“The Mesmerized Western Seeker”
by Kelvin Chin
Life After Life Expert
So many in the West are seemingly swept away by the mere mention of an idea or a guru from the East.
Why is that?
I think it may be because the terminology is so foreign to the Western ear that it somehow garners an almost immediate credibility without further discernment into the underlying idea itself.
In addition, I’ve witnessed a similar phenomenon over the past 50 years with the names of the people pontificating those ideas.
Again, for some reason it appears that spiritual teachers whose names start with “Shri” or even “Shri Shri,” or that sound like or actually are Indian, Southeast Asian, or to a lesser degree East Asian attract Western seekers in droves. Even teachers whose birth names were Christian or Jewish, but who changed them to an Indian sounding one seem to have catapulted their reputations by that simple name-changing act.
But is what they have been teaching really that different from what the Westerners — steeped more in the Judeo-Christian traditions — have been used to hearing?
I think not so much.
Without getting into the weeds of each of the traditions, and just looking at them from 100,000 feet, I think they all share some common denominators.
The use of fear to motivate. The use of a lofty goal to attract people’s minds. The use of rewards to guide and control. The concept that there is something larger than the individual to be either worshipped as an individual being (God) or an inanimate state to attain (Enlightenment).
The languaging of those concepts may vary but I think the similarity and parallelism cuts across both the Eastern and the Western traditions.
What’s the teaching point here?
To look beyond the nomenclature, beneath the outer verbiage, past the titles couched in what may sound to the Western ear as inherently “mystical.”
What are they really saying? Does it make sense?
Does it give new insights? Or is it just rehashing of old ideas dressed up in Asian garb or Americanized lingo?
Sometimes it seems like almost any mystical-sounding idea is mesmerizing enough to inspire yet another few thousand Western seekers to sell all their worldly possessions and blindly follow — prostrating at the feet of someone spouting gibberish cloaked in a foreign language.
Ask questions. Use your discernment. Hone your ability to distinguish between ideas that sound similar but are different.
And then make up your own mind.
Kelvin H. Chin is a Meditation Teacher, Life After Life Expert, and Author of “Overcoming the Fear of Death,” “Marcus Aurelius Updated: 21st Century Meditations On Living Life” and “After the Afterlife: Memories of My Past Lives.” He learned to meditate at age 19, and has been teaching Turning Within Meditation and coaching others in their self-growth for 50 years. He helps people understand their life challenges through their individual belief systems, and helps them find their own solutions. His past life memories reach back many centuries, and he accesses those memories in his teaching and his coaching in the same way all coaches draw on their own available experiences for perspective and effective analogies. He can be reached at www.TurningWithin.org.