The more I listen to the Conspirituality podcast, the more I’m having thoughts about The Secret/the Law of Attraction/“Manifesting” as a new agey Prosperity Gospel and the more I’m getting seriously skeeved out by it.

I don’t think it’s an accident that new age/alt wellness communities tend to be prime hunting grounds for MLMs.

Here’s a thing I think: when your spiritual practice tends to ultimately revolve around material abundance and accumulating things and having a perfect mind and a perfect body and a perfect life, something is seriously askew.

Yeah, see... I’ve said before that I’m agnostic about whether magic as a practice does anything to the world outside yourself. What I do know is that the magic you do has a *direct* effect on who you are. If you do self-centered magic you’ll become more of a self-obsessed person. https://twitter.com/libhawker/status/1361297932037754881

People who do shallow conspirituality-influenced “manifestation” talk about intention but they neglect the deeper meaning of that word, which is bound up in ethics

When I started studying what Philip Carr-Gomm calls “Druidcraft”, it emphasized an ethic of community and service

You do magic first and foremost to make the world better and benefit others. If you make that your priority, you’ll find that your own life improves. There is a completely non-supernatural explanation for this: it can help make you emotionally healthier.

Which *still* isn’t new age Prosperity Gospel, because it doesn’t mean that if your life sucks you’re just thinking the wrong thoughts. Sometimes life sucks for no good reason. But perspective and focus can help you cope with it better.

Anyone who adopts a community-oriented spiritual practice of service and altruism will tell you that it changes how you feel and how you relate to the world. Magic is no exception to this. Maybe it doesn’t have as direct an effect as volunteering or donating, but still.

But something I’m seeing more and more as I learn more about these communities that Conspirituality covers is an *intense* and frankly libertarian focus on the self and the notion of “sovereignty”.

Which of course lends itself to things like being anti-mask.

The demography of the “wellness” community tends to be massively white and affluent. So that’s not an accident. These are people who can afford to engage in Wellness as a capitalist endeavor, which again, leads to an outsized focus on “I do whatever is best for me”.

And that’s not how spirituality works. You’re accountable to other people. You’re accountable to your community.

It’s ironic that these people are all about the idea of everything being connected while denying that what they do has detrimental effects on anyone else.

The Wiccan rede of “an it harm none do what ye will” is deceptively simple. Making it a serious practice involves an intense awareness of how what you do has an effect on others, often in ways that aren’t obvious.

The truth is that we harm people without meaning to all the time.

And here’s the thing: cohesive Pagan traditions like Wicca and Druidry and Heathenry are grounded in that ethic of community and social awareness. But what you often see in the Wellness/New Age community is a sort of mushy shallow vagueness that requires nothing from you.