Sunday, February 3, 2013

Enter the Cyber Guru.

With the advent of the internet there is burgeoning new business that threatens to explode from a cottage industry on to the global stage. It is the new self help gurus who claim they can solve all of life’s problems from love to unemployment. Any pseudo intellectual can pitch himself as a cyber guru just change the name with a prefix like Shri, Acharya, Swami, Bodhisattva, or Lama as Jed McKenna indicts in his book “Enlightenment the Damnedest”. All these pop philosophers seek out amateur intellectuals and persuade them to entrust their deepest anxieties. Mysticism is the new mantra where spirituality is dispensed like coke – the pause that refreshes -. These Gurus never miss the opportunity of quoting the wisdom of others, which is more intriguing than what they can ever say. Every problem is addressed, how do we live with others in society? How to be successful? How to drop anxiety? How to conquer love? Those who read these types of self help spiel are better off reading “Playboy” How to be happy in love and marriage, guaranteed to stimulate, provoke, nourish and console with poetic wisdom drawing parallels between reality and quantum theory. Those with more complex neuroses are dealt with more philosophical depth towards enlightenment. Everything is wrong and lopsided, the logic, the assumptions as Jed distinguishes Satori from religiosity and mystical experiences – neither of which has anything to do with it. Self observation is an ancient practice and it has been called many names or many different things. It was advocated in the Vedas, Upanishads by the term meditation often like Buddha, Socrates, Zen Masters and even Sigmund Freud. Mashing poetry and philosophy together with self actualization is not very insightful.

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