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