Posts in Spirituality
Rhetoric and spirituality

If spirituality is a new religion which arose in the 19th century, then right now feels like the Reformation. It’s a moment of disenchantment, scepticism, criticism, iconoclasm and denunciation. Within the last three years, many people within New Age spirituality have spoken up against some of the problems within the culture, from conspirituality to grifting to psychedelic abuse.

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Robert Anton Wilson on how to integrate weird experiences

I’ve been reading Erik Davis’ magnum opus, High Weirdness. Davis is the pre-eminent chronicler of Californian spirituality, and this book masterfully explores a particular scene — the Californian counter-culture in the 1970s, when hippy optimism curdled into paranoia and conspiracy theories, and everyone suspected everyone else was a narc.

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7) Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the Coming Race

This is the seventh entry in my spiritual eugenics series, which explores the overlap between eugenics and New Age spirituality. You can find the whole series here.

You probably haven’t heard of Edward Bulwer-Lytton. If you have, it’s likely because he was the author of supposedly the worst ever opening sentence of a novel: ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ — a line so cringe, it’s inspired an annual prize for bad writing.


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‘Spiritual Activism’: do we really want New Age hippies to be more politically active?

I confess I have become more cynical this last two years, particularly about my culture — ie New Age spirituality.

If someone calls themselves ‘spiritual’ these days, sadly it’s usually short-hand for ‘anti-vax, anti-science, a sucker for conspiracy theories or snake oil health remedies, with an inflated sense of their own spiritual advancement and expertise (particularly with regard to healing), combined with actions that actively harm others, out of selfishness or simple cluelessness’.

Is that too harsh?

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6) Dune, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and ‘occult eugenics’

This is the latest chapter in my project to explore ‘spiritual eugenics’. It looks at occult eugenics in the practices and books of members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a very influential occult society of the late 19th century. Its members believed they could use sex magic to engineer the incarnation of highly-evolved beings — an idea which would appear in later fantasy fiction, including Frank Herbert’s Dune.

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5) Nietzsche and the New Age cult of the superbeing

In 1883, the same year that Francis Galton coined the word ‘eugenics’, a strange religious text was published, announcing the coming of a new type of human. The grand announcement went completely unnoticed at the time, and yet it would capture the imagination of the world in the coming decades. The book, of course, was Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.

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Joan Didion and the case against hippies

In 1967 Joan Didion went to San Francisco to cover the hippy scene in Haight Ashbury. After spending weeks hanging out with the hippies and flower people, she didn’t feel she ‘had’ the story, but she filed it anyway, and the essay became a classic of New Journalism and a famous takedown of vacuous spirituality, called ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’.

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Postcard from Sedona: balancing critical thinking and mystical surrender

Last week I drove to Sedona, in Arizona, to find out how conspirituality has affected the New Age capital of the United States.

Why did this little town of 10,000 people become such a New Age Mecca? It’s in a gorgeous location, hidden away beneath giant red-rock sandstone protrusions, like alien vessels from an ancient civilization.

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1) Introducing ‘Spiritual Eugenics’

By eugenics I refer to a programme, launched in 1883 by Francis Galton, to improve the genetic quality of human beings, through negative eugenics (preventing those deemed genetically unfit from passing on their genes, either through voluntary or involuntary sterilization, confinement, or extermination) and through positive eugenics (encouraging those deemed genetically fit to pass on their genes more, through breeding with others deemed fit, or through donating their seed to ‘genius sperm banks’).

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Henri Nouwen on waiting as a spiritual practice

I’m in a waiting phase. Literally — I am waiting in one country to be allowed to enter another. Creatively also — I am waiting to see what happens to a project I have been working on for many years, which has hit a bump and needs to develop into something new. And spiritually — I am waiting for a new stage in my life to begin, and feel filled with uncertainty.

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‘The missing ingredient in spirituality is critical thinking’

Rick Archer emerged from a troubled youth to become a leading teacher of Transcendental Meditation. 12 years ago, he left TM and started Buddha At The Gas Pump, a podcast where he interviews spiritual teachers. It now has millions of views and downloads. I talked to Rick about how spirituality has changed since he first started meditating in 1968, and how he thinks New Age culture has fared during the COVID pandemic.

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From Freak to Super-freak

Two cheers for the work of Theodore Roszak, a Californian academic who died 10 years ago, and who is one of the more intelligent chroniclers of New Age spirituality. I’ve read four of his books now, and find much to admire in his prose. Encountering his work in New Age culture is like coming across a dapper gentleman in the heart of a steaming jungle.

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Make love, not vaccines: why are New Age hippies so anti-vax?

In the autumn of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, Dr Emily Grossman and her partner decided to move to Totnes, a small town in Devon that is popular with eco-hippies. Emily looked forward to escaping the Big Smoke and being surrounded by like-minded spiritual activists. A friend encouraged her to join some Totnes online chat groups. It was a rude awakening.

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Ken Wilber and spiritual hierarchy

One of the things I’m wrestling with at the moment is hierarchy in spirituality, and the idea of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’.

I’m writing a book that looks at evolutionary spirituality, and its tendency to elitism and authoritarianism. Many leading figures in the New Age of the 1880s to 1930s preached the coming of an evolved spiritual elite which, they sometimes added, deserved to dominate and control the rest of humanity.

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On environmentalism and spirituality

The most common criticism of spirituality is that its narcissistic, consumerist, selfish, apolitical and full of woo-woo magical thinking. That can be true, but not always. There’s one area where spirituality is much less individualistic, more politically active and more prone to evidence-based thinking than other faiths — and that’s regarding the environment.

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Life without God

At the end of the 19th century, the prospect of the death of God filled people with terror.

It would — we were told — lead to anarchy and despair.

Worried intellectuals assembled new religions — Marxism, Spiritualism, psychical research, Social Darwinism, western Buddhism — and scrambled onto them like life rafts as they awaited the deluge.

But 150 years on, it is extraordinary how absent ‘God’ is from people’s lives, and how little people notice.

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How the New Age fell for the oldest lie in the book

Last week, we looked at how Trump strategists — particularly Roger Stone and General Michael Flynn — mobilized the world of conspiracy culture to attack the Clinton campaign and win the 2016 US presidential election. In this article, we look at how the far-right tapped into the world of New Age conspirituality.

I’m going to focus, in this story, on one well-known New Age influencer, called Sacha Stone.


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How far-right strategists hijacked the New Age (part 1)

Does it matter if Qanon emerged organically from the infosphere, or if it was synthesized in a lab as a weaponized political meme? I don’t know. I don’t know if we can ever find out exactly who was behind Qanon. When people have posted about it all being a psyop (psychological operation) led by shadowy intelligence agents, it’s sounded like, well, a conspiracy theory.

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Michael Murphy on Esalen and the mystical expats

Michael Murphy co-founded Esalen, a cross between an adult education college, a research institute, and an ashram, in 1962. It’s had a huge influence on contemporary spirituality, and was the incubator for everything from ecstatic dance to Authentic Relating to holotropic breathwork. Here, Murphy tells me how he was inspired by his friends, Alan Watts, Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley, and how Esalen managed to keep going for 53 years, when so many spiritual experiments went very wrong very quickly.

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Perennialism and fascism

While I was in San Francisco, I got the chance to meet Michael Murphy, one of the founders of the Esalen Institute. It's a cross between a spiritual retreat centre and an adult education college, perched on the cliffs of Big Sur next to some hot springs. It's been very influential on transpersonal psychology and American spirituality.

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The Quakers on how to balance inner and outer work

Last week I visited Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat centre outside Philadelphia, nestled between the gorgeous Quaker liberal arts colleges of Haverford and Swarthmore. I made a sort of mini-pilgrimage there as part of my research into the ‘mystical expats’ – Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and Alan Watts, four English writers who moved to California in the 1930s and helped invent the ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ demographic (which is now 25% of the US population).

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The lazy mysticism of Alan Watts

The only thinker whose popularity on YouTube comes close to prophet-of-rage Jordan Peterson is Alan Watts, the British popularizer of Eastern wisdom. Watts’ talks from the 50s, 60s and early 70s have millions of views on YouTube, and are often edited to the accompaniment of orchestral or ‘chillstep’ soundtracks and jazzy collages of modern life.

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Integrating ayahuasca into western healthcare (part 2)

Here is part 2 of my interview with pioneering researcher Milan Scheidegger, who works in the psychedelics lab at University of Zurich. You can read part 1 here. In this half of the interview, we discuss how to translate aspects of indigenous ayahuasca rituals - such as the shaman or sacred plant songs - into the context of western healthcare. We also discuss Milan's plans to establish a psychedelic healing clinic in Switzerland.

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Spiritual materialism

Hello. Well, this is awkward. I stopped writing this newsletter two months ago, just before travelling to the Amazon jungle for an ayahuasca ceremony. The good news, back then, was that I'd been handed a philosophy column for the New Statesman magazine - the culmination of a dream I'd had for over a decade.

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New book on ecstatic experience (not by me)

There's a new book out later this month on the psychology of ecstatic experiences, and why they're good for us. It's called Stealing Fire, by two performance coaches, Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal. It might be disconcerting to have another book on ecstasy published two months before my own, but actually I'm glad others are walking the same path and coming to similar conclusions.

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Do ecstatic experiences tell us anything reliable about the universe?

There is a growing consensus among secular psychologists that experiences of ecstasy and ego-transcendence are good for us, and tell us interesting things about the nature of the mind. But do they tell us anything interesting or reliable about the nature of the universe? I'm trying to figure this out. Here are my thoughts so far - please respond in the comments.

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Review: Cure, by Jo Marchant

Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body, is an excellent new book by science journalist Jo Marchant, which explores the healing (and harming) power of the mind and emotions over the body. It succintly brings together a lot of recent evidence in areas sometimes dismissed as 'pseudoscience', such as the placebo response and hypnotherapy, to argue for their medical efficacy and the need for a medical model which better incoporates the mind.

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