Recently I emailed around details of a western esoteric course a friend is about to offer. Soon after I received an indignant reply stating the course was outrageously priced. I pondered this and at first thought, yeah maybe it is a bit out of the reach of somepeople. However, the costing was based on an adult TAFE education course, which thousands of people sign up for every term.
There are a number of issues here which I do not want to go into now: the legitimacy of charging for spiritual tuition; supporting teachers who offer their time to train students in the esoteric arts; and how we value the traditions that nurture us? All these are fruitful avenues for discussion.
However, for me the most interesting aspect is this. On a per hour basis the course was less expensive than most yoga or fitness or exercise classes. Hundreds of thousands of people, including myself and many other esoteric students, attend these classes every week. Here we are guided (hopefully well but often only competently) through variants on the same set of exercises. We happily do this, giving time and money to keep our outer self healthy.
The inner life equivalent would be repeated meditation or prayer or worship or other spiritual practice. But as soon as someone charges for these processes the magical-pagan community throws up its arms in outrage. Why? It seems that despite our avowed focus on the inner life we simply do not value it as much as our outer life.
Of course, many people argue that meditation and prayer are practices which are really solo in nature; that we do not need to be guided. The same however could be said for physical exercises. And the truth of the matter is actually the opposite – we do need guidance and holding from an experienced teacher. It is exactly this lack of ongoing and careful tuition of the basics – meditation, concentration, effective prayer – which plagues the western esoteric community and causes all sorts of pathologies from ego-boosted inepti to abusive power structures in magical groups.
Because the results of meditation and prayer and spiritual practice are seen to be inner (when in fact that are actually beyond the inner/outer dichotomy), we all have a distressing tendency to fool ourselves. This I feel is a major cause of the discrepancy between valuing outer over inner work and instruction. We cannot easily fool ourselves, much less the gym instructor, that we are fit when we are not. We can however easily fool ourselves and some teachers that we can meditate when we cannot. And because one of the unwritten dogmas of new age esoteric practice is never to question or criticize another person’s experience we are seldom corrected and pulled into line.
In eastern esoteric traditions the role of the authentic teacher of meditation and spirituality and the training they offer are valued far more than an aerobics instructor with nine weeks part-time training. The fact that we do not offer the same value shows the incipient influence of materialism within our spirituality. If we do not address these sorts of issues are we really practicing conscious spirituality at all?
I am not saying that financial payment is the only way of showing our respect and support for our traditions. And indeed some traditions and teachers, like myself, consciously refuse payment. When asked about costs, Swami Alokananda, a Tantric Yoga teacher in Perth says that if she charged the real value of the Yoga she teaches no one could afford it. How true – the chance to commune and connect with the One is beyond price.
"We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured." ~
“A religion without a goddess is halfway to atheism” ~
How does my spiritual practice and daily life serve the earth?
How does my spiritual practice and daily life affect the poorest third of humanity?
How will my spiritual practice and daily life affect the generations to come in the future?
"It is through your body that you realize you are a spark of divinity."
“For most of us, however, we only think seriously of food or sex or money when it becomes a problem, which is to say when we feel we are not getting our share. When we find ourselves in that situation then I regret to say that meditational visualisations are really not the best way to remedy the lack. … We are here in a physical condition in a physical world and while in that state we have to abide by the laws appropriate to it.”
"The biblical texts have been strained out through a Greek/Latin mindset, which is very surface and static. I sometimes think it would have actually have been better if Western culture had based so called "Western religion" on Greek philosophy, rather than middle-eastern, because then at least you'd have all one thing. It would be eternally consistent. But what we have now is sort of half of each. And you're left with a basically schizophrenic tradition." 
