RANT

Pyramid Schemes for the Awakened

The promise of financial fulfillment; the reality of spiritual scammers

Photo by William Daigneault on Unsplash

Where I live, there exists an unironically-titled Conscious Community of people who do, well, all the conscious things. It’s unclear whether a reiki practice, belief in astrology, and crystal collection of at least 10 elements are all requirements to get in, or whether one is enough. In any case, these people are in incredible denial about their need to make money. The fact that most of them are struggling to pay for closet-sized rooms in urban rooming houses is the reason for both their desperation for cash and their need to partake in so many “healing” modalities in the first place.

Many of them practice what they refer to as “heart-centred entrepreneurship”, wherein spiritually-minded profiteers allegedly put human compassion over financial shrewdness. As such, these crystal-hoarding clowns have started advertising their very own “conscious businesses”, which teach you, the personal investor, how to hone your inner spiritual entrepreneur — and empower you to start your very own, well, conscious business.

The premise is simple: advertise to people who just know they have the keys to living a fulfilling (profitable) spiritual life about starting up their own enterprise. Inevitably…