self-help is taking over spirituality.

i've been meeting new people new friends since i moved country and one thing that keeps on coming back in conversations uh is their interest in spirituality as someone who's not spiritual nor religious um and someone who's always been into heart sciences i was quite skeptical why do all those people believe in spirituality now this is not how people should see the world bring in the facts and logic this spirituality thing does not make any scientific sense progressively i became so intrigued with the idea of spirituality that i started to see it everywhere around me people on social media kept on talking about manifestations the universe i saw advertisements for the power of now new earth and it kept me thinking for days i couldn't do anything else i couldn't work honestly it was probably the universe preventing me from making this video but anyway we're getting off topic after resisting for days i finally got my hands onto that life-changing book they were all talking about a new earth by spiritual teacher eckhart tolle and here i am ready to make it problematic that's what you're here for aren't you but before we start the video i would like to introduce you to today's sponsor skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creators where you can explore and develop new skills deepen existing passions and get lost in creativity whether you're into photography language learning creative writing basically if you're a curious person like me you'll find what you need on skillshare actually i recently finished a very good class taught by the amazing roxane gay on creative non-fiction it was on how to relate the personal and the political in essay writing something i tried to do in my videos honestly i took so much notes i think actually transcripted the whole thing but yeah what i really like about skillshare is that you get to interact with a community of learners create and submit projects and get feedback on what you've done it's curated specifically for learning meaning that there's no ad and they're always launching new premium classes so you can stay focused and follow wherever your creativity takes you now i have a very cool offer for you because the first thousand of my subscribers to click the link in the description will get a one month free trial of skillshare so you can start exploring your creativity today and now let's go back to the video the ideas coming from these books have spread all over social media in tv entertainment and med of spirituality a valid way of seeing life of going through life a cartel who wrote both books was born in germany he explained that he grew up very poor very depressed until he had a sort of enlightenment that turned his life upside down tall has the power to connect with people on a very deep level his approach of spirituality is centered around the self divided in several parts so the consciousness the awareness the compassionate and minimalistic spiritual self and what he refers to as the ego the surface level type of self the consumer the money driven how people perceive you from the outside basically the topics and aspects covered by a capital makes sense for a lot of us trapped in boring repetitive routines doing a job we hate stuck in toxic relationships that's why spirituality as a form of escapism has become extremely popular and the demand is met with an increasing number of spiritual teachers some of these teachers have grown to become superstars billionaires and tully is one of them in 2008 a new earth was selected by oprah's book club and since then it's been recommended by billionaires influencers selling millions of copies as i continue to research and look more into it i started to wonder naively is it normal for spiritual teachers to be so rich isn't there a discrepancy between what they teach and what they do what they are actually i'm not the only one asking myself those questions within the spiritual community people have shown concern over the wealth of some spiritual teachers i came across an article written by christopher titmus in 2014 and people still comment on it so it's still very relevant in fact he argues that there seemed to be contradiction between what gurus like eckhart tolle promotes so detachment from goods from money from instant gratification and reality his wealth and the very structure of his business model i may not be super knowledgeable about the practice of spirituality but i know how the self-help industry works and the similarities between how self-help gurus and spiritual gurus run their business is scary interesting scary i don't know you'll decide like any self-help guru ek hotel presents himself as someone who has what you don't have but won't toll is enlightened therefore happy and fulfilled he attracts positivity and abundance and instead of keeping that enlightenment for himself he decided to share it with others in exchange of a monetary compensation that compensation comes through books usually charge around twenty dollars merchant retreats charge from 600 to 1k dollars for just a few days actually so i'll let you do the math of all the money that's being made when asked about his relationship with money by one of the members of the retreat uh he explained that once he awakened he always felt like he had enough he never felt lacking eckhart shared how he tried different ways to charge for his teaching including offering it for free or for donations unfortunately found that commitment levels dropped significantly when there was no investment required which meant his message didn't go deep enough eventually he accepted that the message was more important and started to charge for his teachings and allow abundance to flow into his life he still lives a very simple life and never even thinks about money which is the definition of financial freedom while self-help gurus will proudly display their wealth and how much money they make spiritual girls cannot do that they have to justify their immense wealth through other ways eckhart's argument here is that investment means commitment so you had to make them pay to make sure that they were committed to enlighten themselves that they would not give up but i wonder how someone who devotes his life to helping others detach themselves from their ego can surrender when facing that problem so easily because what he says here basically is that people cannot find motivation if they don't put money into it so i can't help you with them so fine fine i'll take the money supporters of toll will emphasize that he cannot help but attract abundance others will say that he's committed to living a very simple lifestyle to not care about money and that's the most important i mean yes he'd better do that if he wants to sound and look credible but where does the money go then i think at this point i would prefer seeing a billionaire just showing off spending their money and actually putting it back into the economy rather than a billionaire that holds money and let it sit into your bank account doing nothing nothing of value now i've also seen people commenting under christopher's article that he gives a bunch of free resources so this guy is not greedy but actually it is part of the business plan when you give out free content in exchange of a newsletter subscription you create a more honest relationship with a potential consumer that wouldn't even have tried your product if it wasn't for free and may be so happy with the results that they now want to support you and give you money giving out free content is the basis for building a following a group of consumers so yes free videos of ecotour on youtube or on other platforms are part of the business strategy and finally matt's point by using words like abundance abundance mindset western spiritual teachers manage to implicitly connect spirituality to traditional self-help a phrase like how to attract abundance sounds way more abstract when more detached from materiality than how to get rich in five steps but it's more or less the same thing people make the connection between the two they want to bring abundance into their lives and part of it is bringing money into their lives and that's how it circles back to traditional self-help that's how they manage to reach out to a larger audience beyond the spiritual hermit or the pure anti-capitalist soul basically them being wealthy turns into a necessity if they want their business to grow i have abundance i have money and now let me teach you how you can too so it allows them to position themselves into the self-help industry and get recommended by billionaires powerful people wealthy people i'm not trying to say that spiritual teachers are bad people i know that gurus like eckhart tolle have changed the lives of many that he has had a positive impact on many people but we like to be critical on this channel actually some of you might argue that if self-help gurus do it why couldn't he what are you really trying to do alice except exposing his hypocrisy trying to put him down what purpose does your analysis serve well first of all i think it's crucial to deconstruct guru-like figures on an individual level because those people have so much influence they are followed by millions of people those people are brands they are an experience you want to buy and we have to recognize it we have to force ourselves to see it before we throw our body and soul into it and second i don't intend to stop the analysis here in 2017 gabriel bernstein was invited on oprah's super soul session to talk about her new book the universe has your back a new york times best seller she explained that after trying to get pregnant for a year and failing to do so she had a sort of enlightenment she still felt her body moving went and sit down at her desk and started typing involuntarily the words that were not mine came onto the page these are the steps for spiritual surrender and within that half hour period i channel the five steps for spiritual surrender only available in my book gabrielle's core message is to accept things as they are to adopt a more positive mindset and first and foremost to surrender in order to attract the things you want in your life you need to surrender and the universe will have you back that is a very important idea in spirituality the idea of surrender and unsurprisingly the school of life run by ananda bhutan also promotes the idea of surrender in a more pessimistic some would say realistic pragmatic way in a video on eastern philosophy he argued that the philosophy of wu wei encourages an intentional surrender of the will based on a wise recognition of a need at points to accede to rather than protest against the demands of reality sure it can be good to practice intentional surrender when your sibling just does not want to share his story with you or when that girl told you that she did not like you yet what happened when we're dealing with a different type of demands i don't know human rights for example um i really appreciated what you guys were saying in terms of bridging the divide between someone's negative and going towards their positive but for me personally when it comes to say someone who's racist who refuses to see my humanity i do not want to spend the time to think about okay how can i see the positive in them if your job makes you unhappy if you leave paycheck by paycheck if you don't have the same opportunities in life because of your race gender sexual orientation that doesn't mean you have to surrender that what is wrong is your mindset get enlightened friend practice compassion and have a positive mindset and you'll be happier no it doesn't work that way what really frustrates me is that i've talked to people who are spiritual uh friends influencers and for them that is not the way we should interpret spirituality it's like really popular on tick tock right now um and it's like till it's not the [Music] western influencers who are talking about it there is not gonna be a discussion on it yeah it only becomes cool once or a person from the west is practicing it yeah that's for sure that's something i try to convey individual as well like showing like just emphasizing the fact that there are western spiritual teachers not just spiritual teachers because it means a lot the fact that it's westernized i think it's just so freeing to to be spiritual i grew up with it dissociated with it and then i think i found my way back okay so how would you define your spirituality now the big uh the biggest part of it is death of the ego yeah and it's not even about like meditating or something it's just like trying to find that peace within myself trying to love everything around me being very compassionate to yourself and through that you find compassion towards others yeah that's what that's what i'm interesting is did you find that spirituality helped you connect with other people maybe people that were spiritual as well is it something that you practice for yourself or is it something that you think has value for uh yeah connecting with others or exchanging with others i think it's both of those things i do practice it for my own peace but that is because i do feel connected to everyone around me through it when we met at the at the house party the girl there and i knew like we just like connected with that girl and we when we were talking it was just like so similar experiences and even the way she was talking she was just i think there was she was just so fluid with her words and actions and it it makes you feel at peace i think how do you balance like being spiritual practicing compassion and um understanding with your knowledge of like social injustices and do you think there is room for um sort of a balance between yeah having being spiritual and at the same time being conscious of social injustices practicing spirituality was something that helped me see the world better and i think in a way it doesn't work opposite to each other i think it works together in harmony very well because for me spirituality would be to use to witness the universe as it is to to see everything and everyone around me and of course like finding love and compassion for them but that doesn't mean that i have to agree with the kind of society we live in like that is what is an imbalance and i think if we have enough people who recognize those facts through and i don't even mean through uh spirituality but just like become conscious of it i think we can make a difference in that way but i think for me it does work together because if i am compassionate to myself and even as a person of color living in ireland it's it's like i have to be compassionate to myself and have respect to people in front of me while making my point i wanted to end this video on a more positive note and so i recently finished this book uh glitch feminism by legacy russell i highly recommend it i was able to draw so many parallels with the research i was doing on spirituality russell's book is all about the internet as a creative space for non-binary bodies a space where queer bodies which she refers to as glitches can reinvent themselves and impact society as glitch feminists this is our politic we refuse to be home to the hegemonic line of the binary body we want a new framework we want new skin the digital world provides a potential space where this can play out glitch feminism demands an occupation of the digital as a means of world building it allows us to seize the opportunity to generate new ideas and resources for the ongoing revolution of bodies that can inevitably move and shift faster than the societies under which we are forced to operate offline this oblique romance of internet as utopia against this backdrop reality should not be dismissed as naive imbuing digital material with fantasy today is not a retroactive mythologizing it continues as a survival mechanism using the internet to play perform explore still has potential giving ourselves this space through experiments perhaps brings us together through a projection of a sustainable future spiritual communities and the internet can be a space for people whose body do not conform to the norm bodies are deemed unnatural malfunctioning people who've been betrayed in the past and are still betrayed by the rigidity and sometime bias of science to materialize the body and transcends limitations we need to make room for other realities as philosophytube said in her video on witchcraft gender and marxism if we reject the supernatural in our case the spiritual then we'll still have to decide through whose eyes we see the natural that's it for today thank you so much for watching the video i hope you enjoyed it thank you again to skillshare for sponsoring the video thank you also to my patrons a special thanks to boneless cloud and carla cabello as always we can continue the discussion in the comment section and yeah i'll see you next week [Music]

Channel: Alice Cappelle

Views: 95,848

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Id: QJFf29RVWU8

Length: 18min 7sec (1087 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021