I am writing this article in a hotel room in Luxembourg.  In every room of the hotel chain, there is a stand-up commercial card on the little table beside the bed that reads, “Contrat Satisfaction.  Restez 100% ZEN.”  There is a little cartoon fellow in pajamas sitting in a meditation posture.  This utter trivialization of the term “Zen” shows exactly what the New Age movement in Europe, North America and the West in general can achieve.  Dead-end personal “spiritual” hobbies have made ancient traditions, including Yoga, utterly trite.  This new Trite Zen, which is acceptable to the shallow mediocrity of ordinary society, indicates something worse than mere decadence.  It indicates in fact the spiritual bankruptcy of contemporary humanity.  It shows precisely the common lack of real Soul and Spirit that makes tyranny, oppression, police state surveillance and utter political and societal corruption the emergent false government of the world.  Westerners are shallow, egomanic and pseudo-free-willed consumers of “spirituality”.  Chögyam Trungpa called this spiritual materialism and he was more right than he knew.  Oh, and inside the card are easy step-by-step instructions on getting into “Zen” peace-of-mind.  You do not have to meet an Enlightened Master these days.  All you have to do is check-in to a hotel and read the quick-and-easy instructions.

Trite Zen is the destruction of the genuine spiritual quest in the West.  It is the New Age New World Order.  Zen is now a commodity in the West.  It is like the neatly wrapped little cookie-wafer you get served with your under-filled cup of coffee.  Self-enclosed consumers making imaginary little choices in their superficial, boring lives like these kind of add-ons.  They are big business.  Even if they don’t try the fifteen minute Trite Zen course, they are charmed by the offering.

Have you heard the joke about the lady who went to the dentist but would not take off her earphones when he was trying to work on her teeth?  He complained to her that they were interfering with his work on her teeth and she said, “If I take off my earphones I will die.”  He found this statement rather disgusting, but tried to go on and just work around the earphones.  After a few minutes, he couldn’t stand it any longer and jerked the earphones off her head.  Immediately she fell out of the chair and began to writhe and turn blue.  In a few minutes she was in fact dead.  Stunned by all this, the dentist put on the earphones and heard a New Age self-realization teacher giving the endless instruction, “Breath in, breath out, breath in, breath out”, over and over again.  That a joke like this would be created in our present time should be telling us a very big story indeed.

In a world where all sorts of knowledge are made cheaply available to superficial, confused, fragmented and distracted “interest”, there is less and less human incentive to step out of that state of mind, that collective hypnotic sleep.  Trite Zen is accidentally asking you a question:  Are you awake?