You’re Not Doing It Wrong – You’re Just Western
For more than a decade, I carried this low-grade pressure that I was failing at consciousness work. I had desires. I was (and I am) deeply attached to my son. I wanted to engage with the material world, not renounce it. And every spiritual tradition I encountered seemed to say the same thing: detach, withdraw, turn inward, let go.
This isn’t abstract philosophy – it shows up as guilt every time you choose engagement over “spiritual practice,” every time you care deeply about something material, every time you can’t bring yourself to meditate for hours because you’d rather be with your family or pursuing something you actually want.
Then I read Bernardo Kastrup’s latest book, “The Daimon and the Soul of the West,” and something shifted. He draws this distinction between the Eastern approach and the Western approach to consciousness that I’d never seen articulated before. The Eastern path says: recognize that Maya (the illusion of the material world) isn’t real, so ignore it, withdraw from it, introspect deeply. You need a guru because you’re charting unknown introspective territory. Maya isn’t your teacher – a human teacher is.
The Western path says: yes, Maya is illusion, but engage with it anyway. Because the illusion itself reveals something about what created it. Kastrup uses this analogy – if an author writes only fiction, every book is made up, but the fiction betrays something about the author’s mind. Why did they create this story and not another? Same with Maya. It’s doing this particular “thing” instead of something else it could be doing, and that reveals something about consciousness.
The Eastern path reaches “I am universal consciousness” through exclusion – not this, not that, not that. The Western path reaches the same destination through inclusion – I am him, I am her, I am nature, I am everything. Different path. Same place.
Honestly, what’s changed is the guilt is gone. I don’t judge myself anymore for wanting things, for being attached to my son’s physical existence (and for my immense love for him), and for engaging with material life. That’s not spiritual failure – that’s my path. The world is the teacher. My desires reveal something. My attachments reveal something. Not because I need to eliminate them, but because engaging with them shows me something about the nature of consciousness.
Do I still sometimes catch myself thinking I should be more “detached”? Yeah. Old patterns don’t disappear overnight.
Walk through it with me in the video above.
