I kinda just realized that a substantial part of so-called spiritual or related esoteric knowledge is just "basic" (in multiple senses of this word) philosophy, in particular meta-physics.
Modern philosophy as is commonly taught and portrayed seem to degrade to little more than clever arguments justifying appeals to common sense. There is nothing wrong with common sense per se, and all perspectives are equally valid, but it's a lot of busywork for nothing to justify one's existing prejudices with clever arguments that don't really do anything except giving you more conviction in a self-reinforcing manner. (it is also useful for getting social media credits [likes!] for sounding clever)
Anyway.
One example is the issue of "identity". There's always a lot of confusion about the "real identity" of something or some being. eg "Did I see the *real* Buddha in my dream, or was it just an illusion?" Confusion about the concept of identity and equivalence. (It's common, manifests in software design as well... i.e. =, ==, ===, .equals, ....) Common sense makes it hard for people to accept that things that function in the same way are "essentially", "really" the "same thing". Persons in the real world don't behave that way because firstly the physical world generally is exclusive in space-time (same objects cannot occupy the same space-time), so uniquely identifying a space-time could uniquely identify a "unique thing" even though it may behave the same way in other aspects. Also persons in the real world have unique histories because of this physical space-time exclusivity. You generally don't get a practical problem of trying to tell people apart when substantial part of their projected histories seem to overlap (unless you're talking about clones, multiverses, time travel, etc... then you get people's mind to blow up). So when, people engage with something that don't necessarily follow physical rules (like spirituality, ... or ...... software........), the experience of "identity" don't really line up with common sense, and there's confusion. In the real world you say a name and it could get linked with some real person with a unique historical record; In the software world you say a UUID and it could get linked with a data record; In the non-physical realms of possibilities, there are no fixation on names or identifiers, they're simply shorthand for subjective thoughts that are not easily quantifiable (could possibly be something like word embedding vectors... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Also the shorthand is not really a general shorthand but a shorthand in our minds, an alias for the realm of associated thoughts). And, fundamentally, a thought is basically all there is. So the question of "Is ____ same as _____" is kind of you trying to sort out your own thoughts, being confused as to there being predefined categories or things. Or sometimes it is a confusion caused by different thoughts having the same/similar name. In the purely subjective world of consciousness, knowledge is not obtained by empirical observation (basically by definition), and thus you don't gain any knowledge through the empirical method of collecting and classifying data, then trying to make predictions from them. Usually the issues we deal with are not 100% subjective, but it's useful to illustrate how the common sense approaches we use to deal with physical things don't work when there's sufficient subjectiveness in the context. Knowing in the subjective world is being able to imagine something, together with the unquestioned belief that it is true. When you cannot imagine something or you doubt its authenticity, then you do not know. You cannot gain subjective knowledge by asking somebody else (or maybe you can by placing unquestionable trust in somebody else's words, but it's generally not very advisable). Ignorance is not necessarily bad, it opens up possibilities, for the things we have not yet decided. (btw, when all things are decided the world ends. the omniscient completes the creation and ends the world). Anyway, due to the different nature of subjective knowledge, context-free categorization is mostly useless; shorthands are mere shorthands, and whether two things are equal depends on whether the thoughts associated are equal in the ways that matter in the context (yes, unironically this is probably also how I would implement context-sensitive methods for equality testing...).
So it's really not about spirituality, even though these approaches answer satisfactorily "did I see the real guanyin or was it an illusion?" (the answer is similar to the answer to the question was the AI generated video of guanyin real or not? -- well the imagery is probably close enough, but is the image a shorthand for the archetypical concept that's associated with the imagery, or just an image? that really depends on whether your thoughts about the image are invoked, or the deeper concept.)
As far as I have criticized "modern" philosophy as is commonly portrayed and taught, i.e. refusing to reference concepts after 1931, basically pretending the major advancements in concepts relating to computing never existed, the general lay person's capability of understanding "spirituality" (or metaphysics)-related concepts has benefited from the same. It's hard to imagine today, but if you had to explain to a person in the 19th century that you can make machines that can "compute anything and everything you asked" by simply writing instructions (i.e. Universal Turing Machines) they won't believe it would be possible, no matter how large the machine is. These days everyone knows what software is, and they know what an emulator (i.e. Universal Turing Machine) is because they want to play retro games.
UTMs are important concepts because it illustrates the nature of thoughts. There is no "ground reality" for thoughts. Thoughts can emulate others perfectly in principle (assuming thoughts are discrete... 😕) and you don't need a physical substrate for thoughts if you run emulators (commonly mispronounced as "turtle") all the way down. Emulators also provide a model of how physical reality, even thought it looks real, can easily be a result of a "simulation" (which is kinda a confusing word, but anyway). On a related note the invention of MMORPGs and other virtual worlds give people a glimpse of what it might feel like to live in a "simulation", and how complex worlds could be created within other complex worlds. It's easy these days to just invoke these words and people generally understand (but not NP though...) and I can assure you that at least some old, incomprehensible esoteric ancient texts tried to explain the same concepts but with much more difficulty because there was no such concepts available to the general lay public.
The refusal of modern philosophy as is commonly portrayed and taught to adopt computing concepts almost makes me want to believe that there's a conspiratorial effort in distracting and misdirecting thoughts away from proper metaphysical understanding of the world. There truly is no other reason for philosophy as is commonly portrayed and taught to get caught up with Gödel and not even trying to understand Turing properly, (or worse... just letting people get lost in the jungle maze of logical notation without telling them the existence of UTMs imply notation doesn't matter....)
Not to mention the common practice of posing questions without arriving at an answer (now that's almost a sin in itself). A story without an ending. A chord progress cut short. As if things are necessarily so. No. Questions always have an answer (Matthew 7:7). To be otherwise is literally to sow confusion. If there are nuances to the answer it simply implies the question is similarly nuanced and the nuance in the question is to be explained, but direct questions have direct answers. Etiquette is nothing in the face of truth, but it is fundamental in human society in particular those where you kind of don't want to offend those vested in the answers you disapprove of. As philosophy is a subjective subject, deeply personal even, the emphasis of it commonly portrayed and taught as being rational, objective, and scientific is really a weird phenomenon. The quest to rediscover truth is personal. The "objective" truth is here all along, we simply failed to see it, and the blinders we put on ourselves are different in each person (and as you may have gathered, the common parts are what we call common sense...). To be thoroughly objective is to supply all possible medicinal remedies for an ailment -- i.e. supplying poison. It is, to me, a wonder why people don't get disheartened to learn that a question does not have one answer, but a gazillion of them out of courtesy, and nobody tells you the actual one that makes sense.