In religious and spiritual communities it is common to hear that this or that practice is thousands of years old. This is said to give the practice gravitas, authority, show that it’s time tested and incontrovertibly good for you. In the same way that organic food is better than regularly farmed and ranched food. However, as a friend of mine is quick to point out, “Anthrax is organic.” Just because something is organic doesn’t mean it’s magically good for your or that you should suspend your critical thinking about it. It doesn’t matter how organic the peanut butter is if you have a deadly allergy to it.
Just because a spiritual practice is old, doesn’t mean that it’s good for you either. First, just because you’re told it’s old doesn’t mean it actually is. There are traditions in most religions of the Bible which claim to be a return to the original practices of the Bible, but which are actually new and have only been around for a few decades. So before you accept things at face value, check the facts. Second, it doesn’t matter how old something is. “There’s no fool like an old fool.”
Stoning adulterers is an ancient spiritual practice but isn’t very efficacious for us or our society today. Same can be said for slavery. Both were advocated by the Bible, btw. And what about that blood sacrifice process the Aztecs and Mayans subscribed to? Very spiritual, appeased the gods, allowed the priests to partake of the energy of their victims and pass that onto the people. Old school or ancient school, as it were. Probably not the best thing to indulge in today. But spiritual. Very spiritual. How about the sacrifice of a willing participant to put in the foundation of the temple as a protector spirit? Again, ancient practice. Note that people will recoil from these practices as misguided or unevolved and therefore not ancient wisdom. They will also use words like cult vs spirituality to make them less than other religious practices.
So being ancient doesn’t actually mean much other than people may or may not have been practicing this same way for a long time. In the end, what has always mattered, then-n0w-afterwards is what the practice means to the participant as they practice today. Who knows, maybe in a thousand years wearing a colander on your head will be seen as an ancient spiritual practice…of non-spirituality…or something…
