I want to discuss something today that comes up in the comments or in private chats on Discord sometimes. I don't believe in the concept of spiritual leaders and I reject religion entirely. This comes up sometimes because people will tell me that I am very knowledgeable on something or have wisdom on a subject and while I don't really agree or disagree to any great extent with those statements, I feel like it is inherently a way that we as a species have learned to give our own power away and it doesn't really resonate with me. I'll explain why I feel that way today and my thoughts on spirituality as a whole.
I was raised into Catholicism and had to go through the whole Act of Confirmation and all of that nonsense because my mother had done all of that as a child and felt it was important. The whole concept that any god makes a decision on whether or not you go to heaven or hell based on some ritual is fundamentally insane to me. It never made sense to me and I stopped going to church as soon as I was old enough to work. If anything my experiences with the Catholic church and all of it's hypocrisy drove me away from religions as a whole and I have to appreciate it for that, but it did lead to a situation where I was thirty years old before exploring my own spirituality.
While going through all of the initiation rituals associated with the Catholic church I was required to learn something they call "apologetics," which are quite simply tactics that are used to attack another person's beliefs to support the idea that the Catholic church is the only true and correct church. One good thing came out of this practice though, I was required to study other religions and learn different aspects of their philosophies. While none of them really felt right to me, it was interesting to see how starkly people can disagree on the core details. I learned quite a bit about religions through this practice and ultimately it led me to the decision that I reject any organized religion or anyone trying to tell another person how to go about having their own spiritual experience.
I feel that spiritual experience on the whole is very subjective and abstract. Anyone trying to tell another person that it has to happen a certain way or that there is any structure, rhyme, or reason to it needs a big lesson in humility and needs to fundamentally understand that there is no one correct way to have a spiritual experience. It's quite easy to view religion as the earliest form of governance as it feels the need to spread its' doctrine and convert or disregard non-believers. Spirituality on the other hand can lead to the desire to share perspective, but there is no need to make another person agree to have the same experience in the same way as we did, because it's all subjective. There is no clearly defined structure or ritual to mark a completion point. There is no need for agreement or acceptance, because it is our own experience.
This leads me back to the concept of gurus or leaders. It's become clear to me that spirituality is something that some people do seek out and when they like what another is doing or resonate with what they are saying, it becomes second nature to look towards them as someone to gain some knowledge or wisdom from. One of the reasons I liked Alan Watts so much is because his views on this resonated so closely with my own, but I can't view him as some guru or teacher. We can only be our own "guru" because who makes the decision to agree or disagree with what someone else has to say about a topic. Who is the one choosing the other person to follow out of all the other humans in existence. The answers are ultimately within ourselves and looking external for anything besides inspiration is just giving away our own power. If anyone is a guru, we all are gurus, and some of us are just more aware of that fact than others. Hopefully that makes sense. Namaste.