Introduction

I had the great pleasure of meeting Greg Keily today via Zoom. I became aware of Greg on the YouTube channel The Other Side NDE. He was an Australian Navy diver who nearly died from being in very chilly Antarctic waters in an adverse situation. But he didn’t have the classic NDE experience and described several decades of emotional trauma in the aftermath. You can watch that video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAN-S0xLvxA&list=TLPQMTIwMjIwMjYRCjb5olzRRA&index=5

Greg eventually became a hypnotherapist specializing in helping people connect with their Higher Consciousness. 

We chatted via Zoom for an hour. What makes Greg so very interesting to me is that he didn’t arrive at a sense of a Higher Consciousness via any ‘religious’ path. A remarkable near lethal experience sent him on an experiential journey driven entirely by rational impulses. 

On Greg’s website there’s a booking format with a set of questions that struck me as refreshingly clear and sensible. I will come back to them shortly.

After being so used to the subject of Higher Consciousness filtered through religious or esoteric language and concepts it was a pleasant change to share a conversation with someone whose sources are experience, plus science and reason. This might be the way of the future for many people. 

Below I want to reflect on my encounter with Greg. 

Experience validates theory

What appealed to me in Greg’s video was his description of an ‘awakening’ to deeper levels of consciousness that seemed to be entirely secular. The idea that accessing this dimension of awareness could by-pass the traditional gatekeepers (the religious, spiritual and esoteric) was immensely refreshing. 

In my thinking about what constitutes a human, I have tried to articulate the X factor that has turned us into remarkable primates in terms that avoid the ‘taint’ of religiosity. It must be universal and culturally neutral. While it might be that ideas are more developed in belief systems – the language is often coded in myths and symbols that create the sense that the tradition also owns the information. 

So, what might happen if a person whose thought is entirely secular has non-ordinary experiences? What language, what ideas, do they use to make sense of such an experience? 

Greg observed that while there is a growing sensitivity to deeper levels of consciousness and reality there’s not the language that would make for easy conversations. If people can’t describe an experience in ‘safe’ and accessible terms they are unlikely to discuss it or accept that it is real and valid. 

Language changes with culture

We use language to serve our own needs. We use the language of reason and rationality not because we are more capable of reason and are more rational – but because we want to appear so. Conversely, we don’t use language we think suggests we might be seen to be less than we think are. So, if experiences of the more subtle attributes of consciousness and perception can be coherently described in only religious terms, they are less likely to be discussed or thought about more deeply. 

For example, I have no problem with using the word ‘soul’ to describe an ‘objective’ reality. I have had to wrestle with my reactions before I could accept that it was just a word that described something I knew to be real. I have personally stripped it of ‘religious’ connotations so it feels secular to me. But, if I attempted to have a discussion with an atheist or a materialist on the subject using that term it might not go very well at all. To be balanced, it might also not go well with a religious believer who has imbibed dogmas about what a soul is and what can be thought about it. 

I am not saying that Greg’s use of the term Higher Consciousness is equivalent to my idea of ‘soul’ only that it is related and it carries way less cultural baggage. It has fewer barriers to shared, deep and authentic conversations.

Over the many years I have engaged with religious and spiritual ideas I have constantly come across people who have firm and fixed opinions about ideas and the words used to describe them. Sometimes the conversations are fruitful but more often they end in a mutual frustrating misapprehension. 

A shared secular language based on reason and science might be desirable, but is it possible? 

The impediment of materialism

While religions might unfairly claim ownership of key ideas about Higher Consciousness materialism denies it entirely. 

Religious and materialist dogma have profoundly impeded intellectual inquiry into Higher Consciousness and non-ordinary experiences. This is changing progressively as such extreme positions are discarded by younger generations who have different cultural influences and different values compared with their parents. 

But this still means that there isn’t an accepted body of ideas that can be articulated with clarity and confidence – yet. I have no doubt this will come about as experience and intellectual curiosity become more prevalent. Such change is underway, but we must see it as happening in decades not years. We need to think in terms of generations too, understanding that not all members of every generation take up practices and thoughts that move on from what their parents believe and do. 

It is obvious from what I read, listen to and watch that there are many more like Greg in a wide variety of fields. I mean this not in terms of going through what he experienced so much as possessing that openness to experience and the willingness to see it for what it is on rational and scientific terms. 

Good questions

Greg’s booking page has a bunch of questions (they are listed at the end) that people booking a session with him are invited to respond to. I have asked Greg whether it’s okay to publish them. It is.

I was surprised and impressed to see them because they were clear sensible questions that were also quite confronting. 

There’s a fundamental difference in approaching the idea of Higher Consciousness from an intentional therapeutic perspective compared to a religious or even a ‘spiritual’ one. The dogmatic and cultural accretions of the latter provide ample opportunity to avoid confronting stark choices. The best example of this is the many ways a Christian might be deflected into issues of doctrinal importance or examining life stories of Jesus rather than contemplating how to honour Christ’s two greatest commandments. What is shown here is a distinction between a commitment to identify with a movement or community and a commitment to act in accordance with a set of self-accepted values. 

Greg’s questions are canny because they are action-oriented and not belief orientated. The only belief required is that one has a Higher Consciousness and aligning with it is a desirable thing to attain. 

The equivalent in Christianity might be the assertion that belief that Jesus is one’s savior is sufficient to attain a desired state of mind (to be ‘saved’). But it is a passive belief that lacks intentional action. 

Attaining a desired state by the act of believing something is true is part magical thinking and part narcissism. It is not a reasoned approach. As a methodology it may have served some purpose in the past, but it is not consistent with the contemporary perspective of taking personal responsibility for one’s actions. This has been a consistent theme in leadership texts for the past few decades. These texts have also emphasized the development of emotional intelligence. 

Leadership development texts are about personal responsibility in a secular sense. They are based on psychological research. They don’t deal with therapy, but they do deal with mentoring and coaching. They are relevant in this context because they embrace the theme of personal improvement (which covers spiritual beliefs and practices, psychotherapy and variety of self-help methods) under the guise of professional development.

There amount of research effort put into encouraging ‘professional development’ is remarkable. Of course there’s profit to be made. But the degree to which it is effective is uncertain. It can be seen as just an impost on time and effort rather than a means of personal growth. Higher consciousness is never explicitly mentioned, although it sometimes obliquely hinted at. The US marketplace has a strong religious undercurrent, so a hint might be all that is needed for many.

In this regard Greg’s questions show his way of looking at Higher Consciousness is from the entirely rational perspective of wanting to confront a need for greater self-awareness – and this may be the missing piece in personal growth jigsaw. That is to say that undertaking intentional attitudinal and behavioural change is more powerful if its personal and self-driven than as a response to external influences – or attributed to an impersonal cause.

Conclusion

It might be Greg’s training as a Navy diver that creates such a pared down pragmatic approach. To me it is refreshing to engage with a person who is not tangled up traditions, dogmas or jargon – and who doesn’t assume that their ‘way’ has the answers. 

There is no fundamental distinction between coaching, mentoring or therapy. All three require another person. Such a person is usually present in spiritual or religious traditions – but of uncertain competence often. Even for those impelled to make their efforts more like a solo DIY adventure there is an accompanying presence – that is the Higher Consciousness (however we define it).

At the end of the questions Greg finishes with a very sensible observation. “You don’t have to heal the past to move forward — but you do have to stop letting it drive.” 

The questions

1. Your Intention for Change – What is happening in your life right now that you most want to change, release, or overcome? (Describe what’s been weighing on you or holding you back.)
2. Your Emotional Cost – How has this challenge affected your happiness, health, relationships, or success? (Be specific — what has it cost you emotionally or mentally to carry this for so long?)
3. Your Readiness – If you could completely free yourself from these limitations in the next 12 weeks, are you ready to commit to that change — or do you feel you’re still gathering information?
4. Your Desired Outcome – What would life look and feel like if this issue was fully resolved? (Describe your ideal state of mind, energy, and daily life.)
5. Your Three Biggest Blocks – What are the three main struggles, fears, or thought patterns that keep repeating and make you feel stuck or drained?
6. Previous Attempts – What have you tried before (therapy, coaching, courses, or self-work)? What helped — and what didn’t bring the change you were hoping for?
7. When you think about aligning with your Higher Consciousness, what does that mean to you personally?

Introduction

I have just finished an audiobook of Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. In my view it’s a must read. There’s no point in rehashing the perfectly serviceable summary on Amazon, so I will copy and paste it below.

Disconcerting . . . a disturbing and important book’ NEW SCIENTIST

‘Smart and wonderfully readable’ NEW YORK TIMES

The bad science and sinister ideas behind Silicon Valley’s foolish obsession with immortality, AI paradise and limitless growth.

Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.

In More Everything Forever, scientist and writer Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow to reveal why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the truth is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience. And behind these fanciful visions of space colonies and digital immortality is a cynical power grab, at the expense of essential work spent on solving real problems like the climate crisis.

More Everything Forever exposes the powerful myths that dominate Silicon Valley, challenging us to see how foolish, and dangerous, these visions of the future are.

Becker is, like the people he comments on, a materialist. At least that’s how he comes across. This isn’t a criticism. It limits his critique of the people whose ideas he reacts to to being informed, rational and sane. He observes that many of the ideas about immortality and salvation in space echo religious dogma – which is nuts for materialists to be accused of that. The implication is that the present error compounds an earlier one. In terms of dogma this is fair enough, but there’s also the non-materialist foundation of the religious dogma to be considered. This is the great and ancient human legacy that materialists deny utterly. The book does not explore this dimension at all. That’s okay. Becker is devastating enough using reasoned argument grounded in materialism.

The quest for immortality

Becker tells us about Ray Kurzweil who has a passion to upload human intelligence into a technological medium so that it is possible to live forever. I came across Kurzweil ages ago and I have been perplexed ever since at why anyone gives him any credence. 

Becker offered a useful perspective which I will summarise as the delusion of transferred expertise. This is when people who are highly competent in a narrow field assume, and are assumed to have, corresponding competence in unrelated fields. I first came across in 1996 when I was reading UK’s The Guardian. There was an article against psi phenomena being real which quoted the opinion of a Professor of Surgery, with no indication why he might have an opinion on the subject worth listening to. It was obvious from the article that he knew less about psi phenomena than I knew about surgery.

Becker also observed that among the tech boosters there is a confidence that developing expertise in STEM fields confers the requisite capabilities to opine on specialist fields in the humanities. Hence the presumption of a materialist perspective isn’t accompanied by any sense of obligation to determine whether it is likely to be true. There is no intellectual modesty, little informed commentary and a lot of mistaking ideas from sci-fi as gospel.

Is immortality a sensible goal? Is uploading the contents of the human brain into a technological medium a sensible thing to aspire to? Kurzweil evidently would answer ‘Yes’ to both questions. But really?

There are multiple perspectives on the idea of immortality – some simple and others sophisticated. There are also multiple perspectives on what constitutes the human mind – and the nature of the brain. Nothing in what Kurzweil says suggests he has a clue beyond his self-defined challenge, and what he thinks might resonate with fellow materialists who share his biases. But what of those who do not?

This isn’t about a right to believe as you will. It’s about credibility. Adherents to dogmas that deny contrary evidence exists are sensibly not regarded as credible commentators who have something of shared value to communicate. At best they are representative of an interest group. At worst they are talking nonsense to their own in-group and to those who innocently presume they are listening to people who really do know stuff.

Saying they are wrong doesn’t mean we are right

From my animistic perspective the idea that human conscious should be uploaded to a technological medium to secure immortality is misguided on so many levels. This is quite apart from the slight problem of whether it is possible at all.

Materialism is a dogma that has been crafted either in spite of, or in ignorance of, an abundance of evidence that it isn’t true. This isn’t to say that I can come up with a counter dogma that is true. All I can say is that there is a vast abundance of evidence that materialism is an insufficient explanation for human experience. It assigns non-conforming data to a set of negative categories – misperception, misinterpretation, hallucination, error, stupidity, ignorance, carelessness or unsoundness of mind.

This isn’t at all remote from the Christian notion that all non-ordinary phenomena are God-approved or Satan-induced – and the faith has got the right to say which was which.

Any form of genuine inquiry will stimulate the evolution of ideas. Dogmas cannot survive doubt and curiosity. Dogmas survive only when they discourage or forbid curiosity. There is no Truth that must be protected by dogma. 

The fact that some materialists discourage inquiry into the humanities tells us that they believe that they have arrived at ‘The Truth’ and contrary perspectives are not conforming to reason as they see it. The tyranny of dogmatic certainty is well attested to in our history over the past 1,800 years.

As we evolve our understanding of who and what we are, we can only assert what is wrong, and hence to be discarded, on good evidence, and what can be dropped into a yet to be completed jig-saw image of a ‘truthful’ understanding.

I don’t think this jig-saw picture of truth will be completed any time in the foreseeable future. It will remain a work in progress. We can say what does not fit the gaps we have. And to me materialism fits no gaps in my picture. It isn’t a useful tool for truth-seeking about the human experience and about human nature.

Conclusion

Becker’s book peels away the illusory aura of intellectual and moral respectability that the tech salvation movement has disguised itself in. 

The dominance of tech in our lives leaves us vulnerable to its hypnotic gestures. The movement insists that tech is the saving grace of humanity, as if unaware that it is what has put us into every perilous position we must already confront. Of course, it hasn’t done this alone. Human nature has played its part as well. It’s like we are not inherently suited to a tech-heavy setting.

But when tech is the only ‘hammer’ you have or believe in, the whole world just looks like one big bag of nails. Suddenly the ‘purpose’ of human life becomes an adjunct to the tech, rather than it being an enabler of meeting human need. We end up serving it.

The relationship between humans and technology hasn’t been explored sufficiently. It’s a conversation we must have in sufficient depth to generate insights we don’t yet have. The advocates of techno salvation have a well-rehearsed sales pitch that seems persuasive because we haven’t crafted a rich enough protective counter response. We are on the cusp of being conned by people saying they are here to save us. The only thing they want to save is their version of what is good and real and true. Sound familiar? 

I am an audiobook devotee. I get through 4-6 non-fiction books a month. This book, among the many impressive ones I have encountered, is the most important in some years. 

It opens up the potential for conversations we urgently need to get into having about what technology means to us on a collective level. It is strangely about transcending gravity, time and space – moving beyond the confines of the concrete material reality. It is increasingly an analogue of the magical. The themes of our contemporary technology are more and more the themes of magical fantasy – and more and more about making our physical reality an analogue of the animistic.

In many respects the technology we are developing is animistic and magical. We are making our devices informed, communicative and responsive. We could take the ‘artificial’ out of AI and it would make sense to an animist – but not a materialist. There’s a lingering ‘god-like’ sense that materialists cling to – as if, in throwing away theism, they cannot surrender a lust for power and status. Does it really come down just to egos? 

I cannot assert that my sense of animism is the perfect counterpoint to materialistic techno salvation. But it is a legitimate jig-saw puzzle piece that has a place in the final picture. I am open to hearing compelling arguments that materialism can claim the same thing. I am listening.

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. 

Introduction

When I was 15, I came across Paul Brunton’s Hidden Teachings Beyond Yoga. That book made a mess of my head and nipped what many thought was a promising career as a geologist in the tender bud. The book was my introduction to a wholly different way of understanding what it was to be human. It took me 18 months to read because I repeatedly and compulsively fell asleep after reading a paragraph.

This book mattered to me because I had been plagued ‘strange’ experiences since I was a child. 

Normally I don’t talk spirituality with friends or family. It’s so often a fraught thing that can trigger strong emotions. I am personally cool with people believing what makes them feel good. 

But recently, over a coffee, a friend, talking about his recent health scare, confessed he had been contemplating the end of his physical life. So, we chatted. I am firmly of the view that reincarnation is the norm. He did too. He had spent a few years in Nepal in his restless youth and was introduced to Buddhism. I had known him 15 years and this hadn’t come up. But he said, “it’s not about beliefs. It’s about attitude.”

That’s so true in so many ways. But what we believe can shape our attitudes. I have just finished John Fugelsang’s Separation of Church and Hate in which he makes a point that Christians who think themselves ‘saved’ by their belief can behave in ways utterly contrary to Christ’s teachings – and can do so in ways that are cruel and harmful. 

Buddhism is around 2,500 years old. Christianity’s foundational Jewish texts go back at least as long. These days we are awash with research into human behaviour – or at least we would be if we engaged with it. To be fair there is so much it can be overwhelming. In addition, there’s also an abundance of very competent research into such as OOBEs, NDEs and reincarnation. 

So, it is a great time to revisit the idea of being human. Can we blend old and new ideas in a productive way?

How can we know?

We each bring our own experiences and reasons to any question. I can speak only to my own. So, what I assert below is said confidently not because I think I am right in any objective sense but because I satisfy my own needs. Hence, I tell my background story not to convince the reader but to enable some appreciation of my reasoning. 

I accept reincarnation not because I have direct conscious knowledge of it but because it is embedded as a truth in multiple sources of thought that I am familiar with and deeply respect. It is supported by credible contemporary scholarship. 

One thing that allows me to accept reincarnation is my direct experience of an OOBE. It has happened only once. I had woken up an intense thirst and headed off to the kitchen for some water. On the way I paused by a window that was well out of sight of my bed. I saw the moon shining through the mulberry tree right outside my flat and wished I had a better camera than my basic instamatic so I could capture the scene. Then I headed off to the kitchen where I tried to get some water. But my hand went through the glass. I decided I was just so half asleep I wasn’t coordinated, so I decided to drink from the tap. But my hand went through the tap as well. Then suddenly I thought, “I must be out of my body.” The instant I had that thought I was back in my bed and very wide awake. I got out of bed and rushed to the window. The scene was exactly as I had seen a minute before. I went to the kitchen. The glass was where I recalled it. I got my drink of water this time.

I also had an indirect experience as well. I was at my girlfriend’s place. We were sleeping when she shook me awake in an agitated state. She told me that she had again gotten out of her body and was floating up near the ceiling and freaking out. She said I had been talking to her calmly, telling her to chill and slowly come back to her body, which she did. Then I told her that she had woken me from a dream in which I was standing in a desolate landscape. Before me was a multistory structure made entirely from scaffolding. On the top was a crane which was lowering body in a very fragile state and on a stretcher. The target was 2 semi-trailer trucks parked very closely side by side. Even in the dream I had remarked to myself about how ridiculously soft the trucks’ suspension was. 

Suddenly the scene shifted and my girlfriend was lying on the ground. Her daughter was nearby, as was a very much older man I had never seen before. He told me to go away at the instant I was woken.

This experience was evidentiary for important reasons. There was a precise relationship between my girlfriend’s OOBE and my dream. And we were sleeping on 2 single Dunlopillo beds pushed together – matching the trucks in my dream right down to the very soft suspension.

My girlfriend had had several involuntary OOBEs before I met her and she had been deeply worried about her health. She had visited several specialists with no indication of any health issue. Then she read Robert Monroe’s Journeys Out of the Body. This is a seminal book on OOBEs. I read it before my OOBE experience.

I have read all of Monroe’s books as well as other authors associated with the Monroe Institute – which has been around since 1971. To my mind OOBEs are not controversial to people who have inquired into the theme.

Non-physical intelligences

My experiences of forms of what some might call ‘para-normal’ phenomena have endured since early childhood. I recently finished fiddling with a 32-page account of them. I began writing it in 2011 and struggled to compile it. I rewrote it in 2023 and then abandoned it. 

A constant theme in my account is my experience of a compelling intentionality and intelligence directly impinging upon my life. This has been a confronting, challenging and disturbing thing for me. I could make no sense of it at all until 2002 when I finally, mercifully, came across the idea of animism in a kind of dictionary of mythology and the like. As I read the entry on animism things started to make sense to me. There was a non-material kind of ecosystem of spirits. I could live with that. 

This metaphysical ecology seems to be universal among humans. But it seems also to be what Christianity sought to suppress in favour of its starkly depopulated notions of what it was okay to believe, know and experience. 

The early materialists of Western civilisation rejected Christianity and, because that was all they knew, rejected the metaphysical entirely. 

As science became the powerful methodology it is today it eliminated any reference to the spiritual and metaphysical. It has been asserted that this is for want of evidence. But that’s not strictly true. If you don’t go looking for something you won’t find evidence of it, and what’s the point of looking for something you ‘know’ doesn’t exist? An honest history of science will demonstrate that not only are there many scientists who comfortable with the metaphysical, but it also sometimes comes looking for them. That’s my experience exactly.

There’s a far more complex reality here. Evidence of the metaphysical is in abundance. This has been accepted by groups and societies which have operated in our culture as secret, or at least discrete, communities of interest to avoid brutal persecution from the institutional Christian Church. 

Organized institutional Christianity and materialism have both been highly motivated to suppress non-conforming thought. It has been very much the case of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. 

But both these suppressing influences have been weakening steadily in the past 3 decades. Interest in alternative and suppressed ideas and experiences has been growing and formal research in universities has been steadily changing the way we can understand what it is to be human. 

Fakes and frauds?

Opponents of what the animistic perspective still insist that forms of heresy, fraud and incompetence prevail. This isn’t so. Yes, there are frauds and incompetents and others whose sanity might be justly questioned. But this applies to science, religion and indeed any domain of human endeavor as well. Efforts to throw a smokescreen over the validity and value non-conforming thought are growing weaker by the year now. 

However, this doesn’t mean that all fans of the animistic/metaphysical perspective are intellectually disciplined, psychologically healthy or well-informed. Sceptical caution is necessary as a constant state of mind.

Advocates and opponents can be genuine inquirers or dogmatic apologists who sincerely believe they are warriors in a zero-sum game as virtuous defenders of truth against deluded dupes and agents of evil. 

But what about God?

This is an immensely messy subject. Sound scholarship is showing the Christian God is derived from a polytheistic belief system. All such systems have supreme deities, and the politics of whose god is highest isn’t unknown. This kind of selective monotheism is a natural response to political and cultural pressures.

The simplest summation of more balanced ideas is that there is one universal unifying consciousness which mystics see as ‘The One’. It is in all things and all beings. But it is also beyond description, measure or knowing. Within that supreme unity there are gods and other spirits which vary in scale from the great down to the very tiny. This constitutes a complex ecosystem in which communities of spirits who may or may not have been human interact with us. 

I have heard this perspective interpreted as –‘God is in us, so we are gods.’ But this evades the bit about God being in everything. The Greek philosopher Thales is said to have declared that, everything is full of gods. We must be careful about assuming inferred meanings are valid. God is in my coffee mug, so my coffee mug is a god? I don’t think so.

Clearly, in the absence of a complex idea a Christian might insist that any such evidence of ‘spirits’ can only be God, Jesus or the Devil. Any materialist will insist it is error, hallucination or chance. 

On a personal level I can make no definitive claims. I am comfortable with the idea of ‘The One’ and an ecosystem and a hierarchy of consciousnesses that could be described as gods, archangels and angels – by whatever language/tradition we care to use.

I have been able to create a theoretical model based on my experiences and research. I think there is a far more complex metaphysical domain than we can yet know and that it is populated by the non-organic aspect of humans and other intelligent agents. There seems to be a community of agents who engage with humans in ways that are both helpful and harmful. Just because they are non-material doesn’t make them good. There is risk to our wellbeing in both physical and non-physical realms. 

As a culture, we are a long way from knowing what’s what with any precision, and access to such information is scattered. Some will claim to have a definitive answer – and may sincerely believe that to be so. While I think that’s unlikely as a rule, some do have useful theories that can work well for now. Of course, others are liars and frauds as well. Some project their delusions and egos with an air of great authority. I am not discounting that there those who do know, those who do tend not to write books or make videos or podcasts.

It is said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. In this context the price of what is true is eternal scepticism. By that I don’t mean being sceptical in the often mis-used sense of denying something, but employing doubt in a rational and disciplined manner. This also includes listening to one’s intuition and being able to distinguish between genuine intuition, fancy and bias. 

What we choose to believe is dependent on our psychological needs. I try to be rational and disciplined in my approach, but I know I am serving my psychological needs, not some objective truth standard. I think reality is way too complex for that. The best I can say is that I try to have a healthy relationship with ‘truth’. The extent to which I succeed is not something I can say.

So, what is human?

This is my sense. Human is the complexity of our biological nature and the complexity of our metaphysical nature combined. We do have an enduring metaphysical element which can leave and return to our organic body while it is alive and persists after it dies. 

We use the terms humane, humanism, humanity and humanitarian in an imprecise way. But we intend to denote our organic primate being and nature and a mysterious undefined pluselement – something that is ‘better’ than our animal nature. Materialists have only the language of evolution to assert that human is just ‘more evolved’ than our primate ancestors. Christians think in terms of a soul in want of redemption. Either way it’s about improving on what was there in the beginning. For me evolution applies to organic and inorganic states of being. We grow from experience and I am content with idea that there is a ‘moral’ component to that – but one built into nature rather than as a theological dogma. 

Conclusion

We must maintain a sense of balance and appreciate that advances in science and scholarship plus great changes in our cultural values create opportunities for us to revisit our sense of being human. It’s a terribly messy field strewn with ideas that are old hat, fragmented, half baked, deranged, poorly formed, inspirational and insightful. 

Institutional Christianity and materialism have created dogmas that induce a lazy expectation that convenient truths can be delivered to our mental doors ready to be believed. No critical effort required. 

But in many respects, we are in a golden age of inquiry. Far from new insights being packaged and served up conveniently, what we have is an abundant garden full of fresh produce from which we can pick what we like and prepare it in a way that meets our intellectual, psychological and spiritual needs. 

We are responsible for what we believe, how we think and how we act. We also have plenty of lives to get good at owning that responsibility.

Bon appetite!

Introduction

I subscribe to the newsletter from the Global Leadership Foundation. It has a very simple objective – to raise “the emotional health levels of people on the planet.” It seeks to do so by inspiring and supporting “leaders to better understand themselves and their impact on others.”

The last newsletter discussed the awful word ‘permacrisis’ and I was instantly reminded of remarks made by an astrologer about this time last year when asked for advice for his audience concerning 2025 and the next 5-6 years. He said, “Don’t hold onto anything too tight.” 

But are things really that bad? You really have to go back in human history a long time before you come across a time when the world was crisis free. Our sense of permacrisis and drama is really a ‘first world’ disruption of comfort zones and aspirations. Yes. Change momentum is intensifying and there is no let up on the horizon.

Our emotional wellbeing is something we must take charge of. But what’s this got to do with spirituality? A lot.

Can I link emotional health and spirituality?

One of the things that has fascinated me is the way religion has been divided into a discipline of self-awareness and a body of self-serving beliefs, the latter dominating our conception. Rather than knowledge, faith and belief are championed.  Paths of self-awareness aren’t fostered in Christianity, or in the civilization it has engendered.

Contemporary psychology and paths of spiritual self-awareness converge on multiple points. The human spirit has long been understood to be our drive for life in obedience to our better natures. We can debate our conceptions of the ‘science’ underpinning this – but can we agree that emotional wellbeing and self-awareness are companion states of awareness.

The teachings of the Buddha and Jesus are about self-awareness in that deep sense of knowing who you ‘really are’. It is interesting that in so many traditional cultures self-knowledge is understood as necessary to become an effective member of one’s community.

We are more about social status these days – our sense of identity and standing. This seems like a legacy of a culture shaped by the religious, political and economic energies of social control.

Self-awareness pops up periodically – often driven by inspiration from random sources – but never in any systematic manner. I have been fascinated by the way that self-awareness has been growing as a theme in organisational leadership – but as an option rather than a requirement. We still hire and promote psychopathic individuals, and we still celebrate narcissists.

In short, the legacy of our religion is that we esteem gaudy priests over ‘good people’. That tension has been around at least since the emergence of Buddhism. That legacy has severed the connection between being self-aware and emotionally health and being ‘good’ in the social sense – obedient and conforming rather than virtuous.

Its time to heal that disconnection.

Restoring our understanding of who we are

Another legacy of our religious culture has been a distortion of our sense of identity. Between Christianity and materialism – two dark twins – our sense of who and what we are has been devastated. Now, between evolving sound science and the restoration of our sense of our spiritual nature, we are allowing our sense of who we are to reform.

But this is an evolving business driven by intuition as well as rational inquiry and experience. It is a collaborative rather than competitive endeavour motivated by goodwill rather than pride.

For the last close on 15 years there have been voices raised in concern over our collective emotional health. There certainly seems to be a problem that has arisen as a consequence of how we are living – about which too few people feel they have any effective control.

It is unlikely that restoring a sense of who we really are will readily arise amidst our various crises of identity, meaning and purpose. We must be prepared to take personal responsibility for our own emotional wellbeing. We can see this present situation as a ‘permacrisis’ only if we remain uncertain about what our vital needs are and our right to meet them.

Conclusion

The Global Leadership Foundation is only one of many bodies intent on doing real good. Its method is uncomplicated. It says nothing about spirituality at all. I am making the point that it is a spiritual enterprise precisely because it seeks to restore and maintain good spirits in individuals and groups or organisations.

Spirituality isn’t about metaphysics or theology but about how we live regardless of who believes what. It is about what we experience in every aspect of our lives. We can discover who we really are when we are free from influences that try to make us servants of other people’s religious, political and economic ambitions.

Some will say that spirituality cannot be ‘secular’. They will say secular means “Worldly rather than spiritual”. To me ‘secular’ should better mean, ‘not disconnected from the reality that we are in the world’. We have a spirit that must be free to interpret what being in this world means to us.

Secular spirituality is really the only kind we can freely have. This means that being self-aware and emotionally healthy should be of great value to us.  

If we are moving toward greater self-determination, it will not be without confusion as we struggle to make sense of what is going, and resistance from those who see self-determination as an impediment to their ambitions.

Introduction

The subject of being spiritual but not religious (SBNR) has been popping up in my awareness a lot lately. I have finally acknowledged that this label applies to me on a personal level. I also have an intellectual interest in spirituality and religion that supplements my personal concerns. 

The term denotes those who have rejected formal organized religion but retain a desire for spiritual meaning. The Pew Research Centre’s research on US SBNRs is informative:

• 59% have become less religious over their lifetime
• 49% have become more spiritual over the years
• 38% say religion does more harm than good
• 72% say it is essential to be connected to my ‘true self’
• 33% think being connected to God is important (compared with 87% of religious and spiritual)
• 20% believe in God as described in the Bible
• 73% believe there is “some other higher power or spiritual force in the universe”
• 71% think parts of nature have spiritual energies
• 4% think following a religious faith is important
• 54% are religiously unaffiliated where 45% are religiously affiliated (still identify with a religion)

SBNR includes active seekers, practitioners of many kinds and those who essentially have an open frame of mind but don’t feel a need to engage in a specific spiritual practice.

Some observers see SBNR as an ill-disciplined and incoherent approach to one’s spirituality. The chief criticism is the that smorgasbord approach – taking a selection of what you fancy to create an indulgent plate of spiritual titbits – let’s you edit out the hard bits. Yeah. It’s a bit like Christianity in that regard. 

Its also unkind and reflects an ignorance of the value of what’s on offer. It has been my approach. Since age 15 I have borrowed from Vedic, indigenous, Buddhist, Taoist, Zen, Theosophical, Cabalistic, Wiccan sources. I can throw in Tarot, astrology, ritual magic, crystals and spirit communications and still not exhaust the list.  I also embarked on a profoundly frustrating quest of trying to make sense of Christianity – the faith I was born into but rejected when I was six. Fifteen years ago, I finally submitted my Social Ecology thesis on whether animism might be a way of understanding a life of persistent non-ordinary experiences. I thought so. 

Dogmas, theologies and traditions may serve some people just fine, but that’s less and less the case as the declining figures on religious affiliation continue to demonstrate. SBNR is an individual expression of changing one’s diet because what’s on offer is variously unpalatable, unhelpful, uninspiring and sometimes downright toxic. 

Below I want to reflect on being a seasoned SBNR quester, not as an assertion of any authority – just as a seasoned traveler – as one with something of an aerial view of the landscape. 

The basics 

The hardest thing for me was to develop a coherent picture of essential ideas. When I began, around 1966 in Tasmania, there wasn’t access to much at all. A friend’s mother discerned my youthful curiosity and lent me Paul Brunton’s Hidden Teachings Beyond Yoga. It took me 18 months to read the book. I found myself falling asleep after a few paragraphs – not out of boredom but over-stimulation. By the time I had finished I had quit my matriculation studies, abandoned an ambition to study geology and left home. When I finished the book, I could find no replacement and contented myself with reading western philosophy for a few years. In 1970, when I was 18, I knew I needed to leave Tasmania to find a place with more prospects for discovery. 

In Melbourne and Sydney, I discovered the Theosophical Society’s Adyar Bookshop where I developed a basic understanding of the constituent bodies of being human – the physical, astral, mental and spiritual. I had several subsequent experiences that affirmed this way of thinking was useful. 

I have had a persistent sense of spirit presence since around age 5. Through direct personal experience I encountered non-physical agents whose role it was to guide members of esoteric groups. Another was an agent with whom I conversed over several years through my then partner. That particular experience directed me into an inquiry about engaging with non-physical agents – the risks, benefits and pitfalls. 

Subsequent experiences and inquiries established for me these three fundamental principles:

1. We are multi-dimensional. Our physical body is not the core of who we are. 
2. We endure – not as the ‘I’ we presently know – but something greater and better than we presently are.
3. Our consciousness is porous. Relationships and communications are multi-dimensional. 

The god problem

Mostly when people say ‘God’ they mean the God of the Abrahamic faiths. I struggled for years to overcome a sense of revulsion against the term. It persists even now. I try to accept ‘God’ as a common generic term which means whatever we say it means for us.

But it’s a big idea – like Love and Justice. It defies precise universal meaning. One of the non-physical agents was helpful. He spoke of ‘the One’, of which mystics have long said is beyond comprehension and description. 

To me the Abrahamic God is a tribal god inflated to become a cosmic deity – a fiction. This is now backed up by compelling scholarship.

The same agent said the gods were ‘of the One, not as the One’. The Abrahamic god could never be anything more than a tribal focus of attention. 

But gods? He asserted that gods are real. I twice had experience of a presence of overwhelming power that the agent told us was a god. That was an utterly incredible thing to claim. Those experiences still sit in my ‘to be confirmed’ file. I can’t reject the idea because the two experiences were off the scale in intensity – way beyond anything I had encountered before by a massive margin. 

Most of our ideas about gods have been deeply influenced by Christian ideas – which deny any validity to polytheism in favour a fictional monotheism. Other than the sense of ‘the One’ monotheism is a religious fiction. 

So, I am okay with the ideas of gods and with understanding that the idea of gods has been so distorted we are a long way from that being a useful idea on a cultural level. There are those who do not share my caution and fully embrace the idea. But I quit ritual magic because it seemed to me more about taking things on faith – and that’s not something I am into. A case of pushing scepticism too far? Maybe, but that’s me being true to my nature.

Some insist that you can’t be ethical without God. This usually means the fictional monotheist God. But many critters have ethics and values with no evident sense of any divine presence. This could mean that nature is ethical in the widest possible sense and hence ethics is built into life and being. There is a fundamental conscious unity which we cannot describe and within which there are gods and a hierarchy of beings through the dimensions. This is reflected in how things are here. And within all this there seems to be innate laws which favour order and justice. I like the Egyptian goddess, Maat, as an expression of this theme.

The attributes of the One are claimed by the fictional monotheistic deity. This distorts our sense of what is morally okay. The One in a mystical sense is the God of Nature of Enlightenment thinkers. Hence saying we need  God in order to have morals can be also framed as ‘we need nature to have morals’. Tribal gods favour ‘their’ people, so what is ‘good’ in that relationship can only ever be contextual – and never completely universal.

I hear the atheist’s objection – “If there is a God why does he let children suffer?” That’s such an awful argument – beyond dismissing the fictional deity crafted from the Abrahamic tradition. It’s an awful argument because it could be applied to any instance of human unhappiness and suffering, supposing that being made to suffer is a betrayal of trust. The myth that the creator of the cosmos has a personal interventionist interest in anyone has not only infantilized so many it has distorted and debased the idea of the divine – and our foundation of moral values.

To be clear, there are non-physical agents who may act to aid us, as well as do us ill. Catholicism, while depleting our natural ecology of ‘pagan’ spirits substituted saints to meet the intuitive need to seek localized intersession. But its not just saints who are available to us. That’s insight to be recovered.

These days I try to discipline myself to see ‘God’ as a term we use to mean our notion of the divine and not be biased against Christianity. If I were to be asked if I ‘believe in God’ my answer would be evasive – I have an idea of God which I hold to be true. But please don’t assume it’s the same as yours -if you have such a belief. I likewise have a sense of justice and ethics which may not accord with other’s ideas. 

Belief

I spent several years trying to get my head around belief. I concluded that it served our psychological needs, not our rational needs. We use rational language to describe and communicate what we feel. We say ‘think’ when we mean ‘feel’. Thinking is a discipline we are usually pretty bad at, truth be told. So, as our psychological needs evolve, so we change what we believe. Hence when we can inhabit our inner sense of being, our psychological needs quieten, and beliefs evaporate. This is kinda what the Zen notion of no mind is about. 

Debating what we believe – as if any person is right or wrong now – seems very strange and pointless to me. The more vulnerable we feel psychologically the ardently we hold beliefs – in an effort to shield our vulnerability. I am happy to explore ideas with others – but through mutually exploratory conversation rather than debate.

Some commentators assert that the ‘age of reason’ has made the language of science and rationality the social norm. Hence, we are more apt to say ‘think’ when ‘feel’ might be better. There is added gravitas in the term. This was brought home to me when I was watching a show featuring Dynamo, Magician Impossible. In response to an impressive performance a woman of modest educational attainment reacted, saying that what she had seen “ain’t scientific”. We all knew what she meant.

I have read a lot of academic books on religion. The intellectual focus often overruns the prospect that many ways of knowing are experience-based rather than the product of a mental process. This happens when there is no ‘theory of how things are’ that is rooted in experience.  Reports of experiences are reinterpreted and translated as imagination or some psychological process. This is because the academic assumes that things can’t be as described. Everything unfamiliar and outside the assumed model ‘tastes like chicken’ – we frame the unfamiliar in terms of what is familiar to us.

We believe what seems right to us in every respect – whether spiritual or intellectual. Reality is way more complex than we can mostly imagine and all we have is our take on it. We believe out of necessity. We’d go crazy if we didn’t. But we need to hold our beliefs with gentle hands and remember that they are ours alone.

Some sources

There is an abundance of material that the SBNRer can find. It’s of variable value and integrity. For what it’s worth, I reflect a little on what sources I esteem below.

The mystical

There are foundational sources of mystical wisdom that endure across the ages. I still love Zen, Tao, Buddhist and Vedic sources. I am not much into moderns like Steiner or Gurdjieff for no particular reason other than I haven’t been able to feel excited by them.

I don’t recommend sources because people will be drawn to what best suits them at the time through an inner impulse. The point is to be open to other ideas that are not familiar. Being curious helps. 

There’s a lot of dross on YouTube, but there are some gems that can be found with patience. I liked this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KArWcMldPM

Out of body

I read Robert Monroe’s Journeys Out of the Body in the late 1970s and soon after had a verifiable OOBE and then was involved in another verifiable OOBE a friend had. The fact we can be consciously out of our bodies is a fundamental and foundational understanding. I have read all of Robert Monroe’s books and I found Thomas Campbell’s My Big TOEparticularly useful.

Robert Monroe set up the Monroe Institute, which remains an invaluable institution exploring the potential of our capacity to go out of body. It’s not something I am eager to get into. I just don’t feel the need. But I commend it to those who do.

Spirit communication

This is also called channeling and can be anything from the delusions of people who fancy they are the vessel for emotionally agitated archangels or some serious liars and manipulators. Or they could tap into sources of profound and provocative insight. Below are a few sources that I find engaging and provocative. I am careful not to say ‘believe’ because although a source isn’t physical it should be no less subject to critical evaluation.

Some of the Amazon links below have the intended content below what comes up first. I use Amazon because it shows ebooks and audiobooks, and I am committed to accessibility. If you buy 3D books, please use your local bookshop.

• Frank DeMarco is associated with the Monroe Institute and his books featuring a former colleague, Rita, are fascinating and challenging.
• Stewart Edward White’s The Betty Book and The Unobstructed Universe are classics that seem to have fallen out of favour. The Unobstructed Universe, the later of the 2, was published in 1940, so the style is old, but the content, the ideas, is not.
• Jane Roberts’ Seth books.
• Joe Fisher’s The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts is a cautionary tale all who venture into channeling should read.
• I recently discovered Lee Harris’s Conversations with the Zs books. They are intriguing.
• I discovered The Ra Contact a few years back and writing this has reminded to revisit.

This list is neither exhaustive nor definitive. It’s just what I am familiar with and recommend. A lot of the content isn’t suited to linear thinking, so it requires patience and a willingness to place immediate critical reflexes on hold. I don’t mean don’t be critical – just not reflexively and immediately.

The bodies and chakras

My sources were exclusively from the Theosophical Society bookshop from decades ago. I found this book on Amazon and chose because it was highly rated:

Spiritual Anatomy: Meditation, Chakras, and the Journey to the Center

by Daaji Kamlesh D. Patel

NDEs and reincarnation

Both are foundational realities which have been intensely studied and affirm the persistence of our consciousness beyond the body. Both themes can be searched for on Amazon – with an abundance of hits. I haven’t read on the themes for decades, so I can make no recommendations.

YouTube has some good content. Some of the stuff on reincarnation is just silly, but there’s good content as well. I noticed a video with Thomas Campbell that’s worth watching. The content on NDEs merits caution. This isn’t because there’s necessarily intentional misinformation offered. 

The very nature of NDEs is that people experience what they believe. The ‘reality’ entered is subjective rather than objective. There are technical reasons why this is the case, and I don’t want to mislead by attempting a brief explanation. It is sufficient that NDEs are valid experiences. But it also means that we should be wary of taking the reports as literally, objectively, true. The message is what should concern us, not the descriptive detail. 

Psychology

Research into spirituality and into how we think and feel affirms the insights of the past and adds rational depth to our appreciation of why we act as we do. 

Psychology should be the primary insight/wisdom source of our age. Leadership is a theme that is researched and written on intensively. These have been the most inspirational sources for me on a personal level because they deal with personal accountability, self-awareness and emotional intelligence on a daily level. Here are three of my favourite texts:

• Fearless Leadership
• Dare to Lead
• The Dichotomy of Leadership

Overall psychology has revolutionised how we understand being human in the past 40 years. We don’t need ancient texts in archaic language to school us in the essentials of being a decent person. We are moral by nature, and we are far more complex and remarkable than our culture’s religions allow us to imagine.

I read a lot of works on psychology. Below is a very brief sample of what I have engaged with in the past few years.

• Modern Man in Search of a Soul by Carl Gustav Jung
• The Master and His Emissary by Ian McGilchrist
• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
• The Awakened Brain by Lisa Miller
• The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
• You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney
• The Moral Animal by Robert Wright
• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van Kolk
• DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman
• Ritual by Dimitris Xygalatas
• How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett

A note on podcasts and audiobooks

The number of podcasts is overwhelming. Audiobooks are growing in number steadily. This reflects a growing trend away from reading 3D printed material. There isn’t a reduced craving for ideas – it’s just that the medium of transmission is evolving. Audio devices are portable and discrete so, in theory, we have more access to ideas and inspiration. This means a SBNRer who is inspired to serious inquiry has an unprecedented opportunity to explore.

My passion is audiobooks. Seventeen years ago, I acquired several disabilities, one which radically diminished my ability to enjoy holding 3D books. Then I went almost exclusively audio. Now I can listen while driving, walking and doing tasks.

Spirituality isn’t just about esoteric stuff. It’s about the human spirit in this world as well. There are great podcasts that explore aspects of being human. Below I have listed my regular go-tos. I haven’t touched on more than a small portion of what’s available.

• ABC’s Late Night Live
• CBC’s Ideas
• The Telepathy Tapes
• People Who Read People
• No Stupid Questions
• You Are Not So Smart
• To The Best of Our Knowledge
• The Psychology Podcast
• Thinking Allowed

Conclusion

Being SBNR is about grazing an extraordinary smorgasbord of offerings to construct a made-to-measure conception of the spiritual – and being human. That’s an evolution in keeping with bespoke creation in so many other areas of human needs and wants. It’s like being able to create your own playlist. What’s not to like?

Of course, those who want to force feed you their dogmas and obey their rules don’t like it. But, as Christian Smith in his excellent Why Religion Went Obsolete shows – that’s a passé mentality. And maybe it will also be an extinct one in the not too distant future. 

Of course there is no uniform model of an SBNRer. Some are content just to have the attitude. Others practice what appeals to them and are context with their niche being replete with ideas they love. Others are serious inquirers for whom it’s a life mission. I am the last sort. I have a passion for inquiring that arose originally from needing to comprehend a seemingly relentless stream of ‘non-ordinary’ experiences that plagued me since age 6. A lot of what I do seems more like therapy than anything else.

The argument that being SBNR is ill-disciplined and chaotic reflects authoritarian passions. Some have a discrete system they have found and stay with. Others see spirit is a universal presence that can be found in anything. Picking and mixing is no different to selecting a bunch of flowers from a great garden. 

To me being SBNR is celebratory. It is liberating.  

There is, however, a certain grounded reality that we need to grasp. That basic knowledge is like physics for the material world and has been taught through the ages -sometimes laced liberally with dogma and lore. It isn’t a belief system. It’s not a dogma. It is experience-based knowledge.

It isn’t taught in the Abrahamic faiths, save maybe to elite members. It is taught in the ‘east’ still because there doesn’t seem to be a history of attempted repression. The traditions of India, Tibet, China and Japan are still available to us. It was taught in the Greek mystery schools that were suppressed by Christians. It is taught in the Theosophical Society and esoteric/occult schools, some other spiritual organizations or groups, and by individuals who operate within a discipline – like yoga – but to a limited degree.

Being SBNR is an opportunity to recover what has been suppressed and to explore what is in potential. SBNR sits between secular materialism and the traditions and dogmas of formal institutional faiths. 

It is where our hope of a better future resides.

Introduction

I am writing this in October 2025. There’s a YouTube channel– Professor Archive – which, among other things, surveys the decline of Christianity. I’ve just watched What a Post-Christian World Might Really Look Like. There are some interesting claims, like in the UK more people practice Wicca than attended Church of England services? True? I haven’t verified, but the fact that the claim is made says so much. The video is against secularism and sees Spiritual But Not Religious (SBNR) as presently incoherent – but may be the beginnings of something new.

In 2025 religion is not the only thing being broken. What we believe and how we live together (with other humans and other lives) are being broken apart in anticipation of new ways of thinking and acting.  Do we respond in fear or in hope?

A few days ago, I finished Why Religion Went Obsolete by Christian Smith. Smith is a sociologist. He charts the rise of the SBNR and the decline of adherence to traditional religions. In the past decade organised Christianity’s loss of followers has been catastrophic to those who are intent on preserving the faith. The emergence of Christian nationalism in the US has been emblematic of the crisis. We see an appeal to politics because the content of faith has lost its power, and shift toward even more pronounced divisiveness and intolerance.

Smith’s survey of the decline of formal religion explores secular forces which have transformed our cultures toward more individualistic values and less reliant on local geographic communities (everything from greater physical mobility and the internet, social media and developments in telecommunications technology). This is quite apart from the growing mismatch between emerging psycho-spiritual needs and what a 1,700-year-old faith can offer.

Late last year I was interested in what astrologers had to say about 2025. One summed things up by saying, “Don’t hold on to things too tightly.” Professor Archive’s video on things post-Christian noted there is a crisis in ‘mental health’, observing that this was evident in countries which had largely abandoned religion and were mostly secular. But I’d also note that faith can also be a way of sandbagging against existential reality. The term ‘religious psychosis’ is becoming very popular.

There is a widely discussed ‘mental health’ crisis. Personally, I detest the term and never use it. Its ‘psychological health’ to me. This crisis seems to signify something important is going on – the loss of the old and emergence of the new. The old is falling away and the new is yet to form in a way that is universally accessible. Transitional times can be traumatic. Do we hang on to what we have, or do we let go?

Below I want to reflect this time and the drama of transition

The way things are now

Smith’s book explores the attitudes of generational cohorts (Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z). Each generation views ‘now’ through a different experiential lens. Our sense of ‘used to be’ can be nostalgic or a relief. 

As a Boomer my nostalgia is about being able to visit places of sublime natural spirit before they became overrun. I treasure the privilege of solitude where hordes now blunder. But I love tech in so many ways.

I abandoned Christianity when I was six years old. But I did not abandon the spiritual – which insistently engaged with me to the point of crisis, and I finally accepted it fully (after several decades). 

In 1970 I left Tasmania as a ‘straight’ person and travelled to Melbourne as the first step of a life adventure. I walked into a radical alternative culture utterly unprepared. I was like the tarot’s Fool. I arrived with a backpack, a small portable typewriter and a camera. I had a dream of getting into journalism. The typewriter and camera were promptly stolen. The dream of journalism evaporated, and I entered an existential drama that took me to the edge several times. I came to understand I was under the watchful eye of spirit after a decade. But it was watching and, if anything, making life tougher for me than I’d cared for.

During that time, I had a telling experience back in Hobart. I had smoked some fiendishly potent weed mixed with hash (I later learned also laced with heroin) and found myself in a seriously bad place. It was a very unpleasant experience, and I knew I had to ensure until the effects of the joint wore off. After a time of grim determination, I suddenly found myself in a quiet calm place full of light. I knew this was the ‘real me’ and nothing external could harm me. Even now that memory remains a potent source of knowing. Some get to that place through devotion, others through trauma.

This present time seem reminiscent of Melbourne in 1970. Only I am now a more seasoned traveller. The familiar seems to be falling apart or have gone completely. The world seems to be going through a crisis of transition between two states. Of course, this transition has been going on for some time and it’s not easy to figure out at what point of the transition we are at. Consider the business of being born into this world. The transition process begins and then passes through stages that are ever more dramatic – and then the umbilical cord is cut. Then begins another transitional phase of adaptation to being in this world.

Where are we now – collectively and individually? Individually some are resisting, some are brashly gung ho. Many are somewhere between – bewildered and worried. “Don’t hang on too tightly.” That seems like good advice. But hardly any comfort.

The drama of transition

Another book I recently finished was The Immortality Key. It explored the idea that from the time of the ‘establishment’ of civilization there has been a tradition of the use of hallucinogenic substances – which started off as ‘spoiled beer’ and evolved into the psychoactive wine of the Greek mystery cults. These cults informed early Christianity. The sacrament of the wine and wafer is an inert residue of practices and beliefs now denied, suppressed and punished.

The book also reminded me of those times in the early ‘70s in Melbourne. We were determined to throw off the repressive influence of a religion we thought debased. We gathered secretly in homes where we shared meals and took our illegal enlightening drugs. We engaged in earnest conversation about life and meaning and explored alternative ways of engaging with the sacred.

This was a transition time that began intensely in the 1960s but can be traced back to the 1950s. It was part of a larger transition period that goes back millennia, but has ages we have distinguished – the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution. Smith charted the fall into obsolesce of religion from post World War 2. That suits us because it is meaningful in concrete ways. For the sake of a conversation, we create start and end dates in a continuum that began when we began. Transition (let us also call it evolution) is a constant but also has periods of great intensity when familiar and cherished things get broken. This includes our senses of meaning and purpose.

We are finally taking ET seriously. AI, still festooned with hype, looks as though it will change a lot of things (for good and ill). Climate change is beyond denial, and its impacts are concerning. Change-denying political movements are hitting us in discomforting ways. Progressive politics seems visionless. There are dire economic indicators that the present system isn’t fit for purpose.

Smith’s sociological survey of the factors of religion’s decline into obsolescence reminded me just how radical change has been. In 1970 I arrived in Melbourne with a portable Olivetti typewriter. It was red and slipped into a hard plastic case. Its gone. Now the equivalent is a notebook computer. When I moved into my current home in 2002 I had maybe 12 boxes of books. Now I have over 300 eBooks on my phone. I can chart the past 60 years of technological change with ease.

Changes in attitudes and values are complex and less easy to list, but no less spectacular. In the ‘60s and ‘70s I protested against the Vietnam War and the drowning of Lake Pedder. I marched for women’s, Gay, and Aboriginal rights. There has been steady progress on equity and inclusion since then. Now new change-resistant religious/political movements want to restore discrimination and inequity.

Conclusion

I can’t see ahead with any clarity. Maybe our world three decades from now will be as radically different to how ‘now’ would seem to three decades ago. Smith’s characterisation of those who are SBNR is hopeful. In three decades, they are likely to be the majority by a wide margin. This will bring welcome changes, but what else will there be?

In that time a lot of things will have to change – especially on the political front. Being SBNR means we can choose our own pathway to the sacred and go alone or in company. But the political must evolve to enable this new way of living together. Disengagement from the debased and distorted politics of our time sends a message to those who imagine they can be of service – but we cannot disengage from the political itself imply because we need functional means of managing our common affairs at the level of community. It has ever been thus for humanity, and we have mostly done it well – until the advent of civilization when elitists imagined they had divine sanction to impose their will.

Our life worlds are being shaken up for good purpose. But it will not seem like that for a lot of folks who will feel their comfort zones are not something they have elected to sacrifice for the sake of a greater vision. But when was that ever a realistic choice?

The SBNR have elected to determine meaning and value on their own account. That means a hive of exploration and innovation with success and failure. The early Christians were inspired by the idea that as individuals they could establish a personal relationship with the divine. Subsequent manifestations of the faith corralled that sense of relationship within constraints of dogma, theology, rituals, rules and imposed authority. And then corruption and scandal killed off any residual loyalty and hope.

The future can be what we make it – well, it will be that, regardless. If we want it better than we fear, then we will have to allow that some things must be broken and discarded – and that includes things we presently imagine to be good. This is especially so in politics, but this is also a proposal that being partisan in a spiritual sense isn’t conducive to shared positive outcome.

Among those who assert their right to believe as they do is a willingness to denigrate and insult others who believe as they choose. Aggressive belief is invasive and likely to stir up conflict for no good outcome. Relationships with our community members are not one of the things we need to break – but mend.

Holding firm to our deep impulse for spirituality is vital. That way we can surrender our grip on things that must change. Belief serves our psychological needs, not our quest for rational or objective truth. If we understand that then we can be free in our quest for meaning and values. Belief about what is ‘truth’ is always context dependent and reliant on what we know and how we think. It is always contestable.

Being SBNR is a personal quest for meaning and values. Professor Archive’s concern that SBNR thinking is a pick and mix smorgasbord of selected elements from many systems and isn’t coherent doesn’t bother me. Other religions aren’t coherent either – especially Christianity. What matters is the quest for meaning and values rather than dogmas.

What we are witnessing now and will continue to witness in the years to come, will not likely bring us comfort. It may distress some of us and excite others. What matters is whether we can discover the core of our values and meaning – where our indestructible nature is affirmed. How we get there is down to us. 

Do explore Christian Smith’s book. A sociologist’s take on generational changes in the way we live, think, feel and act since the end of World War 2 is immensely helpful – not only to understand why formal religion is shrivelling but why so many other things we take for granted are also changing, and must change.

Introduction

Yesterday (25/7/2025) I began my 500th non-fiction book since early December 2018. I have been reading across many categories because it’s not safe just to stick with a couple. For example, if you want to understand religion you must read politics, history, psychology, philosophy and so on. 

This was a wake -up call I got when I was a member of an occult group in the late 1970s, and again in the mid 1980s. Yes, I was so dopey I needed two alarms. 

We would talk esoterica until the cows came home but with no idea whether we were talking nonsense or not. Worse, we used our esoteric jargon to describe the world around us in ways that just got sillier and sillier, and again with no idea whether we had an insightful observation. 

In 1988 I put myself on an occult and esoterica-free diet which lasted until 1995 when I was forcibly inserted back into the realm of woo. 

I broke my occult fast when I impulsively picked up a ‘new age’ magazine and read an article which triggered a sudden flood of memories of an ET abduction incident. I was in Sydney in the early 1970s and was coming down from some very nice acid. I was lying down enjoying flying through a museum full of breathtakingly beautiful artefacts when suddenly the scene snapped, and I found myself in a stark clinical setting on a metal table and surrounded by what I’d now call ETs – the familiar ‘greys’ (I knew nothing of them at the time). I freaked out and sat up. After I regained my composure, I tried to get back to the museum but ended up back on the table. I quit trying and went in search of coffee. 

I had forgotten this experience for around 25 years. I make no claims about it being ‘real’. I don’t know what it was, other than something I encountered while coming down from a trip. The point of recounting it here is because it was a theme that was soon to be powerfully reiterated.

A very short time after finding that magazine I was walking past a bookshop on the way to a cafe for my regular Saturday morning indulgence of coffee, breakfast and newspaper crosswords. Before I knew it, I had walked into the bookshop, picked up a book, paid for it and arrived at the cafe with no idea what I had just bought. It was John Mack’s Abduction. I finished it by the next morning. 

The following week I saw signs advertising a ‘psychic fair’ on the coming Saturday at a local motel. I’d normally avoid such events but now I found myself eager to go. So, I did. It was disappointing until I encountered a woman talking about ET abductions and how she could do regressions to retrieve memories. This was in Bathurst, and she was in Sydney so when I booked a session with her, I had to factor in a 4 drive. 

On that Saturday morning when I set off to Sydney it was around 6:00 that my car refused to start for the first time ever. It was way too early to call to reschedule so I waited 2 hours, trying the car several times with the same result. The car was a Mazda 626 I bought around 1987. It had run flawlessly from the day I got it – until now.

The three things happened next. First, my effort to reschedule went foul of a completely awful telephone call quality – that was weird. Next my car started perfectly normally (and never failed me again). Then, when I formed an intent to get to a new appointment I was flooded with an intense sense of threat. If I tried driving, I would have an ‘accident’. I thought it wiser to quit any such plan. Something didn’t want me to go through with the idea and made no bones about it. 

This series of incidents were the beginning of life altering events that took me from Bathurst to Sydney and then to Dover in the UK, to Port Arthur in Tasmania and then to Lismore in northern NSW in 2.5 years. I had left Lismore in 1993 with no intention of going back. This sequence of remarkable events continued there and end in 2002 when I moved into my current home in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. 

The point of this odd tale is that I had previously consumed books on religion, spirituality and the occult to the exclusion of anything else for over a decade in the belief that this was where I’d find what I was looking for. It wasn’t. I needed the ‘woo fast’ to kick my consciousness into a far better place.

My ‘Aha!’ moment came when a friend and colleague, aware of my interests in spiritual and occult matters, asked me to tell her about those interests. To my astonishment and embarrassment nothing I said to her made any sense at all. I realised I was talking jargon that I could not translate into plain language. In fact, I didn’t really understand what I was saying. I didn’t know anything outside repeating jargon.

Imagine for a moment that the only subject you had developed any expertise in was psychology and the only way you could talk about any idea in depth was using the language of psychology. How would you describe what an emotion is to a person unfamiliar with any psychological jargon?

Of course, a regular psychologist would be familiar with the culture of an educated person and be articulate about politics, science, popular and high culture, sports and so on – sufficient to talk about emotions in a way that would be comprehensible to an average person. This isn’t to say that that average person would understand the conversation, but they would feel they did because the ideas and language would be familiar to them. 

After my embarrassing effort with my friend, I gave myself a good talking in terms I could clearly understand. Was I a wanker or a truth-seeker? Did I want to just accumulate woo brownie points or was I prepared to do the hard work of actually trying to understand what was going on in a serious way?

Artificial categories of knowledge 

We routinely speak of science and religion as if these are two distinct bodies of knowledge. They aren’t. Observation of nature has ever been the trigger of deeper reflection. Belief and knowledge aren’t separate categories either. I think belief serves our psychological needs and knowledges arises really only when we achieved decent self-awareness (I am nowhere near that yet.)

The distinctions we make are useful to convey meaning in certain contexts. And hard distinctions arise only when we anchor our beliefs in a certain set of claims. We can be rational and superstitious. That’s true because ‘rational’ people can also be ‘superstitious’ in ways they will not acknowledge because they have settled on a meaning of superstition that excludes them and others like them. 

In the ‘human sciences’ we have an array of fields – sociology, anthropology, psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience for example. And each field may have subsets. But the distinctions are essentially for administrative purposes only. They share the common theme of the human in all its complexity.

Materialist scientists are fond of pooh-poohing religion, usually unaware that their field, once called natural philosophy, was actually established and advanced by religious or esoteric thinkers.

We celebrate the great advances that science and technology have wrought but we scarcely contemplate the accompanying moral and philosophical influences because we believe that science is entirely rational. 

What is rational is how data is processed but not how it is integrated into the human experience. A belief in the ‘conquest of nature’ or the human right to exploit the natural world is present in Christianity but also transfered to materialistic thought in an unself-reflective way. 

Our technology is arguably more shaped by moral influences that are a legacy of a rejection of religion than by rational thought. Our current concern about global warming may have been precipitated by our technologies but those technologies were shaped by moral choices and beliefs about what is virtuous. 

The dogmas of religion or materialism are incomprehensible without appreciation of history, psychology, philosophy, sociology and so on. No field of inquiry is sufficient unto itself.

Why animism?

Animism was the first idea that let me make sense of a lifetime of experiences that were not positively comprehensible by science or religion. I was either mad or bad. I am neither. 

Animism gives permission to a sense of holism and the universality of intelligence. These aren’t dogmatic positions but just better grounds of possibility from which to permit creative thought and imagination. 

Animism better accords with the insight that humans are mostly crap at thinking. For most of us, what we call thinking is a form of emoting – rarified yes but mostly done fleetingly and badly. 

It is fascinating that the history of thinking about intelligence includes people who we call ‘savants’ as a kind of syndrome. They express what we imagine to be high intelligence without evident effort. Others express genius via inspiration.  Intelligence isn’t the singular attribute of rationality residing in our brains but a synthesis of forms of awareness. The hard graft of rational thought is constantly prone to being ‘derailed’ by emotions. But we should also remember that dogmatic systems like materialism also resist inspiration and succumb to emotions. 

For me there’s a certain kind of natural rationalism embodied in mathematics. But it’s a substratum of consciousness rather than the superstructure. The rationalism our culture reflexively favors is not holistic. This matters hugely because it produces non-holistic outcomes. It has an almost psychopathic character to it – free of emotional contamination. 

In our excitement over AI, we imagine that ‘intelligence’ is data processing power and not the ability to build holistic insight. We seem not able to understand that data processing is only a portion of what intelligence is. We now have theories of multiple intelligences. We can read from Psychology Today that “There is no agreed definition or model of intelligence”.

Calling AI ‘artificial intelligence’ could be a profound mischaracterisation. At the moment it’s a marketing term – and a misleading one at that. That is, unless we understand that the ‘artificial’ component denotes severe limitations relative to the spectrum of available intelligences. We made this error when defining human intelligence as well. Its only been since the mid 90s that we have come to value ‘emotional intelligence’.

I grew up at the tail end of a period of hyper rationalism that began several centuries before. Science was valorized as pure reason. Emotions were thought to be signs of weakness. But it was all a PR con. While it was true that such was ardently believed by a vociferous minority who created a social norm, many people were not like that – but had to perform as if they were. The culture heroes were the (mostly) men who exhibited dazzling capabilities to imagine and make things. They brought us climate change – because their minds did not include moral intelligence or environmental intelligence.

In fact, when we pause to be sensible about it, the ‘rational self’ should be holistic. This used to be the soul until materialism got rid of the holistic element and rebranded higher human consciousness as the mind dominated by the virtuous intellect that is sometimes bedeviled by debilitating and corrupting emotions. However, I should also observe that the ‘rational soul’ of Christianity was assumed to be a slave to theological dogma – free of pagan holism.

I had been going bush solo near my home in southern Tasmania in my quest for geological specimens from age 12. Later I joined a walking club and went on adventures into Tasmania’s southwest wilderness with deeply rational adults with the souls of poets and artists. We craved the holistic stimulation that the wilderness imparted. By the time I left Tasmania for the mainland an animistic spirit had been kindled in me. But it would be decades before I understood what it was. 

My interpretation of animism is that it is a fundamental propensity in the human psyche inherent in us all, and probably in all critters. Rationality is present in all life but it’s just not dominant. It’s not dominant in any life form. 

What makes any life form particular in any way is how it expresses itself in its environment. It’s the instincts, sensations and experiences that convey meaning, value and purpose, not just the extent of rationality, that make us intelligent.

Humans have glommed onto rationality as being the secret sauce of life because we have become accustomed to its imbalance expressed in our non-holistic outlook. We are taught to believe that this denotes superiority and singularity. 

Western civilization is dominated by the Christian dogma of human exceptionalism. We were a special creation aside from other created creatures. There is no evidence for this, just a claim made by home team cheerleaders. 

The conceit of exceptionalism is built into the human psyche. Psychologists have long demonstrated that we have inherently inflated opinions of ourselves. We have a natural potential to believe we are ‘chosen of god’. That’s fine if kept as a private humble conceit. But it becomes toxic if unleashed as a public delusion. It’s rather like the way football fans believe their team is ‘the best’. It’s a great bonding conceit when enjoyed in private but it becomes the trigger for conflict when it goes public and is disputed by other fans who think the same of their own. 

Whether gods or football teams, the communal glue of private conceit becomes the ground for toxic conflict when opened up to the zero-sum truth that there can be only one number one.

The mythologist Joseph Campbell observed that western religious thought was influenced by a traumatic relationship with the divine. In the Christian faith there’s the expulsion from paradise, the attempted genocide of the flood, the persecution of Job and the sacrificial crucifixion of Jesus – to name only a small selection. Materialist and secular thought may not retain any literal belief in these tales, but the deep psychological influences of trauma continue to haunt us. Add to this the dominionistic exploitative mindset and what we have is grounds for a sense of traumatic separation from the embrace of holistic consciousness. And at the same time there’s a craving for exceptional acceptance.

It is little wonder, then, that individualism has become a dominant theme of our culture. But rather than creating a sense of particularity, it has been interpreted and exploited as separation. 

The evidence from the human sciences is clear that intentional effort at greater self-awareness is critical for our collective wellbeing. Greater self-awareness can be seen as a form of intensification or particularization of the individual. From this we build our capacity for empathy and compassion – and through them, holistic awareness. 

This is in compelling contrast to separative notion of individuality which can be used in the exploitative ‘divide and conquer’ rationale.

This is the same message from teachers like the Buddha and the Christ and ET.  In fact, it has been a persistent theme in human culture for millennia. But it has been swamped and distorted by dogmas which claim ready-made truths – so no effort required, just believe. That appeal is stronger if it embraces exceptionalism and exclusivity.

Conclusion

Our collective efforts at understanding the nature of the reality we dwell in paint a picture that is not inconsistent with the deepest spiritual insights. 

Going back to our roots, efforts at understanding this reality were not broken into science and religion but the functional and the sacred – a kind of yin/yang symbolic duality that still reflects a simple unity – a holism. 

Our cultural effort at learning to know our reality is just as sacred. The secular essentially means shared, accessible, knowable and mundanely functional, not other than sacred. Science isn’t other than religion, but other than dogma –  belief without thought or responsibility.

The sacred is what is essential to our existential being – the animistic and the holistic. The functional is what sustains our physical being. Functionality informed by holism is what we don’t have. Now our functionality is informed by existential trauma inherited from a faith we mostly do not follow. The sacred has been misrepresented as thoughtless dogma rather than subtle and complex holism. The spirit rejected in opposition to dogma has become the enemy of reason and virtue. 

Campbell’s insight about the underpinning trauma of separation that informs our culture must be considered. How we see individuality as separation rather than particularity and intensification reinforces this need to rethink.

Of course, like any attempt at a description, this one isn’t ideal. I don’t think we have the scholarship yet to fashion a deft interpretation of the evidence.

What I am arguing is that a wider education is invaluable in one’s search for understanding. My intent is not to assert a truth but to provoke contemplation through disruption of habituated thought. 

Please, disagree with me. But craft an elegant and widely educated argument.  😊