Vagueness In Spirituality, Anyone else notice this Options

I have been noticing a common practice with anything "spiritual", be it one of the many yogas or occult groups or religions. They are all vague about what joining or practicing will do/accomplish/benefit. "Make you life better" sound nice but it is not much to go on. Perhaps I am spoiled, having come from academia where everything is laid out with what is taught, why and what you can get out of the course.

Recently while talking to several priests, Taoist and Buddhist, about empowerment, classes and what I can expect, I was met with almost dismissive vagueness and tired cliches. After talking with them I am just as uninformed as when I started - having no better idea of why such and such a thing is done or what it enables. Looking back, I find a lot of my current practice where not explained, and lacking that it took much longer to gain anything from them, only after long practice did I have enough knowledge to judge their worth. Indeed many that look promising turned out to be useless to me after months of work.

Vagueness in spirituality is necessary to some existent, but with a little application the people who run these orders, and organizations could explain things clearly.

This post has been edited by fatherjhon: Apr 5 2012, 10:06 PM

It may be because it is so individual for each person. There is a version of one's 'karma' in any of these practices, western or eastern. In the eastern side, of course, you can only ever gain by overcoming or transmuting karma. In the west it's just called the will of God - even in the grimoires there's usually a 'caveat' to the effect of "Only with the assistance/cooperation of the almighty can you accomplish these things". So I think that there are cases in most of the practices where the priests/initiators have to be vague; that there is a basic level of improvement you can derive, but that the rest is really out of their hands and to some degree unpredictable.

The few instances where I have heard this is not the case is with specific enlightened masters, gurus, and such, who it is said can absolve your karma, or otherwise take it upon themselves. I don't know anyone specifically, it's 'one of those things you hear about'. So who knows.

peace