The spiritual path is the path of each individual's personal evolution and development. Or change that into saying how one grows and improves through their life. Which is actually over lifetimes. And just to let you know dear watcher or listener, it's why you're currently in the Earth realm. Because there is improvement needed. For each of us.
We have been podcasting, not as a primary thing, but as a tertiary side thing, for coming up on 20 years with having adding a video component to it in just the last couple years. Even after all that time, through various iterations of various podcasts, our work is obscure and mostly unknown. In the beginning, it was way easier to get ears and eyes on stuff because there were just a lot less podcasts out there. But if we did the cardinal sin, don't ever do this, of comparing your creative or artistic outputs to others' similar outputs, our work has gone down while some of theirs has risen. Has the quality of our material gone down? We think not. Has there's gone up? We think not. Like all industries much of this is to do with who you know and who your connections are. For example, now that Joe Rogan is in the club, and see our Essay entitled Carlin vs Rogan on how Carlin was the archetype of the trixter and since Rogen is in the super rich club he is choosing to only be an archetype of the Jester, the Joe Rogan experience has now become the Jeffrey Epstein Experience. As he's had like 10+ guests on his show who are in the Epstein files.
We often have told ourselves over the years that matters of the esoteric inherently means you are going to be talking to a smaller and more sophisticated audience, so we never tried to make our podcasting outputs anything worth monetizing, but then we find some random other channel or podcast that talks about said subjects, like even something like astrology or the tarot, and they've built a business off of them. But to be specific about some numbers, we used to be able to get 10K views on an episode no problem, and now we are lucky if we get 1000. While some other podcasters are off getting 100K and have marketing help and are monetizing away. We have come to credit this to primarily one thing. As our country, The United States of America has tried to become increasingly more theocratic and fascist, both of which are very very very awful, we have talked increasingly more and more about Empire, which inevitably means talking about religion and politics which they say you're not supposed to talk about are you? While those who get more traffic do not because you will lose traffic in doing so because truth is a tough pill to swallow.
This shit is hard. It's hard to face. Hard to talk about. Hard to listen to. Hard to fight. And most people who fight it end up isolated at best or eliminated at worst. We saw Dave Chapelle perform a Netflix special in San Francisco recently. He took heat for getting paid a lot of money to perform at a Saudi Comedy festival. Which is very justified because Saudi Arabia is the opposite of an enlightened place. And he, who is a Muslim, acknowledged it and said I'm sorry Jamal Khashoggi got killed, that's fucked up, but Isreal has killed over 100 journalists this year alone, so it's a lesser of two evils. People deep in the machine don't want to hear that shit. Easier to live in comfort and illusions. Or just talk about the light instead of the darkness. So as someone who is a documentarian and podcasts on the side, we have gone down a much more journalistic path than an easy path. Especially a path of ladder climbing, grifting, sells out, or propagandizes in order to placate to dominator hierarchy power. And we get some, but not much outside support. Algorithms hate it, and we have made little to no money ever off this stuff. We could make videos on our Corgi dogs and get 1000x more of a following, but chose not to because democracy and enlightenment ideals are important.
When someone turns inward to meditation, contemplation, shamanic work, or esoteric or mystical study — they often encounter teachings about transcendence: which in lower level early stages are being more open to conspiracies, or ideas that world is an illusion, or becoming detached from outcomes, or to rise above polarity. Especially political polarity. These ideas are real at a certain level. But when they are used to avoid confronting systems of power, especially those one lives inside of, they become what we now call spiritual bypassing.
At its core, Empire is organized power — economic, military, cultural, and it's more "big religion" and "big capital" than it is any sort of "big government" which shapes the conditions of human life. It determines who eats, who suffers, who speaks, who is silenced. If you are living within an empire, its influence is not abstract, it is woven into your daily existence, your opportunities, even your sense of identity. To ignore that while claiming spiritual awareness creates a split.
You begin to say, consciously or not: “Suffering is just karma” instead of asking who is causing harm? Or “All is one” while partaking in benefiting from systems that divide and exploit. Or “I am detached” while that individual's comfort is materially supported by that very structure. This is not transcendence, it is avoidance disguised as wisdom.
Manly P. Hall often emphasized that true spiritual development must include the refinement of conscience. And conscience does not operate in a vacuum. It awakens in relation to the world. If your awareness expands, so too should your sensitivity to injustice, imbalance, and misuse of power. Otherwise, one risks cultivating what we might call a private faux enlightenment, a state that feels elevated inwardly, which is good, but you also need to do things in the outer world, so you don't leave the outer world unquestioned and unchanged. Which holds more awareness of both the inner and outer worlds simultaneously anyway.
There is also a deeper metaphysical issue here. If you accept that all life is interconnected, that the same divine principle lives in all beings, then ignoring the suffering produced by the empire, especially to the indigenous, and poor underclasses is, in a sense, ignoring parts of yourself. Not metaphorically, but ontologically. There is a puzzle in ancient wisdom in the form of a question which asks "How do you know if you are suffering?" and the answer is "If anyone else is suffering, I am suffering". That's a very what Empire would call a bleeding heart statement. We all have a mind, and heart, and a will, and while far too many in our country our the dumbest dumb F's that ever dumbed, that's the brain, and literally advocate for compassion being weakness, that's zero heart, and then a spiritual path then becomes incomplete, because it excludes the very field in which unity must be realized.
Now, this does not mean one must become politically reactive, angry, or consumed by violent activism. That too can become unbalanced. The real invitation is more subtle and more demanding and requires one to ask: How do the systems I live within shape my points of view? Or Where do I unconsciously participate in harm? Or what does right action look like, given my position? This is closer to what many traditions call "right relationship".
Ignoring empire, again meaning the darkness - supremacism, colonialism, imperialism, racism, classism, militarism, and the general shadow of the world is bypassing because it allows the ego to survive in a more refined form. It says, “I am above this,” while quietly remaining entangled in it and not doing your part to improve it. Facing empire—especially one’s own—dissolves that illusion. It humbles the seeker. It forces integration. And integration, not escape, is the real work.