(I probably won't be widely advertising this post, aside from people who are signed up for my RSS feed, since this one is mostly just me getting shit off my chest rather than some grand essay or life update with careful wording and heartfelt feelings. I cranked this out in like an hour while bored at my desk at work. Make of it what you will.)
I've brought it up before, and I'll keep bringing it up until I'm blue in the face: a whole lot of people in metaphysical spaces care way too much about what other people are doing in their practice, when it's got nothing to do with them. Consider this a spiritual sequel to PR for the Gods, but this time we're talking about folks who get up on their spiritual soapbox to talk down on their own peers, who usually share a similar practice to them.
Let me add a caveat: I primarily see this with younger people, particularly the type who are online way too much (I'm allowed to say this because I am one of those people, on all counts).
Let me add another caveat: This has absolutely nothing to do with holding people accountable for harmful practices such as cultural appropriation or nationalism or similar, which is a whole other thing entirely. This has everything to do with people acting high and mighty, either directly or behind the backs of those who they think they Do Their Practice Better Than, probably because they have a pretty low self-image and are scrambling for any way to make themselves feel better than someone else.
And another: Having to write this many prefaces before you can even get to the fucking point of what you want to say shouldn't be a thing, and is a symptom of people looking for any opportunity to interpret a statement in the worst faith possible. I'm just doing this so I am being abundantly clear.
There, now that we've gotten all that out of the way...
Aren't you all tired? Like, seriously, is that mindset not completely fucking exhausting? When do you have the time to actually do your own practice when you're so busy getting caught up in other people not practicing up to your standards? Do you even have a practice of your own at all at that point, or are you just talking a lot of game on Hatsune Miku's internet to make it seem like you do? Did we all forget how to ignore (and maybe roll our eyes) and move on? Did we all forget what YMMV stands for?
Again, I'm speaking from a place of personal experience. I've been That Guy. I know how this whole shebang goes. I spent several years online basically entirely forgoing my personal spiritual practice in favor of being passive aggressive online towards people who practiced in ways that I didn't like. Sure, it was a quick and cheap dopamine rush in the moment, and it made me feel reeeaaal important, but in hindsight all I can do is cringe at the type of person I was even a year ago or less, when I was definitely still acting like this to some degree. I guess, in a sense, I'm partaking in it right now as I write this, but I'd like to think that I'm being way more direct now than I was ever capable of being back then.
So I guess I can only hope that the other folks partaking in this particular behavior are eventually also able to look back on said behavior and realize that they sounded like a complete tool.
The hugest, most mind-bending change to ever occur in my practice has been a progressive understanding over the last year or so that the amount of variance within a spiritual practice can be basically infinite. No one is going to interact with the Other the same way, think about theology in the same way, understand philosophy in the same way. The amount of tiny permutations that are possible within an individual's practice could never be quantified. Even within practices with rules and structure and even orthodoxy. No one will complete a spell or a ritual in the exact same way, even if they are following the same written instructions on how to do it. And this is, unequivocally, a very good thing, if you ask me. What would we really be achieving if we were all doing the same thing, with no variance whatsoever?
And above all, who the hell are any of us to dictate which of these variances are "valid" and which one's aren't? (If you're about to "um, actually," me to bring up people committing actual harm with and within their practice, please scroll back to the top of the article and begin again. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.) And if this is the case, then what good are we doing by getting mad at strangers on TikTok or Discord or wherever the hell else because they talked about Dionysos a little too casually for you liking, or because they engage in trends that you consider silly?
Does punching down really make you feel better? Do you even recognize that that is what you're doing? You know that someone out there could probably very easily find something just as obnoxious to point out about your practice, right? And if your defense is, "Well, if they did that, I wouldn't care," then who's to say the rando you're talking shit about doesn't feel the exact same way?
Finally, yes, I know that a lot of people will couch their criticism in "concern" for the way that, again, complete strangers on the great big internet, go about their practice, as if the gods give enough of a damn. And again: who the hell are you, really? What makes you so special? You know that what we're all doing is pretty fucking weird when you think about it, right? Is that not part of the point for you folks like it is for me?
Let me be clear. I am aware, as I've said before in the other article I've already linked to twice in this post, that a lot of these hard feelings around people who practice differently (or without the level of "respect" that others might, or whatever) come from feelings of frustration due to many non-mainstream religious and spiritual practices not being taken seriously by wider society. It feels like people are trivializing something that has already been widely trivialized (in the same way that basically every other thing enjoyed by predominantly young people, queer people, and/or women is trivialized). To which I say: the people who are committed to intentionally misunderstanding spiritual practices are gonna keep doing it regardless of how we go about it. The facade of respectability will crumble just as it always does.
There are so many more important things we could be worrying about right now aside from trying to tear down our peers, who we should ostensibly be forming community with. Being part of a community directly involves teaming up with people who you might not agree with or even necessarily like very much. Being too busy infighting with one another over non-issues like someone talking about Apollo or whoever in a way that you don't really like keeps us from bonding together to tackle the actual forces keeping us down, which is what the man wants. I beg of you, please look beyond the desire to feel cool on the internet.