The Magic Pill of Consciousness (And Other Spiritual Myths)
There’s always someone who’s found the way. The one technique that guarantees transcendence into higher consciousness, raises your vibration, heals your lineage, and turns you into a beautiful, successful goddess by the next lunar cycle. Whenever I meet these people, I smile politely and say, “Oh wow, that’s fantastic. Enjoy.”
It’s not that I’m anti-spiritual (I’ve meditated myself into enough weird states to know there’s something real there). But I’ve also watched how quickly “awakening” turns into a sales pitch.
People love to announce their discoveries: “This breathwork changed my life,” “this retreat opened my heart chakra,” “this cacao ceremony made me see everything clearly.” I never ask, but they tell me anyway. Why? (I think I know why, but we’ll get to that later.)
Recently, my sister sent me a link to a woman currently touring Germany. A singer-slash-sound-healer who’s reeeally big on Instagram. She’s offering healing and transformational music. Beautiful voice and videos in beautiful landscapes. Always some guy with a handpan nearby. Or a bun. Sometimes both.
Between cooking and doing dishes, I quickly replied: “I think I’m currently a bit allergic to all those healing people selling a perfect world, always somewhere singing or in meditative ecstasy in beautiful landscapes. I’m not buying it anymore. They’re getting on my nerves 😅.”
My sister knows me well. She caught the humor. But still, the quick and very honest reply stayed with me. Because that’s how I feel these days (don’t come at me with this at any future retreat, I might change my mind), and I can tell you, I once stood close to that line myself.
In 2017, I did my first Vipassana retreat in the hinterland of Queensland, Australia: ten days of silence, eleven hours of meditation daily, and, I must mention, great vegetarian food. By day seven, I was totally in it — meditating four hours a day in a dark room while kangaroos hopped through the dry garden outside. Afterwards, I was convinced I had unlocked the secret code of existence.
In hindsight, I must have been unbearable. Not in a preachy way, but if anyone showed the slightest interest, I’d light up: You should try Vipassana. It can change your life.
There was this surfer guy who had also done Vipassana a year earlier, after a terrible accident. When we compared experiences, it was clear he didn’t get much out of it, while I’d been off in trance states and ancestor callings. That was one of those moments. A hint that techniques don’t exist in isolation.
Since I’ve consciously engaged in spiritual or spiritually branded activities, I’ve had many of those little awakenings where I realized how different spiritual experiences can be. They land differently depending on who we are — our body, background, age, trauma, privilege. The nervous system has its own language. What opens one person might overwhelm another. What once felt sacred might later feel performative.
And yet, we crave the illusion of universality. The comforting promise that there’s one practice, or one vibration, or one “activation” that can align us all, no matter who we are. It’s the spiritual version of the magic pill — the one thing that will fix everything. But the “everything” it’s trying to fix is often social, not spiritual.
Capitalism tells us we’re never enough; spirituality rebrands that wound as “low vibration.” Colonialism disconnected people from their ancestral practices and sense of belonging; now the wellness industry sells those fragments back, neatly packaged and commercialized. What was meant to be community medicine has become all about individual optimization. Designed to help us function in the very systems that made healing necessary in the first place. The result isn’t liberation but spiritual gentrification: the illusion of depth without the discomfort of truth and deeper transformation or change.
The more I look, the more I see how the modern healing scene mirrors the systems it was born in.
And there’s also this quiet obsession with purity — spiritual, emotional, dietary. It’s a kind of gentrification of the soul: every rough edge smoothened, every contradiction filtered out to fit into the wellness package.
The collective dream seems to be to ascend beyond messiness, beyond conflict, and beyond humanness itself. Everyone smiling, everyone glowing, everyone “high frequency”. Preferably in some imagined paradise. It reminds me of that series Pluribus, where an (probably, I’ve only watched two episodes) outer-earth force merges all humans into one collective consciousness. Everyone becomes peaceful and identical. Utopia, apparently. A nightmare, really.
Which brings me back to why people feel the need to tell me (or you) about their latest “absolute truth.” Because when someone believes they’ve found the way, it gives meaning to their own chaos. They want witnesses, believers, to confirm that their transformation is real. And they want you to transform too. Be happy and whole.
I understand that urge. I’ve been there too. When you’ve touched something profound, or even just momentarily quieted the noise in your head, you want to share it. You want to offer others what you’ve found. But somewhere along the way, that sincere impulse turns into a soft form of evangelism.
The wild thing is that the more we try to universalize our experience, the less universal it becomes. Truth, like healing, resists standardization. It lives in the tension between perspectives… in the messy, contradictory, beautiful, and terrible chaos of being human.
So these days, when someone tells me about their guaranteed shortcut to higher consciousness, I still smile and say, “Oh wow, that’s fantastic. Enjoy.”
Not out of arrogance, but out of experience. Because the longer I’m on this path, the more I see that transcendence isn’t about leaving the world behind or becoming a happy-all-the-time-smiling human goddess with a golden glow and an answer to everything.
It’s about learning to stay, grounded, discerning, and unenchanted. Not letting anyone corrupt your soul. Being honest with yourself — and others. While everyone is out there selling the absolute, truest salvation in the universe.
If this resonated with you, moved you, or made you pause and reflect – consider this your cue. I’ve set up a virtual tip jar via Buy Me a Coffee. No monthly commitments, no strings, no memberships required.
Your sweet kindness helps keep the thoughts flowing, the energy exchange intact, and the glow of my inner goddess alive. It won’t fix capitalism, but it might buy me five minutes of joy (or at least a cortado).
Gracias. Thank you. Jërëjëf. Merci. Obrigada. Danke. Arigatō. Medaase. Grazie. Hvala. Tack. Asante. Shukran. Teşekkürler. Dziękuję.
