Should Spiritual Language Be Simpler?

What is owed to today’s readers and listeners?

What is the role of spiritual language today? Many great figures in spiritual history have communicated in profoundly simple or parabolic terms, from Lao Tzu to Zen master DT Suzuki, while others, from philosophers Immanuel Kant to William James, have navigated the rapids of complexity.

What is owed to the 21st century seeker?

I recently excerpted a piece of a new talk on Instagram and a reader good-naturedly took me to task for overcomplexity of language. To explore the nature of what we need today in spiritual language, I am posting my original passage, my reader’s critique, and my reply — which, either in a sign of our times or of my verbosity, was too long to post on Instagram.

My excerpt:

“If I am right about ability of thought to concretize experience then it begs the question: what is mind causation for? If I accept the outlook of critics, is worldly ambition, is the wish to create, is the wish to produce, to earn, to generate, to be or live in a certain way, a worthy aim of the spiritual search?

“I’ve wrestled with that question for many years. The perspective that I’ve come to is ceasing to differentiate between what might be considered the eternal and temporal. I believe those are artificial divisions imposed upon us by the force of familiarity.

“So much eastern and western religious thought tells us that we live in this hierarchical world, a world in which things that are essential, eternal, sacred, everlasting, that belong to the ‘greater you,’ are somehow of a higher degree or sphere of existence toward which we progress as we shed worldly attachments and illusions, sometimes called maya or samsara, and as we realize that attachments breed suffering, and so on. I believe that idea in both eastern and western religion does not suit the life and search of the 21st century seeker. And I think it warrants re-examination in our generation. Because I believe that we’ve gotten into a kind of false division in which we think in terms of attachment and non-attachment, personality and essence, ego and true self, eternal and temporal — and I don’t know where you would necessarily even draw those lines of demarcation. I think these preconceived divisions can tear the seeker apart…

“How would we demarcate the point at which the personality blends into essence or when a more temporal desire blends into or gives way to a more eternal desire? Moreover, how would I or anyone else evaluate what is necessary in your life? My sense of things at this moment in my search, and I share this with you very frankly, is that the essential purpose of life is self-expression. Self-expression can take any number of forms that are intimately important and necessary to you. And I am opposed to nothing other than barriers being thrown up between an individual and his or her sense of self-expression.”

My reader’s response:

Sometimes I wish you could dumb it down for those whose vocabulary is limited. You could reach so many more people if your language was a bit easier to read for those who haven’t had the chance to have a college education! Jus sayin….. obviously I’m don’t care about judgement on this. Let’s help everyone. I usually have to read your writings a few times to fully absorb it- it’s very eloquent and well…. Complicated. 🙌♥️😆

My reply:

I dig what you’re saying. And I will sit with it. One of the things I strive for is transparency. Whether I am speaking at an academic conference or New Age center, writing for a popular magazine or scholarly journal, I say the same things. I never want people to feel that I skew my message in one direction or another based upon who is in the room.

The mind-power field, it seems to me, has done a better job of popularizing than of refining itself. Since William James died in 1910, mind metaphysics — while it has produced some extraordinary figures, such as my personal hero Neville Goddard (1905–1972) — has not really grown. For example, New Thought has never come up with persuasive theology of suffering. Or a theory of why mind power works — and what is occurring when it doesn’t. Generally, its practitioners default to catechism or some variant of “you’re doing it wrong.” I believe that seekers deserve better.

I actually feel that a childish intellectual culture prevails in many precincts of New Thought and metaphysical churches; it pains me to say that about a field that I love and that is supposed to stand on the primacy of thought and intellect. I hold a very deep personal belief in thought causation — but I also believe that we live under great complexity and we necessarily experience many different laws and forces. Hence, I never want to downplay the difficulties (and possibilities) facing the individual. That is why I eschew terms like “law of attraction” or “manifestation” — they are unclear and rely too heavily on previously accepted notions. This is similar to the way that spiritual writers in the 19th century would routinely refer to man having a “soul” without ever defining their terms or making the case for the individual even possessing a soul. Familiar language becomes an easy default.

I also think that we need more transparency of a personal variety. I believe that writers in popular spirituality — and I’ve worked with some of the best-known figures in the field, so I’ve seen how the “sausages are made” — ought to be more disclosing about their own personal failures and weaknesses. Let’s strip away the theater of someone being an elevated teacher or voice (I see myself only as a seeker) so that the reader or listener doesn’t feel so alone and sees that the “man with the plan,” so to speak, struggles with the same things he or she does. That, to me, would mark a maturation of the field.

At the same, I do try to provide really basic principles that produce power. They include:

1. Keep your word — and sustain rather than evade the suffering that occurs when you break it.
2. Get away from cruel people — nonnegotiable, even if not immediately possible.
3. Do not gossip.
4. Sit still for 10 minutes a day in meditation or otherwise. (Anyone who cannot sit still for 10 minutes cannot do much.)
5. Pray radically to any deity of your choice — seek a relationship.
6. Use visualizations and meditations during the state of hypnagogia, or the deep relaxation you feel just before drifting to sleep and immediately upon wakening.
7. As I am developing in a new book, Daydream Believer, the wish alone may be enough to enact the energies of the mind, without any other rituals or methods, once a person becomes aware of the causative nature of thought — and that awareness requires persuasion, which is what I am trying to supply with some of my more metaphysical explorations or theories.

My short book Awakened Mind provides some good basics, as does my upcoming Cosmic Habit Force (Jan 2022). But, again, I dig your point and will sit with it. Wishing you all good things in your search, -Mitch-