Hi, Benches! I am so excited to share a clip from this week's bonus episode with you.

This episode, I interviewed my college bestie and religious scholar, Kate Toomey, about

spirituality, spiritual materialism, the whitewashing of Eastern religions, psychedelics,

higher self-alignment, and so much more. So if you'd like to hear the full episode,

please go to patreon.com slash benchtopia, and if not, enjoy this teaser. Bye!

Hi!

Yeah, no, Ticknot Han, who's a Nietzschean Buddhist, some of you might know of him, he's

very popular in America. He said that after he started doing lecture circuits in America,

and hearing so many people ask about enlightenment, he said that every time he hears the word

enlightenment, he wants to go and clean out his ears and wash his mouth out, because he's literally

so disillusioned with how many people have this perception of enlightenment as an end point.

Yeah, it's all about us interpreting, us interpreting spirituality through that capitalist lens,

baby. Seeing everything as a job promotion, basically, and status. If I meditate this many times

a day, I can tell people I meditate this many times a day. Right, and people use it to hold over

other people's heads, or to yield and say, you really should be doing this, because I'm doing

this in a change my life. And there's a degree to which you are sharing something that is

important to you, and there's a degree to which you have absorbed it into your personality,

so wholly that you believe that you are in some way like a change maker in that entire area.

Like I think that's a huge thing for white people appropriating spirituality as well of like

white people leading, which by the way, let me just say this is an offshoot, but anybody can say

that they're a life coach. There's no certification to become a life coach, so if you see something that

says somebody's a life coach, that just means they say that. But there's people, there's white

...