The Business of Spirituality

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“Shiv, I’ve been enjoying your books. You raise valid points that I believe warrant a response from the spiritual teacher community. Given that these aren’t your average “softball” questions tossed up at retreats, I’ve been curious what your experience has been.  Seems to me that if a teacher isn’t interested or willing to look at this stuff that is a major red flag. Unless, of course, there is ‘no one’ there to answer.”

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I hate to break it to you, but the entire spiritual industry is one giant red flag.

It is an environment that seduces vulnerable people into forming co-dependent relationships through the culturally sanctioned teacher-student dynamic; a dynamic which ultimately entraps, rather than liberates, naïve lost souls who inadvertently wander into the morass of false promises.

But this is nothing unusual. It is just consumerism at its finest. The whole world operates in this way, so why not spirituality?

Let’s fill that void within your soul by promising you shit you don’t need… get you hooked on that shit-you-don’t-need until you can’t do without it…exacerbate that feeling of void each time you aren’t getting what we give you…convince you that what you are doing is working and that you just need more of it … and if you just keep coming back for more you will eventually feel fulfilled, happy, enlightened whatever.

The great irony here, of course, is that the spiritual industry markets itself as being the antidote to the evils of materialism. Yet, this thin veil of virtue-signaling is easily torn apart by those who are willing to see it for what it is.

The responses I have received from the teacher community have been to largely discredit me. I’ve been called all sorts of things from “angry and disgruntled” to “one whose realization is half-baked”. Of course, I have grown used to such criticism and it doesn’t faze me anymore. It used to when I first began writing and I would get into day (or week) long debates with these individuals on Facebook. Now, I couldn’t be bothered. When you challenge a status quo that has helped so many grow powerful, you have to expect some blowback. Five years into writing on this page – I think I am now tolerated by most in the teaching community as a somewhat necessary evil best given a wide berth.

You are right that most teachers aren’t interested or willing to question their own motives. But that is because they exist in an industry that has fostered an atmosphere of complicity for eons. Most teachers who start out aren’t really being Machiavellian about it. Many genuinely believe that they want to be of service to others on the path. Yet, somewhere along the way they compromise their own ethical standards. Why? Because everyone’s doing it. In fact, its almost impossible to survive in this industry and make a living if you aren’t playing the game by other people’s rules.

The fundamental question any spiritual teacher needs to ask themselves is this: “Is the service I provide others based on a model of turnover or retention?”

If you think of any educational institution – be it a school, a college, a university or trade academy – the goal of the educational institution is for its students to graduate. Whether the course/program they are offering is a few months or several years long – the fundamental understanding the student enters with is that there is an expectation for them to keep progressing along the curriculum with the eventual goal of completing their studies and then moving on. In fact, students who fail to complete their education within a certain timeframe may be denied continued enrollment in the program. Therefore, the goal of a teacher is to have their students absorb the lesson, develop a certain degree of mastery and then move on to bigger and better pursuits. In fact, many teachers will often pride themselves when their students become even more accomplished than the teacher is in their field of study.

Therefore, turnover is the fundamental model on which any form of educational pursuit is based. If the student isn’t moving on – that is a mark of failure. Both on the student’s part and on that of the teacher’s.

However, if you think of a corporation – be it a company that creates a product or one that provides a service – the goal of every corporation is to retain and expand its customer base. Corporations don’t want their clients to “grow out of” their products. Which is why they are constantly innovating so that their customers will keep purchasing what they make. Imagine if Apple had stopped with its first-generation iPhone? And imagine if the moment their customers felt like there was a more advanced product in the market, Apple bid them adieu and wished them all the success in their future endeavors? Wouldn’t that be a bizarre state of affairs?

The corporation’s sole focus is its bottom line. And in order to keep that bottom line steady and growing, they have to ensure they retain their loyal customer base while continuing to recruit new customers all the time. This is done using effective marketing strategies to influence what their customers desire and by constantly adapting their supply to the demands of the market.

Therefore, retention is the fundamental principle on which a corporation grows and thrives.

Now, if you were to look at the spiritual industry – how many spiritual teachers out there are trying to actively “graduate” their students? And how many are, instead, overwhelmingly focused on retaining the students they have, all the while recruiting more with slick marketing and promises of psychological liberation? It is clear to me that the spiritual industry overwhelmingly functions on a model of retention and NOT turnover.

In other words, these are businesses operating under the thin veil of educational enterprises. The words “teachers” and “students” are false monikers. What these individuals should really be called are businesses and customers.

Eckhart Tolle is not a spiritual teacher. Eckhart Tolle is a business. He doesn’t have students, he has customers. Mooji isn’t a spiritual teacher. Mooji is a business. He doesn’t have devotees, he has customers. Rupert Spira isn’t a spiritual teacher. Rupert Spira is a business. He doesn’t have students, he has customers.

Repeat this with any name in the spiritual teaching game and you will eventually come to see that almost everyone fits the bill. Even the ones who claim not to “charge money” for their services are nevertheless trading in a different kind of currency – whether that be influence, power, fame or recognition.

When you realize that a spiritual teacher is not really a spiritual teacher, but a business…and that it is that business’s goal to keep you, the customer, perpetually coming back for more – then you can see why “learning”, “progress”, “self-knowledge” or “independence” could never be primary driving force. Because all these things empower people. They don’t make them dependent.

In order to foster dependency – you cannot give someone freedom. You have to do the opposite. You have to provide them a crutch without which they cannot cope. You have to give them what they need easily and without challenging them, so that they never truly develop the kind of self-reliance that is necessary to face life on one’s own terms.

You have to hobble them at the knees and then prop them up – all the while assuring them that you are teaching them to “stand on their own two feet”.