I've rapped a few times about the tendency of some spiritual seekers to mistake a feeling of strong emotion for spiritual experience. This morning over coffee, I'd like to rap about doing that in public, and link it to the phenomenon I think it's most similar to -- whacking off.
Think about recent rants in which one of our resident emotional jackoffs went on and on inventing fantasies about about poor, victimized people and those who prey on them. Now go back and read that same rant and visualize him masturbating furiously while writing it. Doesn't it fit? Doesn't it seem like that's *exactly* what's going on? My theory is this -- if a spiritual organization does not provide real spiritual experience on a regular basis, it learns very quickly that to keep followers on the line and contributing the big bucks it has to give them something *else*. That "something else" is often regular doses of strong emotion. The organization might do this in the form of "telling stories" about the teacher or root guru, stories cal- culated to make the followers feel strong emotion about them. And, over time, the followers begin to associate those strong emotions with real bhakti, and believe that the manipulated pseudo-emotions they're feeling were somehow spontaneous, and that they're "growing in devotion" to the teacher or root guru. A few might very well be, but IMO most of them are just being manipulated as effectively as addicts of soap operas are. "Ooooooh...Guru Noname walked on water...I feel so uplifted and spiritual just thinking about it." "Ooooooh...Genna is pregnant with Darin's baby and he dumped her but she managed to overcome her angst and saved the town from terrorists anyway...I feel so uplifted." The thing is, after decades of being manipulated by others telling you "uplifting stories" to stimulate you into a sense of heightened emotion that you have been trained to associate with "spiritual experience," many people begin to do the same thing to *themselves*. They start to tell these "uplifting stories" to them- selves as a way of "jumpstarting" emotions that they cannot feel naturally. Thus we get the phenomenon of "manufactured outrage" we see so often here on Fairfield Life. Someone pre- tends to be outraged about someone "lying," and rants on and on about it for hundreds of lines of text, jacking themselves up into a mood of oh-so-righteous indignation and moral superiority. Or they accuse someone of "predation" and do the same thing. Or they call someone else an "anti-TMer" and do exactly the same thing. The supposed "causes" of the manufactured outrage vary, but the effect it has on the people expressing the faux outrage never does -- they're *getting off*. I'm presenting the notion that by doing this they are essentially masturbating in public, indulging in fantasies to jack their emotional levels up to the point where they can convince themselves that they can still *feel* emotion. And it is *SO* satisfying to them to feel these emotions. Make up a story about some poor woman manipulated by evil scum who make her do Bad Things, and you can feel *SO* superior to the "scum," and *SO* evolved yourself because you *care* about the fate of this poor woman. Repeat with a regular motion. Now grab a Kleenex and clean your- self up and run the same number again next week. Feeling dull and gray and lifeless, as if your medi- tation practice did nothing for you? Simple solution: pick someone who has done something you can consider "wrong" like...uh...say something positive about a person you hate, and make up some stories about how he or she is evil and use the story as a kind of masturbation fantasy. It doesn't really matter who the target is of the fantasy...it could be Sal, or Vaj, or Barry, or Ruth...it could be the Dalai Lama or Obama or pretty much anyone...their faces are as interchangeable as the photos in Hustler that guys jack off to on the toilet or the photos of Burt Reynolds that *you* jack off to in your bedroom. All that matters is that you can fantasize about them and GET OFF. Again, when you've finished, grab a Kleenex and clean up, while claiming "victory" and saying that you "won." Uh huh. Call me a perv ( and I know that some will :-), but I think of this act, repeated ad nauseum by those who seem addicted to it, is *exactly* what I'm portraying it as -- a form of mental and emotional masturbation. The people who indulge in it are using fantasies to manufacture cheap emotion in themselves and GET OFF. And, interestingly, many in the "audience" they're speaking to *cheer* the emotional jackoffs for doing this, and shout "Booyah!" or "Boy, you sure nailed him/her/it with that one!" I have to assume that after doing so they have to run for the Kleenex box themselves. :-)
