I’ve been taken-to-task recently, in social-media covid convos, for seeming to diss “intuition” or even having abandoned spirituality for scientific materialism.

So I thought I’d clarify where I’m coming-from.

An authentic spiritual path is about inner freedom. It’s not subscription to concepts or theories about spirituality from some book or created by any group or subculture — certainly not concepts created by those who are not-yet-free, which is most of occult and New Age “spirituality.”

Any authentic spiritual path, and especially the Sufi “way,” is not a spiritual Homeowner’s Association where everyone has to keep their vibe neatly-trimmed and have their aura painted in an approved color.

I am not obligated to conform to anyone’s concepts of spirituality or what a “Sufi” is spozed to look like, and that includes what my mentors & teachers think — which is why they are my teachers.

I am not-obligated to anyone’s attempt to shame me for not being a kosher Sufi — especially those who “fake-it-till-you-make-it” … coz y’all still be fakin’ it, OK?

Inner freedom is not some identity-improvement project. It is not about adopting new beliefs that just get recruited into an existing identity structure with no real challenge or change to that structure.  Spiritual practice is to uproot that identity and its subsidiary trauma, not to make it feel better — and still remain sane while something authentic emerges from the depth.

That’s what actually happens in an authentic practice, and a truly functional ego is built on top of that.

And until that happens, intuition is unreliable because ego structure and trauma are much noisier & denser than actual intuition.

It is from that perspective that I keep saying, if you think the issues around masking & vaccination are about your “freedom,” you do not understand freedom nor how controlled you really are — not by some nefarious external force but by the hall-of-mirrors that is your own mind.

And escaping that hall-of-mirrors is not in getting better facts.

It’s from that perspective that I see how much people’s antivaxx views are really the products of their own trauma as well as their abysmal  lack of science education.

And I see how skillfully our individual & collective trauma is being manipulated by agencies working different angles that do not benefit us.

When you believe your intuition has more validity than actual facts and data for communal decisions and other people’s well-being, that can be deadly.  We evolved-as and are hard-wired as inter-dependent, collaborative social animals. The hyper-individuality of Western culture is a destructive aberration, and when someone asserts that their freedom is impinged by caring-about others, that’s a pathology in a social animal.