Marketing Mysticism: How shortcuts to enlightenment shortchange spiritual traditions

*Originally published on January 27, 2021. This episode won a Wilbur Award for broadcast excellence on spiritual issues and themes. 

Living in modern society is hard. The rigours of isolation, the sense that we alone are responsible for our success, the loss of connection that comes from just trying to cope — they all conspire to strip our lives of enchantment. 
 
Opportunities to be fascinated or awestruck can be rare. This diminution can lead many of us to look to other places, or even other worlds, to bring back some sense of higher purpose and deeper meaning. 

Wildly successful books like Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love chronicle that yearning, holding out the promise of contentment through accessing ancient wisdoms. That promise is often built around products and places that guarantee a shortcut to enlightenment. 

Welcome to the mystical marketplace — a place where Western seekers can turn to Eastern traditions to find some kind of healing for the ailments of modernity.

Sophia Rose Arjana is a professor of religious studies at Western Kentucky University and says that while the seeking out of enchantment is a key characteristic of the loneliness of modern life, the challenge of the mystical marketplace —which includes a broad range of products and activities including festivals and experiences and wellness tourism — is that the healing journey of western consumers means the "dumbing down" of ancient traditions and beliefs.

In the context of the so-called East, Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic practices are often reduced to an easily consumable set of goods that promise a quick fix.

Maybe you can't spend decades learning the Islamic spiritual practice of Sufism but you can easily listen to second-rate English translations of Rumi's poetry and gain a sense of calm. Practicing yoga as part of a committed Buddhist or Hindu spiritual practice is rigorous and requires years-long discipline, but goat yoga is fun and all you need to bring is a good attitude — and maybe a goat.

Modernity generates disconnect

The malaise of modernity is not new. Each new innovation that promised a better, easier life also brought us greater social disconnect.

As technology speeds up our lives, we feel more and more out of control. Instead of gaining time from technological efficiency, we are losing time for introspection and thoughtful living.

Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, noted in his 1991 Massey Lectures The Malaise of Modernity that contemporary society has left us feeling unmoored.

As he says: "Human beings in the modern West don't feel themselves anymore to be parts of a larger order of nature, a larger order of hierarchical society that very often in the old days was linked to the order of nature."

Taylor says the rise of individualism has benefited people greatly when it comes to choice but that it has also produced a great deal of worry and anxiety because it's made our lives "less heroic or flatter and narrower."

Exoticizing Orientalism

At its heart, the mystical marketplace is grappling with modernity, says Arjana. So where does the modern Western citizen, living in the belly of late capitalism, go to find answers to deep existential questions?

One of the places, she says, is the East.

"They're going to these kinds of Eastern traditions because they aren't finding that enchantment. To some degree I think that some evangelical Christians find it if they're in these very spiritual Christian traditions. But for the most part, people are looking in these other spaces and the East offers these exoticized pathways for enchantment."

Arjana adds that an important factor at play in this exoticizing is the idea of Orientalism — the framework through which colonial administrators and artists and scholars constructed and defined "the Orient."

She points out that while we're used to seeing the kinds of negative tropes associated with Orientalism — the evil sultan or demonic snake charmer — there is also a "softer" orientalism which associates the East with a place filled with wise men and ordinary people brimming with deep insights about life and living.

"We see stock characters when Westerners or Europeans or North Americans are writing about the East, writing about the Orient. [We see] the mysterious, knowledgeable Buddhist monk or the guru that's Hindu or the Sufi master. There are these characters that are predominantly male characters that are the holders of the tradition."

The desire to access these secrets is what leads people to try to buy their way to enlightenment.

"One of the things I try to talk about …. is what does it mean when you take from another culture's or another tradition's religious beliefs and you take what you want. And so there's an element of colonialism here that's really harmful," she says.

"In real mysticism, it's really hard work. This is something that in some traditions, you're not supposed to even start until you're middle aged because you're basically looked at as not mature enough to even embark on the path to mysticism.... it takes years and years and years of work with reading and oftentimes physical work, as well as religious work, and as well as studying."

The problem with immediatism

Arjana is clear to point out that she's not necessarily faulting people for engaging in these kinds of mystical shortcuts. She says people need relief from the pressures of modern life, something that religion used to offer.

She says non-religious mysticism, or spirituality as some like to call it, has become an alternative to religion, an alternative that may feel more compatible with secularism.

"The mystical marketplace provides these freer ways of being religious and engaging with religious traditions without being constricted by what the same people would call traditional religion."

The problem, she points out, is in not knowing the fundamentals about the faiths and traditions in which these practices are embedded. Relying on translations of Rumi written by someone who doesn't speak Persian, or deriving inspiration from fake Buddha quotes, or practicing yoga and knowing nothing about Hindu beliefs — all of these are a part of the problem of Orientalism. 

"Maybe the reason people are going from product to product to product is because there's a low level of dissatisfaction with these products but, also, that they're not getting it right. Maybe they're not getting it right because they're not really doing the tradition. If you're somebody that's on the path of Sufism and you think you're reading Rumi, but you're really reading some self-proclaimed Christian mystic, then you aren't really doing the tradition. And maybe that's why it's not satisfactory."

Arjana says the issue is that people are tied to the idea of immediatism — an instant way to attain a meaningful life.

"If they have misery or they have loneliness or they're looking for something in their lives, they want an immediate fix. And it's not an easy fix. It takes a while. I think maybe if people understood that it was work and they really need to engage the discussion more, maybe it would be more satisfactory and maybe it would work better." 
 

*This episode was produced by Naheed Mustafa.