Demand for Buddhas

It is a problem that people want some people to be buddhas and not other people.

I’m not going to talk about teachers and claims. I’m going to talk about markets. Consumption. Demand. Supply arises to meet demand. What are you demanding? What are you demanding someone provide you as a service in order to avoid doing your own work?

What are you demanding other cultures provide as conceptual and relational frames for your own flat life rather than growing in your own culture?

I often hear the plague of spiritual materialism attributed to a poverty of options. Rather than consider the consumers responsible, people are often willing to blame The Powers That Be™ for depriving anyone of meaningful cultural options — paving paradise to put up a parking lot and so forth — and thus consumers can’t be blamed for cobbling together a spiritual costume out of internet search results and social media avatars.

I believe people have more cultural agency than that. They may not have many other kinds left, but as long as they have anyone else at all, they have that. They can do the work of mutual and trusting growth with whoever is around, and it is out of that soil that new culture grows.

I tend to find that it’s only materially comfortable people who don’t bother working with that resource, because they feel they can outsource it. They can instrumentalize people like they do their other resources, rather than getting their hands dirty trying to make things work with people outside their antiseptic bubble.

The contemporary online spiritual environment is well aware of the risks of this consumer behavior. Cult documentaries are an inexhaustible entertainment genre on on-demand streaming services. If there’s anything the powers that be can certainly be blamed for here, it’s training consumers to remain strategically ignorant of the harm caused by their appetites.

But that harm is downstream of the cause of spiritual materialism. That problem is caused by the compounding effects of avoiding eye contact with people you see every day. If you meet the buddha on the road, it’s because you weren’t looking before.