New Way of practicing Old Beliefs

[Belacqua]

2) All that I am saying on that is that I am my own shaman, İmam or preacher (mostly). I study new ideas, practice them, see if they work for me and move forward. 

I guess I have mixed feelings about this. 

On one hand, yes: we all have to do the work for ourselves, and this means judging for ourselves what's working. 

On the other hand: a good teacher knows things we don't. And for spiritual practices, I think a large part of the teacher's role is to force us to question the things we thought we knew before. Spiritual traditions are often very much in opposition to the norms of everyday modern life. 

So from the time we're born, pretty much, we're getting trained in the values and beliefs of our society. (You can say "trained," or if you don't like what people get taught you can say "indoctrinated." But that's a value judgment.) By the time you're old enough to start looking around at spiritual traditions, you're going to be so deeply embedded in the ways of a particular time and place that you may not even be aware of it. 

We believe things that we aren't even aware we believe. And we use these beliefs when evaluating other beliefs. 

So the danger is that when learning a new (to us) spiritual tradition, we will judge it according to the values we already have, which means that this new tradition will end up being only a new way of formulating what we already believe. 

It seems to me that when learning a new spiritual system it is very likely to seem counterintuitive, or even downright wrong, at first. The parts that seem the most wrong are likely to end up being the most valuable. But I suspect this is really hard if you're doing it on your own. A person can judge "this new practice is really making me feel good," when what they mean is "this new practice is really massaging and confirming my prior beliefs." 

This is why it's so important to study the ancient traditions seriously, and take the time to get past a superficial evaluation based on modern mores. 

This is very different from people doing things out of fear of hell and hope for bodily pleasures (in a phase of their existence in which they don’t even have a body to experience bodily pain or pleasures).
 

Surely that's a bit of a false dichotomy there, I think you'll agree. 

People don't only follow old-fashioned spiritual practices 1) out of fear of hell, or 2) in the hope of bodily pleasure. Some do, no doubt, but there are a lot of other reasons. 

3) All beliefs can become superficial and dogmatic in time. So there are cases in which you are 100% correct. Still, the new thought movement is more dynamic and individualize din comparison to old religions. People go in, people go out. I learn, I unlearn and because it’s individualized I have no “spread the word” issue of anything like that. 
 
   Also it’s easy to learn and apply on yourself. And it’s based on observation too, because in the end you can observe if this thing is useful to you or others. 

Agreed. It's common for older practices to become habitual, to the point where people practice them superficially. And I agree that working on oneself is more important than evangelizing to others. 

"Based on observation" is tricky, because of course all observation is interpretation. And, again, deciding that it is "useful" may simply be deciding that it conforms to the values you held before. For example, usefulness is very much a modern capitalist value. In some older traditions, usefulness is a thing to be wary of -- a path to be used and discarded, and any really good thing is useless.