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

vague question = vague answer

for example, if you meet someone selling cars, and you ask them "where can I go in a car?" what kind of answer would that inspire? in all likelihood, the reply would involve sweeping generalities, rather than concrete, explicit, details of where you can go, tailored to that particular person's likely traveling needs. so a question like "what can spirituality do for me?" is so vague that it almost demands vague replies, as anything specific would require a great deal more specificity in the question itself.

Even an infinitely more specific question, such as "what has spirituality done for you?", would require significant thought and consideration to answer with anything even approaching completeness. Personally I'd prefer to answer something like that with a 300 page book rather than a few sentences. So tallying all of that up, and presenting it in a concise blurb of an answer? even if one could field the question in a reasonable period of time, it's going to sound like an outline of a digest of a summary of an overview (ie: vague).

also, there is the issue of vocabulary. if a first grader asks why a black hole doesn't simply collapse out of existence & disappear, then to give a genuinely accurate answer, there may be a lot of makeshift tutoring required, just to create the background understandings and vocabulary, with which to answer the question. This is something which can sometimes be overcome with skillful simplification of concepts, and sometimes not.

plus there is the issue of mundane mindset, which seems to latch onto the idea of material gain of some kind. Whereas (speaking only for my own spiritual path), I have found more 'benefit' in understandings which promote something more like a deconstruction of the mundane mindset which would value material gain in the first place. so if someone asks "what can i gain?" and they're thinking dollar signs or sex or money or quick&easy inner peace... then, limiting my reply to just their expectations of an answer, i could only reply "very little". Which isn't really all that encouraging. Though i'd argue that there is 'much' to gain, just not (at least in my own path) along the lines they may be looking for.

all of which casts a friendly light on vague answers.

but let me be my own devil's advocate now...
i rather despise catchphrases & slogans. they take on a sort of superficiality which undermines genuine meaning.
likewise, i despise "profound-sounding-BS", where prose is seen as a valid replacement for substance.
both of these 2 sins are 'prevalent' in human interaction, particularly in spiritual circles.

also, i see vagueness often being used as a way to avoid stepping on anyone's toes. generalized terms are often used, with broad sweeping ideas, to avoid the sort of detailed specific discussion which lends itself to one particular point of view. For example, if 10 people in a room all have a different belief structure about what makes light bulbs light up. and someone walks up ans says "what makes light bulbs light up?" ...a lot of the time you'll see people answer vaguely, to avoid making the implicit assertion that anyone else's belief structure is flawed. Basically, surrendering explicit accuracy in the hope of avoiding strife. However, this practice can compound over time, leading to some excessively bland/vague spiritual mentalities. as well as a gradual cultural loss of explicitly detailed spiritual understandings.

so yeah, vague questions needfully call to vague answers. but do be wary of vague answers to explicit questions. 'what can spirituality do for me?' definitely being the former.

This post has been edited by Kath: Jun 28 2012, 03:27 AM