caitlin is skeptical of anything widespread in the empire; 

A spirituality that is uninterested in ending war, genocide, poverty and injustice is a dead spirituality. If you hold your time on the meditation cushion as something separate from the weeping mother clutching a small body in Lebanon, you’re wasting your time.

Sometimes I get asked why I only occasionally write about “spiritual” matters like awakening, egoic delusion, inner work etc, but from my point of view everything I write is about that stuff. To oppose the injustices and abuses of our world is to directly interface with the mechanisms of humanity’s struggle to become a conscious species.

The overwhelming majority of what people call “spirituality” in our society is really just glorified escapism. It’s about avoiding reality by focusing on good vibes, nice feelings, and comforting stories about the nature of the cosmos. Some of the most unpleasant individuals I’ve ever encountered considered themselves deeply spiritual people, because for them spirituality is about creating a Spiritual Person identity to feel good about yourself rather than engaging in uncomfortable confrontations with the repressed materials within you that are the source of your personal dysfunction.

And this happens to align nicely with the whole of mainstream culture under the western empire; our entire civilization is built upon psychological compartmentalization and avoidance of uncomfortable truths. If we paid too much attention to all the war, imperialist extraction, exploitation, injustice and abuse that western society is built upon, we’d never consent to the political status quo which holds those abominations in place.......more.........