Spirituality: The New Age consumer’s commodity, is a marketer’s dream. Spirituality costs nothing; it quickly attracts paying customers; a large percentage of the population wants it and it is a legislation-resistant product that no one has to create. What’s even more interesting is that just about anything can be marketed as something spiritual and New Age. Want a new car? How about God’s love? Why just settle for the American dream when you can have wholeness; get skinny and beautiful; become spiritually powerful; attain physical immortality; as well as emotional and mental healing—all for a substantial fee?
Someone started taking note of this and businesses started seeing the value of the spirituality market in the 1960’s—The country was in the throes of civil rights movements and Vietnam was raging on: There was a genuine need for consciousness; a genuine search for social changes and desire for spiritual enlightenment’s true benefits. Some truly found those benefits and they continue to uplift us all: Take for example how we've learned to advocate for the treatment of children as people; to challenge the rote-learning style of education here in the U.S. and its hegemonic ideologies and to honor the Divine in and around us all. Think about it: The entire world has benefitted from the promotion of Spirituality in its pure forms: Which are and always will be free of cost: Gautama Buddha did not outline a cost for something freely given, so how can we?
Sadly, it happens fairly easily; the "Spiritual New Age" movement and its authenticity were compromised with its increasing popularity. The genuine spiritual needs of the U.S. were exploited by exclusive retreats and package deals sold by gurus such as Maraheshi and Osho and other alleged “Satgurus”: All modules of Transcendental meditation still cost in the thousands to this day. The desire for spiritual community was also perverted with highly expensive cults and subservient ashrams who take every cent of its monastic's money upon their official joining. That’s not spirituality: That’s someone taking all your money.
Sadly, people who were concerned with relationship—concerned with their spiritual dealings with many communities-- were lost to the wayside in iconism and superficial “fast-fixes” that promised to appropriate the desired traits of commodified spirituality into their own lives. Consumerism and visual culture together have commodified the Spiritual Self in the western world.
In order to create a space for the successful guru—value had to be placed on the images that code what a guru is and most importantly, what s/he looks like. In having pondered deeply the human condition and the root of suffering—the buddha’s teachings were mainly aniconic—as were his followers until 1st Century A.D. This stressed the understanding and experiencing of the true benefits of spirituality. In closing off the mind’s need to see and judge, the Absolutes are revealed through pure experience and self-reliance; through maturing in the understanding of universality and ethics. In the pre-iconic history of Buddhism, no one was concerned with worshipping Gautama Buddha or what he looked like—they were concerned with becoming Buddhas themselves. They knew this to be a life-long journey— not something that could happen in a weekend or as a result of popular endorsements or just acting a certain way to attract blind followers.
Generally speaking, looking at physical representations of Buddha are distracting in that it would rely on the cultural codes of the viewer to mediate the content. There are some Absolutes in the representations that are of great importance: The main one being that Buddha’s eyes are half-closed, in a fixed, yet non-fixed gaze. This stresses the importance of how one explores this life in the physical body: Looking inward and outward, constantly, mindfully and contemplatively. Now, understanding this, would the imagery make sense if Buddha’s, or another enlightened person’s gaze were different and active? The dynamics are different when the subject is engaging the viewer; there is an active relationship based on pure or derived forms of intuition. The early representations of Buddha convey a pure understanding of what Spirituality is: He is not engaged in an active relationship with any viewer. The form was directly based on the characteristics found in the Pali Canon, which outline the Path and makes Buddhahood a possibility for everyone.
Now, in contrast, the image of Osho, a popular guru from the 1960’s, is attacking the viewer’s derived forms of thought and perception. His styled gaze evokes the concepts associated with successfully marketing yourself as a guru: It is policing and inspecting; as well as confronting. This was intentional: It is an identity-forming stare. Such a gaze seems to demand a psychotransfer of desirable qualities to him as a teacher; to recognize him as someone who is from some lineage; as someone who wants a strong relationship with you, as a subservient student. You do not feel comfortable in questioning his position in this picture, and this transfers to “real life” as well: That being the desired effect in someone lacking perceptual acquity.
Satyam Shivam Sundaram
http://www.rkhawaii.org/archivedpres/importanceofhalfclosedeyes.htm
www.dhamma.org
http://www.energygrid.com/spirit/2009/10ap-spiritualmarketing.html
