Spiritual Neighborhood
People searching the spiritual marketplace for answers often miss that the ones whose answers they seek are the ones to whom the answers come with great difficulty, not with ease.
This isn’t a problem per se, but it leads to one. It takes maturity to recognize and accept the help of someone who shares your struggles — and accept that what helps you both with these struggles is companionship in them.
Without that, this situation is ripe for projection.
The message that “spiritual teachers should be flawed, not pretend to be perfect beings” gets out there fairly well, but that only protects against the most insane and one-sided risks.
Even the good ones are susceptible to being idealized for their flaws.
This disconnect shows up clearly on the other side of the transaction as well. So many of the people I observe seeking services of spiritual “professionals” online are clearly just looking for cooler friends. I bet a lot of online sex workers sense this dynamic, too.
This could be a good thing. Companionship through struggle works better as a community feature, not a polarized transactional relationship. What about widely supporting spiritual companions financially via low-friction online media, rather than concentrating support on idolized teachers?
This is happening naturally, by the way. Gold-rush pricing on intensive trainings is giving way to more accessible, digestible, and sustainable skill shares, creating a rising tide of knowledge that is already converting to more mutual material spiritual peer support.
This is called a neighborhood. It’s a thing intact cultures have. Accountants buy their bread from bakers whose taxes they prepare. The pastor of the church on the corner is someone everyone knows and sees in line at the same bakery. Et cetera.
This is an arrangement that protects against projection and romanticization. There’s not none, there’s just enough. You wonder about people and how they’re doing, you know there’s more going on than meets the eye, you’re curious, but you see the limitations all the time.
The thing is, it’s the economic entanglement that makes this possible. There’s not enough trust or stake in a meme-only economy. Prospective neighbors can harness attention economies to find each other, but the dominant force out there is projection.
Can a nice neighborhood harness a little projection to bring in a little tourism money? Sure. Just make sure to cultivate cool tourism by providing unique and high-stakes offerings that leave a lasting impression of the culture of the place — and that bring in some new life as well.
