Report: Update on the Spirituality Business in the Kali Yuga

 

 

by Jody Radzik

When you believe the universe is a Super Hot Dominatrix who has no fucks to give and no sense of what She’s doing as She slashes and burns away while laughing manically about the whole thing, it’s a bit easier to bear the horrors of the present day in its various spheres, including that of commercial spirituality.

Case in point: the devotees of convicted rapist guru Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh. While awaiting the verdict of his trial on rape charges, over 200,000 of his devotees staged to riot in northern India. And when the inevitable explosion occurred after the guilty verdict was announced, everyone was still caught surprised by the intensity of the demonstration of rage that has since come to be known as the Northern India Riots of 2017, in which 38 people were killed (most by police), over 300 were injured, with thousands detained and over 500 people arrested. With his command staff on the lam fleeing arrest warrants, the Baba has been left to his own devices in prison. And apparently, things are looking up for Singh as he has allegedly already converted most of his prison guards into devotees.

But while Singh gets comfy in jail, the heat is now on for anybody else considered to be a Godman or Godwoman in India. The surprise severity of the riots has resulted in a proliferation of news media articles that are critical of gurus in India. Most of these fall into a category you could call “Bad Baba” lists, but the fact that they even exist, and in such great numbers over such a long period of time, does not bode well for those who were imagining themselves to be the next big Godsploitation artist in India.

Meanwhile, in what has got to be the greatest case of overt greenwashing that India has ever seen, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, founder of Isha Yoga and possessor of what is hands-down the bushiest beard in the commercial guru space, is busily trying to shore up his image after erecting a statue of Shiva in his profile on a wetlands. He is doing this by not-at-all-ironically campaigning for the preservation of rivers and wetlands in India! Apparently, they are all drying up, which is an expected outcome when you’re building statues on top of them.

 

Back here in the States, we’ve been left to contend with a newly “woke” Jim Carrey, who is certainly not being shy about it. Taking his already world-class creepiness to new heights, he is now clearly demonstrating being firmly in the grips of a classic case of ego displacement, which occurs when people who are exposed to the ideas of nondual spirituality create a new persona for themselves of not being there as themselves after having undergone some kind of transformational experience that has been misinterpreted as nondual spiritual enlightenment. He’s joining the ranks of thousands who are already online making identical proclamations, but Carrey’s celebrity puts him in a different class entirely—those who will be heard regardless—and with celebrities such as EDM DJ/producer Diplo making proclamations in support of Carrey’s being “woke AF,” a whole generation’s chance at true spiritual understanding now lies in abject peril.

But with much greater perils being dropped into the theater of our lives everyday by a mad Mother Goddess and the crazies She has up on the main stage, what the kids think about Jim Carrey’s enlightenment is going to have to be happy