Month: December 2025

Introduction

I have several times attempted to write a comprehensive review of the past year, but the energy has fled from the effort quickly. Too much has been going on and there’s no way I can process all this in a modest number of pages. Besides, I am not sure I have anything useful to say as an overview.

So, I want instead to reflect on what is uppermost in my thoughts as the year ends. There’s been a rich vein of stimulus to provoke deep reflection. In November 2024 I listened to an astrologer who counselled, “Don’t hold onto anything too tightly.” I took that to mean, for me, interpretations and beliefs. 

Catching some Zs 

I am listening to the 3rd book of a series of chats with a collective of non-physical entities called the Zs. 

I make a point of listening to/reading such sources because I like to be challenged to think differently. These sources are confronting – in terms of their nature and their content. I don’t assume they are unvarnished renditions of actual entities but as translations. 

The idea of conversing with such entities isn’t an issue for me because I have done it myself, after considerable vetting and checking. Hence, I have no problem with the nature of such communication. Content is, however, a very different matter. Because it is essentially a translation process it’s always at risk of distortion. 

The sources do not see the world the way we do, so they disrupt habituated thought. Are they trustworthy? That’s a choice we must make. They are certainly confronting and challenging. 

The nature of Christianity

I am not a Christian and neither do I have any affection for the faith. But it has dominated western civilisation. So, any attempt to understand who we are shouldn’t be distorted by resentment and bias. 

We are who are because of/despite Christianity. Besides it has been a vehicle for the transmission of many ideas – but not the owner of them. It’s more a delivery mechanism a causative force. The guy who delivers your pizza shouldn’t take credit for making it.

It’s also not in isolation. There isn’t really a single thing called Christianity any more than there is a single thing called Vegetable or Fruit. This is why it can manifest as great cruelty or kindness. 

At the core of any religion is human psychology and biology. It can’t function outside of those constraints. This is why I have explored evolutionary biology and psychology and cognitive science. We are organic humans who may be influenced by soul, but not dominated by it, save in rare extreme instances. This is why there are so many sexual scandals associated with religious people (men almost exclusively). Being ordained does not override biological nature and believing in Jesus doesn’t mean you are ‘saved’. Our capacity to believe BS is embedded in our organic nature and no amount of pious talk or thought will overcome it. 

Religion is deeply complex as an idea because it encompasses the whole of who we are. It’s also a bad idea because it creates false distinctions that mislead us and render us vulnerable to manipulation and oppression. 

It is often more fruitful to explore the psychology and sociology of a faith than its beliefs. 

The organization as a microcosm

My third fascination has been organizational behaviour and leadership. In part this is a legacy of my time as a public servant but it’s more that organizations might be the most studied entities on the planet. The amount of investment in research is staggering. The number of books, articles, consultants, coaches, trainers and so on is beyond count. 

An organization is a microcosm of our culture. It’s the canary in our collective coal mine. Organizations are constituted from humans who come together in novel ways, compared to our long history. They are experiments in enterprise and collective endeavor. 

The amount by effort put into improving performance is massive and the sad thing seems to be that it’s the ‘bastard’ corporations who heed the advice and those supposedly committed to doing good who do not. Mind you, there are plenty of ‘good’ businesses who heed the call to be better members of our community but it is so often the that ones who are held up as exemplary instances of good practice are the ones most often despised in popular imagination.

The problem seems to be that to excel at what you do requires hard work and discipline – and that’s not the kind of message that beleaguered public servants are keen on responding to with any enthusiasm. The engine of enthusiasm is self-interest, not idealism – and this is as true for corporations, public sector agencies, religions or spiritual movements. We do enough to secure our rewards.

Our understanding of this has been distorted by fantasies and errors of selflessness as an ideal. The real question is the nature of our self-interest. Is it personal or holistic? We all have a stake in the holistic – and it’s not exclusionary. In contrast, if we imagine selflessness as an ideal, we are not alert when self-interest, which cannot really be suppressed, asserts its presence. That’s why so many who are devoted to ideals betray them. Their devotion is idealistic rather than realistic.

Enthusiastic idealists often turn out to be con artists or folks whose psychological health needs tending to. There are, of course, the quiet idealists genuinely committed to honorable labor. If we allow that the human spirit is present in any human endeavor, running a corporation with an avaricious profit motive is just as ‘spiritual’ as running a religious one – as Alice Roberts’ most recent book, Dominion, makes abundantly clear. The book explores why Christianity spread through Europe. The reasons will surprise many.

The fact that we think spiritual means something religious rather than just about being human has meant that we have been induced handover something innate and essential to us to religious organizations. We need to recover what is ours in a holistic way from those who want to control how we think and how we experience who we are. This claw back is underway, but its in an early and very emotive stage.

Self-interest is okay. That way we own our failings and don’t invent devils to blame when we let self-indulgence, self-delusion and self-pity overrun self-awareness and self-discipline. Selflessness is a fantasy ideal we cannot attain, not even when we abdicate personal responsibility to faith and belief.

Self-awareness, taking personal responsibility and developing emotional intelligence are the key themes of leadership and management texts. They should also be essential themes of ‘spiritual texts’.

Conclusion

I have spent 2025 rethinking and unlearning, still trying to break through the bonds of experiential and cultural conditioning. I was raised in an intensely Christian family and grew up with no affection for the faith at all. I grew up in a culture with a strong English orientation, but on the cusp of it declining. The British empire and Christianity are in decline, but their influences still infest my consciousness. Each generation will have its own inherent infestation of ideas, assumptions and beliefs that are no longer fit for purpose.

I had direct ‘spiritual’ experiences in the Tasmanian wilderness in my teenage years, but it was decades before I discovered the idea of animism. Back then I had no idea about what was happening. I was in a no-man’s-land between hard core materialism and fading Christianity. It was not a pleasant place to be.

I aspire to be an animist, but I am conscious of the extent to which my personal and cultural environment has conditioned how I feel, imagine and think. Animism isn’t something you convert to. It’s a state of mind to be inhabited without reservation. Its all-in. I am not there yet, but over the past year I have moved appreciably closer.

There are no signs that 2026, or the future in general, is going to smile indulgently on those who have no interest in cultivating deeper self-awareness or accepting responsibility for their part in things being the way they are. This isn’t a forecast of doom. It’s just an observation that we can elect to strive to be emotionally and psychologically fit enough to benefit from the times ahead, or we can decide to risk it as we are.

The organizational behaviour and leadership material are often better guides  to the future and how to best respond to it than most of the spiritual and religious stuff for good reasons. Its plain, clear, unambiguous and isn’t full of waffly BS. I am not suggesting that you should make a book like The Octopus Organization your new Bible. But you could throw your holy books away and use the book as a self-help guide.

We mustn’t think that ‘spiritual’ is only what is esoteric or metaphysical. It is all of who, and what, we are. We must restore the potential for holistic intelligence that made us remarkable in the first instance – so many millennia ago.

Let’s see how the new year goes. I am still holding things I think are precious to me with soft hands. I am conscious that I may have to let them go so I have the capacity to grasp what is new.

Michael Patterson

31 December 2025

21:11 EDST

Introduction

I have been doing a deep dive into the nature of religion – trying to get my head around why it serves a purpose. It is a profoundly complex thing that maybe we can’t safely escape from. So, I have been musing about what a ‘fit for purpose religion’ might look like now.

Religion and religiosity have a deserved bad name. And it’s fair to ask whether rehabilitation is possible or desirable. I am imagining an affirmative answer only as a thought experiment – not with any intent to assert a definitive position. As I begin to write I don’t have any expectation of where I will be at the end.

Religion and religiosity should have a good name. But so should many other things. Politicians routinely are ranked near the bottom of a scale on trust but we all would rather they were near the top. Complex and messy reality gets in the way. Human psychology constantly serves up truths that we wish weren’t quite so unfortunately there. We have what we have. Understanding why we do so would be useful.

We have been educated to see religion in very unhelpful ways. Apologists can’t step back and confront weaknesses in their enthusiasm and opponents imagine they are being doggedly rational. So, I am going to attempt to craft a definition of religion that can be useful in helping me see whether it is something we should discard or renovate.

A worldview

These days religion is an optional extra. A few centuries back some people reacted against theological dogma and quit believing. Religion was seen to be irrational, intolerant and cruel. There was a growing affection for reason, evidence and tolerance. This was a genuine critical step in the evolution of western civilization. 

But long before that what we now call religion was part of a worldview that was essentially animistic. The gods were real, as were spirits. Ritual was a vital part of life. Magic was real. Understanding and managing how humans thrived or survived in the world was critical. Cultures and communities made the best efforts they could to engage with the lives that surrounded them – material and immaterial. What we call religion wasn’t something apart from life tasks. It was wholly integrated into a single worldview.

Our perspective on our ancestors has been profoundly distorted. First our Christian roots induced us to imagine our spiritual superiority as adherents to the one true faith. Second, building on that, we saw others as inferior – as primitives or savages. We now imagine that we are ‘more evolved’ than our ancestors. True, we have created technologies that are unlike anything seen before – and through them we see the world in ways others could not. But what we have is a technology mediated sense of the world – not inherently a superior one.

The essential sense of being human hasn’t changed that much. Our psychology hasn’t ‘evolved’ at anything like the pace of our ability to make things out of stuff. We still honour the thinkers of ancient Greece, the Upanishads and the wisdom of shamans. To the extent that we are more evolved than our ancestors on a psychological level, it isn’t by very much at all.

So, thinking of religion as a separable part of an integrated worldview doesn’t help. But that’s a tough habit to break. It doesn’t even work in our present time when thinking about us. We just have a very complex worldview that gives us the luxury of imagining we can see religion as separate. And complex doesn’t mean better – by any means. Chess looks way more complex than Go on the surface.

Advances in our learning have made it necessary to develop highly specialised knowledge fields, but at the cost of understanding how that specialised knowledge is connected to myriad other knowledge domains. Now, rather than getting a balanced worldview, we can end up highly educated but intellectually isolated. The fact that, despite our great progress, we are confronting numerous environmental and systemic crises is testimony that something in our worldview is missing or unbalanced.

The error of the supernatural

The term supernatural was introduced in the 15^th century. It started off as a theological idea but ended up as a materialist’s poke at anything disagreeable. Regardless of its origin it’s an unfortunate idea. Reality can be divided into the natural and the supernatural. Depending on who you listen to the supernatural is superior, scary or delusional.

It’s an idea that infests our culture and shapes how we think about the subtle levels of being. The ability to be attuned to subtle dimensions of anything comes down to natural sensitivity, interest and exposure. A worldview that incorporates ‘spirits’ may lead to intense engagement or just acceptance of their presence. That engagement might include rituals to seek aid, make peace or honour presence and influence.

Cultures that incorporate such a worldview might encourage observance of sacred times or participation in ritual actions regardless of whether there is any conscious sense of presence. People might claim perception of spirits with no means of confirming their perception. It might be that in any such culture there are those who lie, who are mistaken or who are deluded. There will also be those who do not agree with the worldview.

The idea of the supernatural draws a needlessly hard boundary that separates a subtle shade of reality from the not so subtle. The idea that the natural is whole and complex was universal until a theological benefit of destroying that universality was discerned. Early Christianity needed a means of distinguishing the faith on moral and intellectual grounds. It created the idea of the supernatural so it could elevate its claims and diminish all other ways of knowing.

We don’t have any serviceable theory of spirits available in our shared secular space. The idea of spirits is still with us, but our lives are so filled with intense input we scarcely have the opportunity to inadvertently encounter spirits. Our minds are so full of ideas that induce us to dismiss the merest hint of an encounter as unwelcome or unreal, regardless of our desire.

Spirits are not seen as part of nature – but apart – supernatural. Hence, they are evaluated by dogmatic and political instruments.

Natural humans

We humans have been animists for a very long time. When sensing your environment is essential for your survival or flourishing, finely tuned senses are critical – as a constant practice and shared commitment to getting it right. Materialists like to observe that our ancestors’ acute need led them to misinterpret natural phenomena as dangerous critters – and hence to imagine spirits where there were none. It’s a psychological phenomenon called pareidolia. It’s something we all know about, and maybe we have been scared by a shape that looked like a person as we were walking along a twilight path.

But the idea that our ancestors and members of animistic tribes were so dim-witted they couldn’t figure out the difference between something real and an illusion is beyond any civil critique. Acute awareness of landscape yields to many more perceptions of what is present than just what has physical form.

Our ancestors needed a theory of the world they were in that was highly serviceable. Their lives depended upon it. They didn’t invent materialism – and they were dedicated to empiricism. That should be instructive to us. What they came up with was a fusion of functional knowledge about where they lived, ideas about what made good tools, what made good food, what was useful or dangerous, what was good for their community – and so on. They invented shamanism, rituals and beliefs that worked together to sustain their lives. They invented codes of behaviour, morals and practices that strengthened individual characters and their group.

They developed an integrated worldview within which nothing stood apart.

Conclusion

The idea of Religion we know is an awful idea. It trades off an error – that reality is divided into natural and supernatural. It sees itself as a superior way of knowing that is distinct from other ways of knowing. It seeks to dominate a culture’s worldview and assert a privileged standing within it.

It’s not worth renovating. 

Our ancestors didn’t have the idea of materialism available to them. Their acute senses told them that they were in a community of lives we have reduced to unsubtle terms like spirits or gods or ghosts or demons. Theological dogma has napalmed the subtle ecology of consciousness and materialism has cheered it on, adding its own arrogant condescension. Neither can get beyond pride and self-delusion.

Now, mercifully, we are beginning to think that panpsychism might be worthy of serious rational thought. While the intellectual bold step should be welcomed, we need to remember that we do not think in isolation but as part of a worldview. We need the cultural dimensions as well. That means being psychologically engaged with the baggage of deeply confused cultural senses of meaning that are our heritage – and which have shaped how we think and feel.

It isn’t our minds that get us into trouble. It’s our psychological states – shaped by suffering and immaturity. We have long dismissed emotions as unworthy and inferior to the rational mind. In the 19^th century they were thought fit only for women and children. We struggled in the 20^th century to emerge from this cell of conceit – and it remains, still, a job not completed.

So, what’s the alternative? An integrated and holistic worldview that is not distorted or hamstrung by biases or delusions – one crafted by a shared concern for a reality-based sense of our common good. It honours the whole person – on an individual level and as a community. It honours the whole world. Some variation of the idea panpsychism is a necessary container – whether articulated by modern thinkers or expressed through the rich legacy of human inquiry – such as The Upanishads. We really haven’t travelled far in the past 3-4 millennia.

Emma Restall Orr was a huge inspiration to me when I was exploring the idea of animism over 15 years ago. Her books remain a highlight in my inquiry. You can check them out here – https://www.amazon.com.au/s?k=emma+restall+orr&crid=1US7KQT32NLH0&sprefix=emma+restall%2Caps%2C244&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_1_12

There are many other excellent sources of inspiration. I mention Emma’s works simply because they deserve way more interest than they get.

Note: I use Amazon because it uniquely lists books as 3D, ebooks and audiobooks. I am committed to accessibility as a person with a disability. Do please support your local bookstore where you can.

Introduction

In Far Journeys Robert Monroe describes how, while out of his body and travelling with a guide, he watched ‘souls’ streaming into the Earth’s zone eager to experience physical life. The Buddha spoke of how desire caused cycles of rebirth and suffering. He taught how to quell desire and escape the compulsion for physical existence. 

This scenario is expressed in numerous sources. But it is not yet part of our understanding of human psychology. That’s a pity because it leads to a powerful misdiagnosis of the human condition. 

Consider this. Our planet’s population comprises souls at various stages of their experience of physical life. Some are ‘old souls’ and others are at early stages in their cycle of lives. 

A soul’s personality is shaped by life experiences. Some crave danger and excitement, and others seek a gentler life of living in harmony with their surroundings. Some are born into trauma and violence and others into relative harmony and ease. 

As well as this the organic nature of our bodies adds the dimension of instincts and reflexes. Contemporary psychology offers a deep insight into the way our organic aspect influences our behaviour and experiences.

We are 3-in-1. The soul and its attributes, the psychology of physical experiences and our organic body’s inherited traits, instincts and reflexes. 

This being also engages with its environment. The soul interacts with other souls in ways that are mostly beyond our understanding. Our psychological self – the product of physical and non-physical experiences engages with lives that are both physical and non-physical. Our bodies are intimately bound up with lives in the physical world and engage with non-physical lives as well. 

The fuller reality is more complex than this. What I want to do here is paint a quick picture of an idea that we are multi-dimensional and complex. No effort at comprehending human nature and behaviour can be successful without a willingness to be open to this complexity. 

This isn’t ’spirituality’ 

What I have outlined above comes from many sources. Some will insist that this just a belief. Well, in a sense yes. But it is based on experience. 

I argue that psychology and biology are both forms of spirituality in the sense that they explore the nature of being human. The sense of ‘spirit’ exists in each of the 3 dimensions of being human. There is the organic spirit of our physical body, as there is in our psychological make up. And, of course, there’s the ‘spirit’ in our souls.

Consequently, the term ‘spiritual’ should be either global or redundant. 

I should note that I use the term ‘soul’ to mean that enduring essence of who we are. There are some who insist that that the term has a precise meaning and we should stick to it. But it’s a general non-technical term that will serve us well.

I want to think about being human in the fullest sense so there is no point in trying to have a separate category of spirituality. That means crafting a boundary between what is spiritual and what is not. That’s a tricky thing to do and tempts us into dogmas and conflicts over something that isn’t at all important. 

There are important distinctions to be made about which agencies we can relate to and engage with. This why religious texts tell stories of deities as if they were human. Without that context, the stories would be incomprehensible. We explain the ‘invisible’ through the medium of the ‘visible’ in a sense. 

Ideas of the holy or the sacred are ideas about real distinctions. They are not just sentiments or fancies. If one takes a materialist’s perspective, it simply screens out real things that become ‘not there’ – and then we lose the subtly of perception to become consciously aware of them. 

We can make our minds like noise cancelling headphones that keep us hearing only what we feed in. Or we can be open to what is there. Calling this openness ‘spirituality’ misconstrues what is going on – especially because it is often another cancelling filter of belief and dogma. 

We will do what meets our psychological needs (in all 3 respects). 

Many ‘spiritual’ seekers are ignoring psychology just as many psychologists are ignoring the esoteric extension of their field. We need to remember where psyche comes from (please do explore it online). We have substituted soul for mind – a cultural choice rather than a rational one. 

This hassled to the myth that ‘evolved’ humans are ‘rational’ and the intellect is our highest form of awareness. In fact, we feel more than we think and ‘dignify’ those feelings as thoughts. It’s not ‘bad ideas’ that get us into bother but the immature and ill-disciplined emotions we mingle with our instincts and impulses that cause so much peril.

Denial of soul as a reality or an idea is a choice made by those who are committed to materialism. There is some psychological satisfaction in closing off that dimension of being human. And there’s an existential drama in opening up the prospect. 

We have become so accustomed to developing, and confidently expressing, an opinion based on zero serious research. Between this and entrenched ideological biases that produce concrete dogma we have missed so much. 

It is still common to hear “We do not know whether there is life after death.” (We do). “Nobody has ever returned from ‘beyond the grave’” (They have) “We do not know what happens when we die.” (We do). 

A more truthful rendition of these laments would be to replace the “We” with “I”. But then that must force the admission that “I don’t know because I don’t want to/I am afraid to. “

Psychologically, dogmas create boundaries behind which we can craft a sense of personal safety. We can use them to ward off unwanted senses of exposure to a profound existential reality. 

This is something we all must go through on our way to genuine awareness of who and what we are. 

In what might seem like a paradoxical way, religion can be used in such a manner. A determined dogma can become an impenetrable self-soothing fog in which the believer safely resides. This isn’t an insult. It can be a safe zone in which psychological growth or  healing can take place. Exposing oneself to the greater existential reality isn’t for everyone at any given time. And when the time comes, it isn’t necessarily a joyous event at first. It can be many years (and maybe many lifetimes) of struggling to release oneself from psychological processes that are somewhere between maintaining a barrier and tearing it down. 

Opposition to the flesh

Various spiritual and religious movements express an aversion to the flesh and material life in general. 

This creates a contradictory perception that physical life is unworthy, a trap of souls, a debasement of spirit. This a dogmatic interpretation of part of a deeper truth. Physical life is esteemed as a realm of growth, but in the cycle of things there will come a time when it’s time to move on. Those who are at the stage of needing to move on will understandably frame physical life as being a negative experience. It is for some – at the right time. For others physical life will be compulsively gratifying. But for others it will be a balance of proper pleasure and restraint. 

This should remind us that many religious claims are represented as being universally true when they are true and relevant only to people at a particular stage in their existence. 

The abandonment of institutional religion reflects important signs of our times. The claim of universally applicable dogma is rejected by people who see their life priorities and experiences as inconsistent with established systems. 

Understanding being human

To me the deeper knowledge that allows us to stitch together a full picture of being human is not yet available in a secular sense. There will be groups who have strong esoteric knowledge foundations but not all of them honour contemporary knowledge in psychology, biology and neuroscience. This is a future potential. 

There are contentious claims made about fusions of our biology and technology which are driven by what seems to be dogmatic materialism. 

We struggle to imagine the human future in a collective sense because so many conflicting models of being human are clung to with deep passion. 

Yet the knowledge we need is available to those who go looking for it. But its not in a widely digestible form. That’s some time away. This does mean that there’s exciting opportunities for creative synthesists to develop new narratives about being human. This means stepping away from the habit of competitive knowledge seeking and embracing collaborative insight sharing. This is a mutual adventure.

Conclusion

There are multiple commentaries asserting that humanity is in for a shake up in the foreseeable future. Many try to predict that future from a singular perspective. 

I agree about the shakeup. It’s been going on for centuries. But I don’t pretend to understand where it is going beyond anticipating that we will adapt to the evolutionary pressures we are under – even if things might be tough for a while. 

Part of this shake up is the loosening of structures – of living together, of thought, of our sense of relating to the reality beyond our modest bubble. 

Toward the end of 2024 an astrologer, thinking about the year ahead and beyond, offered a piece of canny advice, “Don’t hold on too tightly.” He didn’t say anything about what to. It could be cherished beliefs. It could be ideas. It could be lifestyles. It could be our ideas about what it is to be human. 

There are many times in our lives when relaxing is the best option even when we are awash in a sense of threat. If we tighten up, we rob ourselves of the potential to adapt nimbly.

How we imagine being human cannot grow to the potential it has if we cling to beliefs and dogmas that are inconsistent with the scope of human experience and which reflect a narrow slit through which we fearfully peer at what is around us.

We have devalued our ancestors, presuming them to be less capable than we are. That’s not true at all.  We can hide in our cultural bubble with its glittering conceits, or we can explore what is known about being fully human with open-hearted humility. It’s our choice.