In 2016, while working on The Art of Losing Control, I conducted a survey on spiritual experiences. The results were interesting — 85% of participants reported having one or more such experience, but 72% said they thought there was still a taboo around such experiences.
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In this chapter, we will look at how Julian Huxley and his peers developed the religious creed which he would later call Transhumanism, and how their visions of scientific utopia inspired his brother’s humorous novel, Brave New World.
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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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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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In 1921, the British psychologist William McDougall declared:
Read MoreI have two hobbies — psychical research and eugenics. So far as I know, I am the only person alive today who takes an active interest in both these movements. [‘The need for psychical research’]
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.
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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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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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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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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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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The aim of the ‘Spiritual Eugenics’ research project is to explore the overlap between New Age spirituality and eugenics. It will explore how New Age spirituality adapted Darwin’s theory of natural selection into a theory of the ‘spiritual evolution’ of a new species of superbeings, a master-race.
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Professor Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, who died this week aged 84, was one of the world’s best-known psychologists, famous for developing the concept of ‘flow’. I interviewed Csikszentmihalyi over the phone about his latest essay, ‘The Politics of Consciousness’, published in a new collection of essays called Well-Being and Beyond.
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I had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from 1995 until 2001. Seven years of fear, anxiety, depression and paranoia, which I feared would last forever. But I got better, thanks to a near-death experience.
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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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On March 17 2020, a few days after the WHO had declared COVID-19 a pandemic and states had enforced lockdowns on their citizens, Oprah Winfrey’s name trended on Twitter.
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Above is an interview I did with Stephen Dinan, the CEO of the Shift Network, which is the biggest platform of online wisdom courses, with around three million customers.
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About a decade ago, I was on the London Underground, when a beautiful woman got onto my carriage and sat a few seats down from me. I felt instantly drawn to her and did something I have never done before or since — I spoke to someone on the Tube.
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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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As we’ve explored in previous newsletters, New Age culture has had something of a shocker during the pandemic. It has, in the words of Jamie Wheal, turned into a ‘rat’s nest shitshow’.
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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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