2 0 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 4 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 8 power and authority vested in their lodges to create a tool to disseminate not wisdom about mystical or religious experiences, but western propaganda disguised as spiritual wisdom. The dissemination of a propaganda deck that presents as a tool of deep spiritual wisdom confuses and obfuscates the issues. Of course, the tarot is not the same as mystical experience, but they do speak about it in their works, and it does point to the reality of interference in human spirituality. Other sociologists have uncovered more examples of direct obfuscation. Sociologists Bender (2010) and Janzten (1995) have pointed out how political interests, economic interests, and even gender biases figure into the sanitation and obfuscation of mystical investigations and scholarly theorizations of same. Jantzen, for example, notes how powerful men have sanitized and “domesticated” mystical experience, stripping it of important elements and abstracting it into a private and personalized thing nothing like the actual experiences of those who have them. It has been going on a long time. In a working paper entitled From Zoroaster to Star Wars, Jesus to Marx, I point out how most of the world’s institutionalized spiritualities are rooted in what elite Sassanian priests did with Zoroaster’s original mystical teachings when they captured them and wrote them down some eighteen hundred years ago (Sosteric 2018a). I hypothesize, but have little doubt, which in the process, they sanitized and stripped important elements of the experience, distorting, confusing, and leaving it harder to understand the nature and import of the experiences. Interestingly, suggesting there is deliberate interference in human spirituality is not particularly novel, nor are sociologists the only ones who do it. As the historian Versluis notes, western mystical traditions are quite elitist and have a long history of obscuring the truth behind closed temple doors so that “the masses” do not have access to the real truths (Versluis 2007). Ostensibly, they hide their understanding because they believe that the masses “cannot handle the truth” [2]. The words of Brother Wilmhurst, a Freemason and advocate of esoteric spirituality, which is spirituality where mysticism is obscured and hidden from public view, eloquently expresses this idea, which is that mysticism should be hidden from public view and the teachings obscured. In all periods of the world’s history, and in every part of the globe, secret orders and societies have existed outside the limits of the official churches for teaching what are called ‘the Mysteries’: for imparting to ‘suitable and prepared minds’ certain truths of human life, certain instructions about divine things, about the things that belong to our peace, about human nature and human destiny, which it was undesirable to publish to the multitude who would but profane those teachings and apply the esoteric knowledge that was communicated to ‘perverse’ and perhaps to ‘disastrous’ ends (Wilmshurst 1922). From the above quote you can see that members of esoteric (read elite) organizations want to hide the truth, they have an excuse for hiding the truth, and, as sociologists are beginning to discover in more detail, they work hard to confuse, obfuscate, and sanitize the truth. Why? As a sociologist, I think it is because they don’t want the people to see the uncomfortable truth about mystical or religious experience, which is they trend in democratic, revolutionary, and egalitarian directions that are antagonistic to the status quo (Sosteric 2018b). Human spirituality is something that those interested in maintaining the status quo need to control and subvert, and they work hard to do just that. Even Christian scholars themselves must now admit that the elites in the Catholic Church entered thousands of edits into the bible (Ehrman 2007). They may stumble trying to understand why, but a sociologist would immediately hypothesize social class dynamics and interference, with the only real issue being to unpack the specific reasons why. I have so say, uncovering the social class dynamics of human institutions, human actions, and human knowledge, is what we, and by “we” I mean sociologists, do. It is our “thing” so to speak, and it is a thing that I believe is very valuable and necessary, not only academically to those interested in the full truth of human spirituality, but also practically, for society and the world, especially in these times when we are beginning to explore the spiritual/existential roots of violence (Dědová 2018), and especially as we are beginning to see how easy it is to weaponize human spirituality. Given that there is clear historical and sociological evidence for interference in human spirituality, and given that sociologists are particularly adept at exploring the related dimensions, I think that to fully understand human spirituality, we need a multidisciplinary effort with increased contributions from sociologists. Contributions by sociologists are going to raise awareness of some of the “conspiracies” that have subverted what I would call authentic spirituality, but that can only add to our understanding of human spirituality. Reason four: Explaining to the uninitiated. Lexical confusion, the bigly-ness of it all, and intentional interference all muddy the water and make it easy for us to get stuck, and hard for us to explain and understand, but that is not all it. Even if you do get past the bigness of the experience. Even if you do sort out the lexical confusion long enough so that you can understand. Even if you don’t get snapped up by
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