{"id":2391,"date":"2026-05-05T10:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T17:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/?p=2391"},"modified":"2026-06-26T10:07:44","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T17:07:44","slug":"why-deep-spiritual-advice-is-actually-dangerous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/why-deep-spiritual-advice-is-actually-dangerous\/","title":{"rendered":"Why &#8220;Deep&#8221; Spiritual Advice Is Actually Dangerous"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Why &quot;Deep&quot; Spiritual Advice Is Actually Dangerous\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ttwGT11IqFY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Why &#8220;Deep&#8221; Spiritual Advice is Actually Dangerous<\/strong><\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Bullshit is the Engine of Spiritual Manipulation<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Opening<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s not a problem \u2014 it&#8217;s your process.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;If it triggered you, there&#8217;s something in you that needs to be healed.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;There are no victims \u2014 only lessons.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Most people think the danger in spiritual communities is false belief. Overt control. Leaders telling you what to think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I want to argue the real danger is something subtler \u2014 and more insidious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s what happens when people stop caring whether something is true at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And when that happens inside a system with a power structure, it doesn&#8217;t just feel harmless. It becomes a mechanism of control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The philosopher Harry Frankfurt had a technical term for this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He called it <em>bullshit<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What Bullshit Actually Is<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Bullshit is not the same thing as lying. And the difference matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A liar cares deeply about the truth \u2014 because they&#8217;re trying to hide it. Which means a liar is vulnerable. You can catch them. You can prove them wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A bullshitter doesn&#8217;t care about the truth at all. They&#8217;re not making a claim that could be true or false. They&#8217;re producing a feeling \u2014 depth, meaning, or significance \u2014 without any connection to evidence, consequence, or action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s what makes bullshit so much harder to fight than lying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You can&#8217;t argue your way out of it. There&#8217;s nothing to disprove. The statement was never trying to be true in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Bullshit is meaning detached from truth.&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And once you understand that, those opening phrases start to look different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;There are no victims \u2014 only lessons.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s not a false claim. It&#8217;s not even really a claim. It&#8217;s a reframe that makes a certain kind of question \u2014 <em>did someone harm you?<\/em> \u2014 feel like the wrong question to be asking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Core Problem<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s what bullshit does to your mind over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Your mind is constantly deciding what matters. What&#8217;s important. What&#8217;s a real problem. What demands action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When everything becomes potentially meaningful \u2014 when any event can be reinterpreted, reframed, &#8220;seen differently&#8221; \u2014 something breaks in that system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Because if everything is signal\u2014nothing is signal.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When harm can always be reread as &#8220;a lesson,&#8221; manipulation as &#8220;a dynamic,&#8221; abuse as &#8220;part of your growth&#8221; \u2014 then the question of whether something is actually wrong stops feeling urgent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You&#8217;re not evaluating reality anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You&#8217;re just endlessly interpreting it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that feels like depth. It feels like wisdom. It can feel like you&#8217;re engaging more seriously with life than ordinary people do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But notice what&#8217;s actually happening: your ability to distinguish what&#8217;s urgent from what&#8217;s trivial, what&#8217;s real from what&#8217;s symbolic, what needs action from what can stay abstract \u2014 that&#8217;s degrading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When everything feels meaningful, nothing clearly demands action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Systems Move<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s the thing people miss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In isolation, spiritual bullshit is mostly harmless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you&#8217;re at home by yourself, thinking about how everything is consciousness, how everything happens for a reason \u2014 fine. Interesting, maybe. It&#8217;s not going to determine much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But introduce power into the equation, and everything changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>All groups have a power structure.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The biggest load of bullshit is that some don\u2019t.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Bullshit combined with power is not random. It serves a function.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It allows meaning to be generated without accountability to reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The sense of what demands proof can be altered. The sense of what calls out to be fixed can be manipulated. The sense of what needs to be acted on can shift \u2014 not randomly, but consistently in ways that benefit the people at the top.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A system like this doesn&#8217;t have to threaten its members. It doesn&#8217;t have to punish dissent directly. It just has to give people something to interpret.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If a leader harms someone and the community&#8217;s response is &#8220;what can we learn from this?&#8221; \u2014 the leader doesn&#8217;t need to defend themselves. The framework has already done it for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is why spiritualized language is so effective as a control mechanism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Everything is symbolic.&#8221; &#8220;Everything is your process.&#8221; &#8220;Everything is happening for a reason.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>None of that is obviously false. Most of it isn&#8217;t even falsifiable. That&#8217;s precisely what makes it so powerful. It doesn&#8217;t defend the system \u2014 it makes the question of whether the system needs defending feel like a failure of spiritual maturity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Why Intelligence Makes It Worse<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>You&#8217;d think smarter people would see through this. They don&#8217;t. They\u2019re <em>more <\/em>vulnerable to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That\u2019s because a large part of intelligence is the ability to generate interpretations. To see how things could be understood differently. To hold multiple framings at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s exactly the cognitive activity bullshit trains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So the smarter you are, the better you become at the very skill these systems are cultivating \u2014 and the less likely you are to notice you&#8217;re doing it in a way that&#8217;s working against you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Intelligence in this context doesn&#8217;t produce resistance. It produces fluency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What It Cost Me<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>I was inside a spiritual group that systematically reframed dysfunction as a growth opportunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Boundary violations, provocations, even threats of violence \u2014 all of it was treated as an occasion to detach from your emotions. To remain calm. To not react. To talk through your differences, even when one of those differences involved someone threatening to hurt you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I saw through the most obvious applications of this. I was vocal about it. I argued loudly that people who made threats should be removed, not mediated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But the framework got me in subtler ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When people lied about me, attacked me, had outbursts at me \u2014 I wouldn&#8217;t respond emotionally. I wouldn&#8217;t get angry. I&#8217;d read Robert Greene and tell myself I was being strategic. Outmaneuvering them. Playing the long game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>But I wasn&#8217;t becoming more powerful.&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>I was shrinking myself to maintain inclusion and status in a group.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What made it so insidious was that it felt like maturity. It felt like <em>power<\/em>, even.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s what I couldn&#8217;t see: it&#8217;s true that you generally shouldn&#8217;t act on anger directly. You shouldn&#8217;t act rashly. That principle is real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But anger is sometimes a signal\u2014something real is happening to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Something you <em>do<\/em> need to act on, not rashly, but in a way that&#8217;s genuinely in your own interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The framework I was in took that signal and spiritualized it into noise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And because suppressing it felt like power, I couldn&#8217;t see what it was actually doing to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Closing<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>This is why it&#8217;s not enough to ask: &#8220;Is this meaningful to me?&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You also have to ask: does this help me see more clearly \u2014 and act?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Not just within the group. In general. Across your whole life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because the subjective feeling of depth and growth and spiritual development can be completely real \u2014 and your actual ability to perceive and respond to reality can be quietly collapsing underneath it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If the meaning you&#8217;re swimming in consistently makes harm harder to name, makes action feel less necessary, and makes the people in power less accountable \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s not wisdom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s bullshit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why &#8220;Deep&#8221; Spiritual Advice is Actually Dangerous Bullshit is the Engine of Spiritual Manipulation Opening &#8220;That&#8217;s not a problem \u2014 it&#8217;s your process.&#8221; &#8220;If it triggered you, there&#8217;s something in you that needs to be healed.&#8221; &#8220;There are no victims \u2014 only lessons.&#8221; Most people think the danger in spiritual communities is false belief. Overt&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[32,506,505,67,66,488,487,2],"class_list":["post-2391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-aleister-crowley","tag-cult-recovery","tag-cults","tag-ordo-templi-orientis","tag-oto","tag-oto-high-control-group-2","tag-oto-high-control-group","tag-thelema"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2391"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2392,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2391\/revisions\/2392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}