group study How Is Pop Culture Seeing Spiritual Practice and Spiritual Topics?

[Earl Grey]

People don't even consider that engaging in spiritual practice could change their core values and world views.

Absolutely true. You are what you eat, so if you eat shit, don't expect to get healthy and strong like Popey the Sailor Man. Whether it's actual food or the information you expose yourself to, the company you keep, or the yogas you study, it affects you the same way cult brainwashing changes you.

If the physical practices you do are the yogic philosophies applied, then doing something by Mantak Chia or following random TikTok or Instagram platitudes makes you into nothing more than another meat puppet feeding entities and fattening the wallets of the frauds, while you remain happily deluded in your cage.

Furthermore, by participating in these movements, you add to their pool as well and end up reinforcing the same stupidity because misery loves company. The only way to enjoy something stupid is to be around people who want to believe in it too so that you don't feel alone, lonely and stupid, but instead happy with other friends who think being stupid is fine so long as they're happy.

 

[Roots of Virtue]

View: https://youtu.be/PEhAIOn888Q


This is how popular culture chiefly sees spirituality: though the lense of easily made money. Everything is for sale, unless there is some powerful interest group telling that cultural appropriation is at hand.

In this video, children are targeted with plastic Barbie doll that offers self-initiation in breathing based mindfulness meditation, however shallowly. This can be very harmful because children should be taught the importance of patience, generosity, and ethics most of all as far as spiritual practice goes. Instead, the Barbie doll continues its audio instructions by encouraging self-cherishing affirmations that further depart from traditional understanding about how to teach unselfishness.

Sacred loses its value if it's allowed to be diluted and turned into transactional tokens that serve the individual's appetites instead of self-transformation through virtues and wisdom view.