this is the kind of spirituality that leads to nobody's lives being better in any concrete way. power is a force for good and if your practice is worth anything at all it should be helping you cultivate the proper use of it
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"power" is a word it's worth being very careful with. if it isn't "spiritual" to cultivate power then only "unspiritual" people will have power
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also, meta note, i have strong and poorly thought-out opinions about "spirituality" and when i'm not entirely sober i will spew them; please don't take that to mean that i am claiming to be particularly "spiritually" advanced or developed or whatever
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i have a specific set of obsessions around narrative and storytelling and those obsessions apply to the stories people tell about "spirituality" like they do to many other stories
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i also really like to talk as if i know what i'm talking about; if you notice it getting particularly bad please make fun of me for it to snap me out of it
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okay so let's be a little more precise. there's a large vein of contemporary thought that considers "power" a dirty word and overtly spurns it; i see it as a protest against the abuse of power but it conflates that abuse with the power itself
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Replying to @QiaochuYuan
I'd actually instead invite you to consider that if you took a bit more effort to be a little more precise about your claims, you would become more powerful as a consequence
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when i say "power" i am referring to the most ordinary boring normal version of the concept - the ability to do things, to create change
changes can be good or bad so power is ethically neutral; in that sense it makes sense to worry about the cultivation of power in *isolation*
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"power" is lowercase to distinguish it from "Power" which is more complicated because it's charged with symbolism. Power is the thing that "white people," or "the government," or "rich people," or "jews," have: the people who are the source of all the Problems
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the Problem is not that those people have Power, though. it may be that some people have Power but don't have wisdom or discernment. it has become bizarrely difficult to talk about this because we no longer agree on a religion that could tell us what wisdom is
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in ' terms, at cultural scale we don't know how to talk about wisdom or discernment in the absence of an ethical eternalism
we don't actually need one though. we can confront ethical situations in our lives on their own terms
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so, back to the original tweet. if i were to read it more charitably i would emphasize the word "search" over the word "power." when i imagine what the OP means by "search for power" i imagine a kind of desperate egoic craving for Power. the symbolic one
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the implicit spiritual claim here is that proper Awareness of one's True Nature, or whatever, will calm such egoic cravings. perhaps you even will come to understand and thereby transcend the illusory nature of Power itself. fine, whatever. but "Power" is not "power"
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the point of coming to terms with the illusory nature of "Power" is to restore your ordinary boring working relationship to power, the lowercase-p one, instead of being lost in a fantasy about finally having all the control or respect or whatever you're looking for from Power
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meanwhile: it is fine to want power to do good things in the world. it is fine to want power to help yourself and the people around you. it is fine to want power so you can do shit that's really funny or cool even
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and it is fine to worry that you have more power than you have wisdom to wield it, and start searching for wisdom instead of power. but it doesn't mean that power is bad
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boy sometimes i do be forgetting that the people i QT really exist and can see what i write sometimes 😅
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sometimes i sure do be projecting a whole ass thing on a tweet that was not actually intended huh
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