I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of
established religion—[Baruch
Spinoza]
To
highlight the reality delusion associated with many neo esoteric beliefs I want
to recount an incredibly horrific incident.
It concerns an atrocity that occurred just a few miles from my
home in which a seven year old girl was brutally raped, her throat slit, set
alight and left for dead.
In spite of the inhuman savagery the girl suffered, she
miraculously survived, though now most certainly having to bear the scars of
this unspeakable horror for the rest of her life.
And to add to the depravity of the act, it was perpetrated by a
close friend of the girl’s family, someone she knew and most likely trusted
unconditionally. Though someone who in a single hour shattered her innocence,
and with it most likely diminished the potential of her young life.
However the real tragedy is that this is a far too common
occurrence in a society having been the victim of centuries of brutal
colonialism, savage slavery and racial oppression. Though now in post-colonial
South Africa the former victims of past oppression are sadly brutalizing their
own.
When looking at this particular instance of inhumanity logically
and you do hold strong esoteric views, then you unavoidably have to come to
some rather irrational conclusions about why this girl supposedly must’ve
earned or even deserved her fate.
For instance if you believe in karma and reincarnation, then it
must also be your view that what happened to her – as a consequence of your
belief – had to be as a result of her past misdeeds. That is in this life but
also of her past lives, and that she now must be repaying back some monumental
karmic debt.
Or if you believe in personal spirit guides then they in their
infinite wisdom must have orchestrated this monstrous event from some or other
higher cosmic vantage. Perhaps it is so that the girl had willingly chosen this
lifetime to learn her spiritual lessons through pain and indignity.
Or if you subscribe to the views of The Secret, that “You cannot "catch" anything unless you
think you can, and thinking you can is inviting it to you with your thought”,
in spouting this profanity you must be of the view that her conscious or
unconscious thinking must’ve been responsible for bringing this cruel
inhumanity upon herself.
Or
if you are of the opinion that “love
is all there is, all else is an illusion”, a quote by John Demartini a
contributor on The Secret, explain to her that her horror is not really real,
but that from a deeper perspective had been an act of
love. And furthermore that the actions of the perpetrator were in fact not a
vile and monstrous one, but motivated by some or other form of cosmic love
which he had unconsciously enacted upon.
If these indeed are your views then my honest opinion is that you
are not living in my reality, and particularly not of that girl’s, but rather
in a sick delusional fantasy.
Though if you are of the opinion that you are not deluded, then
you must be an incredibly cruel and unfeeling person for having had the gall to
confidently proclaim that these are your views. What you therefore are implying
is that at some supposed more consequential level, this poor girl had not been
the innocent victim of human savagery, but at some obscure ‘cosmic’ level had
deserved what happened to her.
Such attitudes are very real and unfortunately are significantly
increasing with the advent of New Ageism. The real danger in these neo
‘spiritual’ views is that they essentially are escapist. For instance at a talk
I gave in Cape Town where I spoke about this very incident, a prominent person
in the city’s New Age movement attempted to defend the notion that “love is all
there is, all else is an illusion” by indeed rationalizing it from Demartini’s
perspective.
In defense of his ideology he intimated that, unless one takes mental heed of the event, it did not really happen at
all from one’s individual perspective.
In his argument he literally equated the events of our lives to
the fictitious events on a movie screen by indicating that, if a particular
event was not captured on film, it then does not exist from the vantage of the
movie audience watching the showing of it at all and thus is not a reality for
that particular audience.
Quite frankly,
this is the most inhuman argument that I have ever heard.
I say this because I always understood from my Judeo-Christian
upbringing (not that I’m a Christian or Jew but an Agnostic, if anything) that
one’s capacity to become conscious of the suffering and inhumanity around one
and then to actively reach out to those ill-fated by circumstance, is the most
consequential act of humanity one can ever show.
Moreover, it is imperative we fully acknowledge that the brutality
of ‘humans’ are real and omnipresent and cannot be wished away or meditated
into spiritual oblivion as is becoming the predominant view.
Rather it is incumbent on us to
fully acknowledge that this type of barbarity takes place, being a scourge
within humanity that must be bitterly fought against if we indeed are to
collectively evolve to a higher level of being.
