I think of myself as special far more often than is warranted
I didn’t know until a few minutes ago that there was a perfect crystallization of questions that have been nagging at me from the back of my mind since I finished the Body Electric Living Eros course ten and a half years ago.
To paraphrase:
…[the] expressed goal is one of spiritual, existential, or philosophical enlightenment contingent upon [a person’s] hard work, commitment, and patience, but whose actual barriers to entry are primarily financial. Should its consumers fail, the genre holds them accountable for not being ready to get serious, not “wanting it” enough, or not putting themselves first, while offering no real solutions for the astronomically high tariffs - both financial and social - that exclude all but the most fortunate among us from participating.
- Joshunda Sanders and Diana Barnes-Brown, “Eat, Pray, Spend: Priv-Lit and the New, Enlightened American Dream,” Bitch Magazine
So it would seem that, in a very left-handed way, Oprah and Julia Roberts actually serve a purpose, at least for me in this particular moment.
To be clear, I’m not necessarily all that disillusioned, though the cross-theistic irony is not lost on me. The element of charlatanism is universal enough that I don’t really find it bothersome anymore. It’s more that Westerners are so out of touch with everything around them (oddly enough, a concept that so many commercialized spiritual training paths emphasize so strongly) that they can be duped (and I don’t try to exclude myself from this number) into spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars to have other people guide them through reconnection exercises/rituals that can be found in books or even personally created for much less or no money.
What makes my particular arrival at this conclusion amusing is that the epiphany could have been titled “Everything I Needed to Know About Higher Spirituality I Learned From Saffron’s Rants In Selected Absolutely Fabulous Episodes.”