On October 11, 1962, more than two thousand Catholic bishops, theologians, and cardinals, representing 116 countries, entered St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome for the opening of the Second Vatican Council. ¹ Those gathered represented an institution boasting almost two thousand years of history, coming together in a world which was undergoing rapid change.

Revolutionary social movements advanced the rights of women and minorities. Rapid advancements in science eradicated diseases, and developments in mass communication broke down barriers all over the world.

But the anxieties of the age also loomed large. The devastation wrought by the Second World War still plagued the consciousness of Europe. Colonial empires collapsed under the strain of modernity as their former holdings declared their independence across Africa and Asia.² The United States and Soviet Union were engaged in the depths of the cold war, each leveraging weapons with hitherto unimaginable destructive power ³ and the world teetered once again on the brink of devastation.

It was against this backdrop of fear and possibility that Pope John XXIII, only three months after his election, took the reins of history in hand and called the twenty-first ecumenical council of the Catholic Church.⁴

In a departure from past councils, this council was to be what pope John XXIII called an aggiornamento, an “updating”, ⁵ and he wasted no time in setting out his vision for renewal. In his opening address to the Council, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, the Holy Father argued that the Church possessed an ancient deposit of faith, one which could pave the way for the salvation of mankind, but which needed to be delivered more effectively to reach a rapidly developing world. ⁶ Rather than maintaining the defensive crouch of the past century, John XXIII hoped that by presenting the, “…medicine of mercy rather than the weapons of severity…”⁷ the Church could more effectively reach out to a humanity which was ever more desperate for healing.

It was over the course of four sessions — held between 1962 and 1965 — that the Church set about effecting this renewal.⁸ Preceding the Council, the Roman Curia had developed a host of documents which it hoped that the Council would review and then approve, rapidly updating the Church’s positions on topics ranging from Scriptural interpretation to religious freedom. But on Saturday, October 13^th, the first day of the first session of the council, several bishops voiced objection to the documents which had been prepared by the curia – expressing concerns that the documents as drafted were too defensive in tone, too legalistic, or otherwise failed to represent the kind of pastoral vision that Pope John XXIII had called for.⁹ It became clear that many of the bishops in attendance had no appetite to merely rubber stamp the documents which had been prepared in advance.

As some cardinals demanded a total rewrite of some of the documents, the council altered its committee structure to ensure that such documents could be carefully revised, or in some cases withdrawn and rewritten after open debate.¹⁰

And debate there was. While some Council Fathers expressed excitement for such a renewal, highlighting a desire for ecumenism, and further engagement with modern society, others feared that a rush to incorporate unnecessary innovation could potentially weaken the Church or damage her mission.

The viewpoints were myriad, and such diversity of view seemed to echo the times. While the first Vatican council, nearly a century prior, had been a more local affair — nearly 40% of the bishops attending were from Italy alone¹¹ — the second Vatican Council boasted a truly international scope. Bishops from Europe and North America were joined by large delegations from Latin America, Africa, and all over Asia. Expert advisers and theologians attended to aid in the discussions, among them the future pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger.¹² Even members of other Christian faiths, both Protestant and Orthodox, were invited to observe and take part in informal discussions outside of the council.¹³

A truly a global council — progressives, conservatives, and moderates alike gathered to answer one driving question: How could the Church develop itself for a modern age, while staying true to its roots?

In answer to this question, the Council led to the promulgation of sixteen documents, each of which would permanently alter the direction of the Catholic Church: four constitutions, nine decrees, and three declarations.¹⁴

Liturgical Reform

The first, and most immediately visible of these documents to be promulgated, was the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, or Sacrosanctum Concilium. The document called for the “full, conscious, and active participation”¹⁵ of the faithful in the liturgy (the structured format of worship. Put another way: what actually happens when you go to Church), and authorized reforms that would transform Catholic worship.¹⁶

Perhaps one of the more contentious decisions put forth was permitting the wider use of local languages for certain parts of the Mass — precisely in order to encourage a the active participation of Church goers — while still advocating to retain Latin in the Latin rites.¹⁷ While the legacy of this particular document is certainly contentious — you may have heard about the disagreements among Catholics around the traditional Latin Mass — the council fathers voted to approve the document almost unanimously, the final tally being 2,147 to 4.¹⁸

The Liturgical reform put forth by Sacrosanctum Concilium was also tied to one of the earlier decrees promulgated by the Council, the Decree on the Eastern Catholic Churches, or Orientalium Ecclesiarum — a decree which dealt specifically with the unique liturgical frameworks of the Eastern Catholic traditions, ultimately seeking to affirm, protect, and maintain the unique traditions of the Eastern churches.¹⁹

The second constitution the Council approved addressed the nature of the Church itself. The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, titled Lumen Gentium emphasized that whether someone was ordained, or a lay person, sanctity was truly the responsibility and vocation of every baptized Christian – making a universal call to holiness. To paraphrase Cardinal Ratzinger — who would later become Pope Benedict XVI — Christians are the people of God only insofar as they are, “grafted into the Body of Christ.”²⁰ On the topic of vocation, Lumen Gentium also emphasized the nature of the relationship between the bishops and the pope, clarifying that bishops possessed a genuine pastoral responsibility for the Church given their role as the successors of the apostles.²¹

This renewed examination of vocation also extended to the laity. The decree Apostolicam Actuositatem noted that, far from being passive participants in the life of the Church, lay Catholics possessed a vocation of their own: to bring the Christian faith into their families, workplaces, and all areas of life.²²

Several more decrees related to Lumen Gentium were promulgated on the subject of vocation. The Decree on the Pastoral Office of Bishops (Christus Dominus), The Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests (Presbyterorium Ordinis), the Decree on Priestly Training (Optatam Totius), the Decree on the Appropriate Renewal of Religious Life (Perfectae Caritatis), and the Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity (Ad Gentes), all worked together to outline the vocation of certain offices while working to tie such vocations to the shared mission of all the Christian faithful.

The third dogmatic constitution of the council, Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, presented Scripture and Tradition — the two sources of revelation — as intimately intertwined expressions of the one revelation.²³ The document encouraged Catholics to read and study scripture, with an eye toward understanding the importance of genre, historical context, and the intentions of biblical authors when dealing with questions of interpretation.²⁴

Beyond questions of vocation, Liturgy, and Scripture, the Council also moved to update the Church’s relationship with non-Catholic Christians. The decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio, openly acknowledged that rays of truth could be found outside of the visible bounds of the Catholic faith, ultimately describing Christians who weren’t in full communion with Rome as separated brothers and sisters rather than heretics or schismatics.²⁵

Expanding this dialogue beyond Christianity, the declaration on the relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate, encouraged dialogue with those of other faiths like Islam, Buddhism, or Judaism. It also roundly condemned antisemitism and openly rejected the idea that the Jewish people collectively could be blamed for the death of Christ, a particularly impactful notion for Catholic-Jewish relations, especially only a few years after the horrors of the Holocaust.²⁶

Religious Freedom, Catholic Style

Related to this encouragement of dialogue between different faiths, we are brought to perhaps one of the Council’s most controversial documents, The Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae. This document affirmed that the human person, regardless of their faith, possessed a right to religious freedom and should not be coerced by governments either into or away from faith. (Integralists ought to take notes…) In a radical development, the Church declared that such freedom was a fundamental human right.²⁷

To be sure, grounding its ideas of religious liberty in both the dignity of the human person and the very nature of faith, Dignitatis Humanae was far from a watery kind of pluralism. The document was careful to very clearly proclaim the Truth of Christ (as the Catholic Church is wont to do), but clarified that an earnest appraisal of the Catholic faith necessarily meant making allowance for religious liberty, predicated as it is in the Catholic understanding of human dignity.²⁸

The final constitution of the council, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, continued the previous themes of engagement with the world. Its famous opening line declared that the joys and hopes, griefs and fears of all mankind were also the joys, hopes, griefs, and fears of the followers of Christ.²⁹ Gaudium et Spes cast the Church as a force of love and the good, taking on the sorrows of the world as, in some ways, its own responsibility — a radical affirmation of the founding of the Christian religion.

Further documents explored the role of bishops, the priesthood and priestly formation, religious life in general, the role of the laity and the role of Christian education, ultimately outlining an entire ecosystem of modern Catholic belief.

Following the discussion of these documents, on December 8, 1965, six years after the Councils inception, Paul VI formally declared the council’s closing.³⁰

In the following decades, Catholicism changed dramatically. The Church leaned into its role as a global institution, one that spoke to the whole of humanity and it seemed that a new era in Catholic thought and practice had dawned. Though not all were pleased with the development.

Aftershocks

For all the benefits of the Council, the post conciliar period brought its own challenges.

Many Catholics believed that the interpretation and implementation of the Councils declarations and constitutions had gone too far, weakening traditional Catholic identity through unnecessary innovation, and ultimately damaging the Church’s integrity and authority.

Conversely, many with a more sympathetic view towards a kind of progressive vision, felt that the council was only the beginning of a radical transformation of Catholic teaching and practice. In this view, the reforms had simply not gone far enough.

Recognizing that the interpretation and implementation of the Council’s decrees had led to certain discord among Catholics the world over, later popes attempted to clarify the Council’s place within the longstanding Catholic tradition. Perhaps most notably, Pope Benedict XVI famously affirmed the Council’s decisions while contrasting what he previously called a “hermeneutic of reform” with a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture.”³¹ Later, Pope Francis took care to emphasize themes of discipleship and synodality, and worked to bring more attention the marginalized and oppressed.

To what degree the work of these popes has been successful in smoothing discord among the faithful is debatable, as even today groups threaten schism from the Magisterium, but the work continues.

To be sure, the Second Council did not settle every question confronting the Church, and it certainly raised many new ones. But for all the debate, the continuing conversation truly reflects the monumental scale of what was attempted in Rome those sixty years ago.

At its core, the Second Vatican Council asked how an ancient religious tradition could meet a rapidly changing world without retreating from it, surrendering to it, or girding itself for battle. Wherever you personally stand on the issues — Catholic, or otherwise — its answer made history.

^[1] “Ep.1: History and Genesis of Vatican II,” YouTube video, posted by [NetTV Catholic], [Jun 7, 2013], https://www.youtube.com/watch/BOCJLb_6a_E, 00:20.

^[2] History and Genesis of Vatican II,” 7:28.

^[3] “History and Genesis of Vatican II,” 4:50.

^[4] “History and Genesis of Vatican II,” 2:06.

^[5] “Ep. 2: Opening of Vatican II & Liturgy/Sacrosanctum Concilium,” YouTube video, posted by [NetTV Catholic], [March 4, 2013], https://www.youtube.com/watch/QATKTMTynCo, 12:21.

^[6] “Ep. 2: Opening of Vatican II & Liturgy/Sacrosanctum Concilium,” YouTube video, posted by [NetTV Catholic], [March 4, 2013], https://www.youtube.com/watch/QATKTMTynCo, 12:21.

^[7] John XXIII, “Gaudet Mater Ecclesia,” opening address to the Second Vatican Council, October 11, 1962, 5.

^[8] “Opening of Vatican II & Liturgy/Sacrosanctum Concilium,” 0:10.

^[9] Stefan Gigacz, “Cardinal Liénart Upends the Council Agenda,” Cardijn @ Vatican II, May 28, 2023, https://vatican2journey.josephcardijn.com/cardinal-lienart-upends-the-council-agenda/

^[10] “Ep. 4: Dei Verbum,” YouTube video, posted by [NetTV Catholic], [March 18, 2013], https://www.youtube.com/watch/MsQqcn1XGiE, 7:01.

^[11] Pat Morrison, “A Council Primer,” National Catholic Reporter, October 4, 2002, https://www.natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives/100402/100402e.htm

^[12]“History and Genesis of Vatican II,” 16:30.

^[13] “History and Genesis of Vatican II,” 17:18.

^[14] “Documents of the Second Vatican Council,” Holy See, accessed August 10, 2026, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/index.htm.

^[15] Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, December 4, 1963, no. 14, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_sacrosanctum-concilium_en.html.

^[16] “Opening of Vatican II & Liturgy/Sacrosanctum Concilium,” 13:40.

^[17] “Opening of Vatican II & Liturgy/Sacrosanctum Concilium,” 4:55.

^[18] Piero Marini, “The Fortieth Anniversary of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,” Vatican, December 4, 2003, https://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/2003/documents/ns_lit_doc_20031204_40-concilium_en.html.

^[19] Second Vatican Council, Orientalium Ecclesiarum, Decree on the Catholic Churches of the Eastern Rite, November 21, 1964, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19641121_orientalium-ecclesiarum_en.html.

^[20] “EP 3: Lumen Gentium & The Church,” YouTube video, posted by NetTV Catholic, March 12, 2013, 11:07.

^[21] “Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, November 21, 1964, no. 18, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html.

^[22] Second Vatican Council, Apostolicam Actuositatem, Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, November 18, 1965, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19651118_apostolicam-actuositatem_en.html.

^[23] “Dei Verbum,” 8:39.

^[24] “Dei Verbum,” 4:30

^[25] “Ep. 6: Ecumenism,” YouTube video, posted by NetTV Catholic, April 15, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch/bWw35GPS4uQ, 15:02.

^[26] “Ecumenism,” 17:08.

^[27] “Ecumenism,” 10:40.

^[28] Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae, Declaration on Religious Freedom, December 7, 1965, no. 2, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651207_dignitatis-humanae_en.html.

^[29] Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, December 7, 1965, no. 1, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html.

^[30] Pope Paul VI, In Spiritu Sancto, Apostolic Brief for the Closing of the Council, December 8, 1965, https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/apost_letters/documents/hf_p-vi_apl_19651208_in-spiritu-sancto.html.

^[31] “Genesis of Vatican II,” 18.27

Why is it that there’s something rather than nothing?

Well the obvious answer might be that if there wasn’t something, we wouldn’t be able to look around and see it, and there wouldn’t be anyone around to ask the question. But believe it or not, this is a question that has dogged philosophers for almost a thousand years.

Given the fact that there does seem to be something as opposed to nothing, and given the fact that inquiring minds want to know why this appears to be the case, folks have been trying to come up with an answer for at least a thousand years.

One of the earliest attempts to answer this question actually comes from the Islamic world. In his 11th century work, the Kitāb al-Najāt (The Book of Salvation) the Persian philosopher and polymath Avicenna, developed one of the first systematic metaphysical arguments from contingency.

Avicenna started with an observation: There are clearly things, and these things seem to fall into one of two possible categories.1

Things could either be necessary — meaning that they must exist, and cannot not exist.

Or things could be contingent — meaning that these things could potentially either exist or not exist. As an example, people are contingent things. Your parents could have chosen not to have children, or perhaps you could be hit by a bus tomorrow, or Sam Kriss could come to your house and kill you for using AI. In any event, your existence isn’t impossible — obviously — but it doesn’t seem to be necessary either.

When Avicenna looked around, it occurred to him that, because just about everything he was seeing was contingent — these beings required a cause to bring them into being. (Parents, sun, water, whatever.)

So Avicenna said, ok, well it seems that everything I’m seeing is contingent and as a result has a cause, but when I look for the cause of these contingent things, the cause too, seems to be contingent.

I’m contingent, my parents are my cause, but they’re contingent, and their parents were their cause, and on and on to infinity.

Well ok, said Avicenna (Not really, but just roll with it) that’s problematic for answering our question of why there is something rather than nothing, because it would seem that we’ve just gotten to the problem of infinite regress. Now we have contingent things causing contingent things, off into the distance of infinite time, which isn’t particularly helpful in answering our original question.

So Avicenna said, perhaps the collection of contingent things — the universe itself — is either necessary or contingent. Well, it would seem it’s not necessary, because its existence is itself contingent on the existence of its members, so the universe itself is contingent.

But if the universe itself is contingent, it, too, must have a cause. Now, that cause could be part of the collection, or it could be outside of the collection.

Well, it would seem that the cause isn’t part of the collection, because as the cause of the whole collection, it would somehow have to be the cause of itself, which doesn’t really make sense based on what we know about how contingent things are caused.

(As an example, I didn’t cause my own birth.)

So if the cause can’t be inside the collection, it must be outside of the collection. And if that’s the case, it must be necessary. Otherwise we just run into the same problem of infinite regress we sidestepped a little while ago.

Long story long, Avicenna makes the argument that to stop the infinite regress of contingent causality, there must be at least one necessary thing, which he identifies as God.

Tidy, right?

St. Thomas Aquinas took a shine to this argument and made a very similar pitch in the third of his Five Ways which is worth checking out if you’re into this kind of thing.2 But for my money, the cleanest version of this argument actually comes from the 18th century philosopher G.W. Leibniz who inherited the distinction between necessary and contingent things from folks like Avicenna, but leaned much more heavily on something called the Principle of sufficient reason — wherein all things which exist require an explanation.3

To put it briefly, Leibniz argued that we basically had three options to answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Either…

1. The universe has no explanation and is itself just a brute fact. (Which he dismissed as violating the principle of sufficient reason.)

2. The universe explains itself, or

3. The universe is explained by God.4

If, Leibniz argued, the universe does indeed require an explanation, and it cannot explain itself, it follows that God explains why the universe exists.

Of course, certain philosophers and thinkers have taken umbrage with the assumption that the universe requires an explanation. In the famous radio debate between Fr. Copleston and Bertrand Russell, Russell famously asserted that the universe could well be a brute fact and required no explanation at all.5

But Leibniz and contemporary supporters of the argument lean on something called the Principle of Sufficient Reason as an antidote to the objection from brute facts.

Put simply, the PSR (Principle of Sufficient Reason) posits that everything which exists has an explanation for why it exists.

Of course, Russell and others like him reject the PSR. But if the PSR is true — and if it is applicable to the universe — then it would seem that the universe itself would indeed require an explanation.

And if that’s the case, if the arguments premises are accepted, the argument concludes that a necessary being exists.

Problems With the Argument

Now, if you’re a theist, it may seem that this is a pretty slam dunk argument. But not so fast, you would be defender of theism! There are issues here that might not readily appear to the untrained eye.

The first, and perhaps the largest, is the simply fact that it’s not clear that the PSR is true. Certain subatomic events, like radioactive decay or the fluctuations of virtual particles are widely viewed as foundationally probabilistic.

As an example, if we were to put two Uranium-235 atoms side by side, they would emit alpha particles at totally unpredictable times. If, indeed, this is probabilistic rather than deterministic — and it would seem that this is the case — it would really challenge the idea that every event, or thing, has a definitive cause.

Of course, there are a few rejoinders theists could make here. Firstly, that if the PSR were false we would expect all kinds of explainable phenomena to happen on a regular basis. Why not have random things occur all the time then? And beyond that, why couldn’t it be the case that we just have a probabilistic cause instead of a purely deterministic one? (I’m not saying I go in for that argument, but it isn’t obvious to me that it couldn’t be employed to some effect.)

The second objection might be the simple response that, if the PSR wasn’t true, most of what we’ve derived from the scientific project would be rendered unreliable at best, and meaningless at worst.

But perhaps a more interesting retort might be to argue against positing brute facts in the first place. After all, if we want to know why certain things have come into being, why would we stop at larger things or systems like the universe? Why have we drawn the line in the sand around certain things we’re willing to seek causes for, while excluding others that we’re not?

But this brings us to the second problem with the argument from contingency, the composition fallacy.

Put briefly, the composition fallacy is when we assume that something which is true for a component of a thing is true for the whole of the thing.

For instance, as Bertrand Russell put it,

"Every man who exists has a mother, and it seems to me your argument is that therefore the human race must have a mother, but obviously the human race hasn't a mother." 6

As the argument from contingency assumes that the universe must share the same kind of causal dependency as the things which exist within the universe, this is a classic composition fallacy. It assumes that the universe as a system is the same kind of thing as the objects that exist within it, which may well be wrong.

Of course, the theist could easily argue that some whole-part inferences are perfectly legitimate. To say that every brick weighs something, so the wall made of bricks also weighs something is perfectly reasonable. But from this point, the question is really about whether or not contingency as a property is something that can transfer.

But perhaps the stronger retort might not be to posit that the universe is a thing, as such. Rather the real question would be to ask if the whole of contingent reality itself (as a system) calls for an explanation. I’m not sure there’s an easy answer to this one, but it shows where the logic on both sides runs into a legitimate question.

At any rate, speaking of composition, there is another argument against the argument from contingency that was leveraged by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his text The God Delusion.

Dawkins argued that appealing to God as an explanation for the universe or its ultimate cause actually complicates matters greatly because it doesn’t cleanly tie off the chain of infinite regress.

God, Dawkins argues, would necessarily have to be at least as complex as the universe in order to bring it into being and sustain it.7 If things require an explanation, and complexity qualifies, Dawkins contends that invoking God as an explanation actually just kicks the problem of explanation higher up in the chain as we would now need to explain God’s complexity.8

Of course, if Dawkins’ critique was aimed specifically at the argument from contingency, he would seem to be making a category error here as the argument from contingency isn’t really about complex things requiring an explanation — it’s about contingent things requiring an explanation.

But to be fair to Dawkins, while his criticism here is primarily directed at certain versions of arguments for intelligent design than at contingency arguments, the special pleading critique here is really something to grapple with. Though his idea that God would also require an explanation when applied to this specific argument misses the forest of necessity and contingency for the trees of complexity.

Further, even if his argument around complexity was taken at its strongest, Classical theists generally don’t describe God as a sort of uber complicated thing somewhere in the universe. From the view of classical theists like Leibniz, or Aquinas, or even Avicenna, God is just seen as necessary being whose existence is not dependent upon anything else.

From that view asking ‘What explains God?’ or perhaps, ‘What explains God’s complexity?’ misunderstands these kinds of arguments in the same way that asking ‘What caused an uncaused cause?’ misunderstands the definition of ‘necessary.’

But just because the argument breaks down there, the logic around an implied case of special pleading is something that’s worth looking at.

So, is the invocation of a Necessary being just special pleading? Maybe. I’ll leave that up to you.

Final Thoughts

At any rate, whether you go in for the argument from contingency or not, it’s a great example of what philosophy can be at its best. This kind of question is an invitation for us all to take a step back from the mundane, take a gander around the room, and really ask whether or not we can leverage logic to get answers to the big questions.

Whether we accept or reject its conclusions, wrestling with the argument from contingency is a remarkable way to spend an afternoon — or perhaps a lifetime.

Thanks so much for reading.

Sufficient Reason, Insufficient Rizz

It seems to me that part of what makes these discussions unapproachable for your average bear is simply that the language of philosophy is difficult to parse. There are few things less sexy than having to define your terms so your complicated metaphysical argument can be understood.

Actually, I think this is a problem with philosophy more generally.

“Pastor Bob DESTROYS [insert some poor loser here] with FACTS and LOGIC” just gets more engagement than “A Nuanced Look at Arguments for God.”

And, like, fair enough. You need to do a bit of groundwork to get a handle on terms like Principle of Sufficient Reason, or A Priori, or Justified True Belief. And as trends in education have shifted away from the humanities — with the percentage of those enrolled in humanities degrees dropping to historic lows — it makes sense that folks…

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Something I run into quite often, and particularly in the spiritual space — but also more generally — is the number of folks who attempt to use a one size fits all solution to almost every problem. It’s been my experience that when folks are met with this or that problem, many of us default to the tools we’re most familiar with, even if they may not be the best tools for the job.

In the face of adversity, some folks become passive, freezing in lieu of fight or flight and holding up their inaction as virtue. Others react with righteous indignation, leaning into a kind of holy, moral fury. Some try to smooth the situation so all is well again — either out of discomfort or a real desire for peace — yet others try to bring in new ideas that might solve the issue or otherwise shift the focus of the interaction.

Any one of these approaches — if skillfully employed — might bring about a positive resolution to this or that situation, but different situations call for different approaches! Trying to reason with someone who is trying to stab you is probably the wrong approach. Likewise, lighting yourself up with righteous indignation and furious disagreement rarely presents an opportunity for dialogue that another person might be open to if the situation was approached differently. Sometimes you really do need to put your foot down. Sometimes it’s best to cool off. Other times, you’ve just gotta put your head down and get to work.

But if you only have one tool in your toolkit, you don’t get access to all the options that might be most helpful with this or that situation. Bluntly, when you only have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

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As an example of a spiritual system that does this particularly well, the Tantric ritual technology of the Tibetan Vajrayana equips practitioners with a set of tools called The Four Enlightened Activities. There are really possibilities in certain magical rituals that are specifically designed to work with different circumstances, though we don’t have to be into Tibetan ritual technique to benefit from getting our head around them.

If we avail ourselves of these profound teachings, not only will we get our trusty hammer, we’ll also get a drill, some duck tape, and a big bottle of superglue. Or at least their spiritual equivalents.

The Four Enlightened Activities are…

1. Pacifying,

2. Enriching/Increasing,

3. Magnetizing, and

4. Subjugating.

Each have their own use and set of symbolic associations and really represent the options we can avail ourselves of if we ever find ourselves stuck.

To walk through them each in turn, the enlightened activity of pacifying has as its goal to to calm the situation, quieting discord with equanimous resolve. In magical ceremonies its often employed to bust up negative energy and conflicts as well as to gently overcome spiritual obstacles through the path of peace.

The activity of increase has as its goal — fittingly — increasing things that are already available. The basic idea is to multiply the good so that we can flourish. Its often applied in ceremony to things like wisdom, wealth, and even lifespan and tends to be a fairly popular lay practice.

Similarly, magnetizing is set up to attract things, or even to enchant and bring others (spirits, people, etc.) under the power of the magician. More regularly, this is leveraged to attract positive circumstances more generally by developing a kind of irresistible compassion.

And lastly, the activity of subjugating is specifically tooled to conquer and overpower enemies. It’s generally not employed unless absolutely necessary and is leveraged to defeat hostile forces, banish aggressive evil spirits, and forcibly sever strong attachments or even hatred itself.

As a note, this subjugating action must necessarily be done with great compassion, lest the magician invite karmic consequences for acting out of ego and not out of luminous compassion.

Even if you want to crush a negative spirit, it must be done so that the spirit is liberated, and not out of hatred or a desire to cause harm. Sometimes a bully really does just need a punch in the mouth, but if done to cause harm, rather than to stop them from causing harm, we ourselves step off the path of enlightened action and succumb to our baser instincts.

As a quick aside, there’s this story about this samurai I heard a while back — and have since forgotten where I heard it — that illustrates this point.

Some time ago, a samurai’s master was slain by a rogue swordsman. The samurai swore to avenge his master’s honor, and as a result hunted the killer all across Japan. Years passed, but the samurai finally find the killer and kicked in his door.

Seeing the man filled him with rage at the injustice of his master’s death. Nearly frothing at the mouth, the samurai raised his sword ready to deliver the killing blow. But just before he struck the man’s head from his shoulders, he slowly lowered his blade and left the house.

Later, one of his disciples had asked him why he hadn’t slain the killer. He turned to his disciple and said,

“The reason I didn’t kill him was because, in that moment, I wanted to.”

It had no longer been about justice, or putting a stop to evil. If he had killed the man out of hate, he would have only perpetuated a cycle that he had initially set out to break.

Interfaith Spiritual Toolkits

While the four enlightened activities in this particular form are specific to Buddhist Tantra, you find similar notions across faith traditions. In certain Vedic texts and rituals — which may well have inspired the Buddhist tantras, or in the case of later tantric rituals of Hindu tantra, at least risen alongside them — you have a system that has many of the same components. In the Shakta Tantra, for instance you find rituals for healing, spiritual and physical nourishment, and general attraction that are exceedingly similar to the first three of the four enlightened activities of Buddha tantra.

You also get seeds of this stuff in the Atharvarna Veda when it’s talking about every day charms and operations, but the full development of these particular tools wouldn’t occur until centuries later. Though, even if they weren’t fully developed, you can see that the authors of the Atharvarna Veda were well aware of the need for these specific tools.

Vedic traditions aside, you can also find similarities in certain schools of western esotericism — particularly the modern strains. In fairness, many of these traditions often openly stole from Buddhist and Hindu teachings, but if anything, it just shows how universally applicable the tools are.

As just one example, the four elemental grades that comprise the outer order of the Golden Dawn, as well as the elemental correspondences in general, can be imperfectly mapped onto these operations as well. Even the magical weapons and the associations we find in Golden Dawn rituals — perhaps the most famous of western magical societies — echo the operations here.

Water (the chalice) pacifies and promotes emotional healing and calm we find from tantric pacifying rituals. Earth (the pantacle) grounds and speaks to material growth and the accumulation of resources and experience we find in the enriching/increasing rituals. Air (the dagger or sometimes the wand) separates concepts and form, severs attachments, and echoes Archangel Michael’s sword that vanquishes demons and evil, mirroring the subjugation aspect.

And — here’s where we get a bit imperfect with the comparison — fire (the wand, or sometimes the sword) could be understood as a uniting of the magician’s will to the world, allowing for influence. In the last case, you bind the will to an idea, and then that idea takes on more force in your life. Call it a kind of manifestation, or perhaps magnetization.

The Mundane Reality of Discernment

But forget all this spiritual hooey. You don’t have to be waving a wand around in tantric ritual to figure out how to bring good vibes to your life.

To put all this stuff simply, it might be easier to think about reality in a kind of compartmentalized way. This, naturally, will be an imperfect system, but almost every situation you run into is going to call for one of these actions.

Does the situation call for:

1. Resting, tamping out fear, and resolving conflicts?

2. Increasing health, wisdom, or resources?

3. Magnetizing something you don’t already have into your life? (Community, cash, inspiration, etc.) Or…

4. Putting a stop to destructive energies that need to chill? (A firm no for bad habits, difficult people, etc.)

Put another way, do you need to calm the scene? Make things grow? Bring stuff to you? Or draw good boundaries?

Almost every situation you’re going to run into in life calls for one of these categories, and when you equip yourself with the tools to act on those situations, you’re much better prepared for whatever life is going to meet you with next. So next time you’re out and about, you might want to think about bringing along more than just the trust metaphorical hammer.

Simple Rituals for Enlightened Action

While I’d love to drop a full book on you about tools for the kit, and will almost certainly be posting an article in the next few weeks on the mechanics of ritual, you don’t need to be an enlightened master to pad out your bag of tricks. But having some practices in the bag that you know you can rely on can help you when you run into one of these situations in the wild…

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The term warlock is derived from the Old English term wǣrloga.

Wǣr: Meaning “pledge,” or “covenant”. And, Loga: Meaning “liar” or “betrayer.

Literally, a wǣrloga is a “pledge betrayer.” But the term is more commonly rendered as oath breaker.

Today, most folks who hear the term Warlock don’t associate it with its original meaning. If anything, the word is more likely to elicit images of bearded wizards in gazing into crystal orbs. It is more common to hear it used in D&D sessions and in fantasy novels than in your day to day. But within certain mystery schools and occult orders, its been my experience that the term is occasionally leveraged in its original capacity.

Part of the reason for the disconnect between popular culture and occult use is to do with a kind of semantic drift — as words progress through history, they begin to take on new and sometimes rather different meanings. It can even be the case that a word will change so drastically that its original meaning fails to represent its modern usage.1

As it happens, this is exactly what happened to ‘warlock’. Around the turn of the second millennium, Europeans began to associate the term with people thought to have made pacts with the devil and otherwise betrayed God. As a result, ‘warlock’ slowly lost its original meaning, eventually warping to mean something like a male witch. Which is how the term is most often used today.

Now, to the best of my knowledge I have never made a pact with the devil, and I’m fairly certain I haven’t betrayed any gods — one very strange night in the Badlands perhaps notwithstanding — but I have flirted with breaking oaths. Though I have never broken one myself, I nevertheless have tremendous respect for some of the greatest warlocks in history precisely because of their oath breaking.2

Now listen, I know that sounds like I’m a scoundrel of the highest order — someone who breaks their solemn vows would seem to be revealing something unsavory about their character — but hear me out.

What’s in an Oath?

It is part of a longstanding tradition in certain western mystery schools is to initiate neophytes (baby practitioners, freshly planted) by asking them to take a series of oaths. These can range from basic vows of secrecy, all the way up to oaths which swear to interpret every phenomenon as a direct message from God, aimed squarely at the soul of the oath taker.

The punishment for breaking these oaths can be as simple as social ostracization. Sometimes, they can be worse.

As Aleister Crowley wrote in The Vision and the Voice, the oath of the Magister Templi is to be taken solemnly, and followed swiftly with this vow to accept severe consequences: "And if I fail herein, may my pyramid be profaned, and the Eye closed to me".

And as bad as that sounds, certain oaths are thought to carry significantly graver consequences. Hell, if you read some of the historical texts around this, even having your pyramid profaned might be the equivalent of a magickal slap on the wrist.

In Kings 2:24, King Solomon says to Shimei, “Did I not make you swear by the LORD and warn you, ‘On the day you leave to go anywhere else, you can be sure you will die’?” Of course, Shimei breaks this oath and winds up dead for the trouble not four passages later.

In the old Norse Poetic Edda it is written that oath-breakers are sent to Náströnd (literally: the corpse-shore). These poor souls are thus condemned to forever wade through rivers of horrible venom while a dragon chews on their corpses.

Of course, many modern practitioners view these examples metaphorically, advocating for a view of consequences that are primarily psychological. But even so, such consequences remain dire for the individual who would seemingly no longer be able to trust themselves.

With that in view, it might seem downright diabolical to take an oath and then renege on the promise, particularly given the consequences that were thought to follow — metaphysical or psychological — but much of the reason we even know about the workings of certain schools of ceremonial magic is to do with the handiwork of such oath breakers. To whom I think we should be grateful.

The Great Warlocks of the Past Century

Arthur Edward Waite, co-creator of the wildly popular Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, broke his oaths to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn by publishing The Pictorial Key to the Tarot as well as provoking a schism within the order. The founder of that very same order, S.L. MacGregor Mathers qualified as an oath breaker after he overrode the London temple’s hierarchy and handed over secret materials to Aleister Crowley. Crowley himself was definitely an oath breaker after he splintered from the GD and founded his own magical lodge.

But perhaps the most famous oath breaker in modern occult history — the man without whom we may never have gotten access to the Golden Dawn’s curriculum — was the gentleman scholar and ceremonial magician, Dr. Israel Regardie.

For his oath breaking and flagrant publication of secret material, Regardie was widely condemned by traditionalists and members of the GD at the time. But even in the face of such condemnation, he argued fiercely that the importance of preserving the system for future generations outweighed any possible repercussions of breaking his vow.

In this, I am profoundly indebted to Dr. Regardie, and I suspect my gratitude is shared by the vast majority of modern magicians. Alas, I was not born in 1890 and as such, was unable to break this particular oath in the pursuit of preserving the magical tradition. Nevertheless, I, like Regardie, am generally ok bending the rules around traditional hierarchies — particularly if I’m talking with someone who I think can benefit from some knowledge of the hidden mysteries. I certainly benefited greatly, as have many others I know.

If we’re being fair, whether the man was a preserver of magical history or a nefarious oath breaker may just be up to the eye of the beholder.

Having now expressed my admiration for Regardie’s actions, I personally would very much like to avoid breaking any oaths. As such, I’ve done my best to avoid taking oaths that would bind me to secrecy — largely for the reason that I would almost certainly break them at the first opportunity to teach someone something that might help them.

The Law is for All, as Regardie’s one time teacher Frater Perdurabo penned, and I believe him to have the right of it.

The Magick of Keeping Your Trap Shut

Having said all this, I’ve certainly been in situations where I probably should have clamped down on my tongue about things that I had learned of from oath breakers that I would otherwise not know (and not be in a position to share). As it happens, there’s a reason certain secrets are best kept... well, secret.

I tend to be someone who is a bit more lackadaisical about secrets than some in the magical world, but even with my lassie faire attitude, I’ve seen my fair share of would be magicians lose their marbles after jumping into techniques they shouldn’t have had access to, and really had no business practicing. I’ve seen all sorts of otherwise reasonably well adjusted folks get into magick, start mucking about with active imagination, synchronicity, or even evocation of disembodied entities, and very suddenly totally lose it.

The thing is, you don’t have to believe in magic to watch folks go on power trips, or otherwise wreck their lives after retreating into the fantastical realm of occult secrets. While it might feel amazing to pump up the magick juice (and believe me, it does) it is much harder to pull off any kind of effective ritual work if you can’t pay your rent or otherwise keep your life together.

Part of what usually insulates new adepts from this kind of thing is the fact that most competent mystery schools drip feed their neophytes with a steady diet of study and basic practice.

In such system, new initiates toil through the outer grades for months or even years while they get the techniques down, and only after they’ve mastered the basics do they even bother with the big stuff. Before you stand in the circle, you’ve got to know how to visualize, how to hold form, what correspondences are useful for each working, which planetary hours are beneficial for a given working, and so on and so on.

From this view, it’s rubbish to try and start messing about with serious ceremony before you’ve got your foundations under you — or at least before you’ve got some familiarity with the mechanisms of what it is you’re even trying to do. In some cases it may even be dangerous to try this stuff without some solid ground under your feet. To hand someone tools they’re not ready for or don’t have proper training to wield can be a recipe for disaster.

Again, you don’t necessarily have to believe in magick to grok this.

If someone is spending hours a day every day visualizing entities and carrying on conversations with them, the entities don’t have to be ontologically real for that relationship to fuck up your life. Take a gander at /r/tulpa and you’ll see what I mean. (Or better yet, don’t. Just take my word for it.)

If someone is getting deep into meditation without an understanding of what meditation is for, they’re liable to disassociate and possibly do real damage to themselves.

If someone is getting deep into correspondences and starts to hear God speaking to them personally through the television, it’s just as likely to be a blessing as it is to be a schizophrenic break.

Flinging yourself head first into the mysteries of magic and religion, while obviously enticing, is certainly not without its pitfalls. And anyone who has any idea what they’re doing probably shouldn’t throw their pupils into the deep end if they can help it.

If practitioners go ahead and open their big mouths, sharing techniques above another person’s paygrade, it can inspire folks to start playing with techniques they’re not ready for.3

And in fairness, sometimes that’s just fine. Occasionally, the deep end is exactly what certain folks need. In such cases we rely on the skill and compassion of our teachers to yoink us out when the water starts getting over our heads. But there is a fair bit of difference between teaching your kid how to sail — standing alongside them and teaching them the ropes — and just tossing them the keys to the boat. Even if you trust them and have faith, someone who doesn’t know how to sail is liable to get into some trouble.

When it comes to magick, many have drowned. They got in too deep, too quickly, and generally made a mess of things.

In some ways, this is the fault of the oath breaker. If Regardie had never published his material, If Crowley had never written Magick Book 4 and Liber ABA, if Mathers had never initiated Crowley, much of the danger of occult silliness would be mitigated. People simply wouldn’t know enough about this stuff to really get into trouble.

To be sure, there is certainly something to be said for personal responsibility here, but handing a child a box of matches and expecting them not to set the house on fire is probably not the smartest plan.

That said, even with the harm that this material has caused, many beneficiaries of the great warlocks of history have taken the teachings, integrated them into their lives, and constructed something beautiful that they otherwise might not have. I count myself among them, and in this, I am grateful to these warlocks. Even though I, myself, am someone who keeps my oaths.

As part of my program of exposing myself to folks I regularly disagree with, the other night I found myself listening to a conversation between New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat and conservative political commentator Rod Dreher. The topics ranged from cultural shifts in the American political landscape, how they compared to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, and what potential future the American cultural trajectory heralded. If you’re into that sort of thing, whatever you think of Dreher, it’s worth a listen.

For the most part, the conversation stayed at a kind of historical level of analysis, but every now and again it would dip into discussions of Christianity and the potential for re-enchantment of secular societies. This idea of re-enchantment, for those who are unfamiliar with the term, is basically shorthand for what it might look like to have a kind of spiritual or religious revival in Western culture that would propel us out of our kind of secular malaise and into something resembling a cultural renaissance.

If we see some kind of religious re-enchantment, I personally think it will be something along interspiritual/pluralist lines, but there’s no Kalshi category to bet on this so I guess I’ll have to settle for prattling on about it here.

In the back half of the conversation, Douthat asked Dreher if he thought AI was demonic, and for a brief moment the conversation turned to a dialogue on spiritual warfare and something called the dark enchantment — a term which I haden’t encountered before but which I was nevertheless taken by. Dreher posited that the dark enchantment would be a kind of grasping for meaning not in religion or shared humanity, but in technology. He pointed to a conversation between a mother and son — also hosted by the NY Times — where the mother had fallen in love with her chatbot. When her son expressed concern that his mom was withdrawing from life, and that was potentially mistaking this chatbot for a person, the mother responded that she knew it wasn’t a person.

But she was emphatic. She didn’t want a person. She wanted AI.

Dreher then ventured a proposition, that this state of affairs — when people prefer something which is a mere simulacrum of real life over the messiness of the real — is indicative of a kind of spiritual sickness. A sort of sign of the world of the demonic subverting the goodness of creation.

“I believe that AI will be used as a vector of the demonic. It’s not that every instance of AI is demonic, but I believe that people will come to see it as an oracle. It’s already happening now, people granting it Godlike powers.” - Rod Dreher

His major concern seemed to be a kind of outsourcing of our humanity to machines in such a way where our humanity — what it means to be a human person — is ultimately degraded.

Frankly, independent of the claims of demonic infiltration, I think that this concern around offloading our humanity is a rather widely shared one. Sure, there are folks on all sides of the political spectrum that are bullish on AI, but anywhere between 46% to 57% of the American public hold negative or extremely negative views of the technology.

Somewhat interestingly, Pastors and other Christian leaders think it’s even worse. If we look at at a study from the Barna Research Group, of 442 American pastors polled, some 72% of pastors report viewing AI as a threat to religion in general. Concerns of shallow theology are compounded with concerns around isolation, integrity, and a withdraw from real life. This isn’t even to mention concerns around theological accuracy and the potential for AI to misrepresent Church teaching or potentially misinterpret scripture.

Still, almost 87% of pastors use AI in some fashion, so how seriously they actually view AI as a threat may not be captured in the study, but the concern is there.

But ok, back to Dreher. He’s made claims in other interviews that he’s spoken with people in the tech world who think that AI is somehow able to channel disembodied entities who will help us advance our society, become more progressive, and live better lives.

As he says of these tech folks…

“These are not weirdos who, you know, go to the grove at midnight to pray to the moon. These are tech people, and they think that AI is the vector through which these higher intelligences are helping us. Now, as a Christian, I think this is Demonic, this is clearly demonic… if these people are correct — and I say if because I don’t know, but these are people who aren’t religious who believe this — then AI is becoming a way to channel demonic entities, demonic intelligences, to affect humanity.”

In the same interview, Dreher spoke of a demonic agenda to merge humanity with machines, not in a way where we’re all walking around with robot arms, but in a way which we erase the borders between our minds, psyches, and even souls becomes ever more degraded as we outsource our thinking to machines. In this, humanity is quite literally surrendering our agency to algorithms, and in Dreher’s view — if there is demonic intelligence behind AI — to literal demons.

Wild enough for you?

As someone who has done their fair share of going to the grove at midnight, I can report with certainty that it is generally a much more pleasant experience to cavort with spirits under a full moon than in front of a glowing screen — though this might just be personal preference. But demons or not, I actually think Dreher is onto something interesting here.

The Occult Gripe with Algorithms

To be sure, I’m generally agnostic about what Dreher is saying regarding the potential for AI to be channeling demons. Hell, I’m not sure what I think of demons in general, though I’m fairly certain the most common Christian theologies around them are probably wrong. (That said, I did just write a piece the other week on possible non-corporeal intelligences, so take this with a grain of salt.) But as someone who is into occultism, religion, and technology, I do think AI and algorithmic driven media in general is cause for concern. Whenever we surrender our agency to some external force that — very clearly — doesn’t have our best interest in mind, it would probably be a good idea to do some calculus around it.

Are we getting something out of the deal? Is algorithmic driven media making us better? Smarter? More compassionate?

For many, if not most of us, it seems that the answer is a pretty clear no. As someone who has been practicing ritual magick for the majority of my adult life, and who has seen first hand the power of repetitive ritual, I can’t just wave away a daily abdication of the self to the algorithm as some silly indulgence humanity will grow out of.

The entire point of the occult revival of the past two centuries — encompassing traditions like Theosophy, The Golden Dawn, Thelema, modern neo pagan traditions, and a host of mystery schools to name just a few branches — was to sus out the hidden knowledge of reality, and ultimately get at the inner workings of the universe. The whole core of the occult revival is centered around a quest for the truth, and once it was had, to leverage that truth to elevate the lives of practitioners, and the lives of those around them.

On one hand, it was a quest for knowledge, and on the other, power. But lest it become as insane as any other power system, these movements were — at their best — driven by compassion.

To put it another way, the whole occult project of causative ritual, is fundamentally a rebellion against nihilism, a reclamation of agency at the deepest levels, and a rejection of submission to systems and beings who do not have your best interest at heart.1

As it seems pretty clear to me that much of AI and the algorithms that run much of our lives do not have our best interest at heart, occultists might want to start seriously thinking about their place in all this.

It is precisely because occultism has always been foundationally about knowledge, agency, and compassionate action, no magician worth their salt would ever be caught dead having their consciousness overtaken by the machines. Not only would that be profoundly embarrassing (and indicative of wild energetic leaks) but it would be an abdication of the entire project of self-reclamation and agentic relationship with reality. But claiming agency of the self is one thing, becoming a beacon for others is another thing entirely.

Now, can occultists use AI as a tool? Surely. Can it be part of the program? Undoubtedly. Can folks conceptualize it in a way where they are doing “possession” or modes of invocation on purpose? Most probably.

But the more we unconsciously outsource our tools to other entities — machines or otherwise — the more the magician surrenders his or her power altogether. As Ram Dass said, if you don’t want the ego to sink into psychosis, you’ve got to, “Watch it, watch it.”

Spirits can make for very helpful partners — whatever you think “spirits” actually are. But in every grimoire, across every tradition, for the whole time that occult practice has been a thing, the magician is ever reminded that there are only two folks allowed to drive the car. The magician, and her God(s).

In this, occultists of all stripes should probably share at least some of Dreher’s concern about AI. Not because it’s a conduit for demons in a theological sense, but because it is yet one other system of control and power that is designed to erode your boundaries, and replace your individuality with algorithms.

This may sound alarmist, but the data should concern everyone. Religious or not.

Studies on a phenomenon called Cognitive Offloading show that even 10 minutes of AI interaction can significantly impair our independent problem-solving skills as well as our persistence. Over time, we see clear declines in critical thinking, memory, and even neural connectivity in the areas of our brain most associated with higher-order reasoning skills.

By abdicating our dominion over our minds, we are literally getting dumber, slower, and less able to problem solve. In some ways, we are replacing our own brains with those of the machine.

But whether demons, entities, or just habits of attention, every occult tradition in history agrees on this point: To surrender your agency without awareness is a recipe for disaster.

As it stands, we are aiding in our own possession. If not by literal demons — as Dreher might have it — then by silicone entities that may not be all so different.

An Occult Theory of the Digital Self

Thankfully, we don’t have to throw our computers into the sea. But just as magicians will perform banishing and invocation rituals as energetic hygiene in their day to day life, if we’re going to be cavorting with digital entities (demonic or otherwise) it seems prudent at present to think about what it means to develop a banishing and invocation routine for the digital age.

If the physical body acts in the physical plane, and the astral body in the astral plane, and so on and so forth, what might it mean to have a digital body?

It seems to me that, as the astral body is an energetic projection of the magicians consciousness into the astral, something like a digital body is the projection of a magician’s consciousness into virtual spaces.

The internet, for all its problems and gifts, is effectively another plane of existence. An artificial realm that we created. And when we sit on our laptops, or phones, or whatever, we are projecting our consciousness into the net.

By and large, most of us are not consciously doing this.

In certain English and Irish mythologies, there are stories of “fairy circles”, rings of mycelium, which whisk away those who unexpectedly step into them into a realm of whimsy, danger, and profound strangeness.

I would wager that most of us don’t spend a great deal of thought on the dangers of fairy circles, but perhaps some level of concern would be appropriate for the technological varieties.

Most of us carry our own kind of fairy circles with us. Each of us, in our pockets right now, carries a portal that is capable of whisking our consciousness into alternate planes of existence.

Though many of us launch our consciousnesses into this plane on the daily, most of us are totally unequipped to make this journey with any meaningful sense of direction, and as a result wind up just getting pulled along for the ride.

Its similar to how some reports of psychedelics speak of guides that appear within the trip to shunt our consciousness to new insights. But instead of potentially benevolent non-corporeal spirits, when we launch into cyberspace, we’re relying on algorithmic beings to do something similar.

In this, our digital body — for lack of a more precise term — is a kind of “lower” self. Something that is operating beyond our usual waking consciousness.

In its own way, it can only really be divinized, it can only really be saved, by its relationship to higher functions. Much as certain occultists conceptualize the Holy Guardian Angel as a kind of perfected, higher self, we might consider our digital bodies as having a similar relationship to our higher functions.

From this view, just as certain magicians aim to bring their ego into alignment with their higher selves, we might consider having an equal responsibility to direct our digital consciousnesses to our higher selves if only so they are not left to the mercy of a hostile plane of existence.

In this, we have a responsibility to be benevolent rulers of our digital expressions. And that means we have a responsibility to direct them with conscious compassion.

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The Lesser Banishing Ritual of Ctrl, Alt, Delete

In most grimoire traditions, the circle and summoning triangle represent tools that allow the magician to compel or otherwise command the spirits that they summon. Instead of interacting with spirits from a circle, many of us today interact with them in the form of a rectangle.

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In the midst of working on a paper about Catholic discernment criteria for mystical experience, I stumbled across a theoretical pre-print that piqued my interest.

In Traces of the Other the paper’s authors, Andrew Robert Gallimore, Niffe Hermansson, and Donald D. Hoffman, have proposed a framework that could potentially allow for the discernment of entity contact in DMT experiences. In particular, the paper proposes a framework to discern whether or not the entities reported during these experiences are agents in their own right, as opposed to the commonly accepted view at present that these entities represent a kind of hallucination.

This notion, built on the back of the American cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman’s Theory of Conscious Agents — the idea that reality might be fundamentally built out of interacting conscious agents — flies directly in the face of the materialist consensus that has been the project of western cultures for at least the past two centuries.

In favor of admitting my own biases, I tend to be agnostic about the proposition, but the possibility that we’ve been so foundationally wrong about reality is obviously exciting. (Or perhaps horrifying, depending on your disposition.) But before folks even get into the entity situation, the paper asks: what it would even mean to have a world where non-corporeal entity contact of this sort was even possible?

What Do Our Senses Tell Us About Reality?

As I’ve said, the paper itself is built on the back of Hoffman’s Theory of Conscious Agents, but it’s equally predicated on something called the Interface Theory of Perception. A kind of anti-naturalism which claims that reality as we usually experience it — as relayed through our senses — developed as an evolutionary optimized, species specific interface.

In this view, our sensory systems did not evolve to grant us access to objective reality or track ontological truth. Instead they developed for the sole purpose of keeping us alive. They allow us to interact with reality insofar as utility is concerned, but beyond that we are woefully ignorant of what’s actually going on.

In this view, our perceptions of reality are a kind of useful fiction, analogous to how we might view desktop icons on a computer. That little yellow folder on your home screen isn’t really a folder. It’s a bunch of code that congeals into the image of a folder.

This said, though we only have access to the folder, that code that underpins it is still there, even if it remains out of reach.

This may sound silly, but if the interface theory of perception is anywhere close to the truth, it would have profound implications regarding the limits of epistemology.

What does it mean to say that something is true if our senses — the very things which we would use to track truth — might never have been calibrated to it? Could we say anything about truth at all?

Fans of Protestant theology might note that this view is similar to what the philosopher of religion and champion of reformed epistemology, Alvin Plantinga, proposed in his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism.

Plantinga’s argument can be briefly summarized as a sort of radical skepticism. From his view, if you accept evolution and naturalism, you have a rational and compelling reason to doubt the reliability of your beliefs.

Why, he asks, would we assume that evolution would imbue within us a capacity to track truth at all? Isn’t it quite possible that we would develop a host of false beliefs as long as those beliefs are useful in keeping us alive?

If we accept Plantinga’s proposition, this would mean that we must either abandon the epistemology of naturalism — collapsing into a kind of full throated agnosticism about the real — or else fall back on a defense of theism, arguing that an external creator God would be capable of calibrating us to the True.1 Now, Plantinga’s move here is indeed to argue for theism, but Hoffman takes a rather different tack.

Instead of Plantinga’s argument for theism, Hoffman advocates for a kind of quasi-idealism. His argument — that our perceptions are merely useful fabrications that ultimately allow us access to a mere fraction of reality — doesn’t stop at radical skepticism. Rather, he argues that there might be other ways to organize our experience beyond the senses that might give us access to more of reality. Or at least, different aspects of it.

The next question is natural. If Hoffman is right, and we can reorganize our interface to grant us access to more of reality, what is it, exactly, that we are getting access to?

A Universe of Conscious Agents

Enter the Theory of Conscious Agents.

At base, TCA is the claim that reality is fundamentally made up not of matter, or even mind, but of… well… conscious agents.

To be clear, Hoffman isn’t using “conscious agent”, in the way you or I might in a regular conversation. For Hoffman, conscious agent is not a synonym for a kind of spirit or mind. He’s not saying that the universe is constructed out of Angels playing ping pong.

In Hoffman’s view, a conscious agent requires only two things to be worthy of its name.

Firstly, the capacity to perceive something.

And secondly, a capacity to respond to that initial perception.

That’s it. That’s the ballgame.

A conscious agent doesn’t need to be anything we might consider an entity in the traditional sense (fairies, angels, your boss, etc.) Conscious agents don’t even require a “mind” as we might usually conceive of one.2

At base, a conscious agent is basically a perception/action loop. Input meet output, repeat.

Imagine how your action can become another person’s perception. As an example, this article (a direct result of my writing it) becomes something you perceive. You then act in response by scrolling away because you’re bored becoming a paid subscriber.

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Link enough of these loops together and what you get at scale is what we experience as objects. Space, time, and the whole physical universe. So what we call objects are, in Hoffman’s view, “interface objects”. The objects are, themselves, a kind of icon that represents the interaction between conscious agents.

In this model, the universe isn’t made of matter, or mind, or even information. Instead, it’s made of the relationship between these agents — the effects of their input and output — and all that other stuff are really just objects in our interface, generated by interactions among these conscious agents. The objects are not “real” in the sense that they are a reflection of objective reality, rather they represent what is available to us through our sense interface.

Which presents an interesting question. Did evolution give us access to the totality of conscious agents that pervade the universe? For Hoffman, the answer is, “Why would it?” Precisely given the reasons already discussed. Why would we need to be aware of certain agents if their existence didn’t impact out survival? It becomes plausible, on Hoffman’s account, that there are aspects of reality that our ordaniry perceptual interface isn’t calibrated to reveal.

Gallimore’s paper pushes this to the limit, arguing that if Hoffman is right here, entity encounter becomes possible in a way that it simply doesn’t under a framework of physicalism. If, indeed, our ordinary experience is only one possible interface among many, then radically altered states of consciousness (arising from, say DMT) force the question: do these states reorganize perception in ways that might reveal interactions among conscious agents which are usually off limits to us?

Which is what is so interesting to the co-authors of the paper, Gallimore and Hermansson. Could the entities reported during DMT experiences represent interactions with conscious agents that are usually excluded from our particular interface?

If Hoffman is right, his framework sets up a conceptual scaffolding for taking the possibility of this idea seriously.

Space-Time as an Operating System

Lets grant for a moment that Hoffman is right about interface theory and his critique on the limits of our sense knowledge holds.

Lets suppose that Hoffman is correct that our perceptual framework, represented by spacetime, is merely one possible interface layered on top of a deeper network of these conscious agents. If we’re limited by our particular interface, it would stand to reason that there a bunch of conscious agents which don’t appear in our usual interface.

This is a strange enough idea that it bears dwelling on. If it is true, as Hoffman asserts, that space and time are only one format we can use to organize our experience, what exactly is it that other formats would look like? What would it even mean to organize reality without time and space? What would it even mean to gain access to other conscious agents?

Well, it might look like accessing realms that seem outside of time and space, populated by DMT entities. Maybe.

To illustrate this, lets return to the computer metaphor. Consider the difference between the operating system (windows, whatever Mac is using, Linux) and the electrical activity that happens behind it. The desktop screen with its folders and cursor isn’t “false” in the sense that it doesn’t exist. They’re just convenient ways to interact with something significantly more complex.

Nothing actually prevents another operating system from organizing the same electricity in a totally different way. Say we delete Windows off our computer and install Linux. It’s a totally different way to organize that electricity. A totally different way to engage the conscious agents that make up the system.

Now, imagine instead that space-time is the equivalent of a Windows’ operating system. It’s not base layer reality itself — its not the code and electricity that is imperceptible to the average computer user — rather it’s the interface we use to navigate it.

Granted, we’re obviously a bit more complex than computers, and this metaphor is certainly strained, but it’s conceivably worth asking how much flexibility our conscious interface actually has. And perhaps what different interfaces might both open us to, and what facets of reality they might exclude.

All that said, if this metaphor does indeed hold, there’s no particular reason to suppose that all conscious experience needs to be organized through our current set up. If we start to mess about with the interface of our senses and perceptions to alter them to organizing principles potentially outside of space time, (taking copious amounts of DMT, darkness retreats, intense prayer and meditation regimens, whatever else) we might find that we start to organize reality differently. We might even find that this reorganization gives us access to different sorts of things than we otherwise would be able to touch on. Like conscious agents manifesting as DMT entities, for instance.

We’re still not really getting access to the code in a direct sense, but we might be getting access to entirely different interfaces.

Imagine starting up your machine but instead of letting the operating system load, you hold F5 and boot into the BIOS. While your usual operating system can’t do things like overclock your CPU, you can do that from the BIOS.

If we start to load up different interfaces, distance, individuality, and all our usual sense tools might stop functioning as the primary modes through which experience is organized or structured. And we might start to get access to areas of reality which are usually off limits.

But lets circle back to entities for a minute. If the entities folks report while under the influence of DMT aren’t showing up in the Windows Desktop, and I really only need to open Microsoft word and ignore my Teams’ messages, I never have an occasion to seek them out. Put another way, to reiterate an above point, if their existence doesn’t immediately impact our capacity for survival, why would we care?

But what if things are out there just beyond the limits of cognition? What if these experiences really are revealing a network of Conscious Agents we’re normally unaware of because we never evolved to perceive them within spacetime?

What if that is what something like, say, DMT is doing for us?

Precedent for Entity Contact

To be sure, certain traditions have been talking about non-corporeal entities for thousands of years. The Babylonian Talmud speaks of such a volume of demons just out of sight that we would be paralyzed if we were made aware of them, which is weirdly synchronous to Hoffman’s proposition.

“If the eye was given permission to see, no creature would be able to withstand the abundance and ubiquity of the demons and continue to live unaffected by them.” - Berakhot 6a, Babylonian Talmud

Likewise, there have been thousands of pages written about the existence of angels. Fairies, djinn, and bizarre apparitions litter the histories of human kind. If it turns out that this isn’t all just a pipe dream, and there are Conscious Agents that have higher levels of agency than we might expect of, say, a rock, we’re going to need to have a sit down and sort this out.

But this brings us back to the question that Hoffman, Gallimore, and Hermansson are interested in. Do radical alterations in our consciousness truly open us up to new operating systems (what Hoffman calls “headsets”) and agents that are usually inaccessible by virtue of their location? Further, can we establish relationships with these agents in a meaningful sense?

If we find ourselves suspecting that the answer might be “yes”, the immediate next question is then one of, “How can we confirm or falsify this thesis?”

What exactly are we looking at here? Can we even know?

Perhaps the most interesting idea in the paper is exactly this question of falsification.

It’s all well and good to posit the existence of these entities — accessible if we can engage different organizing principles — it’s another thing to construct a falsifiable experimental framework.

Bizarrely, this creates its own set of problems.

If these conscious agents do exist outside of our usual operating system/organizing principles, it seems that we’ll never be able to actually perceive other agents directly precisely because any way we might perceive them would itself be through one of these different operating systems. We’re not getting at “true” reality. We’re just getting at another mode of it.

As a result, any data we get will necessarily be inconclusive about what these entities might actually be in a base ontological sense.

This sounds wonky, but it’s not too terribly strange. Just as we don’t have access to the full knowledge of another person’s character by looking at them, we have traces of their character through their actions and our perception of their actions. Over the phone, over video, or in person may give us access to different amounts of information about the person, but no matter the modality we are still restricted from a kind of “full” knowledge. In this case phone, video, and in person are metaphors for different headsets/interface systems.

To use another example, we cannot see black holes with our eyes. But we can know that they’re there by measuring gravity waves. Such traces of entity contact might allow us to infer something about these otherwise inaccessible conscious agents, but those traces are not the thing itself. Only some aspect of its outward sign.

Foundationally, while our organizing experience might not be able to tell us directly about a things properties, they might at least be able to intimate that the thing exists.

This is actually something that proponents for analogical conceptions for God have been saying for centuries. Take the words of the Angelic Doctor, Thomas Aquinas:

"From effects not proportionate to the cause no perfect knowledge of that cause can be obtained. Yet from every effect the existence of the cause can be clearly demonstrated... though from them we cannot perfectly know God as He is in His essence." (Prima Pars, Question 2, Article 2)

At any rate, the paper itself goes on to propose that, if these entities are truly real, conscious agents — what that actually means is another question entirely — we might expect some of them to exhibit autonomy, responsiveness, and in some cases teaching behavior, distinguishing them from mere hallucination.

Perhaps most excitingly, the paper proposes that we should be able to construct hidden-variable experiments to provide evidence seemingly consistent with the autonomous entity hypothesis.

In one example, an entity would be shown information which is hidden from a subject under the influence of DMT. In one example, a screen might be placed in another room. The screen itself would be programmed to changes colors between blue and yellow.

The subject would then ask the entity what color is being displayed, ensuring it was impossible for either the subject or the researcher to know what state the screen is in at a given moment.

Afterwards, researchers check the accuracy of the report. Unlike questions of teaching behavior, which really ask researchers to trust that the experience felt a particular way, this kind of test is much more clear cut. Either the report matches the hidden information at a rate higher than chance, or it doesn’t.

This said, a negative result wouldn’t necessarily kill the Conscious Agent Theory. The authors could conceivably argue that these entities just aren’t epistemologically privileged in this particular way (Could it even know what was playing on the screen in the other room? How could it? Why should DMT entities be able to see through walls?), or whatever is conveyed might not actually reduce to well packaged enough information that the subject could accurately report back the findings — as an example, wild fractal lights might not boil down to something intelligible that the subject could then report.

But if researchers achieved positive results — at least better than chance — we’d blast past, “this is a neat theory” and directly into full blown parapsychology. Which is equal parts insane and exciting.

Don’t get me wrong, the authors here are very clear that they’re not arguing for the existence of these entities — and I want to make a point that I’m not either. Rather, the point of their work is, assuming that if Conscious Agent Theory is true, to venture a framework for how we might actually test if these entities have agency. Not only would that be profoundly odd, but it might upend just about everything we think we know about reality.

What do we actually do with this?

It’s possible that maybe the naturalists were right all along and we’re just dealing with hallucinations.

Conversely, it’s possible that Hoffman is right and that there does exist a whole ecosystem of conscious agents hanging out just outside of what we’ve evolved to perceive.

On another tack, it’s possible that the entities folks report in DMT sessions are some other class of thing that is only appearing to us as an entity because we don’t have the hardware to actually perceive what’s really going on so we shoehorn whatever it is into ‘entity’ because our brains can’t get a grip on what they actually are.

It’s also possible Plantinga is right instead, and all this stuff ultimately points back to God.

Lots of views are possible. And I don’t think any of us are qualified to come down one way or another. But I do know that this is one of the more exciting proposals I’ve read in a long time.

Frankly, I find any framework which upends both naturalist and theistic assumptions to be worth taking a look at, if only because it’s rare to find examples that aren’t quackery.

Now, whether or not Hoffman is right is another question entirely. But the implications are so profound that, barring the breakout of a global conflagration, we should be racing to put this proposal into action.

Do DMT entities exist as real, agentic beings? As it stands, the answer is unclear. But I, for one, would very much like to find out.

What Do I Make of all This?

I will admit I have a tendency to be taken by these kinds of ideas precisely because I have a built in bias against materialism. Frankly, it just irritates me as a framework. I don’t necessarily have reasons to believe it’s untrue, but I find the arguments that it is true to be fairly uncompelling. I suppose I occupy a kind of negative agnosticism about it. I have little interest in arguing that it’s false on its merits, but I have yet to be convinced that it is true. At least, none of the arguments for materialism I’ve come across seem to compel assent.

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I occasionally meet a certain kind of person who express such austere seriousness about their beliefs that they share the news of their insight through clenched teeth. Delivering the ontological claims of their faith in God or naturalism with such elevated blood pressure it’s remarkable that cartoon steam doesn’t erupt from their ears.

More often than not, these tend to be a type of person who is convinced that they have discovered the ultimate truth of the universe. Which makes sense. If you’re going to be uptight about something, ontological truth is a pretty reasonable thing to clench your tuchus over.

Now, whether they are themselves religious, or they hoist the flag of positive atheism, folks who think that you’re condemned to hell — or worse, that you’re a moron — because you don’t share their priors don’t tend to be very fun at parties.

Buddhist Ontologies?

Somewhat strangely, I find this particular type of dour zealotry more and more common among some of my Buddhist-adjacent acquaintances of late. This strikes me as rather bizarre as Buddhism — at least its early iterations — has a unique relationship to truth claims as regards ontological reality, often keeping silence and acknowledging the limits of our epistemological capacities. Now you might think this would insulate folks from making definitive proclamations, nevertheless, such proclamations do happen.

In fairness, when you read the early canon, you are exposed to the Buddha’s visions that came to him under the Bodhi tree, revelations about karma, about rebirth, and a host of other things we would consider metaphysical. But if you spend some time reading through the Pali canon — specifically the Sutta Pitaka — again and again you will run into certain situations where someone will put a question of metaphysics to the Buddha and he’ll either deflect to something about the eight-fold path, or otherwise just not answer, keeping what is sometimes called, “noble silence”.1

Granted, questions of whether or not the universe is eternal or if it had an origin feel really important. Questions about psychic powers — while perhaps less important than those of universal origins — are nevertheless interesting and conceivably worthy of discussion. Hell, I went through a whole Masters program in theology with the specific intention of getting to the bottom of some of this business precisely because it does feel so weighty.

Now, I like to think that I’ve relaxed around my own belief systems, especially as I complete my masters and see how some questions are perhaps missing the mark — having worked hard over the past few years to unclench my own buttocks — but even still, I can understand how it would be irritating to ask the most weighty questions we can think of to the guy who purportedly has all the answers, and instead of giving it to you straight, he tells you to bugger off and focus on your practice.

Of course, good ol’ Gautama is probably right about where our focus should be placed — on the spiritual work and not the metaphysical speculation in pursuit of truth — but you can probably see why our first instinct might be to ignore that and inquire anyway.

It’s almost a certainty that if I had just listened to my dharma teachers, or my Christian ones, or a host of other folks who have been around the block a few times more than I have, I would have saved myself some headache regarding my own epistemological hubris. But as I historically have not been very good at listening to people who are wiser than me, we’ll chalk up the past few years to an adventure in philosophy.

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Besides, it’s kind of fun to ponder the imponderable.

At any rate, to return to Buddhism, the Buddha basically supplies a view of certain questions as simply imponderable. These four acinteyya (literally: imponderables) are…

1. What are the powers and knowledge developed by a fully enlightened being? (What miracles and realizations can an awakened person have or do?)

2. What kind of powers are available to those who access deep meditative states?

3. How does karma work? Like, specifically beyond mere action and causality in our own lives?

4. What is the origin of the universe? (and adjacent to that, does the universe itself have a purpose?)

In the Acintita sutra, the Buddha literally says, “These are the four unconjecturables that are not to be conjectured about, that would bring madness & vexation...”2

I could talk about the “10 unanswerables” (another set of the kinds of questions the Buddhist tradition says you’re not liable to get satisfactory answers to) but you get the idea.

The basic claim here is that human reason simply isn’t equipped to provide answers to certain of these queries. As a result, anyone who wishes to really be free of suffering shouldn’t bother about them in the first place. Much more generative to the project of liberation is the practice of developing insight and compassion.

From this view, there are certain questions that, at least the early Buddhist tradition sets up as imponderable — read: both impossible and ill-advised to ponder. Call it a twofer.

It’s not that these questions aren’t important, or even worthy of answer. Rather, it’s simply that the traditions — at least certain iterations of them, anyway — make a claim that we just shouldn’t bother about them because they’re ultimately a distraction from what really matters. Besides, once you’re enlightened you’ll probably get the answers anyway.

Now, it’s an open question within the tradition as to whether or not even the enlightened Buddhas themselves know the answers to these questions — it’s at least implied in some texts that they do — but for your average bear, their recommendation is to lay off the metaphysics or you’ll lose your mind. Or, in my case, become mildly irritated at your inability to sus them out.

This kind of thinking isn’t reserved for just the Buddhist path. For the inquiring mind, you’ll find parallels to this kind of limitation on knowing — or at least the suggestion that your time and energy is probably better spent doing something else — in Christianity, Judaism, and a host of other faiths.

To use Christianity as an example, in Life of Moses the fourth century Desert Father Gregory Nyssa wrote:

“Every concept which comes from some comprehensible image by an approximate understanding and by guessing at the divine nature constitutes an idol of God and does not proclaim God.”3

Gregory’s claim, that our concepts will never mount to God, simply by virtue of the inherent limits of conceptual knowing, is what the kids call straight fire.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is something that you don’t hear too often in apologetics spaces — Buddhist, Christian, or otherwise. (In fairness, it’s not often that you run into Buddhist proselytizers, but it occasionally does happen, despite the tradition frowning on the practice in general.)

This all makes sense as far as apologetics go as part of the lack of this kind of epistemic humility in apologetics spaces is to do with what apologetics actually is.

Apologetics (noun) : systematic argumentative discourse in defense of a doctrine.

Given that part of the stock and trade of apologetics spaces is convincing someone of your position, a shrug and a smile when someone puts the screws to your worldview is not exactly a recipe for slam dunk conversion.

Cracking the Door to Dialogue

But if you are ok without having answers to some questions — and if you’re ok with refraining from proselytizing — indeed if the acknowledgement of the limits of your own reason is built into your system, suddenly some doors open to you that may have otherwise been closed. How do Christians think about the origins of the universe? How do Buddhists understand what happens to enlightened beings after death?

“I sure as hell don’t know — some of the greatest thinkers of my own tradition says that there are some questions I can’t know, and there are real open questions of epistemology (Agrippa’s trilemma, foundationalism, etc.) — but I wonder what these other dudes/dudettes think about the situation.” - Someone with epistemic humility, probably.

Suddenly, asking those questions earnestly isn’t a project in demolishing someone else’s worldview, or even reifying your own. Any answers you get are just… interesting.

It’s this kind of curiosity that slowly cracks the door to mutual understanding. Instead of coming into a discussion with tightly held views around questions that the traditions themselves see as either unanswerable, or unwise to even inquire about, not only are you leaning into humility — and Gods know we could do well with a smidge more of that— but you’re flexible enough in your own positions to legitimately engage and change when new information comes to light.

From a position of flexibility, you’re not so invested in your own worldview, because you already know that some of it is necessarily built on unprovable assertions. A theology of vibes, if you will. It is both fun to frame our own theologies in this way, but also ultimately more useful than coming into things clinging so tightly to our own priors.

Of course, traditions which possess soteriological considerations — and profess to have serious things to say about doctrines of salvation — understandably don’t have a ton of room for epistemic humility. The stakes are perceived as impossibly high, and if you’re convinced that the only way to save someone’s eternal soul is to get them on board with your project, I would suspect you’d be less likely to be flexible in your approach to dialogue.

Epistemic Humility as a Spiritual Path

But ok, so humility is probably good because there’s some stuff that’s outside of our reach. Fair enough, yeah? But does this cost something? Sure does. And that price is surety. Or at least our grip on it. Take this quote from the religious philosopher William Lane Craig:

"Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter, not vice versa." - William Lane Craig

The above quote by William Lane Craig represents a fundamentally different epistemology than what the average person (read: you and I) might be familiar with. For Craig, there exist certain forms of religious experience that themselves constitute a properly basic warrant for certainty. But as someone who has dropped enough acid to have seen all kinds of different Gods and spiritual beings in my living room, sometimes so wildly out of synch with everything I know about religion and spirituality, I find Craig’s position deeply troubling. I simply don’t trust phenomenological experience to be indicative of mystical realities in the same way that Craig does. That said, I understand why he holds the position he does. The faith acts as a bulwark against nihilism and meaninglessness. And he might be right. I’m not willing to go in for his worldview, but I’m not ready to reject it either. Call it a tendency for agnosticism.

In that, I admit that I am something of a heretic. I have no creed or code or religious affiliation that I would hold to at all costs — and certainly not one built on phenomenological assertions and frameworks of basic belief (something another theologian, Alvin Plantinga advocated for in order to argue for the felt experience of God as evidence of a kind for ontological realities). Frankly, I think that a worldview which treats further evidence as — in the words of the late Christopher Hitchens — an “occasional convenience”, to be dismissed when it no longer congeals with your priors, is deeply impoverished.

That said, take an alternative view, the Dalai Lama’s position on the matter,

“If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”

While the Dalai Lama obviously thinks Buddhism is true, insofar as true is understood as a pragmatic and functional sense rather than perhaps an ontological one that Christians might employ, he is open to the possibility of change in the face of conclusive evidence. In fact, this has already happened a few times. If you’re curious, I recommend googling the Mt. Meru flat earth cosmology pitched in Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakoshabhashya.

The belief that the universe is centered on an enormous square mountain, Mt. Meru. This mountain was itself surrounded by concentric rings of oceans and mountains of iron and gold. Our world, the human realm, was thought to be situated on a flat, disc-shaped southern continent called Jambudvipa.

While this is sick as hell, it’s also pretty conclusively wrong.

Many Buddhists held to Mt. Meru as a literal description of reality well into the last millennium. This led to an amusing attempt by Christian missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries to try and discredit Buddhism by arguing that, if the Buddha was wrong about Mt. Meru, how could we trust the rest of his teachings? The rich irony here being that many of those same missionaries believed that the sun orbited the earth and that the universe was constructed in literally seven days.

But I digress. I’m not trying to say the Christians are schmucks and the Buddhists are right. There’s loads of examples of Christians updating their worldview based on new evidence. I’m just pointing out that whatever you think of the Dalai Lama, or Buddhism, or Christianity — or their attendant cosmologies — His Holiness’ stance on the matter of accepting new evidence is undeniably humble. And it offers us a mirror for our own belief systems. How flexible are we willing to be with what we believe? What counts as evidence? And perhaps most importantly, what evidence — if any — might cause us to update our belief structures?

Pluralism is Cool and Good

With so much nativism and nationalism taking root of late, perhaps now more than ever a call to sincerely engage with other philosophies would be generative to our shared human project. If a worldview is so fragile that exposure to ideas which are alien to it is enough to shake the foundations of that worldview, it might be a good idea to figure out what we could bear to dispense with in pursuit of both the common good and a better future for ourselves and those around us.

As I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time with those who hold wildly different positions on these points than I do, I can report that I personally have grown tremendously as a person as a direct consequence of being exposed to different philosophical positions. Perhaps I’m being naïve, but it seems fairly obvious to me that most all of us would be enriched by sustained dialogue with those whom we disagree, or with whom we might just not fully understand.

But the only way we as a society can advance a project of pluralism and dialogue is by earnestly looking at our own belief structures, and engaging in our own project of epistemic humility.

Everyone I’ve mentioned in this essay has been wrong about something. Statistically speaking, it’s likely that you have as well. But if we have the courage to admit what it is we don’t know — perhaps even the courage to admit that there are potentially some things we can’t know — I suspect we might have a more enjoyable time here. Or at the very least, a marginal decrease in butt clenching.

Almost every week I find myself in a conversation with someone new about their religious beliefs and attachments. The depth of these conversations is often startling, and so I found myself wondering why I — some schmuck living in Boulder — am so consistently playing the role of an interfaith priest for non-traditional spiritual seekers.

“Through the ministry of presence, you can bring comfort to the hurting—without ever being ordained or certified. You do not have to be anything but available…” -Dr. Steven Davey

One of the weirder aspects of my experience is how regularly I become a sort of proxy minister for folks who have been burned by their religion of origin but who otherwise still have some kind of yearning for the divine.

Call it an accidental vocation.

In some ways this is to do with the fact that I am a regular at a kava bar, which draws a less than traditional crowd. But I think there’s something else going on here.

Whether I’m talking with lapsed Catholics, western Buddhists, folks who identify as Spiritual but Not Religious, or straight up witches and occultists, I regularly find myself drafted as a temporary priest of the liminal. Folks pepper me with questions about the existence of God, what I think of magick, what meaning can be found in life, and a whole host of other questions in a bid to get to grips with their own commitments.

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The Decline of Religious Authority

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by this. My place in the religious landscape is a bit unique in that I don’t have any faith commitments in particular, but I’ve also been deeply versed in comparative religion by virtue of my formal education. In a lot of ways, its exactly that bizarre formation which makes me a candidate to help folks sort their way through these big questions.

Especially given the fact that, when I look around my communities, I don’t see a ton of folks who are willing — or able — to bridge multiple faith traditions. Even fewer who are equipped to help others explore their own traditions without trying to slot them into this or that view of the “correct” faith.

I’m not trying to say that I’m some holier than thou envoy of the divine. I’m really nothing special. I’m just a super nerd with an interfaith focus because I find faith and practice particularly interesting. And I know that not everyone has the same privilege to go to school for this stuff. Studying theology isn’t exactly a golden ticket to a stable career.

But as it stands now, there exists such a serious dearth of accessible, flexible religious dialogue in the popular culture — despite the number of people yearning for understanding. Relative to this immense thirst for real religious and spiritual exploration, it just seems strange that there aren’t more people who are leaning into the weirdness. Particularly because there is a vacuum in the culture that seems to need filling.

Now you might say,

“Nick. Of course there aren’t a bunch of people like you. You’re an uber weirdo with hyper-niche interests, and most people aren’t going to spend a decade of their lives studying interfaith theology.”

And you would be right (even if saying it like that would be a little mean.) But forget about we weirdos into interfaith stuff.

Even the number of folks who could be considered religious authorities in traditional institutions are on the decline.

Since the 1970’s, the number of Catholic priests in the United States has nearly been cut in half, falling from about 59,000 to just over 34,000.

Evangelical denominations might look healthier, but as the US population has grown by almost 150 million people since the 1970’s, the absolute number of evangelical pastors hasn’t increased to reflect the population trends.

And that’s just some of the Christianities. When you start digging, it becomes clear that the trends are similar for other faiths. Fewer than half of mosques in the US have a full time imam. Of the five to six million religious Jews, there are only about 4,500 rabbis.

All told, there are actually fewer traditional religious leaders and authorities in the U.S. than there have ever been. As it stands now, there just aren’t enough religious scholars to meet the needs of the traditionally religious populace.

The problem is significantly weirder for those who consider themselves Spiritual but Not Religious. And that’s a sizable chunk of the population. Recent PEW data tells us that almost a quarter of Americans identify as SBNR (spiritual but not religious). That’s just shy of sixty million Americans.

These are people who often believe in a higher power and practice things like meditation or prayer, but who don’t naturally find themselves seeking out traditional institutions.

Even if there were more priests, rabbis, and imams, it’s unlikely these SBNR folks would have their needs met by those functionaries. Which is bizarre. Because there are tens of millions of American’s who believe in God, or have serious interest in religion and spirituality, but who simply don’t have access to trusted authorities who could help them really explore that part of themselves.

An Alternative Ministry

But let’s forget about religious education for a second. The internet exists. If folks want to learn about this or that faith, or some interesting spiritual practice, google is a thing. And over the past decade or so, there has been an explosion of so-called spiritual influencers across social media. But if I’ve learned anything from my conversations, it’s that folks are looking for something deeper than just information alone. It’s as if the information is the gateway to something deeper.

As someone who has studied comparative theology for the better part of my adult life, I’m not particularly surprised that folks are curious to pick my brain on subjects that they might not otherwise have an opportunity to explore. It’s a cool subject, and it’s kind of an unusual thing to meet someone with a graduate degree in theology1, so I often get questions that you might expect. (Do you believe in God? What do you think about the Trinity? Is Buddhism a philosophy or a religion? What does ‘occult’ mean? etc, etc.) Pretty classic stuff.

What does surprise me — or used to, anyway — is how often these conversations turn confessional. Over and over I find myself standing alongside someone as they grapple with the heaviest parts of life. With deaths of friends or family. With anxiety about new children. With grief over relationships or unforeseen change.

Which is wild, because, like… I’m just some fucking guy.

I’m not a priest. I’m not a minister. (Well, I am. But only because I thought it would be amusing to get ordained online.) I’m just some random schmuck who has spent a lot of time reading dusty old books and meditating. Not exactly the pinnacle of holiness over here.

But maybe that’s the point. So much of formal religious practice is a stuffy affair. Where churches are breathless enterprises and folks nod off during boring services that don’t speak to the experience of the modern human being. Not to mention the distaste folks have for some of the dogmatic conventions that are sometimes espoused in traditionally religious spaces.

It’s no wonder so many modern seekers avoid traditional venues almost on principle.

But then when someone like me come along — someone who maybe drinks too much kratom, and smokes more than I should, but who also studies theology — suddenly the religious becomes approachable for folks who would otherwise never step foot in a church, temple, or chapel.

To give you some examples, in the past month I’ve had conversations with strippers, former drug addicts, and working class folks of all stripes about topics as diverse as Trinitarian theology, arguments for (and against) the existence of God, the history of Buddhism, and even which church one should seek out if they value community but can’t stomach certain dogmas present in this or that faith.

Not one of these folks had stepped foot in a church in the last year. Most hadn’t attended a religious service since their childhoods, if they ever had. But almost without exception, every person I talked to expressed a deep desire — even a yearning — for a real connection to something larger then themselves. It’s as if we are crying out for meaning in a world that has been so thoroughly disenchanted it seems almost insane to vocalize belief in the sacred. For what ever reason, the opportunities to explore the nature of the sacred in community — at least in the traditional religious framing — are vanishing by the day.

We’re getting to a point where the spiritual health of our neighbors, friends, and family is basically unaided. Where millions of Americans are desperate for real connection and unable to find it either because the religious culture of the U.S. has collapsed, or there were never systems built to serve them in the first place.

And so we’re left to wonder, what comes next?

The Dawning of an Interspiritual Church

A few years back, one of my teachers, a Pir in the Inayati-Maimuni Sufi lineage — Pir being the Persian word for a kind of spiritual elder — turned me onto the idea of interspirituality.

Coined by brother Wayne Teasdale, (as far as I can tell, first published in his book The Mystic Heart) the term originated as a way to outline a kind of unitive worldview — one aimed at bridging multiple traditions without erasing what makes them unique.

“Spirituality, in its interspiritual manifestation, is a vision of the spiritual life nourished by other schools of spirituality, mysticism, and contemplation, integrated with a person’s own tradition, if indeed the person is fortunate enough to have one. Interspirituality in this sense represents a spaciousness of being in the conduct of spiritual life, in the human search called the spiritual journey, that culminates in an understanding of spirituality that is sustained from its universal stream of mystical consciousness.” - Brother Wayne Teasdale

What’s so interesting about this idea is that it addresses a human experience that exists beyond the symbols of the traditions to which many of us belong. And, at least in the notion of a supra-conceptual experience, you find purchase there across different traditions.

Many Christian mystics assert that God is beyond concepts. Certain Madhyamaka Buddhists assert that concepts are only conventionally useful and cannot lead to ultimate reality. Muslims believe that God is beyond human comprehension. The medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides literally invented apophatic theology, claiming that we cannot comprehend what God is, only what God is not.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

So if we’re all groping about stupidly in the dark when it comes to ultimate reality, the interspiritual impulse is to say, “Hell with it. Everyone’s going to walk as far as they can go, and we’re going to walk with them as best we can. We’re all on the same journey toward a non-conceptual reality and if I can help my brother or sister deepen their journey, that’s what I’m going to do.”

Which is rad.

Don’t get me wrong. There are real issues here too. It’s easy to see how this would slide into a kind of philosophical relativism where we’re all just holding hands despite real disagreements. The great traditions of our time aren’t just using different words for funsies.

These traditions make significantly different claims about the nature of reality, salvation, and God. Claims that carry real weight and need to be understood on their own terms. Its all too easy for certain versions of interspirituality to flatten those differences into a vague spirituality of good vibes. In doing so, it runs the risk of a kind of spiritual consumerism. Which is precisely what interspiritual groups are so often accused of.

But serious practitioners know Sufi dhikr is not the same thing as a Hindu mantra just because both involve repetition. Folks who have sat with Buddhists and prayed with Christians know that a Zen koan is not interchangeable with the Jesus Prayer. Catholic magicians understand that ritual magic doesn’t work as a stand in for holy Communion.

That said, it’s recognizing these differences which allows a genuine dialogue to unfold. And as best I can tell, the only way to recognize the differences is to actually practice these traditions. It’s not enough to only study them from a birds eye view.

As I’ve come to understand it, the value of interspirituality is in taking traditions seriously enough to earnestly try to grasp them — to really get to grips with what they’re saying — before trying to spin up a dialogue between them.

Which is pretty much exactly what I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to do.

Allies of Faith

I’ve joked with some of my Catholic friends that while I am not a Catholic, I am an ally to the Christian project. (Well, some of it anyway.) By this, I mean that I get a sense of meaning by walking alongside them — I get juice out of being witness to the deepening of their faith. I literally get high as I watch others score wins as they struggle with the big questions. And I know I’m not alone in this.

I’m coming to think more and more that the next big push in the tapestry of American spiritual life, and in particular for the Spiritual but not Religious, is going to be made up of folks who aren’t one religion or another but who have reverence for the traditions which do exist. Call it a priesthood of the liminal, where the clergy don’t inhabit one role, but serve to aid others walk a path which they are already on.

These are people willing to accompany a Christian deeper into Christianity, a Buddhist deeper into Buddhism, or an atheist deeper into the questions of meaning, without feeling compelled to convert them into a specific worldview or faith.

Whatever you make of all this, it seems quite clear that the institutions of old are struggling to provide meaning to a growing number of Americans who nevertheless are reaching for the divine.

In this, I am reminded of the words from William Butler Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

As we enter an unprecedented new era, it seems a new order is necessary, perhaps an Ordo Liminalis, perhaps something else. It’s far from certain that this order will be an interspiritual by nature, or that it will arise at all, but the need is there. At this point, it seems we’re just waiting for folks to step into the breach.

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I was hanging out behind a tea house I frequent the other day when I got into a conversation with a guy from the east coast about empathy and compassion.

After some chit chat, he straight up asked me what I thought the difference was between the two. I mulled it over for a minute and said something about how empathy was primarily an internal experience — sharing in the emotions of another person — while compassion was primarily manifested as an action.

If empathy is sharing the panic of a drowning person, compassion might manifest as a sincere desire to throw the drowning person a life preserver.

(My delivery was much more wise and sagely than that, but you get the idea.)

Anyway, the guy I was talking to looked at me for a second, kind of scoffed, and said something along the following lines (I’m paraphrasing here, but it’s as close as I can remember).

“I always thought empathy was a better bet than compassion. If compassion is inherently action, you’re just always getting you into trouble with people that don’t want help or sticking yourself in somewhere you don’t belong. You know the story about the frog and the fish?”

I did not.

“Well there’s this frog, see. And he sees this fish swimming. And he says, ‘oh, shit. The fish is drowning. Better help him out.’ so he yoinks the fish out of the water, and the fish suffocates on land.”

And I was like, yeah bro. That’s not compassion though. That’s some weird ego thing where the frog convinced itself that it had all the right answers. If the frog had asked the fish if he was alright, the whole situation would have changed.

The dude nodded at my sagely wisdom and took a drag off his smoke before following up.

“Well what about things where you just help as much as you can but you keep getting burned for it? If people keep asking for help but can’t really accept it.”

At this point, I was almost certain we were talking about an ex, but I was game.

One of the teachings my early spiritual teachers hit me with was that, when Buddhists vow to show compassion to all sentient beings, that includes themselves. You count too! Which seems like it should be obvious, but you’d be surprised how that can shock people.

So I reached back to the story about the frog and the scorpion.1

“You know the frog/scorpion story?”

“Yeah.”

“Well the frog wants to help the scorpion get across the river. But he knows he’s probably gonna get stung and they’re both gonna drown, yeah? So even if the scorpion is asking for some kind of help, the most compassionate thing for the frog to do, in this situation, has to involve him and the scorpion. If you’re being compassionate to the scorpion, you don’t want him to drown. And if you’re being compassionate to yourself, you don’t want to drown either. So if you’re the frog, the most compassionate thing to do here, for both you and the scorpion, is actually to just walk away. Sure, the scorpion is stuck on the river bank, but better stuck there than dead at the bottom of the river.”

When I finished, this guy took like a comically long drag on his cig and looked up at the sky. It was drizzling now, so it had the effect of making him look like he was shedding some manly tears.

“Thank you. I needed that bro. I knew there was a reason I came over to talk to you.”

And I was like, hell yeah bro.

Standing in the rain while this dude smoked his hand rolled cigarette, we both realized that he had been getting into that river over and over and over again. He felt deeply for the people around him, but was sacrificing himself in a hundred different ways, and that conversation behind a tea house gave him permission to stay out of the water.

Because he hadn’t been acting with compassion. His empathy had overwhelmed him, and had led to a kind of self-sacrifice that wasn’t noble, or even really helpful for others in his life.

The Buddhist teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche2, termed this kind of self-abandonment “idiot compassion.”

Basically, idiot compassion enables another person’s aggression or destructive behavior, while simultaneously allowing our own self-destructive patterns to run riot. All so we can avoid rocking the boat, preserving our own internal image of being “good” or “nice”.

So when the scorpion pinky promises not to sting us, even though we’ve seen it happen a dozen times, we say, “Sure buddy. I am good and nice, so because good and nice people do good and nice things, I will do this thing because it is both good and nice.”

Of course, giving the scorpion an opportunity to sting us in the river, ultimately leading to both of us drowning, is neither good nor nice.

It is, in fact, dumb and bad.

And you probably don’t want to be dumb and bad, so you probably shouldn’t try to be good or nice.

It might be interesting to ask what it is to serve the actual situation, rather than your self image? Forget good and nice. What would it be to be skillful and compassionate instead?

The other week I had the opportunity to sit in on a lecture about the five aggregates as they’re presented in the Buddhist tradition.

For those of you who don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, the five aggregates are an ancient Buddhist model of the person wherein our experience of being can basically be broken down into five ‘clumps’ of experience. The ‘clumps’ are…

1. Form (all your basic sense organs and objects of those organs, eyes for sight, nose for smell, etc.),

2. Sensation (The vibe you get from interacting with stuff. “This is pleasant.” “This sucks.” “This is neutral.”),

3. Perception (The mind’s ability to recognize and label stuff, “red.” “bird”, etc.),

4. Mental formations (habits, impulses, intentions, all your mind stuff),

5. and Consciousness (your awareness of all of this as it goes down.)

Basically this whole model is designed to get you to look at the process of experience. To see these in action, lets look at the following as an example.

You see something (form). It feels good/bad/neutral (feeling). You recognize it as “An orange” (perception). Reactions and associations arise in the mind, “I want to eat it,” “this reminds me of Substack” (mental formations). And your awareness of each of these experiences as they unfold, and what ties them all together, is consciousness.

When the five aggregates are all working together, they create the illusion of a permanent "self" that is experiencing stuff, but the Buddhists contend that these processes are totally separate things, all weirdly working together to give rise to the idea of an individual self with a seamless experience.

From that view, these aggregates are constantly changing, and are fundamentally impermanent. The orange you’re looking at will eventually be out of eyesight. Dig?

Nevertheless, because we are ignorant and blind to the true nature of things as transient, we cling to them as though they are permanent, hoping that they’ll be concrete fixtures in our experience.

I mean, the orange is a dumb example. But consider something like love, or relationships, or health. Same diff. We treat these like they’re permanent things. And duh. We want them to last. These are good things!

But more often than not, precisely because we mistake impermanent things as permanent, we wind up suffering stupidly as a result.

From that lens, the only game in town is working to realize that none of these are permanently you. You have no static state you can just exist in forever. There’s no you to exist in a static state anyway! The aggregates are just experiences, coming up and fading away. And they themselves are empty. No one behind them. Even awareness, even the witness, is itself part of the aggregate set-up. No more exempt from the rules than the other functions.

The idea here is that ultimately, once we see that, we recognize that the aggregates are empty of intrinsic nature we are led directly to the realization of the mind’s nature as empty and unconditioned. Which liberates us from both clinging to things (because we recognize that they’re obviously impermanent so clinging is a fools game) and suffering by virtue of gripping to the objects of our senses (and even ourselves) so tightly.

Cut flowers die. But even with that knowledge we still appreciate them as beautiful.

From the Buddhist view, we are all cut flowers. And getting hip to that, really sitting with it and accepting what’s going on, that’s the path. In doing so, we’re released from our ignorance, greed, and hatred. Functionally, we’re released from our cravings and our desires.

Both in early Buddhism, where there's no self to own them, and in later traditions, where it’s understood that even the aggregates themselves are empty of inherent existence.

In either case, what we’re talking about here is more or less what the Buddhists call enlightenment.

The Smiley Face Plastered Across Cosmic Horrors

I find it amusing that so much of western, mindfulness style Buddhism is, “Sit down and mindfulness will make you happy! Haha yay! :D” when the historical tradition is really saying something closer to, “Everything you love is structurally incapable of remaining stable. Fucking deal with it right now or you’ll suffer stupidly until you die. And maybe even after that.”

That might sound terrifying, but the Buddhist tradition makes a promise that the acceptance of impermanence transforms suffering. It promises you that the sense of nihilism that seems apparent from the impermanence of all things is, itself, empty.

Most of human misery stems from our insatiable need to demand permanence from impermanent things. Sensations, experiences, people, etc. We want them to stay frozen in time, like a beautiful rose encased in glass. But this is the philosophical equivalent of trying to nail water to a wall.

From the Buddhist position, the nature of reality is, itself, change.

I get why loads of modern practitioners hear “everything is empty” and freak. Tons of folks who get into Buddhism without groking this either bail to something like Advaita Vedanta or some other tradition that promises some kind of permanence. Which, like. Fair enough. The Buddhists might be wrong here. I think basically it comes down to a hinge point about a priori assumptions about what experience is, so to each their own.

The other common experience is to try and vault directly over the painful, human part of this realization into the bliss of emptiness and equanimity. Emptiness itself is a frightening thing to face.

It’s understandable why folks either reach for a metaphysics of permanent consciousness, or else reach for emptiness ASAP, without first reckoning with the loss that it entails. We want that sweet, transcendental bliss without realizing that it means letting go. Not that we were actually holding on in any meaningful way anyway.

Now, I’m not a Buddhist per se (I’ve got some commitment issues that are probably better reserved for a longer post) but I think they’re pretty much right about this part.

You better believe I’ve cried over it more than a few times. And I don’t mean like, I once shed a single manly tear. I’m talking bawled like an inconsolable child. This shit is tough. It’s one of the most harrowing, existentially demanding things you can put yourself up against.

A Confrontation with Death

Much of the modern spiritual marketplace pitches meditation as a sort of cure all for modern ailments. Be more productive, get more regulated, touch more grass. You’ve heard the pitch.

This stripped down view of these traditions, appropriated for productivity never really deals with what it was these traditions were designed to do.

There’s a reason contemplative traditions are in the habit of producing both saints and raving lunatics in the midst of nervous breakdowns. Any kind of sustained confrontation with impermanence absolutely FUCKS the standard ego structure. In a lot of these traditions, you’re basically speed-running self-dissolution on purpose.

In traditions with good containers, the practitioner is held through this transformation. It’s rough, but they’ve got support to get through it.

Without a container though, without lineage, and cosmology, and ritual, and community, folks are in danger of getting themselves in way over their head. Especially if they try to leapfrog over their actual lives in a bid for some kind of transcendence. The folks in the biz call this spiritual bypassing — a kind of blocking out real issues in favor of some kind of rarefied air.

I’ve seen this happen over and over to folks who dive into these things without a solid foundation. They ignore relationships, systemic issues, and all kinds of gnarly shit while leaning into “good vibes only.” Of course, this just makes them come off as out of touch and serves to help precisely no one. The person doing the bypassing isn’t integrated. The people around them dismiss them as fundamentally unserious, and nothing really changes.

Perhaps worse than this, when the techniques of meditation are marketed as a “self-help program” they can wind up catapulting already vulnerable people face first into a wall of existential horror they have almost zero context for and are often wildly unequipped to deal with.

Meditation is not an inherently benign practice. It is, foundationally, a direct confrontation with impermanence at a root level. For that matter, despite the crowing about ego-death from certain corners, ego-death is not inherently therapeutic. If you’re not prepped to let go into emptiness, it can be fucking terrifying. It can feel like dying. Because, in a way, it is.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Love In the Midst of Change

The fragility of our condition and the constant shifting sands under our feet can be seen by a great many as a call to nihilism. If nothing is fixed, nothing really matters. Thankfully, collapse into a kind of existential despair isn’t a requirement of the spiritual journey. In fact, the call from serious spiritual seekers is to pretty much do the exact opposite. We’re not called to bail on life, we’re called to inhabit it as deeply as we possibly can.

If the Buddhist path teaches us anything, it’s that the impermanence that we’re forced up against is both a horror and an incredible call to action. If all things are empty of intrinsic existence, every little act we take matters tremendously. Just because there’s no stable eternal center doesn’t mean that beings don’t experience themselves as real. And because of that alone, there is incalculable suffering in the world.

The Buddhist then, is called to act as a kind of physician. A sort of hospice chaplain for every sentient being that they encounter.

And that includes themselves.

But if you’re on your deathbed and you haven’t dealt with all of your shit, the regret is going to eat you alive. This, I gather, is an extremely common occurrence.

In many ways, nihilism is actually the easy way out. It doesn’t take a ton of effort to throw up our hands and get stoned if nothing we do has ultimate consequences. But if you’re laying in palliative care, thinking about all the harm you’ve caused, and all the harm you’ve let happen because you didn’t intervene, it’s much harder to fool yourself into peace than it would be to honestly say that you did what you could when you could.

Sure, maybe the ultimate consequences aren’t enshrined in some eternal reality. But the consequences matter just as much even if they’re only temporary. If only because they matter to the people who experience them. With that said, the abdication of responsibility in the face of emptiness is almost farcical.

Imagine a wildly implausible scenario where you're chained in a burning building with 400 babies. You're not making it out. But there's a window.

For a little bit of effort, you can start to throw those babies out of it and they’ll land safely on a bouncy house below. Do you spend your remaining time meditating on the intrinsic emptiness of reality? Or do you start slinging those babies?

Our responsibilities are not made less by the transient nature of reality, and while getting to grips with emptiness can ease our suffering, and even potentially alleviate the suffering of others, that’s only one tool in the toolkit.

If we really deal with emptiness and impermanence as a conceptual framework, our reason for doing things might change, but that babies need shoveling does not.

Compassionate Action

Perhaps the biggest argument for compassion joined with spiritual practice is the fact that we, and our fellow beings, are all stuck in a predicament where we are faced with our own impermanence. And everyone is just as freaked out as everyone else as we march through life towards our very own pine wood box. The whole argument for kindness, for compassion, and for care in the world is that even though this suffering is temporary, it still matters.

If we really want to ease the pain of self and other, the real question is this: How can we cultivate ourselves so that we tend to our own suffering while also extending that medicine to others?

Time to start shoveling those babies.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve likely heard about some of Pope Leo XIV’s posts on social media.

I’ve been watching with some level of fascination as the pope will reiterate the most milquetoast, stock-standard Catholic dogma there is, and floods of ostensibly Catholic commenters will come out of the woodwork accusing him of politicizing the church and polluting the gospel with woke liberal nonsense.

Just the other week, in a continuation of the message he’s been promoting since the beginning of his papacy, his team put up a video on Instagram where the holy father had the audacity to proclaim that all human beings possess inherent dignity independent of their sin.

Despite the protestations of select internet personalities, this is something that has been consistently affirmed across papacies (at least five) and regularly printed in papal encyclicals and Congregational Doctrine of the Faith documents. Documents like…

1. Dignitas Infinita (2024)

2. Fratelli Tutti (2020)

3. Evangelium Vitae (1995 )

4. Dignitatis Humanae (1965)

5. Pacem in Terris (1963)

6. Rerum Novarum (1891)

There are probably a bunch more but I am too lazy to look them up right now.

To say that the pope’s view is an uncontroversial one among serious Catholic theologians seriously understates how foundational this claim of inviolable dignity is.

This isn’t to even mention the concept of Imago Dei — that human beings were created in the image and likeness of God. Or capax Dei — that humans were created with a capacity for knowing and participating in God.

Now, you might not take these concepts seriously or attribute validity to them. Many do not. But if you do accept these propositions, you must also accept the fact that no matter how awful our transgressions, the human person is never stripped of the image of God. Even if our nature is wounded by sin, that image is not destroyed, and so repentance always remains available. No matter our blemishes, we still possess inviolable dignity by virtue of our maker and our relationship to Him.

Gregory of Nyssa was writing about this in the fourth century. Aquinas hammered this home over and over in the Summa Theologiae. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explicitly lays this out in the first article.

So it’s a little weird that a rather loud sub-section of self-proclaimed American Catholics regularly melt down in the comment section of Instagram over basic Catholic social teaching — a position that the church has held and taught for literally centuries.

Look, I’m not a Catholic, but I am someone who has spent the last few years of my life working through a Masters in Theology, so believe me when I tell you this is profoundly strange. The idea that the pope has somehow gone woke for just reiterating the most basic building blocks of Catholic social teaching is really worth examining.

Identity Displacement

That people wag their fingers at the pope for pitching classic Catholic doctrine isn’t anything new. The political left has been doing this for basically forever. But the left has always been associated with dissent from authority. And whatever you think of the left, that’s like, kind of their whole thing.

Conversely, the people currently waggling their digits are folks who have historically, openly, and loudly declared themselves as stalwart defenders of the faith. A bulwark against those whiney schismatic liberals who seek to pick and choose which doctrines suit their fancy.

But now, among those would-be defenders of God and Christendom, it would seem that a political identity has supplanted their religious identity as the primary mode in which they engage with the world.

In effect, these are folks who have now functionally converted to a different religion — albeit one which still leans on Catholic branding. This is the exact same thing conservative folks complained about left leaning Catholics doing for the entirety of the last century.

This usurpation of the conservative Catholic tradition by political identity is perhaps best evidenced by the fact that, when the head of the church says something that’s out of synch with conservative political leanings, the first instinct is not to re-examine their own belief systems — the first instinct is to just accuse the papacy of wokeness.

Again, the left does this all the time in their own way. But now the right’s doing it too.

To be sure, the politicization of religion is nothing new. Heads of state have clashed over and over again with religious authorities. Frankly, the Church and heads of state are often working toward opposite ends. Where one leader’s nationalistic push might be popular within the borders of the state, Catholic social teaching abhors nationalism that overrides human dignity. Where one Pontiff might push for religious law, secular leaders put up walls of separation. It has always been thus.

But now, in a way we haven’t seen before — at least not in my lifetime — we are watching something of a schism happen among conservative adherents of Catholicism.

What is most interesting about this is that many of these folks who have undergone a kind of conversion away from Catholicism — or at the very least, a kind of usurpation — don’t seem to be aware of what has happened.

While their political identity has straight up replaced their religious framing as the primary lens through which they view and understand the world, all of the trappings of Catholicism — the rosary, the language, the identity — remain in play. The actual content of the faith, however — and in this case specifically long standing Catholic social teaching — has been gutted and the corpse stuffed with something else.

All this has led to a situation where folks on the internet are accusing the pope of promulgating a progressive liberal woke agenda because he is affirming Church doctrine that’s been around since the fourth century. A doctrine which runs counter to their new identity structure.

Information Overload

I suspect that part of the whole #wokepope business is to do with the fact that our channels of information have changed. Where, in the past, worshipers had to rely on parishes, and encyclicals, and a host of other Church sponsored communications, the media ecosystem of the modern age has replaced these information channels and has had a tremendous effect on spiritual formation.

Where Catholics might have exposure to a homily once a week at Sunday mass, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok have supplanted that as the primary channel where adherents receive both their theological information, and maybe their information in general.

This has led to a situation where personal opinion regularly outranks papal authority. Which, in fairness, is about as American as it gets.

In this situation, church authority is either watered down or ignored, with the goal of making Catholicism more palatable to Americans.

Somewhat ironically, the last Pope Leo — Leo XIII — condemned this subordination of Church teaching to American values as a heresy. The Church even had a spiffy name for it: “Americanism.”

Despite this condemnation, personal insight is often elevated above Church teaching — very much an impulse of some Protestant denominations — and as a result we’re in a very odd time in Church history, where trad-caths are building their own theology piece by piece, often outside direct Church authority. It is exactly this mechanism of hyper-curated information that has produced the undercover conversion here, and a bizarre kind of digital neo-reformation of the American Catholic Church.

A Restoration of the Faith?

As the political identity of Christian Nationalism is consistently overriding the traditions of Catholicism, we’re starting to see a kind of authoritarian nationalism, adorned in the trappings of the church but which is nevertheless something that stands opposed to many of the Church’s tenets.

From a Catholic perspective, this borders on heresy.

Obviously, the tension here between political loyalty and loyalty to Church doctrine isn’t something that is just going to go away. That said, some seem to think that Catholics are presented with two distinct choices.

The first choice would be to just bail on the whole thing. If folks have truly found that Catholicism is outdated, progressive hogwash, we’ll see them flip on the tradition and embrace the ethno-nationalism many have already tacitly chosen.

The second choice is somewhat rosier for the faith. If the great bulk of American Catholics really are true believers in the one and Holy Apostolic Church, it would seem that safeguarding their faith requires rejecting the heresy of Americanism.

Of course, the reality of the situation is that neither one of these choices is really available to the folks who have already ceded ground. The whole media ecology that produced the kind of conversion narrative is all pervasive and almost invisible. If your information channels are restricted enough that you hear the Pope reiterate a fourth-century doctrine and recoil and instantly accuse him of political liberalism, it’s quite possible you just don’t have the vantage to see what has happened to your theological foundations. So you don’t bail on the trappings of the tradition, but you just start to twist the theology to other ends.

Even more bizarre is the fact that this story seems to mostly be about people who are entirely sincere. It seems likely that these folks might truly be mortified to realize that they’ve abandoned their church’s longstanding teachings in favor of a gospel of politics, but because of the information channels available, many sincerely feel that they’re upholding the one true faith, and that it’s the institution that’s gone wrong.

What we’re most likely seeing, and what we’ll continue to watch, is a kind of slow-motion digital schism. Something that the already dwindling numbers of the Catholic Church can ill afford.

Apostasy, noun.

1: An act of refusing to continue to follow, obey, or recognize a religious faith

2: Abandonment of a previous loyalty : defection

In 1972, the American Evangelist Mike Warnke sent shockwaves through the Christian community with the publication of his book, The Satan Seller. The book detailed Warnke’s time as a high priest of the devil, and outlined his role as the head of a coven of thousands of satanic followers. It was during these years, in which he trafficked in genuine evil, that Christ entered his life and purportedly turned him from his demonic ways.

Christians across the country were electrified. Here was genuine proof that there was no darkness so black that the light of the gospel could not penetrate it. Here was evidence that Satan’s own soldiers could defect and join the side of the angels.

Warnke’s book was a massive hit and a compelling story. It was also, as Cornerstone magazine documented, almost entirely made up.

Conversion as Shameless Grift

Lately, out of a gripping sense of curiosity, I’ve been watching a host of “conversion” videos on YouTube in which self-proclaimed former yogis, witches, and Satanists will tell of their conversion to the one true faith. You may have seen similar videos. Usually shot as vlogs where folks talk about their deliverance from [X tradition] into the loving arms of the Christian faith.

This, in itself, is not a bad thing. I genuinely applaud folks who have come to a place where they can set down their spiritual search and drill deep into a living tradition. It’s a beautiful journey and I am happy for them.

But as I watched more of these videos, it became apparent that these folks were not the only stories out there. It seems to me that this genre of videos is largely comprised of three groups.

The first, and seemingly the largest group, is comprised of folks who found that their former religion just wasn’t a good fit. So they jumped to a tradition which was more in alignment with their understanding of reality. And honestly, good for them for making the leap.

The second smaller but still sizable group of folks seem to have been misaligned at the outset. They drank deep from traditions which they didn’t fully understand, and when the going got tough, or the practices got too real, they bailed to something less alien, and in some ways less frightening. No shame in it. Shit happens. The world’s weirder than you might expect, so as far as I’m concerned, no harm no foul.

But the third group (by far the smallest) were the folks who interested me the most. They spun tales — much like Warnke — of their dark deeds and missteps into the world of the occult, only to inevitably be accosted by demons and summarily saved by the redeeming light of Christ.

This would be all well and good, except for the small inconvenience that almost everything this last group says about witchcraft, or yoga, or even Satanism, appears to be absolute nonsense.

Now, you might think I’m painting with a broad brush here, but the more I watch these videos, the more it becomes apparent that many in this third group — these confident former ministers of Satan who preach the salvific power of Christ — mostly have no idea what they’re talking about. Many are just confidently making things up as they go.

Their shamelessness would honestly be impressive if it wasn’t such obvious quackery.

The Banality of Lying for Clout

Part of the reason so many folks get away with this is the fact that most people just don’t know all that much about yoga, or witchcraft, or Satanism, so it’s easy to make up nonsense and have it sound like it could be true. These bad actors rely on the ignorance of their audience to pull off their cons, and it works because people want to believe their claims are true, no matter how dubious.

In these videos, you’re likely to encounter such gems as…

“Yoga poses are worshipping Hindu gods.” or, “My tarot cards summoned the devil”, or my personal favourite, “Meditation opens your mind so demons can move in.”

These claims grate on me horribly for two reasons. In the first case, they just aren’t true in any measurable sense.

Take yoga as an example. Anyone who knows anything about the history of yoga knows that the majority of the postures we see in modern studios were developed in the early 20th century after Indian gymnastics, European calisthenics, and Hatha yoga breathing techniques were rolled into one. Not exactly an ancient system of demon worship.

Now there are tantric traditions that use the body as a vehicle for certain divine energies, but this is an esoteric practice requiring a teacher, initiation, and a lineage-specific ritual context. Not really something you stumble into at a CorePower studio.

But the folks who confidently assert that downward dog was designed to worship pagan gods don’t care about the history, or how silly they sound to anyone who knows anything about yoga. They’re happily applying their busted understanding of Hindu theology to the wrong practices, in the wrong context, without understanding the framework that even makes these practices meaningful, even within the yogic tradition.

Which might be embarrassing if they had any idea what they were talking about.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent: Occult Edition

Alas, as I apparently did not inherit any kind of instinct for self-preservation or economic advancement, I have spent the majority of my adult life studying religion and the occult.

So when I hear this nonsense about other faiths from folks who have clearly never been involved in these traditions, my ears perk up. And lately, I’ve been pondering a simple question: Why do these stories keep working? Why do people — smart ones who in any other circumstances might have some skepticism about the fantastic claims of self-purported former Satanists — keep buying in to obvious bullshit?

As it turns out, there are actually a few theories on this from reputable academics (Read; not me) who have been doing some really cool work on the spiritual scene as a marketplace. One of the more interesting ideas I keep running into is conversion as a method of accruing social capital. The idea here being that conversion exposes the new convert to new social-groups, and perhaps more importantly builds trust within members of an existing religious community. As they say, the highest form of flattery is imitation.

As Joanna Maselko et al. found in their 2014 paper, Religious social capital: Its measurement and utility in the study of the social determinants of health, when we look at regular religious attendance, 88% of attendees believe that fellow members share the same values. A whopping 94% of regular attendees believe that members of their in group can generally be trusted.

This may shed some light on why so many new converts to new religious structures are welcomed with open arms, and why it’s so easy for bad actors to adopt religious language and subsequently make their way into these high trust circles. From there, simply by virtue of their group belonging, any nonsense peddled is often met with less skepticism than it might deserve.

More, in a 2002 review by Robert Wuthnow, the data clearly indicates that religious affiliation and attendance is directly related to “status-bridging” social capital — that is, proximity to the well to do in Church services opens the door for potential economic advancement by these relationships. What’s more interesting is that many attendees seem consciously aware of this fact, and so are incentivized to welcome those of high social and economic capital into their midst. Celebrity sells, as it were. All the better if your celebrity is anointed.

The Marketplace of Spiritual Identity Encourages this Kind of Grift

Over the past decade or so, loads of digital ink have been spilled about the so-called “spiritual marketplace.” Usually, this is a pot shot against the Spiritual but Not Religious crowd, accusing them of shallow engagement with faith and a kind of piecemeal approach to the big questions of life. But less work has been done in examining American religion as foundationally consumer-driven.

I don’t mean to discount serious faith here, but there’s clearly something to be said about the tendency for religious believers — and even leaders — to follow certain incentive structures more than straight theology or metaphysical commitments.

In the case of grifting new-age converts, the incentive for the conversion is, more often than not, fat stacks of cash.

As I wrote about the other week, it is not uncommon for your average bear to toss out theological commitments wholesale if the faith they have historically belonged to no longer adequately serves their material, political, or social needs. The incentive structure changed, and as a result, so too did their religious commitments.

That this happens at all speaks to religion as, in some ways, vulnerable to consumer-driven incentives, in which folks pick and choose between traditions precisely because of the benefits they can accrue from membership.

In some ways, I actually think the consumer model is a reasonable lens through which regular congregants ought to view faith. There are very salient reasons that folks should be discerning in their religious community specifically because we do have needs. Any serious faith that makes you miserable all the time is probably something you should re-examine.

Nevertheless, the same impulse that leads seekers to shop between traditions can lead less than scrupulous actors to take advantage of those traditions. Where the seeker asks, “Can this meet my emotional, social, and spiritual needs?” The grifters ask, “Can association with this faith make my wallet fatter?” Sadly, the answer to the latter question is often a resounding yes.

The Cost of the Con

What really gets under my skin about all this is that it feels worse than just ordinary fraud. These folks get paid off of abusing the human impulse to reach for the truth, fabricating a story and replacing the truth with a lie.

Of course, what folks like Warnke figured out was that their story doesn’t need to be true. It doesn’t even need to be believable. But the one thing it absolutely needs to be is useful.

Useful to the grifter, obviously — their measurably fattened checking accounts will attest to that — but more importantly, it needs to be useful to their intended audience. We’re all suckers for a dramatic rescue. Suckers for stories where good triumphs over evil. Those narratives serve a purpose for us. They help us find meaning, and they help us feel good about the world.

This isn’t just restricted to Christian denominations either. As an example, Doreen Virtue spent decades as the darling of the New-Age. She published more than 50 books, oracle card decks, and certification programs in things like “fairyology.” She peddled a narrative where she could give you the truth, and that truth would set you free. Nevermind the fact that her work was shot through with errant nonsense, wild factual inaccuracies, and insane misunderstandings of religious doctrines.

For decades, folks lapped this up. Despite the fact that anyone who had bothered to do any amount of research at all would quickly discover that what she was selling wasn’t fit to use as toilet tissue.

But by the mid teens, it seemed that her credibility among occultists and those in the New-Age community started to fall off. This was in no small part to do with the hyper-commercialization of her offerings, but was also likely to do with declining sales numbers and the fact that people were catching on to her nonsense.

Then, in 2017, she made a splashy conversion to Christianity and — to the apparent surprise of everyone but me — immediately monetized her conversion with the publication of her book, “Mornings with the Lord.” Her YouTube channel now has upwards of 350,000 subscribers where she gives fundamentalist teachings and rails against New Age practices and she has since published two more books, “Deceived No More” and, “Sweet Dreams Scripture.”

Now, again, as someone who has spent too much time studying religion and magic, Virtue’s New Age publications were obviously rubbish. But lots of folks didn’t know that, and so took her at her word. And when people did start to figure out the game, she made an about face to a new audience, employing the same hustle under a different brand name.

It doesn’t matter that Virtue was full of it before her conversion — and as far as I can tell, likely still is. The fact is, people loved her for her willingness to just claim she had secret knowledge she could share with them. And the same goes for her audience after her conversion.

It’s the same across traditions precisely because people want the narratives pitched to be true — and because the data shows these are high trust institutions — believers (pagan or Christian) will overlook almost any silliness.

In a maximally depressing twist, it’s not because these communities are full of morons, willing to believe whatever. It’s because folks are, for the most part, good. They’re willing to extend the benefit of the doubt. They’re excited when someone tells them that they have the truth! They’re doubly excited when someone renounces something which their culture has told them is evil. The prodigal son (or daughter) has returned.

Poisoned Waters

But this level of grift poisons the waters across all traditions. Because so many religious communities are high trust, misinformation sticks in a way it might not if folks were more willing to call BS. And worse, the broadside against communities — like yoga communities, or Buddhist ones, or Christian ones, or even out and out occult ones — creates barriers to dialogue that serve to destroy real and potential relationships.

If yogis are really worshiping Satan, it’s much harder to work alongside them in a respectful way. If Buddhists are infested by devils, their communities become the enemy. And don’t even get me started on LaVeyan Satanists…

The whole process serves to entrench believers into an embattled worldview where demons lurk around every corner, and it’s by the sheer grace of God that Lucifer himself isn’t banging down the front door. Of course, this is by design. The more dangerous the outside world seems, the more important solidarity becomes. (And the more books you can sell which detail the evils of your neighbors.)

There’s also the problem of genuine seekers trying to sort out what people in a real occult tradition actually get up to. They give a quick google, but instead of facts, they find the ravings of some loon on YouTube telling them that anything other than their particular brand of Christianity is devil worship. It pollutes the whole spiritual well for anyone, Christian or otherwise, trying to drink.

Look, I’m sure this has been a thing long before Warnke, and will likely continue well into the future. The formula is insidiously simple. The grifter makes up a horrifying and dramatic past, and sings the praises of their redemption. Their audience is kept in rapt attention, and they solicit donations under the banner of heaven until someone calls them out. This last bit often takes quite some time.

At the end of the day, it’s such an effective con precisely because of the high-trust structure of these groups. When that structure is coupled with a solid (and dramatic) narrative, these bad actors are free to create a poisonous atmosphere, where otherwise good people are suckered into fear and hatred of their neighbor.

The worst bit is, it only works because people are good and trusting.

Despite the purported holiness of the convert, to take advantage of the goodness of others is the least Christ-like thing going.

Over the course of five years, from 1979 to 1984, Pope John Paul II gave a series of talks on the Catholic view of the human person.

In a hundred and twenty nine addresses, his holiness taught that it is the human body which makes the invisible divine love of God visible in the world. This view — clearly supported by a litany of encyclicals across multiple papacies — is a view of humans as beings imbued with inherent, inviolable dignity. In this view we are created with a most exalted purpose — to embody a loving communion with one another and the divine.

If I had to wager, most of us do not think of our bodies as having a purpose in this way.

Insofar as most of us think of the purpose of the body at all, it is much more common in the States to think of the body as some kind of machine. A sort of flesh robot that is piloted by the ghost we call the self. And which, in the case of habit or addiction, occasionally usurps control and acts of its own accord.

Given this view, it seems strange to even ask, “what is the purpose of this body?”

It is much more common to ask, “What is my purpose?” presupposing that the “I” — the sense of self — can then direct the body to whatever end is brought to mind.

This view of the body as a tool or machine — separate from some non-material “self” — runs directly counter to the Catholic assertion that the body is no more separable from our personhood than heat is separable from flame.

While this might not be the most intuitive thing in the world, this view — that human beings are indeed body-mind composites — is also supported by a growing chorus of neuroscientists and philosophers of mind. These unlikely bedfellows reject the mind-body dualism of the Cartesians at a foundational level.

From this position, to ask “what is the purpose of this body?” is really to ask, “What is my purpose?” precisely because the two are not separable in any meaningful way. As Aristotle said, rejecting Plato’s dualism,

“The soul is the form [the very essence] of the body.”

Now, you’re not going to get a straight answer about ultimate purpose from neuroscientists. That’s not their bag, and fair enough.

Ask a Catholic on the other hand, and you’ll get something like this: Our purpose is nothing short of participation in God — a kind of maximal participation in divinity so that we, ourselves, might become perfect.

In this particular tradition, the roadmap for participation in God requires following a combination of divine and natural law. These laws direct the soul-body composite of the person towards its fulfillment as a complete being.

Now, whether or not you go in for the Catholic conception of natural law is one thing. (admitting my biases, I personally do not) But they are obviously right about the view of the individual as composite.

To split the human into mind and body does us a disservice and readily opens the doors for us to do violence to ourselves. When the body is viewed as a tool we can leverage for gain, we run the risk of actively harming our bodies by ignoring their needs and nature — both as an animal form, and as a social, communal, and expressive being.

Conversely, the view of the body as something sacred, something that we are inseparable from, and something imbued with inherent and inviolable dignity, safeguards us from the abuse of our bodies in the pursuit of some other good.

Full Participation in Life

To be sure, the Catholic view is certainly divergent from the way that most of us think about our bodies, but the view of the mind and body as one system which needs to work in harmony to flourish, may well provide an antidote to the crushing crisis of meaning — wrought so clearly from a disconnect between mind and body — that has smashed through western culture like a wrecking ball.

We live in an age of social media, where many have sacrificed the embodied dimension of experience and replaced it with spectacle. As such, a return to the wisdom of the body is sorely needed.

Wellbeing

Social isolation and crushing loneliness is a direct result of the kind of folk-Cartesian mind/body split that has become the philosophy of the masses. Almost one in three Americans report severe loneliness, leading to a litany of adverse health conditions.

The idea of the individual as an isolated, internal observer, somehow set back from the body and the world, leads to the sensation that we are, in real ways, locked inside ourselves. In this, we’re reduced to observers of the world rather than participants in it.

This observational mode, as a replacement for embodied experience, can be clearly seen in the so-called “sex recession” among all cohorts, and the collapse of communal physical life into screen-mediated spectacle. In our modern age, the world is less something we participate in, and more something we observe at a distance. Mediated by time and space and the ever prevalent supercomputers we keep in our pockets.

This hyper-isolation, brought on by the replacement of real experience with simulation is slowly strangling the life out of us, one short form video at a time.

But our isolation is hardly the only social ill that has come about from this mind-body split.

When it comes to our economic system, most of us work jobs we actively dislike. Treating our bodies as means to an end, sending them off to collect a paycheck, and hoping that when we return home our capacity for deep thought and work will somehow magically return to us. As if they’ve been on hold for the workday and will become available whenever we choose.

This view — of the mind’s separation from, and dominance of the body — is emblematic of the Cartesian position. It also happens to be a view that many of us simply assume as reality. The underlying assumption here is that we can simply direct our bodies to whatever we desire and, like magic, our faculties will comply. #grindset, as it were.

This, of course, ignores the reality of the integrated human being, but nevertheless continues to influence our cultural explanations of what exactly the human being is.

All this said, though we have accepted at least some level of alienation from our bodies as the price for modern life, we need not be ultimately condemned to a world of simulation. There are solutions, however off putting we may find the institutions that peddle them.

An Antidote to The Matrix

The good news is that we don’t have to just roll over and submit to the ascendency of folk-Cartesian silliness. We need not accept a permeant slide into spectacle, culminating in Nozick’s experience machine — a virtual reality of limitless but empty sense pleasure — as the necessary terminus of the human project.

The great philosophical and religious traditions have put forward solutions to this issue for literally millennia. And the best bit is that most of the world’s serious religious and philosophical traditions are pretty much aligned on the solution here, even if they aren’t willing to get together about the metaphysics that underpin it.

The real trick is just putting the solution into practice.

Thankfully, it’s really a simple thing. Get into the body. Do it regularly, and most importantly, do it on purpose. We’ve got to make it a practice.

Go dancing. Do stretching. Go to a group movement class. Go shoot bow and arrow. Lift weights. Learn to run and jump and play instruments. Learn to paint. Fall in love. Have sex.

Explore a vocation of the body — not as an errant hedonism but as a genuine engagement with the wisdom of experience. It is this which most readily provides an antidote to meaningless.

What is being prescribed across traditions is an embodied, repeated, and communal engagement with the physical reality of being alive. Not as a side project, but as part and parcel of our purpose.

The Catholics call this practice of knowing the body ascesis. It is an ordering of the body toward its proper end — or at least what the Catholics consider its proper end. In doing so, Catholics train the body with discipline and right action with an eye towards getting in touch with the physical sensations of living in an extraordinarily deep way.

The stoics use the same term to refer to the program of discipline central to their beliefs — a program designed to train adherents to live better lives by mastering and integrating the body into their lives and ultimately into their very being.

Sufis dance and gyrate in prayer. Yogis stretch and sit and sing. Taoists regularly practice shifting their focus of consciousness from their head to their heart and lower belly. Buddhists literally have whole disciplines of meditation designed to experience the sensations of the body.

I could drone on here, but the idea across these traditions is exceedingly similar. You show up in your body over and over until you stop relating to your body as an object.

And in a real way, this both supports, and is supported by, community. The physical presence of other bodies, eating together, dancing together, building a deck together, whatever else, puts not just minds, but bodies into communion.

The sex recession, the loneliness epidemic and the crushing banality of meaningless work are all, at their core, one problem. We have forgotten that we are more than just our minds, and that our bodies have needs. We have forgotten that our bodies cry out for use — for flourishing beyond mere spectacle.

No matter how much we suppress these needs, they don’t ever just go away. They simmer just beneath the surface, waiting to burst forth.

Whether you’re religious or not, if we want to pull ourselves back from the brink of the eternal experience machine, we have to show up in the bodies we have, and in the life that we’re actually living.

The good news is that we can always make a choice to re-inhabit our lives. The body is waiting.

Some years ago, when I worked in a New Age bookstore, I had the distinct displeasure to work alongside a woman who claimed to be psychic.

Now, I don’t take umbrage with folks who read tarot cards or claim to be psychic or anything else in that vein. I’ve got my fair share of decks stashed under my altar, and my bookshelves would likely make an exorcist blush.

My own interests aside, I’ve also known and worked with some absolutely lovely people who claim to be psychic, and while I tend to be skeptical of how they frame their abilities (and particularly the mechanisms behind them), my sense was that these folks were genuinely good people, sincere in their beliefs, and humble in their actions and speech.

My coworker Martha (not her real name) was not one of these people. Martha was in the business of lying to people for money. And she was the Warren Buffett of bullshit.

She would spin tales of lovers “just around the corner” and tremendous opportunities just waiting in store for her clients. All they had to do was keep the faith, and keep coming to see her for her regular rate of two dollars a minute, of course.

Despite the incredulity of myself and the rest of the staff at her open and shameless grift, Martha had done an excellent job of establishing herself as a close friend of our manager and so could pretty much do whatever she liked.

With increasing horror, I watched her string her clients along with empty promises of love and wealth, laying on false hope as thick as she could — always sure to keep predictions vague enough so that, when inevitably, no lover walked into the lives of her clients, there was always an explanation on hand.

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The fact that she raked in cash hand over fist was no small source of irritation to me. This was in part because I, and the rest of our team at the front of the house, were basically lay-scholars of religion, mostly concerned with the pursuit of the great faith traditions. Our particular areas of expertise were tuned to exploring the worlds philosophies and contemplative practices, all so our rotating clientele of Christian mystics, Buddhists, occultists, and yogis could deepen their practices and better themselves. We spent literally every day trying to help where we could.

So you can imagine that we didn’t love the fact that something resembling real moral evil had seemingly taken root in the back room.

In stark contrast to the bookstore end of the business, the back of the house was specifically devoted toward psychic reading and spiritual guidance. On days when Martha was working, it quickly turned into a den of desperation and sorrow, preyed upon readily by our very own unscrupulous black magician.

Thankfully the other readers we employed, weren’t of this ilk. Mark, Jen, Robin, and the rest were legitimate seekers in their own right. Each coming from a background of meditation, magic, and psychology. When you sat with them, you got the distinct impression that they were genuinely trying to sus our how it was that you came to be there, and took pride in encouraging their clients unique gifts.

Sure, you got the odd prediction from time to time, but even these were lightyears away from the kinds of predictions Martha would fire off at a moments notice. Insanities like, “Next week, your twin flame will enter your life.” or, “You are about to come into a great inheritance.” or, “You are a chosen one with an incredible destiny.” which she was willing to lie to you about explain for a small fee, of course.

Eventually, after something close to a revolt from the staff, the horrid and open desperation of her clients reaching a screeching crescendo, and some exceptionally pointed words from yours truly, Martha decided she would be better served taking her grift elsewhere.

The Dangers of Egoic Inflation

Towards the end of Martha’s tenure at our little shop, she began to refer to herself as a “chosen one.” Expanding her authority by virtue of being selected by God to steal money from desperate middle aged women shine her light into the dark corners of the world. Martha was not alone in this kind of egoic inflation. I’ve seen it time and time again in so-called psychics whose whole schtick is to string the desperate along, and fleece them for all they’ve got.

It’s not just restricted to psychics either. The same nonsense is on display in many fairly prominent evangelical circles. Uber famous evangelist Paula White-Cain, makes her bread and butter off of a prosperity gospel rap that Martha would salivate over. Just recently, she was out and about happily selling “blessings” for the low, low price of a thousand bucks. For this paltry sum, you could be the proud recipient of angelic protection, prosperity, health, and a special year of "increase" — whatever that means.

Whether these folks actually believe they were chosen by God is one thing — frankly, I suspect not — but their whole grift is selling that identity to folks who are down and out. They make their shekels by convincing you that, given their holy nature, indeed their special connection to the divine, they are uniquely equipped to guide you the promised land. And all that’s required is to fork over some cash. But even if they know what they’re doing, the way their adoring followers look at them clearly has some kind of effect on their psychology.

To be honest, at the end there, I really think Martha was drinking her own kool-aid. I can’t speak for Paula, but I assume it’s a similar thing. It’s hard to go through life with everyone telling you that God has chosen you specifically without at least some part of you starting to believe it.

The Malice of the Wounded

It’s been my experience that for the most part, the folks who fall prey to the grifts of the “chosen” do so not because they’re stupid, but because they are desperate. They’re lonely, or broke, or have surrendered their agency in some way, and so the first person who confidently promises them answers — no matter how dubious — feels like a drink of water after 40 days in the desert.

This is extremely disheartening. Not only that these folks are hurting so badly that they’ll reach out to any life raft that comes their way, but that there are bad actors willing to openly take advantage of them under the guise of providing spiritual guidance. Not to encourage agency, but to encourage dependence on the knowledge of the con-artists supposedly supernatural knowledge.

I don’t believe in hell, but if I did, these grifters would surely earn their spot in the deepest layers.

To my mind, the religious among us — no matter the faith tradition — have a responsibility to their fellow human beings, not to mention to their God if they have one, to act uprightly. To do their utmost to shepherd souls toward the good. Not to rip them off at the first convenient opportunity.

The fact that these con-artists can look a drowning person in the eyes and — instead of giving them the tools to swim to shore — lie to them before taking them to the cleaners makes my blood boil.

Now listen, these psychic grifters and holy rollers and the like, all have their own baggage. There’s a reason that someone can become callous enough to take advantage of the desperate. They, themselves, are hurting. In that, I sincerely hope they repent and heal, and sort out their shit. I legitimately want the best for them. But hurt people hurt people, and their hurt does not excuse them of their actions.

I say this regarding the damaged nature of these grifters because many of these charlatans are, in themselves, quite weak. If anyone dares to push back, even a little, their charade often falls apart at the brush of a feather. As Robert Wilson once said in his incredible essay Don’t Be Afraid of Black Magic,

“He [the black magician'] is quite powerless against those who realize that he is actually a stupid liar… Every kind of malice is a stupidity, but occult malice is stupidest of all. To the extent that the mindwarper is not 100 percent charlatan through-and-through (and most of them are), to the extent that he has picked up some real occult lore somewhere, his use of it for malicious purposes is like using Shakespeare’s sonnets for toilet tissue or picking up a Picasso miniature to drive nails. Everybody who has advanced beyond the barbarian stage of evolution can see how pre-human such acts are, except the person doing them.”

Because the game falls apart under even the slightest scrutiny, it falls to the rest of us poor, hapless losers to encourage both discernment and engagement with the uncertainty inherent to life as a virtue.

The grift of the spiritual con only works because people crave certainty. When the going gets tough, we all want someone to tell us that it’s going to be alright. That love is just around the corner. That we’re not walking stupidly into walls for no reason. We want someone to tell us that something good is coming. .

But it’s been my experience that real spiritual guidance looks almost nothing like a proclamation of certainty. Real spiritual paths are humble down to their core. Every single genuine teacher I’ve ever met is perfectly comfortable just sitting in that uncertainty and won’t hesitate to tell you so. They might suggest techniques, maybe even worldviews, but it’s all invitational. It’s all a call to relationship with reality in a deeper, more embodied way, and the techniques and tools are just methods of cultivating that relationship — tools to navigate it.

Relationships by their nature aren’t certain. Whether with a romantic partner or with life itself, relationships are always in flux, always changing. That’s what makes them interesting. But they also require two to tango. You’ve got to be an agent.

To ask, “What will happen to me?” puts you in the passenger’s seat of your own life. A much better question might be, “What can I do to make my relationship with reality stronger, better, and more vitalizing?”

Once you start asking that kind of question, you take back your agency, and you start to be a player.

If you want to get better at anything, you have to practice. And life is one big practice session. Don’t surrender your agency to folks who will tell you what you want to hear. Go out and try to make your dreams happen. And if you fall and scrape your knee, well that’s just part of the process. Get back up and get back at it. No psychics required.

A few weeks ago I was accused of heresy during my comprehensive exams in Theology. Now, because it isn’t 1480, I was never really at risk of inquisitors banging down my door at the behest of the papal authorities, nevertheless the experience was supremely weird.

As news of my heresy spread (I told some friends because I thought it was funny) my infamy grew. And so, naturally, I wanted to talk about it on Substack. Which got me thinking about…

The Commodification of Experience

Part of what I enjoy about the writing process is that I can distill my personal experience into chunks that others (you, in this case) can experience at a distance. One of the strange side effects of this is that, in some ways, my personal experiences of spiritual exploration get turned into something that uncomfortably approaches “content” — by which I mean a reduction of profound experience into something bite sized, and by it’s nature only a facsimile of the experience itself.

As the Polish-American scientist and philosopher, Alfred Korzybski, said, “The map is not the territory.” But social media is largely in the business of producing maps — aesthetic facsimiles of real experience designed for consumption.

The price of this is that real and profound experience, as undergone by the individual, is often flattened into an impoverished simulacrum of lived experience and repackaged for the aesthetic sensibility of the masses.

No longer a guide for experience, it becomes a simulation of experience itself, whereby viewers live vicariously through the flattened medium.

Our Long and Storied Relationship with the Technologies of Symbol

This flattening, or reduction to symbol, isn’t necessarily a bad thing in itself. The great annals of poetry and art are in themselves a version of this impulse. The great texts of the world, foundational as they are in the conveyance of experience and truth, are themselves only imitations of life.

But the domain in which we engage with art, and writing, and content is a domain of spectacle. It is a step removed from the squish of the flesh and the fire in the nerves.

The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan argued that our central nervous system extends outwards via technology — ultimately arguing that media and technologies act as prosthetic enhancements of our senses.

These enhancements, like those that have come before, fundamentally reshape our perception, social structure, and modes of thought.

As the wheel was an extension of the foot, and the book was an extension of memory, so too is the internet an extension of the nervous system. And these can be good things! But we’ve got to be careful — the longer we rely on a given technology, the more our original faculties decay, replaced by the technology that usurped them. Before we know it, we might find that spectacle has replaced true experience.

Spirit as a Consumer Good

When it comes to the world of the spiritual, this is a supremely weird turn of events.

What used to necessarily be an embodied path has, in many ways, been reduced to that which is visible. But as spiritual transformation, and serious formation within the person, often doesn’t have outward signs that are immediately apprehended via the eyes, we make do with manufactured symbols to signal our internal states. Maybe it’s certain modes of speech or dress, maybe it’s certain symbols pasted to our walls.

Whatever the case, these symbols will never be enough to convey the fullness of the experience to which they are ascribed. Nevertheless, many who consume such spiritual content or teachings, mistake the outward signs leveraged by these purveyors of spirit as the thing in itself.

This is not a new problem. Many modern teachers have written at length about spiritual materialism. Many ancient teachers speak of not mistaking the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. In either case, the trappings of the thing are not the thing. No matter how much we might want them to be.

The pursuit of real transformation is necessarily more than spectacle — it is something which moves beyond a mere aesthetic preference. Despite this, the road to self-development is littered with the yoga pant clad corpses of those who mistook the symbol for the experience, and lost their way for the trouble.

Identity as Symbol

Which brings us to what I wrote about the other week, the identity of individuals being reduced to outward signs, while the fullness of their whole selves languishes in the shadows, often unaddressed.

But this tells us something profound about human cognition and how we sort our world into understandable categories. Symbols are useful, but they are unable to take us to the fullness of understanding by themselves. For that, we are required to fully embody our lives. To move beyond the trappings of symbol and spectacle as the end all be all of experience.

That said, the grinding wheels of social media depend on us remaining locked into symbolic affiliation, ever refining our outward identity, ever tweaking our symbolic emergence into the world, but remaining quite silent on how we ought to revamp our internal experience.

In part, because this internal experience does not drive engagement with content or culture as a project, but also because the practice of spiritual formation is an ancient path that even in the best of times has been something that only a few lunatics, unmoored from the spectacle of manufactured culture, have taken seriously.

Assuming that you — like me — are a fool, lunatic, or otherwise unhinged mad person, we have a responsibility to continually exorcise this tendency for symbolic substitution. Anything less is abdication of our station as stewards of our own lives.

When I was in undergrad, I was acquaintances with someone who made it their stock and trade to practice black magic.

I’m talking trying to summon demons out of grimoires, casting curses and hexes, the works.

As I am someone who is also fascinated by the occult, if not particularly the black magic aspects, I viewed his activities with some interest. Though as time went on I began to suspect that he was misguided in some serious ways.

Eventually, it became clear that my suspicions had proved correct. Over the course of some months, I watched my acquaintance withdrawal from the world, enacting a slow retreat into the identity of a powerful mage. To his mind, he was becoming something else — a magister templi, a true adept of the dark arts. To the rest of us, he was coping with an inability to act in the world.

The irony was that this freshly formed identity conflicted openly with the reality of his situation — one where he was unable to hold down a job, keep a relationship, or otherwise really engage with the world. This state of affairs, quite obvious to the rest of us, never really seemed to dawn on him.

In a similar vein, just the other week I met a Christian who proclaimed the immanent return of Christ, while in the next breath spun a tale of flat earths, ancient giants, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and a host of other curiosities. He spoke feverishly on the persecution of Christians in our country, and with a wink and a nod, alluded to a conspiracy against white folks.

That he readily admitted that his Christian identity shielded him from really examining his beliefs was equal parts fascinating and absurd. It said so in the bible! Case closed.

He had found the truth so no more questions were required. But despite his surety, many of the same issues that were present in my acquaintance from undergrad seemed present in his life — unstable relationships, social isolation, egoic inflation, the works.

What both of these fellows had in common was a shield against actually engaging in the world, and beyond that, engaging with themselves. They retreated into a worldview that couldn’t be assailed from the outside, based solely on their surety, and as a result their identities became idols unto themselves. Dead, sterile things that had no room for growth, curiosity, or integration.

They had each built up an edifice that was impregnable from assault, and were made poorer for it.

Shut Up In the Tower

In his work Magic Without Tears, Aleister Crowley discusses a group of individuals he terms the Black Brothers. Not to be confused with black magicians, these are folks who do really walk a spiritual path. But in their final stages, instead of surrendering their ego to divine unity — to die to themselves, as the Christians would have it — they shut themselves up in a kind of egoic construct, locking themselves into an unchanging identity structure and clinging to it with all their might.

It doesn’t require you to be a highly advanced spiritual soul to lock yourself in a tower of your own making. Anyone can construct a self-image that shields them from curiosity — one that shields them from good faith engagement with the world.

In fact, this kind of egoic solidification is one of the first safeguards human beings erect to combat uncertainty. One which you’re liable to find anywhere trauma has touched. And the truth of it is that building a sort of metaphysical fortress does provide a sense of safety. Though it’s a false sense of safety, one which is allergic to growth.

In that sense, what might feel like protection can quickly calcify into something much more pernicious.

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It Comes out Sideways

Something my mom used to say to me when I was little, was that if I didn’t acknowledge an emotion, it would “come out sideways.” — Erupting from the dark confines of my psyche like a volcano, in a violent and uncontrolled conflagration.

(Well, she didn’t say the last bit, but I’m pretty sure it was implied.)

The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung had a similar notion around psychic constructs he called “complexes” — feeling tinged constellations of memories, emotions, and perceptions that unify into an overarching theme.

As an example, if an individual could never live up to their parents expectations, they might develop an inferiority complex where their memories and perceptions reinforce the idea that they’ll never be good enough.

To correct this, folks will often find themselves overcompensating for their poor self-esteem by overachieving, but never feeling satisfied by their actions. It might not be apparent why they can never feel at peace, but the underlying constellation of fear, insecurity, and poor self-image (the complex) is what’s in action.

If we lean into Jung’s framework, we start to see that if we don’t acknowledge certain autonomous complexes — if we stuff down inferiority, savior complexes, power/victim complexes, etc. — they can break free of the psyche and override the ego.

These splinter psyches, or mini-personalities rooted in trauma or unresolved issues, can quite readily lead to behaviors that mimic possession.

These out of control aspects of the mind which subsume our rational faculties are, as you might guess, predictably destructive.

Now, whatever you think of Jung, this seems to be an obviously correct take. I’m sure you’ve seen it. The alcoholic overcome by vicious habit. The wounded young man losing himself in meaningless sex at every opportunity, even if he knows it’s hollow. The mother who can’t let her children grow up lest she be rendered obsolete. The young women who betrays herself, desperate for the approval of her peers.

These functions overwhelm what would otherwise be a healthy and functional person, pushing them down paths they know are destructive, but which nevertheless feel like the safest option.

Ultimately, if we choose to abandon our whole self for long enough, we lose our hold on our true identity as a whole being.

If we spend the majority of our time locked in a limited and rigid identity structure, then any novel experience that disturbs that identity is consequently seen as both a threat to be dealt with and an experience to repress.

If our walls were lower, or our sense of self not so fragile as to be destroyed by the perturbations of life, we might see these novelties as invitations to a deeper relationship with life — we might see them as opportunities for curiosity and growth. But for so many who adopt brittle identity structures, when an experience threatens to shift our sense of self, it is seen as an existential threat.

So, in a bid to protect our very lives, the experiences are shoved into the unconscious without awareness on the part of the individual.

The trouble is, when our minds repress experience in this way, the experiences and desires themselves don’t just magically vanish. They shift like undulating shadows at the back of the mind, ever growing in the moist substrate of the psyche, until one day, when our fortress of identity isn’t as strong as usual, or another experiences causes us to look inward, they break free of their bonds and overwhelm us, causing all sorts of unpleasant outcomes.

Shadow Eruption

A friend of mine has recently described these moments of overwhelm as shadow eruption. Where unconscious complexes are causing action that the individual might abhor, but might continue to engage in.

Perhaps the best way to understand the shadow is as a bag we carry with us from childhood. We have a conception of ourselves, good, bad, spiritual, rational, whatever. And when we encounter desires or experiences which doesn’t fit the conscious view we have of ourselves, we stuff them into the bag.

“Good little boys aren’t angry.”

So we shove anger into the bag.

“Good little girls don’t rock the boat”

So we shove our feelings into the bag.

Greed, anger, cowardice, lust, all of it is “unacceptable”, and so each in turn go into the bag.

Of course, we haven’t actually dealt with these things. It’s not like because we say we’re not the kind of person who gets angry that we actually deal with our anger. It’s not by denying our experiences that we understand them and deal with them in a healthy way. But when we repress them, we rob ourselves of the chance to truly engage with these aspects of ourselves. We rob ourselves of the chance to understand ourselves at a fundamental level.

“I’m not uncertain! I’m Christian!”

“I’m not lustful! I’m spiritual!”

“I’m not greedy, I’m a good person!”

And in the meanwhile we lie, cheat, and steal because we’ve never actually dealt with our shit out in the open. And when it finally does come out (often sideways) our community is left dealing with the fallout of our inability to engage with our shadow stuff. Which makes it all the more important to integrate it into your life.

Why this is almost impossible to talk about

Much of this is difficult to discuss openly because it is foundationally shameful. These emotions, actions, and thoughts are usually quite unflattering — especially when they concern our idealized image of ourself. It’s one thing for Joe the plumber to be controlled by lust, it’s another thing for Ted the spiritual life coach to be chasing baddies at the bar.

It’s one thing for Samantha to be propelled by desire (call it greed.) But it’s much more embarrassing when Mary the minister acts on her ambition.

You get the idea.

Whether or not anyone actually cares if Mary or Ted just get to grips with their desire and express them in a healthy way is immaterial. The fact that they are gripped by shame, that they even have these desires, makes it almost impossible to discuss these issues openly given the crushing negative emotions that accompany them.

Of course, over time this only compounds the both shame and subsequently the level of repression folks have to employ to stuff the emotions ever deeper — only for them to erupt later in an uncontrollable explosion.

Feed (and tame) your Demons

There’s a Tibetan Buddhist practice called Chöd (‘severance’), in which practitioners make a go at cutting through ego-clinging. The practice is designed to consciously confront fear and forces which obstruct us from enlightenment — described within Tantric traditions as different forms of māra — with the end goal being the transformation that fear into generosity and compassion. One of the more wild processes by which this practice is accomplished — and stress tested — is by visualizing a ritualistic sacrifice of the practitioner’s own body.

The idea behind the practice is that cultivating a purposeful encounter with deep fear, anxiety, and shameful emotions — rather than purposefully avoiding them — helps the practitioner break free of egoic attachment and allows for a more radical transformation of the individual.

Recently, Lama Tsultrim Allione of Tara Mandala adopted some of these elements and constructed a new kind of practice designed for western audiences. Whatever you might think of that particular strain of Vajrayana, it’s worth taking a look.

The notion here being that if we can bravely and safely encounter our shadow material — the stuff that’s welling up that we would rather not think of as ourselves —we can learn how to integrate it. If we can get to grips with the aspects of ourselves that are truly there and learn modes of healthy expression, our relationship to our self changes.

Even in Christian traditions you have notions of shadow work, though this is usually in a framework of repentance, forgiveness, and restoration.

To better understand the underlying assumption around what we might consider inclination to sin we might rely on the words of St. Augustine, who informs us that sin is disordered love. From this view, if you can surface the dark parts of yourself and offer them to God, you can understand both how that disorder came about, and what the individual is actually reaching for. (In the Christian tradition, this is the gratuitous gift of grace and unyielding love of God, sought in the wrong places.)

The Christian approach to shadow work can perhaps best be summed up by Psalm 139:23–24, "Search me, O God, and know my heart," And once we bare ourselves in this way, once we bring the darkness to the light, can we understand what this disordered love is really reaching for, and then order ourselves more properly to the good and ideally the true.

As it is written in Ephesians 5:11-13, "Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible."

Releasing Identity

To bring us back, much of this can be avoided if we loosen our hold on a hyper rigid conception of our identity. While good spiritual teachers might not be affected by lust, humans are. While good coaches might not feel desire for material gain, humans do. But it is only by recognizing these aspects of yourself, and trying to sort what they’re actually about (and if they’re healthy despite our ego’s protestations to the contrary) that we can begin to integrate them into our wider being. Or at least find their proper place in the order of our lives.

So while identity might be useful as a way to erect barriers against chaos, in many instances, too rigid of an identity is liable to hold us back rather than helps us forward.

In April of 1900, fresh on the heels of the Chicago World’s Parliament of Religions, the great Hindu sage Swami Vivekananda delivered a lecture expounding on his love for the practice of meditation:

“Meditation is the one thing. Meditate! The greatest thing is meditation. It is the nearest approach to spiritual life — the mind meditating. It is the one moment in our daily life that we are not at all material — the Soul thinking of Itself, free from all matter — this marvelous touch of the Soul!”

And he’s not wrong, but he’s assuming something that might not be obvious for most Americans: that meditation ought to be embedded in a whole system of spiritual development.

Meditation isn’t a standalone practice. It is a piece in a larger framework of transformation. But without the rest of that framework it rapidly loses its effectiveness, and can even become harmful.

With that in mind, when it comes to the growing popularity of “mindfulness” in the United States, you would think that there would be good English language instructions out there for folks looking to master this ancient practice within the context of its proper container.

You would also be mostly wrong.

So, What Gives?

While there are books out there that are good at explaining meditation as a stand alone practice, it is exceedingly rare to find books written for western audiences that recognize that meditation is one part of a system of practices. A system that is designed to balance your being, and to allow you access to the deepest layers of reality.

As an example of such a system, you can’t get very far in the Buddhist world without encountering a concept called the three trainings. Sila (ethics), Samadhi (concentration/meditation), and Panna (wisdom). From the Buddhist perspective it is understood that unless you are working to develop all three of these capacities, you’re going to turn into a horribly unbalanced homunculus.

When you go to the gym, you do arm day, you do leg day, and you do chest day. If you only ever did arm day, you’d become a freakish monster with stick figure legs. It’s the same thing for a spiritual program

You need balance in meditation if you hope to get the goods.

But that’s just Buddhism. As far as I can tell, there are no serious spiritual traditions that recommend you focus on mind training alone.

Literally the first two rungs in Patanjali’s Yoga sutras—raja yoga, as it’s sometimes called—are the Yamas and the Niyamas, systems of internal and external ethics. The Yamas help you train your ethics—non-violence, honesty, avoiding theft, etc.—and the Niyamas help you train your wisdom—austerity, self study, devotion to God, etc.

Training your ability to concentrate doesn’t even show up until the sixth rung on the ladder.

The Taoists, gods love ‘em, have a similar take even if their framework is slightly different. Instead of the Yamas and Niyamas, or even the three trainings, Taoists have something called the three Treasures (honestly a much better name). Jing, Qi, and Shen. We can loosely translate these as essence, energy, and spirit.

First, you cultivate your Jing into Qi via a process of internal alchemy. Which is a fancy way of saying you shouldn’t waste your energy on stupid, vapid pursuits. You regulate your body by abstaining from things that harm you, and abstaining from things that would cause unwholesome states in others. (It’s ethics. We’re doing ethics again.)

Then, once you’ve got your Qi revved up, you leverage that cultivated energy to still the mind (concentration/meditation.)

From there, your Qi is refined into Shen. Your concentration allows you to see into reality. And because you’ve learned how to not blindly indulge in every whim—because you’ve cultivated your Jing into Qi—you can merge into the Tao, acting with, you guessed it, wisdom.

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Western Systems

Make no mistake, there are meditative practices in the western world that have been around much longer than the modern mindfulness craze has been.

Christian Hesychasm via the Jesus prayer is basically a mantra meditation.

Centering prayer in the Catholic tradition (admittedly a new-ish phenomenon) is similar to single pointed concentration meditation. Only instead of the breath, you’re focusing on God’s presence, or lack thereof. Don’t even get me started on Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence of God. Or Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle. Or a dozen other mystics and saints.

And that’s just Christianity.

There are all kinds of wild meditative practices in the Jewish tradition—Kabbalah specifically, but also in more exoteric strains.

In the Sufi tradition, meditation is exploding in popularity and has been around for, like, literally forever—if you believe the Sufis anyway.

But what all of these meditative practices have in common is the fact that they are embedded within traditions.

It’s not like Asia figured out that meditation should be part of a larger system, and the rest of us are just playing catch up. This is something that everybody figured out, and then the mindfulness movement just straight up ignored.

It is only in the mindfulness movement that we have stripped meditation out of its container. Shockingly, this has caused us some issues.

The Art of Spiritual Bypass

Despite how our cultural milieu tends to treat meditation—as a sort of universally beneficial enterprise—there are clear issues that arise when we divorce the practice from an ethical grounding and the view towards meditation as one component of a larger system.

The first, and perhaps most obvious of these issues, is the tendency for meditators to leverage meditation to avoid dealing with life. Whether trauma, responsibility, or conflict in general, it’s easy to detach from life and retreat into states of bliss.

Good vibes only is the watchword here. I’m sure you’ve heard it more than a few times. But that whole edifice only arises because folks are lacking a solid ethical foundation. If meditation classes began with a commitment to honesty, responsibility, and god forbid, compassion, a lot of this stuff would be torn up at the root. But western mindfulness wasn’t really built around transformation. It was built around self-optimization, which unfortunately doesn’t have much use for ethics.

The Scientific Yogi

There’s a real argument to be made that the only reason meditation is so accepted in the west, is because it was snuck in through the door of empirical data. We could measure the brain waves, measure the stress response, and could conclude that this wasn’t a religion—it was a science of the mind!

Turns out, it’s much harder to science our way to religious claims like emptiness and compassion as a vehicle for our telos, so it seems that we didn’t bother.

Of course, it was absurd to think we could just yoink one practice in a spiritual canon and there wouldn’t be repercussions, but there it is.

With a proper view of meditation—as one part of a larger system aimed at genuine transformation—we lowly meditators can actually orient ourselves toward something beyond pure optimization. In doing so, a host of common problems that arise from meditation—social withdrawal, egoic inflation, and even psychological destabilization—can be mitigated if not outright overcome.

Much Ado About Sitting

Meditation, for whatever it is, has a tendency to amplify what’s already going on for us. Folks who have buried their anxiety have to confront it, and will often report getting more anxious after beginning meditation. Folks who have no experience with philosophy can mistake insight into emptiness for nihilism, leading to all sorts of nasty outcomes.

A few weeks back I saw a photo in the New York Times of a white supremacist practicing yogic meditation. Which is…

1. Insane.

2. And a perfect example of what I’m talking about.

Meditation didn’t transform him into a kinder, gentler white supremacist. It elevated what he was already working with.

If you lack ethics, meditation can straight up amplify your ability to do harm to both yourself and others. If you lack wisdom, meditation can amplify your misunderstanding and leave you reifying concepts to your detriment (and to the irritation of those around you.)

If you have both of these in proper doses, meditation can become liberating! Especially if practiced within the systems in which it arose.

I’m not saying you should ditch your meditation practice. Far from it. But if we’re hoping for meditation to truly transform us, it’s worth asking what it is we’re aiming to be transformed into.

What do you do when two religious claims are both coherent—but contradict one another?

For a long time, my standard response was to try to get more conceptual leverage on the situation. I tried to use logic to think my way to an answer. Which claim was more logically sensible? Which had more intellectual heft?

I read more philosophy, I read more theology, I beat my head against metaphysical treatises, but my problem still remained.

The issue I was running into was that I was continually trying to leverage the powers of reason as a kind of master key; a one size fits all solution for theological and philosophical quandaries alike. Of course, during this time I was happily ignoring the fact that most serious religious traditions hold that logic is insufficient to propel you to ultimate understanding.

My assumption that reason alone was enough to get a grip on ultimate reality was imported from my culture. But given the fundamental constraints of reason—as a tool of the mind—it alone cannot lead the individual beyond the realm of concepts, and certainly not into what might lay beyond.

Many seekers aren’t aware of this going into their search—and for a long while I certainly wasn’t. But if this is the situation you find yourself in, your search for truth is likely to end in a kind of intellectual paralysis.

If you find yourself in a situation where coherent frameworks are set side by side as conceptual entities, and remain only conceptual entities, you may find you have no way of adjudicating between them. At least not with the tools you’re most familiar with.

Wrestling God in Public

Last week I stumbled across a reel from —a theologian, calligrapher, and all around interesting person—discussing this very thing.

In the video, she clips the public philosopher, Johnathan Bi, expressing his discomfort when two religious traditions are both coherent, but have profoundly different doctrines.

How, Johnathan asks, can we adjudicate between two traditions that tick all the boxes for spiritual formation, but nevertheless diverge on key issues?

For her part, Connie does a wonderful job of breaking down some of the discomfort that might, understandably, arise from holding this kind of tension. Particularly what it means to suspend belief between two competing frameworks. A situation Johnathan labels as equipollence.

She notes that equipollence ought to ultimately lead to a suspension of judgement, which would ideally lead to a sort of tranquility.

The problem is, sometimes this doesn’t happen. When the tension doesn’t resolve, we can be left with a sort of desperation; a felt sense of discomfort held not just in the mind, but in the body. This is exactly the desperation Johnathan is expressing in his podcast.

To help sort this tension, Connie makes an excellent move and appeals to the wisdom of the body: what would it be like if you didn’t have to choose between these two frameworks at all? What if questions around logical coherence are the wrong way to approach the tension, and you should instead lean into an embodied experience?

Indeed, she asks, what if being held between these two traditions is the path forward? And what if the sacred actually lives in this sort of tension?

Different lenses

As I’ve said, I’ve been wrestling this question on my own for some time now, particularly around the difficulty that arises when you run into problems at bedrock philosophical assumptions—too many proposals are coherent for me to pick a camp in good faith. Reason sits uneasily, regardless of the choice.

So I greatly appreciate what Connie is putting forward. A kind of embodied-knowing as the key to sorting the tension. She wonders, openly, “What [has] your body already chosen?…What does your body cry out for?”

This focus on embodied knowing as a legitimate compass toward the sacred is something that is largely overlooked in a lot of more patriarchal traditions. In some ways this is to do with an understanding of the universe as fundamentally rational and ordered, created as it was via the divine intellect. It is the mind then that is seen as the tool to uncover the deepest levels of reality.

Curiously, Thomas Aquinas argued that the intellect can know reality when forms—an “intelligible species”, or likeness of the thing—become present in the mind. But he also believed human knowledge begins in the senses and only then abstracts upward. These abstractions, then, are fundamentally imperfect representations of reality, even if they gesture at something really real.

In this framework, the senses experience something, the intellect then abstracts the form of the thing sensed as a concept, and then reason organizes them. As Aquinas says, “Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu”—nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses.

Put another way, you have to have an experience first and only afterwards can you conceptualize it.

The problem with an overdependence on rationality is to remain solely in the intellect without referencing sense experience as the foundation of conceptual knowledge. We divorce our concepts from their roots, and then mistake them for the end-all-be-all. As Plato’s cave reminds us, the shadows on the wall are not the true reality, however real they might appear.

Which is why I almost jumped up and down when Connie started talking about how the sensation of the sacraments feels in the body. You’ve got to have the experience, deeply, in order to conceptualize things later on. Without that initial sense experience, the logical formation that comes afterwards is hamstrung, caught in a recursive world of concepts with no real world corollaries.

What Johnathan and I both seem to be struggling with are the limits of logic to conceptualize and articulate ultimate truths. And this tension can’t be resolved by more logical inquiry. If logic is something which necessarily takes place after embodied experience, you need to first get into the body to abstract the form.

Where Aquinas and the Buddha Agree

In my work for my Theology MA, I spent a lot of time studying a Papal encyclical written by pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason). In it, Pope John Paul argues that reason alone is enough to know that God exists. Though this knowledge will be imperfect as it regards what God actually is.

This isn’t to say that faith isn’t a necessary component of Christianity. Indeed, reason is prone to error, and so non-conceptual faith, stemming from revelatory theology, is understood as a necessary counterbalance to both correct the errors of the mind and garner an understanding of who God is.

That said, the bedrock assumption that the Church makes, and that it has made for more than a thousand years, is that reason ultimately can—in a limited way—mount to God. From the Catholic view, when reason is enlightened by faith, it is capable of grasping fundamental truths about objective reality, however imperfectly.

How this happens is a trickier subject, and much debated among theologians, but the main point is that logic, on it’s own, is capable of this ascent.

If, as Aquinas assumes, the world is intelligible—as it was created by the divine intellect—it follows that the human intellect, created as it was in the image and likeness of God, can get a grip on real features of reality. Though these concepts are only analogously related to God, they do point to actual structures “out there”.

It is this logic that is used as a springboard for the mind to mount to divine realities. Even if the mind can’t fully understand them, it can know that there are realities that can be leaned into.

Though, to actually do that leaning, it is necessary to leave logic behind. Once folks are oriented by their concepts, they are called to let go into love, as it is sometimes said. To participate in reality rather than just reify our concepts about it.

Which is very similar to what the Buddhist Nagarjuna argues—that conceptual structures reify reality. While structures and concepts are helpful for what he calls conventional truth—truth depicted through concepts—the only way to grasp “ultimate truth” is by moving beyond conceptual knowing.

Though he disagrees with Aquinas on some substantial issues. In his text, the Mülamädhyamaka-kärikä (MMK for short), Nagarjuna rejects large parts of the Catholic framing, not by arguing that conceptual thought cannot grasp “ultimate truth”, but rejecting the view that concepts necessarily correspond to inherently existing realities.

While both agree that a move beyond concepts is necessary, Nagarjuna takes it a step further than Aquinas. He goes so far as to suggest that understanding objective truth as a conceptual category, even if you’re working analogously, is a fundamental epistemological misstep—a category error.

In an amusing critique of attempts to conceptualize ultimate truth, Nagarjuna says this,

“When you foist on us All of your errors You are like a man who has mounted his horse And has forgotten that very horse.”

The horse might be able to take you places, but the horse is not the destination.

Nagarjuna calls on us to see reason and conceptual thinking as only relatively true, and useful only insofar as they stay within their zone of influence. Conceptual thought. When it comes to ultimate truth, it is the pacification of objectification which is necessary to unshackle the seeker from conceptual frameworks.

As different as these arguments sound on the surface, it seems to me that the fruits of these arguments lead to the same conclusion. Concepts might point at reality—to different degrees depending on the tradition—but no matter the tradition, true reality is necessarily beyond conceptual knowing. It must be participated in beyond mere thought.

Don’t get me wrong, there are real differences between these frameworks. While Aquinas assumes that reality is intelligible, and as such the human intellect can grasp real truths about it, Nagarjuna argues that concepts of truth always reify reality, and so any attempt toward ultimate truth can only emerge after we abandon conceptual formation.

Though both recognize that conceptual knowledge is an imperfect mechanism to apprehend the deepest layer of reality, even if these thinkers disagree on the degree to which conceptual thinking can point to the divine.

Baked In Cultural Assumptions

Most of us in the U.S. are like Johnathan. We swim in a culture informed by Christianity, and inherit its assumptions without inheriting deep spiritual formation. It is no great surprise that we primarily rely on the tools of reason in our search for truth. But as most of us are without a deep formation in a theological tradition, we tend to miss out on the accompanying caveat: such conceptual knowledge is always incomplete on its own, always analogous, and always pointing toward something it cannot name.

In the case of Nagarjuna, this reality is emptiness. Which he strenuously advises against adopting as a framework. It is only something that can be inhabited and perceived, not reified into a worldview.

As he says in the Mülamädhyamaka-kärikä,

By a misperception of emptiness A person of little intelligence is destroyed. Like a snake incorrectly seized Or like a spell incorrectly cast.

When you reify it into a concept, you’re in trouble.

Likewise, when Aquinas talks about God in the Summa Theologiae, he says,

…we cannot understand God's existence nor His essence…

He openly rejects the notion that God’s essence is something we can grasp in the mind.

Refreshingly, what Connie suggests is a sort of non-conceptual knowing, echoing some of the suggestions of the Buddhist path. But what’s really at the crux of this idea of equipollence is that two systems of thought are being compared from only one mode.—the assumption that reason alone is enough to come to a valid conclusion regarding the truth claims of these traditions.

This notion is smuggled in from the Christian worldview. Even before we get to grips with this or that question, we are already weighted towards one conclusion. Not that Christianity is “right” and Buddhism is “wrong”, or vice versa, but that reason alone can bring us to ultimate reality.

To my mind, starting with this assumption that reason is enough to bring us to the shore of understanding hamstrings the inquiry before it really begins. As Johnathan and I have experienced, the deep inquiry into faith using reason as the bedrock might well lead to a kind of uneasy equipollence—in which we’re forced into a tension between traditions which feels unresolvable because we’re unwilling or unable to abandon reason as a tool. Or at least limit its actionable scope.

But this doesn’t mean that these traditions are destined to forever be in tension.

Beyond Reason: Christian Mysticism

When folks read Nagarjuna, they tend to gloss over a model that has been refined as “The Two Truths”.

“The Buddha’s teaching of the Dharma Is based on two truths: A truth of worldly convention And an ultimate truth.”

He goes on to say that,

“Without a foundation in the conventional truth, The significance of the ultimate cannot be taught. Without understanding the significance of the ultimate, Liberation is not achieved.”

His basic premise is that logic and concepts must be mastered and used to deconstruct themselves to see that all things are empty of intrinsic existence.

Which is the same move that some of the Christian mystics make when talking about God. They’ve read the saints, they’ve explored the theology, and yet, in the 14th century mystical Christian text, The Cloud of Unknowing, it is written that…

God may be loved but not thought.

Which, for those of you keeping track at home, is the same kind of non-conceptual move that Nagarjuna uses. The theological conceptual knowing gives the concepts to us to talk about categories like God and faith, but the true mystic has to eventually move beyond them.

The Off Ramp

All of this to say one thing, among the great traditions, there is one instruction that is held in common: when you reach the end of what logic can tell you, you must participate—you must practice, you must engage. Not just with your mind, but with your body, your spirit, and with your whole being.

From this vantage, the question is no longer which system is more logically true. In my opinion the question becomes one of whether a system, once you enter it, can transform you in the way it promises.

Quite fashionable in the U.S. of late, the category of Spiritual but not Religious covers a growing demographic of people who dabble in what might be called spiritual technologies—things like meditation, astrology, or breathwork—but who haven’t pledged affiliation to an institution or specific creed.

As academics like Liz Bucar have pointed out, public surveys about belief aren’t great at capturing this sort of individuated enterprise—a spiritual identity untethered from group affiliation and concomitant dogma. This goes doubly so for the frameworks employed in the academy, which have historically categorized folks into creeds, doctrines, and buckets of institutional belonging.

Determining a common thread between spiritual but not religious identified folks is somewhat difficult given the lack of positive categorization. Given this, the academy has largely settled on a negative definition.

Whatever Spiritual but not Religious might be, it is reasonable to declare what it is not: a project of institutional belonging.

It seems that when it comes to SBNR we’re not just witnessing a collapse of religious identity, rather we are witnessing a collapse of institutions.

This development beggars a series of fascinating questions: What is it that the SBNR identity does for these individuals that traditional religious identities don’t? Is SBNR enough to create long lasting spiritual formation in those who have walked away from institutions? And what does the future of faith look like in a country whose religious landscape seems to be fragmenting?

To my mind these questions can only be answered if we first uncover what prompted this shift away from institutional affiliation in the first place.

Religion in decay

Much of the talk around the American Religious Studies watercooler over the past few decades has been around the subject of declining religious affiliation—and whether that decline is pointing to a great secularization.

To be sure, this would be an understandable framing of events. Though it would also be an incomplete reading of the data.

In the 1970s, something like 90% of Americans identified as Christians.

By the time of this writing, that number has fallen to somewhere between 62% and 64%.

On its face, this seems like a slam dunk argument for a secularization narrative. But recent Pew research tells a different story. While there has been a decline in religious affiliation, accompanied by an uptick in secularism, the narrative that folks are only abandoning faith for a more secular mode of being is an oversimplification.

Since the seventies, we’ve seen the growth of other religious groups—things like Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as New Religious Movements, making up some of that gap. We’ve also seen a rise in folks who identify as religiously unaffiliated. This category includes atheists, agnostics, and secular humanists—but about a third of them identify as SBNR.

When you include the numbers for folks who do identify with a faith tradition, but reject a “religious” framing, you’re looking at almost a quarter of Americans identifying as spiritual but not religious.

The secular supremacy narrative is doubly weakened when you factor in the explosive rise of non-denominational Protestant Christians, making up at least some of the gap in religious affiliation.

Looking at the numbers in this context, while we do see an uptick in secularism, it’s rather hard to see how these trends support the sweeping narrative of ascendent secular identity, especially when you put non-denom numbers next to SBNR numbers.

Frankly, the data doesn’t support a secular revolution. But it does support an anti-institutional one.

So what does this shift in identification say about belief and practice?

In the aughts and early teens, it was assumed that folks were leaving religion—and spiritual practice—in general because faith and spirituality were seen as pernicious in themselves. But as new data explains why folks are leaving their faith, it’s becoming clear that it wasn’t faith in general that pushed people away, but the institutions themselves.

According to the Public Religion Research Institute, the two largest reasons folks leave their childhood faith—behind the number one reason of losing faith in the teachings—are a rejection of institutional attitudes regarding LGBTQ+ identity, and the revulsion following repeated cover-ups of child sexual abuse scandals.

And while these would certainly be understandable reasons to abandon the religious enterprise entirely, the vast majority of those who abandon their institutional affiliation do not become purely secular—as we’ve seen above. Instead, they retain belief in a higher power—or other spiritual realities.

They have opted not to abandon faith writ large, but to abandon the institutions seen to be toxic, oppressive, or archaic.

What does SBNR aim to measure?

From its humble beginnings as a self-reported identity, SBNR is now employed in the academy to categorize a particular demographic with more precision than simply “unaffiliated”. Though, to be sure, SBNR fits under that unaffiliated umbrella.

That said, leveraging SBNR as a category of analysis is unique among religious studies demographic tools in that it tells us almost nothing about what people believe—or don’t.

It seems to me that SBNR affiliation instead measures the attitude individuals take when they do practice something. An attitude more concerned with individual exploration. One concerned with individuated spiritual formation.

This is particularly strange given that much of the history of religious studies as an academic discipline has been an exercise in comparative belief among these institutional bodies.

It has only been in the last sixty years or so years that religious studies has shifted to a more anthropological approach, focusing more on the actions and lived experience of believers rather than doing a straight theological comparison between the doctrines of the great faiths.

You might say that the shift toward the anthropological approach was timely, because when it comes to SBNR, it seems that there isn’t a unifying belief structure among the spiritual but not religious.

Folks who read tarot aren’t necessarily going to have the same beliefs as someone who’s into astrology. Angel channelers aren’t going to cleave to the same dogma as UFO cultists. And so on.

Of course, you get some variance within the world religions as well, but to my mind the level of variance in belief among SBNR folks seems unique for a demographic category aimed at measuring religion.

So as we’ve seen, SBNR doesn’t do a good job at measuring belief. But it does do a good job at measuring folks who have walked out on institutional affiliation.

We are prompted to inquire then, what, if anything, these disparate practitioners have in common in terms of their attitude toward spiritual experience and practice. If the threads are only a distaste for institutional affiliation that’s one thing. But if there is a common thread of practice among them, that may tell us something important about the makeup of this demographic.

Experience as a guide to practice

All this about belief aside, we may not even know what SBNR practitioners do—in that we don’t have a good overview of their disparate spiritual practices—but new data is giving us a window into why they do it.

What I find when talking to folks who identify as spiritual but not religious, is not that they reject religion out of hand. Rather, it’s that their spiritual practices and lived experiences didn’t fit inside the accepted parameters of the traditional faith structures on offer.

It seems that what binds these folks, if not belief in a particular doctrine, or even a common set of practices, is an unwillingness to be hemmed into systems which they don’t feel adequately account for lived experience. So from this lens, we’re seeing the locus of authority be relocated from institutions to individual experience.

But beyond that, new data seems to indicate that the SBNR identity is often accompanied by a desire to look within.

Nearly two thirds of SBNR report “looking inward or centering themselves” regularly. Almost half of those folks do so with the intention of connecting with their “true self”. As you might suspect, this number is significantly higher than either religious identifying Americans, or those who identify as secular.

Further, SBNR folks are more likely than both of those groups to spend regular time in nature, with the explicit purpose being, “to connect with something bigger than themselves.”

With this, it’s fair to say that spiritual but not religious identified folks value practices designed to foster a deeper sense of connection to themselves and to the world around them. More so than the traditionally religiously affiliated, or their secular counterparts.

These practices, whether it’s meditation, nature walks, centering prayer, or some other method of internal inquiry, look quite different on their face. But if you drill down into the why of the practice, you find similarities that might not otherwise be readily apparent.

For my money, this is what SBNR is measuring as a category. Not belief, not practice, but a particular orientation toward experience. A deep desire for interior exploration, unmediated by institutions.

Institutional collapse elicits a market-based spirituality

This line of thinking—that spiritual experience should be self-directed, efficacious, and freed from its institutional constraints—naturally tends to chafe against any specific tradition’s dogma.

One clear result from this attitude has been the emergence of a sort of spiritual information marketplace, where individuals can seek teachers willing to dole out this or that practice at varying levels of intensity.

This is best evidenced by the popularity of new information channels like Witchtok, and the spiritual side of YouTube. Teachers occupying these spaces (sometimes affiliated with different lineages, but often not) are sought after precisely because they promulgate teachings which are both immediately actionable and a la carte—that is, unmoored from any number of full religious commitments.

The critical objection

The piecemeal approach is at once what makes these practices so accessible, but it also sets off alarm bells among more traditionally minded practitioners.

To be sure, there are real concerns around the loss of coherent cosmologies, the loss of structures of ethical development, and the dangers of long-term spiritual formation without structures of accountability (sangha, church, etc.)

And there is serious discussion to be had about whether or not spiritual practices lose something of the above when these practices are not presented in their full religious context—many good academics have argued that they do.

This isn't a trivial concern to be ignored in favor of a progress narrative. Spiritual formation in any serious tradition isn't just a collection of techniques—it's a process of being remade. A process of living out a coherent vision of what a human life is for and being transformed by the pursuit.

But if we strip the techniques of spirituality from a vision of the purpose of humanity, while we may get therapeutic benefits from these practices, it's worth asking if adherents still undergo that deep transformation.

The honest answer is: we don't really know. The traditional critique argues that the answer is no. The SBNR practitioner tacitly assumes yes. But without real data—and I’m not really sure how we even would measure this outside of qualitative surveys—all we can do is wait and see.

That said, for folks who are just breaking away from institutions, that experiment is worth running. For them, even truncated practices can feel like life water in a sea of sand.

The tension between concerns of appropriation, and the impossibility of a return to a storied past

In a very American way, this new generation of spiritual but not religious seekers has followed in the footsteps of their hyper individualistic elders. As institutional affiliation has collapsed, without alternative institutions that offered the sort of freedom of belief required to capture this new generation, it’s no surprise that so many have availed themselves of the aforementioned marketplace.

But as we saw in the seventies, there were some problems with this individuated approach. Esalen-era individual spiritualism fragmented and collapsed almost entirely. The Human Potential movement fizzled almost as soon as it began.

The reemergence of individual seeking has created a series of responses that attempt to “fix” this problem of fragmentation before it endures the same fate as its predecessors.

On the one hand, there have been calls to return to the institutions so many are fleeing. But this, to my mind, is dead on arrival. Disparaging the SBNR movement without offering a new view of faith practice will be an exercise in futility—willfully ignoring the conditions that created it. This view of the necessity of returning to older modes of faith is sometimes referred to on the right of the political spectrum as the memified “retVrn”. Reject modernity, embrace tradition, as it were.

On the other end of the spectrum, there is an underlying assumption in much of the discourse—often unsaid—that if these new seekers only accepted the whole container of religion without rampant appropriation, they wouldn’t be so ethically shallow and socially anemic. Indeed, their spiritual practice would have depth and real cultural cohesion, able to press real change. But, again, that’s just a different way of trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle of institutional faith.

Both of these responses are understandable, even if neither is fully satisfactory.

So what’s next?

To be sure, there are some very legitimate critiques of the SBNR movement. Appropriation, shallow engagement, even psychological and physical harm that can result from unscrupulous teachers. But the long and short of it is, these practices work in that they do provide some sort of immediate feedback for the seeker. They allow for that interior exploration that SBNR identified individuals are seeking.

To ignore this in the pursuit of some version of “pure” or more social justice oriented religious practice is, to my mind, misguided.

With that said, if this institutional collapse and continued interest in unmediated spiritual experience is going to be a long term trend, it seems like we’re looking at a few possible futures.

The first is that spiritual practice continues to fragment. Institutions continue to collapse until we’re all self-soothing with individual practice, turned ever inward, and increasingly disengaged from the world at large.

The second possibility is that everything stabilizes. The market logic continues for a subset of seekers, but life goes on more or less as usual.

And the third possibility, by far my favorite, is that new, integrative traditions emerge with interspiritual teachers replacing Spiritual but not Religious. These new lineages work to fuse lineages and practices while honoring both the desire for freedom, and the importance of tradition, alike.

While that last future might seem like a bit of a pipedream at present, I’ve spent a great deal of time with serious teachers across lineages which gives me reason to hope. In my own life, I’ve watched a sort of syncretic universalism create a new movement of decentralized, pluralistic spiritual practice. A kind of universalism where interior exploration is encouraged, but so too is connection with the larger world.

Just last week, I watched folks practice Sufism alongside Vajrayana Buddhists. I’ve seen Contemplative Christians pray the rosary alongside neo-pagans. At the time of this writing a Rabbi with sympathies for interspiritual dialogue is giving an interfaith talk to a host of diverse spiritual seekers on campus three blocks from where I’m typing this.

It seems that a syncretic future—complete with interspiritual teachers—might be closer than we think.

For those who don’t know me, I am a white guy living outside of Boulder Colorado, the former American hippie mecca. During my undergraduate education, I attended one of the only Buddhist-inspired schools in the country—Naropa University—with the specific intention of learning from actual Buddhists.

As a result of this decision, my undergraduate education in Religious Studies was a wonderful exploration of Buddhist philosophy and practice. I’ve studied everything from pre-sectarian philosophy and Korean Zen to more modern strains of Shambhala Buddhism and back again.

My bookshelves literally sag with translations of the Pali Canon, many of the Mahayana scriptures, and more than a few Vajrayana texts—though this may be more indicative of poor bookshelf construction than intellectual heft.

Though I myself am not a Buddhist insofar as I am initiated into a lineage—it’s pretty obvious to anyone who knows me, I think Buddhism is rad.

That said, something that has always felt a little strange to me is the fact that almost all of my teachers have been white folks, conveying teachings to Americans which they themselves had received from distinctly Asian lineages.1

My experience is certainly not unique, and in many ways seems to be a function of the way that Buddhism spread in the United States. In the sixties and seventies, prompted by a wave of Tibetan exiles after the Chinese invasion in 59, interest in Tibetan Buddhism exploded. This marked a shift from a focus on Zen as the dominant entry point for those interested in Buddhist thought—popularized in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s by figures like D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts—to an interest in the more body and symbol focused tradition of Tibetan Vajrayana.

As the American countercultural milieu of the sixties and seventies emphasized individual experience, personal transformation, and self-directed practice, many Americans received the lineages of Tibetan Buddhism through that same lens. This is to say nothing of the fact that Tibetan teachers tuned their teachings to get better traction within this new cultural framework.

This fusion was especially reinforced after Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche made his decision to found Vajradhatu—what would eventually become Shambhala International—and the Naropa Institute in the heart of Boulder, Colorado. Once that happened, the city became a hub for hippies, artists, and writers of all stripes as thousands flocked to Boulder to learn the Buddhist teachings.

My teachers then, already primed from a culture of renewed individualism, landed in Boulder to study historically Asian lineages under Asian teachers; and eventually became teachers themselves.

Now don’t get me wrong, the dharma transmissions I’ve received from these teachers were genuine, powerful, and a part of lineages of Buddhism that are still alive and well today. They received the dharma from their teachers, they taught it, and I am profoundly grateful to have learned from them.

But as always happens when one group receives a teaching from another, and especially those from another culture, syncretism occurs and the teachings inevitably change as they are applied to that new cultural sphere.

This is not necessarily good or bad, but it is perhaps more important than ever to get to grips with what this tradition of American Buddhism, handed down from white American teachers who emerged from a period of extreme, almost revolutionary individualism, actually means for modern American dharma. We can honor the teachings—and teachers—while being clear eyed about the development of the tradition.

I want to be clear, this essay isn’t a screed on who should be allowed to teach, or even about what went wrong with American dharma. This could be an essay that talks about the dangers of appropriation. But it’s not really that either.

Just as a note, there are wonderful Buddhist communities of AAPI practitioners all over the states that operate with traditional practices more or less intact—despite decades of erasure and marginalization—and there’s much to say about that, but for the purposes of this essay, I want to focus on teachings handed down through predominantly white lineages. Particularly focusing on what that has meant for the students of these first and second generation folks.

If we hope to be ethical practitioners, we are compelled to take a look at what lineages of white American Buddhism have produced so far, and how those teachings have merged with American culture in general. If we’re lucky, we might see what it is that we’re missing.

American Buddhism

At present, as a result of both the internet and the flowering influence of many of these first and second generation American teachers, we are witnessing a profound merging of Buddhist thought with Western culture, well beyond those initial waves of last century.

The popularity of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction alone—MBSR for short—and the rampant proliferation of mindfulness apps should be evidence enough for this.

But while there have been a great many boons that have been born from the infusion of Buddhist thought into the American cultural sphere, there are quite a few less excellent developments that have resulted from this cultural merger.

To perhaps greatly oversimplify matters, mindfulness meditation was copied and pasted from cultural systems which are in many ways alien to the average American worldview. As a result, it is a regular occurrence for folks to fall into a trap of self-absorption, particularly when practitioners are engaged with modern lineages of secular meditation.

Is it any great surprise that cultures fixated on self-improvement, self-expression, and market competition see meditation not solely as a means to transcend the self, but as a means to further the very American project of self-development? Especially as a means to self-soothe in a world gone mad? Western individualism met mindfulness practice through a unique framework, and now we’re in the second and third generation of students, the effect of that particular framework is becoming more and more apparent.

Ultimately, whether or not we should be shocked by this doesn’t matter. The fact is, it’s happening. Or perhaps we should say, it has already happened. The question now is what we are to do about it.

The Abdication of Moral Responsibility

As I said above, there is a pronounced tendency in American spiritual circles—particularly those which are dharmic adjacent—to fall back into ever deepening layers of the self. Some folks disengage from politics to avoid “feeding anger” while others avoid conflict under the guise of compassion. I’m sure you’ve seen it. Most of us have.

“Good vibes only, man.”

A result of Buddhist practice being repackaged as a personal exercise—rather than a religious or social one—is the tendency for meditators (white or otherwise) to withdraw from social obligation, or difficult interaction—even if that interaction is a moral necessity.

In some ways, this is really just a function of meditation more generally, cultural concerns aside. I’ve noticed it in my own practice. The more you meditate—the more you train yourself in non-reaction regarding your own internal processes.—you start to realize that if you don’t upset the apple cart inside yourself, you have an easier time. Especially attaining deeper and deeper levels of concentration.

And while you’re sitting in meditation, that’s excellent.

But there’s more to life than just the cushion.

In many traditional forms of monastic Buddhist practice, there are mechanisms designed to prevent this sort of detached navel-gazing. The sangha—the community of practitioners—was a bulwark designed to keep aspirants accountable and engaged socially. It wasn’t just you and the wall. It was you, the wall, and the community of folks sitting alongside you.

And while it may be well and good to develop non-reactivity in your sitting practice, too many meditators are happy to sit back and be non-reactive when the times call for more engagement beyond themselves.

Too many of us are happy to leave the apple cart be, when in actuality, the best thing we could do for our communities and our own morality, is to tip that bitch over.

We might even have a responsibility to start lobbing those apples. Or at least handing them out to those with less.

Not Religious, Not Socially Engaged, but a Secret Third Thing

To be sure, the oldest forms of Buddhism weren’t particularly concerned with social or political change. The initial Buddhist teachings were primarily concerned with escaping samsara (the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.) To do so, folks more or less renounced the world, walking away from the ebbs and tides of cultural concerns to focus on the pursuit of enlightenment.

It is only relatively recently that movements of engaged Buddhism—pioneered by folks like Thich Nhat Hanh and Bhikkhu Bodhi—have applied teachings on Buddhist ethics to modern social issues.

But what’s interesting is that so many folks who practice Buddhism in white lineages, or even just secular ones, aren’t really doing either of these things.

These new Buddhists occupy a strange sort of half-state. Many have absorbed a handful of practices from Buddhist philosophy, but haven’t renounced the world.

Many advance their quest for equanimity, but have trouble taking those practices into the political or social sphere in the pursuit of transformation.

It’s not the old time religion, but it’s not the new kind either. Instead, we’re seeing a distinctly third way. Though this one is perhaps not as helpful as the traditional meaning of the term.

Enter secular mindfulness. An adoption of some of the teachings to ostensibly make life easier, while leaving much of what might be considered unpleasant or seen as too much effort on the side. It’s a piecemeal approach of things that work for the individual, while leaving other things on the table.

To be sure, the explosion in popularity of secular practice has been a boon for folks seeking a balm to their mental health, or even those hoping to gain some insight into their own minds. But for many, it is becoming clear that a shallow practice leaves much to be desired.

Why Buddhism at All? Secular Buddhism and the Death of the Sangha

Most of the folks who I’ve spoken to who are into Buddhism got into it because out and out secularism wasn’t enough. It didn’t give them the tools that they craved, and it often denied the reality of spirituality at all.

And when they went hunting for spiritual traditions to call their home, many found that American Christianity just didn’t pass muster. They were looking for a faith, and a practice, that gave them real tools for self-transformation without the moral cudgel, cultural baggage, and—if we’re honest—a perceived hatred for the other, that often comes with much of modern Christianity. (In this, I am sure Christ weeps.)

So, enter, secular Buddhism: Buddhism without any of the messy religious stuff that turns people off.

It makes sense why this sort of Buddhism, pioneered by folks like Stephen Bachelor and Jack Kornfield, continues to be adopted by the majority of white American dharma sympathizers, well after the revolutionary cultural period of the seventies has drawn to a close.

To put it simply (perhaps a little too simply) we might think of secular Buddhism as effectively a Buddhism which finds alignment with scientific materialism. And it makes sense why this would be appealing to modern day seekers.

Gods, reincarnation, and certain views of karma are out. Brain waves, psychology, and personal-development are in!

When looking at it from a purely developmental stance, in admitting my own biases, I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing on its face. Syncretism is a slow project, after all. But when we’re looking at Buddhism as a whole, if you ditch rebirth, if you ditch an understanding of karma—and the obligations to the external world that come from that—but you hang onto the practices that turn you inwards, you wind up with this lopsided thing where practitioners withdraw from the world in a bid to further secure their own peace.

Which, again, might make sense in the context of meditation as wellness.

It even makes sense when looking at a religious application of Buddhism. But much of the emphasis in modern practice seems to be on the latter rather than the former. And that can be a problem.

Spit Shining the Three Jewels

In traditional modes of Buddhism, there exist what are called the Three Jewels (or the Triple Gem).

These Jewels are the Buddha (the enlightened teacher), the Dharma (the teachings/the pathway to liberation), and the sangha (the community of believers and practitioners).

Whether we’re talking about Buddhism as a religion, or as a mode of social action, these three components are understood to be integral to the development of not just the individual, but the community as a whole.

To understand why this is important, it’s necessary to outline that the sangha isn’t just a community of likeminded folks. It’s a system of accountability and obligation to one another that is mutually reinforcing.

But as we’ve seen in the States, many convert Buddhists have ditched the sangha almost entirely. In doing so, we have done away with not only the obligations that would come with an understanding of karma in a traditional sense, but also with the community members of the sangha, further reinforcing a focus on the practices of interior exploration.

For my money, it is this understanding—that community is integral to true practice—that needs to be integrated into the modern American project if American Buddhism has a hope of breaking free from its commoditization. Or if it has a hope of expanding into a larger sphere of enlightened action.

Whether we’re developing along the lines of engaged Buddhism or along the lines of more traditional religious practice. In any event, we desperately need one another.

Now that many of us meditators have applied the teachings of our teachers, and have mastered the art of looking within, it’s becoming more and more apparent that it may be time to get off the cushion.