
Charlatans working within the profession of spirituality will be commercial. They use a wrapper of new agy, self-helpy, or even esoteric catchphrases, while still having profit as their primary goal. If you see a spiritual teacher saying things thats seem self empowering and internally transforming or promoting consciousness expansion on their website while showing flowers of life, or panpipes, or CG renders of a globe Earth, or a series of “featured on” or “as seen on” with a bunch of corporate logos, then watch out. Pay massive amounts of money to come to my sold-out seminar, were taking millions of dollars to build our new temple. The real temples are inner, which you envision. They’re not built by stone. God wants us to be plentiful so you should give a percentage of your earnings to the congregation. By my New York Times best selling book. Our psuto mystery school has high monthly dues all due on the first sharp. So they pretend they’re spiritual but can only exist through expanding their followings and email lists. Look at my psuto-spiritual website converted in fallacies about my high numbers and downloads. All signs of fakery.
People tend to shit can what they are not good at. We must be big individuals, which happens through our spiritual growth, to reduce big corporations and big corporatized governments. Targeting this power is certainly one of my main priorities, which I’m sure you’ve noticed, yet frankly, I’ve been quite successful personally in my “career”. But I’m doing less of it than I ever had commercially, which means much less money and the content of substance like the documentaries and essays have to be supported in more decentralized ways for listeners like you. For I know my carrier is mostly an outer shell and any success in it is an allowance for me to highlight both the good and bad within it systematically. Because the best things I’ve created are the least commercial projects and the last ones that I would put front and center on the resume. I certainly appreciate the beneficial aspects of the professional working class, the disciplines and the drive to accomplish goals in teams. And see huge benefits in output of excellent things that are created through prideful jobs that make our lives easier so we don’t have to work the land 16 hours per day and then die at 34 because of a brutally hard winter. Yet I still can point towards its many flaws when scaled out too large. I’ve also said numerous times in the past I’m the lease commercial person on spaceship Earth. This was prior to formulating the more distilled thoughts given in this essay. Perhaps it has been my higher self subconsciously telling my current self, you are trying your best to live a real spiritual life as much as you can.
This material/commercial vs spiritual dynamic is of course not a binary. As their might be a glimpse of real sometimes seen within something commercial. “Conscious business owners” or triple bottom line business have the right idea but are operating in a system which goes counter to their intentions. An ad campaign for a specific outdoor clothing supply company shows footage of a human being climbing to a mountain top saying, hey unless you want to live as a primitive iceman in a raw animal hide to do this, you should instead buy our jackets to keep you warm. Sure. Were the jackets sourced well or were they made using sweatshop slave labor? The point is it’s more about the ratio of each. If you’re sponsoring business you actually use or you think is adding value to the world, then great. It’s the struggle of every artist through time. Making a living (or is it more like dying) off their art by having to interact with commerciality when all you want to do is move toward spirituality. So basically always remember, the more commercial something is, the more illusory and pretend it is, the more advanced and wise and deep something is, the more spiritual it is.
Yet, we can pay folks for their time and efforts, as money is energy. By a product I directly created myself, come to my smaller sized workshop, sign up for my magic school behind a paywall, become a premium member, join my Patreon. However far you want to play that to sustain your work. It’s up to you to decide how commercial you want to be. For the first couple years of this podcast I resisted and resisted putting any sort of commercial introduction to it and it took everything in my bones to eventually ad it. For I must have a products/store section of my website in an effort to bypass gatekeepers. It did feel a bit weird and slightly dirty, but I caved. Since people’s works take up their time, and a compensation like that in today's day and age is totally understandable. So it’s not a binary. All or nothing. It’s a sliding scale. And where you land on that scale is up to you and you alone. We all want to do good work. Real spiritual work is our inner work which helps the great work. It’s why we are here. Commercial work is for the dollar and is outer work. They will usually be different things but that doesn't mean we can’t find an alignment and balance with each. Or even better, if you find something which fuels your true will and helps others spiritually and sustains you financially then that’s great and amazing. A shamaness who takes a small fee for ceremony for example. George Gurdjieff owned a carpet company in Moscow. Manly P Hall had a couple main patrons who were was the wife and daughter of an oil barren which financed his works, seeing the value in them. John Michael Greer gets royalties from his occult books and his website very high quality blog entries with no marketing with a little tip jar on the side. Hal Lucid Nation’s real esoteric spiritual temple (which leads to your own inner temple) is literally a private newsletter. David Shoemaker’s Temple of The Silver Star has a very basic website. Any real mystery school will have no website at all or a very simple basic website with a simple contact us area. Fake AA or OTO or Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn websites will be packed with information. A dear buddy of mine who’s galactivated hundreds of people in Santa Cruz California on 5-MeO-DMT, providing them with life changing betterment, removed his presence completely off the internet and continues to operate with a private encrypted email address only for being contacted at but with mainly an underground network of connections in the flesh in that area. He’s been on a past episode of the Novelty Generators archive by the way as a hint hint. Neil Kramer sells audio products, does personal consultations for a fee, and he has a single annual workshop which is very modestly priced. Both of which allow you to spend direct time with him rather than just being one of many thousand audience members in a huge hotel conference room or even full megachurch style stadium. Our film Transmutation does not have a marketing team behind it. It’s just word of mouth via its sales. On the Josephine McCarthy first (will not be the only) episode of my podcast, she mentioned her magic school being not a commercial entity and they do not care if they don't make any money ever. Which was a coded way of her saying it is legit. While she and her online course are not perfect, none of us are, she accepts donations on the side and if you pay her for her creation that is certainly a nice way to show appreciation. At the time of this writing, I do use Patreon which is un-perfect tech but I like that it requires you to create your own content to have a page worth supporting on it. I also have royalties of my creations which I made directly, will occasionally consult others which they are welcome to financially compensate me for, and send out a very sporadic newsletter telling folks with eyes to see and ears to hear whats new. Because real spirituality will care about providing you with guidance and tools for path walking practice first and any profits as a third, fourth, fifth priority.
When you go to all these websites and they want your email address, it’s because all marketers know that the more emails you collect, the more sales you will get off your newsletter. Typically the ratio is about 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 conversions. So if you send out a newsletter email to 1000 people you will get between 1 and 10 sales from that email. So you can imagine how many sales you’ll get if you have a newsletter of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. The non-binary component of this spiritual vs commercial dynamic can also be compared to how you structure an email list. It’s the difference between being marketing gimmicky about it with the “hey give us your email” front and center at the beginning of the site, maybe even with a pop up field or a “claim your free gift” field, which are primary, and really the only reason that website exists. That vs content first and enter your email address field being secondary and non intrusive somewhere else on the website page. One way is more commercial than the other.
A shining example of someone who found excellence in this balance is Bill Watterson. A cartoonist and the author of the delightful comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, which was syndicated from 1985 to 1995. Watterson stopped drawing Calvin and Hobbes at the end of 95 with a short statement to newspaper editors and his readers that he felt he had achieved all he could in the medium. He made money off creating the comic strip while he was putting his time into it and the rights to the various anthology books which are wonderful pieces of comic art that will always be there for future generations to enjoy. But he did not commodify it, turning it into a franchise with toys and other merchandise. Today, Watterson is still known for his negative views on licensing and comic syndication, his efforts to expand and elevate the newspaper comic as an art-form, and his move back into reclusive private life after he stopped drawing Calvin and Hobbes. Which other than third party bootleggers who made stickers and decals off the characters, only exists in its original medium. It was about the characters, the art, their stories, and the childhood joy and magic of a youthful imagination which existed within its pages. It was kept pure and never watered down. My daughter likes Peppa Pig, a very cute British preschool animated series but has done the opposite. Merchandising itself to the nines, with peppa albums, films, and many plastic crap toys spilling out all over shelves of toy stores which will ultimately all end up in a landfill in the near future. The creator who devalues licensing will have more spirit and thus more to say in the work then the one who’s all for de-spiritualizing by making tons more money off licensing. Thus, Calvin and Hobbs will always have more magic hermetically sealed within it than Peppa Pig.