As I said yesterday, there’s a host of miraculous Mind-Body-Spirit techniques and solutions on offer out there, routes to increased power, peace of mind, freedom from disorder and anxiety, and even – and especially – to quantum increases in wealth. Money, coming through your door, apparently just because you called it.
It’s good that people are looking for inward ways to make sense of their outward lives. Can’t be a bad thing that more and more people are turning their attention towards a life with at least an element of spirituality. Two things worry me about this spiritual supermarket, though.
1) The suggestion that these breakthroughs in self transformation, in your spiritual and physical life, happen with ease and without effort.
2) The inclusion of physical wealth – or for the moment, given that some make a distinction between wealth and money, let’s just say money – in the list of benefits accruing to those who sign up for these teaching packages and practices.
1 I finished yesterday with: ‘Why should we expect reward without effort here, when we don’t anywhere else?’ – purposely because I wanted to examine this idea more closely. With the greatest of love and respect to my American friends and soulmates, it’s a common theme in modern American culture to aim for the reward without the labour. Ads are always telling you that what you’re buying will deliver whatever it is you want without you having to work for it. Weight loss programmes (programs?) are specially good at this. My unease about this is simple; you don’t get a damn thing without somehow working for it. I address this in the Magic Minute idea of Eco-Mentalism, which is designed to get you started on a meditative, spiritual practice because it is so easy and takes so little time. But the truth is, the more time and effort you spend on growing your own Self awareness, the more it grows. Your Magic Minute, likewise, will grow into two, ten, or even 15. Which is a good chunk of meditation time to put into your every day.
2 The money thing. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have a £10,000 cheque come through my door for no apparent reason. Or even £100,000. Yes please. I also do genuinely think that one’s attitude to money helps or hinders one’s ability to get it, and for the idea of creating a new relationship with money I am grateful to Morgana Rae. But the really tricky thing about associating the appearance of physical abundance, in the form of money, with spiritual practices such as tapping, opening the chakras or other more straightforward meditations is: what happens to your state of mind when that cheque doesn’t flop on to your doormat? Keep working away at it but your circumstances don’t change? Anxieties still there? H’mm. You must be a failure then. Add disappointment and a reduction in your sense of self worth to your struggle to elevate your consciousness. No help. You must be doing something wrong. See what I mean? Stop now. More tomorrow.
