How To Protect Yourself and Others in the Spiritual Marketplace of Ideas | Big Think

Every form of spirituality we can identify, whether it’s traditional religious forms of spirituality, a kind of a materialistic, scientific world view, or progressive spirituality in all its many phases, as in the last 50 years that have emerged within American culture and elsewhere, have both dignities and disasters, right. The spirituality brings out the best and the worst in humanity.

And so, every one of these major categories—the religious, the secular, and the progressive—have very beautiful and important expressions. They also have dark expressions, which we do well to avoid. I certainly feel that scientology is a dark expression of progressive spirituality, or maybe even secular spirituality. It’s not really clear how to categorize it, but it is a cult, and we see cults of all kinds.

Whenever you’re dealing with something that’s ultimately true and real, people can go astray. They can be pulled into forms of organization which are diabolical. The signs of a cult include a particularly strong personality who wants everyone else to conform. It can include intense commercialization, in which it seems more like a business than a form of spirituality.

I think that the best way we can protect ourselves on the spiritual journey is by taking an integral view of spirituality. Seeing how spirituality evolves, and seeing how it can become stuck, how it regresses. And so, if we look at scientology, we can see that there’s a lot of negative fruits. A lot of lives have been ruined. A lot of falsehoods have been projected.

And so, using this test of their fruits, we’d be able to determine right away that’s a kind of spirituality we would do well to avoid. Ultimately, I think spirituality is a personal affair, and while we can socialize our spirituality and be part of a spiritual group, spirituality, in its essence, is really about our own spiritual growth and our own experience of that which is beautiful, true, and good.

And so, maintaining our prerogative as agents of evolution and as indeed agents of our own spiritual growth is one way we can protect ourselves from the ways that we can be led astray in the spiritual marketplace of ideas.